No Hero, Part 3

Now that you’ve left active service, you remark acidly on the nature of your patriotic zeal now that it is totally gone, sapped from you by the heavy handed indifference of the government you naively entrusted your life to. Then, you made sarcastic jokes about how much ol’ Uncle Sam really cared about all the GI Joes in his illustrious armed forces. You were not well liked by your superiors for your negative remarks about the looming war with Iraq, despite your decent performance as a soldier. Your unpopularity didn’t blunt your comments; in fact, the negative responses served to goad you on.

As war grew tight around you, the other soldiers that you worked with, the soldiers at home in the barracks, the officers at the Command and General Staff College, everyone who wore a uniform became embroiled in a great one-sided debate. This debate was directed at the people who were protesting the unavoidable conflict:

"Don’t they see the horrible things Saddam Hussein had done to his people?"

"Don’t you want to strike back at the man who is besmirching our national honor with his abject denials of what is very obviously the truth: that Saddam Hussein wants us all to die and he has the ability to make it so. "

"We need to finish what we started in ’92. Yeah. This is the path of righteousness."

You, on the other hand, weren’t convinced of the necessity of conflict in a region of the world that, historically, no foreign power had been able to keep a grip on without considerable heartache. When you tried to engage in the great one-sided debate on the side of the protestors, they called you a coward and a faggot. You were assaulted with the virulence they had been unable to unleash on the fucking hippies and communists who were against the war.

Before lunch on a sunny day in late February you trekked over to the JAG office on post, cornered your boss’s boss’s boss in his office, closed his door and talked for nearly an hour about your feelings about the war. You were greatly distressed. There was a tremendous tension just behind your eyes as you tried to talk calmly about the lives to be lost, on both sides, for what amounted to a pissing contest between two bullys. You expressed a desire to remain safe at home, and then choking back a sob you looked your boss’s boss’s boss right in the eye and asked him to get you sent to Kuwait for the buildup. You felt like you had no other choice- how could you, a dissenter, dissent without first being directly involved in the conflict? What kind of hypocrisy would you be promoting if you were unwilling to put your own flesh and blood on the line for the war effort you didn’t support, that you figured would result in your permanent disfigurement or death, but were willing to cat call from the safety of the sidelines?

Your boss’s boss’s boss was a good man, close to retiring and buying a boat, close to fishing for the rest of his life. He smiled a lot on other occasions, quick to laugh and joke and enjoy himself, but just then, looking across his desk at you, he was a man bent by a burden too great for him to bear. He opened his mouth to speak, and closed it again. He rubbed the skin around his eyes. His face sagged into old age.

"I just don’t have the personnel to spare right now. I need you right where you are," he said.

You told him you couldn’t take no for an answer. You stood up and placed both hands flat of the surface of the desk between you and your boss’s boss’s boss. You leaned towards him in what you hoped was a menacing fashion.

"I’m sorry," he said, "if a request comes down the line for volunteers, I’ll sign you up."

You asked him again, and this time, you asked with desperation flooding your voice. To you there was no other way than this to serve, to exorcise the demons that wouldn’t allow you to sleep at night.

His voice was flat then, emotionless. "No," he said.

March came, and with it the certainty of conflict, and rumors of conflict. The QRF gathered together in the conference room of the barracks, clanking gear dropped noisily on the floor next to plush office chairs as bodies sank into the soft fabric.

The sergeant in charge of the QRF came into the room carrying a manila folder with the details of an assignment, the first activation you’d be a part of and the first for the QRF since 9/11. The sergeant set the folder down on the table and a smile came to his face. He ran a hand through his close-cropped blond hair and rubbed a hand on his clean-shaven chin. He waited until he had everyone’s attention before speaking.

"Intel reports that there is going be protests right outside the main gates of the Fort, and that we’re going to be on hand for riot control," he said. "We’re going be doing some training on gate guarding and riot control procedures in the next couple of days. The protest is scheduled for Saturday of next week. Finally," he said, "in the event of violence or potential security breaches, like protestors trying to break through the gates to cause mischief on the Fort proper, that we’re going to be issued live ammunition to be used only as a last resort to maintain order and control of any situation that arises."

Your blood ran cold in your veins at the mention of live ammunition, potential firepower brought to bear on American citizens in front of the gates of a government installation. Images of the Kent State massacre flashed before your eyes. A panic rose in your throat and you made an audible choking sound.

The sergeant turned towards you, smiled and said "This is, no shit, the real deal."

A kind of awed sound came from the other soldiers gathered around the table, twenty-five in all, the sergeant oldest of all at twenty-six; aside from you, most of the soldiers had yet to breach their nineteenth year. There was a smattering of "hell yeses," from the group, a few amazed whistles. Scanning each face in turn, you could not detect the slightest bit of horror in the implications of your orders in the other young men.

The meeting adjourned after that. Training would begin the next day and take absolute precedence over normal work routines by order of the Fort’s Commanding General. After taking your gear back to your room, you came back downstairs to your car, intent on returning to work. You unlocked the door on your car, opened it and sat quietly in the driver’s seat. You were unable to breathe. Your mind played images of ammunition in front of your eyes; cascading brass shells hitting the asphalt and bouncing and bouncing again and finally rolling to halt, only to be followed by more, an endless stream of glittering shells. After a moment you regained control of yourself, rose from the driver’s seat and locked the car. You went into the barracks and up to your room. When you opened the door to your room you felt a wave of crushing fatigue pull you toward the bed and down onto the cool surface of the comforter. You didn’t even have time to kick off your boots. You were asleep before you had a chance to think about it too hard.

After your dad shot his buck it started to snow, and snowed hard for the rest of the trip. For the next four days you and your dad saw neither hide nor hair of a single buck, only does which you didn’t have tags for. You watched herds of cattle graze and roam, appearing and disappearing from the blowing clouds of snow. You saw tracks in the snow, and followed the fresh looking ones. You made jokes about how a herd of bucks were following the two of you, hiding just out of sight, watching you grow more and more frustrated with each passing doe that played chicken across your path. You did see a coyote one morning, far away on a hillside. Coyotes preyed on the cattle that grazed in the shallow, treeless valleys of the National Forest, and it was encouraged by the Parks Department to eliminate them when the chance arose. He ran in short spurts, climbing slowly, pausing every few steps to case his surroundings. You waited patiently until you had his rhythm down, and when he paused you took a shot. A plume of snow rose up just underneath him. Without waiting for a follow-up, the coyote ran like hell for the crest of the hill and the safety of the treeline.

By the last day of the hunt you had resigned yourself to going without even a sighting of a second buck. In fact, you were preparing a story to tell everyone when you came home empty handed. By that time you would have shot a man if he had a convincing buck costume on. You had what your dad called "buck fever", the burning desire to "bring one, any one, down." Tension had grown between you and your dad. It was stressful to wait so patiently for nothing, to follow tracks that led nowhere. Frustration rose up and broke upon the two of you. The morning light had not yet even crested the gentle summit of the Black Hills, and cast the predawn in a gray that made everything look lifeless. You and your dad were arguing, snapping back and forth about school, your future, about anything that had given one or the other the slightest bit of annoyance for the past decade. The two of you came around a bend in the logging trail you walked, and looking up on the steep hill that rose on your right stood two hearty, startled looking bucks. Your dad was oblivious as his voice pounded in a furious whisper. You reached out a hand for his shoulder to stop his tirade. Stilled, you both stood looking dumbfounded at the two beasts who were frozen in the calf deep snow.

Your rifle was at the ready, and your dad had his slung up on his shoulder. Slowly, you raised your rifle, doing your best not to spook the animals, but your dad grew impatient. His rifle swung down off of his shoulder even as you raised your rifle. He hissed at you that he was going to get your deer if you weren’t. You hissed back at him to hold on, but he was firing. Thunder. Pause. Thunder. Pause. Thunder. Both bucks spooked and ran fast up the hillside, disappearing under the trees. You scanned the trees with the scope on your rifle for a few long moments. After a while you saw the rump of one of the beasts under the bow of a tree laden with snow. He was facing up the hillside, ready to bolt if the danger persisted. You aimed right for the base of its tail, hoping the bullet would hit and shatter his spine, what your dad called a "pooter shot." You fired. BAM! The animal raced away, and you lost him in the trees. Your dad, who had fired all of the ammo in his rifle’s magazine, was fumbling in his coat pockets, grabbing loose rounds and reloading. You undid the bolt, ejected the spent shell into the snow where it hissed softly. You slid the bolt closed with a metallic snicker, jacking a round from the magazine into the chamber and began to jog up the hillside after the fled animals. Your dad yelled at you to walk. Running would only spook them more. You slowed to a walk and scanned the trees carefully and had gone no more than twenty feet up the hill when the deer you had shot at came crashing out of a copse of trees on your right and ran straight at you going as fast as his legs would carry him.