Stephen Coonts - Combat

There was an upside, though: the way the people refused to quit. The towns and villages were struggling back to life, with new glass in many of the windows, shops reopening, and posters for the coming election. No one wanted the war to reignite, though everyone said it would.

The Jeep passed a white UN vehicle, its occupants straining not to see anything.

Then, toward the end of the valley, up a mountain road with defensible approaches, the village of Melnica sat untouched, a museum display of a destroyed world. The war had taught the people to pay attention to little details, and they figured out from the license plate and vehicle make that Americans had come to visit. Everyone had been anxious to offer directions to the site of the mass grave, with the men interrupting one another and the children blooming from sullenness to giggles and greed. It had been difficult keeping volunteer guides out of the Jeep.

“Do they listen to you?” Green asked Frankie. The captain down in the ravine had given the innkeeper a vague salute, maybe just a wave, when he showed up.

Frankie spit. “They’re dumb shits. Uneducated. Dumb-dick farmers, you know? They don’t listen to anybody. But they figure I’m smart because I been to America. I mean, they’re good people. Just kind of stupid.” He gestured toward the riddle of bones. “They don’t deserve this shit. Nobody deserves this.” He nodded across the mountain again. “Those people … they’re not Europeans. They’re fucking animals.”

“You should tell them to be more careful,” Green said as a worker swung a pickax in the pit. “They’re destroying the forensic evidence.”

Frankie looked at him as he might have looked at a child. “They don’t want evidence, man. They want revenge.”

“Well, if they expect anybody to come to their aid, evidence matters.”

Frankie smiled. “Oh, come on. It’s like I tell them. When they start all that shit about America riding to the rescue. I tell them, ‘Hey, America doesn’t even know you exist. We might as well be in goddamned China or on the moon or something. Americans … they live good. They don’t need our shit. America got no interest in this.’”

Green had not been prepared for the display at his feet, for the rawness of it, and he was trying to keep his temper with the world. How could you prepare yourself for this? It was important not to show any emotion, he knew that. But every word he said felt phony and hollow and useless to him. He believed in justice, and he believed in the goodness of his country, and he only wanted to know who was right and wrong. But he had never been anyplace where right and wrong were so hard to figure out.

He wanted to do something. But he did not know what to do.

“Well, if they want anybody to get interested,” Green said, gone peevish, “it’s going to take evidence. Who killed who. When. Whose troops were in control at the time of the massacre. Ages and sex of victims. Proof that they were noncombatants. They need to wait until people get down here from the capital, people who know what they’re doing.”

Frankie looked at him with an expression close to wonder. “Major … Melnica lucked out, you know? Couple mortar rounds. No big deal. But we lost people. In ones and twos, like I told you. Some old farmer. A girl with no sense. Everybody got a missing brother or cousin or something.”

“All the more reason they should be careful. So they can identify—”

Frankie closed a hand over Green’s forearm. He had a powerful grip. “You don’t under stand, man. These are mountain people. They don’t want … like for their daughter or something to become some kind of medical exhibit. The truth is … they don’t want to know exactly who’s in the grave. Not names and shit like that. They’ve had enough bad news.”

Sergeant Crawley, who had spent his career in Special Forces and had over a year in-country, said softly, “Different world, sir.”

Green understood that the NCO was telling him to back off and let it go.

A whistling noise came down the mountainside: wind sweeping along like a tide. The pitch rose and then, suddenly, cold air flooded through the trees and poured over the grave site. The captain down in the trench clutched his hat. The earth smell rose, and leaves tore away from their branches. The workmen paused and looked at the sky.

“Hard winter coming,” Frankie said. “Like these poor shits don’t have it tough enough already. So, hey, tell you what. You’re not going back today, right? I mean, you don’t want to drive that road in the dark. There’s still mines in the ditches. You got to stay at my place. ‘Yankee Frankie’s.’ I even got American music. Liz Phair, man. Hot little bitch like that. And Mariah Carey. All that shit.”

Sergeant Crawley, who wore a plaid wool shirt for this peculiar duty, spoke again. With the endless NCO suspicion in his voice: “How much you charge for rooms, Frankie-boy?”

Frankie smiled. “No charge for the room. If it wasn’t for America, I never would’ve been able to buy the place. You’re Frankie’s personal guests. You just pay for dinner, cause I got to pay the yokels for the produce and shit, keep the local economy going. But the room’s free. I even got running water. But no MasterCard or crap like that. This is hillbilly country, man. Cash only.”

Green wanted to be a good officer. He wanted to appear strong, impervious to physical discomforts. But the thought of a warm bed had more appeal than a fall night in the mountains crunched up in the Cherokee, engulfed by the decline of Sergeant Crawley’s digestive system. And it was standard practice to stay on the economy when there was no fighting in the area. The small talk with the locals sometimes paid off. Random facts led to revelation.

Green was imagining a warm room and dinner when a worker approached him with a bundle. The man laid the corpse of an infant, reduced to leather, at the American’s feet.

“I’ve been from Bolivia to Bumfuck, Egypt,” Sergeant Crawley said, “and nothing’s ever simple.” He sipped from his can of Coke. Hergestellt in Deutschland. The rule was no alcohol during a mission, and Green and Crawley both honored it, though grudgingly. The sign advertising Austrian beer was a wicked tease.

The room held half a dozen tables, a corner bench, and the bar. It was a poor man’s copy of a German Gasthaus, down to the Balkan kitsch that substituted for Bavarian kitsch on the walls. Business was slow, but the place was warm and surprisingly clean. An old R.E.M. disk whined in the background. America had had its effect on Frankie Sostik, who stood behind the bar, drying glasses and talking to a man with a scar that ran from his ear down across his cheek then back into the collar of his jacket. It was the kind of ragged slash inflicted during a hand-to-hand struggle.

Frankie and his customer were drinking shots. Leaning against the bar, Scarface looked like a made-for-television movie’s version of a thug. He showed no interest in the Americans. The only words Green overheard were “girls” and “cigarettes.”

“I know it isn’t simple,” Green said. Crawley was a helpful, closed man, hard to get to know. Shaped by the special ops world, he was a masterful soldier. He made Green, most of whose soldiering had been on training ranges and in schools, feel amateurish. Yet the NCO was never condescending, and he let Green take the lead without resentment. Crawley was a team-player in a world of yes-men who thought they were team players, and Green learned from watching him. In the two months they had been working together, they had spent enough time on the road and in the office late at night to know each other’s habits, health, and appetites. They disagreed, almost angrily, on politics and music. But the two men were becoming friends — even though Crawley, with an NCO’s reverse snobbery, still refused to call Green by his first name.