by Paula Guran
“It was an accident,” he said softly.
“But what happened?” Em said, getting tired of asking, not knowing what else to do. He had six women staring him down now, and a handful of men looking back and forth between them and him. Probably wondering who was going to start crying first.
“Why don’t you just tell her, Milliken,” Jim said, frowning.
“Please, no one will tell me—”
“It was an accident!” His face was flushed; he ran a shaking hand over his hair. “It was just a game, you know? I only buzzed her a couple of times. I thought it’d be funny—it was supposed to be funny. You know, get close, scare her a little. But—it was an accident.”
He probably had repeated it to himself so often, he believed it. But when he spoke it out loud, he couldn’t gloss the crime of it: he’d broken regs, buzzed Mary in the air, got closer than the regulation five hundred feet, thought he could handle the stunt—and he couldn’t. He’d hit her instead, crunched her wing. She’d lost control, plowed into the earth. Em could suddenly picture it so clearly. The lurch as the other plane hit Mary, the dive as she went out of control. She’d have looked out the canopy to see the gash in her wing, looked the other way to see the ground coming up fast. She’d have hauled on the stick, trying to land nose up, knowing it wasn’t going to work because she was going too fast, so she turned off the engine, just in case, and hadn’t she always wanted to go faster—
You tried to be respectful, to be a good girl. You bought war bonds and listened to the latest news on the radio. You prayed for the boys overseas, and most of all you didn’t rock the boat, because there were so many other things to worry about, from getting a gallon of rationed gas for your car to whether your husband was going to come home in one piece.
They were a bunch of Americans doing their part. She tried to let it go. Let the anger drain away. Didn’t work. The war had receded in Em’s mind to a small noise in the background. She had this one battle to face.
With Burnett in charge, nothing would happen to Milliken. The colonel had hushed it up good and tight because he didn’t want a more involved investigation, he didn’t want the lack of discipline among his male flyers to come out. Milliken wouldn’t be court-martialed and grounded, because trained pilots were too valuable. Em couldn’t do anything more than stand here and stare him down. How could she make that be enough?
“Mary Keene was my friend,” she said softly.
Milliken said, his voice a breath, “It was an accident. I didn’t mean to hit her. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, all right?”
Silence cut like a blade. None of the guys would look at her.
Em turned and walked out, flanked by the other WASP.
Outside, the sun had set, but she could still hear airplane engines soaring over the airfield, taking off and landing, changing pitch as they roared overhead. The air smelled of fuel, and the field was lit up like stars fallen to earth. The sun would shine again tomorrow no matter what happened, and nothing had changed. She couldn’t tell if she’d won. She slumped against the wall, slid to the ground, put her face to her knees and her arms over her head, and cried. The others gathered around her, rested hands on her shoulders, her arms. Didn’t say a word, didn’t make a big production.
Just waited until she’d cried herself out. Then Lillian and Betsy hooked their arms in hers and pulled her back to the barracks, where one of the girls had stashed a bottle of whiskey.
The last time Em saw Mary was four days before she died.
Em reached the barracks after coming off the flight line to see Mary sitting on the front steps with her legs stretched out in front of her, smoking a cigarette and staring into space. Em approached slowly and sat beside her. “What’s gotten into you?”
Mary donned a slow, sly smile. “It didn’t happen the way I thought it would, the way I planned it.”
“What didn’t?”
She tipped her head back so her honey brown curls fell behind her and her tanned face looked into the sky. “I was supposed to step out of my airplane, chin up and beautiful, shaking my hair out after I took off my cap, and my handsome young officer would be standing there, stunned out of his wits. That didn’t happen.”
Em was grinning. This ought to be good. “So what did happen?”
“I’d just climbed out of my Valiant and I wanted to check the landing gear because it was feeling kind of wobbly when I landed. So there I was, bent over when I heard some guy say, ‘Hey, buddy, can you tell me where to find ops?’ I just about shot out of my boots. I stood up and look at him, and his eyes popped. And I swear to you he looked like Clark Gable. Not just like, but close. And I blushed red because the first thing he saw of me was my . . . my fanny stuck up in the air! We must have stood there staring at each other in shock for five minutes. Then we laughed.”
Now Em was laughing, and Mary joined in, until they were leaning together, shoulder to shoulder.
“So, what,” Em said. “It’s true love?”
“I don’t know. He’s nice. He’s a captain in from Long Beach. He’s taking me out for drinks later.”
“You are going to have the best stories when this is all over,” Em said.
Mary turned quiet, thoughtful. “Can I tell you a secret? Part of me doesn’t want the war to end. I don’t want this to end. I just want to keep flying and carrying on like this forever. They won’t let us keep flying when the boys come home. Then I’ll have to go back home, put on white gloves and a string of pearls and start acting respectable.” She shook her head. “I don’t really mean that, about the war. It’s got to end sometime, right?”
“I hope so,” Em said softly. Pearl Harbor had been almost exactly two years ago, and it was hard to see an end to it all.
“Sometimes I wish my crazy barnstormer uncle hadn’t ever taken me flying, then I wouldn’t feel like this. Oh, my dad was so mad, you should have seen it. But once I’d flown I wasn’t ever going to go back. I’m not ever going to quit, Em.”
“I know.” They sat on the stoop, watching and listening to planes come in over the field, until Mary went to get cleaned up for her date.
Em sat across from Colonel Roper’s desk and waited while he read her carefully typed report. He read it twice, straightened the pages, and set it aside. He folded his hands together and studied her.
“How are you doing?”
She paused a moment, thinking about it rather than giving the pat “just fine” response. Because it wasn’t true, and he wouldn’t believe her.
“Is it worth it, sir?” He tilted his head, questioning, and she tried to explain. “Are we really doing anything for the war? Are we going to look back and think she died for nothing?”
His gaze dropped to the desk while he gathered words. She waited for the expected platitudes, the gushing reassurances. They didn’t come.
“You want me to tell you Mary’s death meant something, that what she was doing was essential for the war, that her dying is going to help us win. I can’t do that.” He shook his head. Em almost wished he would sugarcoat it. She didn’t want to hear this. But she was also relieved that he was telling the truth. Maybe the bad-attitude flyboys were right, and the WASP were just a gimmick.
He continued. “You don’t build a war machine so that taking out one cog makes the whole thing fall apart. Maybe we’ll look back on this and decide we could have done it all without you. But, Emily—it would be a hell of a lot harder. We wouldn’t have the pilots we need, and we wouldn’t have the planes where we need them. And there’s a hell of a lot of war left to fight.”
She didn’t want to think about it. You could take all the numbers, all the people who’d died over the last few years and everything they’d died for, and the numbers on paper might add up, but you start putting names and stories to the list and it would never add up, never be worth it. She just wanted it to be over; she wanted Michael home.
Roper sorted through a stack of papers on the corner of his desk and found a page he was looking f
or. He made a show of studying it for a long moment, giving her time to draw her attention from the wall where she’d been staring blankly. Finally, she met his gaze across the desk.
“I have transfer orders here for you. If you want them.”
She shook her head, confused, wondering what she’d done wrong. Wondering if Burnett was having his revenge on her anyway, after all that had happened.
“Sir,” she said, confused. “But . . . where? Why?”
“Palm Springs,” he said, and her eyes grew wide, a spark in her heart lit, knowing what was at Palm Springs. “Pursuit School. If you’re interested.”
March 1944
Em settled in her seat and reached up to close the canopy overhead. This was a one-seater, compact, nestled into a narrow, streamlined fuselage. The old trainers were roomy by comparison. She felt cocooned in the seat, all her controls and instruments at hand.
She started the engine; it roared. She could barely hear herself call the tower. “This is P-51 21054 requesting clearance for takeoff.”
Her hands on the stick could feel this thing’s power running into her bones. She wasn’t going to have to push this plane off the ground. All she’d have to do was give it its head and let it go.
A voice buzzed in her ear. “P-51 21054, this is Tower, you are cleared for takeoff.”
This was a crouched tiger preparing to leap. A rocket ready to explode. The nose was higher than the tail; she couldn’t even see straight ahead—just straight up, past sleek silver into blue sky.
She eased the throttle forward, and the plane started moving. Then it really started moving. The tail lifted—she could see ahead of her now, to the end of the runaway. Her speed increased, and she watched the dials in front of her. At a hundred miles per hour, she pulled back on the stick, lifted, and left earth behind. Climbed fast, into clear blue sky, like a bullet, like a hawk. She glanced over her shoulder; the airstrip was already tiny.
Nothing but open sky ahead, and all the speed she could push out of this thing.
This was heaven.
“Luckiest girl in the world,” she murmured, thinking that Mary would have loved this.
The military definition of collateral damage—as it relates to target selection and prosecution—rests on intent; it is damage apart from that which is intended. There are many ways of inflicting collateral damage during war, and not all of the harm can be immediately determined. In Ken Liu’s story, Kyra is motivated to become a warrior in hopes of mitigating such damage; her weapons are algorithms.
In the Loop
Ken Liu
When Kyra was nine, her father turned into a monster.
It didn’t happen overnight. He went to work every morning, like always, and when he came in the door in the evening, Kyra would ask him to play catch with her. That used to be her favorite time of the day. But the yesses came less frequently, and then not at all.
He’d sit at the table and stare. She’d ask him questions and he wouldn’t answer. He used to always have a funny answer for everything, and she’d repeat his jokes to her friends and think he was the cleverest dad in the whole world.
She had loved those moments when he’d teach her how to swing a hammer properly, how to measure and saw and chisel. She would tell him that she wanted to be a builder when she grew up, and he’d nod and say that was a good idea. But he stopped taking her to his workshop in the shed to make things together, and there was no explanation.
Then he started going out in the evenings. At first, Mom would ask him when he’d be back. He’d look at her like she was a stranger before closing the door behind him. By the time he came home, Kyra and her brothers were already in bed, but she would hear shouts and sometimes things breaking.
Mom began to look at Dad like she was afraid of him, and Kyra tried to help with getting the boys to bed, to make her bed without being asked, to finish her dinner without complaint, to do everything perfectly, hoping that would make things better, back to the way they used to be. But Dad didn’t seem to pay any attention to her or her brothers.
Then, one day, he slammed Mom into the wall. Kyra stood there in the kitchen and felt the whole house shake. She didn’t know what to do. He turned around and saw Kyra, and his face scrunched up like he hated her, hated her mother, hated himself most of all. And he fled the house without saying another thing.
Mom packed a suitcase and took Kyra and her brothers to Grandma’s place that evening, and they stayed there for a month. Kyra thought about calling her father but she didn’t know what she would say. She tried to imagine herself asking the man on the other end of the line what have you done with Daddy?
A policeman came, looking for her mother. Kyra hid in the hall so she could hear what he was telling her. We don’t think it was a homicide. That was how she found out that her father had died. They moved back to the house, where there was a lot to do: folding up Dad’s uniforms for storage, packing up his regular clothes to give away, cleaning the house so it could be sold, getting ready to move away permanently. She caressed Dad’s medals and badges, shiny and neatly laid out in a box, and that was when she finally cried.
They found a piece of paper at the bottom of Dad’s dresser drawer.
“What is it?” she asked Mom.
Mom read it over. “It’s from your Dad’s commander, at the Army.” Her hands shook. “It shows how many people he had killed.”
She showed Kyra the number: one thousand two-hundred and fifty-one.
The number lingered in Kyra’s mind. As if that gave his life meaning. As if that defined him—and them.
Kyra walked quickly, pulling her coat tight against the late fall chill. It was her senior year in college, and on-campus recruiting was in full swing. Because Kyra’s school was old and full of red brick buildings named after families that had been wealthy and important even before the founding of this republic, its students were desirable to employers.
She was on her way back to her apartment from a party hosted by a small quantitative trading company in New York that was generating good buzz on campus. Companies in management consulting, financial services, and Silicon Valley had booked hotel rooms around the school and were hosting parties for prospective interviewees every night, and Kyra, as a comp sci major, found herself in high demand. This was the night when she would need to finalize her list of ranked preferences, and she had to strategize carefully to have a shot at getting one of the interview slots for the most coveted companies in the lottery.
“Excuse me,” a young man stepped in her way. “Would you sign this petition?”
She looked at the clipboard held in front of her. Stop the War.
Technically, America wasn’t at war. There had been no declaration of war by Congress, just the president exercising his office’s inherent authority. But maybe the war had never stopped. America left; America went back; America promised to leave again some time. A decade had passed; people kept on dying far away.
“I’m sorry,” Kyra said, not looking the boy in the eyes. “I can’t.”
“Are you for the war?” The boy’s voice was tired, the incredulity almost an act. He was there canvassing for signatures alone in the evening because no one cared. When so few Americans died, the “conflict” didn’t seem real.
How could she explain to him that she did not believe in the war, did not want to have anything to do with it, and yet, signing the petition the boy held would seem to her tantamount to a betrayal of the memory of her father, would seem a declaration that what he had done was wrong? She did not want him to be defined by the number on that piece of paper her mother kept hidden at the bottom of the box in the attic.
So all she said was, “I’m not into politics.”
Back in her apartment, Kyra took off her coat and flipped on the TV.
. . . the largest protest so far in front of the American Embassy. Protesters are demanding that the U.S. cease the drone strikes, which so far have caused more than three hundred deaths in the country this year, ma
ny of whom the protesters claim were innocent civilians. The U.S. Ambassador . . .
Kyra turned off the TV. Her mood had been ruined, and she could not focus on the task of ranking her interview preferences. Agitated, she tried to clean the apartment, scrubbing the sink vigorously to drive the images in her mind away.
As she had grown older, Kyra had read and seen every interview with other drone operators who suffered from PTSD. In the faces of those men, she had searched for traces of her father.
I sat in an air-conditioned office and controlled the drone with a joystick while watching on a monitor what the drone camera saw. If a man was suspected of being the enemy, I had to make a decision and pull the trigger and then zoom in and watch as the man’s body parts flew around the screen as the rest of him bled out, until his body cooled down and disappeared from the infrared camera.
Kyra turned on the faucet and held her hands under the hot water, as if she could wash off the memory of her father coming home every evening: silent, sullen, gradually turning into a stranger.
Every time, you wonder: Did I kill the right person? Was the sack on that man’s back filled with bombs or just some hunks of meat? Were those three men trying to set up an ambush or were they just tired and taking a break behind those rocks by the road? You kill a hundred people, a thousand people, and sometimes you find out afterwards that you were wrong, but not always.
“You were a hero,” Kyra said. She wiped her face with her wet hands. The water was hot against her face and she could pretend it was all just water.
No. You don’t understand. It’s different from shooting at someone when they’re also shooting at you, trying to kill you. You don’t feel brave pushing a button to kill people who are not in uniform, who look like they’re going for a visit with a friend, when you’re sitting thousands of miles away, watching them through a camera. It’s not like a video game. And yet it also is. You don’t feel like a hero.
