Novic Sara - Girl at War

After the announcements, the conversation descended quickly into the realm of justs — speculations leveled at the bearer of the list:

“He’ll be fine. He’s just missing, not wounded?”

“Just shot, it says. Not necessarily killed .”

“Probably only a flesh wound.”

The list reader scanned her paper in an attempt to offer some affirmative responses to the barrage. I’d always assumed Damir’s father was in the army, but Damir never mentioned him, and he didn’t come up on the list while I was there.

When people got frantic the captain stepped in and took the paper. He folded it in a lopsided accordion and attempted to put it in his shirtfront pocket before realizing that he wasn’t wearing a shirt and stuffing it in his waistband instead.

“The boys are all fine,” he said firmly, and everyone dispersed back to their posts.

“Who are you?” said one of the girls when she came to get a new clip. She wore a patrol cap and long auburn hair, and fiddled with both as she talked.

“She’s Indy,” Stallone said, having grown accustomed to his role as my spokesperson. “Indiana Jones.” He turned to me, lowering his voice. “That’s Red Sonja. She’s the girl boss.”

There was a philosophical divide in the Safe House about whether or not the girls should take on exclusively female nicknames. Some argued that they didn’t want their pick of badass characters limited on the basis of gender, while Red Sonja said there were plenty of worthy women action stars who were actually more badass than their male counterparts, given they had to fight in tighter pants.

“Indy,” she said, frowning, no doubt at the gender attached to my adopted name. “Well, too late to change it. Nice job with this, though.” She gestured at my latest organizational effort for munitions, bullets separated by cartridge type and stored in terra-cotta flowerpots. I gave her a thumbs-up and she tied off the braid she’d plaited during the exchange and went to reload.

Sorted munitions made the Safe House run smoother, but the older girls all had their own assault rifles, and I was getting restless. I had proven myself a good worker, I thought, and wanted to fight like everybody else. The following week during morning meetings, when weapons were issued to the new recruits from neighboring villages, I lined up with the rest, tucked my hair up under my cap, and hoped the dirt on my face covered any traces of girlhood. The captain looked me up and down and said there was not enough for everyone. But the next day we took on mortar fire that tore a new hole in the south wall. The captain made Stallone and me lie facedown on floor, and I loathed the familiar feeling of helplessness. I tried to lift my head but could only see boots. Someone fell beside me — I couldn’t tell who — and his weapon discharged as he hit the floor. A hollow, wobbling tone filled my ears, then a roaring sound like rushing water. The man was bleeding in spurts from his neck, and I closed my eyes again.

Afterward, I sat up and looked around. Stallone was beside me, pressing his sleeve to a slash across his forehead, saying something I couldn’t hear; my ears were still ringing. I took the gun from the dead man next to me, a Wolverine, and slipped its strap over my head. No one noticed. There were three other men on the floor, not moving. Red Sonja had me rip a bedsheet into squares, and she closed the dead men’s eyes and covered their faces with the fabric. The Bruces were stacking weapons — guns and knives and brass knuckles newly available. I pushed the gun up against my back and knew from that moment it was mine.

The strongest men heaved the corpses down the stairs and laid them out behind the house, waiting for nightfall so they could transport them to the cemetery at the far end of the village. At dusk Stallone and I went out on recon and counted Četnik casualties. We kicked the bodies, searched their pockets for ammo.

—

Damir taught me how to fieldstrip and reassemble an AK. Forward grip, gas chamber, cleaning rod, bolt (piston first), frame, magazine.

“Function check!” It meant to cock the gun as a test, the last step in reassembly, but anyone completing the check yelled it triumphantly, a battle cry preceding the first bursts of gunfire. The fieldstrip was a protocol that never changed, and I found solace in the repetition.

The old men let me keep watch while they were eating lunch. Too short to shoot with my feet on the ground, I’d climb up and kneel in the windowsill. I shot over toward the schoolhouse at anything in camouflage moving in the windows, or outside ground-level on the other side of the street, then jumped down and ducked in case a Četnik was clearheaded enough to shoot straight back. With every round I envisioned killing the soldier with the brown teeth, the one who’d struck my father in the back of the knee and laughed. I relished the power that seemed to run through the chamber of the weapon directly up into my own veins.

Occupation under the Četniks was a delicate balance. In their state of perpetual intoxication they’d been satisfied in rape and pillage mode, their genocidal appetites satiated by picking off Safe Housers and the occasional roadside murder of travelers like my parents. The danger of killing too many of us and losing their UN meal ticket staved off any large-scale assaults. But the JNA, closing in on the area, sent reinforcements, and the reinforcements were not yet weary of the place, were not content with exchanging fire from the comfort of the schoolhouse. They had salaries, uniforms, better weapons, and a functioning chain of command. Relatively, they were sober. They were ready to attack.

I was at the attic window keeping watch with the Terminator when we spotted a band of armored vehicles, about ten it looked like, but it was hard to tell from the curve in the road. The trucks were green, not UN issue, and when I looked up at the Terminator he was gesturing frantically. I bolted across the attic to get Stallone, who, upon seeing his brother’s signs, yelled, “Holy shit! The JNA! They’re coming down the street!” The trucks were closer now, and I could see the red Yugoslavian stars on their doors.

“Let’s move!” said the captain, and everyone who’d been without a gun lunged for the extras on the hat rack. I turned to the captain for his next instructions, but from downstairs we heard gunfire, the blowback of broken glass, and the door guards screaming.

“They’re here,” said Stallone.

We ran — down the uneven rear stairs and out the back door, through the packed-dirt alley by the market, and out into the wheat fields. The stalks bowed with rotting, grain-laden heads abandoned by farmers when the bombing started, but even in their hunched posture they were taller than I was, and I could see nothing but wheat in all directions. I wondered where Stallone had gone. Then, from a side row, I saw Damir darting toward me.

“You’ve got speed, girl,” he said when he caught up. He grabbed me by the hood of my sweatshirt and yanked me to the left, hard. “No sense of direction, though.” The butt of my rifle banged a bruise into the back of my leg as we ran.

A pack of JNA foot soldiers were coming from the other side of the field now; there were at least twenty of them, running in a clean, arrowlike formation. I froze, gaping as they closed the meters between us — one hundred, seventy-five, fifty — but Damir pushed me ahead of him and released a spray of gunfire on them. In the corner of my vision I saw him go down, but he yelled “Don’t stop!” so I kept running, made a sharp turn into the field’s middle strip. The wind hit my face fresh and hard — my nose dripped and my eyes watered. Dragging my sleeve across my face, I pumped my legs faster until I could no longer feel the ground, until gravity slithered off the treads of my sneakers.