Honor Road

by Jason Ross

  “Overwatch two. Two targets down.”

  Mat hadn’t asked them to do that. The hunters racked up kills on the highway like culling a deer herd.

  Team one on Mat’s left opened fire, first a trickle, then a roar. The woods exploded with rushing people. They were in the refugee camp proper now; drooping lean-tos, ragged latrines, and smoldering fire pits.

  Mat had pictured a slow drive, converging on the camp, then pushing toward the highway. With the constant radio call outs of enemy casualties, and the chaotic melee of human shapes darting through the trees, the plan came undone in the first three seconds.

  “This is punishment for last night’s raid. Stay away from town,” the bullhorn hollered.

  Refugees sprinted in every direction—men, women, children. Almost everyone had something in their hands. The strike team opened fire at anything that looked like a weapon, which was pretty much everything. Mat stepped over the motionless body of a teenage boy gripping a folded-up camp chair.

  A cluster of tents came into view as Mat stepped around a huge beech tree. Rats ran for the thickest brambles, or bolted down muddy paths toward the highway. Some ran in circles. Others snatched at belongings.

  Return fire pattered from the camp, weak and sporadic. A hurricane of fire rained down in response from the strike team, hacking the brush to bits and sawing off branches from the trees. A tent collapsed. A metal pot on a campfire exploded.

  “This is punishment for last night’s raid. Stay away from town.”

  A group rushed toward Mat’s team, probably running away from the snipers on the highway. Mat put a handful of rounds into the front-runners—they were carrying sticks and knives. The rats attempted to scatter but none was still standing after half a second of sustained gunfire. Two more rats popped up off the ground, ran away and were shot in the back. One looked like a teenage girl.

  “Let them go!” Mat screamed, but he hadn’t clicked the push-to-talk on his radio. He couldn’t call a cease fire while anyone in the camp was still shooting at them. They were taking incoming gunfire.

  Mat despaired and finally radioed, “Hold fire!”

  A few on the channel responded, but the gunfire continued—rifles and shotguns in the woods, and the booming long guns on the highway.

  “This is punishment for last night’s raid. Stay away from the town.”

  “Robert’s hit! Shit-eating rats!” someone on Mat’s team screamed.

  “Light ‘em up!” the college kid next to Mat yelled and rushed into a cluster of ramshackle tents.

  “Hold fire! Cease fire!” Mat shouted. They’d overrun the campsite, but kept pushing through the swampy, filthy hovel and into the surrounding forest.

  “Fuck these guys!”

  “Hold! Hold!” Mat bellowed. “Cease fire.”

  Finally, gunfire slowed. Mat made his voice heard. “Cease FUCKING fire!” he screamed into the pause. Other than the booming hunting rifles, the strike team quieted their guns.

  Two minutes later, it was over. Finally, the rifles on the road either ran out of ammo or the snipers came to their senses. Mat’s teams milled around, hiding behind tree trunks, pointing their guns into the now-quiet woods. Few looked back at the camp.

  Mat turned and looked. It was a massacre. At least two dozen men, women, and children lay strewn across the camp. A lot of them cried in pain and writhed on the wet ground.

  Gladys Carter slung her rifle and ran back into the camp. She scooped up a crying little boy next to a woman’s limp body. He screamed and fought in her arms until she set him back down on his feet. He clawed at his dead mother, patting her face, running his fingers through her dark hair. A bloodless, fist-sized exit wound gaped where her right eye had been.

  “Report,” Mat keyed his radio.

  “Rickers is dead. Friendly fire,” Cabrera replied over the radio. “Two others wounded.”

  Mat’s team was okay, other than a grazing wound and what looked like a sprained ankle. Mat plowed through the woods to Cabrera. He stood over the corpse of Deputy Rickers, shot through the liver and bled out in the muck. His skin was the color of chalkboard dust. Mat turned and stormed back to the center of the refugee camp.

  They hadn’t planned for what to do with enemy wounded, and there were a lot of them. Six, at least. Gladys darted among the shredded and sagging shelters, organizing whomever would listen to collect the wounded. Mat had no idea where she planned on taking them.

  He still couldn’t bring himself to think about the highway. There would be a bumper crop of dead and wounded on the road.

  He keyed his mic. “This is Actual. Overwatch One and Two, come in.”

  “Copy,” they chimed overtop of one another.

  “Return to town.” Mat hoped the order would be enough. If they could all just walk away from this, that might be best. “Everyone return to town. Now.”

  Juan Cabrera waded toward Mat through the underbrush.

  “Sergeant Best. I have four guys who pursued rats to the south. I can’t raise them on their radio.”

  As if on cue, rifle fire crackled in the distance.

  Mat sighed. “Fuck ‘em. They can find their own way home. Tell everyone to RTB. Return to base. Regroup at the sheriff’s station.”

  Mat hoped that’d end the conundrum about the enemy wounded, but Gladys still darted around the camp, giving orders. She had no rank, but people listened to her. Some of the strike team had begun to come down off the rush and they were doing whatever she told them. Sheriff Morgan shuffled his bulk around in her wake, gathering up the broken remnants of the refugees.

  “What’re we gonna do with those guys, Sarge? What are your orders?”

  “Go home. RTB.” Mat didn’t wait for acknowledgement. He’d done his job. They’d obliterated the camp. Questions of decency were not his to answer. “RTB.” He circled his finger in the air. “RTB, folks!” Mat shouted as he walked toward town. He didn’t turn around to see if anyone was following.

  He breech-checked his rifle, shuffled through a tactical reload, inventoried his magazines, yanked out his radio earbud, and trudged alone toward the Objective Rally Point.

  “Sarge?” Wiggin called over the dangling earbud. He sounded like a mechanical spider on Mat’s shirt. “Sarge? You okay?”

  There were questions within the question. Am I okay? Are any of us okay?

  Mat didn’t answer. His thoughts felt heavy, sluggish. This was not the first time an operation produced collateral damage. But in his mind, a trollish thug in a suit and tie made the case prosecuting Mat for the massacre at Brashear wood.

  Cue the video...

  People running for their lives, some shot from behind.

  Mat defended himself in the mock court in his battered cerebellum. “They killed our townspeople! They killed Marjorie Simms. They killed a baby, for God’s sake.”

  Mat remembered the open, sightless eyes of Bob Rickers, killed by his friends.

  “That’s not my fault. There was no time to train.”

  He remembered his girl, Caroline, dead in a hospital bed, one leg missing under the cruel, flat sheet.

  “I did everything I humanly could to save her.”

  Mat stumbled on a root and went down to one knee. In an instant, the wet ground soaked through to his skin. His head felt like it might explode. He squeezed his eyes shut and covered them with his hands, pressing in with the heels of his palms so hard that purple lightning bloomed behind his eyes.

  The images stopped, but there was little relief. They were replaced with one, constant refrain. Two words, relentlessly in their finality.

  MISSION FAILED.

  “I can’t protect these people,” he said out loud to the dead leaf litter and the soaked, mossy tree trunks. “I can’t protect anyone. Caroline is gone. William’s parents are dead. Rickers is killed,” he babbled out loud, to himself.

  This was not what Mat had been trained to do. He was an attack dog, not a guard dog. A missile, not a shield. A fighter, not a sav
ior.

  “I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know what you want of me,” he despaired at the forest canopy.

  Mat waited for an answer from the sky. All he heard was the quiet dripping of the forest and the distant sounds of his men bearing the aftermath of the strike. He was alone. So utterly, profoundly alone.

  Later, Mat wouldn’t remember his route back to town, or how he avoided confrontation with refugees in the woods. He wandered, circumnavigated a swamp, passed through a three-mile gap in the HESCO, drifted through neighborhoods, then arrived at his doorstep. It was a wonder he hadn’t been bitten by a cottonmouth. At some point, William silently prepared him food and Mat ate mechanically.

  He fell asleep before dark and he dreamt of assaults.

  Sergeant Mathew Best raised his binoculars and glassed the mountain village from his position 700 meters on a ridge above. He and Airman Perez, TACP, were tasked with confirming the presence of an Al Qaeda HVT for a Predator strike. The winged missile platform circled on station where the late afternoon sun would conceal it.

  In the compound, they celebrated a wedding. Some chieftan’s cousin’s sister was marrying an elder’s brother’s son. Most of the males from the village were in attendance, and the men served food to one another. Mat was focused on the guests who traveled to the wedding.

  Six small pickup trucks and one incredibly-dusty sedan were parked a short walk outside the compound.

  The “compound,” as described in his briefing, consisted of a larger house than the rest of the village homes with a few outbuildings huddled inside a wall. Mat couldn’t see any women, but they would be inside tending to the bride and following the required traditions.

  “Fuckers eat well,” Perez commented as he munched on a Powerbar.

  “You’re not wrong,” Mat replied. The serving tables clustered against the inside wall of the compound. The food filled Mat’s binos. Men buried a meat dish under heaping scoops of rice flavored with carrots and spices from twenty-gallon pots. The dark specks looked like dead flies, but they were raisins. Afghans did not fuck around when it came to food. Their grub made the military MREs and energy bars seem like processed cardboard.

  The Afghan men dipped from communal plates. Oranges were served whole, peeled and shared. A young man Mat took to be the groom drifted among the other men, greeting them and laughing. He held hands with an older guy. Maybe the father or the best man.

  Mat and Perez could’ve brought a hellfire down on the compound and not kill a single person who wasn’t a Taliban sympathizer, but that wasn’t the mission. Their orders were to take out a single guy and his security detail, and not waste another soul if possible. Still, they were so far into Zabul Province, they could erase an entire village and it probably wouldn’t catch print in the newspapers.

  Mat and Perez watched and waited. After a time, the bride made her appearance. She walked slowly, demurely; her henna-tattooed hands clasped in front of her. Her attendants carried a decorated cloth awning over her head. It hid her face from Mat’s position, but he was surprised by the beauty of her gown. The gold and red edging caught the rays of the setting sun and twinkled like an aura.

  She moved more gracefully than her attendants, and the awning undulated as they walked with her. Mat caught the profile of her face. On any other day, the bride was a six-out-of-ten. Pretty, but not hot. To Mat, watching from half a kilometer away, with the low sun caressing her with its final rays, greater beauty could not be imagined.

  “We’re Mission Incomplete,” Mat said, his eyes fixed on the young woman. “He ain’t coming.”

  Perez wasn’t convinced. “He could show up late.”

  Mat checked the road again and a wisp of dust rose from behind the rolling hills.

  “Vehicles approaching.”

  Perez scrambled for his binos.

  They’d have a narrow window for the strike, if this was their guy. They’d provide the cake eaters at the TOC with eyes-on confirmation of the target, then the head shed would green-light launch, then a UAV driver, stateside, would pull the trigger. All those steps had to happen in the time it took the HVT to step out of his vehicle, but before he entered the compound. It was like shagging two sisters in the same house without either finding out, and without making the dog bark.

  The TACP spoke up, “Three vehicles. Two technicals with crew-served and one sedan. With a parade like that, that is our dude.”

  The Air Force required one of their own guys to be present on a strike like this one. Mat was there to back Perez up in a shooting situation, even though Mat out-ranked him. In any case, the TACP was a solid warrior. They were a good team together.

  Perez lowered the binos. “You ID the target and I’ll make the phone call.”

  “Roger that.”

  Mat settled on his ruck, prone, with his elbows resting comfortably on his sleeping pad. The binoculars steadied. The trucks pulled into the dusty parking lot, the gunners swiveled to-and-fro, hunting for invisible threats. Neither looked into the sun, where the Predator swam on air currents, happy as a falcon.

  The sedan parked. The dust swirled, then cleared. Mat recognized the HVT, rising out of the back seat.

  “HVT identity confirmed,” Mat said.

  The TACP rattled off confirmation into the radio.

  Mat’s job was done. He swiveled his view back to the compound. They must’ve heard the vehicles arrive. The bride and her entourage stopped floating among the crowd, and all eyes turned to the open gates of the compound.

  The bride’s face lit up and she gathered her skirts.

  “No, no, no, no. Be smart. Stay put,” Mat muttered.

  She bolted from under the awning. The bride broke decorum and rushed toward the gate, her face radiant. There hadn’t been any intel about a personal relationship between the bride and the HVT, but his arrival turned her into a bubbling schoolgirl.

  “No, no, no. Stay inside,” Mat hissed. He glanced over his binos. The target and the security team had circled up in the parking area. The HVT checked his hair in the driver’s side mirror.

  “There’s a civilian running toward the target,” Mat told Perez.

  “No authority to cancel the Reaper for collaterals...” Perez stated the obvious. Their job was to call the arrival of the HVT, not to sweat a couple civilian casualties. Some collateral damage was “baked in” to the plan. Vaporizing the whole compound was to be avoided.

  “We could call it in again when they go to leave,” Mat squabbled. He knew they wouldn’t do it. By then, it would be dark, and target ID would be impossible.

  “Negative,” Perez replied.

  The bride ran through the gates, her bright orange shawl and brilliant, yellow dress flowed around her legs like pooling ephemera. One of the bridesmaids followed close behind.

  They made it half-way to the grinning Taliban chieftain when the hellfire missile turned the ground into a tower of dirt-vapor. A full second later, the concussion hit Mat’s face like a sand blaster.

  The wave passed and Perez radioed, “Target eliminated.”

  Mat caught a flash of color in the roiling dust and returned to his binoculars. A brilliant, orange, flickering ghost rose above the churning mushroom. It danced on the air currents; twisting, reaching, rising above the death below. The soul of the bride, stripped of her body, pirouetted into the evening sky.

  “...the fuck was that?” Perez uttered.

  “Sergeant Best,” a man’s voice jostled Mat from sleep. Mat cracked his eyes. Sheriff Morgan hovered over him with a thin smile. “It’s morning,” the sheriff said.

  Mat moaned, then rubbed his face.

  “Bad dreams?” the sheriff asked.

  Mat turned away so he wouldn’t blast the man with his morning breath. “Something like that.”

  Mat felt a strange compulsion to talk about it this time. “Yeah,” he continued. “I was remembering a bad Predator strike in Afghanistan. I mean, it was a good strike—by the book. But a couple girls ran onto the X at th
e last second. It happens.”

  The sheriff nodded. “Just because it’s by the book doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.”

  “Yeah. True dat. I ran into Perez before the shit hit the fan—the TACP who was with me on that mission. I ran into him at a bar in Landstuhl. He was all strung out on oxy and booze. He couldn’t talk about anything else. He’d done a million of ‘em, but it was that strike that ate his lunch; the one with the orange shawl.”

  The sheriff nodded and kept his mouth shut, which was smart. There was no way he could understand or commiserate. Civilians just didn’t get it, no matter how hard they tried.

  “I’m going to brush my teeth,” Mat made his excuse, climbed off the couch and walked to the bathroom. When he got back, the sheriff waited on his couch.

  The sheriff shifted his butt nervously. “I’ve got some shitty news. I couldn’t find you last night, so I held off till this morning,” the sheriff said.

  Mat’s stomach flipped. “What’s that?”

  “Parker shot himself.”

  Parker had been one of the overwatch guys, blocking for the Brashear camp assault.

  “Parker went down to the road for some reason, after the...thing,” the sheriff explained. “It was a mess. He and Bergman really got into it. They hammered anyone who stepped onto the highway. I’m talking boxes of shells. Anyway, Parker went down to see his handiwork, saw a dead teenager or something, and he shot himself right there on the road. He has a wife and a baby—Parker does. Well, Parker did.”

  Mat slumped on the couch next to the sheriff. He rubbed his eyes again. “I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know what you want from me,” Mat agonized.

  The sheriff tried to make it better. “Yesterday got crazy. I was there. I took part. This is the shitty hand we’re being dealt. It’s nobody’s fault.”

  “Every time we defend ourselves,” Mat grieved, “We’re snuffing out the town. We can’t kill our way to safety. No matter what, we can’t use that fucking gas. Promise me we won’t use the WMDs. If we use mustard gas or anthrax on refugees, this whole town will commit suicide.” Mat’s eyes burned into the sheriff. He was fully aware that he was being melodramatic, but the truth wasn’t far from the worst case scenario. “I don’t know what I’m doing here. This is not what I was trained to do. I fight bad guys, not infestations. Nobody commits mass murder and shrugs it off, least of all a bunch of Midwestern pig farmers. Parker is just the first from that strike team to off himself. He won’t be the last.”