Mexico by Josh Barkan

Author:Josh Barkan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2017-01-24T05:00:00+00:00

Had it all been in my mind? Was Charlie really gone? My buddy gone? Certainly his suitcase, which was at the bottom of our bunk, was gone when I got back to base. I sat on the bunk bed, thinking of Charlie, shocked and crying. Could Charlie have really been guilty, as the colonel said? There was the watch and the sudden money. But I needed proof, much more proof than that.

What I knew is that the colonel had gone crazy. Such a direct order to shoot Charlie could only have come from battle fatigue, from too many tours in Afghanistan and Iraq before being sent to the relative calm of the “pasture” of Mexico. But six months later, stateside, out of the heat of the moment in the field, I wasn’t so sure the order had come from battle fatigue. I had seen headlines in the newspapers that confirmed what I had seen on my own: drone strikes in Pakistan and Afghanistan, taking out people who had never been judged in a court of law. American citizens shot by the drones. Those were true terrorists, true enemies, and before the incident with Charlie, I had never thought about them too much. Yet now I could see, placed within a command environment of choosing who lives and who dies, and deciding that even American citizens could be shot from the sky, and placed in situation after situation where millions of dollars of cash are given out to buy the loyalty of men who are thieves, like the president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai—how far of a step was it from those actions, approved every day by my government, to an order that crossed the line, like the one from Colonel Saunders asking me to kill our own man, simply because he had double-crossed us? Yes, in Saunders’s heart of hearts, he must have known somehow that what he had ordered me to do was too much, a crossing into the land of some character like Mr. Kurtz in that novel by Joseph Conrad that I read once called Heart of Darkness. Coming home, I began to read up more and more, even at the slower pace of my dyslexia, to make sense of what had happened to me down in Mexico.

This morning it is Memorial Day, and a full year has passed since I left Mexico. I told the other men in my unit, after the battle where Charlie died, what the colonel had ordered me to do. None of the men would believe me, or they chose not to hear. The army wrote up a report about the “incident,” as they called it, and they said that after a case of accidental “friendly fire”—as they call such shots from us when we hit our own—the soldier, Charlie Reynolds, was lightly wounded and then taken out by the members of the Sosa Cartel. The description is completely accurate as to what happened, physically, and yet it is completely false. The colonel had me removed from the unit.

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