Ironhound

It's not the man in the combat, it's the combat in the man

The accusing eyes of a police dog, gold star on his chest and cute little patrolman's cap on his head, stared at me from across the room. Stuffing leaked from his burst plushy guts. I faced down my accuser and triumphed.

I'd reported to the Brigade Commander at his advanced HQ, set up just the night before in a ruined toystore in the Brigade Area of Operations. Staff bustled here and there, treading on the crushed heads of dolls and skittering on tiny cars.

There were the usual sounds you get in a tactical HQ: buzz of drones and crackle of radio comms. The smell of intense urban combat drifted over the place: crackling ozone, fuel oil, palm dates, rat feces, spilt souring milk. But not the noise, apart from a lone dog barking blocks away and the odd angry shot. It was quiet this time of the morning. Our boys hadn't had their breakfasts yet.

A cup of coffee handed to me by an aide, no sugar: sharp, tasting black and dextrous, metallic as razor wire and thunder. I tuned out the other scents and focussed my mind on that taste and odor alone. The bitterness became me.

The Brigade Commander strode into the Ops Room, towering as a golem, magnificent and machine-like in his buzz-cut, shoulder-holster and calf-strapped commando boots. Command of a combat unit is mostly just a matter of ruthlessness and theater, and his performance told you he would slit any throat, even yours, even his own, perhaps, to achieve operational objectives within the designated timescale.

I was overwhelmed by this resolute monster, as was the intention; if it hadn't been for the coffee I would have wept like a child when faced by some foreboding stranger. As it was, I kept it together enough to stay silent and wait for him to initiate.

He lurched to the room's center of mass, faced me and my wincing cup, and thrust out some words that only repeated what I'd already seen in my written orders: attach to F.O.B. IRONHOUND, assess intel, analyze, report. I drifted into his eyes, pretty as a schoolgirl's despite being set like dainty gems in a brutalist square-aligned field of scar and leather. There was a sparkling loveliness in them that his bluster and callousness somehow couldn't quite conceal.

"Are you by any chance tripping, major? Tripping balls?"
"Sir, pursuant to agreed doctrine for intel analysis, it's SOP to microdose with LSD when engaged in the active analysis of operational intelligence. I was so engaged just before coming here, sir."

Not strictly true: I'd dropped a tab while bored out of my skull at Corps HQ and was now coming down from a peak just around midnight, when witches flew on broomsticks between the drones and dragons rode in on iron bombs to cough out their phosphorescent satisfaction wherever they landed.

"SOP or no SOP, I'm not having anyone attached to my unit involved in drug-taking of any type. There'll be no hallucinogenic use here, whether engaged in intel analysis or not. Got me, son?"
"Yes sir, no acid sir. Nor any other drug, sir."
"Questions...? Dismissed."

I saluted and turned, but way before I'd even thought of moving, he'd swooped on one of his aides and was scooping handfuls of knowledge from out of his skull. I was nothing to him, a distraction of less import than a shred of stuffing from the guts of a plushy pooch which clung to his thick-soled commando boots.

There was literally no one in charge at F.O.B. IRONHOUND. It was like an experiment in aimlessness. The previous platoon commander had been medevacced the day before, and there was an unspoken struggle for dominance between the squad leaders, three reservist sergeants who all worked in the same tech startup back in the world. It seemed that whoever gained command of the platoon would thereby gain control of the development of a new killer app employing AI in dating platforms when they rotated back. A shitshow of an entirely normal shape and size.

I could have assumed temporary command myself but why bother? If I played my cards right I'd be outta there in a week or two. To get involved in some obscure combat-unit politics is such a lifer game to play. I had my own concerns.

F.O.B. IRONHOUND was based at the city library, considered a secure and robust structure with good axes of approach and clear fields of fire from the roof to dominate the local neighborhood. The library was just about the oldest building in the city, with solid columns of classical girth and weightiness.

It had fine spacious reading rooms, now vandalized to shit, with all the books in their unreadable script scattered all over the floor. There was an inner atrium where a bunch of chickens wandered amid the the parched and wilting shrubbery and the marble ornamental fountain, now dry. A local woman had been attached to the unit to interpret, but since nobody wanted to talk to the city dwellers, she simply tended the chickens and cooked the platoon their stew in a makeshift kitchen in the western reading room.

The enlisted men were not startup entrepreneurs like the squad sergeants. They were tough farmers and orchard-tenders who scrubbed along in sunny valleys with automatic weapons strapped to their backs. They loved each other intensely; everything and everyone else they hated, not least the squad leaders and the now-departed platoon commander. And me.

I saw them sitting round a fire in the eastern reading room, feeding the books stripped from the shelves one by one into their warming fire. Breakfast was done and I'd missed it. Now they were just huddling. One of them had a guitar which he strummed tunelessly. The others just kind of squatted or lay around the flames and stared into space.

They ignored me utterly. I was just some spectacled geek from Brigade who held no mystery to them, an open book in an unreadable script which didn't merit any effort to learn. A city-boy, a dweeb. They looked away from me, or else stared with malign incuriosity at the empty space which I occupied.

I was hungry, so I set about scrounging up a late breakfast. First I ran down the local woman who was tossing seed at the nonchalant chickens in the ornamental space of the atrium.

"Hey lady! Whatcha got to eat round here? Why don't you grab me one of those nice chickens to roast?" I projected my voice and it echoed nicely through the space, coursing out to the corridors and around and into the reading rooms.

Silence in the library, screw that.

"I wish I would be dead," she said in her language. The fact that I knew her own language's grammar better than she did indicated that she was not a regular former user of this sadly depleted center of learning.

"I wish I would be able to end it all. A martyr, not a slave."
"How about you fix me one of those chickens in a pot!" I yelled. "I haven't eaten since yesterday!"

Our little kerfuffle had drawn some attention, and the soldiers started to gather in the doorways from the reading rooms to the atrium. There was nothing else going on. This pathetic squabble was something. Therefore interesting. One or two raised their cellphones and started filming, contrary to standing orders. I said nothing to them.

The woman was wailing something I couldn't understand. I still stayed clear of her but raised my voice some more.

"You hear me, woman? I'm hungry, I need something to eat!"
"Oh God save us, God have mercy, I wish to be dead and out of it all!"

I drew my pistol and cocked it.

"You gonna get me a chicken or not?"
"Mercy on us, mercy on me, such evil times, such evil men among us..."

I walked over to where a chicken stood pecking at nothing in particular on the white gravel, between a ficus and a tiny withered peachtree.

Fired once. The sound was fine and resonant in that echoing space. The remaining chickens scattered, clucking madly.

I picked up the bloody remains of the chicken with the devastated chest. Probably not much white meat left on it. Thrust it into the hands of the wailing woman.

"Here. Cook that for me. A little cus-cus to go with it."

She turned and headed back into the west wing, still calling on her God to take her from this sinful world. There was blood all over her hands but only literally.

I looked toward the men, who now gazed upon me with a different expression.

"Hey, major, while you're waiting for that to cook, maybe you could have a little of my special hummus. Sent special by my sister."
"Yeah, come on over to the fire and warm yourself a little."
“Join us, sir. What’s ours is yours.”

That night I slept among these men, as we huddled our sleeping bags for warmth against the night frost creeping into the cracking shell of the city’s only library.

I threw another book on the fire and snuggled with them. Together they dreamed a single dream, but I could dream only of burst chickens and the blood that had seeped into my heart.

The Library of Babel, where this story has already been written

NOTES

Miltary Glossary
FOB - Forward Operating Base, an outpost
SOP - Standard Operating Procedure, the ‘doctrine’ or established way of operating

With gratitude and love for Isaac Babel, the absolute master.
This is an adaptation of his story "My First Goose" from Red Cavalry/Konarmiya (1926).
A retelling or possibly an inversion of his story of Soviet Cossack forces in the 1920 Polish War.

For the use of LSD in military intelligence, see:
'Microdosing: Improving performance enhancement in intelligence analysis' by Major Emre Albayrak USMC, Marine Corps Gazette February 2019

For The Golem in Modern Warfare, see:
Maya Barzilai, Golem: Modern Wars and Their Monsters (2016)