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GWOT 2 The Thin Veil
Oct. 31st, 2018 05:20 pmGWOT 2 The Thin Veil
We were still alive. Life went on.
But the awareness of murdered millions and millions yet to come hung heavy on us all. The Chinese strike on the American Midwest had brought it home even for those of us who had seen the destruction of San Francisco.
The Firecracker War was a war to the knife. America versus the world. Russia, saber rattling. Europe and UK, moving from embargo to flirting with actual blockade. Canada and the Caribbean, once America's back yard, actual conflict zones. Just don't ask about South America and Africa.
China, wrecked. We had deliberately nuked the Forbidden City just last week. Not for its military value, but for its propaganda value.
One proposal being floated was to require the Chinese to wreck the Great Wall the same way it had been built. By hand.
The propaganda was full of disaster response. Hundreds of ambulance task forces rushing along freeways - but if you paid attention to markings, you saw it was the same thirty or so over and over again. Mutual aid from fire services all over the Midwest, responding Code 3 to Chicago and Flint and Cleveland and Colorado Springs. National Guard units "invited" to "assist" in securing the Canadian border from both sides. Stock footage of casualties and burns. One particularly horrific image, of children being decontaminated, caused Sarah to look at me curiously.
"That guard looks a lot like you," she said. The caption scrolling below said "Disaster Medical Site, Illinois" but anyone who knew Palo Alto knew it was Stanford on Day 2.
I died at Stanford. And I kept dying moment by moment, day by day. A brave man dies but once, I get that, but was I such a coward that I had that many more deaths to go?
I said nothing. Not safe, you see, even among us and even here.
On paper it was Halloween. No costumes, no candy (unless you counted the sugar bits I kept marking up in the Echo 18 Sundries shop) and a lot of parents and children with PTSD. A lot of new grief.
I was very proud of everyone, however. We had not yet had any additional suicides. This was as much the product of frantic hard work as anything else. We will draw a merciful veil over how much of that work was done.
I scheduled a patrol for midnight. One of our junior leads would take the duty, supported by Wyatt. All of our qualified supervisors - Arturo, Sharon, Sarah, Brooke - were on the patrol. Plus Mo. No one from outside Security. Not even Janine.
About thirty minutes to midnight we met in the assembly area outside Security. We checked each other's equipment. No electronics. Not even radios. In the unlikely event of an attack, the site would light one of the colored strobes on H5, never mind which one, you don't need to know.
I took the point. Our destination was Boot Hill. Unsafe at night. That was the point, and a necessary one.
This was our graveyard. Our beloved dead. Two hundred and seventy seven human remains in individual graves. A binder in a half buried ammunition box listed their names and grids. A view across the side of the hill of the larger hills beyond.
At the base of the hill, a charnel pit full of discarded corpses that we neither numbered nor remembered. Attackers. A few criminals. In effect, enemy personnel. To be as forgotten in death as they were worthless in life.
As I had planned, we arrived shortly before midnight.
We formed a circle facing inward, watching each other's backs. We safed our rifles.
Mo laid out a piece of cloth and knelt on it, after taking off his boots. He made motions as if washing his hands. He whispered briefly, then stopped. Halfway through his prayer. He stopped. Mo is Muslim. Or ... was.
Arturo lit a tapered candle. He stared into the distance and crossed himself, thinking of loved ones far away, in the high intensity battle zone. He prayed for their safety to saints he barely believed in any more.
Sarah pricked her finger and let a few drops of blood fall into the dust. I caught only a tiny whisper of what she said, "Blood for blood, life for life." She was very quiet, not wanting to offend either Arturo or Mo.
Brooke drew her knife and put it in front of her and to the right. She cut a lock from her hair, lit it from Arturo's candle, and let it burn down to her fingers. She whispered the name of her dead wife. Then she softly wept.
Sharon opened a book. With a tiny pen light, she read softly. Again, only whispers. "And behold, the tomb was empty... for God so loved the world that he gave His only begotten son ... let not the sins of the fathers be visited on the children ... forgive us our trespasses, and deliver us from evil ..."
I knelt mute. I had nothing to say to the divine. Except fuck you.
I took a deep breath. My people deserved better. The murdered millions deserved better.
I felt their presence all around us like a physical weight. A million Americans, a hundred million Chinese, another three million Americans ... what next? Another three hundred million Chinese? A half billion North Americans? Ten billion human beings? Where would it stop? Where would it end?
And two hundred seventy-seven people laid to rest nearby. Not anywhere near all the Employees and other affiliates who had died, only those who had died on site or whose bodies had been recovered.
I did not have the strength. Strange as it sounds, and knowing I could never explain ... they did.
They were dead. I was alive. I had to speak for them because they could not speak for themselves.
Duty is heavier than mountains. Death is lighter than a feather. This was duty.
I opened a piece of paper on which was handwritten an illegal poem. Aggravated treason to possess, or even to say the title of.
"First They Came For The ..."
I read it, quietly but aloud, once my peers had finished their speakings.
"And there was no one left to speak for me," I finished.
Then I read something else, also handwritten, originally from a Russian.
"You should have shouted and shaken your fists when the streets rang with the heels of boots. When the cobblestones echo with the roar of diesel engines and crack under the weight of the treads, when the tanks roar louder than the gathering storm and louder than any scream, it is too late then to merely shout. One must bow your head to your conquerors and remain silent..."
A long pause.
Then I said forcefully, not shouting but loud.
"... or shoot!"
The candle went out. Brooke stopped crying. Mo gripped his boot. Sarah gasped. Sharon swore, "Jesus!"
Arturo said quietly, "We are the ones who shoot."
I knew in that moment that they would never betray me and that I would never betray them.
In this, as in very much else in my too-long life, I was horribly mistaken.
We were still alive. Life went on.
But the awareness of murdered millions and millions yet to come hung heavy on us all. The Chinese strike on the American Midwest had brought it home even for those of us who had seen the destruction of San Francisco.
The Firecracker War was a war to the knife. America versus the world. Russia, saber rattling. Europe and UK, moving from embargo to flirting with actual blockade. Canada and the Caribbean, once America's back yard, actual conflict zones. Just don't ask about South America and Africa.
China, wrecked. We had deliberately nuked the Forbidden City just last week. Not for its military value, but for its propaganda value.
One proposal being floated was to require the Chinese to wreck the Great Wall the same way it had been built. By hand.
The propaganda was full of disaster response. Hundreds of ambulance task forces rushing along freeways - but if you paid attention to markings, you saw it was the same thirty or so over and over again. Mutual aid from fire services all over the Midwest, responding Code 3 to Chicago and Flint and Cleveland and Colorado Springs. National Guard units "invited" to "assist" in securing the Canadian border from both sides. Stock footage of casualties and burns. One particularly horrific image, of children being decontaminated, caused Sarah to look at me curiously.
"That guard looks a lot like you," she said. The caption scrolling below said "Disaster Medical Site, Illinois" but anyone who knew Palo Alto knew it was Stanford on Day 2.
I died at Stanford. And I kept dying moment by moment, day by day. A brave man dies but once, I get that, but was I such a coward that I had that many more deaths to go?
I said nothing. Not safe, you see, even among us and even here.
On paper it was Halloween. No costumes, no candy (unless you counted the sugar bits I kept marking up in the Echo 18 Sundries shop) and a lot of parents and children with PTSD. A lot of new grief.
I was very proud of everyone, however. We had not yet had any additional suicides. This was as much the product of frantic hard work as anything else. We will draw a merciful veil over how much of that work was done.
I scheduled a patrol for midnight. One of our junior leads would take the duty, supported by Wyatt. All of our qualified supervisors - Arturo, Sharon, Sarah, Brooke - were on the patrol. Plus Mo. No one from outside Security. Not even Janine.
About thirty minutes to midnight we met in the assembly area outside Security. We checked each other's equipment. No electronics. Not even radios. In the unlikely event of an attack, the site would light one of the colored strobes on H5, never mind which one, you don't need to know.
I took the point. Our destination was Boot Hill. Unsafe at night. That was the point, and a necessary one.
This was our graveyard. Our beloved dead. Two hundred and seventy seven human remains in individual graves. A binder in a half buried ammunition box listed their names and grids. A view across the side of the hill of the larger hills beyond.
At the base of the hill, a charnel pit full of discarded corpses that we neither numbered nor remembered. Attackers. A few criminals. In effect, enemy personnel. To be as forgotten in death as they were worthless in life.
As I had planned, we arrived shortly before midnight.
We formed a circle facing inward, watching each other's backs. We safed our rifles.
Mo laid out a piece of cloth and knelt on it, after taking off his boots. He made motions as if washing his hands. He whispered briefly, then stopped. Halfway through his prayer. He stopped. Mo is Muslim. Or ... was.
Arturo lit a tapered candle. He stared into the distance and crossed himself, thinking of loved ones far away, in the high intensity battle zone. He prayed for their safety to saints he barely believed in any more.
Sarah pricked her finger and let a few drops of blood fall into the dust. I caught only a tiny whisper of what she said, "Blood for blood, life for life." She was very quiet, not wanting to offend either Arturo or Mo.
Brooke drew her knife and put it in front of her and to the right. She cut a lock from her hair, lit it from Arturo's candle, and let it burn down to her fingers. She whispered the name of her dead wife. Then she softly wept.
Sharon opened a book. With a tiny pen light, she read softly. Again, only whispers. "And behold, the tomb was empty... for God so loved the world that he gave His only begotten son ... let not the sins of the fathers be visited on the children ... forgive us our trespasses, and deliver us from evil ..."
I knelt mute. I had nothing to say to the divine. Except fuck you.
I took a deep breath. My people deserved better. The murdered millions deserved better.
I felt their presence all around us like a physical weight. A million Americans, a hundred million Chinese, another three million Americans ... what next? Another three hundred million Chinese? A half billion North Americans? Ten billion human beings? Where would it stop? Where would it end?
And two hundred seventy-seven people laid to rest nearby. Not anywhere near all the Employees and other affiliates who had died, only those who had died on site or whose bodies had been recovered.
I did not have the strength. Strange as it sounds, and knowing I could never explain ... they did.
They were dead. I was alive. I had to speak for them because they could not speak for themselves.
Duty is heavier than mountains. Death is lighter than a feather. This was duty.
I opened a piece of paper on which was handwritten an illegal poem. Aggravated treason to possess, or even to say the title of.
"First They Came For The ..."
I read it, quietly but aloud, once my peers had finished their speakings.
"And there was no one left to speak for me," I finished.
Then I read something else, also handwritten, originally from a Russian.
"You should have shouted and shaken your fists when the streets rang with the heels of boots. When the cobblestones echo with the roar of diesel engines and crack under the weight of the treads, when the tanks roar louder than the gathering storm and louder than any scream, it is too late then to merely shout. One must bow your head to your conquerors and remain silent..."
A long pause.
Then I said forcefully, not shouting but loud.
"... or shoot!"
The candle went out. Brooke stopped crying. Mo gripped his boot. Sarah gasped. Sharon swore, "Jesus!"
Arturo said quietly, "We are the ones who shoot."
I knew in that moment that they would never betray me and that I would never betray them.
In this, as in very much else in my too-long life, I was horribly mistaken.
