Stephen Coonts - Combat

The captain saluted Green, despite the American’s jeans and Gore-Tex jacket. Green had been open about his rank and purpose. He saluted back, although he would have preferred not to.

He had been trained in Russian, back when the Russians still mattered, and the local language — spoken by all sides in the fighting — was related. He could get through the basics, but could not conduct a geopolitical discussion of any nuance. Two months in-country had not been enough time to gain fluency, but Green understood more than he could form into words of his own.

“Major Green,” the captain said in mashed English. “Very bad things those people do. You see?” He reached down and picked up a faded rip of fabric. Once, it had been red. “You see?” he repeated, breath steaming in the cold. “Woman’s dress. No man’s clothes. Dress of woman. Who kills woman, child? Bad, bad.”

Green nodded. It was very bad. He offered the captain the skull.

The shorter man seized it and tossed it in his hands. “Maybe woman. Maybe very pretty.” He held up the skull. “Not pretty now.” Suddenly, his expression blackened. He tossed the skull onto a lattice of bones. “Why America stays away? Those people … they kill the little babies. Why America stays away?”

“I’ll report what I’ve seen to the embassy.”

“The American Army must come,” the captain said in his own language. “With American airplanes. Or there is no justice.”

“Listen …” Green struggled for words in a language he found as jagged and difficult as the mountains surrounding him, “ … you need to be careful … how you dig up the bodies. You’ll destroy …” He struggled to remember the word for evidence.

The captain snorted. “Look. You see? Everything is there. How many bodies? I count skulls, I know how many. How many those people have killed of my people. That is all I must know.”

Green rearranged what he wanted to say into words he could reach. “All this … should be done scientifically.”

The shorter man had a lunch of onions on his breath. The workers had sat around the edge of the pit, unbothered, as they ate.

“I fuck science in the ass,” the captain said. “Bullets. No science.”

Green turned away and took more photographs. The war, in a lull for several months, had left many massacres in its wake. Some sites contained a single family, others an entire village. Some graves held only male bodies, while others had seen equal-opportunity killings. Green had visited two other locations, but the digging had been finished days before he arrived. He had expected freshly uncovered bodies to stink and he had braced himself for it. But the corpses had been in the earth long enough to lose all of their liquid and most of the flesh, and the only smell was of the disturbed earth.

“Call me Frankie,” the man from the blue truck said in English. He had introduced himself as Franjo Sostik, late of Milwaukee and now the proprietor of an inn down in the village of Melnica. “No bedbugs or shit like that,” he told Green and Crawley.

Frankie had the kind of looks that draw women’s eyes, but he was reaching the age when he would no longer be able to convince women he was young. He wore a pullover with the sleeves crushed up above the elbows. His forearms were thick. Black hair grew down onto the back of his hands.

He gestured at the mass grave.

“Can you believe this?” he asked, talking mostly to Green, the officer, but including Crawley with a glance now and then. “Look at this. Like the fucking Middle Ages or something. Is this nuts, or what? I got to ask myself why I came back here.”

“Why did you?” Green asked.

Frankie lifted his shoulders and held out his hands, palms up, weighing the air. Black birds settled on the branches above the dead.

“What the fuck you going to do?” Frankie said. “I got relatives, family. They need me. But I don’t have to like it. No way, man, am I going to buy into this shit. When the war started, I said, ‘To hell with that shit. Frankie-boy’s a lover not a fighter.’” He made a spitting gesture, but his lips were dry. “Back in the States? I had me this woman, you know? Drop-dead gorgeous, man. We’re talking serious, high-energy pussy. And clean about herself. Not like the barnyard animals around here.” He raised a fist, protesting the fate that had brought him back to this place. “Christ, I love America. The States are my real home now. But what are you going to do? A man’s got to look out for his family.”

“You served, though, right?” Sergeant Crawley asked. “In the war?” The NCO’s voice remained casual, as if he hardly cared about the answer.

Frankie shook his head in disgust. “Naw. Not really. Not my style, man. I mean, what is this about, huh? Let those people stay on their side, I’ll stay on mine. Live and let live, you know? I mean … I carried a gun and all that shit. Kind of like National Guard stuff. Weekend warrior. But I was never in any real fighting. Melnica lucked out.”

Green looked down at the tangle of bones, at the workmen with their spades.

“Who are they?”

“Local guys. With nothing better to do.”

“I mean the bodies.”

Frankie shrugged. “Makes you want to puke, don’t it? I mean, who needs to kill women and children?” He nodded toward the top of the mountain. The new border lay on the other side of the ridge, in deep forest. “We might be stupid peasants. But those people are goddamned animals. Fucking sickos.”

“But the bodies … aren’t from Melnica?”

Frankie repeated the shrug. It was a gesture that seemed to refresh him, get him going. “Who knows? Maybe some of them. People disappeared. Drive down the road, never come back. Go up in the fields after the cows, never come back. We lost some. I lost family members myself. But I don’t want to make this a personal hate thing. The truth is those people could have been marched up here from anyplace in the valley. They’re ours, that’s all I know. From our valley. Our people didn’t do this shit.”

The valley. When the Cherokee came down the pass, with SFC Crawley at the wheel, the panorama had been pure tourist brochure: the river reflecting the sun, and the low fields, the slopes open for pasture below an uneven treeline and the leaves falling up above. Tan houses clustered in the villages, while here and there a farmhouse with a tiled roof stood alone. It reminded Green of Italy, where he had taken a girlfriend when he was stationed in Germany.

Then you reached the valley floor and saw the shell holes in the roofs and the burn scars, the windows shot out and the walls pocked by heavy-caliber rounds. Craters pitted the road and half the fields had gone to bracken. Ranks of stumps told where apple and plum orchards had been cut down, for spite, during a slow retreat. Bitterness seemed to have soaked down into the earth, it pierced the air like rot. In the towns, which had changed hands several times, the Catholic and Orthodox churches had been desecrated in turn. There had been few Muslims in the valley and their small mosques were gone without a trace. The Muslims were the Washington Redskins of the Balkan league.

Green already had a catalog of destruction in his head from other observer missions, but the fighting had been particularly cruel here. The combatants had tried to make the towns of their enemies uninhabitable. When they had been in a hurry, they had only destroyed the clinics, schools, and municipal buildings. When time permitted, they wrecked the houses, too, and blew in the water pipes in the towns.

Green had been a mech infantry company commander in Desert Storm, but no one in his entire brigade fired a round in combat. They just steered their Bradleys across the barren landscape, and the troops joked about the most expensive driver’s training exercise in the world. The worst thing about Green’s experience of war had been the need to wear MOPP gear in the desert heat. But he was a dutiful soldier, ambitious within the bounds of honor, and he had studied war since his plebe year at the Point. He wanted to understand, and he took what books could give. But nothing he had read had spoken of this kind of hatred.