“Send a request to Holy Land Command for your Marines to be subordinated to First MOBIC Corps. Justify the request by stating that the Army’s Third Corps and General Harris misused your Marines, then restrained you from fighting.”
“And what — exactly — do my Marines get in return?”
“I told you. The Military Order of the Brothers in Christ has no quarrel with the Marine Corps. We simply need to put an end to the current duplication and waste of our nation’s resources caused by the continued existence of the Army.”
“That’s still not an answer.”
“If you require more specificity, I’m authorized to tell you that the MOBIC high command is prepared to guarantee that it will do everything in its power to ensure the survival of the Marine Corps.”
“The same assurance that you gave the Air Force, I take it?”
“I wouldn’t know anything about such matters. My focus is on finding a way to preserve the Marine Corps. As I said, the Corps is a national treasure.”
“Then why should preserving it be contingent on lining up with you against the Army? Or on anything?”
“We live in a practical world. A world of finite resources. Everyone needs allies. Your help at present would obligate us to help you later.” The visitor tried to summon a reassuring smile. “I realize the sort of feelings you must have. Military men are loyal to one another. Even across service lines. I know — I used to wear an Army uniform myself, before I decided to better serve my country by bearing arms for the Lord. I don’t expect an immediate answer. I can give you twelve hours. But then we’ll need your answer. And, if you’ll allow me a personal note, I’d be deeply sorry to see a tragic rift develop between the Order and the Corps. When we’re natural allies.”
Morris wanted to grab the overgroomed brigadier by his shining hair and hammer his face into the table. And not just once. But Morris recognized that he had a duty to control himself. And to think, hard, about what he was being offered.
He didn’t believe the man’s elusive promises for an instant. But he also wondered what he
He already knew his answer, or thought he did. He saw that this was just a downright insulting attempt to drive a wedge between the Army and the Corps, then to defeat both in detail. Nor did he think he could live with himself if he betrayed Harris at a juncture like this.
But it was, nonetheless, his duty to think the offer through, to analyze the situation as dispassionately as he could and to burrow into every nuance, to overcome his personal and professional prejudices to judge what truly was best for the country.
“Twelve hours?” he said.
His visitor perked up. “You’ll think about it then? Good. Grand. I’d love to see the Marine Corps and the Military Order of the Brothers in Christ embrace each other in loving friendship.”
Morris almost asked, “And after the embrace, we get fucked, right? In front, or from behind?”
Instead, he told the brigadier, “You’ll have my answer in twelve hours. Now I’ve got work to do.”
But he accomplished little after his visitor disappeared back into the night. As soon as the dev il with the black cross evaporated, Morris could say with certainty that he wouldn’t do as asked, wouldn’t betray the Army or Flintlock Harris. The MOBIC creeps wouldn’t honor the bargain, anyway. They’d howl with laughter at his stupidity, the gullibility of a dumb-ass Jarhead.
And yet… What did it all mean? Would he go down in the books as the man who destroyed the Marine Corps? Was that how Major General Morton Morris, USMC, would be remembered?
Yes, if the MOBIC crowd wrote the history books. And, increasingly, it looked as if they would.
Monk Morris longed for the days of his youth, when men found their dev ils in wretched foreign holes, or in their sick imaginations, or in Internet lairs. Now the dev ils wore uniforms and claimed they served his country. They ran for office and won elections by landslide votes. They appeared in the night with cynical offers that left a man with no good alternatives. Monk Morris had no patience with religion of any kind, but he couldn’t help thinking of Gethsemane.
Was this what they were fighting for? This goddamned squalor? One moment, Morris saw Flintlock Harris as a brilliant commander, shining with ethical rigor. A moment later, he saw Harris as a fool who would doom them all.
Morris wondered, yet again, who on his own staff reported secretly to MOBIC’s Christian Security Service. Who had already betrayed the Corps? The CSS had agents everywhere. Would one of their stooges take his place if he didn’t cooperate?
The situation made him clench his fists. He understood how to fight a battle, a war. But he no longer understood how to fight the men who were taking over his country.
God’s plan? This? All this? He didn’t understand how any man with eyes in his head could believe in any kind of god. After the things he’d seen in the Nigeria fighting, the horrors in Delta State, he’d abandoned his last, perfunctory religious habits. Men had to take responsibility for their own failings, their own viciousness, their own deeds. That was humanity’s one slim hope. Blaming the world’s horrors on a punitive deity or on a scheming Satan who wanted to spoil the porridge was the coward’s way out. Years back, Morris had read something to the effect that, even if there was no God, men should behave as if He existed. A lifetime of coping with what men wrought had convinced Morris that the aphorist, whoever he’d been, had got it exactly backward: If there
What was his responsibility now?
He dozed off and slept fitfully for a few hours. His aide looked in but refused to let anyone wake the general.
In the brightness of the morning, Harris reached him with a request. That he send one company of Marines into Nazareth. To help with a local crisis created by a poisoned water supply. But, above all, to demonstrate Marine-Army solidarity, in case the MOBIC command tried to force HOLCOM to order the massacre of the Arab civilians in the city.
“You sure one company’s all you need, sir?” Morris asked. Without hesitation.
“One company. With strong stomachs.”
“On the way,” Morris said.
And that was that. He didn’t bother trying to contact the MOBIC brigadier with a formal answer. With a little guidance from Jesus, they’d figure it out.
And now he stood proudly by the roadside, sucking down dust and saluting his Marines as they drove past.
Above the roar, he heard a vehicle commander shout, “Semper Fi, sir,” in his direction.
“Semper Fi,” Morris responded. But his voice was lost in the noise of the war machines.
Sergeant Ricky Garcia had pulled some crappy duties in his time, but he couldn’t remember any as bad as this. First, he’d overheard the battalion XO telling Captain Cunningham that Bravo Company was being sent on a mission that would give it time to recover from the hard-luck fighting of the past few days. No company in the 5th Marines had suffered heavier losses, the XO said. He’d try to funnel them some replacements while they were in Nazareth. To bring the company back up to combat strength.
Garcia knew that he should’ve known better, but when he heard the magic name, he pictured a whitewashed village with donkey carts and women carrying water jugs like in the Bible pictures. Instead, Bravo Company dismounted at the edge of a grubby plot of apartment buildings, with a litter-strewn field on the other side of the road. An Army lieutenant colonel had been waiting for them. After some glad-handing, Garcia heard him tell the company commander, “Make sure you bury them with their heads facing toward Mecca. Keep the trench properly oriented. It’s the least we can do for the sorry sonsofbitches. And it might help calm the families down.”
But the rags hadn’t calmed down. They were still yelling and wailing after the Army fucksticks bailed, leaving Garcia and what remained of Bravo Company to keep a local with a broke-dick backhoe extending a ditch fast
