by Mendy Sobol
“Operations’ security protocols begin on this bus,” he said.
“When the hand goes up, the mouth goes shut,” Coop whispered from the seat next to mine.
Smith heard him, narrowed his eyes like he was making a mental note, and continued.
“You are required to stay with the group at all times and immediately follow any instructions given by IPI security personnel. Everything you will observe today is classified. Do any of you have questions concerning your responsibilities in that regard?”
I felt Coop’s hand start to go up, but I grabbed it before he could raise it above the seatback in front of us.
“Very well,” Smith said, and motioned for the driver to head across the parking lot.
A gun-toting, Kevlar-wearing security team met us at the Building B door. They scanned our I.D.s and took some headshot video. Coop gave me a look and started to say something, but Captain Rusk cleared his throat, and Coop shut up right away. I knew what he was thinking—this was ridiculous. But locked and loaded M16s held at the ready made sure we knew it wasn’t just for show.
Our Programming Center in Building A could have passed for the headquarters of any company that had a C-ASS exemption—desks, chairs, phones, offices, partitions, computers, all brightly lit from above. The Ops Center in Building B was more like the set from some big-budget sci-fi movie. The first-floor hall was lined on either side by closed doors with complicated-looking security locks, but the surprise came when the armored elevator doors opened onto the second floor. As my eyes slowly adjusted to the dim green lighting, I realized that it was really the second, third, and fourth floors, because the ceiling was high above us at roof level. Unlike Building A, there were no windows or skylights, though from the outside it appeared there were both. There were also no workstations, no exit doors, and no stairwells. I figured if someone needed to pee they’d have to get on the elevator and find a head behind one of those locked doors downstairs, because there were no restrooms either. And if there was a fire—shit—we were dead.
A wide central corridor led to four sets of double doorways opening into what looked like four heavily soundproofed IMAX theaters. Smith led us down the corridor and through the second set of doors on our left into Theater 2. The low buzz of shoptalk and chitchat coming from inside stopped as we entered. Smith blocked our passage down the aisle with his broad-shouldered body and motioned us to sit in the first of the three rows of plush theater-style seats at the back. Where the floor leveled out in the front of the room, a dozen men and women in shirtsleeves sat or stood by a row of consoles, keyboards, and joysticks. In front of them, the theater’s three-story wall consisted of two rows of eight high-resolution screens topped by one giant screen at least twenty feet high and thirty wide.
Smith sat down by himself in the last row. One of the shirt-sleeved girls made a cupped-hand remark that got a laugh from the guy next to her, squared her shoulders, and looked up at us.
“Welcome to The Show,” she said, “where IPI’s real work gets done.”
No one said anything, but I knew what all of us cybergrammers were thinking—Screw you, asshole—and a whole bunch of really creative variations on that theme.
“We’ve timed your visit today to coincide with a scheduled op. We’ve got a company of troopers in the field, hard intelligence that our target will be accessible within the next thirty minutes, and a “go” from the Pentagon brass for actualizing RITA’s decisions without running them up the chain of command. Operations timetables, are, however, always fluid and subject to change or cancellation. Your job today is to sit silently and wait until the scheduled operation is either completed or scrubbed. When either of those two has occurred, Mr. Smith will escort you to your bus. There will be no opportunities for questions.”
So we sat in silence, fidgeting, because when cybergrammers have nothing to do and can’t jack in, we always fidget. Meanwhile, at the front of the theater, the Ops guys made a big show of looking all cazh. You know, just another day at the office.
That all changed when five ever-louder beeps sounded through the theater’s speakers. Everyone was at their stations, sitting up straight, hunching over, or standing behind seated pairs of operators. The annoying girl stood behind all of them, looking like she was in charge. I jumped a little when the screens lit up, at first just a mashup of green and black, then slowly resolving, the small screens filled with jerky images of dimly lit earth and foliage, the big screen showing an aerial view of moonlit ocean. In Indonesia it was night, and Righteous Sword troopers equipped with night-vision goggles were humping their way through the jungle while Marine aviators launched from carrier decks far out at sea, their every move uplinked to RITA and directed by RITA through the people at the front of this room 9,900 miles away.
If this were a movie, it would have been boring. Thirty minutes of leafy, dripping fronds and heavy breathing interrupted by occasional halts, while whispered queries and terse commands flashed back and forth through the ether at light speed, everything orderly and controlled. But it wasn’t a movie, and without realizing it most of us were leaning forward in tense anticipation.
Suddenly, there was a clearing—so suddenly the troopers stumbled into the open before they realized it. Someone, probably the company commander, turned and raised both hands, signaling a halt. At the clearing’s center, three-dozen thatch-roofed huts surrounded by tilled pasture. At 4 o’clock a goat pen, at 5 a chicken coop, two outhouses at 7 and two more at 8. Between the troopers and the huts a clear alley at 6 o’clock without so much as a boulder or stump blocking the way.
More whispered consultation, and while I couldn’t make out all the words, it sounded like the IPI Ops team, after consulting RITA, was urging the unit’s reluctant commander forward into the village in search of a specific target. Slowly, and way too noisily, first one platoon, then another, then another moved forward into the clearing. Part of my mind—the part trained more by running simulations on RITA than by the Navy—knew the troopers were too bunched up, knew the third platoon should have been kept in reserve. Another part of my mind realized I was holding my breath.
Now the chicken coop and goat pen were on the first rank of the troopers’ right flank, the outhouses on their left. A goat bleated. A twig snapped.
Then, chaos.
I remember most of what happened after that, but I’m not sure what happened when. A searchlight flicked on atop the chicken coop and swept the closely bunched platoons. Blinded troopers began frantically tearing off their goggles. The first rank disappeared from sight as though a trapdoor had opened beneath them, and many of the second rank stumbled over the first rank. Muzzle flashes lit the goat pen from ground level, and both outhouse doors burst open with a fusillade of rifle fire.
The theater’s speakers, so quiet before, erupted with gunfire, screams, shouts and curses, the shrill sounds of men and women under attack. Above the noise, one voice hollered, “Fall back! Fall Back!” The front ranks were pinned down by flanking fire, but the rear ranks began pulling out, turning to direct covering fire as best they could.
This was nothing like IPI’s real-time public broadcasts. For one thing, that video was always choppy. For another, our troops always won. I’d suspected those broadcasts were edited; now I was wondering if they were staged.
Inside the tree line, the troopers reformed, directing automatic weapons fire at the goat pen and outhouses, and less discriminately at the huts beyond. Javanese curses and screams filled the theater as the enemy’s rifles stuttered, then fell silent. Surviving troopers still in the clearing began shinnying toward the jungle, while from the tree line friendly fire into the village whistled inches above their helmets. Too slowly, the survivors inched their way to safety, some dragging the injured with them, some, the dead.
After a few more rifle cracks from inside the village, and a hail of answering fire, everything fell silent. Now we’ll get those bastards! I thought. I’m not proud of it, but that’s what I thought.
/> In the silence, a different voice this time, barely under control, crackled over the speakers. “The captain’s dead. What the fuck do you want us to do now?”
At the front of the room the controllers huddled briefly around the main console before answering. The HBIC lifted a microphone to her lips.
“Pull out,” she said.
“Are you fucking kidding me? We didn’t take a shitload of casualties for nothing! We’re going in and finish the job!”
“Too dangerous. RITA’s calling in an airstrike.”
“An airstrike! Listen you fucking asshole, we’re on top of the goddamn village. That fucking computer will kill us all!”
“Then you better stop talking and pull out.”
“You motherfucker… okay, okay… how much time do we have?”
She looked down at the console. “Less than three minutes. I repeat, three min…”
“I fucking heard you! Jesus Christ!” Whoever it was in charge of the company shouted orders, and troopers began shuffling deeper into the jungle. At their backs, more rifle fire erupted, directed toward their noisy departure. One trooper went down. A lucky shot.
“Medic! Medic!”
“No time, goddammit! You two, get up under her shoulders and carry her—double time!”
I was so focused on the smaller screens’ grainy images that it took a while until the steadily increasing rumble coming through the speakers made me look up at the big screen. Green-lit jungle was whipping beneath the rotors of a Zulu Cobra attack helicopter flying at treetop level. I recognized it because I worked on the IPI team that developed the targeting software for its weapons systems, including the sixteen AGM-114 Hellfire air-to-surface missiles it carried in wing-mounted launchers. Ahead of the Cobra, I could make out the outlines of three more gunships speeding above the jungle, until, in the distance, there was a clearing. All four choppers plunged dizzyingly at the village, and I closed my eyes for a moment to clear my head. When I opened them the Cobras were so close to the deck, I could see people running for cover, or holding their ground, uselessly aiming rifles skyward at the terrifying howl above them.
I glanced at the small screens. The troopers had barely cleared the tree line, but at least they could count on the Marines to come in low, risking their lives to make sure their ordnance fell on the enemies instead of the friendlies.
“Death from above!” One of the pilots said, her words crackling from the speakers. If there was a reply, it was drowned out by at least a dozen booming concussions as the darkened theater flooded with the light from fiery explosions on all nine screens.
The Ops team worked swiftly, sifting data, adjusting camera angles, and reading RITA’s analysis of it all. It took a few minutes, but finally the large screen revealed towering flames where once there had been a village. For a moment, there was silence. Then the Ops team members leapt to their feet, whooping and high-fiving. As for our little troop of cybergrammers, all of us, even Coop, sat in stunned silence.
Captain Rusk stood up. Smith blocked the aisle, but the Captain shouldered his way past him like Smith was a ragdoll and pushed through the theater door. The rest of us followed.
That was the last time we were invited to Ops.
Chapter Twenty-Four: Melora
At IPI we talked about the war, like people everywhere talked about the war. In the beginning, with troop deployments small and White House promises big –The AEF will be home for Christmas!—most supported the war without question. As one deadline for withdrawal after another passed and casualties grew daily, people at IPI, like people around the country, started taking sides. But despite IPI’s focus on war-related R & D, discussions about the war remained casual water cooler and lunchroom topics. Even when we accessed classified information conflicting with Pentagon reports carefully spun to the media, we still felt like we were merely observers. Only Professor Sherman, who was against U.S. involvement from the beginning, argued that everyone at IPI shared “…personal responsibility to act on our opposition to the war.” Everyone ignored him. Including me.
The Navy tapped into patriotic feelings I never knew I had, and also put faces on the warriors. I stayed in touch with the old gang from Pensacola—Chief Kavaney was back at sea on the Dallas, God only knew where or how many fathoms deep, and Bosworth, promoted to Lieutenant Commander, shipped out on the Abraham Lincoln, running Computer Ops for an entire carrier battle group, probably fantasizing he was Robert E. Lee. My nephew Darin enlisted on his seventeenth birthday, announcing, “I’m gonna join the Navy and kick some Red Path ass. And when the war’s over, I’m gonna learn all about computers, just like Melora!” I encouraged him because, like me, the navy was his only way out. Nine months later he was cruising the war zone on the Lovell, a tin-can destroyer.
Politics never interested me, but I understood the connection between what I did every day and what I saw on my TV at night. And now I knew something I hadn’t known before my visit to The Show—IPI was sanitizing its so-called livestream of the war. Don’t get me wrong, what America saw on TV every night was plenty gruesome. But they never showed dissension among the troopers, only patriotic displays of bravery. And they never showed a clusterfuck like the one we witnessed at Building B. And they never showed a whole village being wiped from the face of the earth because RITA had a bug up her ass about one particular insurgent.
Everything I’d seen reminded me of Mr. Belasso and his Marine buddies, the picture hanging on the wall behind the counter at the pizzeria, his warning about Huế and the Tet Offensive. So that’s where I began my research.
After three weeks and a couple of all-nighters reading every Vietnam War history I could lay my hands on, I had to talk to Coop. In high school they forced me to take seven semesters of history, but hadn’t taught me a fucking thing about Vietnam. Maybe it was different for Coop in college or at John Paul Jones.
One day during lunch, I asked him straight up, “What do you know about Vietnam?”
“Only that my dad got completely screwed up there.”
“I didn’t know your dad was in combat.”
“Nah, he never did any fighting. He was a veterinarian. They needed someone to look after the guard dogs and all the poor retrievers who got blown up sniffing out landmines and digging their way into Viet Cong tunnels. But whatever the hell happened over there made him start drinking. My mom said he never touched booze before the army.”
“Look, Coop, I’ve been reading all kinds of stuff about Vietnam. You should take a look too.”
Coop’s face got funny, a twisted up expression I’d never seen before.
“Nah, no thanks, Mel. We’ve got our hands full with this war.” Seeing the surprised look on my face, he added, “C’mon, Mel, we’ve finally got things going our way. Let’s not screw it up.” Then he took a last bite of his sandwich and walked off without another word.
My next stop was Captain Rusk’s office. Everyone at IPI knew about his Vietnam combat record—nine MIGs killed, countless bombing raids, shot down twice by surface-to-air missiles and walked out of the jungle to safety both times—but they hadn’t heard it from him. He never talked about that war, was about the only one at IPI who never talked about the Indonesian War.
I knocked on his door gently, like I always did.
“Enter.”
“Hi, Captain.”
Captain Rusk was always calm and direct. Usually, he greeted me with a smile. Not today.
“I’m glad you came by, Melora. There’s something I’ve been wanting to talk about with you.”
“There’s something I’ve been wanting to talk over with you, too, Captain.”
“Do you mind if I go first?” He didn’t wait for me to answer. “I’m thinking that mess over at Ops shook you up. Am I correct?”
“Yeah, you could say that. I even thought about quitting.”
“Well then, may I say that it shook me up, too? That I also thought about resigning?”
I never expected I’d hear anything li
ke that from Captain Rusk. My face must have showed it.
“I see that surprises you,” he said.
I nodded.
Captain Rusk was one of the few people I’d ever met who always looked me in the eye when we talked. Now he looked down at his hands.
“Yes, I thought about resigning. Then I thought about all the terrible decisions I’ve seen human commanders make. All the stupid, vain, ambitious, corrupt, greedy, bigoted choices humans make every day and the countless lives lost because of them. Whatever mistakes RITA makes, at least she won’t make them because of prejudice or self-interest. So I didn’t quit, Melora. And neither should you. Quitting won’t help. We’ve got to stay, because we’re the ones who can make RITA better.”
“I don’t think RITA’s the problem, Captain. I think it’s the war.”
He looked up at me, startled, like it was the first time he’d really seen me since I walked into his office.
“Melora, if you don’t mind my saying so, you look like you’ve been burning the candle at both ends.”
“More like burning the midnight oil. I’ve been up reading about Vietnam.”
“Oh? Reading what?”
“Westmoreland, Giap, Karnow, McNamara. About the Tet Offensive and Huế.”
“That’s quite a list. What’ve you learned?”
“That our war looks a lot like that one.”
He could have said many things. What he did say shocked me.
“Does that make any difference?”
“Well yeah, of course it makes a difference. If we’ve gotten into another fucked-up war we need to get out of it before we kill more innocent people.” I’d never cursed in front of Captain Rusk before, and the instant the words came out of my mouth I knew I shouldn’t have done it then. But Captain Rusk didn’t look angry, he looked icy calm. Which was worse.
