The captain lost his mind a little bit when we lost No-go. Cap
wasn’t usually the crying type, too busy writing those mother-letters,
lost in his own head; We regret to inform you. No-go was a
different story though, zip for next of kin, nobody in-country could
even deliver the letter. Probably nowhere to deliver it either, unless
some kind-hearted spook wanted to run a drone over and airdrop a piece
of registered mail into a random collapsed hut somewhere near 15 north,
25 east.
We pulled him out of a burning gun-truck back in Sudan; Maybe fifteen, underfed, feral. I say we,
but it was Cap and Doc did the pulling, I probably would have helped,
but I was pretty busy trying not to pass the fuck out, Top jamming a
tampon in the hole some Acholi nationalist had just blown through my leg with a shitty revolver, yelling at me in that crazy-cheerful cholla spanglish not to be such a pussy. Grunt-funny.
That was day… three, I think, just after we went in with the UN
interdiction force. Supposed to be keeping a shitload of hardware from
crossing the border, stuff the LRA had been funneling through Kaya, playing tag with the Cranes.
We did our bit, blew up a bunch of Chinese AK knockoffs and gas
mines, got most of it on video, as ordered, everybody making polite
noises at the brass once we got back on a fairly deniable and totally
disreputable bird and got the fuck out of the country; Handshakes and
smiles and drinks on the veranda, probably. Standard data. Few weeks
later one of No-go’s little brothers drove a Landcruiser full of
jiggered artillery rounds up Tank Hill and took out the Kampala water supply, claims and counter-claims, like it really mattered who did it.
No-go should have gone down to rehab in Gulu, really, but Cap
wouldn’t have it, and we backed him on it. Child soldiers weren’t the
cause du’jour anymore, probably would’ve been dead inside a week.
So we threw a spare uniform on him and had Doc slip him a mickey,
carried him up the ramp on a stretcher, played it like a heat casualty.
Chaos enough to keep him under the radar; Got him up to speed on basic
grunt English in a couple months while my leg was healing, warned him
not to talk or bite the brass during barracks inspections, not that
there were many. Lots of wiggle room, since almost nobody had the time
or the balls to ask what the hell he was doing, wide-eyed in the chow
hall with a huge plate of eggs, or stalking back and forth in the arms
room, stripping rifles and looking dangerous in all the wrong ways.
“What the fuck do you mean, who is this? This is my motherfucking
armorer, Lieutenant, and he’s a god damn good one, now get your
checklist and your coffee cup the fuck out of my AO while I’m still willing to salute you.”
Top never did handle inspectors very well, but she made sure we always passed.
Turned out he was a gun nut. When they hadn’t been beating the shit
out of him or putting counterfeit Marlboros out on his elbows, Konys’
boys had him doing bush-style PMCS
on a couple tons worth of de-serialed gunmetal, worn out Daewoo and
H&K surplus. First time we took him out to the range and let him
fire a real weapon he had that look on his face that usually only shows
up in paintings of the Virgin; Ngongo and Child.
It all worked out okay until he started watching CNN a few years
later, hitting the bottle and reading the bill of rights. Must’ve been
listening to us all bitch and moan and started thinking that politics
were serious business. Easy mistake to make, we acted like it
mattered. Maybe it did. Vanished one night; made his bunk, logged out a
50 cal and hotwired my pickup.
Came back smiling on election day, sixteen hash marks carved in the
stock, full tank of gas, empty ammunition box and a beat up road atlas
on the passenger seat. And we knew, really, had already guessed.
Somebody had been hitting congressional candidates, long range, high
caliber. Lots of hi-def outrage; Concern and Condolences. We’d bitched
about that, too, sipping beers and playing spades while the ass-hats
trying to buy first class tickets on Air Force One blamed each other for
mad-dog snipers and blizzards and the fact that most of humanity was
too profoundly fucking ignorant to realize that we were all lying to
ourselves about pretty much everything.
Too bad about Ngongo; Survived Sudan, lived through the beatdown Cap
laid on him for going Rambo. Didn’t live to see the collapse though.
Bad rumors and worse news, and we kept getting weird fucking alert
orders for missions that never did get a green light, just days on
standby, checking and re-checking, jokers with coffee cups and shipping
manifests and Top wanting to break shit. We just didn’t have the time
to keep an eye on the kid. Failed him.
One morning he got a finger too deep into a bottle of Everclear and
just quit breathing. We were all racked out, nobody even noticed. Good
people, even if he was bent all wrong, and he never would put a weapon
back on the rack the first time you tried to turn it in. Knew his shit
though, loved his fucking guns, took pride in ‘em. Loved Cap, too, and
his idea of America, I guess, in his own deeply fucked up way.
Cap had us packed to ship out thirty-six hours after we found his
body, part of that little breakdown he had, played it like a real
deployment, except the gear list was all screwy, too much redundancy,
too compartmentalized.
Formed us up at 3am, yawning, lazy hands warm in forbidden pockets.
Sat us all down with a shitload of doughnuts and told us we could come
up north with him, or not; That all the normal garrison bullshit and
secret squirrel deployments were over, the paychecks were gonna stop
coming, and we could either bug out now and maybe stick together, or go
down the hole with the top brass and the policy wonks, live like a bunch
of scared fucking rabbits while everything we were supposed to stand
for just collapsed into a big steaming pile.
Hell of a speech, he said it better than I can remember it; Must’ve
been reading his Carroll or something. Somehow, he knew about what was
coming, because too much of it actually happened. Rumors and
superstition, maybe. Or maybe he was just grief-crazy and we were
brainwashed suckers. But he called a lot of it.
About half of us went with him, after some pretty surreal Q&A.
Everybody else just went back in the barracks and hit the sack. Nobody
called the MP’s, far as I know; no panicky tweets about mass desertion
and stolen equipment. Nobody even said the magic word, AWOL, just eyes open and deuces and complicated handshakes with sticky fingers. Maybe they just thought he was wrong about the paychecks. Dunno.
He was right though… Normal was definitely over. Haven’t seen a doughnut in years.