The convoy resumed their journey toward the Gulf and soon plunged into a thick, low-hanging haze. Some covered their mouths and noses with handkerchiefs against the choking smell. Stephie remembered. The Canadian Rocky Mountains, summer vacation, when she was eight. Her first smell of a forest fire.
The conflagration that consumed the Alabama woods was nowhere in sight, but the trees that lined the highway were now nothing more than charred hulks, brittle limbs, and pointed black fingers. The Chinese would find no wood for shelter or for campfires when the nights grew cold. There would be no brush to provide concealment from killing American fire. They would find nothing but death and devastation, Stephie thought with boiling hatred. A loud snapping sound — like she’d broken a tooth — came from her jaw. Her face twitched, and she fought back tears. Anger always made her cry.
Only PFC John Burns, seated beside her, noticed. He glanced her way, cracked a half smile from one side of his mouth, then closed his eyes to resume his slumber.
At first, he was the only one among the almost two dozen soldiers in the truck who seemed to be resting comfortably. The two squads and weapons teams were packed shoulder to shoulder. The warm breeze stifled conversation. Everyone other than Burns stared out in sullen silence at the cloud-shrouded, desolate scenery. They clutched their weapons as if for psychological comfort.
One by one, however, they began to drift off. Soon — miraculously, Stephie thought as she looked all around — every last one of her comrades had fallen sound asleep, including Animal, the beefeater next to her, who slumped her way.
Soon, Stephie felt the same pull toward slumber. The clicks from the tires as they crossed the regularly spaced seams in the aging concrete were almost hypnotic. The old truck’s stiff suspension rocked steadily from side to side. But Stephie could never rest while on the road. She had never felt comfortable enough to relax in a moving vehicle.
John Burns flashed Stephie another encouraging smile before again closing his eyes and leaning his helmet back against the metal frame that held the canvas. Stephie had smiled back at the boy — the man, really, for the dark-haired Burns was a little older than the others in their platoon — out of a habit bred in high school. High school, she thought. High school!Four months earlier, she had walked across the stage and been handed her diploma. The night of the prom she and Conner Reilly, her boyfriend, on leave from his unit, had hopped until dawn from one party to the next in the rented limousine. Four months ago.
She felt depressed, on edge, dispirited, and suddenly totally unprepared. In the balmy silence of the late-summer morning, a single question dominated the eighteen-year-old’s thoughts: How did it ever come to this?
Scenes of a distant war flickered across the television screen. Ten-year-old Stephie Roberts watched, though her mother ignored the grainy pictures of combat on the nightly news. “The addition of Thai army forces to the war in Vietnam has done little to slow the advancing Chinese.” When the news moved on to some boring ceremony in Korea, Stephie returned to her journal. “Sally H. said today that we’ll look really hot when we get our braces off, but that Gloria W. needs a nose job. I told Judy, who told the evil James Thurmond, who told Gloria, who got really, REALLY pissed at me,” she underlined, “for some totally warped reason!” U.S. troops, the reporter explained, had been withdrawn as a condition to reunification of the North and South. On the eve of a nationwide free election, the North Korean government had collapsed as its leaders — fearing retribution — had fled the country. China and South Korea had both stepped into the void to quell the violence. Their armies had clashed, and China had occupied the entire Korean Peninsula: North and South. The Chinese-backed puppet government was now celebrating the long-awaited reunion. “Must destroy James Thurmond!” Stephie wrote as she muted the boring program. “Hey, hey!” her step-dad said, grabbing the remote. They listened to a report that affected the company where he worked. Despite falling defense appropriations, Congress was authorizing billions of dollars for an antimissile shield. Her stepdad was beaming. Her mother said, “Now, finally, maybe you’ll get the guts to ask for a raise.” Stephie went outside and took a walk down the beach barefoot in the fading Alabama sun, plotting the total social demise of The Evil One.
The blue water of the Gulf didn’t look the same as it had in Stephie Roberts’s youth. Nothing was the same as it had been before. “First Squad, out!” shouted Sergeant Collins. “Stay off the beach! It’s mined! Look alive!” The six other men and two women of Stephie’s squad climbed down from the green, canvas-covered truck with their weapons and combat loads. Tony Massera, a private from Philadelphia, stood on the pavement squinting into the midday sunshine before donning his army shades. “Is it always this fuckin’ hot in Alabama, Roberts?”
“Puh-ssy,” Animal coughed into his fist. His fit of faux hacking ended with, “Puh-, puh-, pussy!” and a smile at Massera to ensure that he’d heard it correctly. Had the insult come from anyone else, the wiry and tough Massera — Animal’s assistant machine gunner — would clearly have faced the man down or pummeled him to the ground with a flurry of blows. But the hulking machine gunner they all called Animal — who was semipermanently attached to their squad — was a would-be offensive lineman for Ohio State. He dwarfed everyone else. Massera let it drop. Animal cleared his throat. “Sorry. Shit! Must be comin’ down with somethin’, Antonio.”
“Tony,” Massera corrected for about the hundredth time since the crew-served weapons had been handed down to the platoons. No one else had anything to say.
By age twelve, Stephie was even less interested in world events. But she remembered the day her class was watching the big screen in the Internet Lab of her Mobile, Alabama, middle school. A grown man — India’s prime minister — stood crying on a dock in Bombay. The sight riveted the darkened room filled with seventh graders. All were still young enough to take their cues from distraught adults, but not yet old enough to fully understand the reason for their shared distress. Indian civilians and soldiers were hastily boarding an overcrowded gray destroyer. “Does anyone know why the Indian prime minister didn’t get on that ship?” the hyperstrict teacher asked the class. When no one answered, she said, “With Pakistani and Chinese troops just outside the city?” Again, no one ventured a guess. “Because the ship is British,” the teacher explained with a sigh. It was a class for the gifted and talented. Stephie felt they were letting her down. “He was too proud to leave his country on a foreign ship.” Everybody stared at the crying man. Stephie raised her hand and, when called upon, politely asked what had happened to him. “He was executed,” came the teacher’s reply. “Shot.” All Stephie could think to say was, “Thanks.”
“Shut up and shoulder yer loads!” snapped their squad leader despite the fact that no one standing at the back of the truck was talking. At twenty, Sergeant Collins was the oldest among them, and he was nervous. “This is the coast, in case you morons missed it!”