The War Hero

We were captured about thirty kilometers north of the border. What was left of my squad and three marines who had lost their own squad. They ambushed us as we rounded a mountain; they came out of the trees and roaring down the slope, guns ablazing like some goddamned Western. They were hooting like Injuns, some incomprehensible horrible war cry.

Murphy, next to me, was shot. The front of his forehead blossomed into this red rose almost instantly and he fell over, dead. I had always liked Murphy. Poor Irish kid from Boston. He never pronounced his r’s—I normally can’t stand Boston accents but I made an exception for Murphy since he was such a sweet kid. He had a girlfriend back home, another poor Irish kid from Boston but damned if he didn’t write her the nicest love letters I’d ever read. He always brought them to me to read and correct because I’ve got a degree. Now, I don’t mean to come off sounding arrogant or anything, but I’ve written a fair amount of poetry and prose for a fair amount of ladies, both under the influence and sober. Murphy's letters, for all their spelling and grammatical errors, were beyond anything I could ever manage. Comparing my love letters to his was like comparing Shakespeare’s sonnets to the crude “Mary’s got a big rack” scribbled in the men’s bathroom.

Murphy’s girlfriend was in a teaching college back home and, when she got out, when the war was over, when he came back, they were going to get married. I was going to point out that she was probably getting poked by some bastard who’d never got suckered into the army but I didn’t have the heart. When Murphy died, I sort of felt better. At least he wouldn’t get one of those goddamned “Dear John” letters you always hear about.

Murphy was killed right away, along with one of the marines we’d picked up. He was this big, mean looking black guy. He looked like a pit bull in human form and I had felt better, just knowing he was around. Didn’t quite work out that way.

We gave up pretty easily after that. I was in charge and, really, once you’ve got fifty of the bastards, swarming around you and your five or so guys, what are you going to do? I took out my hankerchief and started dancing around with it, with my hands up, doing the international sign for “I-Give-Up-So-Don’t-Fucking-Shoot-Me.” They seemed to understand that. Or maybe it was how my pants had suddenly gotten very, very wet.

The bastards grabbed my, slammed me down on the ground, took my gun, my knife, my wallet, my jacket, my boots and anything decent I had. They were poor sons of bitches. They were like animals when they started fighting over which one of them got my boots. I glanced at their footwear. They had rags and animal skins wrapped around their feet and soaked through with snow.

After I surrendered, the guys with me, my squad and the remaining marine, they came out and laid down their arms too. You’d never see anyone so excited. They damn near stripped my boys naked, took their guns, their boots, jackets, shirts, everything. It was cold out. It had been snowing a few hours ago and my guys were shivering right away.

I felt kind of bad for the sons of bitches. Our enemies, not my men, though I definitely felt bad for them too. Sort of guilty also. I, at least, got to keep my shirt. Our enemies though, you’d think they’d never seen wool. I felt sort of superior too. Like the representative of some superior culture to a bunch of primitive bushmen. Part of me wanted to try and tell them, “In America, we’ve got even better stuff…”

Once they had looted everything possible off of us, they started us marching. It was getting late but they knew what they were doing. Most of them broke off to continue the fight, leaving the five most pathetic of all of them to guard us. They were either really young or really old. One of them, I swear, was twelve years old. He thought himself pretty hot shit and I wanted to punch him in the face. And I would have too, had I not been scared shitless. Had he not been waving around my stand issue pistol.

I would like to take this moment to make something clear: Not I, nor anyone I was with, was feeling particularly heroic at this moment. In the movies, of course, the hero dispatches his poorly trained enemies with a few choice hand-to-hand combat techniques. Palm hand strike! Roundhouse kick! Shoulder throw! Flying kick! Where the hell did they come up with that bullshit? The guys who were guarding us, old or young as they were, still looked vicious. You could tell they hated our guts. The way they looked at us. Their eyes, jealous and vengeful. They would spit at us occasional, mutter some curse in their guttural tongue. The last thing I wanted to do was get anywhere near one of them, let alone within biting range.

I was kind of disappointed, though that neither I nor any of my boys did anything. Of course, what could we do? Still, I’ve always felt like we should have done something. Anything. If we all jumped one at once, we might’ve been able to get his gun. Something like that. Something heroic. However, this wasn’t the time or place for heroics. War never is.

We marched for an hour. It was boring. And terrifying. It was this horrible mixture of boredom and terror that drives men insane. Planes were flying overhead. I think they were ours but I didn’t dare wave to them. I would’ve been shot dead. We walked, over the desolate, torn green earth, pummeled by the war. It was probably the most depressing thing I’d ever seen, looking at the country these guys were fighting so desperately to defend. It was like fighting over a used tissue and twice as pointless.

I’m not going to go into why we were fighting either. There’re guys, much, much smarter and more eloquent than I, who’ve put it much better than I ever could, and in ways that won’t get me blacklisted. All I want to say is that fighting the actual war is like standing in line at the DMV and being shot at simultaneously. It’s so goddamn boring and terrifying but you can’t do a thing about it except wait it out.

A plan came flying low. I looked up and my heart leapt because I saw the good ol’ stars and stripes on the wing. It was low, low enough to see us and it did. Then, it started to shoot. The pilot didn’t see the American prisoners. Just a bunch of dirty, bastards marching along. Couldn’t be Americans. Had to be the enemy. The guns burst with this loud popcorn. Next time you’re making popcorn, hold your ear real close to the microwave and listen. That’s what it sounded like.

We, and by we, I mean us, the Americans, we instinctively dove for cover. Some of our guards did too and they were okay. The little kid, though, the twelve-year old with my handgun, he was flayed alive by the bullets. I saw it. He was right in front of me. I’ve always been grateful to him because he acted like a shield for me. Even though he was torn to shreds by the guns, none of the bullets hit me.

The plane circled back, saw us lying on the ground, covered with the boy’s blood, because we had been marching so closely together and his death had been so ferocious. I guess the pilot assumed he had gotten all of us, or else he had run out of bullets, because he flew off.

The two of our captors who actually seemed to be regular soldiers started jabbering away in their language, pointing to the two others, both old men, in their language, pointing at the boy’s body. One of the regular soldiers looked maybe sixteen, not much older than the boy, and he seemed pretty shaken up by it. But, mostly, he seemed mad. He was yelling especially loud, on the verge of tears, at the grandpas. They just stared at the younger men yelling at them, dumbfounded, as if they understood as much as I did. To this day, I never knew what they were saying. The old men started to get teary and distressed too. We, the Americans, just stood back and watched this foreign soap opera as flies took to the boy’s torn body. That’s what it was to us just then: a soap opera. The fact that there was this little dead kid, sprawled horribly right in front of us didn’t register. As far as we were concerned, we were just watching the drama on a TV.

Finally, they came to a point and we resumed the march, leaving the boy there. I don’t know whatever happened to his body. I like to think that one of the old men, or maybe even one of the soldiers, returned and buried him, but I doubt it. I saw the vultures in the sky when we left.

It was pretty dark when we finally got to the prison. It was a small, depressing looking building, with a few smaller, even more depressing looking building built around it. The prison itself reminded me of my own high school, which had looked like a prison itself.

We were hustled in, taken down a flight of stairs that smelled like piss and thrown into a cell. Not so much a cell as it was a pen, filled to the brim with captured Americans. Later, I would find out that it was a cafeteria. As it turned out, the prison had once been a school.

The cell smelled of shit, sweat, puke and any other horrible thing you could think of and right then, I could think of plenty. In the darkness, I could see hundreds of faces peering back at me. Just eyes in the dark. Like in cartoons, when the characters are in a dark room and all you see are there eyes? That’s what it was like. It was like looking at the stars, there were so many pairs of eyes.

We staggered in, tripped over a few people and found a place to sit. I didn’t realize how many Americans had been captured. The war was going pretty badly at the moment, I late learned, and our forces were demoralized. Many surrendered instead of fighting with substandard equipment and no support at all.

There was this listless boredom in the cafeteria. There were soft, slow voices, uttering things that no one else could hear. Someone next to me muttered something. I don’t remember what it was but it was great to hear someone speak English again.

Temperature wise, it was actually remarkably pleasant in there. Outside, it was freezing cold and the building wasn’t heated but there were so many bodies packed into the small cafeteria that the heat offset the chill.

The smell was the worst. Find the shittiest, stinkiest men’s bathroom in the world and multiply that by twenty progressively. That’s what you get. It just kept getting worse and worse because every five minutes, someone took a dump or pissed or threw up from the smell of the other two. Not to mention that everyone was sweating.

As I sat there in the prison, I just sort of tuned out. I didn’t think about the war or the shit around me or the smell or my parents back home or my college buddies or my fiancée, or anything because if I did, I felt like I was going to cry. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I admit it. I, the big and tough war hero, wanted to cry. I just forced myself not to think about anything. It was like a survival mechanism.

A few minutes, a few hours, a few days, weeks, months, I don’t know, time stopped mattering in there, eventually, the door opened. A rather strapping young officer entered and spoke to us in perfect English.

He told us how foolish it was for us to resist. He was like a Borg from Star Trek: “Resistance is futile.” He told us how evil how imperialist government was and that the Will of the People was against us. He told us of the atrocities we had committed on these innocent people. He said we would still be forgiven if we did the right thing and defected.

This went on for about ten minutes. No one was paying attention. Scratch that. One guy paid attention. This Mexican kid. Couldn’t have been more than nineteen. Halfway through, he stood up and the officer got all excited, thinking his bullshit had finally affected someone. And it had.

The Mexican kid told him to shut the fuck up. He told him how awesome America was. He told him what a piece of shit country this was and how proud he was to tear it a new asshole to protect America. He told him about all the opportunities and freedoms in America and what great lives everyone in America lived.

I honestly think his speech should be counted among the greatest in history. Right next to the Gettysburg Address should be, “The Unknown Mexican Kid on America.” You could tell he had been planning out what he was going to say and it all flowed forth like a water hose. The best part was the irony. I don’t know if even the kid believed it. There was no denying it, though. He was a poor Hispanic kid, probably from LA or New York or Chicago or any of the other Mexican ghettos across the country. He could barely read English and he was in the army because it was that or work as a janitor because he dropped out of high school. And here he was, defending the nation that had given him so little. Here he was, putting his life on the line, knowing he could be shot at any moment. But, the funny thing was, right then, I envied him. I wanted to be able to believe in that American dream and be proud that I was serving my country and retain my faith even in captivity. But I didn’t.

Once the Greatest Speech in the World was finished, the officer just stood and smiled pleasantly. Finally, he said a few words in another language to the guards down the hall and they came down and they pulled the kid out into the hall and he didn’t resist because he knew what was going to happen and it all happened real fast onetwothree and they had him stripped and they were beating him, smashing him, pummeling him. It was all this horrible blur that we watched. No one tried to help him. It was like we were waiting for someone to start it. For someone to get up and help him first and then, we could all join in. A catalyst. That was what we needed. Someone to start up the reaction. A John Wayne. Someone brave, unflinching, to drive us forward.

No one stepped forward. They did horrible, horrible things to that poor Mexican kid and at the end, they just tossed him back in like a rag doll and locked the door.

And so, the boredom set in again, along with the darkness. This time, though, I was mad. I was mad at the bastards who hurt the kid, I was mad at the kid for speaking up, I was mad at myself for not doing anything, I was mad at everyone in the prison for not doing something, I was mad for having joined the army, I was mad at America for getting into the goddamned war, I was mad at this country for being there. I could just feel this incredible rage building in me.

I started to cry. I thought of my mom back home and I was still mad because I thought how sad she would be when I died here. She had already lost my dad to cancer and I was an only child. After I died, she’d have no one. That pissed me off more than anything because, Christ, all men love their mothers.

The guy next to me patted my shoulder. It’ll be okay, he told me.

Time went by. My rage simmered. I was mad at the movies for putting ideas like the glory of war into our heads. For showing us a twisted idea of what it should be like. John Wayne, killing the Japs and riding off into the sunset. The sergeant, riding on a tank, straight into the German lines. Goddamned Patton, taking on the entire Wehrmacht single-handed. That was what war was supposed to be like. Not this shit we were currently knee deep in. That was what pissed me off the most. We had been lied to. By the government, by the army, by Hollywood, by ourselves, by our very culture. It pissed me off.

Hours later, the officer was back. I was done crying but I was still mad and I felt like I was going to cry again when he started talking. Started telling us how wrong we were. I wondered if the Mexican kid would get up and try and tell him off again. I wondered if he could stand. The officer told us about the great rewards that lay in store for us when we defected. Resistance is futile.

Nobody did anything. We sat there and listened and felt sorry for ourselves and wanted to be anywhere but here. Dead, even.

Well? he said. Didn’t anyone want to defect?

Something inside of me, something I still don’t understand, willed my body to stand.

I do, I said softly. He was quite pleased with this and beckoned me forward. I wondered if anyone would stop me. I staggered along slowly. I stepped on a few people but they were too out of it to care. Or maybe they were dead. I don’t know.

I got to the doorway and he looked me over. He said I was a fine specimen of a young man and he told me and everyone else that I would be “rehabilitated” and ready to start my new life. I had no intention of doing that, though. Somehow, my body, my soul, my subconscious, something, had this all planned out.

I snapped.

I drove my fist into his gut as hard as I could. I was never much of a fighter when I was a kid and I’m not a big guy but in basic, they made us do a lot of push ups and I boxed daily. Plus, all that rage, all that anger and sorrow, it all came out in that one punch. It all went from my knuckles to his belly. I think I snapped his spine with that punch

He doubled over and I came down on top of him, wailing on him and screaming. I let it all out. I wasn’t a movie hero, goddammit, but I was the closet thing to it. I was beating the figurative and literal shit out of him, slamming fist after fist into his body, smashing him into pulp. The rage consumed me and then, him, as I roared, I sounded my “barbaric yawp” into his body, tore him to shreds. I did it as much for the Mexican kid as I did it for myself. I was angry. God, how I was angry, at everything. He just happened to be the focal point of my anger.

He was dead by the time the guards got down the hall. They pulled me off him, punched me, tried to shoot me but I was so wild and screaming that I knocked the gun away and tackled one. The other pulled me away again, smashed his fist into the back of my head but I was already an animal. I looked to the other prisoners as they beat me. I said, I yelled something. I don’t know what. It might’ve been “Let’s roll!” or “Give me liberty or give me death!” It could’ve been “God bless America!” or even just “Let’s fuck ‘em up!” Now, I tell people it was one of the first ones but I’m pretty sure it was closer to the latter.

Slowly, at first, but then quickly, chaotically, like a horrible wave, the prisoners surged forward, grabbed the guards, dismembered them, tore them limb from limb. They were shouting too. Screaming. The rage I felt was shared by all of them as we made our own personal declaration of independence. We took the guards’ guns and surged out of the cafeteria. More guards came, tried to shoot us but we overcame them, slaughtered them. We spread out, along with our rage, found other cells, freed other prisoners, passed out anger and hatred onto them and soon, the entire prisoner was in rebellion. They guards, the poor bastards, they didn’t stand a chance against our rage.

By noon, we were free. We had taken the prison by force, with very minimal loss of life. We killed all of the guards and soldiers we could find. We took their weapons and declared the prison and all the area around it liberated territory. We made an American flag and flew it overhead.

In the end, I was given a medal for having “engineered” the break. It did a lot of for the war effort. Morale sky rocketed once the story of a bunch of unarmed prisoners overtaking the prison got around. We won the war.

And now, I’m a war hero. A genuine, bonafide war hero. They want to make a movie out of the story now. Goddammit.