The Society of Timid Souls by Polly Morland

Author:Polly Morland [Morland, Polly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-88908-9
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2013-07-08T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

MAN (II)

J’ai vécu.*

ABBÉ SIEYÈS, when asked what he had done during the French Revolution

IMAGINE THIS. YOU ARE STANDING IN THE DESERT. YOU ARE an eighteen-year-old soldier. You signed up three years ago, when you were scarcely more than a child, but this is your first war. The combats you are wearing are patched and came in packaging marked with the name of the last war your country’s army fought in this desert. You were only six back then. You have spent the last month in a desert camp not far away, waiting and training and watching your country’s leader on satellite TV arguing the casus belli. Every few days you drive in convoy up to the border between one tract of desert and the other, and then you drive back again. A few of you crack jokes about coming on holiday. But one day, a Friday, you cross that border, and along with many thousands of others, you have become, overnight, an invading army. Monday comes and your brigade is assigned a mission. You are to look for the enemy’s armored division in what your seniors term “virgin territory.” This is how you pass the week: by day, you patrol down long, straight, desert roads waiting to see if anyone or anything shoots at you and periodically they do; by night, you sleep on the sand with your buddies inside a square of your parked vehicles. It is very hot; you smoke a lot of cigarettes and eat a certain quantity of boil-in-the-bag burger ’n’ beans, but you have yet to really taste war.

Until now. It is Friday again, your eighth day in the theater of conflict. You are standing in the same desert as before, but you are surrounded by blood, flames, gunfire, and screaming. This is to be your first and your last day of war.

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