A Distant War

A Distant War

         The city of Abiu Kotay.

         Behind us was the jungle. Before us lay the long, gentle slope of the hill on which we hid. Then the river, and a stretch of cultivated fields. Beyond the fields were the white buildings of Abiu Kotai. The city seemed almost to be made of gold in the late evening sunlight.

         Heat waves shimmered up from the white and mud colored buildings that stretched out toward the setting sun. Bright green fields spread out between us and it. From our vantage it looked peaceful. A serious misperception.

         It didn’t take a specialist to figure it out, either. Nothing moved. No traffic in or out of the city. No workers going about their business in the fields. No activity at all. Though the city was several kilometers distant, it exuded a sense of feral patience.

         They knew we were coming, and they were waiting.

         We were an advance team. Point men. Our job was to recon and report. Seek out enemy positions, calculate enemy strength and numbers, and identify traps.

         The problem was...the enemy.

         Soldiers we knew. Trained military personnel, like ourselves, we were comfortable with. Killing was never easy but we were trained for, if and when it became necessary. In Abiu Kotai, as in many other places in this country, the people themselves had been armed and ‘trained’ to fight. A fact that left a knot of permanent tension deep inside all of us.

         We would go in there and do our jobs, as we had been trained, but it wasn't going to be easy. We had all seen death. We had watched friends fall, and we had each done our share of killing in battle. But this would be different. Danger now would come not just from identifiable soldiers. It would now be present from every crevasse and angle in that gleaming city. How could we even know who the enemy was for certain?

         Our orders?

         Don’t let anyone get within 100 meters of the troop, do whatever we had to do to protect group integrity!.

         Target any and all movement in windows, doorways, and hidden places.

         Shoot to kill.

         How could we know if the innocent looking child in the street had a gun hidden behind his back or not? The little old grandma might have a grenade clutched in her arthritic old hand. The lovely young girl could grow enticingly near before setting off the explosives hidden beneath her gowns and robes. The smiling street merchant could have a gun hidden within his cart.

         These people were, for the most part, innocents. They were just afraid. Afraid of us, and afraid of their country’s leader. They dare not disobey the man who put guns in their hands told them to kill. And they feared and hated us just enough to have their own motivation to do it.

         We would have to kill. We would kill, and many of them would be innocents. This country's leadership posed a threat to the world. A serious threat, if only indirectly. The only way to ease the danger was to get to the leader and the only way to do that was to go through the innocents the leader had chosen to hide behind.

         He wanted to destroy our will, and the will of the people back home, to go on with this war, and we all knew this was eminently possible. We had been briefed on the psychological effects of what we were about to do. We understood, at least intellectually, and possibly a little bit in our hearts as well, what this would do to us. We would never be the same. Our country would never be the same. Our own people might hate and vilify us, but we would do it anyway. We would go in there and we would shoot the child, the old woman, the merchant. The lovely girl. If we had too. We would shoot to kill, as would the men and women who came after us, to protect our country and to protect the world. At least for a little while.

         And then…? What…?

         Our souls would suffer. Our hearts and minds would suffer. Nothing would ever be the same.

         We would never be the same.


         “OK, men. Let’s roll….”