For my friend Daniel Anderson, who saw the Field of Blackbirds.
Some said it began with what happened at the checkpoint.
Others of us said the old man had nothing to do with it. They said he had only made the old man into some kind of fear, a bogeyman, and what happened was nothing more than a long chain of bad luck in a cold, broken country.
We all knew the end was him leaving his post. The incident report says that last contact was at 0235 hours. His weapon and gear were left behind the sandbags.
They listed him as missing. We never heard about a body.
We came by helicopter after the site was established. The twin-rotor Chinook set down just inside the perimeter’s triple rolls of concertina wire. The crew had painted the name Svarog on the side in Roman letters: Sky-god.
The people from the town stood some distance away and watched.
It had taken the engineers four months to set up the point. Berms, sanitation, entrenched fighting positions. They would construct these things, and what they built by day would collapse by night, or so the story goes. Concrete refused to dry in the cold and wet. Mud would cave in the walls of trenches and splinter pine boards.
We were one platoon, a reaction force for an ammunition supply point — ASP — two hundred kilometers from the main base, detached from a light infantry unit. The Navy had a carrier off the coast and was flying bomber sorties several times a night. That was farther south, though, and we heard no jets: only the breathy roar of attack helicopters with their stubby, clustered weapons, the two-blade thump of a Huey, a distant spotter plane’s turboprop drone.
The most explicit definition given of our mission was that we were there to prevent anything from happening.
The commander of the unit managing the ASP was a logistics major who had been passed over for promotion. We assumed the mission statement meant that our function was to guard ordnance from being co-opted by local militias. The major’s plans were larger in scope.
We were sent out in patrols by squad, and we were tasked with setting up a checkpoint. We liked neither of these: there are more than seven million land mines still in place there. Our lieutenant was unwilling to disobey. The engineers had been through to make safe what they could, but we all understood that it was only a matter of time until something happened.
Despite its problems, the checkpoint was easier to deal with. Soldiers feel more secure on guard duty than in the field. There are the rest of us close at hand.
The major said we were there as peacekeepers, to stop the locals’ military traffic. The checkpoint was nothing more than a roll of concertina wire stretched across the road with sandbag points on either side, a .50 caliber machine gun on one, a belt-fed MK19 grenade launcher on the other. Several times a week, one of us would have to turn away another farm truck with a mortar mounted in the bed. There would be skinny barely-bearded teenage boys squatting around it in back, holding vintage rifles, wearing motley camouflage and denim and knit wool caps.
There was one morning when the sun was small and bright and cold in a clear, thin sky and even those of us not near the checkpoint heard the rumble and clank of ancient metal. The rusted tank approached the checkpoint at a crawl, reeking of diesel. It did not stop until the ground exploded ten meters in front of it.
The shot’s sound hung in the air for long moments, the faint whisper-echo ricocheting from the surrounding hills. It was no more than a sound, quieter than any of us expected. In itself it signified nothing.
Our lieutenant stood with arms folded and watched the scene from our perimeter. Steel creaked. No hatches opened, no one demanded to pass. With a grinding sound, the tank’s left tread moved forward, the right back, and it turned in place to face the way it had come.
Days later, we could not manage a solitary thin old man, bent beneath a far too heavy load.
The old man was a foreigner: that was all the people of the town would say when we asked them, later.
He stood by the checkpoint’s concertina wire, watching the old man approach. It was a cold day, with low, heavy clouds. The load hung on the old man’s back, a long gray bundle tied and secured by fraying brown rope, with irregular protrusions and indentations in the canvas.
He halted the old man and approached with his weapon leveled, demanding to search the bundle. The old man made a formless vowel of refusal.
He saw the empty space where they had cut out the old man’s tongue. It frightened him visibly.
He raised the weapon to his shoulder and began to shout at the old man, ordering the old man to drop the bundle. The old man refused: a mute, violent shake of the head.
The people from the town had emerged to watch from the other side of the concertina wire.
There was a local legend of Saint Kosmas and Saint Damian, who cured a blind man. The saints had ordered the blind man to rape a woman in church. The blind man was convinced it was the voice of the devil, and he prayed and made the sign of the cross. They gave the command twice more. On the third repetition, the blind man leaped up and raped a mute woman upon the altar before the entire congregation. The mute woman cried out, singing exaltation, decrying the blind man. The blind man found he could see again, and rejoiced. He slashed the woman’s throat and danced about the church. For three days, the mute woman’s corpse sang the glories of God and the saints.
Around them, around us, all of us, the hills and trees sucked away the sound. The grey mist of the morning; the shiny-black pine trunks. The road’s wet clay.
The old man refused a last time.
He raised the butt of his rifle. In a motion we all knew, he grasped the barrel in one hand and the butt just behind the grip in the other and reversed them in a vicious upward sweep that had the muscle-weight of his thigh behind it. The butt cracked the old man’s face.
The old man dropped to the ground in a heap. He kicked the old man and began to undo the bundle. The old man wrestled it away from him and struggled up, bleeding from one ear.
This was seen by everyone. Us, the lieutenant, the people of the village, all watched as the old man clutched the bundle and lurched weakly away from the checkpoint, not back down the road, but into the woods. We watched as he watched, standing there, holding his weapon.
No one spoke.
He was taken off checkpoint duty and put on perimeter guard, standing ankle-deep in the icy water at the bottom of the trenches. The major initiated charges against him. Our lieutenant convinced the major not to follow through. We retreated into a close knot, the platoon, refusing to associate with the ASP personnel. They did not face it every day; they could not understand.
Days later, he could not walk. His feet swelled hugely, erupted into angry purple sores and pustules that burst and bled. The medics called it trench foot. They washed his feet and gave him Betadine for the sores, and antibiotics.
The itching was unbearable, he said. He would scratch the sores and fall asleep with bleeding feet. The wind howled and whipped around the tent at night and caved in the camouflage net’s support poles. The blood spread in a rich dark stain at the bottom of his sleeping bag.
Perimeter guard shifts were changed from eight hours to four hours. After a space of weeks, his feet healed. He was sent on patrol with us.
The operations order said reconaissance only, but we were sent out with two grenades and seven thirty-round magazines each, every third round a tracer. Flares, smoke, claymore mines. Many of us had cut the last two knuckles off the trigger fingers of our gloves.
We were peacekeepers. The most explicit definition given of our mission was that we were there to prevent anything from happening.
The woods were dark trunks and the shining white of new snow, with shadowed patches of rotted leaves. We moved up the incline like shades. At the hill’s top, twelve kilometers from the town, there were the ruins of a church. The church had burned in a conflict long past and remained unrepaired. There were only two of the stone walls, eroded and crumbling, fallen pieces of decayed masonry sinking over years into the earth.
Our breaths frosted silently in the air. Some shivered; no one spoke. Cold rifle barrels pointed out at all angles, angles of potential attack.
There was the distant clank of metal. We froze and dropped. The lieutenant made hand motions, laying out a close perimeter. We rolled to our places. Breathless, silent. The crunch of snow against our sides.
Another clank. Two. They sounded closer, but we could not be certain. The woods were too dark.
— Flare, the lieutenant whispered.
There was a pop and a hissing, burning sound. It came from inside the perimeter, and we heard the faint whoosh as someone tossed it out. We smelled the sulfur and knew it was not a flare. An illumination flare pops and goes.
Smoke. It gusted from the grenade and billowed down around us.
Another metallic clank. It rang briefly, like a stick against a cast-iron skillet.
The lieutenant said nothing. We could see nothing, helpless in the night and smoke. The clicks of our weapons being turned from safe to auto.
There was the sudden furious clang of iron and it did not stop.
Someone pulled a trigger.
Briefly, an interminable moment: the sudden yellow strobe, four-petaled bloom from a rifle’s muzzle. Quick bursts of gunfire over the unending ring of metal. The hiss of hot brass on snow.
— Cease fire, the lieutenant yelled. — Stop firing.
Smoke and darkness, acrid reek of cordite. The clanging stopped, and we were only blind. The smoke grenade sputtered and died.
Doctrine states that there are several signals used to give warning once a chemical attack has been detected. Three short bursts of a vehicle horn are one. Clanging metal against metal is another.
The smoke began to clear. Some of us overcame our immobility and ripped our protective masks from the carriers, donned and cleared and sealed them. — It’s not gas, the lieutenant said. — It was smoke.
Others were frozen. Faces staring at empty masks.
— Gas, the lieutenant finally said. The fear in a single word. The rest of us put on our masks. — Give me an M9 check. The lieutenant’s voice came muffled through rubber and plastic.
The M9 is a small chemical agent detection kit, no larger than a blister-pack of cold pills. It takes sixteen minutes. We lay in the snow and waited, the sound of our breathing loud in our ears.
That was when he stood up. — It’s not gas, he said. The lieutenant told him to get down.
He broke the seal on his mask and removed it from his head, blinking in the thin moonlight. — It’s not gas. The lieutenant ordered him to put his mask back on. He took a deep breath and looked at us.
The M9 indicated no chemical agents were present.
We returned to the perimeter. The ASP’s chemical early warning system had not gone off, we were told. It went off twice the following day: a high, sharp whooping sound. We masked both times. The operations office reported the presence of no chemical agents.
The major gave a briefing that evening. Two small caches of blood agent had been discovered and confiscated by our forces several months earlier, far from our location. It was forty years old and of dubious lethality.
There are several types of chemical agent. Nerve agent is the most feared, and the most widely made. The simplest description of its effects is that it kills upon contact with skin. It acts upon enzymes at the muscle-nerve junction, causing immediate convulsions, paralysis, and death.
Blister agent, of which mustard gas and Lewisite are subtypes, destroys the skin and respiratory tract.
Blood agent acts on the hemoglobin molecule, destroying its ability to carry oxygen. The body responds to the oxygen shortage by stopping blood flow to the extremities and causing a frantic increase in the respiratory rate. The victim of a blood agent suffocates with lungfuls of air and dies hyperventilating.
Soldiers are superstitious. It made us uneasy when his feet swelled up a second time, to twice their normal size. He should have obeyed the lieutenant, some whispered. He should have left his mask on.
According to the major, chemical warfare was not projected to be a danger at our current threat posture. Our mission was unchanged.
He was moved to the medical tent on a stretcher. The slightest pressure on his feet caused the skin to crack and bleed. It was diagnosed as residual infection. He was put on stronger antibiotics, and quickly developed a fever. None of us went near, afraid to hear his moans. The medics said he hallucinated, cried out, pleaded. They said he wept and apologized repeatedly, to no one.
Some of us refused to leave the tent without carrying our protective masks. We argued with one another. Small things disappeared: candy, playing cards, matches. There was a fistfight.
The fever broke after two days. The swelling died with it, and his feet healed. He would be monitored for another week before returning to duty.
We went on patrol without him.
Our route was to take us up and over the same hill, past the ruins of the old church. It was a daylight patrol. Still no one spoke when we passed the place of the smoke grenade incident.
The brass gleam of spent shell casings.
The hill sloped steeply, with dark trunks of firs clustered thick and punctuated by outcroppings of gray rock, until the trees thinned and finally cleared at the hill’s bare top. We melted from the woods, camouflage shadows clinging to the near edge of the grounds of the old church. Beyond the ruins there was a wide, open space that offered no cover. The lieutenant had just begun to give the halt sign when we heard the whicker of ripped air and the falling shriek of a mortar round.
— Incoming, the lieutenant cried.
We dropped. The round hit fifty meters in front of us. It was followed by the low, steady chug of a heavy machine gun opening up from somewhere beyond the church. We saw no muzzle flash: only the brief geysers of earth.
— Give me an up, the lieutenant ordered. We accounted for ourselves, from cover: alive. — Bound by fire team, back to the woodline. I want suppressive fire. Go, go, go.
There was the sustained roar of our SAW on full auto. Another mortar round fell, closer. We scrambled retreating towards the cover of the woods in two groups of four, each group dropping to provide covering fire for the other to move. It made no difference. We could not see what we were shooting at: there was only the sound of the machine gun, the crack and rip of small arms fire. Another mortar round, and another.
— Give me a target fix, the lieutenant said.
There was no answer. There was no visible target.
— Radio. Get me Fire Base.
We reached the woods and arrayed ourselves in a loose semicircle inside the shelter of the trees. The machine gun stopped. The lieutenant spoke into the radio’s handset.
— Fire Base, this is Echo Four Zulu, over.
The hilltop’s bare space.
Fire Base answered.
The lieutenant spoke again: each moment frozen. — Fire Base, request close air immediate suppress, grid location kilo foxtrot niner fife niner four tree zero, over.
— Echo Four Zulu, we have Spectre gunship, break, approx four mikes from your position. Describe target, over.
There was the scream of another mortar round. It exploded in the woods, thirty meters from us. The lieutenant paused, unable to avoid a look at the crater.
A Spectre gunship is a slow-moving C-130 cargo plane, modified with an array of cannons and bombs.
We waited for a target.
— Fire Base, cannot observe, approximate grid same, over.
— Echo Four Zulu, roger, break. Echo Four Zulu, set zero, go to zero. Pilot call sign is Spectre Tango Niner, over.
— Fire Base, roger out. — Spectre Tango Niner, this is Echo Four Zulu, over.
— This is Spectre Tango Niner. Go ahead, Echo Four.
— Spectre Tango Niner, request close air, target approximate grid kilo foxtrot niner fife niner four tree zero, cannot observe, over.
In the field, he had been RTO man, the one who carried and monitored the radio.
The Church made Kosmas and Damian the patron saints of doctors, of surgeons and physicians and those who treat the ill. Their legends have fallen, dying.
— Echo Four, we got eyes on the hill, no targets say again no targets. Report your location, over.
— Spectre Tango Niner, thirty meters inside the woodline, southwest side, over.
Two more rounds landed on either side of us in close succession, close enough to shower us with hot dirt. Someone moaned.
The lieutenant began to speak more rapidly. — Spectre Tango Niner, they’ve got our range. We’re being bracketed, we need close air now-now-now, over.
— Echo Four, we caught those, visual on your location, over.
— Spectre Tango Niner, request immediate suppress, fire of unknown origin. Burn the hill, danger close, over.
— Roger that, Echo Four, you got big spooky inbound. Burn in fifteen seconds from my mark. Burn, burn, burn: mark.
In the weeks following our return to the ASP, no one spoke about the incident, save to give statements verifying that we had been fired upon. The major was ordered by headquarters to temporarily suspend patrols and dismantle the checkpoint, pending assumption of road control by military police.
Our mission was to function as a reaction force, to prevent anything from happening.
Perimeter guard was increased to thirty percent strength. Those not on guard shored up defensive positions and dug drainage ditches. We adjusted to the new routine: there was not the uneasy diplomacy of the checkpoint, the numbing tautness of patrol. We played cards in the tent, read portions of letters from home to one another.
He pulled daylight guard duty twice before being assigned to the midnight shift at the perimeter’s entrance.
At 0235 hours, the lieutenant received a land-line call from the position at the gate and scrambled a fire team. We were given no details.
We could hear nothing from the direction of the gate. We came from the tent at a stumbling run, pulling on boots, slapping magazines into weapons. The lieutenant met us there.
He was gone. Night: empty road, silent trees. In those long minutes, each of us strained to see past the dark, to catch a flash of movement, to hear the snap of a twig, some clue.
There was nothing.
His dog tags were found on the main road several days later, far from the hill where the church had been.
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