FUBAR: A Collection of War Stories

by Weston Ochse

  But Pearson’s attention was drawn from this to the walls of the massive room. In the fire’s glow, he made out pictures that had been drawn on the white-washed wood. Turning to take in the whole room, he realized that the entire wall had been drawn upon, a record of something both great and horrible.

  The cave-like paintings began to the right of the doorway from which the Colonel raved. Pearson followed them around, squinting through the shadows to make out what the Colonel had been doing. It didn’t take long to realize that this was the story of the man’s life. From the first drawing of a child, to a young boy with a baseball bat, to the young man carrying a rifle, it was clear that the Colonel had been chronicling his life.

  The drawings became better as Pearson progressed past a car accident, a burning cross, the lyrics to The Day the Music Died drawn in a spiral around a portrait of John Lennon, the legend unmistakable in his small round shades and Mona Lisa smile. Past the explosion of a space shuttle on takeoff, through the man’s life in the eighties, then nineties, only to be bookended by another space shuttle explosion, this one across the sky in comet trail scars. The figure of a young man pointing to the sky beside a taller fatherly figure was followed by the same tall figure weeping into his hands, colonel’s rank on the collar.

  Colonel Freed had wanted to be an astronaut. He must have known the people aboard the shuttle. They’d probably been his friends. He’d trained with them for three years, until he was boarded out because of some problems with a psych eval. Not enough to end a career in the Air Force, but enough to shatter any hopes at space travel. NASA’s standards for behavior and sanity were far stricter than the military’s.

  Here the nature of the drawings changed. Until now, they’d been drawn with charcoal, probably the end of a burnt piece of wood. As the pictures continued winding their way along the wall and through the life of Colonel Freed, the drawings became inconsistent, sometimes sloppily drawn, sometimes a masterpiece. The color of the ink was no longer the stark black against the white walls of the pagoda. Now the pictures were a dark brown, sometimes flaking, sometimes smeared. Here and there a fingerprint stood out.

  Like finger painting.

  Pearson breathed in sharply.

  Like finger painting with blood.

  Pearson moved faster and faster around the room, watching as the last days unfolded. Marches in Washington. The Killing Fields of Tibet. A map of the world with mushroom clouds chronicling the first moment of the end times. And a B1B bomber. First on the tarmac, then in formation, then solitary. The release of bombs, then the skip across the water and then the present. The pagoda drawn with fires coming out of the top, a solitary figure swan diving from the top floor.

  “I wanted to be a hero.”

  Pearson realized that not only had the screaming stopped, but that he’d come full circle. The Colonel stood on the other side of the flames in the doorway facing him. The man’s calm countenance belied his previous ravings.

  “I wanted to be a hero, but you stole that from me.”

  “Destroying the world isn’t heroic, Colonel,” Pearson said, finding his voice.

  “But fighting and dying for a cause is.”

  “What cause? America? The red, white and blue?” Pearson shook his head, the crackle of the burning pile that separated them sounding like laughter. “America doesn’t even exist. She’s gone.”

  The Colonel pounded his chest. “Not here. Not for me. America exists in here.” He moved his hand and slapped his brow. “And here.”

  “What good is that? You can’t live there. You can’t ever return.”

  “That doesn’t make it any less of a cause.” He sighed. “I joined to serve, Pearson. You joined for a job. We’re two different people. When you stare at the flag, you mimic the respect shown by those around you. When I stare at the flag I’m simultaneously joyous to be a part of something with so much hope, and saddened by the litany of loss represented by the stars and stripes. All those who died for a cause, this cause I’m staring at when I stare at the flag– I think about them.”

  “That’s not fair. You don’t know what I think.”

  “Of course I do, Leroy. Your kind is all over the place. Your kind is now the norm. People like me, those who actually believe in causes, we’re anachronisms. We’re almost extinct.”

  “But I loved my country. I loved what she represented.”

  “Then why did you refuse to drop the bombs? Why did you stray from the cause? Why did you, in her last breaths, betray her?”

  “I... I thought I was doing the right thing.”

  “Most people do when they do the wrong thing.” The Colonel shook his head like a father would to a son.

  Pearson felt his eyes fill with tears as he thought about all that had been lost. The Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, the Age of Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, all the advances of the combined societies of the Earth, gone in a flash-bang nuclear explosion of heroism, each country, each pan-national entity fighting for a cause. Each thought their cause was just. Each thought they were in the right; just as Pearson thought that he’d made the right decision.

  “You’re always talking about television and books and movies. Let me leave you with two words, Major Pearson.”

  Rubbing savagely at his eyes with the palms of his hands to clear away the tears, Pearson looked up.

  “Kobyashi Maru.”

  “What?”

  The Colonel smiled sadly. “You’ll figure it out.” Then he turned, took three running steps and hurled himself into the air. From down below Rasheen screamed, but the Colonel was lost from view. Instead, all Pearson saw was the horizon comprised of the mountains and Erhai Lake. And within the lake, along an axis pointing towards the pagoda, was a long bright green glow.

  Pearson felt his heart still.

  Radiation didn’t glow by itself, but in the presence of zinc sulfide it glowed this same bright green. Sphalerite was a major export of China, especially in Yunnan Province where it was strip-mined because of its nearness to the surface. The fact that the water was glowing, or more realistically the lake bottom, meant that sphalerite was present in great quantities. It also meant that some of those bombs that he’d dumped before they’d crashed had split open, the fissionable materials contaminating the water.

  A great weight pressed down on Pearson shoving him to the floor. He fell heavily to his knees as he stared at the destruction he’d wrought and at that moment, the Colonel’s words finally made sense.

  Kobyashi Maru referred to the television show Star Trek. Although Ohura was the only black person on the bridge of the USS Starship Enterprise, Leroy had always associated himself with Captain James Tiberius Kirk. The man transcended color and represented everything a man and an explorer should be. From facing down Klingon battle fleets to getting friendly with blue-skinned outer space babes, Kirk was the outer space explorer every boy wanted to be when growing up.

  The Kobyashi Maru was a test every cadet took at the Starfleet Academy. It represented a no-win situation. Every single person who took the test failed, with only a few exceptions, of which Captain Kirk was one. But as it turned out, he really didn’t pass it. He changed the test. He cheated so that he could win.

  But the ultimate goal of the test wasn’t to win. The Kobyashi Maru was a test of character, with the goal being to show the student how they’d react in the face of death and defeat. Pearson remembered the opening sequence of the second Star Trek Movie, Wrath of Khan, and heard Kirk’s words, “How a person faces death is as important as how a person faces life.”

  Pearson sobbed.

  He’d had his own Kobyashi Maru. The bombing of Shanghai was a no-win situation. The city would be destroyed as part of mutually assured destruction. Those in the bombers would try and survive, but that wasn’t their purpose. Their cause was to destroy and represent their own country that had been destroyed. But lik
e Kirk, Pearson cheated. He hadn’t dropped the bombs. He’d disobeyed orders.

  And the result of his failure?

  The destruction of the Bai people who would have lived a secluded life at the edge of the world had not a B1B bomber dropped its nuclear payload into their drinking supply.

  Pearson realized that he’d faced death as a coward, a coward to the cause. He’d allowed sentimentality to creep into his sense of duty and in doing so, had murdered an entire people.

  As he stared at the glow from within the lake, he became sick. Falling to his side, he wretched, his arms hugging his shoulders as he contemplated taking the Colonel’s way out.

  THE CHILDREN STILL dance, but there are fewer of them. The little girl who’d called him Lou Roy no longer comes. When the bell sounds, instead of running, the children make their way as best they can. The teachers no longer follow. As far as Pearson knows, they might be dead.

  Rasheen took to the hills the morning after the Colonel’s death when Pearson told him of the radiation. Rasheen implored Pearson to come with him, but ended up leaving on his own. Pearson didn’t have a choice. He’d already failed the Kobyashi Maru once. Now that he’d been allowed to take the test once more, he had to pass.

  It wasn’t whether you survived or not, he knew that now. It was how you faced death.

  How you died.

  And as the murderer of the Children of the Butterflies, he needed to see it through. He needed to bear witness to his cowardice. He needed to be the one to bury them all.

  THEY SAY NUCLEAR winter will last for decades, bringing the temperature down worldwide. Nothing will grow. The planet will be wrapped in a cloud of cold. The planet will remain this way until one day far in the future a spring will arrive. The cold will lift. The temperature will rise. And those things that are still living will once again surge with life.

  Earth, like the butterflies, will be dormant, surviving as a pupa or chrysalis. And within these encasements reside hope and the future. For one day, the chrysalis will open and that which once was a worm shall be a butterfly, majesty on wings, as beautiful as anything in nature.

  This idea is what kept Pearson working through the long cold months. He carried his water from an untainted spring in the hills and moved into the Colonel’s pagoda. He cleared away the plane using some of the town’s construction equipment and filled the once broad expanse between the pagodas with the bodies of the dead. He’d found them all, wrapped them in white cloth and brought them to this place because it was where they’d danced and played. Just over five thousand succumbed to radiation sickness. Now they were stacked four stories high in the cold hardening winter.

  Wrapped as they were, they reminded Pearson of cocoons.

  And now as he drank the cool, clear water of the lake, he imagined the cocoons opening one day and releasing the Bai to once more dance. Each laughing, chatty, buoyant Bai child would flap his or her arms like they had wings of butterflies. Sparks of future brilliance, the children would balance on tiny feet, holding hands as they danced in the broad green field of his dreams.

  But first they must have a winter.

  Then the spring.

  Only then.

  * * *

  Notes from the Author: We’ve forgotten more about the sheer horror of mutually assured destruction and the absolute terror that gripped us than we should have. Yet I still remember nuclear fallout drills both as a student in elementary schools and as a soldier. This is yet another story revolving around duty, responsibility and cowardice. Was Pearson a coward? To many yes? But to him he was as brave as his father had been every Saturday morning. Pearson had spent a life wondering how his father had dealt with those beatings every Saturday night and at the end of the world he finally got a chance to find out.

  Fugue on the Sea of Cortez

  HE’D TRAVELED from the Panama Canal to Puerto Peñasco listening to a soundtrack created to drown the memories of his own cowardice. Dangermouse, Van Halen, AC/DC, and Madonna reinvented themselves in a thunderous Crazy-For-Those-About-To-Rock-Might-As-Well-Jump-Material-Girl-We-Salute-You crucible where he was the strong, confident cavalier he’d always wanted to be since he’d grown-up reading about the scions of Shannara, improbable hobbits and Stainless Steel Rat space heroes. Really nothing more than vapid electronic musings, fugue voices that carried him along on an expository stretto until his escape shoot landed somewhere else where the women were fine, the liquor was cheap, and his conscience had a way to escape.

  “Uno mas, por favor.”

  The bartender wordlessly slid another frozen margarita over from the platoon of drinks he’d prepared for the afternoon rush.

  “Gracias.” Thomas Greely Jones relished the icy tequila, so far the only deterrent against Mexico’s molten heat. He gazed out the window and watched the boats returning from a day of shrimping, the air above them swirling with pelicans and gulls eager to steal the day’s catch. White-skinned tourists lay on the beach in front of their resort hotels, their drinks served by malnourished, brown-skinned locals. Rich white kids skipped along the water’s edge, their boogie boards slipping across the waves in mad gyrations, oblivious to squalor, their only concern the moment and the now. Farther out to sea along the azure waves of the Sea of Cortez, a dozen swimmers treaded water, their gazes locked on the horizon.

  All seemed as it should be except for these twelve swimmers. For the life of him, Thomas couldn’t figure out what they were about. The waves of the Sea of Cortez were the most languid of the sort. The swimmers didn’t have diving apparatus, as one would expect a group such as theirs to have, perhaps waiting for pickup after a long day of coral snooping? What were they doing? Why were they treading water when they could turn, swim and easily make the shore? He was about to ask the bartender, his mind already searching for the words in Spanish, when she walked in.

  Mid-twenties and blonde with an athletic build, she wore flip-flops, black shorts, and a black T-shirt with the slogan Army of One emblazoned across the front. Her hair hung halfway down her back. Elfin features surrounded a freckled nose. She reminded him of someone, but he couldn’t place it. She found a seat by the window, kicked off her flip-flops and drew her feet beneath her in the chair. She stared at the sea, the dozen swimmers, and the horizon, her furrowed brow the only expression on a face that could raise a nation.

  Then he had it and his heart sunk with the memory.

  Her expression reminded him of his mother’s when he’d told her he was going AWOL. Away Without Leave was the official term, and she hadn’t begrudged him his decision, although he could have sworn she could see inside him. Her eyes had never been accusing, but had held him in their inquisitive rays as she tried to plumb the depths of his conscience to determine if it was something she’d done which had caused such a heroic malfunction. He’d told her what he’d told his First Sergeant when he’d called that final time before he turned his back on the red, white and blue. “I’m a conscientious objector. I did my time in hell. I spent one tour in the box. I saw things no kid should ever see. Limbs blown off. Sucking chest wounds. Bodies shattered from IEDs. I shouldn’t be forced to do it again while other kids live safe, happy lives.”

  Thomas was a mechanic and had been promised that if he’d re-enlisted he’d be assigned to Fort Carson, Colorado. But no sooner had he found a place to stay and grabbed a season pass at Breckenridge than his unit had won the Iraq lotto and been awarded an all-expenses paid ticket back to the sandbox. His unit had left for Ramadi, his friends had gone to Hell, and he’d left for Panama.

  The bar began to fill after she arrived. A few honeymooners, some snowbirds from the RV Park off of Oro Del Mar Beach and some ex-Pats back from a soccer game soon turned the gloomy interior into a den of laughter and light. Everyone seemed to be having a good time except her. She finished one margarita and stirred her empty glass with a straw as she gazed at the ocean.

  Thomas saw hi
s chance. He grabbed two fresh margaritas and sat down beside her.

  “Thought you might be thirsty.”

  She continued to stare at the sea.

  “After all, you are in a bar,” he added undeterred. He’d been in Mexico for nearly two months, and although he’d seen other women, this one intrigued him the most. Perhaps it was her shirt and the possibility of sharing fear that pulled him towards her. Army of One. What a screwed up motto. He didn’t even know what it meant and he’d lived the life for three years.

  Long moments passed before she finally spoke. “I come in here for the view.”

  The Black Dolphin held the high ground on a rocky promontory overlooking Bahia de Sonora on the Sea of Cortez and indeed had a spectacular view. Only the lighthouse above the bar boasted a better one, but it didn’t have a happy hour so it didn’t count. He pushed the sweating margarita glass closer to her, hoping his offer would be the olive branch he needed to get her talking. She took it, drank slowly and resumed her vigil, moisture beads on the outside of the glass slipping across her knuckles and onto the table.

  Something about her gaze told a tale of loss in the making compelling him. “Is everything okay?”

  “Sure.” She nodded vaguely in his direction.

  “My name is Tom.”

  “June.” She held out a hand.

  He took it. “I wonder what they’re doing.”

  She glanced at him for the first time and he felt the weight of her gaze.

  “Those twelve in the water, they just seem to be floating out there and I can’t see the reason for it.”