“Logical.” It was.
“A wedding and a funeral, we’ll have the whole circle of life.” He said it dolefully.
“Yes.” Some people had the oddest moral lines. In a country where there was starvation, disease, and wide-scale slaughter of innocents, for some reason air attacks on funerals bothered people. When it came to war, even nonreligious men would start drawing magic circles, declaring this and that sacred.
“We killed kids today,” Jeffie said, still staring into his whiskey. “Not what I signed up for.”
Such fastidiousness. “You’re American,” Juan Pablo said. “You’ve killed kids before.”
Jeffie let out a little grunt of displeasure. Juan Pablo took a sip of the whiskey, and then took a gulp, letting the burn settle pleasantly. He was getting irritated.
“Have you ever lived in a violent city?” Juan Pablo continued. “I mean, a truly violent city? Not as a soldier. As a citizen?”
No. Jeffie had grown up in Northern California.
“People from places like that only want one thing,” Juan Pablo said. “Order.”
“Is that why you’re here? To provide order? Come on. You couldn’t resist the check.”
“I’m paid well. There’s no shame in that. I provide a valuable service.”
Jeffie nodded. Juan Pablo scowled into his whiskey. This fool, this fellow mercenary, wanted to believe in clean wars with clear boundaries. Such a thing didn’t exist. He thought of his days in Saravena, playing the clown, trying to change the pro-guerrilla culture of the town by seducing the children. Wars are not fought by armies. They are fought by cultures. If the animal you are fighting is communism, then the guerrilla are simply that animal’s claws. Drug trafficking is its heart, coca and heroin the blood coursing through its veins, and poor, angry, ignorant people its hide and the flesh underneath. The Houthis were a different animal, sustained by a different type of blood entirely, but the underlying principle was the same. Your job is not to trim the claws. It’s to kill the beast.
“This is a good war,” he said. “Who is on our side? In our operations center we’ve got Americans and Israelis and Emiratis and one Colombian. We’ve got resupply from the United States, arms from half the globe, and if you look closely, see who is supporting this war, directly or indirectly, you will find that what sits behind us is the entire civilized world. And on the other side, we have men and women raised in tents, in a debased culture of rituals and poverty and sacred texts that half of them are too illiterate to read, sending out suicide bombers and laying land mines that will maim and kill for generations, and for what? So they can install the great-great-great-great-grandson of a desert preacher’s cousin as king? I am on the side of civilization against primitive nonsense.”
He did not add that this was a sometimes lonely side to be on, even in his own family. That his wife and daughter believed in primitive nonsense, in rituals and sacred texts, and it was an embarrassment he hardly liked to consider himself.
Jeffie laughed and shook his head. “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “Kids, though. Kids.”
Jeffie, who had done support for air missions over Serbia in the ’90s, served in Iraq and Afghanistan, suddenly had qualms. Why? Because the quality of the video feed on their drone was good enough to show off a child’s corpse. Americans are so very sentimental. Fingers in every conflict in the world, but then they get histrionic about a random dead child and think that makes them a good person.
“Well,” Juan Pablo said, “you and I improve the precision of the Emirati targeting? Yes? I suspect there are, in the end, fewer dead children because you are here.” Silly. A scrap thrown to Jeffie’s conscience. But it seemed to comfort him. Maintaining morale is just as important for mercenaries as for any other kind of soldier.
• • •
The conversation stayed with him during his next shift, as he tracked a running battle in a town north of Aden. Friendly armored forces versus rebels who rarely appeared on-screen or gave the opportunity for a successful air strike. Mostly, those in the operations center had just watched on the screens as small boxy shapes spat out little flashes, and then the walls of little buildings crumbled.
It was like he’d said. Civilization versus primitivism. Those armored vehicles could have come from almost anywhere in the civilized world. He’d seen American MaxxPro and Oshkosh M-ATVs here, but also Finnish Patrias, South African RGs, even French Leclerc tanks, though he couldn’t make any of those out on the screens before him. If the resolution was good enough to make out individual weapons, he knew he’d see representatives of even more countries. Singaporean 120mm mortars, Serbian Zastava machine guns, Belgian FN minimis, Chinese M80s, and an assortment of small arms and heavy ordnance from Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Brazil, and more. The buildings they were destroying were made of local stone, or soil mixed with straw, or burn mud.
Yes, it was an ugly little war. But with the right perspective, there was something majestic at work here. The rebels, whether they were fully aware of it or not, were threatening a main artery of civilization—the Bab el-Mandeb strait, one of the world’s most important trade routes. And so civilization, which had never cared much for desert tribesman, had come here and shown its steel.
The day of the funeral, a surveillance team was emplaced in a nearby building to provide eyes on the mourners. They waited. The team radioed about people coming in and out of the building where the funeral was to be held. About “no weapons.” About “military-age males,” which means any human with a Y chromosome tall enough to piss in a standard urinal. They waited. The early arrivals came. Still no weapons. They waited. Then as the funeral was about to start, a convoy
