“But the service is over.”
“Not exactly, Maria.” Jane took her arm. “Let’s step outside, shall we?” On their way to the exit, Maria glimpsed Terry Peters speaking into a handheld radio.
Thirty seconds later the screech of low-level jets echoed off the surrounding buildings. “There!” somebody shouted, pointing to the south. Other witnesses followed the gesture and clapped or cheered—or merely shielded their eyes against the glare.
With the effortless grace of jet-propelled flight, the finger-four Skyhawk formation glided eight hundred feet overhead. In unison, they dropped their tailhooks in salute.
“It’s illegal as hell,” exclaimed Carol Delight. “How’d you swing that?”
Zack whispered in her ear. “Don’t ask, don’t tell!”
Maria leaned against Jane Peters, one hand to her lips and the other dabbing at her eyes. Jane hugged her close. “That’s Liz, Maria. With Eric and Rob and Tim.”
From eight hundred feet over downtown Mesa, Arizona, Scooter Vespa added power and abruptly pulled up from the number one position while the others continued straight ahead. The vacant space—the missing man—was obvious to everyone on the ground.
As she laid the stick to starboard, inducing a series of vertical aileron rolls into a cloudless blue sky, Liz Vespa made the call to Hook Peters.
“Wizard Flight, off and out.” She paused. “Break-break. Scooter Flight, returning to base.”
BARRETT TILLMAN is the author of four novels, including Hellcats, which was nominated for the Military Novel of the Year in 1996, twenty nonfiction historical and biographical books, and more than four hundred military and aviation articles in American, European, and Pacific Rim publications. He received his bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Oregon in 1971, and spent the next decade writing freelance articles. He later worked with the Champlin Museum Press and as the managing editor of The Hook magazine. In 1989 he returned to freelance writing, and has been at it ever since. His military nonfiction has been critically lauded, and garnered him several awards, including the U.S. Air Force’s Historical Foundation Award, the Nautical & Oceanographic Society’s Outstanding Biography Award, and the Arthur Radford Award for Naval History and Literature. He is also an honorary member of the Navy fighter squadrons VF-111 and VA-35. He lives and works in Mesa, Arizona.
THERE IS NO WAR IN MELNICA
BY RALPH PETERS
A workman tossed him a skull.
Green had played football at West Point and should have made an easy catch. But the gesture was unexpected. He got a couple of fingers on the dirty bone, not enough to grip. The skull dropped on a flat rock and rolled into the dirt. Undamaged. Skulls are hard.
The excavating crew laughed and bantered in their own language. Green was supposed to understand, but the dialect was too thick. He smiled, unsure.
“Assholes,” Sergeant Crawley said. He canted his head toward the valley. “More company coming, sir.”
Green looked down through the trees. Autumn had chewed off most of the leaves on the mountainside, but he still heard the vehicle before he saw it. The putter and choke was a leftover sound of Socialism, from the days when nothing quite worked. Now freedom had come, and some things did not work at all.
A small, light-blue truck with a flat bed bounced up the track that led toward the mass grave. It would have to stop down below, where Green and his NCO had left the embassy’s armored Jeep Cherokee. Then the visitors would need five minutes to climb to the massacre site. Unless they were drunk. It was afternoon, and the drinking started early, and the men who drank carried guns. If the visitors were drunk, their climb would take longer.
Green picked up the skull and looked at it. He felt things he could not put into words. Except for the anger and disgust. He could express that. “Fuckers,” he said to himself. Then he climbed down into the ravine where the victims had been shot and lightly buried.
His orders were to observe, not to interfere. The embassy had gotten the report the day before. Yet another massacre site, this time in the mountains down south, outside the village of Melnica. The defense attaché, a small, brave man who did not look like a soldier and therefore had not been selected for promotion, had told Green:
“Take Crawley down there for a couple of days and have a look. Get plenty of Kodak moments and GPS the site. Joe Friday them when they give you the song and dance about NATO intervention and American neglect.”
Lieutenant Colonel Andretti had been passed over for promotion and was slated to retire, but the Army had asked him to extend his tour as attaché because the system that was forcing him out could find no replacement with his skills. Balkan expertise had long been a careerkiller, and now the military was scrambling. Andretti did what was asked of him, with his daughters in high school back in Springfield and their mother remarried. The dark circles under Andretti’s eyes reached halfway to his knees. He had been in-country for five years, and none of those years had been good ones.
“And Jeff,” the attaché had said as Green was leaving the office, “the cease-fire’s holding in that sector. There’s no war in Melnica at the moment. Don’t you and your cowboy sidekick go starting one, all right?” But Andretti was smiling, kidding. “Take care of yourself.”
Green slipped on a clot of leaves, almost dropping the skull again. He resurrected himself and spanked the dirt from his jeans with his free hand. Avoiding the exposed rib cages and hip bones, the femurs and decayed rags of clothing that had emerged from the pit, he made his way toward the foreman of the dig.
The foreman was the only man in uniform, if you called a mismatched collection of military scraps a uniform. He wore an unzipped camouflage-pattern jacket and a gray cap that reminded Green of the German mountain troops he had gotten to know back in his Garmisch days. But the resemblance stopped there. This man was unshaven, despite his captain’s insignia, and he carried two automatic pistols on a web belt cinched into his big belly. The calluses on his hands would have stopped a knife. Even his eyes seemed shabby.
The captain saluted Green, despite the American’s jeans and Gore-Tex jacket. Green had been open about his rank and purpose. He saluted back, although he would have preferred not to.
He had been trained in Russian, back when the Russians still mattered, and the local language—spoken by all sides in the fighting—was related. He could get through the basics, but could not conduct a geopolitical discussion of any nuance. Two months in-country had not been enough time to gain fluency, but Green understood more than he could form into words of his own.
“Major Green,” the captain said in mashed English. “Very bad things those people do. You see?” He reached down and picked up a faded rip of fabric. Once, it had been red. “You see?” he repeated, breath steaming in the cold. “Woman’s dress. No man’s clothes. Dress of woman. Who kills woman, child? Bad, bad.”
Green nodded. It was very bad. He offered the captain the skull.
The shorter man seized it and tossed it in his hands. “Maybe woman. Maybe very pretty.” He held up the skull. “Not pretty now.” Suddenly, his expression blackened. He tossed the skull onto a lattice of bones. “Why America stays away? Those people … they kill the little babies. Why America stays away?”
“I’ll report what I’ve seen to the embassy.”
“The American Army must come,” the captain said in his own language. “With American airplanes. Or there is no justice.”
“Listen …” Green struggled for words in a language he found as jagged and difficult as the mountains surrounding him, “ … you need to be careful … how you dig up the bodies. You’ll destroy …” He struggled to remember the word for evidence.
The captain snorted. “Look. You see? Everything is there. How many bodies? I count skulls, I know how many. How many those people have killed of my people. That is all I must know.”
Green rearranged what he wanted to say into words he could reach. “All this … should be done scientifically.
”
The shorter man had a lunch of onions on his breath. The workers had sat around the edge of the pit, unbothered, as they ate.
“I fuck science in the ass,” the captain said. “Bullets. No science.”
Green turned away and took more photographs. The war, in a lull for several months, had left many massacres in its wake. Some sites contained a single family, others an entire village. Some graves held only male bodies, while others had seen equal-opportunity killings. Green had visited two other locations, but the digging had been finished days before he arrived. He had expected freshly uncovered bodies to stink and he had braced himself for it. But the corpses had been in the earth long enough to lose all of their liquid and most of the flesh, and the only smell was of the disturbed earth.
“Call me Frankie,” the man from the blue truck said in English. He had introduced himself as Franjo Sostik, late of Milwaukee and now the proprietor of an inn down in the village of Melnica. “No bedbugs or shit like that,” he told Green and Crawley.
Frankie had the kind of looks that draw women’s eyes, but he was reaching the age when he would no longer be able to convince women he was young. He wore a pullover with the sleeves crushed up above the elbows. His forearms were thick. Black hair grew down onto the back of his hands.
He gestured at the mass grave.
“Can you believe this?” he asked, talking mostly to Green, the officer, but including Crawley with a glance now and then. “Look at this. Like the fucking Middle Ages or something. Is this nuts, or what? I got to ask myself why I came back here.”
“Why did you?” Green asked.
Frankie lifted his shoulders and held out his hands, palms up, weighing the air. Black birds settled on the branches above the dead.
“What the fuck you going to do?” Frankie said. “I got relatives, family. They need me. But I don’t have to like it. No way, man, am I going to buy into this shit. When the war started, I said, ‘To hell with that shit. Frankie-boy’s a lover not a fighter.’” He made a spitting gesture, but his lips were dry. “Back in the States? I had me this woman, you know? Drop-dead gorgeous, man. We’re talking serious, high-energy pussy. And clean about herself. Not like the barnyard animals around here.” He raised a fist, protesting the fate that had brought him back to this place. “Christ, I love America. The States are my real home now. But what are you going to do? A man’s got to look out for his family.”
“You served, though, right?” Sergeant Crawley asked. “In the war?” The NCO’s voice remained casual, as if he hardly cared about the answer.
Frankie shook his head in disgust. “Naw. Not really. Not my style, man. I mean, what is this about, huh? Let those people stay on their side, I’ll stay on mine. Live and let live, you know? I mean … I carried a gun and all that shit. Kind of like National Guard stuff. Weekend warrior. But I was never in any real fighting. Melnica lucked out.”
Green looked down at the tangle of bones, at the workmen with their spades.
“Who are they?”
“Local guys. With nothing better to do.”
“I mean the bodies.”
Frankie shrugged. “Makes you want to puke, don’t it? I mean, who needs to kill women and children?” He nodded toward the top of the mountain. The new border lay on the other side of the ridge, in deep forest. “We might be stupid peasants. But those people are goddamned animals. Fucking sickos.”
“But the bodies … aren’t from Melnica?”
Frankie repeated the shrug. It was a gesture that seemed to refresh him, get him going. “Who knows? Maybe some of them. People disappeared. Drive down the road, never come back. Go up in the fields after the cows, never come back. We lost some. I lost family members myself. But I don’t want to make this a personal hate thing. The truth is those people could have been marched up here from anyplace in the valley. They’re ours, that’s all I know. From our valley. Our people didn’t do this shit.”
The valley. When the Cherokee came down the pass, with SFC Crawley at the wheel, the panorama had been pure tourist brochure: the river reflecting the sun, and the low fields, the slopes open for pasture below an uneven treeline and the leaves falling up above. Tan houses clustered in the villages, while here and there a farmhouse with a tiled roof stood alone. It reminded Green of Italy, where he had taken a girlfriend when he was stationed in Germany.
Then you reached the valley floor and saw the shell holes in the roofs and the burn scars, the windows shot out and the walls pocked by heavy-caliber rounds. Craters pitted the road and half the fields had gone to bracken. Ranks of stumps told where apple and plum orchards had been cut down, for spite, during a slow retreat. Bitterness seemed to have soaked down into the earth, it pierced the air like rot. In the towns, which had changed hands several times, the Catholic and Orthodox churches had been desecrated in turn. There had been few Muslims in the valley and their small mosques were gone without a trace. The Muslims were the Washington Redskins of the Balkan league.
Green already had a catalog of destruction in his head from other observer missions, but the fighting had been particularly cruel here. The combatants had tried to make the towns of their enemies uninhabitable. When they had been in a hurry, they had only destroyed the clinics, schools, and municipal buildings. When time permitted, they wrecked the houses, too, and blew in the water pipes in the towns.
Green had been a mech infantry company commander in Desert Storm, but no one in his entire brigade fired a round in combat. They just steered their Bradleys across the barren landscape, and the troops joked about the most expensive driver’s training exercise in the world. The worst thing about Green’s experience of war had been the need to wear MOPP gear in the desert heat. But he was a dutiful soldier, ambitious within the bounds of honor, and he had studied war since his plebe year at the Point. He wanted to understand, and he took what books could give. But nothing he had read had spoken of this kind of hatred.
There was an upside, though: the way the people refused to quit. The towns and villages were struggling back to life, with new glass in many of the windows, shops reopening, and posters for the coming election. No one wanted the war to reignite, though everyone said it would.
The Jeep passed a white UN vehicle, its occupants straining not to see anything.
Then, toward the end of the valley, up a mountain road with defensible approaches, the village of Melnica sat untouched, a museum display of a destroyed world. The war had taught the people to pay attention to little details, and they figured out from the license plate and vehicle make that Americans had come to visit. Everyone had been anxious to offer directions to the site of the mass grave, with the men interrupting one another and the children blooming from sullenness to giggles and greed. It had been difficult keeping volunteer guides out of the Jeep.
“Do they listen to you?” Green asked Frankie. The captain down in the ravine had given the innkeeper a vague salute, maybe just a wave, when he showed up.
Frankie spit. “They’re dumb shits. Uneducated. Dumb-dick farmers, you know? They don’t listen to anybody. But they figure I’m smart because I been to America. I mean, they’re good people. Just kind of stupid.” He gestured toward the riddle of bones. “They don’t deserve this shit. Nobody deserves this.” He nodded across the mountain again. “Those people … they’re not Europeans. They’re fucking animals.”
“You should tell them to be more careful,” Green said as a worker swung a pickax in the pit. “They’re destroying the forensic evidence.”
Frankie looked at him as he might have looked at a child. “They don’t want evidence, man. They want revenge.”
“Well, if they expect anybody to come to their aid, evidence matters.”
Frankie smiled. “Oh, come on. It’s like I tell them. When they start all that shit about America riding to the rescue. I tell them, ‘Hey, America doesn’t even know you exist. We might as well be in goddamned China or on the moon or something. Americans … they live good. They don’t need o
ur shit. America got no interest in this.’”
Green had not been prepared for the display at his feet, for the rawness of it, and he was trying to keep his temper with the world. How could you prepare yourself for this? It was important not to show any emotion, he knew that. But every word he said felt phony and hollow and useless to him. He believed in justice, and he believed in the goodness of his country, and he only wanted to know who was right and wrong. But he had never been anyplace where right and wrong were so hard to figure out.
He wanted to do something. But he did not know what to do.
“Well, if they want anybody to get interested,” Green said, gone peevish, “it’s going to take evidence. Who killed who. When. Whose troops were in control at the time of the massacre. Ages and sex of victims. Proof that they were noncombatants. They need to wait until people get down here from the capital, people who know what they’re doing.”
Frankie looked at him with an expression close to wonder. “Major … Melnica lucked out, you know? Couple mortar rounds. No big deal. But we lost people. In ones and twos, like I told you. Some old farmer. A girl with no sense. Everybody got a missing brother or cousin or something.”
“All the more reason they should be careful. So they can identify—”
Frankie closed a hand over Green’s forearm. He had a powerful grip. “You don’t understand, man. These are mountain people. They don’t want … like for their daughter or something to become some kind of medical exhibit. The truth is … they don’t want to know exactly who’s in the grave. Not names and shit like that. They’ve had enough bad news.”
Sergeant Crawley, who had spent his career in Special Forces and had over a year in-country, said softly, “Different world, sir.”
Green understood that the NCO was telling him to back off and let it go.
A whistling noise came down the mountainside: wind sweeping along like a tide. The pitch rose and then, suddenly, cold air flooded through the trees and poured over the grave site. The captain down in the trench clutched his hat. The earth smell rose, and leaves tore away from their branches. The workmen paused and looked at the sky.
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