“Seven,” he replied, “three dead. I got two medics staying with ’em.”
“I lost more,” she said. “Twelve, I think. About half dead. Sh-shit! We gotta do better next time.”
“We will,” Animal said confidently. “Fuckin’ A.”
Ackerman’s voice over the radio called for the casualty count, and Stephie reported. “We could use an hour or two,” she requested. “We need some time.”
“Negative,” Ackerman replied. “We got ’em on the run. We got tracks on the highway moving up on the right.” Stephie could hear the cracking bolts of main battle tank fire. It had been a long time since she’d seen American armor not buried — hull defilade — into defensive works. The army had been marshaling their mobile strike forces over all the long months of the war. On the road up to the line of departure, she had seen miles of the beasts parked bumper to bumper. “We gotta keep going,” Ackerman continued, “or this war will leave us behind. It should be open-field running up ahead. Our armor is threatening to break through on both flanks. The Chinese are running,” he said with what Stephie thought must be a smile on his face.
She and Animal rounded up her two platoons, made contact with neighboring companies, who were also advancing, broke through a wooden fence, and entered a peaceful neighborhood. The quiet street was an odd pocket of tranquility on the raging battlefield. Although explosions and towering smoke and flame rose from surrounding firefights, the pleasant street of one-story houses lay seemingly undisturbed by war. Still, Stephie proceeded cautiously. It was Mason Street in Atlanta all over again, only this time in reverse. It was the Americans — now combat-hardened veterans — in the attack against newly arrived Chinese cherries. They advanced from house to house ready to fire on sight of movement.
A white flag suddenly protruded from a window. Stephie assumed that it was surrendering Chinese. Charlie Company’s day had begun in reserve. By the time they were taken up to the step-off line — riding aboard armored fighting vehicles, not canvas trucks like before — small pockets of surrounded Chinese were being mopped up by survivors of the first echelon to plow into their lines. The American victors were rough with their bedraggled captives — dragging them by their hair across pavement on knees with hands and ankles bound — but none, as far as Stephie could see, returned the treatment received at Chinese hands by Becky Marsh and John Burns.
“If you see a weapon,” Stephie said into her voice-activated mike as she approached the window with her teeth clenched and her rifle butt to her shoulder, “kill ’em all.” She kept the open window above the flag in the raised front sight of her M-16. Surrendering was always a tricky maneuver. Things could go wrong. A lone Chinese holdout could doom their already disarmed comrades with a single, futile shot. Stephie was ready to do the killing. There was no sense in taking unnecessary risks on the eve of a battle’s victory.
“Hello out there!” shouted an old woman in a thin, frail voice. “Hello-o-o-o!”
Stephie’s first thought was that there were hostages. “Come out with your hands up!” she ordered in a shout. She then saw to it with hand signals that she had two machine guns on the front door. But out came a white-haired lady in a housecoat. From behind her came agitated shouts of family members. “Mother!” a grown man barked in what sounded like frustration. But the old lady waved the white flag until she saw the American soldiers, then threw it on the steps. In its place, she pulled from her housecoat a long wooden spoon to which she had mounted a small American flag. She waved the limp stars and stripes in figure eights above her head. “Hooray!” she shouted. “Hooray! Hooray for our boys and girls! Hooray for America! Hooray for America! Hooray!”
Tears flooded Stephie’s eyes, but not from anger. In a rush of unexpected emotion, her jaw dropped, her skin tingled, and she cried. The jubilant old woman danced and turned to the front door as Stephie and the others lowered their weapons. “It’s all right! They’re ours! They’re our troops! Our troops! They’re ours! They’ve come back!”
The tears that rolled down Stephie’s face had come out of nowhere. She wasn’t mad. She wasn’t sad. But she cried.
Out of the recesses of the house came an extended family. Middle-aged father, first, then mother and two teenage children, a boy and a girl. Their dog bounded out, and the boy chased it. The golden Labrador ran straight to Animal and licked his face. “Good boy,” Animal said, scratching its matted coat. “Thatta boy.”
Other front doors opened as people tentatively emerged from hiding. Nearly half the houses, it appeared, were occupied. “They went that way!” some civilians called out to the nearest American soldiers. “Come on, I’ll show you,” a young girl of about ten — wearing her soccer team’s warm-ups — said, tearing off toward the enemy before being grabbed by her mother. The girl stood there on toothpick legs and held out her thin arm out, pointing.
Animal dispatched a squad to check, but Stephie could tell that the war had already passed this small, middle-class neighborhood. She could tell by the receding sound of American main tank guns that the battle was being carried away by vehicles faster than foot sloggers could travel. She could tell by the scenes of neighbors greeting neighbors in what looked like a spontaneous block party, but was more of a reunion among the isolated holdouts.
A small gathering of civilians had been directed by soldiers to Stephie, the commanding officer. All stood behind the outstretched offering held aloft by the old woman with the flag. In her hands was a sheaf of papers. Another family brought up their small bundle of green forms and added it to the woman’s stack.
“What?” Stephie asked. “What is that?”
“We wanted you to see this,” the old woman said. She had large, sad eyes behind thick glasses. She looked like she hadn’t showered or eaten properly for a long time.
“What is it?” Stephie asked, taking the forms in her hands. At the top was printed the heading, “Declaration of Loyalty.” Small Chinese characters and numbers in the margins gave the form number.
“None of us signed that thing,” a man said from the crowd. “Not a single person on this block.”
The old woman in the housecoat in front of Stephie explained. “If we signed it, the Chinese said we’d get food and medicine. That all we had to do was just sign. None of us did. Not a single one!” More of the forms were added to Stephie’s stack.
Stephie nodded and read the pledge of loyalty to China, renouncing their citizenship of the “former United States.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a cigarette lighter. The civilians and soldiers broke into smiles and laughter when she lit and dropped the declarations onto a front lawn. The dry, crinkled paper flamed brightly and was quickly consumed. The old woman, the other adults, and then the children stomped the smoking ashes into the yellowed grass. Stephie’s soldiers took their turns in the ritual with twisting boots long after the forms had ceased being anything more than a symbol.
“I wish all the others could be here to see this,” Animal said softly to Stephie.
Their names, their faces, their smiles all came rushing back. They were victorious, but John Burns was still dead. “Let’s move out,” Stephie said, seeking escape from the memories and the silent stares.
Han sat on the raised dais at the sumptuous Beijing banquet far from the no-man’s-land at the table’s center. He felt disoriented after the long flight from America, which had taken a circuitous route through South America and the South Pacific after Hawaiian airports had come under attack by stray bands of roving American Marines, who were all supposed to be dead by now.