These Heroic, Happy Dead by Luke Mogelson

Author:Luke Mogelson
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2016-04-25T16:00:00+00:00

By that time every local knew that Kansas—the wide track of barren earth and upturned trunks surrounding the patrol base, where we’d bulldozed the trees and razed the bushes to deprive would-be waylayers of cover—was a no-man’s-land across which, absent permission, one did not proceed. Nonetheless, according to Dupree, the kid climbed right over the berm of logs, which the bulldozer had pushed to the edge of the clearing and the locals, accustomed to burning dry cow patties in winter, had immediately ransacked, leaving smooth poles like driftwood heaped along a tide line. He climbed over the logs, said Private Dupree, set down the object, looked at the tower, and waved. Dupree raised his weapon and peered through the scope. The kid was skinny, barefoot.

“But the object,” I said. “The object.”

“Like…a lunch pail?” said Dupree.

We were in the box, a converted shipping container that served as our tactical-operations center, huddled over Murray, the contractor from Raytheon.

“Show me Kansas,” I said.

“Kansas, coming up,” said Murray, toggling the joystick that controlled the camera.

“Go get Sergeant Parker,” I told Dupree.

“Ain’t no lunch pail,” Murray said.

I leaned to the monitor. There, smack-dab in the middle of Kansas, equidistant between the logs and the entry-control point, sat a five-liter jerrican.

“Is that?”

“Ain’t no lunch pail,” Murray said. He chuckled to himself, and I could tell it was going to become a thing with him. Next time we heard gunfire on the ridge—“Ain’t no lunch pail.” Next time a scorpion skittered across the tent—“Ain’t no lunch pail.” Next time someone pulled a six-inch hair from his instant eggs or the helicopters strafed or a mortar or a ZPU round whistled overhead—

“Fuck’s that?” Sergeant Parker said.

I preempted Murray. “Looks like someone brought a present for you, Bruce.” Like the mustaches, using their first names was something the bomb techs did to remind everybody else that they were special. I went along. They were special. “Dupree says a kid just set it down and walked away,” I said.

“And waved,” said Murray.

“And waved,” I said.

Bruce Parker scowled at the monitor.

“Empty, I bet.”

But after he’d suited up, ventured out to Kansas, packed some C-4 around the jerrican, and uncoiled a detonation cord back to the ECP, Bruce had his game face on.

“Not empty,” he said.

—

At first, when we arrived in the village and erected the patrol base, we traveled everywhere by vic. They were magnificent machines, a locomotive’s worth of steel on wheels, the awesome apogee of our desperate, decade-old pursuit of superhuman invincibility. And yet: if you sparked enough potassium chlorate under one of them, the effect was comparable to wrapping a stick of dynamite in tinfoil. Within a month, I had the platoon moving exclusively on foot. An engineer with a metal detector would walk point while the rest of the squad followed in a line, stepping in one another’s boot prints or tight-roping down a trail of baby powder. Tactically, single-file has to be the least desirable formation into which infantrymen can organize themselves. But we were getting blown up, not bushwhacked, so fuck tactical, was my thinking.

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