the fruck is that damn flag?” as I reached the last page in the ’Gol’s diary, where he’d had the time to write one final line:
“Snow today—cover land. Soon cover me.”
Closing the book, the pages falling together with a soft chuff, I rocked back and forth on my heels, eyes shut, but still seeing what my mother had written in her diary, not long before the MOAW missile fragmented her like so much shrapnel:
Lull in the fighting—I don’t like it. Don’t know what will happen next. Better to either be in a battle or be coming out of it. This way—too much uncertainty. Get too relaxed. My mind is racing, racing. Remember a war movie I saw in basics, really an after-war film from the 1940s. No color, like old TV. The Best Years of Our Lives. Three men-grunts, coming home from one of the world wars. Second one, I think. Yes; no movies during first world war.
Anyway. The three—one was maimed, navy one—couldn’t adjust to life without war; war had given them all purpose, justification, glory. Came home to uncertainty, rejection, degradation. Seemed to me that the war years weren’t the best years of their lives, but had instead sucked away the best lives of their years. Oh, the movie had a sort-of-happy ending, but the maimed one was still maimed, and the poor one was doing work on junked war materials. The one who was rich before got to be rich again, but his daughter was in love with the low-life one. Strange to see a war actually end. And the women had stayed at home. Must’ve been why it finally ended.
Watching, I kept thinking it was all a dream-life, with women razzed about having to stay home and take care of the home front. Thought maybe EVP must’ve gotten into us women, made us hard, tough, mean—everything the men have lost. But seeing the play-soldiers of old, I think: They have lost something we women can never have—the ability not to be manly under certain circumstances. We women are so wrapped up in being wo-men, both in one, that we are neither.
And later, during history class in my last year of school, while learning of Desert Storm, I read a microfiche of an old pre-EVP newspaper, and an article about the first instances of bunkering (high-tech scavenging) in the Kuwaiti desert. This reporter who wrote the article came across one fallen soldier, named Mardy. Mardy had a diary, like mine, like all of ours. He hoped the war of his people and ours would be over soon, He asked God to make it so. He felt betrayed by his life. He had a girlfriend, Diee, whom he never saw again. And when the American reporter found him, Mardy was dead, mouth open, hand over his heart. And the reporter read of Mardy’s words: “I open my eyes and cry, sitting, thinking, ‘O God, will you accept me?’ I close my eyes and remember. Then I cry again. There is sand on my face. It is about to cover me. It is my destiny. I want to shout in my loudest voice but life doesn’t follow me.”
And before he left Mardy, the reporter buried him in those same sands. Reading that, I realized, in war there are no real enemies. Only victims—of our countries, of our races, and of ourselves. We need no other adversaries.
War, politics, EVP and AIDS before that—all shadow boxing partners. Only we do the actual moving.
My mother died a couple of days after writing those words. Oh, she did write a letter to her mother, but it only skirted the questions gnawing at her, perhaps in deference to her mother’s rank, more probably in deference to her own un-faceable fear. Yet hers was a war of equals, of women hurting other women. No fear of being killed faster and dying slower. My mother fought a war, not others not quite like herself.
“...who is enemy?”
Sitting by the earless ’Gol, his soul resting cloth-bound in my hands, I wish I knew the answer to his—and my—question. Just as I wish I knew who was doing the real moving—me, or my image on a snow-flecked earthen wall.
Author’s Note: The newspaper article mentioned in this work appeared in the Tuesday, July 30, 1991 edition of USA Today, and was written by Jack Kelley. The diary passages quoted were written by Hussam Malek Mohammad Mardy, to whom this work is dedicated.
Afterword for “The Best Lives of Our Years”
Looking back on the genesis of this story, I suppose it amounts to my overwhelming disgust over the events which made up the end of the Gulf War (senior), including the treatment of those enemy soldiers who tried to surrender, only to be literally buried alive by their own military vehicles, driven by our soldiers...somewhere along the line, even the barbaric rules of war had been hideously breached, and the horrors of the second Bush (“Dubyah”) Presidency’s Gulf War were yet to come, even as they had been anticipated by the events of the 1990s war. That war marked one of the first instances of women being used on the battlefront in a supporting role, a situation which blossomed into the current Middle East war(s) creating female vets coming home sans limbs, or worse. Now, I’ve read that women will probably be in combat soon. Never have I hated to see something I once wrote about in a fictional sense coming to fruition more than I hate this current military turn of events.
Getting back to the actual writing of this story, I had the first two sections outlined in my head long before I finally wrote it in 1991; I knew part one would be “red” and part two was “white” but I had no idea what “blue” was going to be. I had an inkling it would involve the granddaughter of the woman in part one, but I couldn’t come up with a viable scenario for her part of the triad of war stories. Then, I read the account in the July 30, 1991 issue of USA Today of the live burial of those enemy soldiers, and I had my ending for the tale. But when it comes to war, and war, in any century, all I can eventually do is hang my head after seeing or reading accounts of what actually happens in battle, and ask myself: How can any civilization do something so stupid so many times?
But I think I know the answer to that earless ’gol’s query: We are the enemy. We always have been, and as long as we fail to figure out how not to settle arguments through battle, we’ll never cease to be the enemy.
CONTINGENCIES AND PENTI-LOPE-LOPE
with John S. Postovit
Day 93:
The ’lopes watched us from their self-imposed distance as the six of us gathered in a circle on the flat-grass around the box holding the last of the spacer ’slop. I could see them craning their necks, oddly wide and flat heads jerking, flared ears twitching, as they scrutinized our movements. And Penti-Lope-Lope’s canted amber-orange eyes were focused on my hands, my face, as I tore open my last dinner packet and pretended to enjoy it. At the best of times, the ’slop was a poor replacement for real food. This sure wasn’t the best of times. Even if I hadn’t been preoccupied, I still wouldn’t have enjoyed it. My sinus medication had long ago run out, and without my pills, I had little sense of taste.
And Nutraform (’slop’s official moniker) wasn’t much to brag about even when I could taste it. It was nothing more than a flavor-enhanced, textureless, gloppy substance with the consistency of adipocere flesh; a nutritious, amino-acid, vitamin, mineral, carbohydrate, and damn me I can’t recall what else that was just bulky enough to provide proper elimination, neutral enough not to cause heartburn, indigestion, or allergic reactions after ingestion.
Spacer swill; compatible with any and all human digestive systems, made palatable by loads of flavoring designed to fool the taste buds into thinking it was getting something real. If I ever got back to Earth, I’d start a campaign to impeach the politician who got the stuff on the official provisions list. Him and the moronic food-processing company that makes the stuff. Probably owned by the politician’s second cousin.
Well, he’s safe from me. I don’t expect I’ll ever make it back to start that campaign....
The others half closed their eyes as they moved the ’slop around in their mouths, oblivious to the watching ’lopes, savoring whatever packet they’d saved for their last meal. Their last real meal, before descending into that lonely abyss that yawned before us. I lowered my eyelids, pretending to enjoy ’slop I found as appetizing as nose drippings.
The ’lopes bunched closer, shifting from thickly muscled feet to half-squat in place, elongated torsos supported by their extended tails. They patted each other with their great hairy hands, all the while making those rumbling grunts and semi-mewls. But they