Christmas.”
Zakaria’s wife smiled indulgently. “We respect the People of the Book, and believe in the Book and in the miraculous birth of Prophet Jesus, peace be upon him. We disagree with claims of his divinity, but he is still a Prophet of Allah. And those who follow him, whether they realize it or no, too follow Allah. We are family, more than you realize.”
Troy smiled pleasantly as her words and the flavors of her dessert washed over him. Then he said, “Neat. Can I have another slice of pie?”
Table of Contents
Quarter
My dad was a liberal, the kind who thought we should cut the military budget. Hell of a thing to hear, as a kid, your old man ranting about how 5% of the world’s population shouldn’t be paying 40% of the world’s defense tab- especially when there are deficits. He always thought having that big, bloated military budget was why every generation we seemed to get into another war.
They cut our budget down to a fourth of what it was, increased cooperation with NATO countries in R & D. Functionally our military became targeted to short-term ops, and consisted almost entirely of special ops.
I don’t know if dad was right or not, but I’ve heard it compared like this: our old military was a shield- meant to act as a deterrent, but the new, lean military was more like a sword- where you had to use it to show that the sword- a good offense- could be just as effective as the shield- the good defense- had been. It means the active duty army we’ve got are active 68% of the time; we actually have a deployment schedule, now.
We don’t operate foreign bases, either, so we have to stay with the locals, often in private homes. Sometimes the locals don’t like that, but usually a call to the local cops gets it sorted. It feels a little… un-American, doing that, because of the third amendment, though I guess any time we’re in country it’s kind of war time, isn’t it? And most of the time we’re only in country to help the locals, and usually at the request of their government.
Though that’s not why we’re in Myanmar, or Burma, if you want to piss off the junta. And I guess we’re kind of here to piss off the junta. On the 40th anniversary of the 1988 protests, the junta cracked down on protestors- hard. But this time video phones and social network sites spread the message before it could be spun; we were just winding down a mission on the Pakistan-Afghani border, so we were in the neighborhood.
Burma’s taken prisoners, that they’re holding without trial. My dad sent me a ranty email about an old base called Guantanamo and reaping the whirlwind- I love him but he’s a throaty old bastard- and I have more important things to worry about than whether we’re historical hypocrites. The Lady of Burma’s been dead a while, though the junta swear up and down she died of natural causes (though they’re always pretty vague on what nature did to her). No, we’re here to loose the so-called revolutionary leaders, which from our intel are mostly a group of old Buddhist monks and a few upper middle class merchants.
The Burma mission’s important in another way, because it marks the ten year anniversary of our organ harvesting program. Basically, anyone KIA, ours or theirs, forfeit their organs. It saves our country, annually, billions of dollars, and thousands of lives. Dad says it’s “sick, but, you know, practical.” We give half to the local hospitals, and medevac the other half back to the states. The last few years we’ve actually run what the State Department called an “organ surplus,” where we sold organs to other countries- not enough that we’re self-sufficient yet, but if the curve continues, we will be in six years’ time.
I’m marginally in charge, but since I don’t speak the language it doesn’t feel like it. On short notice, the Company couldn’t get us a direct English to Burmese translator, so everything from the translator’s going through our med officer who speaks Chinese (though he tells me there are a lot of similarities, so at least he might be able to tell if the translator’s jerking us around). Dad still bitches that we don’t use electronic translators (because “it’s the goddamned future, damnit”), but after we almost started an old-fashioned shooting war in Taiwan with those, the Pentagon says we use real people.
At least the Company translator isn’t a complete coward- I’ve had a few, like that one in Libya, where the after first shots were fired he tried to run; of course, standing up and presenting a broad target to an enemy soldier is nearly guaranteed to get you killed- and nobody outruns a bullet. Honestly, we lucked out that in that skirmish- the opposing commander spoke broken English, because it meant he could surrender when the time came for it, and we ended up dragging him around for the rest of our trip; he wasn’t such a bad guy, for an asshole.
Our translator, this time, stayed with us, and when we made our first contact he did exactly as we did, got behind cover, and then he watched and he waited for orders, same as the rest. It was a hastily crammed together checkpoint; the junta probably got wind we were blowing through this way, and tried to muster some farce of a resistance; they probably think we’re French or Portuguese, because I doubt they’d throw bodies at the US.
I felt bad returning fire, because these poor stupid fuckers aren’t our enemies; they might not be our friends, either, but taking apart some local police and army for no good reason doesn’t feel right. At least they’re volunteer, not conscripts. But the battle was over almost before it started.
One of the Tatmadaw, the name for their military, opened fire too soon. Not only were we too far out of range for a decent shot, but they hadn’t finished setting up their .50 cal, and it gave up their position. We returned fire, slowly advancing, and we hadn’t even spun off a force to flank them when it was done. One of theirs took a 5.56 through the chin and smacked pavement, and the others thought it a good idea to do the same, sans bullet.
We hustled the rest of the way down the street. The barrier was even more pathetic than it looked from a block away, just a parked car and a bunch of trash piled up around it in a narrow alleyway.
Maloney was just behind me in hopping over the barrier. Maloney’s new, just added to us for the trip to Afpak. He got into some shady shit there, not fiendish, but I got the sense he was dipping a toe in to see how the water was, and I was starting to suspect the reason he got transferred to me in the first place was because he was an asshole.
There were three guards kissing concrete, and Maloney stooped over the one bleeding, with his field knife out- I assumed to render assistance- but Maloney jabbed it in the bullet hole and sliced from exit wound to entry wound, sawing through his throat in the process.
I grabbed Maloney by the webbing and smashed him into the wall; one of the guards panicked, thinking we were all prisoner executing psychopaths, reached for his gun, and got the butt of an M4 into his cheek for it from Smithson. “Sir?” Maloney asked, with a grin that said he knew what the fuck he’d done, but thought he could pass it as some kind of monkeyshines. “State of medicine around here, he likely would have died from that. And that body, that’s a quarter of a million dollars worth of transplants, just lying there.”
I let him go, and turned to walk away. Maloney picked up his knife, and started back towards the body. “Leave it,” I told him, and turned back to him, “and if you pull this shit again I’ll shoot you myself.”
I hate being in a country like Burma. Times aren’t as high in the US as my dad says they were when he was young, but you don’t see poverty, real poverty, like they have in Burma. And the fucked up part is the country’s actually been doing comparatively well. The last twenty years their government opened up, and their economy's been on the mend- so it’s still this bad after getting better.
And it doesn’t help that this is after the protests, which were attacked by the military, and became full-fledged riots. Broken glass and windows everywhere, bombed out husks of cars; it feels like we’re back in Israel. I hate being in Israel; you never know when someone’s going to shoot somebody else.
It’s getting late. We can’t storm the base they’re holding the prisoners in at night. So we found a ne
ighborhood not far from our path.
Convincing people to let US soldiers not sanctioned by their government stay in their homes is about the right combination of patience, caution and intimidation. Leave one of those out and they’re likely to go fetch the local police while you sleep, but this translator seemed prepared for the eventuality. He knew of a place in the poorer section of town, and I had to do little more than stare at the patriarch as they negotiated to be sure it got done right. “He would appreciate $200 American dollars, please,” the translator eventually said, and I began to wonder how much more English he might speak. But $200 was a good amount- low enough that it wasn’t a token to prove he was cooperating before turning us in, though not so high that he was obviously reluctant to house us at all (and would probably turn us in anyway), and I had more than enough petty cash on me.
I was on the third watch, and it was 1:15 exactly when I heard a gasp, just a little too loud. I figured one of the men had shacked up with one of the daughters, and I was going to have to slap the shit out of him for compromising the mission (to say nothing of our safety). But as I walked through the house, only one light was on, inside the father’s room. I cracked the door.