The War After Armageddon

“I knew the girl was trouble, sir,” Garcia said. “I just didn’t know what kind of trouble. How could she do some crazy shit like that? I mean, she was a kid. Why would she do that?”

“She’s dead now?” the captain asked. As if he hadn’t heard all that had been said to him.

“I fucking hope so,” Garcia told him.

1091ST COMBAT SUPPORT HOSPITAL, ZIKHRON YA’AKOV

The patient evacuation holding area had gone quiet. Now and then, the sound of a man confused by pain and drugs rose and fell away, but the new calm seemed almost eerie to Major Nasr. Drifting in and out of consciousness, he lay intermittently aware of the battery of clamps, splints, ban dages, and tubes controlling his body, only to find himself back in Nazareth again, being beaten for reasons he couldn’t remember or imagining that he’d pissed himself bloody again.

Had he pissed himself again? He wasn’t sure. He wanted to know but couldn’t tell for certain. Then he decided, again, that he didn’t care.

He counted the crucified men. Thirty-six. He counted them again. Thirty-seven. Again. Only thirty-six.

Why wouldn’t the number come right?

Where was he? The doctor was there. No, that had been earlier. He was sure it had happened, though. In a lucid moment, he’d asked a doctor how bad his injuries were. The doctor, a lieutenant colonel, told him, “We don’t know. You need tests that we can’t do here. But you’re going to live.”

To live.

What would they tell his parents? He wished he could speak to his father first, before they got to him. His father, who had always seemed so strong but wasn’t.

The pain was so strange. He knew it was there. The way you knew another person was in the room, even though you couldn’t see him. Plenty of painkillers racing through his bloodstream. But the pain was still there. Dressed up in a bizarre costume.

Guess who I am?

Pain, in an Arab robe. In a crisp uniform patterned on the British military of a previous century. Only Arabs wore those Sam Browne belts nowadays.

He was an Arab.

Was he? What did that mean? Wasn’t being a Christian more important? Being an American?

It was all in the blood. It would be there after the painkillers thinned out. You knew things with your blood. Things that others couldn’t understand.

An officer in battle dress had tried to ask him questions, overriding the nurse and then the doctor. It was urgent. What was urgent? “I have to ask you a few questions… I’m sorry… The Corps G-2 needs to know…”

Who had a need to know? What could be known, anyway? A hundred transfusions wouldn’t change what he knew in his blood.

I know that I am still alive. In a field hospital. I know… that I’m going to live.

Nasr wondered if he’d be able to have sex. The boots of Arab policemen gravitated toward testicles. Testicles and kidneys.

He’d always heard that badly wounded men wanted their mothers. But he found his thoughts returning to his father. Who had seemed so shockingly frail, so bewildered. “But my son… He is in the specialty forces…”

Dad, it’s going to be okay. You hear me?

Had he accomplished his mission? In Nazareth? Who had he better served? His own kind, or the enemy? But who were “his own kind?”

Not them, not them. American. I’m an American. Dad, we’re Americans. They can’t change that.

A charley horse in his left leg made him cry out. The leg was immobilized, and he couldn’t cock it up to ease the spasm. It seemed worse than the pain he’d felt during his beating. Or after.

Then it subsided. “These things, too, shall pass away.”

If he could revisit any old girlfriend, who would it be?

That didn’t work. For him, it was always the one he was going to meet. The perfect one. Who was waiting.

The nurse who had come into his field of vision while he was lucid had looked like a pit bull. While he was in ROTC in college, he’d had to read A Farewell to Arms for a survey of 20th-century American literature. It struck him now as the most dishonest book he’d ever read.

Dad, it’s going to be all right. Don’t worry. They’re not going to take you and Mom to any camps.

He faded again, swirling in and out of dreams of torture. He was in the snack bar at the bowling alley on Ft. Bragg. He told them they had to stop because there were children watching. Then he was back in the Bradley that had evacuated him from Nazareth. But that was impossible. That had to be a dream, because he was already in the field hospital. He was sure of it.

I did my duty, he wanted to scream. I did all I could do.

It wasn’t a bowling alley after all. And he was doing the torturing. With kitchen knives.

Nasr woke. To the fitful quiet of the evacuation ward. It took him a moment to get a grip on reality. Then, all at once, everything seemed clear.

He was going to live.

Dad, I’m going to live. Everything will be okay.

A man in scrubs loomed over him. The man wore a surgical mask. He held up a syringe.

“Who are you?” Nasr asked, alerting.

“A friend,” the man said. He stabbed the needle into Nasr’s forearm.