I want to go home.
Iowa seems so far away from this sweaty shack, blistering in the unforgiving
Pacific sun. Its not just the heat. Its the
pressure. The unspoken, unseen, ungodly pressure. The
chattering teeth of these deafening
machines eat the lives of men far away if we don't press them
fast enough. Lives hang in the balance.
When
Pearl Harbor became the rallying
call to arms across the plains, I rushed headlong like a
lemming. Strike back at the hated
Japs, who dared to bloody the nose of
Uncle Sam,
fence sitter. It was like a flipped
switch. Europe went from
newsreel fodder to
national concern overnight.
Peace became
war. Most wanted revenge on the
sneaky yellow bastards. Racial hatred bubbled under the surface. The
clapboard town hall was soon decked out in
Fourth of July colors, which looked
alien in the grip of
December. The wind tore the banners away not long after. Every boy from my long twisted country road,
stir crazy in the snow, lined up after the paper cried '
WAR' in black letters the size of my hand.
The recruitment officers looked fresh from
retirement parties. The old men, veterans of the First War lucky enough to survive in mostly
one piece, shuffled and poked, questioned and sorted. They acted with a strange
grace, like they were recruiting a new generation for the
VFW. Only a few had the
thousand yard stare of
trencher. I was poked and prodded, my ego
stroked and my patriotism
lauded as an example. My fateful mistake was admitting a
simple skill forged in back of my Uncle Carl's
general store, Sundays after
church for a payment of
comic books and
penny candy. I could type, read and tabulate. I wonder if a
flat arch or a
gammy leg would have saved me. I doubt it.
Basic training from the
Army was cut short by a
telegram from the
Secretary of the Navy. I think I would have ended up cooling my heels in
England if I had survived the crazed
Southern drill sergeant who dubbed us all '
boy' in a strangely demeaning manner, and relished the
midnight inspection. I think it was a twisted creation of his own mind, never having seen the inside of the thick
green manuals covering the base commanders office. My last midnight inspection saw me
hustled off in the night, my unit getting
chewed out for hiding a
Navy cocksucker under the
sergeant's delicate Army nose. I haven't seen any of them again.
Signals and codes run the
war. Nothing is
secret in the modern world. Spies don't have to steal orders fresh from the desk of a
general. Not anymore. They can sit in a
radio shack, hundreds of miles away and pull it from the
ether. Only problem with this is the
encryption. Dropping a typewriter out the back of a
Jeep would make a more
logical message. It is
devilishly twisted. The airwaves are full of the
thoughts and
will of the
enemy, who is actively plotting to
kill you. All you have to do it figure it out,
before it happens.
So now I am the
human component in a huge
Turing machine. The
high tension lines feed right into the
hulks, row on row of
unfinished metal and
dials and
gauges and
wire. They look like bizarre
cocoons for monsters from a
pulp novel. It makes a
hum that reverberates in your
bones, like a
fly buzzing deep in
amber. It smells of
ozone and high power reactions. Some people say its like being shrunk down and dropped into a
radio, living among the
vacuum tubes. I think of it more as being a little
cog in a vast
inhuman brain. At night it glows
orange through the
vents, like it's powered by
hellfire trapped in little
glass jars. The
heat is incredible, the breath of a
dragon trapped in a
metal cage. It fills me with
dread, this
thinking box. It
puzzles and
eats the code strings we type.
So, for what seems like a
lifetime, I sit with all the others, typing the
gibberish on the keys. We feed the
beast. The men in the uniforms come to tell us of the great things we have done, of all the people we helped
save or
kill, but it doesn't
matter. Nothing matters but the
Beast. We must
feed it. The doctors say I should go on
stress leave, but they let me
work. I am valuable to the
war effort, and I tend this new
metal god.
I
feed it and it decides who
lives and who
dies.