A Private Little War by Sheehan Jason

Author:Sheehan, Jason [Sheehan, Jason]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: 47North
Published: 2013-06-10T18:30:00+00:00

In his bed, in his tent on Iaxo, Carter thought back to that day, that moment, that picture. He knew that he hadn’t had that look on his face because he was happy. He’d been shot in the neck while piloting the rescue helicopter crashed and burning in the background. He was dying. And those marines certainly weren’t headed his way to help. They were coming to arrest him. To drag him to his feet, stomp the little frog-thing he’d been holding beneath their heavy boots, popping its head like a grape; to dig their fingers cruelly into the wound in his neck until he screamed and cried for them to stop; then to beat him into unconsciousness—which, if he recalled correctly, hadn’t taken much.

Carter spent eleven years in a military prison after that, and all of NRI’s politicians and lawyers and rich members and documentary filmmakers and idealistic young followers and sympathetic supporters and soldiers and believers and faithful didn’t do a goddamn thing to get him out. He was beaten regularly in prison. Left to rot in solitary confinement, on a diet of water and thin protein gruel all full of spit and piss and worse. He was raped. Humiliated. Passed around. Starved. He was left for dead by guards more times than he could count, by men who wanted him to die because he didn’t belong. Because he was a race traitor, a tree hugger, an alien lover. Because he was an aberration, an enemy combatant imprisoned among those against whom he’d fought. For eleven years he was kept mostly in solitary because, if left to the appetites of the general population for more than five minutes, no one would’ve ever found enough pieces of him to identify his body.

To NRI, he’d served his purpose, and was forgotten but for a once-a-year care package with some cigarettes, candy, toiletries, and a form letter from the board of directors thanking him for his brave sacrifice and saying how concerned they were for his health and well-being. It was the same goddamn letter every year. That Carter remembered very clearly. None of them could even be bothered to sign it themselves. He checked every year before using the letter as toilet paper, or to smear the blood of another beating from his face.

One year they’d even sent him a T-shirt with that picture screened onto the front and the NRI logo on the back, telling him he should wear it often, “to show his continuing dedication to the cause of native rights.”

His name had been blacked out of the picture. He’d assumed it was so that no one who saw it ever asked, Hey, whatever happened to Kevin Carter?

No one ever did.

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