In the Valley (11 page)

Ah, his helmet cooled him down quite nicely. Taking his helmet for a dip had been a good idea.

Paul wandered over to the villagers sitting on the wall and spoke with them through his headset. As always, the Farsi that came out of his headset wasn’t perfect, but he could make himself understood and understand them as well. He talked with the villagers about their crops; he asked about their families. They asked him where he was from. When they found out he was from off-world, their questions rained down upon him.

“Where you come from, do women respect their men? Did you travel the stars? Have you seen the Holy Kaaba?” There was no end to it. Finally, Bashir called. It was time to leave. Paul pinged Z’s halo and had him pull rear security while they left the peaceful courtyard.

As they moved toward the ground-cars, Paul spotted a pretty, dark-eyed, young girl who was staring at him curiously and smiling. Without saying a word, he reached to his right shoulder and tore off his Pan-American flag patch and handed it to her as a souvenir. She smiled and ran away. A group of children chased after her, wanting to look at or steal her prize.

Huh, Paul thought, counterinsurgency isn’t always miserable. With a smile, he mounted up in the ground-car. Second Company left Buree. They had had a successful mission: one shithead captured, and Paul got to see magical fish. Huh, he thought, I’ll be damned. Maybe he was. The blood on his hands said so.

F
ather was waiting for Paul outside the shuttle-port security zone. Upon seeing him, Paul was struck immediately by the idea that his father had aged since they had last seen each other. Had it been that long? It had only been seven months, but it seemed much longer. So much had happened; there was so much to talk about. Paul and his father hugged. They didn’t say much while waiting for Paul’s duffel to arrive; a comfortable silence surrounded the two. Paul was glad to be home, and his father was happy he was there.

Paul figured conversation would wait until they were in the ground-car. So much here in the terminal was familiar, but there seemed to be a distance now, a mental distance, that existed between Old Paul and New Paul. He knew the difference he felt was all bullshit, pure conditioning. It was the stuff of cheap novels. However, he felt the feeling nonetheless. And he felt the difference strongly now, standing and waiting on his bag with his father.

Listening to the whir of the luggage carousel, standing there in his browns, Paul caught the appraisal his father was giving him, the looks of the people in the shuttle field. He was an Other, no longer of Them, the civvies. Paul understood that for the first time his father was treating him like a man, not a boy.

The feeling didn’t come from anything his father had said. What he had said was precious little. The difference lay in the way his father addressed him, the way he carried himself. In a flash, Paul understood. His father was no longer acting like Paul was a boy to be protected. He treated him like one of the pack,
not a junior member—if one can apply wolf pack psychology to humans. But that’s how things seemed to Paul, and here came his bag down the chute.

The cam-patterned bag rolled down the shiny carousel, and Paul heaved it up and onto his shoulder. It weighed close to his equipment allowance, thirty-five kilos, but Paul hefted it easily, casually.

“You waitin’ on anything else, Son?” his father drawled. God, but the accent of home sounded good to Paul, after so many months cooped up with relative strangers.

Paul shook his head, and they left the terminal, off to the awaiting ground-car.

It was good to be home, and dreadful, too. Good, in that he was returning to his family and friend’s bosoms; dreadful, in that he knew that he had to leave oh so soon. The fateful day was still thirty days away, but the knowledge that the departure date was there sat on his chest like a stone. Even though he was home, there was no going back. His browns marked him as surely as a scarlet letter. Paul and his father stepped into the rented ground-car and left.

The trip home was uneventful, and Paul’s eyes sucked in the sights he had known since childhood. An hour later, he saw the white clapboard house with the banner over the door. “
WELCOME HOME PAUL
,” it said, and a crowd poured out as Paul emerged from the ground-car. Aunts and uncles hugged, kissed, and congratulated him; it was all he could do to get his duffel and go into the house. Someone took it from him and said he would put it in his room.

Paul felt uneasy to let the duffel get out of his eyesight; after all, in one month that would be all his worldly goods. That duffel and a small ten-kilo handbag with “personal possessions” would be it.

The party progressed, and everyone was duly glad to see Paul. Tears were shed, and the aunts blubbered over their prodigal son, the soldier. The party ebbed and flowed, and Paul went with it.

But over it all was the glassy feeling he was having and a set of words:
SM will be shipped outbound on the FSS
Merton R. Johnson
28MAR15
.

The party was nice; Paul definitely appreciated the love; but after a couple of hours, he felt exhausted and had to beg off to go to his room. Up the well-worn stairs he climbed. He smelled the old smells. He went into his room and noticed there had been some changes.

First, his room was immaculate in a way it had never been when he lived here. His duffel had been thoughtfully laid at the foot of his bed. Second, it seemed smaller than he remembered. Finally, he noticed the quilt was no longer on his bed. The quilt had been replaced by a blue, wool blanket of unknown provenance. Paul wondered why that was.

Tired, he stripped off his browns and hung them in the closet. He had already pinged all of his friends to let them know he was around. Depressingly, a great deal of them had already left for elsewhere after graduation. It was the time-honored, wrenching tradition of Harrison Hills, in the Ohio Valley.

He remembered to put his socks and underwear in the laundry hamper before he showered. The military had changed him, in so many ways he didn’t even know yet. But he would experience the changes, eventually. Paul slept the sleep of the still innocent.

He spent the days of his leave walking the forests of Old Earth, in the Ohio Valley, his ancestral home. He took care of the goats for his mother and lay awake in his bed after dawn, listening to the sounds of home.

His halo pinged one day about halfway through his leave. Amy Brown, late of his chemistry class, appeared on his visual. They chatted briefly, and she was interested in his being in town. So they made some arrangements, and out came Paul’s browns for a date in Wintersville that night. Amy was duly impressed, and, after a perfunctory courtship, Paul fulfilled some long-held desires. Maybe Amy did too—that certainly seemed to be the case from Paul’s perspective at the time.

Who knew, however, what really lay in the breast of a woman? The female of the species was still terra incognita for Paul and would always be so.

Their trysts, given different circumstances, might have led to something else, but Paul was running out of time. Maybe the brief, sweet time they enjoyed together was a function of his limited time—a relationship with a declared expiration date did hold its attractions for some people after all.

The couple went to parties, shopped, and made love on the chill, rainy days. It was good but too short by far. All too soon his time of freedom was over.

He sat on his bed and thought of what a cliché the whole situation was. What a timeworn theme: the space-travelling soldier with a day left of leave.

He had to report for his flight to Cuba tomorrow. Time had run out. Yesterday, he had taken his leave of Amy; she had cried. It felt horrible then; it felt horrible now. But like someone shoveling dirt over your grave, it was bound to happen sooner or later.

“Paul?” came his mother’s voice. “Paul, are you in your room?” she asked. He answered her, and she came up the steps. Paul had been trying to figure out what to bring with him on his trip to the eternal stars. Stuff was scattered around his room. The disarray annoyed him—these days, he liked everything put in its place, tidy and neat. He even lined his shoes up under his bed, even though he mocked himself for doing so. His door was open, so his mother walked in.

“Paul, I have something for you, for your trip.” Her voice cracked over the word “trip.” Paul looked at what she was carrying and heard the emotion in her voice. It was his quilt, the one he had had on his bed for years—if something like the quilt could rightfully be called “his”; better said that the quilt had been borrowed over long generations.

Oh, Mother, he thought. His family had never been big for emotional displays. But Paul knew how much love was in that blanket. He had just figured
out what he would surely take. The rest of the stuff was junk, except for the scarf Amy had given him and a switchblade his father had bought. He stood, hugged his mother, and took the quilt.

It was time to turn the page.

P
aul not only thought—he knew that he needed to turn a new page in the book of his life. Hopefully, the new page wouldn’t be the catastrophic script he could see coming from the insanity he was currently engaged in. Teaching these guys on Juneau 3 about how to find bombs before they found you was starting to fray his nerves a bit, and they were already plenty frayed.

Paul had been on Juneau 3 for about two months, and the journey just kept getting crazier by the minute. The colonel, his commander, had turned out to be a guy with a fertile imagination and boundless courage. He was also in possession of a seemingly limitless depth of knowledge on how to conduct counterinsurgencies “from the bottom up,” as he liked to say.

Today’s bright idea was going into a known hostile village to look for bombs. The village was called Nagamas, and he was patrolling the streets with the Juneau Army because intel had heard there was a bomb threat there. Rumor had it the provincial police had been blown up in Nagamas twice the week before. The effect of the rumor was that Second Company, Juneau Army, was patrolling the village’s mean streets a week later. They were looking for bombs on foot.

The colonel had been specific: where the Second Company went, so went Paul and his not-so-trusty (as of yet) sidekick, Z-man. It wasn’t high enough
profile of a mission for the colonel to be there in person, so Mike’s icon was tagging along on the trip.

Mighty Mike himself was on a small firebase in an area they called “the Belt,” about twenty-five klicks north. He had his own party he was attending to: last night one of his First Company soldiers had rolled a ground-car, and Mike was currently engaged in cleaning up the mess—while keeping an eye on Paul’s mission for the colonel.

Mike was good at juggling balls for Team 1.69.

Paul and Z were out on a basic dismounted patrol—no suit, again. The colonel, Mike, and he had discussed the mission on halo link the night before. Yes, there was an explosives-hazard threat. Yes, Paul and Z might get shot at. No, no real force-on-force situation was foreseen that the unarmored soldiers of Second Company probably couldn’t handle.

“Force-on-force” was the vernacular for a creditable infantry opposing force. Nagamas was thought not to have many shooters around. Therefore, there was no measurable force-on-force threat.

So Second Company’s advisor team was out on the feet God had given them and not the Plastlar paws of a suit. Tough to look a villager in the eye when all the villager could see was the visor of a suit. Eye contact and the intuitive feel it gave were indispensable tools in a counterinsurgency fight.

This approach—the dismounted bomb patrol—Paul thought it could be called the “maybe we’ll be blown up, maybe we won’t” technique. It was what it was. Paul was resigned to the threat. The colonel had given Paul a mission. Second Company’s extraterrestrial Pashtuns were on foot; therefore, so were Paul and Z-man.

Paul knew that under his feet, in a culvert or something, could be a big honkin’ bomb. It was a creepy-crawly feeling. There were lots of culverts; they were everywhere. The Pashtuns liked to cross irrigate their rice fields. Therefore,
there were tons of hollow spaces under roads, trails, and dikes. Weapons, drugs, and bombs could be stashed in those spaces, to be used at the villagers’ and the dissidents’ discretion. Also, the culverts were frequently a hiding place for the infamous orange-and-blue-striped Juneau “scorpion,” whose venom awaited those with incautious hands.