American Insurgent

by Phil Rabalais

  “I’m not questioning your judgment, but this is pretty bloody, guys.” Mark tried to make his voice sound soothing, not wanting to provoke a confrontation with these men. It was not fear that motivated him, more of a quiet respect. These were the men who had won more ground in this fight with the agency in a month than his group had won in years, and he desperately wanted to keep this partnership together, but even he had to question this provocation.

  “It isn’t like we cut his head off and stuck it on a pike or anything,” Andy retorted. Andy, always with the sardonic sense of humor and sarcasm, and always ready to back John no matter how bad things got. It was easy to see why the two of them had become fast friends.

  “I’m not saying you were wrong. Just give some of us a minute to come to terms with the reality of leaving dead bodies in plain sight as a way of getting a point across,” Mark seethed.

  John stood briskly, his knees knocking the chair out from behind him. “Now you listen here. Every time we called here for intel, every time we reported ‘mission accomplished,’ every time we came back here and locked ourselves away in the shop to reload ammo, what in the FUCK did you think was going on? Were we out selling Girl Scout cookies? Collecting for the American Red Cross? We have been killing these guys every night, everywhere we can find them. Hell, I quit counting so I wouldn’t have to wonder how many of them have wives and kids. I have to sleep with what I’ve done every night, and I have to keep reminding myself we are at war, and war involves casualties. I’m sorry, Mark, that you suddenly noticed a few drops of blood on your own hands. I can’t see the drops anymore ’cause I’m covered in it.”

  “John, I—”

  “Fuck you, Mark! You want your turn outside the wire? You want to wake up at two in the morning with bugs crawling on you, picking ticks off Andy’s ass every morning so we don’t end up sick? You want to tell your wife ‘sorry, honey, got to go shoot people in the face for a few weeks. See you later’?” John’s eyes flared, his fists clenched, the cords in his necks and arms pulled tight.

  “John.” It was Andy’s voice that spoke. John’s head craned in the direction of the sound, to see his friend at the back door, holding two cigars. He angrily stomped towards the door, snatching one of the cigars on his way past his friend.

  “Mark, I wouldn’t suggest you come out this door for a few minutes if you like chewing your food. Take that as a friendly suggestion,” Andy said seriously as he closed the door.

  The room was silent. Even Rachel, normally the peacekeeper, was deeply conflicted. She found little to argue with that John and Andy’s methods were brutal, but she was incensed at Mark for his reaction. “I suggest you do some soul-searching, Mark. If you want us out of here, just say the word. But John is right, he is the one out there doing what no one else wants to do. He is fighting this war while you watch it from the comfort of a computer monitor. It isn’t fair that he comes back after almost getting shot twice in one night to have you and your wife unload on him. You don’t get to send him out there into danger just to ‘Monday morning quarterback’ him afterwards.” She left the room to check on Kay and George, then joined her husband and Andy on the back porch.

  “What do we do?” Vicky demanded of her husband. “Those two aren’t men, they’re animals. How can they kill a man like that and feel nothing?”

  “That’s just the problem, Vicky,” Mark replied. “I think they do feel something. Andy may hide it with sarcasm, John may rationalize it, but they both see the face of every man they’ve killed. And I just threw it right back in their faces.”

  “Damn that man.” John fumed. His friend stood just out of arm’s reach. “Where does he get off questioning me? He sits here in his ivory tower, eating home-cooked meals and banging his wife, while we sit out there smelling our own shit, risking our asses every night! And then when we come back, I’ve got a hole in my plate carrier and a bruise the size of a fist, both of us scared to death we almost got shot, and he has the freaking nerve to say ‘hey, guys, little over the top.’ I got half a mind to go punch his lights out for his trouble.”

  Andy just stood there, toasting the foot of his own cigar while regarding his friend. He was not given to the same brand of explosive anger his friend was, but he understood the reaction. John was a man of action, and he understood intrinsically the only way to end this fight was through violence. Anything less than that would only prolong the fight and invite casualties he did not want to incur. What John was really wrestling with was his own conscience, not wanting to be reminded of the body count they had already caused. “Look, give him a few minutes, and I’m sure he’ll come out here with his tail between his legs,” Andy offered.

  “Until the next time. Then I’m going to have to chew his head off all over again. What did he think, we’d just send the government a politely drafted email and they’d realize the error of their ways? Did he think this little insurrection wouldn’t balloon into a full-scale shooting war? He knew what he was getting into; he just doesn’t like the feeling of the blood being on his own hands,” John spat.

  The sound of the door opening sent John’s head swiveling around. He was sure it was Mark and was readying a dizzying array of profanity to hurl in his direction when the sight of his wife walking through the door greeted him. “At ease, boys, I come in peace,” she said, half joking. “Has he found anything to throw or punch yet?” Rachel asked Andy.

  “Nope, think Mark smartened up and started nailing everything down,” Andy said through a grin.

  John’s shoulders slumped, the humor working to defuse him. He took another pull from his cigar and looked back at the house. Once a refuge from the ugliness he was seeing daily, now it just looked like judgment to him. He saw recriminations, reminders of his past deeds. He saw the questions and the looks.

  “Rachel, I can’t do this.” John sighed. “I can’t stay here and work with these people if every time I come home, I get dragged across the coals. This is just like Iraq, when someone would grease a guy and the damned Army wanted to try him for war crimes. Put a soldier in a situation where he practically has to get his head shot off before everyone wants to clear him to shoot. And with two on a thousand odds, we don’t have the luxury of waiting for our enemy to fire the first shot.”

  “John, I understand what you’re doing. The reality of it is shocking even to me, but I understand. Where do you think the disconnect is between you and Mark?” she asked.

  “I think,” he answered, “he was under the impression the good guys act like good guys. He wasn’t prepared to be the villain in this story. Good guys don’t desecrate bodies and shoot people in the back.”

  “They don’t?” Rachel prodded.

  “Shit yes, they do, they just write the history books afterwards and clean up the finer details. When we talk about the first Thanksgiving, everyone talks about the Native Americans and colonists breaking bread together like old friends. No one talks about the smallpox blankets and the ambushes, the murders and rapes, the turf war over land. This country is not unique in its history. The victor always writes the history books to present themselves in the best possible light. I can assure you, if the Germans won World War Two, you wouldn’t have read about a single Jew walking into a gas chamber. The bombs fall on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Japanese Imperial Army wins anyway, you never read a word about their prison camps and GIs being starved half to death. That’s just reality.” John’s words came out in a rush, his mind racing. “Mark’s problem is that he sees what we’re doing for what it is. We are mounting an insurrection and behaving as insurrectionists. We are operating a terror cell, fighting against a technologically superior force with vast numbers and near unlimited power.”

  “In other words, we’re acting like ISIS,” Rachel summarized.

  “Yes and no, some of their methods are so inhumane even I won’t be able to face myself if we used them. More like the kinds of tactics employed by the colonial militias against the British before the Revolutionary Army was
raised. These men weren’t soldiers, they were farmers and outdoorsmen. They didn’t stand in a field lined up nice and pretty to be cut down by British muskets, they hid in trees and used their rifles to shoot officers off their horses. And trust me, there was plenty of backstabbing and assassination to go along with that, it just never made it into the history books. Even we wanted to portray ourselves after the fact in the most righteous light possible,” John explained.

  “So how do you get that across to Mark?” Rachel asked.

  John looked at his feet. “I guess shithead just needs a history lesson. ’Cause from here, things are going to get a lot uglier.”

  A History Lesson

  John sat with Mark, just the two of them, as they wrestled with their words to communicate. They were just realizing just how different their worlds had been the last month of their lives, and Mark just how detached he had felt from all of the violence John and Andy had wrought upon the local agency personnel. For the first time, Mark questioned the methods employed by John and realized just how deeply personally John had taken that questioning. “John I’m—” he started.

  “Shut up for a second and listen.” John clipped Mark off midsentence. His eyes bored straight into Mark’s, as Mark wondered whether he had come to talk or just to throttle the life out of someone. “I left here a few weeks ago pretty sure you and I were on the same page, and it has just come to my attention we are not. So let’s you and me put our cards on the table. What the fuck do you want?” The words came out of John’s mouth dripping with venom.

  “John, I want what you do. I want these camps emptied out, and I want the searches to stop. I want our government to back off,” Mark said evenly, careful to choose his words.

  “I want the same thing. The problem seems to be my methods are a little too brutal for your liking, so please tell me how you propose to accomplish your goals without me and Andy getting our asses shot off. I can’t go out there, knock on the front door of their compound, and ask to speak with Mr. Shorts to work out this little misunderstanding we seem to have had. They will take about six seconds to put me against a wall and blow my damned head off. I likewise don’t have the luxury of waiting for a dozen of them to start shooting at me and Andy before we start shooting back. The disparity in our numbers just makes that impossible. So spit it out. What’s on your mind?” John’s voice was simultaneously a demand and a challenge.

  Mark saw himself for the first time as John’s adversary, and the reality frightened him. He saw what all of those men must have seen before they met their end. He saw a man simultaneously in control and on the verge of losing control, like a train barreling down the tracks, going too fast to stop before it flew off the rails.

  Mark sighed. “John, I was wrong. I shouldn’t have put you on the spot like that. The news was shocking, and I let it get the best of me. I apologize.”

  “That’s it?” John snapped.

  “What else do you want from me?” Mark fired back. “Jesus, John, look at yourself. You walk into my house with blood and mud all over the two of you after you just executed a man while looking into his eyes and sat him up against the front gate of his compound for everyone to see like some kind of gruesome scarecrow. You’ve bombed people, shot them, ambushed them; you guys are out there acting like terrorists—”

  “Motherfucker, what do you think we are?!” John roared.

  Mark’s speech was stopped in mid-word.

  “You said the Minutemen were modeled after a terror cell. Well, bubba, I got news for you, we ARE terrorists. Go grab your dictionary and look up the word; tell me what it says. We are using violence to enact and force political or social change, straight out of Webster’s. What, you thought the good guys didn’t do that shit? We always fought fair? Hell, son, you’re a pretty smart guy, but you’re the most ignorant person I’ve ever met,” John lectured. “I’m going to go grab a shower, and I’m going to bed. Between now and tomorrow morning, friend, you do yourself a favor and open up a history book and start reading. The American Revolution was a bloody war. Every war is. If you question my methods, you do some homework and have a look at how the game is played before you start questioning the rule book.”

  John turned and saw Kevin standing there, his hand on the butt of his sidearm. It occurred to him he hadn’t even realized till now that Kevin and several others had started carrying sidearms around the compound. His eyes grew deadly serious. “Kevin, you want to take your hand off that gun, or you want to see if you can outdraw me?”

  Kevin looked down at his right hand, unaware he had even reached for it, and slowly moved his hand away. “I just came to see what the yelling was about.”

  “I didn’t tear your boss’s head off, if that’s what you’re worried about.” He walked past Kevin and down the hallway to his room. Rachel and Andy came in from the back porch.

  “Well, that went well,” Andy quipped.

  “Agreed. Mark isn’t dead, and my husband is going to get some rest. See everyone in the morning,” Rachel said nonchalantly as she followed her husband to their room.

  Andy sat down by Mark, kicking his boots up on a footrest without regard for the muddy condition of his footwear. “So have you figured it out yet?” Andy asked. His tone was halfway between chiding and a genuine question.

  “Figured what out?” Mark asked, emotionally exhausted.

  “That we aren’t the good guys this time?” Andy said levelly. “That’s what John said outside, we aren’t the good guys. No such thing in a war. There’s just people looking out for their own interests. We want our rights, not just guns but all of them, to be respected. The government, with the backing of some of the population, disagrees. They are willing to use force to accomplish their goals, so are we. The difference is, they are at peace with their decision and you don’t seem to be. Why is that?” It was the longest sentence Andy had spoken to Mark since he had arrived at his home.

  “I’m not a soldier, Andy. I don’t kill people. I don’t shoot them. I’m not like you and John.”

  “Rachel overheard what Vicky said about John. He isn’t what you think he is. Vicky is wrong; he isn’t an animal or a barbarian. He actually places such a high value on human life he wrestles with taking one every single time. That’s why he takes it so personally when you question what he’s doing. He and I have known each other a long time, and we’ve spent a lot of time out there in the woods together. He is, on a very deep and emotional level, haunted by every life he has taken, but he won’t stop,” Andy explained.

  “Why is that?” Mark pleaded, looking for the key to unravelling John.

  “Because,” Andy explained patiently, “he is at peace with his decision. He knows these men must die, not because they are evil men, but because what they do is evil. To take another person’s freedom or free choice or property, that is all evil. If they serve the will of a government that engages in evil, then they must be sacrificed to bring that evil to an end. I kinda wish you hadn’t pissed John off, he could’ve explained this a bit more eloquently than I am.”

  “Why do I seem to constantly piss him off?”

  Andy sighed. “Believe it or not, it isn’t you. You and your wife just dredged up the same argument he’s been having with himself and caught hell for it. Tomorrow morning, after a good night’s sleep, he’ll probably come out of that room with his tail between his legs and apologize for tearing your heads off. You don’t know, can’t know, what it’s like to be out there doing what we do every day. But do not mistake the fact that you all screwed up. You let that man go out and do the dirty deeds you don’t want to do, or can’t, whatever. You cannot turn around and throw him to the wolves of his own conscience after he has shed blood on your behalf. Like it or not, no one is innocent in this fight, whether you pulled the trigger or you told him where to go to pull the trigger. You may not be a wolf like John, but you aren’t sheep either.”

  Andy hauled himself to his feet. “Think long and hard about what we just talked about, and ta
ke some of John’s advice. Crack a history book, because that man certainly has. He is such a nerd in a library, reading history and philosophy, that you’d never believe what he’s like in a fight. A savage fighter with the intellect of a scholar. If you want to understand him, try understanding where he’s coming from. Try to understand what it means to wish for peace, but resign yourself to viciousness to achieve it.”

  As Andy turned his back on Mark and walked to his room, Mark did just that. He walked to his study and started looking for a book on the American Revolution. By the time he fell asleep with a book on his chest, he had indeed come to understand John a little better. That was incidentally where John found Mark the next morning.

  He gently shook Mark by the foot, well outside the reach of his arms. It was an old habit born from the military, to wake a man out of his reach so you couldn’t be struck by a jumpy person. He needn’t have worried, Mark woke gingerly and peered over the top of the book on his chest at John. With a fresh cut to his beard, trimmed hair, and thoroughly scrubbed face, he looked like a different person. “Listen, Mark…” he started, the remorse obvious in his tone.

  “No, don’t you dare apologize to me.” Mark’s words came out as a sigh, not an accusation. He raised the book to show John the spine. “I took some of your and Andy’s advice and read several history books. Then I read a bunch of old Army field manuals about unconventional warfare, guerilla tactics and such. I don’t know what I was expecting you to do, but I never really stopped to ask either, and it was insensitive of me to second-guess you after the fact. Insensitive and unfair.” Mark sat up and looked at John. The usually intense eyes were merely blank this morning, exhausted.