Orphanage

by Robert Buettner

  I envisioned Metzger lounging poolside in trunks and a star pilot’s scarf while twin blondes—no, one blonde, one brunette—ministered to his blistered trigger finger, suffered while he zoomed through outer space, saving millions of lives weekly. Here at Indiantown Gap, my idea of living large was seconds on something the army called apple cobbler.

  It was what you’d call a nice day since the war started. The haze was almost bright, and it was a windless thirty degrees or so. Then something in the air went funny.

  Of course, it was overpressure. As everybody knows now, a Projectile is so big that it piles air in front of it when it plows into the atmosphere at thirty thousand miles per hour.

  Walter spun his head toward me, brow knit beneath his Kevlar pot. “Do you feel—”

  We saw it before we heard it. I never want to again.

  Sun-bright light boiled in a streak that seemed as wide as the sky and a hundred feet above us. It was actually twenty miles up. The noise and shock wave as it roared by knocked us all flat. Then the impact-flash bloom blinded me like an old film-camera flashbulb, even half a state away.

  The ground rolled underneath us, like a bedsheet snapped over a mattress, then we all tumbled and fell back onto the road. It knocked the wind out of me, and I saw stars.

  Somebody said, “Holy shit!”

  Then the blast wind swept across us, whipping house-tall, bare trees like goldenrod straw in a breeze.

  For too long nobody moved, just lay and breathed.

  Ord was first up. It was the first time I’d seen him even faintly impressed. His eyes seemed wide, and he stood close enough that I heard him whisper, “Holy Mother of God!”

  He dusted his uniform off, straightened his hat, and called out, “On your feet! Third Platoon, sound off!”

  Everybody was up, rattling off names by squad. Nobody admitted being hurt. He had us marching before we could think.

  We all stared west, toward the impact flash.

  Somebody whispered, “What’s over there?”

  “Pittsburgh. Was.”

  I teared up, and my throat swelled.

  I’d have thought Ord would call off training. We had just witnessed people die. Stunningly. Horribly. Massively. But he kept marching like something else mattered. Nobody sang the rest of the way to the range.

  The M-16 is no marksman’s weapon. It’s short-barreled. The bullet wobbles, the better to tear through flesh once it strikes. The bullet is small, so a GI can carry more ammunition. But those characteristics reduce accuracy. At ranges beyond 300 meters without telescopic sights you might as well throw rocks at the target. Which didn’t stop the army in its wisdom from setting the farthest rank of range targets at Indiantown Gap out at 460 meters.

  Lorenzen stood chest deep in one of a firing-line row of foxholes, popping away with his ’16.1 sat cross-legged on the ground beside him, serving as his “coach” and marking his scorecard. The shooter-coach pairing was repeated up and down the line. I scored using an antique lead pencil and sniffed drifting cordite.

  “Did I hit that last one, Jason?”

  How the hell did I know? The close-in targets were easy to shoot, but I couldn’t even see the far row through the dust-dimmed twilight. I checked off Walter’s card. “You nailed that mother!”

  “Wow! A perfect score!”

  Nobody talked about it, but if an infantryman scored less than expert, his coach’s pencil failed, not his marksmanship.

  Everybody switched places, me and the other coaches now hunkered in the foxholes, plinking away. I whacked the close-in targets, then sighted on the far row.

  Walter squinted downrange. “I think you missed that one Jason.”

  “Nah.”

  Walter shook his head. “Maybe you need to bear down more. Like I did.”

  I exhaled. “Christ, Walter! Just mark them hits!”

  He shook his head again. His helmet misfit him so his head moved while his pot sat still. “That would be cheating.”

  Ord strolled by behind us. I shut up and shot.

  Later the drills sat around a wood outdoor table adding scorecards while the rest of us eyed three deuce-and-a-halfs parked behind them. The old, internal-combustion-engine kind that ran on diesel fuel. As heavy as they were, battery power wasn’t an option. One truck had litters and a medic aboard. A makeshift ambulance. Anytime we practiced live fire the army made sure we had plenty of Band-Aids close by.

  The sight moved me near tears. Not with emotion at the army’s concern for our well-being, but at the realization that there were three trucks. Four platoons. Lowest-scoring platoon was going to walk six miles home with full pack.

  Ord stood and read from a Chipboard. “In first place, Second Platoon.”

  Those dicks whooped and piled into a truck.

  Ord watched them go, then said, “First Platoon also achieved perfect scores across the board. Most impressive!”

  Everybody perfect? I got a sick feeling. Maybe the other drills had tipped their platoons off about the creative scoring system. Ord had left us to figure it out for ourselves, and at least Walter hadn’t. We were screwed.

  Fifteen minutes later Third Platoon trudged toward the post, six miles away. Ahead of us the last truck disappeared, leaving us to eat Fourth Platoon’s dust. At least we didn’t have to listen to them hoot and make sucking sounds at us over the tailgate anymore.

  “Nice work, Wander! The only guy in the company who scored less than perfect!”

  If I said a word about how it happened, Third Platoon would kill Walter. Even the stress of field-stripping his rifle made his hands shake. If the other guys crapped on him for this, he’d crumble. They already hated my guts. I could take it.

  But still, as I marched alongside Walter, the injustice of it all made my hand quiver as it clutched my rifle sling.

  “Jeez, Jason. If you’d asked me I would have helped you practice. I bet you could learn to shoot just as good as me.”

  I don’t know what happened. Maybe it was Pittsburgh. Maybe it was that Ord and this idiotic, insensitive army kept us playing target practice when all those people had died. I just grabbed Walter by his scrawny fucking neck and choked him. His helmet popped off and rocked on the ground.

  “You ignorant, four-eyed toad! Get a clue!” We fell and rolled in the road while the rest of the platoon gaped.

  “At ease!”

  My fist froze midway to Walter’s nose. Ord’s voice could stop a falling piano thirty stories up. He dragged us to our feet by our field-jacket collars.

  A blood string trailed from Walter’s left nostril. He peered at me through cracked glasses, with hurt-puppy eyes.

  Ord frowned at me. “Wander, when will you learn that you will all get through this together or you will all fail separately?”

  Me? I was Mr. Teamwork here. These other assholes were the problem.

  Ord moved the platoon out, and as we marched, he walked alongside me, and said, “Wander, after you have cleaned your weapon and returned it to the armorer and attended to tomorrow’s uniform requirements and your policing duties you will report to my office.”

  “Yes, Drill Sergeant.” My heart sank. But at least the rest of the platoon wasn’t getting screwed for my fuck-up.

  “Oh. That’s right. I should be sure you get back early enough to get all that done, Wander.”

  Forty-nine pairs of boots crunched Pennsylvania’s frozen earth. What could be worse than six more miles of this drudgery with full pack?

  “Platoon! Port arms.”

  My heart shot into my throat. When you walk with a rifle, you carry it over your shoulder. You carry it across your body, at port arms, when you double-time.

  Ord was going to run us all six miles back to camp. As a favor to me.

  I should change my name from Mr. Teamwork to Mr. Popularity. Nobody had breath to curse me, so it was a quiet six miles.

  Lights were out when I stepped up to the wedge of light that spilled from Ord’s open office door. He sat behind
a gray metal desk, hat alongside him. How his uniform looked morning-fresh off the hanger at 2200 hours I couldn’t fathom. I rapped on the doorjamb.

  He didn’t look up. “Come! And close the door behind you.”

  Oboy. I stepped in front of the desk and froze at attention. “Trainee Wander reports, Drill Sergeant.”

  He was reading an old, paper greeting card. He slipped it and its envelope under his hat brim while I swallowed, blinked, and breathed.

  I survived many a pop quiz by reading somebody else’s paper upside down. Ord’s card read “Happy Birthday, Son.”

  The envelope’s return address was Pittsburgh.

  My God. Ord had just lost his mother. When I lost Mom I beat the crap out of everyone who crossed my path. And here I stood in front of Ord. I clenched my jaw and braced for the worst.

  Finally, Ord swallowed, then looked up. “Why are you here, Wander?”

  Was this a trick question? “Because the drill sergeant told me to be.”

  “I mean in the army.”

  Because if I wasn’t here, Judge March would lock me up with the scum of the Earth until I was so old I creaked. “I want to be Infantry because Infantry leads the way, Drill Sergeant!”

  “I don’t mean the bullshit answer. I know how you came to enlist. I know about your mother. And I am genuinely sorry.” His eyes were soft, almost liquid.

  I wanted to tell him I knew. Knew what he had lost. Knew how he had suffered. But soldiers don’t do that. I thought.

  “I don’t know, then.”

  “Son.”

  Now there was a word I thought was outside Ord’s vocabulary, until now.

  He rocked back in his chair. “I’m not sure you belong here. This really is about working together, eye-rolling cynicism to the contrary.”

  “Together? Those other assholes cheated at the range!”

  He nodded. “Lorenzen scored you honestly at seventy-eight of eighty. I doubt anyone else in the company really broke sixty. I’ve seen lots of perfect scores, but only two trainees have actually hit seventy-eight targets in the last ten years.”

  My jaw dropped. I should have realized that Ord knew about the scoring. Ord knew everything. And my chest swelled a little about the seventy-eight.

  “Wander, your Mil-SAT math score was average, but your verbal pulled it up so your overall score is higher than Captain Jacowicz’s was. And he’s a West Pointer! Infantry seems like a lowest-common-denominator exercise to a bright guy like you, doesn’t it?”

  Another underachiever lecture. I sighed loud enough that Ord heard.

  “Mock foot-soldiering if you choose. But it’s really about the toughest thing men or women can discipline themselves to do.”

  I swallowed. I wasn’t mocking. I understood the discipline that let Ord carry out ordered training even though he had just watched his mother die.

  It wasn’t disrespect, but wonder, that made me roll my eyes.

  But Ord didn’t know I knew, didn’t know I understood. Whatever softness had been in his eyes disappeared. “The world’s dying, Wander. I don’t know whether the Infantry is destined to reverse that. But I do know that it is my job to assure that every infantryman I train is ready if destiny calls. An infantryman who’s not part of the team isn’t just a pain in the ass. He’s dangerous to himself and to other soldiers. Would you like to quit?”

  Like to? I’d love to. But I couldn’t, or I’d go to prison. I shook my head.

  He sighed. “I can’t order you to quit. But I can make sure you consider carefully how badly you wish to stay.”

  I swallowed. I didn’t wish to stay.

  He bent, reached into a desk drawer, and came up with a plastic bag. From it he drew a purple, pencil-size object and displayed it between thumb and forefinger. A manual toothbrush strung on a cord loop. “Wander, do you know upon what you gaze?”

  I squinted. “Toothbrush?” It was stained in that way that Mom would say you didn’t know where it had been.

  “Toothbrush?” He exploded.

  I stiffened. “Toothbrush, Drill Sergeant!”

  He smiled and sauntered around his desk to stand in front of me. “No. No, no, no. Trainee Wander, you gaze upon the Third Platoon Memorial Nocturnal Hygiene Implement”

  “Silly me.” Had I lost my mind?

  Ord just kept smiling. He held his hands apart so the brush dangled between them on the spread string loop. “Once every few training cycles, a very special trainee earns this.” He lifted his hands above my head and lowered the little necklace onto my shoulders. The brush passed my nose. Now I knew exactly where it had been.

  It was midnight when I crabbed sideways across the latrine floor to the third of six toilets and continued to scrub and swear. Ord said it was going to be a nightly exercise.

  He said I had to wear the brash at all times. He said the reason was to give me time to think about my future.

  Right. Usually, if you weren’t on KP or CQ or taking your hour wandering the barracks as fire guard, you got to sleep. Ord was royally fucking me over to make me quit.

  Well, fuck him instead. I scrubbed harder.

  If fifty guys in an open platoon bay was a bit un-private, the latrine was a living, breathing rape of the Fourth Amendment. The toilets sat in an open line facing the sink row six feet away. You crapped counting the hairs on somebody else’s bare butt while he shaved. The showers were at the end of the room, just as open.

  If they ran a prison like that, we’d all get released on grounds it was cruel and unusual punishment.

  The first few weeks people were so intimidated that they got up in the middle of the night to crap in relative privacy. Gradually most of us got desensitized. Not everybody, though.

  “I’m sorry you have to do that, Jason.”

  I looked up. Walter shivered in his field jacket, bare, pale legs spindling below the hem. They ended in sock-blobbed feet, so he seemed to wobble on a pair of Q-tips.

  “You here to crap or talk?”

  “Do I really look like a toad, Jason?”

  “No.” Of course he did. I stared at the floor so he couldn’t see me smile.

  He smiled, then frowned. “It should be me down there scrubbing. I’m the platoon’s biggest fuck-up.”

  “No.” Of course he was. “The army’s just not for you.”

  “It has to be.”

  I scuttled sideways and massaged the next ivory throne. “Why?”

  “You remember I said my grandpa won the Medal of Honor? He saved a man’s life. Everybody in my family served. My mother won’t be proud of me unless I win a medal.”

  “That’s crap, Walter. People get medals when things go bad. Medals are just ways that armies hide mistakes. Nobody in my family ever served. Now they can’t” Tears blurred my vision, and I scrubbed harder. Somebody’s army killed Mom, for the crime of taking a trip to Indianapolis. It killed everyone in Pittsburgh. It even killed Ord’s mother. “It never ends. It’s wrong. What’s the point, anyway?”

  “My grandpa was a hundred when he died. He served in World War n. He said the point was to make it stop.”

  He rocked from sock to sock, and his intestines gurgled. Walter needed his privacy. Soon. But he was still too shy to ask even me for it. I stood and arched my back. “I need a break. I’m going outside a minute.”

  I stepped out into the cold dark and looked up. Beyond the dust, constellations still shone. Somewhere up there star pilots like Metzger waged the battle to save the human race. I’d watched a million people in Pittsburgh die today. Did I really want to be just a smart-ass scrubbing toilets with a toothbrush?

  I didn’t know who or what took Mom and my life away. I didn’t really want revenge because that wouldn’t bring my old life back. But if I could help to make it stop, that would be worth everything.

  Walter stuck his relieved head out the door into the cold and smiled. “Thanks, Jason. You’re okay.”

  My breath curled out into the dark. No, I wasn’t. But I could be.
r />   Chapter Seven

  The next morning we drew our M-16s from the armorer and went straight to hell.

  Not just Third Platoon, but the whole eight-hundred-man training battalion mounted an olive drab convoy of antique deuce-and-a-halfs, belching diesel soot in volumes unseen since cars went electric years ago. We rolled west toward Pittsburgh’s ruins beneath a drifting grit plume that a day before had been strip malls and skyscrapers and children. Exhaust soot seemed irrelevant.

  We rocked and shivered on facing benches under our truck’s canvas top.

  Somebody asked, “Why’d we draw weapons? Did the fuckin‘ aliens land this time?”

  “Looters.”

  “Fuck! I ain’t shootin‘ no brothers.”

  “Brothers all gone, hombre! So’s the loot.”

  “We’re gonna feed fuckin‘ civilians.”

  Troop-truck discourse isn’t Question Time at the House of Lords.

  Rural Pennsylvania unreeled beyond the open tailgate. At first, we saw the occasional cow trying to graze a frozen field. Closer to Pittsburgh the cows stumbled, deaf and disoriented even a day later from blast-wave overpressure.

  The trucks slowed to a crawl in the gloom as we closed on the city. Civilians lined the roads, headed away from the grit plume. Cars were outbound, but also well-dressed people pushed shopping carts piled with plastic trash bags. Parents walked, pulling kids in coaster wagons and yard carts.

  Some kids waved. Their parents shielded their eyes against our convoy’s headlights and stared at us like we were insane. Or they were.

  It was dark by the time we got close enough to smell it

  Burned buildings and flesh. “Dark” is inaccurate. Pittsburgh still burned, and red glow reflected from low clouds lit our faces. We dismounted the tracks, grateful for the leg stretch, and formed up.

  The residential streets around us were a flat, tract-house neighborhood of undamaged two-story homes. They were old enough that the now-dead trees in the yards had grown to be as big around as my leg. Soot piled inches deep on everything and kept falling.

  Captain Jacowicz addressed the company. Drifted soot grayed his hair and made him cough behind his government-issue paper mask.