“Some of them were terrorists and what not too,” says Tommy. “But I don’t feel any better about it still.”
“It was just some fucked up shit, nothing more to it. We had to,” says Isaac.
“War didn’t,” I mention.
“There it is,” says Vance.
“There it is,” we all repeat.
I watch as Thomas swats away insects and takes random pictures of the foliage and foxholes. Dmitry at one point walks to the depot to get another charge pack for a sentry turret, and Thomas bombards him with questions. Before Dmitry can say anything Blake growls out at him to shut up. In moments the scene is the same as Thomas sits bored on an ammo crate, and we slump about in our foxholes.
A whistle breaks the silence and we duck for cover. A single explosion erupts at the depot where Thomas is. I raise my head from between my knees. Tommy sucks on his scarf while lighting up the jungle with the MG alongside the sentry turrets, and Blake calls Command.
I look over at the depot. The ammo boxes have started sparkling and popping from the mortar strike, and Thomas rolls around screaming and howling as he clutches his leg and stomach.
“We gotta go get him!” says Isaac.
“I don’t know if it’s safe man,” says Vance.
We turn back to the infinite jungle and fire our rifles till the magazines are empty, and then load more and continue shooting at nothing as Thomas screams in the background.
Blake orders for us to stop. No more mortar shells fall, or even responding gunfire from the jungle. An AC-130 gunship arcs in a wide circle above the canopy way up in the distance, its side cannons occasionally firing into the thick foliage. If it’s actually targeting anything of a threat, I doubt it.
We scramble out to reach Thomas, but it’s too late. He has already died from blood loss. Blake calls for a little bird to retrieve his corpse. Thomas’ camera remains perfectly intake under his shrapnel ridden body as we lay him out properly for a dustoff.
“Funny he wanted to protect it so bad, can’t take pictures when you’re dead,” says Rommel.
I grab his camera out of interest and click the button to view his recent pictures. What I see is the unfolding events of moments ago. The entire time he was screaming for help he was also taking pictures of us firing into the jungle.
At one shot I see myself peeking out of the foxhole back at the camera—this must have been when I heard him scream. I look so small and empty. My eyes, they are cast in shade from the helmet visor but I can still see it, they have that thousand yard stare in them, is that really me? The large blue helmet covers most of my head down to my brow, my face dark with dirt and sweat lines. I can see my cheek bones protruding too. Only my birthmark distinguishes me as the Peter before the war. Jesus, this morphine was taking one hell of an effect on me. I guess the others just figured I wasn’t eating from how I felt over the past few weeks. Blake brought it up once. I told him I just can’t keep the food down so he prescribed me some nutrients pills. They don’t fill the up stomach though.
I am finished with the camera and put it down. I gaze at his corpse. I never really looked at a dead person without being under the effects of Buzz or DT before. The morphine makes me careless to myself, but not to viewing death unbiased as the field drugs do. As I stare at him I feel sick. It’s not natural to look at the dead. It fucks with a person after a while, showing us how deranged and misplaced our bodies can get. Alien insects zip around and about his shattered legs, landing on the gore and getting stuck in the puddle of blood forming around his lower torso. His legs are bent in all weird directions due to his bones being shattered. And that god awful yellow bloated effect forms all over his body, poking out of his shredded clothing where shrapnel hit him. His face, pale and estranged from any motion a living person could create, looks up at the sky. He was talking to me only a little bit ago, full of life and excitement. Now he is full of nothing.
Blake comes over and sits on a crate nearby with his face in his hands. After a while he throws his helmet off and starts rubbing his head sporadically while looking at Thomas. He frequently looks away in disgust and horror, sometimes even at me.
“What does that mean?” says Blake, pointing at my helmet.
I take it off. “The quote, sir?”
“Yeah you all have it, what is it?”
“It says Fool’s Gold, sir.”
“Why?”
“We used to be the Golden Youth. Now…”
He snorts, looking down at his thighs. “I fucking killed him,” he mutters. “I should have never made him stay out here in the open. I made him an open target. Why would I do that?”
He looks back at me, his eyes wild. “How do you do it? How, how, how do you just keep going on, huh? How do you just sit there and take it all in and not get fucking gut wrenched over it all?” He sucks on his bladder for a while, then coughs spitting the water out onto his lap. “How the fuck are we supposed to go on like this!”
Isaac and Vance come over to Blake’s yelling. The others poke out of their foxholes and watch too.
“I don’t know, sir,” I say.
“That’s it? So no one fucking knows?” Blake takes out his knife and looks at it. “What we did in Khaf’Jadeed, no one knows? I told him,” he points his knife at Thomas’s body, “I told him to stay away from you guys to protect us. Nobody really knows, let alone understands anything about it. Just like us, huh?”
“Should we have told him, sir?” says Isaac.
“Maybe, if we did though, who knows what would happen to us,” says Blake as he twirls his knife between his fingertips. “Just like you said Peter, our own war hero,” he aims his knife at me, “even he doesn’t fucking know either. No one does. We all do know though, that we aren’t supposed to talk about it. That’s what they hammered into us when they rounded us up and said what really happened. What really happened even though we know, we know what really happened. And yet, we don’t know!”
The little bird hums from afar, and the AC-130 does one last sweep firing its cannons for dramatic effect into the canopy before leaving.
We sit quietly, most of us smoking and looking out into the infinite jungle surrounding us. The bird arrives, and we tie a rope around Thomas’s body and he is lifted up with his small bag of belongings. As he is lifted through the air his gored foot falls off and smacks onto the ground before us. The chopper leaves unconcerned and we stare at his foot for a while. Rommel plants a branch at the depot area and sticks the boot crudely on top of it. I forgot to place the camera back on his body before he was taken away, so I tie its strap around the top of the pole with his boot.
“Maybe he’ll get a story out of us after all,” says Vick.
His ever vigilant foot camera watches over us as we sleep.
XXIII
“Where are all the animals local to this planet?” says Tommy. It’s our eighteenth—I think, I stopped caring—day here in the country of Kuplar province. All of us have nearly forgotten about Thomas, besides the pole that still stands in the center of our foxholes holding his camera. Blake had Rommel remove the boot as it began to rot. Half our unit slumps about lazily resting in a foxhole, XM’s lying against the earth walls and we’re all smoking. The other half of the unit is out on patrol by the village nearby. The bizarre jungle trees on either side of us moan in the slight wind. It is starting to get colder now, and we wrap ourselves in our camouflage cloaks to keep our precious warmth.
“What do you mean?” says Isaac, grabbing an ancient and lighting it.
“You know, the animals special to this planet,” continues Tommy. “All I’ve seen lately are just cows and sheep and chickens, stuff from our planet. But nothing here alien or different like.”