The Rub

by Bruce Patterson

In combat it's the short-timers who get the worst of it. If it's your destiny to get wasted in the war, then you want it to happen as soon as they kick you off the boat. To get mercifully zapped in your first or second firefight — it's amazing how often that happens — is the best you can do if it is your fate to die in the war. But to survive 11 or 12 months in combat just to get snuffed out in the end — that's God's way of telling you that He really can't stand your ass.

Another bad thing that can happen to you is to realize that the folks back home have flushed you down a toilet. Last long enough in combat and see enough people killed, and you might reach the point where you realize that if the folks back home cared about you, or if they supported you in any way, then never in their wildest dreams would they ever have put you where you are now.

How is it possible? How could you have landed halfway around the world and one million miles from home?

While standing guard you watch the rag-hanging little boys playing in the trashy road and the furtive young women darting between mud huts, their bare brown feet calloused and caked with dirt. You mark the cluster of old men camped in the shade of a palm grove, the old women drawing water, and you wonder how you could ever have felt so seriously threatened by these poor, luckless bastards that you'd wind up over here and killing them wholesale.

Your helicopter gunships stalk the sky like predator drones. The choppers are your guardian angels and they are ready to rain down death in your name, to cover your ass 24/7. The tracks of your battle tanks squeal in the slums nearby and still, manning your guard post, you keep eyes in the back of your head and your trigger finger ready. You stand ready because you know that here in this neighborhood it is you who are the hunted, and you with the bounty on your head.

Pretending to understand, the politicians back home tell you that they know there are no military solutions. And the math is sure plain enough. You've seen the equation in operation. You kill the son and now the father and the brothers step up as your new enemies. The more you kill, the more you must kill, the bodies pile up and, by and by, both you and they wind up as just more fresh meat for the grinder. There are no military solutions and yet they are still shooting at you. They are still shooting at you and the killing keeps going on and on, spreading like a pool of blood, growing like a tumor, and you're stuck in the middle of it, trapped on all sides. There are no military solutions and yet they use their gold-plated fighter bombers to pulverize civilian neighborhoods in order to buy the politicians back home some time and some cover and concealment. Meanwhile by bombing the civilians what the politicians are buying you is the eternal gratitude of the natives who tell you with their tight lips and hard eyes that they will never so long as they live forget your kind deeds, your place in their hearts and minds.

The bloodiest battles between you and them are put off until after the election back home, back home over there on the dark side of Mars, and you can hardly wait for the days of reckoning. (What else will the politicians be buying you for Christmas?)

You peel away the lies and you know that the war will go on at least so long as you are there; that you have worn out your welcome and then worn it out some more. Now you know that the only sound military solution is for you and yours to get the fuck out of there. The military solution is for you to go back to where you belong and to where you never should have left in the first place. You know in your bones that only after you are gone from here will there ever be a beginning of an end to the killings.

The folks back home worry about threats, gathering threats, and threats that might someday threaten to gather. To justify killing you, before the General Assembly of the UN they presented a long, detailed laundry list of Clear and Present Dangers with the Most Grave Implications for American National Security and Global Peace and Global Stability and every one of those dangers turned out to be as invisible as boogie men, as real as the Easter Bunny.

So what do they do with you now? Aren't you threatened? If a red hot bumblebee of shrapnel slicing through the air at 600 mph whacks you on your knee cap, are you not made of flesh and blood? How is standing guard in this country not a clear and present danger to you and to your future? Don't you count? Because these poor bastards over here never presented any kind of threat to even the most lily-livered of the folks back home, how dare they get you killed?

You can no longer stand to think about the folks you supposedly came all this way to "liberate." What kind of joke was that? "Democracy flows from the barrel of a gun." "We had to destroy the city in order to save it" — where have you heard that bullshit before? War as a Holy Crusade — how sick at heart and feeble of mind must you have been to have fallen for that putrid bit of blasphemy? Was it the Devil who'd planted that worm in your ear?

The first thing battle taught you was that heroes die at supersonic speed. The second thing battle taught you was that military victory means getting you and your hole mates out of there in one piece.

While standing guard your mind drifts back to that little girl who recently got caught in the crossfire. In your mind's eye you see the girl's mother shaking her fist at you. Thousands of the civilians trying to go about their traditional lives within your self-declared Theater of Military Operations have been slaughtered, and you have seen lots of their bodies. You have smelled their bodies crushed beneath the rubble of their bombed-out apartment buildings. You have helped pick up the pieces of their dead.

"Collateral damage" is Martian for murder. When your number is up and a bullet blasts through your brain pan, collateral damage is all you'll be, too. Your death will be incidental and accidental, regrettable yet understandable and justifiable and, besides, to inquire in polite company after the untimely death of a no account like you is impertinent and unpatriotic and rather rude, wouldn't you say? This is America. Let your family bury you and be done with it.

You cannot hold your mind together without hatred — you must hate the enemy to function. So you use the blood and gore, the fear and hunger, the pain and exhaustion to try to focus your hate, to make it searing like the concentrated beam of a magnifying glass. You pray to Jesus to set your enemies afire. You force yourself to see the ungrateful natives as two-faced and unworthy, sneaky, cowardly and murderous. They don't value human life the way you do. They don't appreciate democracy and progress and civilization the way you do. Add it all up and in God's eye the piles of their chopped up corpses weigh almost nothing.

You try your best to passionately hate them, but it is difficult because the people you are surrounded by are so young and penniless and so very much at home.

Not long ago your squad took some small arms fire from a back yard in a village beside the highway. You returned fire until the incoming ceased and then, after carefully working your way forward, you discovered that you had scored two enemy Killed In Action. The KIAs were both boys who looked to be about 15 years old and no older, and they looked vaguely familiar. Never again will they take any potshots at you, or your buddies, or anybody else, and you do your best to take some measure of satisfaction in that. But pleasure? Where's the pleasure?

Watching the natives going about their business — the folks back home have never experienced this unless they've passed through a society that is dirt poor — again you appreciate how young most everybody is, and how you find yourself at war with a nation of children. In such circumstances homicidal hatred, or even lesser types of hatred, is difficult to sustain and it is hard for you to keep your withering eye. Watching the little boys laughing and playing, the girls and women walking, the old men gossiping and grandly gesturing with their hands, for a moment your fortress falls away. Your fortress falls away and you see that your cause ain't worth it, and the folks back home ain't worth it, and you are left naked and helpless because now you know that talk is cheap and that everything always gets back to the dirt under your boots, to the ancient land you are standing in. If only these kids invaded America. If only these kids came to America with their fighters and their bombers, battleships and artillery, mortars and choppers, tanks and rockets. If only they set about putting your country to the torch. Maybe then you could get up a powerful hatred for them. Maybe then you could kill them with pleasure.

A young boy rides by on a bicycle. He is staring at you and, when you stare back, you lock eyes and then he spits and turns away. He is one of them, you know. Soon he'll be coming.