Bombs, he realized. They’d been bombed.
He suddenly panicked. What was he doing there? Where was everyone else? Could it be that… he was dead? That he had died and his spirit had just risen… uncertain what to do next? He looked down at the snow beneath his boots. He saw no corpse. Only the bile he’d spewed from his aching belly.
Where is everybody? He looked all around. At first he saw no one. Then — slowly — the crumpled shapes that had moments before been logs metamorphosed into human form. Half-covered in snow. An elbow. A helmet-covered head. A severed leg. Chin stood there… alone among the dead.
He was alive. If they were dead, he must be alive. Chin groped in the snow with numb hands for his rifle. He pulled the weapon from the powder. He shook and brushed it until it might possibly be in good enough condition to fire. Then he listened. Nothing. The attack must have been called off. They’d been discovered. Bombed. They’d never made it to the American guns.
He took one last look at the brightening sky to the east, then headed back in the direction from which they’d come. Away from the American base. When he got back to his platoon that afternoon, his senior sergeant gave him the headcount. Twelve missing. Two wounded. Fifteen present and ready for duty.
His platoon was now down to half strength. They had yet to fire their weapons in combat.
The French colonel took the radio microphone himself. The interpreter whispered the translation into Clark’s ear. ‘Do you read me, Firebase Toulon, over?’ But Clark had been listening to the repetitive calls for so long that he needed no translation. Two hundred French paratroopers and engineers had been helicoptered into Firebase Toulon. Their mission was to prepare the base for a brigade that had gotten bogged down by a series of minor ambushes dozens of kilometers away. The colonel repeated his call. Clark walked over and put his hand on the man’s shoulder.
The officer lowered his chin and continued to call out over the radio. Clark left him alone. But the spell his vigil had cast over the group around the radio was broken. By returning to his desk, Clark had pronounced the unit dead.
Papers lay spread over the working area that he used at one end of the operations center. He had a spacious office upstairs, with oriental rugs and dark hard wood furniture of vaguely Scandinavian style. But he preferred this spot — in the company of others — to the quiet of the tomb-like room.
The calls in French drowned out the other noise and chatter of the spacious Op Centre. It wasn’t that they were any louder. It was the regularity of the man’s efforts. First a call, then a pause to listen for a response, then the exact same call again. Clark sat there staring at the paper. Waiting for the next try. It was like water dripping from a leaky faucet. As the man’s wait for a reply grew longer, the silence grew more oppressive. Clark listened intently. All that was missing in the din of activity were the few words spoken in French. The silence went on and on. Clark’s mind tried to fill the void with what it expected to hear — the words that were now long overdue.
But it was over. Even the colonel had finally given up. There was no one single event that marked the death of a unit, Clark thought. Like the death of a single human, the line was a wavering one. Was it when the heart stopped functioning? Or respiration? Or the brain?
A unit was a living organism too. Its death was also purely definitional. When the last man had been chased down and shot like a dog, the unit was clearly dead. But its death really occurred some time before that. Was it when the main line of defenses was breached? he thought. No. The unit still lived. It still fought. Hand-to-hand in trenches and holes. The commander desperately sending his last feeble reserves into the gap. Was it when the command post was overrun? The commander killed? No. The military made its units tough. Resilient. Even after the command post was overrun, the subordinate commanders held their panicked men together for the final phase of every decisive battle — the slaughter.
Clark was tired, but he forced his mind to focus on the question he’d posed. He knew he couldn’t sleep now anyway, even if he wanted to. When is it that a unit dies? When would he know to take the marker off the map? To declare its men ‘Missing in Action, Presumed Dead or Captured’?
The radio traffic that poured into Clark’s nerve center was growing by the minute. The operators’ replies formed an ever louder buzz in the background of the windowless shelter. He looked at his watch — the only way to learn the hour in his perpetually darkened world. Dawn was approaching. Each cell of the UNRUSFOR organism was preparing for the inevitable ‘contact.’ Clark realized just then he had his answer. A unit died when it quit calling him on the radio. It no longer existed when he couldn’t talk to it. No matter that the last soldier hadn’t yet been tracked down. When a unit’s radio goes off the air, it’s dead
Clark pulled out a pad and a pen. He began to write.
‘Dear Lydia: By now I know you and the boys must be back in McLean. I understand your desire to return home, and I totally approve. You must also have seen by now the accounts of my visit to Birobidzhan. I must tell you that my actions there were every bit as foolish as was reported in the press, if not more so. I know you must be worried sick about me. And added to those worries, I know, is the already heavy burden of caring for our two sons alone. But I have to write this letter. I have to talk to someone. I have nowhere else to turn. No one with whom I can speak these words that now crush me so completely that I can hardly breathe. I’m sorry. Please forgive me, but I must put them down on paper and know that someone else has read them. I must ask you to help shoulder the weight of these words, because I’m too weak to bear it alone.
‘War is the saddest thing I have ever known. In this world, I know, human tragedies abound. Loved ones perish by illness or accident or old age, and their loss is immense. But in war, huge armies of bright, healthy young people are sent out into the field to rip the life from one another. They are our very best. The brightest hopes of a million mothers and a million fathers. They are strong, and brave. They know where they’re going. They know what lies ahead. They know what’s going to happen to them when they get there. God Almighty, Lydia, how do they do it? What cause could be so great as to bind them to their duty?
‘I must confess, Lydia, that at times my strength fails me. At times I cannot remember the cause for which I send those young men and women to their deaths. I know the words. But they’re like mental tricks which work sometimes, and fail me at others. They are failing me now, Lydia. At times like these, I feel I owe a duty greater than to my country. A duty to God or to nature or to those hundreds of thousands of men and women whose lives are being wasted. Wasted. I feel an overpowering urge to step out into the middle of no man’s land and shout “Stop!” at the top of my lungs. “Nothing matters more than life! None of this will change a thing!”
‘It’s then I realize that I could no more stop what is happening here than I could alter the drift of the continents. We were always going to fight. Here. In this awful place. Some immutable law of nature bound us to this battlefield as surely as gravity holds our feet to the earth.
‘I have been through war before, Lydia, as have you. I know that my present weakness will pass. I will banish it, because it is defeatist. It goes against what I was taught to think. But what if I’m wrong, Lydia? What if everything I’ve been led to believe has misguided me? What if the deeds I believe to be heroic prove nothing more than base sins against humanity? Lydia, if I’m dragged down into the fires of Hell to pay for the evil I am committing, I will go without complaint. I will wish nothing more than that I spend eternity paying the price for my corrupted ideals. I will bear all, suffer all, pay whatever toll with a lightness of heart born of the certainty — finally — of knowing what is right and what is wrong. I will gladly accept that fate, Lydia, but only if you will forgive me those sins. If you will know and believe my one excuse that I give only to you, Lydia, only to you — I didn’t know what I was doing was wrong. I didn’t know, Lydia. I didn’t know.’