The Teacher/Student Contest (Nearly 3 mil)

[Lord Tezzy]

please stop derailing this contest with frivolous internet drama.

That is all.

[Alanora Calaran]

I'm out of town for the weekend, so I'm really going to have to step it up when i get back >_< Stupid traveling and not having time to write...

But I think I'll be done by Sept. 15th!

[Lord Tezzy]

Well, good luck. Though the deadline is, in all likelihood, going to be extended by quite a bit.

[ecopper12]

I say keep the deadline the way it is. It gives me a reason to not slack off when finishing this. It also lets us to not have to wait to really get into this. But your say rules, just giving my two cents.

[Alanora Calaran]

ecopper12

I say keep the deadline the way it is. It gives me a reason to not slack off when finishing this. It also lets us to not have to wait to really get into this. But your say rules, just giving my two cents.

The only problem with that is the lack of entries by the 15th. If not enough people get their work in then it's going to be really hard to make this contest legitimate and worth the effort.

[antumbral light]

Title: Scenes from a Lesser War
Genre: War Story
Length: ~6700 words
Content:


Now
Christian sometimes wonders -- staring at the shadowed planes of his ceiling at night, with nothing but silence to hold him and the red lights of the clock display to mark the hours until dawn-- what his life would be like if he had never met Rand Boyd.

It is a complex question to ask—though Christian has not seen Rand for upwards of twenty years, he cannot imagine life without him. In this way, Rand is rather like mathematics: Christian can almost envision a world without mathematics, but the imagination stops short: he has no way of knowing what consequences this lack might bring. In the same indefinable sense, Rand is fundamental.


Then
The Academy is cave-like, with dark and twisted passages, walls of clay bricks and floors of black and white stone. Each fall of boot-heels echoes on the tiles, but in the echoes he cannot quite hear footsteps; everyone walks in a brusque, military style, together. Already they are soldiers marching into battle, books stowed beneath their arms like weapons and legs pounding the ground in martial unison. The Academy is structured, organized, controlled.

Christian is nineteen, and his classmates are nineteen and twenty. For a time he tells himself that he is unlike the others, that he is un-mechanical, individual, but his steps fall into pattern with everyone else, and after a time he gives up the deception. They do not speak to each other here; they cling to their own concerns, chanting the mottoes together: “Semper Fidelis.” A Marine doesn’t leave a man behind.

His bunkmate is a Texan with a surfer’s tan and a sardonic sense of humor. They meet on the first day, as Christian cleans out the bathroom that will become his own. Neither speaks until they are almost done scrubbing the floor together, then the bunkmate introduces himself as Rand, grins, and snaps the washcloth. Christian gives his own name, and they finish the cleaning in more companionable silence. Rand walks away. Christian can hear the echoes of his leaving down the hall.


Now
A night bird shrieks outside again, replying to its mate, and Christian relaxes back against the bed. He can hear the echoes of a siren, the sound woke him, but now that he's awake it isn't threatening. Remnants of his dream chase through his head: the Cadet Corps, Rand laughing.

At the Academy, Rand was always three steps ahead of everyone else, and grinning back at the crowd in his wake. He rolled his eyes just a second too quickly. In friendly football games, he stumbled and was up before anyone realized he had tripped, already focused on the ball and driving towards the next goal. Once, in an argument, Christian had succeeded in punching him, and Rand had laughed, then pinned him to the floor and blackened both his eyes as a lesson.


Then
Christian spends most of his free time on the soccer field if the weather is pleasant, and in the indoor basketball courts if it is not. At night, he visits bars, playing pool for money or picking up an alarmingly varied string of women who are impressed by his uniform and by muscles streamlined by training. His mother would be appalled if she knew of these dalliances, but these are not the things that he includes in his weekly letters home.

He doesn’t particularly care about the women. The truth, he confides in Rand, is that he misses simple company: his high school classmates, the old ladies of his church.

"There's only men here, you know?" Christian says from his bunk. He hangs his head over the edge of his mattress, speaking downwards to Rand on the bunk beneath him. "It's depressing. I mean the officers, you get them drunk and all they talk about is the Bulge. Lots of winter, lots of Germans. Corporal Jacobson described trenchfoot to me the other night. He said it smells like pigs."

"Pigs?" Rand lifts an eyebrow. He's laying on his back with a pencil in one hand, a drawing pad resting against his drawn up legs. Christian can't see what he's sketching.

"Yeah. Sweet, kinda earthy, but really really bad at the same time. But it's not just Jacobson. The old guys, they're all like that. Jacobson talks about trenchfoot, General Harding once told me about the time he shot a Marine because the man had lost half his face to a Panzer. Said the guy didn't want to go on, and he respected that. Semper Fi, and everything."

Rand chuckles. "Bitter old coot. You staying in tonight? 'S Saturday, usually you're out getting laid."

"Nah, too tired. But anyway, I want a girl. A long-time kind of girl. Not for getting laid, just as a relief from the heroism that's been floating around this place recently." Christian folds his arms behind his head and stares up at the ceiling. The fan makes lazy patterns of moving shadow against the bumpy white surface.

Rand humphs distractedly, and Christian can hear the pencil moving more quickly across the paper as Rand gets involved in his work.

A few minutes later, Rand lays the drawing pad down and crosses the room to turn out the light. Christian can see the detailed outline of a foot on the pad in crosshatched shades of grey, toes flexed out in relaxation, a mangled combat boot lying beside it. Smells like pigs? is written in the bottom corner of the page. He smiles to himself.


Now
When Christian is very honest, as he sometimes becomes when the sky darkens so in the wee morning that dawn begins to seem inevitable, he admits that he knows exactly where he would be if he had never known Rand Boyd: dead in a Viet Cong forest, his body a skeleton and his soft parts long devoured by the scavengers of the jungle. That he has had a life at all past age twenty one is entirely Rand’s fault. That a distant siren can awaken him and leave him sleepless for the remainder of the night, pondering such questions and recalling the past, is also entirely Rand’s fault.

They were in their third year when the draft began in earnest, and the time for books expired. In other colleges, students were protesting, but at the Academy war was a fact of life. Christian didn’t wait for his number, and volunteered to go when it became clear that they were calling up cadets before graduation. Rand volunteered as well. They shipped out together, and were placed in the same platoon, stuck in Saigon but bound for the front. Saigon brought them closer, a bond forged of distance from home and two-am card games.

Strangely, those tension-filled nights of waiting to leave are some of Christian's favorite memories of Vietnam. He closes his eyes and dozes in and out, seeing the outline of his friend behind his eyelids.

“I wanna get married,” Rand had said, shuffling his cards and dealing carefully and obviously from the top of the deck. “Find a girl, build a shack, settle down. ******** this tropical s**t, I wanna go home and tie the knot with the first girl I see.”

Christian slid two cards across the paste-board table, and tapped their tops. “There’s girls for hire here. You don’t have to get hitched to get laid, you know.”

“I know,” Rand dealt him two new cards, then leaned back and skritched a hand across cropped blond hair, “but why bother? ‘S only a matter of time, yeah?”

“Huh. But in the meantime you spend your nights here with me. Hurry up and bid.”

“Yeah, ******** it, dude, I give. You’re the secret love of my life. Nah, there’s someone out there for everybody. Love’s kinda like death that way. Figure I'll find mine eventually. We’ll all find ours eventually.”


Then
The Lan Ahn isn't a serviceman's bar. It's mostly locals, and a few out of town businessmen that gather around the vinyl bartop or crouch over the worn pool tables.

Christian goes to escape from his fellow veterans. The men newly back from the front tell horror stories of faces in the trees and gunshots out of nowhere. Christian listens, and drinks more than he did at home.

The bartender's name is Charlie, which Christian privately thinks is someone's idea of a sick joke. He never asks for an ID, even though at home Christian is only a few years past legal. They don’t care much about that here, anyway; his money’s American, and he doesn’t need to speak the language for the bartenders to understand the word “whiskey”.

Christian perches on a rickety stool in the neon-drenched corner of the bar, and holds his little cup of golden liquor gingerly, as though it might burn through his fingers. He leans back to avoid a pool stick waving towards his face, and is careful not to spill any whiskey on his uniform: it would smell of alcohol, and the laundromats here leave much to be desired. The uniform cannot get dirty, he is an American soldier.

The seats nearest to him are empty, though, because of the uniform. The natives chatter away in their indecipherable language, and when Christian is finished, he rises and leaves no tip on the bar.

Outside, the broken, uneven clap of returning soldier’s boots on the pavement gives testimony to the wounds of the front lines: lost legs, sprains, blisters. The sound reminds him oddly of the Academy.


Now
In hindsight and awake in the dark, Saigon was paradise, despite its gaudy neon signs and dirty, close-pressed buildings. Everything changed when they shipped out to the front lines. For one thing, they didn’t see as much of each other. Rand was the unit scout: exploring ahead of the others and checking for villages, for hills where snipers might lay down in the brush, for water or minefields. Christian was the unit’s heavy gunner. He’d never been a crack shot, but he was good at hauling weight and didn’t mind the steely heft of the extra ammo he had to carry because the bigger guns fired faster than everyone else’s weapons. He still feels the weight sometimes, when his back complains at sudden movements. He is getting old.

Rand had come back every night, face smudged with charcoal and sweat, leaves tucked in his helmet to make him look more bush-like and less like sniper-bait. They didn’t play cards while on the march, just huddled next to each other and didn’t talk, until sleep came. They slept sitting up.

Enemies became vaguer with distance from Saigon. It took about five miles of trekking into the brush to understand that they were fighting the jungle most of all. ******** the Charlies, the real danger was the buzzing heat and growling foliage that they hacked though day by day. Machetes were the primary weapon of battle.

Sound was also an enemy. The very trees had eyes, and three times they lost a man to sniper fire without even knowing where the bullet came from. Soldiers just keeled over, bleeding from a neat hole in the head, and the only thing to do was run like mad and hope that it wasn’t you who fell next. Sudden noises still set Christian off, speeding up his heart rate and forcing his eyes to automatically look for places that might be cover. It has become a ritual to trim the tree near his bedroom window every three months so the branches don’t scratch at the glass at night.

Christian remembers the first time that they got ambushed very clearly, and he remembers later that night after they made camp, when he leaned his forehead against a tree, pressed his palms into the bark hard enough to hurt, and just trembled with the draining adrenaline and dawning reality of the war.

Rand hadn’t been there when the sniper hit: he was two miles ahead investigating a river crossing when Rafferty fell with that perfect blue-red circle between his eyes. Nobody had bothered to stop and radio Rand until it was all over and they were holed up safely beneath a giant tree half a mile from Rafferty’s cooling, unfortunate body.

But that night Rand was back with them, and he walked over and propped a hand on Christian’s shoulder. Christian turned around and leaned against Rand like he had the tree, and much later he remembers laughing quietly, shakily, unable to stop and utterly miserable. Rand had just let him work it out, and when Christian had finally gotten quiet again he was kind enough not to mention it the next day.


Then
To get to the front, they walk through the jungle for five weeks, and so it is rather a surprise to Christian when the war finally comes. He can tell that it’s arrived, because that’s when everything goes to hell.

Before that point, it was just a matter of attrition. Men fell gradually to sniper fire, but those long periods of marching interspersed with bursts of utter panic didn’t seem much like actual war. It isn’t war until you can fight back against the enemy. He writes to his mother about the shape of pagodas, and waits.

The actual war sounds like planes low overhead, and smells like chemicals and fire. HQ radios that there’s a village a mile up, but when they get there it’s not so much a village as a series of scorched holes in the ground, a black bare patch amongst the endless foliage. That’s not fair, Christian thinks incongruously, not fair at all. They hadn’t prepared him for this.

The heat is the most unexpected thing. Even the haunted men in Saigon hadn’t mentioned the fact that smoking bodies aren’t the same temperature as the rest of the jungle. The whole burned out area is still blinding hot, and the wind from the trees blows the stinging ashes and sand into their eyes. No one says anything about the brown-skinned people that they aren’t fighting, the old women with scabbed ankles that stare at the ravaged huts without comprehension, choking on the dust of what was once the bodies of their loved ones.

Christian hikes five minutes into the forest, plants his hands on his knees, and throws up. When he gets back, Rand grins at him, and gives him a ‘glad you’re back’ nod.


Now
Christian gets up and goes to the bathroom. He finds the sink without turning on the lights, and drinks water out of cupped hands. He turns off the tap, and looks up, staring at his dark reflection in the mirror. There is a nightlight behind him on the wall, soft orange and glowing comfortingly of home. His eyes reflect the glow, look strange, haunted.

Most nights, he remembers small, piecemeal things. The way Rand used to bite his lip when he pulled the pin on a grenade; the way he had once tried to give a flower to a woman wearing an orange headscarf in a village, and she had watched him strangely, then took the flower and very deliberately placed it in a little boat and floated it down the river; the way his mother would include little scraps of fabric that smelled like her laundry powder in her letters to remind him of home; the way he had been so careful to never let another soldier see him jerk off.

Christian shakes off the memories, turns off the nightlight, and gets back in bed. He is restless now, though, and doesn’t lay down, choosing instead to sit on the edge and stare at the wall as though it held answers.

Some rarer nights, he remembers that he has only truly hated one person in his life. Of course, he has hated the VC abstractly, in the way that everyone hates the bad guys, and he has hated politicians and lawyers in the abstract way that everyone hates politicians and lawyers and similar scum, but he has only hated one man with the kind of personal hatred that makes him feel somehow dirty and cleaner at the same time.

Christian finally lays down and dozes off.


Then
They’ve been at the front for two months, and have lost three men to malaria, when Rand radios back that he’s found the VC ammo dump that HQ has had them after for weeks, and that he doesn’t need the unit, he just needs Christian to bring a few men, and the big guns. “Bring fire”, he says, and Christian adds flamethrowers to his arsenal, then heads out.

Rand meets him below a hill, and points to the north. “Half mile up,” he whispers, “I marked it, you just torch the bastards.” Christian nods and motions to his squad to move out.

“I’ll follow you” Rand says, and that’s that, they’re moving.

At the top of the hill is a circle of low shacks, silent, no sign of guards. He's been here too long for the quiet to mean anything. The Charlies are dangerous when you get complacent, if you allow the silence to lull you into thinking they aren't around. His squad gathers in behind him with a rustling shift of feet, and waits for him to start the attack.

As the forest settles deep and green around them, he thinks that nothing could be more sickening than the single, suspended instant of utter silence before he squeezes the trigger on the flamethrower. It's as if the entire jungle is holding its breath, waiting to see if he will do this thing, judging him. It's as if the palm log huts are deer frozen in a beam of light, and begging with mute and luminous eyes for mercy.

Christian ruthlessly sprays flame in a fifty foot arc, wide enough to catch the nearest three huts, and make sure that those will catch the rest of the small village. He throws down the flamethrower and shoulders the heavy, rapid-burst machine gun in the five second pause before chaos explodes. People run out of the houses, and he sprays gunfire into the panic. There are screams, and he smells the added scent of burning meat in the fire. The rest of his squad fans out around the perimeter for containment, making sure that no one escapes. Christian empties the gun into the flames, and then picks up the flamethrower again.

There is a woman running towards him, taking advantage of the break in gunfire, and Christian catches her in the first burst from the flamethrower. The rush of the chemicals spraying from the nozzle drowns out the sound of her death.

There weren’t supposed to be women. There are never women at the ammo dumps, the VC consider them bad luck. And then there is a familiar voice behind him saying, “Shoot them. If they live, we’ll be killed,” so he doesn’t even think about it, just numbly shoulders his M60 and fires until the gun is empty. The heat from the fire singes the edges of his hair, but Christian doesn’t notice.

He shoots until all his ammo is gone, until his squad has reconvened behind him and is waiting, until there is no sound in the forest except his own raw panting and the crack of sparks from collapsing beams. Then he turns around, and Rand is standing behind him, watching. Christian steps towards the squad and Rand steps away, involuntary and afraid. In that moment, Christian hates him with a fatalistic hunger that consumes him as surely as the inferno raging behind them.


Now
He wakes up sweating still. It took three years out of the Army and a few visits to a therapist, before it became habit to automatically look to his left, take deep breaths until his alarm clock shows a full minute past, and remember that he is no longer in the jungle. Knowing that he is at home doesn’t keep him from imagining that night, though. He still passes people on the street and sees that woman’s eyes in their faces. Sometimes, at the gym, he falls into the mindless state of punching a hanging bag and pictures Rand’s face.

They had screamed at each other that night, held it together until they were back at camp and Christian had cleaned and put away his weapons, then they walked a few hundred yards from camp and just fought it out. Christian can still remember the rawness in his vocal cords.

“Christian, it’s not your fault.” Rand’s voice had been quiet, the same voice that his therapist uses now sometimes when he’s being unreasonable.

“******** you, ******** you, there were women there. It wasn’t a dump Rand, there was no ammo, and I killed those people.”

“You think I don’t know that?” Rand was sweating and still trembling with the sudden drain of adrenaline and the absence of terror. “It was my mark, Christian, my mark. I know, goddammit. You think I don’t know that we shouldn’t have been there? I know! But this isn’t about me, and this isn’t about you, and it’s not about them, and goddammit, there’s nothing we can do about it.” At least Rand wasn’t quiet now, his voice had gotten louder to the end and he had shouted too.

“It is about them, Rand! Maybe she was someone’s mother, and I can still see her eyes, and she was burning, Rand! God, I can hear...” And Christian remembers crying, and thinking that someone at the Academy had told him that Marines don’t cry, but what had they known about war?

“Christian, it’s not…”

And then it had all come together, and for a moment had seemed crystal clear. Even thirty years later, Christian still remembers the utter simplicity of that moment. “You told me to shoot her.”

“We couldn’t have let her escape, could we? ********, we’d all be dead right now if the VC found out about it. We’d have died too.”

“But I didn’t have to shoot her. We could have taken her prisoner, we could have…” Christian recalls the freedom of hysteria quite clearly. “But you said to shoot her, and to kill them all, and there wasn’t any ammo, Rand. ******** we’re murderers now, and you told me to!”

For all that he is haunted by the war, Christian’s single clearest memory of Vietnam is the meaty give and snap of Rand’s jawbone beneath his own hand.


Then
They return to the camp and the rest of the platoon without speaking to each other. Avoidance is impossible, but it quickly becomes clear to the rest of the troops that their scout and their heavy gunner are no longer friends. Rand’s jaw is swollen and blue for the next two weeks. Every time he sees him, Christian thinks about punching him again, because the betrayal and the ravening hatred haven't abated at all, but for now the sight of the bruises is enough.

Inevitably there is another ambush, and this time in the chaos of running madly away from the fallen body, Christian runs right over the two snipers themselves. They are skinny men, and when he points an M60 at one of them, they both begin to cry.

Christian radios the rest of the squad with his position, then watches as through his obvious terror, the man that Christian has the M60 aimed at pats around on the ground beside him and grabs the hand of the other one, holding until his knuckles turn white. The sight sparks a sensory memory, and Christian lives the next moments in montage: the sobbing, too-young sniper; the white of his terrified hand in the dim forest; Rand’s fingers fast and competent as he dismantles a rifle on the firing range of the Academy; the smell of blood and peat and faintly of urine; Rand in the camo paint of a scout, flitting through the forest and hard to see; the faint flash of the sniper’s eyes before the shot. Christian blinks, and behind his briefly closed eyelids hears a voice saying, “Shoot them. If they live we’ll be killed.” He opens his eyes. One of the snipers has high cheekbones, and suddenly looks a little like Rand. Christian doesn’t even think about it, just raises the gun and pulls the trigger.

The sniper’s eyes are wide open when the bullet hits his chest and splatters blood across the leaves of the forest. He collapses against the ground without a struggle, like a sack of flour. Just crumples, and Christian feels something inside of him die -- he doesn’t even hesitate to shoot the other sniper as he shouts, broken, still clutching at the hand of his partner. In the remaining silence, Christian empties the rest of his clip into the bodies and watches the blood trickle in far-too-placid rivers across the dirt. He imagines a village woman with an orange scarf, a flower floating downstream in a small boat. “These people are not the enemy,” he thinks. He doesn’t look too closely at why that thought brings Rand’s face to mind.

The rest of the squad arrives, and his superior says nothing. He takes that as a good sign.

That night, Christian passes the tent where Rand is sleeping, and feels a twinge down his spine, but it’s only the heat, and he walks straight until he reaches his own tent to grab a few hours sleep before guard duty.

He knows what he did was wrong. He still feels something oddly out of place about his chest, a clenching that tightens against his lungs as if accusing him for breathing in air.


Now
Christian finds himself twisting the ring on his right hand as he lies awake. It has become a comfort object: when he’s tense or bored he plays with it, twirling it on his finger, or sliding it off and back on just to feel the cool weight of the polished steel against his skin. The repetitive motions center him, help him calm down and concentrate. The therapist says that’s a good way to deal.

Truth be told, since he’s reliving the past tonight, that moment was the worst of the war that he can remember. The rest exists in his mind as a cacophony of sound: the drone of supply helicopters overhead, the bark of the guns in his hands, the crack of the burning jungle, the silence of tense nights. He lasted another two grueling months on the front, but after the snipers it all just runs together in his mind, not sharp anymore, just a rather vague blur of horror that he can’t really name.

Ironic, really, that he can remember the death of the two snipers in such detail, but doesn’t recall the ambush that finally got him out of it all. The shrinks had had a field day with that when they realized. He knows that the unit was ambushed because he’s been told so, knows that he was captured because he remembers the captivity some, but he doesn’t recall the capture itself at all. That particular battle is just blank, like someone else had been living those days of his life.


Then
They are kept in 8 x 8 cells. Christian knows the dimensions by heart, because he’s watched Rand pace it for two days now. They haven’t been fed since three days ago, and Rand ran out of energy a while back, slumping down against the opposite wall. It's raining outside, and they’ve got a little water from a pail that gets refilled every day, but the hunger is starting to get to them both.

“Never being able to see or never being able to walk?” Rand says. They pass the time by giving each other questions, either/or answers. Red or black? Punched or kicked? Train or aeroplane? He discovered yesterday that Rand prefers sex to blowjobs, and that he’d rather his future wife was a blonde than a brunette. Rand now knows that Christian likes the Red Sox over the Yankees, and that he’d rather die of drowning than burns. Food questions were declared off-limits a day and a half ago. It is strange, this banter between them: at the same time both natural and full of tension. They haven’t spoken face-to-face since the night that Christian ruined Rand’s jaw, but forced together in the cell like this, their silent détente seems pointless.

“Never being able to walk.” Christian pauses, feeling compelled. "I hated you, you know. After the ammo dump. Maybe still do." He doesn't know why he is telling Rand this. The hunger has gotten to him.

"I know." Rand doesn't say anything else, and Christian stares at him for a long time while water drips down their windowsill and plinks onto the stone floor.

When Rand doesn't offer any more information, Christian thinks for a minute, then finds a question. “Bugs or Tweety?”

“Bugs.”


Now
Human memory has fascinated him for a while. He knows with deep certainty what Rand’s answer was, but he cannot actually remember Rand answering, remember the sound of his voice in those moments. The shrinks say words like PTSD. Christian privately thinks that he was just too hungry for his brain to waste the effort of exact memories, so it settled for impressions sometimes.


Then
Christian’s eyes are closed. ”Birch or cedar?”

They are interrupted by the opening of their cell door. Four Charlies walk in, three in combat fatigues and one in a business suit. Christian watches the muscles of Rand’s jaw tighten with sudden alertness. It strikes him as odd, seeing a Charlie in a suit. He’s seen villagers and guerilla soldiers, but this is his first hint that the enemy deals in bureaucrats too. Two of the guards move to Rand, holding him down. The other soldier and the suit crouch in front of Christian. The soldier babbles for a moment, then looks at the other man.

“Where is your camp?” the suited man translates. Christian meets Rand’s eyes across the cell. “Tell us or we’ll hurt your friend.” The man’s English is broken, but his voice says he means business. Christian holds Rand’s eyes, and doesn’t say anything. Neither of them looks away, and neither of them makes a sound as the thugs gut-punch Rand a few times. Christian bites his lip to stifle the laughter that threatens to emerge, inappropriate and clawing and hysterical in his throat. He could tell them that they couldn't have picked a worse pair for this trick. Could tell them that it makes him sick inside, but that doesn't stop the fact that every blow Rand takes feels to Christian like justice. If justice tastes bitter and more guilty than he'd imagined, well, that's one more lesson of the war, and Christian is learning enough for lifetimes over here, in the faces of murdered women and the heat of unnatural fire. The soldier crouched beside him rips off another question, and the suit translates.

“We know that you were camped with a squad. Where is your camp? Don’t be silly, we can keep hurting your friend for as long as this takes.” Rand shuts his eyes when the thugs aim for his ears this time, but Christian doesn’t look away. His mind flashes the image of the dead snipers before his eyes. A wet thud gushes blood from Rand’s mouth, and Christian’s hand tingles with the sense memory of the give and snap of bone. It shouldn't feel as good as it does.

“Where is your camp?” The questions go on forever. Christian remains silent and doesn’t take his eyes off Rand. The beatings feel good, even as they twist his stomach until the bile rises burning in his throat. In a way it's him who's administering them, and his brain quells at the amount of irony it takes to imagine that he can be a hero and have his revenge in the same breaths, because it's one and the same thing and Rand is asking for it, taking all the pain that Christian gives him through the fists of the Charlies because that's the way it should be, that's the only way to make the whole ******** up situation make sense.

He tries say with his eyes everything that he cannot with his mouth: I’m sorry; I wished this on you before, and I wish it on you now; I would make them stop if I could; I hate you, it's not that simple but I hate you still. Rand’s eyes are speaking too: don’t break, tell them and they won’t need us, they’ll kill us both; I forgive you; I hate you and it doesn't matter; don’t break. Nothing's ever simple. Don't break.

Christian loses track of time, but when Rand is curled into a fetal position and coughing up blood with every breath, the interrogator suddenly changes tactics.

“It is not honorable to allow your comrade harmed, but if you will not tell us for him, perhaps you will tell us for yourself.” The soldier nearest to Christian draws a gun, points it at his leg. “Where is your camp?”

Across the floor, Rand opens his eyes. Christian meets them, and bites his lip. Rand doesn't talk either, and Christian understands that this is the flip side of the hysterical justice of the beatings, Rand's chance to be revenged on Christian for being the weapon through which he is guilty of being a monster. Christian remembers the sound of the gun shot, but nothing after that.


Now
Under the covers, Christian stretches his legs, like he always does when remembering the POW camp. It’s a reflex now, wiggling his toes to prove that he still can, feeling the reassuring tension of the scar tissue across his thighs. He has eight bullet furrows there, and the scars remind him that he has been terribly, terribly lucky.

Truth be told, the time in the POW camp after they started shooting him is nearly a complete blank in his head. Not even vague impressions exist, almost no memories at all. There are a very few things. He can remember Rand crawling next to him then curling up from the pain of motion, can remember insect buzz and panting breaths, can remember Rand whispering to him, but not the words. That’s it, those three snatches are all that stuck in his head of what he’s told were forty days in captivity.

The bullet wounds got infected pretty quickly in the jungle. He could have died of the bleeding, and when he didn’t die of that, he could have died of malaria or gangrene or maggots or one of the half-dozen infections that were cured in the field hospital after his rescue. The infections kept him delirious, and so he doesn’t remember the POW camp. He has a sense of the helicopter blades that signaled rescue, isn’t sure if this is actually a memory, or just his brain mapping helicopters he heard elsewhere onto what he was told happened during the rescue.


Then
He awakens to the sight of sunlight through the burlap of a tent, and the unfamiliar sounds of a hospital. He closes his eyes for a moment, and when he opens them again he’s still in the hospital, not in one of the front line temporary camps or back in the POW cell. He turns his head, and Rand is on the cot to his left, asleep still. Christian relaxes back against the sheets, and fantasizes about choking the life from Rand's throat as he lies there. It doesn't seem like justice that both of them should survive. One should be a martyr and one should be a murderer, and Christian isn't sure which is which but it isn't right that both of them should be here and thirty or fifty or a hundred women and children should be dead. A nurse comes by, checks his temperature with a thermometer under his arm, then slips a needle into his IV.

“Morphine,” she says, and hey, Christian’s not complaining. He goes back to sleep, and dreams of the girl in the orange scarf, her little flower in its fragile little boat; of Rafferty’s empty, dead eyes; of faceless one-night-stands at the Academy; of the screaming, burning village women; of the sniper clutching for the hand of his countryman; of Rand bleeding on the floor. “These people,” he thinks, “are not the enemy,” but the feeling doesn't make an ounce of difference. Where once his sense of right and wrong resided, there is now only the crackle of a jungle in flames and the sound of buzzing flies. Loathing still rises unchecked within him, until he can almost imagine it was right that all those people be stamped out and slaughtered. This is what the jungle does to a man: lodges itself into his soul and grows there with its vines and its diseases, until he carries it into whatever civilization he can find and not even fire can prize it out of his soul.

Christian turns on his bunk until he can see Rand's face again, and when his fevered imagination draws the lines of blood from eyes and ruptured ears and toothless mouth, the tortured visage peacefully asleep beside him begins to look both like every Charlie he's ever killed, and oddly like himself.


Now
That's it. Christian turns onto his stomach, sick to death of the memories and eager for whatever dreams sleep might bring, even if they revive ghosts he'd rather leave dead. Anything better than the creeping embers of the hatred that still leaves him hollow. He’d been shipped home after the rescue. He’d done his duty for the country. Rest, he was told, you’re a hero. Because you held out, because you didn't talk, a hundred and fifty men in the camp you didn’t tell them about are still alive. Christian told no one that he hadn't thought of the hundred and fifty men while he was trapped in that cell. He'd watched Rand curled up and bleeding across from him, and he hadn't talked.

“I torched a village,” he’d wanted to say, but his commanding officer had shook his head and that had been the end of it.

Two days from shipping out, he’d been resting in a godforsaken hotel room in Saigon and staring at the ceiling when someone had knocked on the door. Rand was outside when he opened it.

“I…” Rand seemed at a loss. “I just wanted to give you this.” In his palm was a ring, plain and silvery. “They pulled the bullets out of you, and I saved the steel shot, thought you might…“ he trails off. Green neon lights cast a sick glow on his face. “You saved my life when you didn’t break.” They both know that this fact is incidental, that Rand's safety is just about the opposite of the reason Christian never talked.

He wonders if Rand also feels the burning, if he thinks of Christian getting shot and curls up proprietary around the pleasure of it. The ring is hot and heavy in his palm, as if its uncertain significance gives it more weight than ordinary steel would carry. Christian closes the door without saying thank you. Neither of them would believe him if he did.

Three months later and stateside, two thousand miles away from Rand and even further from the jungle, he’d noticed the faint engraving on the interior of the band: Semper Fi. Never leave a man behind. In sleepless mornings and the anxiety of sirens, in tension around the Vietnamese vice-president of his chess club, in his refusal to barbeque on the Fourth of July and the way that action movie explosions sometimes leave him inexplicably sobbing, he hasn't yet left Rand. He still dreams the burning, still wakes to ashes and massacre with his coffee. There are soot stains beneath his eyes that even scalding showers cannot burn away, and sometimes he is Lady Macbeth to himself in the mirror, every day scrubbing at blood.

When it counted, Christian thinks, when it really mattered most, they were Marines. And push come to shove, want come to need, he's never left a man behind.

[Lord Tezzy]

ecopper: read Alanora's post, that exactly the reason the deadline might be extended. But I swear if I don't have at least five or six entries by then I'm liable to shut the contest down and just lock my stuff away for all eternity. So there is still a good reason for you to finish quickly. Hows that?

@Antumbral Light: I do hope you applied *goes to check other account*

[Lord Tezzy]

antumbral light

Title: Scenes from a Lesser War
Genre: War Story
Length: ~6700 words
Content:


Now
Christian sometimes wonders -- staring at the shadowed planes of his ceiling at night, with nothing but silence to hold him and the red lights of the clock display to mark the hours until dawn-- what his life would be like if he had never met Rand Boyd.

It is a complex question to ask—though Christian has not seen Rand for upwards of twenty years, he cannot imagine life without him. In this way, Rand is rather like mathematics: Christian can almost envision a world without mathematics, but the imagination stops short: he has no way of knowing what consequences this lack might bring. In the same indefinable sense, Rand is fundamental.


Then
The Academy is cave-like, with dark and twisted passages, walls of clay bricks and floors of black and white stone. Each fall of boot-heels echoes on the tiles, but in the echoes he cannot quite hear footsteps; everyone walks in a brusque, military style, together. Already they are soldiers marching into battle, books stowed beneath their arms like weapons and legs pounding the ground in martial unison. The Academy is structured, organized, controlled.

Christian is nineteen, and his classmates are nineteen and twenty. For a time he tells himself that he is unlike the others, that he is un-mechanical, individual, but his steps fall into pattern with everyone else, and after a time he gives up the deception. They do not speak to each other here; they cling to their own concerns, chanting the mottoes together: “Semper Fidelis.” A Marine doesn’t leave a man behind.

His bunkmate is a Texan with a surfer’s tan and a sardonic sense of humor. They meet on the first day, as Christian cleans out the bathroom that will become his own. Neither speaks until they are almost done scrubbing the floor together, then the bunkmate introduces himself as Rand, grins, and snaps the washcloth. Christian gives his own name, and they finish the cleaning in more companionable silence. Rand walks away. Christian can hear the echoes of his leaving down the hall.


Now
A night bird shrieks outside again, replying to its mate, and Christian relaxes back against the bed. He can hear the echoes of a siren, the sound woke him, but now that he's awake it isn't threatening. Remnants of his dream chase through his head: the Cadet Corps, Rand laughing.

At the Academy, Rand was always three steps ahead of everyone else, and grinning back at the crowd in his wake. He rolled his eyes just a second too quickly. In friendly football games, he stumbled and was up before anyone realized he had tripped, already focused on the ball and driving towards the next goal. Once, in an argument, Christian had succeeded in punching him, and Rand had laughed, then pinned him to the floor and blackened both his eyes as a lesson.


Then
Christian spends most of his free time on the soccer field if the weather is pleasant, and in the indoor basketball courts if it is not. At night, he visits bars, playing pool for money or picking up an alarmingly varied string of women who are impressed by his uniform and by muscles streamlined by training. His mother would be appalled if she knew of these dalliances, but these are not the things that he includes in his weekly letters home.

He doesn’t particularly care about the women. The truth, he confides in Rand, is that he misses simple company: his high school classmates, the old ladies of his church.

"There's only men here, you know?" Christian says from his bunk. He hangs his head over the edge of his mattress, speaking downwards to Rand on the bunk beneath him. "It's depressing. I mean the officers, you get them drunk and all they talk about is the Bulge. Lots of winter, lots of Germans. Corporal Jacobson described trenchfoot to me the other night. He said it smells like pigs."

"Pigs?" Rand lifts an eyebrow. He's laying on his back with a pencil in one hand, a drawing pad resting against his drawn up legs. Christian can't see what he's sketching.

"Yeah. Sweet, kinda earthy, but really really bad at the same time. But it's not just Jacobson. The old guys, they're all like that. Jacobson talks about trenchfoot, General Harding once told me about the time he shot a Marine because the man had lost half his face to a Panzer. Said the guy didn't want to go on, and he respected that. Semper Fi, and everything."

Rand chuckles. "Bitter old coot. You staying in tonight? 'S Saturday, usually you're out getting laid."

"Nah, too tired. But anyway, I want a girl. A long-time kind of girl. Not for getting laid, just as a relief from the heroism that's been floating around this place recently." Christian folds his arms behind his head and stares up at the ceiling. The fan makes lazy patterns of moving shadow against the bumpy white surface.

Rand humphs distractedly, and Christian can hear the pencil moving more quickly across the paper as Rand gets involved in his work.

A few minutes later, Rand lays the drawing pad down and crosses the room to turn out the light. Christian can see the detailed outline of a foot on the pad in crosshatched shades of grey, toes flexed out in relaxation, a mangled combat boot lying beside it. Smells like pigs? is written in the bottom corner of the page. He smiles to himself.


Now
When Christian is very honest, as he sometimes becomes when the sky darkens so in the wee morning that dawn begins to seem inevitable, he admits that he knows exactly where he would be if he had never known Rand Boyd: dead in a Viet Cong forest, his body a skeleton and his soft parts long devoured by the scavengers of the jungle. That he has had a life at all past age twenty one is entirely Rand’s fault. That a distant siren can awaken him and leave him sleepless for the remainder of the night, pondering such questions and recalling the past, is also entirely Rand’s fault.

They were in their third year when the draft began in earnest, and the time for books expired. In other colleges, students were protesting, but at the Academy war was a fact of life. Christian didn’t wait for his number, and volunteered to go when it became clear that they were calling up cadets before graduation. Rand volunteered as well. They shipped out together, and were placed in the same platoon, stuck in Saigon but bound for the front. Saigon brought them closer, a bond forged of distance from home and two-am card games.

Strangely, those tension-filled nights of waiting to leave are some of Christian's favorite memories of Vietnam. He closes his eyes and dozes in and out, seeing the outline of his friend behind his eyelids.

“I wanna get married,” Rand had said, shuffling his cards and dealing carefully and obviously from the top of the deck. “Find a girl, build a shack, settle down. ******** this tropical s**t, I wanna go home and tie the knot with the first girl I see.”

Christian slid two cards across the paste-board table, and tapped their tops. “There’s girls for hire here. You don’t have to get hitched to get laid, you know.”

“I know,” Rand dealt him two new cards, then leaned back and skritched a hand across cropped blond hair, “but why bother? ‘S only a matter of time, yeah?”

“Huh. But in the meantime you spend your nights here with me. Hurry up and bid.”

“Yeah, ******** it, dude, I give. You’re the secret love of my life. Nah, there’s someone out there for everybody. Love’s kinda like death that way. Figure I'll find mine eventually. We’ll all find ours eventually.”


Then
The Lan Ahn isn't a serviceman's bar. It's mostly locals, and a few out of town businessmen that gather around the vinyl bartop or crouch over the worn pool tables.

Christian goes to escape from his fellow veterans. The men newly back from the front tell horror stories of faces in the trees and gunshots out of nowhere. Christian listens, and drinks more than he did at home.

The bartender's name is Charlie, which Christian privately thinks is someone's idea of a sick joke. He never asks for an ID, even though at home Christian is only a few years past legal. They don’t care much about that here, anyway; his money’s American, and he doesn’t need to speak the language for the bartenders to understand the word “whiskey”.

Christian perches on a rickety stool in the neon-drenched corner of the bar, and holds his little cup of golden liquor gingerly, as though it might burn through his fingers. He leans back to avoid a pool stick waving towards his face, and is careful not to spill any whiskey on his uniform: it would smell of alcohol, and the laundromats here leave much to be desired. The uniform cannot get dirty, he is an American soldier.

The seats nearest to him are empty, though, because of the uniform. The natives chatter away in their indecipherable language, and when Christian is finished, he rises and leaves no tip on the bar.

Outside, the broken, uneven clap of returning soldier’s boots on the pavement gives testimony to the wounds of the front lines: lost legs, sprains, blisters. The sound reminds him oddly of the Academy.


Now
In hindsight and awake in the dark, Saigon was paradise, despite its gaudy neon signs and dirty, close-pressed buildings. Everything changed when they shipped out to the front lines. For one thing, they didn’t see as much of each other. Rand was the unit scout: exploring ahead of the others and checking for villages, for hills where snipers might lay down in the brush, for water or minefields. Christian was the unit’s heavy gunner. He’d never been a crack shot, but he was good at hauling weight and didn’t mind the steely heft of the extra ammo he had to carry because the bigger guns fired faster than everyone else’s weapons. He still feels the weight sometimes, when his back complains at sudden movements. He is getting old.

Rand had come back every night, face smudged with charcoal and sweat, leaves tucked in his helmet to make him look more bush-like and less like sniper-bait. They didn’t play cards while on the march, just huddled next to each other and didn’t talk, until sleep came. They slept sitting up.

Enemies became vaguer with distance from Saigon. It took about five miles of trekking into the brush to understand that they were fighting the jungle most of all. ******** the Charlies, the real danger was the buzzing heat and growling foliage that they hacked though day by day. Machetes were the primary weapon of battle.

Sound was also an enemy. The very trees had eyes, and three times they lost a man to sniper fire without even knowing where the bullet came from. Soldiers just keeled over, bleeding from a neat hole in the head, and the only thing to do was run like mad and hope that it wasn’t you who fell next. Sudden noises still set Christian off, speeding up his heart rate and forcing his eyes to automatically look for places that might be cover. It has become a ritual to trim the tree near his bedroom window every three months so the branches don’t scratch at the glass at night.

Christian remembers the first time that they got ambushed very clearly, and he remembers later that night after they made camp, when he leaned his forehead against a tree, pressed his palms into the bark hard enough to hurt, and just trembled with the draining adrenaline and dawning reality of the war.

Rand hadn’t been there when the sniper hit: he was two miles ahead investigating a river crossing when Rafferty fell with that perfect blue-red circle between his eyes. Nobody had bothered to stop and radio Rand until it was all over and they were holed up safely beneath a giant tree half a mile from Rafferty’s cooling, unfortunate body.

But that night Rand was back with them, and he walked over and propped a hand on Christian’s shoulder. Christian turned around and leaned against Rand like he had the tree, and much later he remembers laughing quietly, shakily, unable to stop and utterly miserable. Rand had just let him work it out, and when Christian had finally gotten quiet again he was kind enough not to mention it the next day.


Then
To get to the front, they walk through the jungle for five weeks, and so it is rather a surprise to Christian when the war finally comes. He can tell that it’s arrived, because that’s when everything goes to hell.

Before that point, it was just a matter of attrition. Men fell gradually to sniper fire, but those long periods of marching interspersed with bursts of utter panic didn’t seem much like actual war. It isn’t war until you can fight back against the enemy. He writes to his mother about the shape of pagodas, and waits.

The actual war sounds like planes low overhead, and smells like chemicals and fire. HQ radios that there’s a village a mile up, but when they get there it’s not so much a village as a series of scorched holes in the ground, a black bare patch amongst the endless foliage. That’s not fair, Christian thinks incongruously, not fair at all. They hadn’t prepared him for this.

The heat is the most unexpected thing. Even the haunted men in Saigon hadn’t mentioned the fact that smoking bodies aren’t the same temperature as the rest of the jungle. The whole burned out area is still blinding hot, and the wind from the trees blows the stinging ashes and sand into their eyes. No one says anything about the brown-skinned people that they aren’t fighting, the old women with scabbed ankles that stare at the ravaged huts without comprehension, choking on the dust of what was once the bodies of their loved ones.

Christian hikes five minutes into the forest, plants his hands on his knees, and throws up. When he gets back, Rand grins at him, and gives him a ‘glad you’re back’ nod.


Now
Christian gets up and goes to the bathroom. He finds the sink without turning on the lights, and drinks water out of cupped hands. He turns off the tap, and looks up, staring at his dark reflection in the mirror. There is a nightlight behind him on the wall, soft orange and glowing comfortingly of home. His eyes reflect the glow, look strange, haunted.

Most nights, he remembers small, piecemeal things. The way Rand used to bite his lip when he pulled the pin on a grenade; the way he had once tried to give a flower to a woman wearing an orange headscarf in a village, and she had watched him strangely, then took the flower and very deliberately placed it in a little boat and floated it down the river; the way his mother would include little scraps of fabric that smelled like her laundry powder in her letters to remind him of home; the way he had been so careful to never let another soldier see him jerk off.

Christian shakes off the memories, turns off the nightlight, and gets back in bed. He is restless now, though, and doesn’t lay down, choosing instead to sit on the edge and stare at the wall as though it held answers.

Some rarer nights, he remembers that he has only truly hated one person in his life. Of course, he has hated the VC abstractly, in the way that everyone hates the bad guys, and he has hated politicians and lawyers in the abstract way that everyone hates politicians and lawyers and similar scum, but he has only hated one man with the kind of personal hatred that makes him feel somehow dirty and cleaner at the same time.

Christian finally lays down and dozes off.


Then
They’ve been at the front for two months, and have lost three men to malaria, when Rand radios back that he’s found the VC ammo dump that HQ has had them after for weeks, and that he doesn’t need the unit, he just needs Christian to bring a few men, and the big guns. “Bring fire”, he says, and Christian adds flamethrowers to his arsenal, then heads out.

Rand meets him below a hill, and points to the north. “Half mile up,” he whispers, “I marked it, you just torch the bastards.” Christian nods and motions to his squad to move out.

“I’ll follow you” Rand says, and that’s that, they’re moving.

At the top of the hill is a circle of low shacks, silent, no sign of guards. He's been here too long for the quiet to mean anything. The Charlies are dangerous when you get complacent, if you allow the silence to lull you into thinking they aren't around. His squad gathers in behind him with a rustling shift of feet, and waits for him to start the attack.

As the forest settles deep and green around them, he thinks that nothing could be more sickening than the single, suspended instant of utter silence before he squeezes the trigger on the flamethrower. It's as if the entire jungle is holding its breath, waiting to see if he will do this thing, judging him. It's as if the palm log huts are deer frozen in a beam of light, and begging with mute and luminous eyes for mercy.

Christian ruthlessly sprays flame in a fifty foot arc, wide enough to catch the nearest three huts, and make sure that those will catch the rest of the small village. He throws down the flamethrower and shoulders the heavy, rapid-burst machine gun in the five second pause before chaos explodes. People run out of the houses, and he sprays gunfire into the panic. There are screams, and he smells the added scent of burning meat in the fire. The rest of his squad fans out around the perimeter for containment, making sure that no one escapes. Christian empties the gun into the flames, and then picks up the flamethrower again.

There is a woman running towards him, taking advantage of the break in gunfire, and Christian catches her in the first burst from the flamethrower. The rush of the chemicals spraying from the nozzle drowns out the sound of her death.

There weren’t supposed to be women. There are never women at the ammo dumps, the VC consider them bad luck. And then there is a familiar voice behind him saying, “Shoot them. If they live, we’ll be killed,” so he doesn’t even think about it, just numbly shoulders his M60 and fires until the gun is empty. The heat from the fire singes the edges of his hair, but Christian doesn’t notice.

He shoots until all his ammo is gone, until his squad has reconvened behind him and is waiting, until there is no sound in the forest except his own raw panting and the crack of sparks from collapsing beams. Then he turns around, and Rand is standing behind him, watching. Christian steps towards the squad and Rand steps away, involuntary and afraid. In that moment, Christian hates him with a fatalistic hunger that consumes him as surely as the inferno raging behind them.


Now
He wakes up sweating still. It took three years out of the Army and a few visits to a therapist, before it became habit to automatically look to his left, take deep breaths until his alarm clock shows a full minute past, and remember that he is no longer in the jungle. Knowing that he is at home doesn’t keep him from imagining that night, though. He still passes people on the street and sees that woman’s eyes in their faces. Sometimes, at the gym, he falls into the mindless state of punching a hanging bag and pictures Rand’s face.

They had screamed at each other that night, held it together until they were back at camp and Christian had cleaned and put away his weapons, then they walked a few hundred yards from camp and just fought it out. Christian can still remember the rawness in his vocal cords.

“Christian, it’s not your fault.” Rand’s voice had been quiet, the same voice that his therapist uses now sometimes when he’s being unreasonable.

“******** you, ******** you, there were women there. It wasn’t a dump Rand, there was no ammo, and I killed those people.”

“You think I don’t know that?” Rand was sweating and still trembling with the sudden drain of adrenaline and the absence of terror. “It was my mark, Christian, my mark. I know, goddammit. You think I don’t know that we shouldn’t have been there? I know! But this isn’t about me, and this isn’t about you, and it’s not about them, and goddammit, there’s nothing we can do about it.” At least Rand wasn’t quiet now, his voice had gotten louder to the end and he had shouted too.

“It is about them, Rand! Maybe she was someone’s mother, and I can still see her eyes, and she was burning, Rand! God, I can hear...” And Christian remembers crying, and thinking that someone at the Academy had told him that Marines don’t cry, but what had they known about war?

“Christian, it’s not…”

And then it had all come together, and for a moment had seemed crystal clear. Even thirty years later, Christian still remembers the utter simplicity of that moment. “You told me to shoot her.”

“We couldn’t have let her escape, could we? ********, we’d all be dead right now if the VC found out about it. We’d have died too.”

“But I didn’t have to shoot her. We could have taken her prisoner, we could have…” Christian recalls the freedom of hysteria quite clearly. “But you said to shoot her, and to kill them all, and there wasn’t any ammo, Rand. ******** we’re murderers now, and you told me to!”

For all that he is haunted by the war, Christian’s single clearest memory of Vietnam is the meaty give and snap of Rand’s jawbone beneath his own hand.


Then
They return to the camp and the rest of the platoon without speaking to each other. Avoidance is impossible, but it quickly becomes clear to the rest of the troops that their scout and their heavy gunner are no longer friends. Rand’s jaw is swollen and blue for the next two weeks. Every time he sees him, Christian thinks about punching him again, because the betrayal and the ravening hatred haven't abated at all, but for now the sight of the bruises is enough.

Inevitably there is another ambush, and this time in the chaos of running madly away from the fallen body, Christian runs right over the two snipers themselves. They are skinny men, and when he points an M60 at one of them, they both begin to cry.

Christian radios the rest of the squad with his position, then watches as through his obvious terror, the man that Christian has the M60 aimed at pats around on the ground beside him and grabs the hand of the other one, holding until his knuckles turn white. The sight sparks a sensory memory, and Christian lives the next moments in montage: the sobbing, too-young sniper; the white of his terrified hand in the dim forest; Rand’s fingers fast and competent as he dismantles a rifle on the firing range of the Academy; the smell of blood and peat and faintly of urine; Rand in the camo paint of a scout, flitting through the forest and hard to see; the faint flash of the sniper’s eyes before the shot. Christian blinks, and behind his briefly closed eyelids hears a voice saying, “Shoot them. If they live we’ll be killed.” He opens his eyes. One of the snipers has high cheekbones, and suddenly looks a little like Rand. Christian doesn’t even think about it, just raises the gun and pulls the trigger.

The sniper’s eyes are wide open when the bullet hits his chest and splatters blood across the leaves of the forest. He collapses against the ground without a struggle, like a sack of flour. Just crumples, and Christian feels something inside of him die -- he doesn’t even hesitate to shoot the other sniper as he shouts, broken, still clutching at the hand of his partner. In the remaining silence, Christian empties the rest of his clip into the bodies and watches the blood trickle in far-too-placid rivers across the dirt. He imagines a village woman with an orange scarf, a flower floating downstream in a small boat. “These people are not the enemy,” he thinks. He doesn’t look too closely at why that thought brings Rand’s face to mind.

The rest of the squad arrives, and his superior says nothing. He takes that as a good sign.

That night, Christian passes the tent where Rand is sleeping, and feels a twinge down his spine, but it’s only the heat, and he walks straight until he reaches his own tent to grab a few hours sleep before guard duty.

He knows what he did was wrong. He still feels something oddly out of place about his chest, a clenching that tightens against his lungs as if accusing him for breathing in air.


Now
Christian finds himself twisting the ring on his right hand as he lies awake. It has become a comfort object: when he’s tense or bored he plays with it, twirling it on his finger, or sliding it off and back on just to feel the cool weight of the polished steel against his skin. The repetitive motions center him, help him calm down and concentrate. The therapist says that’s a good way to deal.

Truth be told, since he’s reliving the past tonight, that moment was the worst of the war that he can remember. The rest exists in his mind as a cacophony of sound: the drone of supply helicopters overhead, the bark of the guns in his hands, the crack of the burning jungle, the silence of tense nights. He lasted another two grueling months on the front, but after the snipers it all just runs together in his mind, not sharp anymore, just a rather vague blur of horror that he can’t really name.

Ironic, really, that he can remember the death of the two snipers in such detail, but doesn’t recall the ambush that finally got him out of it all. The shrinks had had a field day with that when they realized. He knows that the unit was ambushed because he’s been told so, knows that he was captured because he remembers the captivity some, but he doesn’t recall the capture itself at all. That particular battle is just blank, like someone else had been living those days of his life.


Then
They are kept in 8 x 8 cells. Christian knows the dimensions by heart, because he’s watched Rand pace it for two days now. They haven’t been fed since three days ago, and Rand ran out of energy a while back, slumping down against the opposite wall. It's raining outside, and they’ve got a little water from a pail that gets refilled every day, but the hunger is starting to get to them both.

“Never being able to see or never being able to walk?” Rand says. They pass the time by giving each other questions, either/or answers. Red or black? Punched or kicked? Train or aeroplane? He discovered yesterday that Rand prefers sex to blowjobs, and that he’d rather his future wife was a blonde than a brunette. Rand now knows that Christian likes the Red Sox over the Yankees, and that he’d rather die of drowning than burns. Food questions were declared off-limits a day and a half ago. It is strange, this banter between them: at the same time both natural and full of tension. They haven’t spoken face-to-face since the night that Christian ruined Rand’s jaw, but forced together in the cell like this, their silent détente seems pointless.

“Never being able to walk.” Christian pauses, feeling compelled. "I hated you, you know. After the ammo dump. Maybe still do." He doesn't know why he is telling Rand this. The hunger has gotten to him.

"I know." Rand doesn't say anything else, and Christian stares at him for a long time while water drips down their windowsill and plinks onto the stone floor.

When Rand doesn't offer any more information, Christian thinks for a minute, then finds a question. “Bugs or Tweety?”

“Bugs.”


Now
Human memory has fascinated him for a while. He knows with deep certainty what Rand’s answer was, but he cannot actually remember Rand answering, remember the sound of his voice in those moments. The shrinks say words like PTSD. Christian privately thinks that he was just too hungry for his brain to waste the effort of exact memories, so it settled for impressions sometimes.


Then
Christian’s eyes are closed. ”Birch or cedar?”

They are interrupted by the opening of their cell door. Four Charlies walk in, three in combat fatigues and one in a business suit. Christian watches the muscles of Rand’s jaw tighten with sudden alertness. It strikes him as odd, seeing a Charlie in a suit. He’s seen villagers and guerilla soldiers, but this is his first hint that the enemy deals in bureaucrats too. Two of the guards move to Rand, holding him down. The other soldier and the suit crouch in front of Christian. The soldier babbles for a moment, then looks at the other man.

“Where is your camp?” the suited man translates. Christian meets Rand’s eyes across the cell. “Tell us or we’ll hurt your friend.” The man’s English is broken, but his voice says he means business. Christian holds Rand’s eyes, and doesn’t say anything. Neither of them looks away, and neither of them makes a sound as the thugs gut-punch Rand a few times. Christian bites his lip to stifle the laughter that threatens to emerge, inappropriate and clawing and hysterical in his throat. He could tell them that they couldn't have picked a worse pair for this trick. Could tell them that it makes him sick inside, but that doesn't stop the fact that every blow Rand takes feels to Christian like justice. If justice tastes bitter and more guilty than he'd imagined, well, that's one more lesson of the war, and Christian is learning enough for lifetimes over here, in the faces of murdered women and the heat of unnatural fire. The soldier crouched beside him rips off another question, and the suit translates.

“We know that you were camped with a squad. Where is your camp? Don’t be silly, we can keep hurting your friend for as long as this takes.” Rand shuts his eyes when the thugs aim for his ears this time, but Christian doesn’t look away. His mind flashes the image of the dead snipers before his eyes. A wet thud gushes blood from Rand’s mouth, and Christian’s hand tingles with the sense memory of the give and snap of bone. It shouldn't feel as good as it does.

“Where is your camp?” The questions go on forever. Christian remains silent and doesn’t take his eyes off Rand. The beatings feel good, even as they twist his stomach until the bile rises burning in his throat. In a way it's him who's administering them, and his brain quells at the amount of irony it takes to imagine that he can be a hero and have his revenge in the same breaths, because it's one and the same thing and Rand is asking for it, taking all the pain that Christian gives him through the fists of the Charlies because that's the way it should be, that's the only way to make the whole ******** up situation make sense.

He tries say with his eyes everything that he cannot with his mouth: I’m sorry; I wished this on you before, and I wish it on you now; I would make them stop if I could; I hate you, it's not that simple but I hate you still. Rand’s eyes are speaking too: don’t break, tell them and they won’t need us, they’ll kill us both; I forgive you; I hate you and it doesn't matter; don’t break. Nothing's ever simple. Don't break.

Christian loses track of time, but when Rand is curled into a fetal position and coughing up blood with every breath, the interrogator suddenly changes tactics.

“It is not honorable to allow your comrade harmed, but if you will not tell us for him, perhaps you will tell us for yourself.” The soldier nearest to Christian draws a gun, points it at his leg. “Where is your camp?”

Across the floor, Rand opens his eyes. Christian meets them, and bites his lip. Rand doesn't talk either, and Christian understands that this is the flip side of the hysterical justice of the beatings, Rand's chance to be revenged on Christian for being the weapon through which he is guilty of being a monster. Christian remembers the sound of the gun shot, but nothing after that.


Now
Under the covers, Christian stretches his legs, like he always does when remembering the POW camp. It’s a reflex now, wiggling his toes to prove that he still can, feeling the reassuring tension of the scar tissue across his thighs. He has eight bullet furrows there, and the scars remind him that he has been terribly, terribly lucky.

Truth be told, the time in the POW camp after they started shooting him is nearly a complete blank in his head. Not even vague impressions exist, almost no memories at all. There are a very few things. He can remember Rand crawling next to him then curling up from the pain of motion, can remember insect buzz and panting breaths, can remember Rand whispering to him, but not the words. That’s it, those three snatches are all that stuck in his head of what he’s told were forty days in captivity.

The bullet wounds got infected pretty quickly in the jungle. He could have died of the bleeding, and when he didn’t die of that, he could have died of malaria or gangrene or maggots or one of the half-dozen infections that were cured in the field hospital after his rescue. The infections kept him delirious, and so he doesn’t remember the POW camp. He has a sense of the helicopter blades that signaled rescue, isn’t sure if this is actually a memory, or just his brain mapping helicopters he heard elsewhere onto what he was told happened during the rescue.


Then
He awakens to the sight of sunlight through the burlap of a tent, and the unfamiliar sounds of a hospital. He closes his eyes for a moment, and when he opens them again he’s still in the hospital, not in one of the front line temporary camps or back in the POW cell. He turns his head, and Rand is on the cot to his left, asleep still. Christian relaxes back against the sheets, and fantasizes about choking the life from Rand's throat as he lies there. It doesn't seem like justice that both of them should survive. One should be a martyr and one should be a murderer, and Christian isn't sure which is which but it isn't right that both of them should be here and thirty or fifty or a hundred women and children should be dead. A nurse comes by, checks his temperature with a thermometer under his arm, then slips a needle into his IV.

“Morphine,” she says, and hey, Christian’s not complaining. He goes back to sleep, and dreams of the girl in the orange scarf, her little flower in its fragile little boat; of Rafferty’s empty, dead eyes; of faceless one-night-stands at the Academy; of the screaming, burning village women; of the sniper clutching for the hand of his countryman; of Rand bleeding on the floor. “These people,” he thinks, “are not the enemy,” but the feeling doesn't make an ounce of difference. Where once his sense of right and wrong resided, there is now only the crackle of a jungle in flames and the sound of buzzing flies. Loathing still rises unchecked within him, until he can almost imagine it was right that all those people be stamped out and slaughtered. This is what the jungle does to a man: lodges itself into his soul and grows there with its vines and its diseases, until he carries it into whatever civilization he can find and not even fire can prize it out of his soul.

Christian turns on his bunk until he can see Rand's face again, and when his fevered imagination draws the lines of blood from eyes and ruptured ears and toothless mouth, the tortured visage peacefully asleep beside him begins to look both like every Charlie he's ever killed, and oddly like himself.


Now
That's it. Christian turns onto his stomach, sick to death of the memories and eager for whatever dreams sleep might bring, even if they revive ghosts he'd rather leave dead. Anything better than the creeping embers of the hatred that still leaves him hollow. He’d been shipped home after the rescue. He’d done his duty for the country. Rest, he was told, you’re a hero. Because you held out, because you didn't talk, a hundred and fifty men in the camp you didn’t tell them about are still alive. Christian told no one that he hadn't thought of the hundred and fifty men while he was trapped in that cell. He'd watched Rand curled up and bleeding across from him, and he hadn't talked.

“I torched a village,” he’d wanted to say, but his commanding officer had shook his head and that had been the end of it.

Two days from shipping out, he’d been resting in a godforsaken hotel room in Saigon and staring at the ceiling when someone had knocked on the door. Rand was outside when he opened it.

“I…” Rand seemed at a loss. “I just wanted to give you this.” In his palm was a ring, plain and silvery. “They pulled the bullets out of you, and I saved the steel shot, thought you might…“ he trails off. Green neon lights cast a sick glow on his face. “You saved my life when you didn’t break.” They both know that this fact is incidental, that Rand's safety is just about the opposite of the reason Christian never talked.

He wonders if Rand also feels the burning, if he thinks of Christian getting shot and curls up proprietary around the pleasure of it. The ring is hot and heavy in his palm, as if its uncertain significance gives it more weight than ordinary steel would carry. Christian closes the door without saying thank you. Neither of them would believe him if he did.

Three months later and stateside, two thousand miles away from Rand and even further from the jungle, he’d noticed the faint engraving on the interior of the band: Semper Fi. Never leave a man behind. In sleepless mornings and the anxiety of sirens, in tension around the Vietnamese vice-president of his chess club, in his refusal to barbeque on the Fourth of July and the way that action movie explosions sometimes leave him inexplicably sobbing, he hasn't yet left Rand. He still dreams the burning, still wakes to ashes and massacre with his coffee. There are soot stains beneath his eyes that even scalding showers cannot burn away, and sometimes he is Lady Macbeth to himself in the mirror, every day scrubbing at blood.

When it counted, Christian thinks, when it really mattered most, they were Marines. And push come to shove, want come to need, he's never left a man behind.

[RunningLynx]

Oh. I hope that the deadline can still be potentially extended, because I'm not near close to finishing. Most of my exams will be over soon, but I'm still not totally sure that I will finish my story on time because of all my other commitments.

[Alanora Calaran]

Yay, my desktop finally works again!

Boo, all my stuff is on my laptop. Time to do a switcharoo!

[SnowRune]

Ohh. I am most definitely interested.

You'll be hearing from me.

[Mokomonko]

I'll definitely enter. I'll finish it as soon as i can, probably before Sept. 15 since i have no life. ha ha.

[s u g a r c u b e - - x]

I'm tempted to join.....Yet, I don't think I have the skill......And carpal tunnel sucks for writing stories.....

[Alanora Calaran]

The Tofu Panda

I'm tempted to join.....Yet, I don't think I have the skill......And carpal tunnel sucks for writing stories.....

Who cares if you have the skill? This is where you sharpen the skill! That's what this contest is all about. biggrin

[Alexander J Luthor]

lol, i read your likes and dislikes here then compared them to my other story and was like "wooooow, i got away with a lot"

this story's gonna be amazing!! *starts writing in his crappy word pad* oh yeah, i had like, eight other ideas but they all sucked sweatdrop