Project Itoh: Genocidal Organ

Ordinary ID tags at that—no different from ones used to sort inventory in a market stall. Only now they were being subcutaneously injected into the armed insurgents and drafted children. The ID tags being used in this war—including the ones that we all had in our stomachs—were no doubt mass produced cheaply in some factory somewhere, Oklahoma or Osaka or anywhere else in the world.

In countries like this one where the government had all but disintegrated due to civil war, it wasn’t at all uncommon for family registers and birth records to be lost completely. Citizenship papers? Who was to tell whether you were even actually a citizen? Was someone going to take a census, dodging bullets as they did so? Sure, you might live here, work here, grow crops on the land, but you’re not from here anymore—how could you be, when no one knew where here was? No, all you had left was your name, and you had to hope that was enough for you to get by in what now passed for the local community.

So, if you became a soldier, you’d be tagged, you’d have an identity that the armed insurgents’ portable devices could read and process. You’d become somebody. A number on their free spreadsheet, with a record as to whether you lived or died. Even here, out in the boondocks, in a country where all semblance of rule of law had long since broken down, it still seemed the most natural thing in the world that people could—and should—be organized according to what was essentially an inventory management system.

That was how the children of the region became soldiers. So they could advance in the eyes of somebody—not even their fellow countrymen, as they didn’t exist anymore. So that they could move up in rank, in status, as an item of infantry. They went to war so that they could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Snickers and M&Ms and cans of Pringles.

As for the four of us who were now marching through the nightscape of this foreign land, we were a bit more sophisticated than supermarket merchandise. Our built-in internal sensors that monitored our physical status were able to transmit detailed information back home. Not something your typical merchandise tag can do.

It wasn’t really much of a choice for the kids, of course. Basically they either joined the ranks of the men who had just killed their parents and raped their sisters and girlfriends, or they died along with the rest.

Leland had been right. The source of the intermittent gunfire was a firing squad.

There was a large circular pit that had apparently been dug in the ground by a piece of heavy machinery that probably would have been used on a construction site during peacetime. Men and women were lined up on the edge. The executioners gave the signal, the AK rifles were fired, and the men and women, shot in the head and torso, toppled into the pit.

I’ve seen corpses burnt to a crisp before. The skin blackens like charbroiled chicken. Muscle shrinks when it’s cooked, causing the brittle bones to bend or snap, and when you look at the resultant mess you can’t help but realize that humans are really just physical objects. By which I mean just a mass of raw ingredients. When it comes down to it a dead body really is just a thing, like any other thing.

The soldiers pushed the crumpled bodies further into the hole. A dead body isn’t exactly light, and with the corpses that didn’t conveniently fall backward into the pit, it took the soldiers much more than the couple of light kicks you’d imagine it would to push the lifeless bodies over the edge. In many cases, the soldiers had to kneel down and really put their backs into it.

Now, it’s not as if I was unaffected by the scene in front of us, even if I had seen it all before. This was a blatant mass murder of innocent townsfolk, plain and simple—nothing can ever desensitize you to that completely. But the fact was that I’d seen so much casual, meaningless death in my life that I no longer felt the impulse to stop it at all costs. After all, it wasn’t as if we were much better equipped than the soldiers here. We might have been able to take them, or we might not. Anyway, we weren’t here as stakeholders. We were here as outsiders, neutral observers who had but one single-minded purpose: to kill our target.

Not only that, I was carrying the responsibility for both the mission and my three subordinates on the team. We might have been able to rescue some of the people dying in front of our eyes, but it would mean the mission would end in failure for sure, and the crazed ex-brigadier general would escape to kill and kill and kill again—creating more innocent victims that would otherwise be saved if we took our target out now.

Sure, some people might have called it a moral crossroads. All I knew was that now wasn’t the time to meditate on the finer points of ethical semantics.

To be thick-skinned is to be enlightened. So, develop a thicker skin than the next man.

So, as usual, we hardened our hearts, thickened our skins, and proceeded with the mission. This was made easier by the fact that our target was approaching, or rather our two targets were about to have their rendezvous. We finished the necessary emotional adjustments so that we could cope with the tragic scene in front of us, and in an instant we were ready for action.

The ex-brigadier general who now styled himself defense minister led a peripatetic existence. He was always on the move, precisely to reduce the threat of assassination. Similar to what Saddam Hussein had done for many years to avoid capture. They say that Hitler too used to change his plans and his movements at the last minute, also to reduce the risk to his person. Once the sheer scale of the humanitarian disaster in the region became known to the world, the US decided to consider assassination as a tactic to help curb the chaos, but by that time the defense minister knew what to expect and what precautions to take to minimize the risk. After all, in his former incarnation he had been the beneficiary of training from the very same US intelligence apparatus that was now trying to assassinate him …

Which was why it was only dumb luck that allowed our people to happen upon the intelligence that our targets would be meeting in this former mosque at this time. If we let this opportunity slip, who knew when the next opportunity would come about to stop the murderous yet prudent ex-brigadier general? We simply couldn’t afford to fail. And that was why we were able to abandon the dying people in front of us to their fates.

“I guess we’re all going to hell,” said Alex. Young, devout Alex, with his master’s degree in Catholic theology. How he managed to cope with seeing hell on a daily basis in his work I never could work out. I guess he must have had some sympathetic—and very discreet—padre to whom he could make a copious confession after every mission.

“As an atheist, I don’t really have a reply to that, I’m afraid,” I said.

“You don’t have to believe in God to know that hell’s real,” said Alex, a mournful smile passing his lips.

“Sure it exists. It’s right here! Just take a look around you!” Williams said with a laugh. Well, if this was hell, our job was to go to hell and back. Mr. Dante, eat your heart out.

But Alex disagreed, pointing at his own head. “Respectfully, sir, no. Hell is here . Inside your head. Inside your mind. Seared into your cerebral cortex. This scene around us, it might be hellish, but it’s not hell. After all, you can escape from all this. Just close your eyes and it’s gone. And when you get back to America and return to normal life, the scene in front of us now will be gone forever. But you can’t escape from hell. Because hell’s right here, inside your mind, and you carry it around with you.”