War Story

     In a faraway land where the language was strange and the customs foreign, there was war.  Civil strife, violence, murder and hatred prowled the streets of a once-great city, and the people lived in fear.  When war began its rampage and established its tyranny over the land, it attracted soldiers from far and wide.  You see, soldiers are drawn to war like moths to a flame. 

      

     One of the soldiers was a young man who had come to the war with a desire to fight for the cause of good, to stand against evil, and so to become a hero.  It would not be until much later in his life that he would come to understand that this cause was not good, and that heroes are rarely born of violence.

     The Soldier lived in a fort, an imposing structure made of solid concrete, taller than any nearby buildings, and surrounded with a wall and protected by rooftop fighting positions.  He spent a great deal of time patrolling the old city and a great deal of time standing on guard duty on the roof and at the gate.  What little time remained to him, he spent sleeping.

     When the Soldier was guarding the gate, he would often have a visitor; immediately outside the wall of the fort lived a family with a young daughter who made money for her family by taking the soldiers’ money to the market and returning with bread, cheese and chicken so that they had something to eat during their interminable guard duty.  The little girl spoke only a few words of the soldiers’ language, namely “bread”, “chicken”, and the numbers one and five, which were the respective prices she charged in the soldiers’ currency.

     At first the Soldier didn’t trust the girl to bring him food.  When she approached the gate he would assume his most menacing aspect and shoo her away with a brusque command in her own tongue.  He was worried that any food she brought may be poisoned, or at least unsanitary.  To a lesser degree he worried that she’d carry off his money and never return.  But as the war ground on, and his daily exposure to risk accumulated toward something more and more like certain death, the Soldier decided that some warm, fresh-baked bread would be a nice change of pace from the preserved rations he’d been eating for months, and he felt less and less attached to the money he was being paid to expose himself to the dangers of the old city.  So the next time the girl cautiously approached the gate, the Soldier beckoned her to approach.

     She eagerly jogged toward him until she was only a few paces away, then she slowed her pace, displaying some anxiety at being so close to the exotic-looking soldier.  He was wearing an easy smile for the first time she’d ever seen, but his black sunglasses, heavy-looking armor, and immaculate black rifle still gave him a menacing demeanor.  The Soldier asked for bread, the girl asked for “one”, and the Soldier pulled a piece of money from his wallet and handed it over to her.

     She brought the bread and cheese back a quarter-hour later, and the transaction was complete.  The Soldier enjoyed the first fresh bread he’d had in months, and decided then and there that he’d buy bread from the girl at every opportunity.  The Soldier didn’t guard the gate every day, and the girl didn’t come every time the Soldier was at the gate, but they became familiar in time.  The Soldier, preoccupied with thoughts of home and trying to cope with the stress of war, never thought to ask the girl’s name though she would try to pronounce the name stitched onto his armor every time she saw him.

     The little girl had a pet dog.  The dog was a pitiful thing, small, grey, and dirty.  He looked like an old, discarded mop head.  When the little girl would come to the gate her dog would mount the wall by her house and run back and forth, carefree and oblivious to the human conflict playing out around him.  When the Soldier would point at the dog, the little girl would smile knowingly and just say, “Eshwe,” as one might when saying, “silly dog.”

     The Soldier didn’t know if Eshwe was the dog’s name, or if it just meant “dog”, or something else entirely, but it was one more piece of mutual language that they shared.  Bread, chicken, one, five, and Eshwe.  These made up the entirety of their verbal communication.  These, and the girl’s tortured efforts at reading the Soldier’s name.

     The Soldier’s first brush with death came soon enough.  His enemies launched a salvo of rockets at the fort, and their aim was respectable.  All but two of the rockets hit their mark, and the imposing concrete fort shuddered violently under the assault.  The perimeter wall was reduced to rubble in one spot by a direct hit, the armored vehicle at the entrance was damaged by a near miss, and the building itself was cracked and aflame.

     The soldiers responded grimly, quickly donning their gear and loading their murderous weaponry, heading out into the billowing smoke and dust to repel any further assault on their home.  Some climbed into the choking clouds of toxic smoke to put out the growing inferno which threatened to dispossess them of their meager property and comfort in this strange land. Amidst the chaos and bitter resentment, the Soldier realized that one of the two rockets which had fallen short of the fort had impacted the house of the little girl, just outside the wall of the fort.  The little girl’s home was a ruin of smoke and shattered concrete.

     The Soldier was directed to help move the crippled vehicle back from the gate to the main entry of the building, as the perimeter was now compromised.  In some distant corner of his mind he was lamenting the carnage which he imagined must exist inside the collapsed and broken home of the girl.  He wondered how his assailants would feel if they knew they had just murdered a little girl and the dog she called “Eshwe”, without killing any of the soldiers whom they were targeting.

     That afternoon passed without further incident for the soldiers.  They were thirsty for retribution, but no enemies dared assault them in their stronghold, even in its vulnerable state.  That is not to say that there was no more death in the city that day, but the soldiers of the fort neither inflicted nor suffered any further violence.   After life had returned to something resembling normalcy and all the soldiers were talking about their brush with eternity, one of the men told the Soldier that while standing guard he had witnessed the rocket launch in the distance, seen the projectiles streaking loudly through the stifling afternoon air, and witnessed in a moment of bizarre absurdity the dog Eshwe take off running at full speed away from the impending calamity.  He had been seen in the area since the disaster, alive and well, if a little bit dirtier.

     A week or two later the little girl and her family returned as well, and the Soldier was comforted in the knowledge that the bloodthirsty specter of war had been denied these lives.  It was many years before the Soldier realized to his chagrin that of course the girl and her family had survived.  They were forewarned about the attack, and had made sure to not be home during a prescribed few days.  And of course the family hadn’t warned the soldiers in their concrete fort.  Such is war.  But even so, many years later, surrounded by peace and all the trappings of civilian life the Soldier can’t help but smile to think of Eshwe, running as fast as his legs would carry him, compelled by some invisible force to escape from death itself.