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The 3rd World War is over, and America is whole again. This is old news now, but the words still make me proud. The cost was great, and paid out of necessity, but things are still improving. PEACE is crumbling at least in name. I suppose one can only call oneself PEACE until the first war of aggression. I never was one for politics, though.

Throughout everything, men have come and gone through my platoon. Breechzone has his own platoon, Tyler now his own division. I suppose that says something about my leadership, but those accomplishments belong to my men, not to me. My duty is to take care of my responsibilities with firmness and without negligence. It won't help Elmie, or Riddle16, but comporting myself as an officer is my duty as well. I will not tolerate laxity, and I will show strength, distancing myself.

Riddle16 was the name of the dead man. What happened was, we crossed a muddy river and marched west into the mountains, and on the third day we took a break along a trail junction in deep jungle. Right away, Riddle and Simplex started goofing. They didn't understand about the spookiness. They were just kids; they just didn't know. They were playing a silly game they'd invented. The game involved smoke grenades, which were harmless unless you did stupid things, and what they did was pull out the pin and stand a few feet apart and play catch under the shade of a huge tree. It's all exactly true. At one point I remember Tyler turned and looked at me, not quite nodding, as if to warn me about something. As if he already KNEW, then after a while he moved away.

It's hard to tell you what happened next.



They were just goofing. There was a noise, I suppose, which must've been the detonator, so I glanced behind me and watched Riddle step from the shade into bright sunlight. His face was suddenly brown and shining. A handsome kid, really. Sharp gray eyes, lean and narrow waisted, and when he died it was almost beautiful, the way the sunlight came around him and lifted him up and sucked him high into a tree full of moss and vines and blossoms.

The perpetual war against the former PEACE bloc isn't all terror and violence. Sometimes things can get almost sweet. I remember a little Indonesian boy with a plastic leg. I remember how he hopped over to General Spartan and asked for a chocolate bar-"GI Number one," The kid said, and Spartan laughed and handed over the chocolate. When the boy hopped away, Spartan clucked his tongue and said "Man. One leg for Chrissake. Some poor sap ran out of ammo."



If you weren't humping, moving or training, you were waiting. I remember the monotony well. Digging foxholes. Watching battles. Slapping mosquitoes. The sun and the heat, the cold and clouds and wetness that was everywhere. Even in the Siberian flats, where you could die any number of ways, the war was nakedly and aggressively boring. But, it was a strange boredom. Boredom with a twist. The kind that caused stomach disorders. You'd be sitting at the top of a high wall, the day feeling calm and hot and vacant. Right as you would try to relax, you'd hear the rattle of gunfire and see the Hungarian tanks rolling up, your nuts would fly into your throat and you'd be shouting battle cries and pounding the wall harder than ever before. That kind of boredom.

Not all the stories of war in The New World are bloody. Some stories are happy. Even a few are about peace. Here's a quick peace story:

A guy goes AWOL. Shacks up in Central Greece with a Red Cross nurse. It's a great time. The nurse loves him to death, and the guy gets whatever he wants whenever he wants it. War is over for me, he thinks. Just nookie and new angles. But then one day he rejoins us in the Airborne, stationed in North Korea. Can't wait to get back into the action. Finally I ask him what happened with the nurse, why so hot for combat, and the guy says "All that peace, man, it felt so good it HURT. I want to hurt it back." It takes a special kind of guy to be an Airborne trooper.



What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments with no beginning and no en😛

Shadow6463 laying on his back one night, watching the stars, then whispering "I'll tell you something. If I could have one wish, anything, I'd wish for my dad to write me a letter and say it's okay if I don't win any medals. That's all my old man talks about. Nothing else. How he can't wait to see my medals."

Or Billy Mountain teaching a rain dance to Breech and Tyler Jenkins, the three of them whooping and leaping around barefoot while a bunch of Turkish civilians looked on with a mixture of fascination and giggly horror. Afterward, Tyler says "So, where's the rain?" Billy replied "The earth is slow, but the buffalo is patient." Tyler thought about it for a minute and said "Yeah, but where's the rain?"

Or Elmie adopting an orphan puppy-feeding it from a plastic spoon and carrying it in his rucksack until the day Nick Donovan strapped it to a Claymore antipersonnel mine and pulled the firing device.

On occasions the war is like a Ping-Pong ball. You can put a fancy spin on it. You can make it dance. PEACE is good at this. I just fight the battles and let the actions speak for themselves. That's how the Airborne is trained, and that's how we operate. That's why we're the best of the best. The Marines may hit the wall harder, but we can hit it any time, any-where. Our area of operations is wherever we land, and the enemy is never safe even in his native land.



What drives us is ambition to start, though from there it gets perverted. We all know this and accept it. A true war story if truly told makes the stomach believe. A true warrior fights as much with his gut as with his head. And the things I carry, they make me hate PEACE. Gut hate. The kind of hate that stays with you, even in your dreams.