Six soft plops marked the firing of six DC Police gas guns, and the missiles skittered across the pavement leaking white fumes, spun, rolled and slid raggedly along. The point of firing them into the ground was to bounce them into the crowd at low velocity rather than firing them into people at high, possibly killing velocity.
'Gas!' the command came again, and six more CS shells were fired.
The sergeant major's scream carried through the air: 'Assault arms and with that the rifles left the cross-chest position of carry and were brought around the right side of the body, stocks wedged under right arms and locked in, muzzles with sheathed bayonets angled outward at forty-five degrees to the ground.
'Prepare to advance came the command.
Only Crowe's rifle wavered, probably out of excitement, but otherwise the muzzles lanced outward from the formation. Donny could sense the crowd of demonstrators drawing back, gathering somehow, then re inflating with purpose. Tear gas drifted loosely amid their ranks. It was just a crowd, identities lost in the blur and the gas.
Was Julie over there?
'Advance!' came the final command, and the Marines began to stomp ahead.
Here we go, thought Donny.
They looked like Cossacks. The rank was green, slanted in two angles away from the point, an arrowhead of boys, remorseless and helmeted, their facial features vanished behind their masks.
Julie looked through her tears for Donny, but it was useless. The Marines all looked the same, staunch defenders of whatever, in their sharp uniforms with their helmets and now their guns, which jutted out like threats. A cloud of tear gas washed over her, crunching her eyes in pain, she coughed, felt the tears run hot and fluid down her face, and rubbed at them, then dipped for her wet washcloth and wiped the chemical from them.
'Assholes!' said Peter bitterly, enraged at the troops advancing on him. He was trembling so hard he was locked in place, his knees wobbling desperately. But he wasn't going to move.
'Assholes!' he repeated as the Marines closed in at a steady pace.
J-Jonny was in the lead, solid as a rock, next to him, on the left, Crowe seemed strong. They clomped forward to a steady beat of cadence from the sergeant major, and through the jiggling stain of his dirty lenses, Donny watched as the crowd grew closer. The sergeant major's cadence drove them on, tear gas wafted through the chaos, overhead a helicopter swept low and its turbulence drove the gas more quickly, into whirlwinds and spirals, until it rushed like water across the bridge.
'Steady on the advance!' screamed the sergeant major.
Details suddenly swam at Donny: the faces of the scared kids before him, their scrawniness, their physical weakness and paleness, how many of them were girls, the cool way the leader exhorted them with his bullhorn and that shocking moment when at last the two groups clashed.
'Steady on the advance!' screamed the sergeant major.
Maybe it was like some ancient battle, legionnaires against Visigoths, Sumerians against Assyrians, but Donny sensed a great issue of physical strength, of pure force of will as expressed through bodies, when the two came together. There was no striking, no Marine lifted his rifle and drove through for a butt stroke, no blade came unsheathed and leapt forward into flesh. Rather, there was just a crush as the two masses crunched together, it felt more like football than war, that moment when the lines collide and there are a dozen contests of strength all around you and you lay what you've got against someone else and hope you get full-body weight against him and can lift him from his feet.
Donny found himself hard against not an enemy lineman or a Visigoth but a girl of about fourteen, with freckles and red, frizzy hair and braces, headband, tie-dyed T-shirt, breastless and innocent. But she had more hate on her face than any Visigoth ever, and she whacked him hard on the helmet with her placard, which, he read as it descended, stated make war no more!
The placard smacked him, its thin wood broke and it slipped away. He felt his body ramming the girl's and then she was gone, either knocked back or pushed down and stepped over. He hoped she wasn't hurt, why hadn't she just fled?
More tear gas drifted in. Screams arose. Melees had broken out everywhere as demonstrators leaned against Marines, who leaned back. One could feel strain as the two leaned and leaned and tried to press the other into panic.
It only lasted a second, really, then the demonstrators broke and fled and Donny watched as they emptied the bridge, leaving behind port-a-pots and sandals and squashed Tab cans and water buckets, the battlefield detritus of a vanquished enemy. There seemed no point in pursuing.
'Marines, stand easy,' the sergeant major yelled.
'Masks off.'
The masks came off and the boys sucked hard at the air.
'Good job, good job. Anybody hurt?' yelled the colonel.
But before anybody could answer, a considerable ruckus arose to the left. Policemen were clustered around the railing of the bridge and the word soon reached the Marines that someone had panicked as they had approached, and jumped off. A police helicopter hovered low, an ambulance arrived and paramedics got out urgently.
Police boats were called, but it took only a few minutes to make it clear that someone was dead.
CHAPTER Six.
The scandal played out pretty much as expected, depending on the perspective of the account.
Girl, 17, killed in demonstration, the Post headlined.
The more conservative Star said, demonstrator dies in bridge mix-up. marines murder girl, 17, argued the Washington City Paper.
No matter, for the Marine Corps the news was very bad indeed. Seven liberal House members demanded an
