“Butted heads? Ya tried to punch me,” I said with a chuckle. “You were so hellbent on savin’ those people, ya didn’t see that it was my job to keep all of us alive and in one piece…fat load of good that did us in the end, eh?”
“Don’t pull the pity card,” he said, not roughly, but not exactly gently either. “And what you didn’t understand, not even afterward, was that it was something I had to do. Not as a soldier, but as a man…as a person. And I remember what you said back then. For the record, I knew that was your job, but that was something that went beyond my job, or my ‘duty’. It was my obligation. Even if I’d got hurt, it would have been worth it.”
“Even if they were people who would’ve helped the people shootin’ at us?”
“Sometimes we do things we think are for the greater good that aren’t, or might be but come back and bite us in the ass all the same.”
“Ya think that was for the greater good?”
“It’s fine to pretend we were the good guys, Cade. Because that’s what everyone does in situations like that, everyone is the good guy in their own head. But even then, I still wouldn’t have cared. That was a half-starved man, a terrified woman, and a little boy. It was the only right thing to do in that situation.”
“And if one of us had been hurt…or killed tryin’ to help you?” I asked calmly because the anger from that day, and that argument, was long gone. It was just that after all this time, I realized I had been missing something important about him back then. I had been so caught up in being furious at his refusal to follow my orders, at the fear I’d felt when he had leaped intoaction and half my team had formed up as if sharing one mind to help him, and all for what? People we didn’t even know, people who weren’t…well, weren’t my men.
“You asked me that back then too,” he said softly. “And my answer remains the same. That hasn’t changed.”
“At all?”
“No. Has your reaction changed?”
I remembered how I’d stood there, towering over him and roasting him over the coals of my fury and frustration, and had demanded an answer to that same question. There had been a sense of accomplishment, ofvictory,when he had bowed his head with a troubled look in his eyes. Here was a soldier who had been on my team for just shy of two months, and I thought he had finally understood that what he had done was stupid, impulsive, and dangerous to the rest of us. I had thought he finally understood the stakes he was playing with, and would finally fall into line.
And then he had picked his head up, and I could see from the hard look in his eyes that victory was far from my grasp, even before he had spoken.
“To be a soldier is to accept death,ourdeaths. But I won’t make others pay that price.”
It had been like a slap in the face because he wasn’t backing down, and because it was like facing down the reality of what we were, of what we did, and of what could happen to us. I still remembered what I had said and the easy grace with which he’d accepted my rebuke.
“You’re a terrible soldier,” I echoed my past self and then chuckled. “I guess that was as true then as it is now, ain’t it?”
He smiled. “I guess I was, and I am. Maybe I should have never enlisted, but I thought…I thought I was going to be doing something good in the world. But then reality set in, and Irealized all I was doing was just…I was just another cog in the machine. And then that family?—”
I closed my eyes, but it couldn’t block the memory of coming back through that village a few days later to ensure everything was calm again. The family he had risked his life, our team’s lives for, had been heaped in a pile along with others. We never got the answer to why those specific people had been killed, but we suspected. Walker’s act of mercy and compassion had inevitably doomed them, and the realization had been…ugly. It had taken a few of us to hold Walker back when the person overseeing the ‘burial’ had sneered and told us that accidents happened, especially when you were stupid enough to accept help when death was preferable.
It was the only time I’d ever seen Walker lose all self-control and composure. It was as if a wild animal inside him had been released, and we’d been forced not just to pin him to the ground, but to drag him away in zip ties. If we hadn’t stopped him, I was sure Walker would have burned half that village to the ground. Maybe they deserved it, but Walker didn’t deserve to live with that on his conscience along with everything else.
“I want to say that war makes monsters out of men, but that feels like an excuse,” he said softly, staring up at the ceiling distantly. “I think the monster is always there, in all of us. All it needs is an excuse to come out; war is one of the easiest excuses.”
I wasn’t sure how we had gone from me going through my first bottoming experience to the horrors of war and being soldiers, but there we were. “They weren’t your fault.”
“I know…or at least I’ve always known in my head that it wasn’t my fault,” he said, closing his eyes. “I wasn’t the one who killed them. I wasn’t the one who decided a suffering family in need of help deserved to die because I chose to help them. And it took me a long time to understand that. In a lot of ways, it wasn’tmy fault that I was there. I had been lied to, had been told that this was the better way, that I could do something worthwhile there. And they, even the ones who chose to murder that poor family, had been told they were doing the right thing. There is nothing more monstrous than someone who does evil in the name of good.”
“You’ve done a lot more thinkin’ on this than I ever did,” I said quietly, and when he glanced at me with his gaze sharp, I realized how that sounded. “Naw, it’s not a bad thing. I mean, I don’t think it is…but maybe it would’ve been easier on you if ya hadn’t thought so much about it. I never thought about it too much. Wish I could say I had to try not to think about it, but that’s not true. Back then, all that mattered was gettin’ shit done like we were supposed to, and gettin’ all of us back in one piece.”
“And that’s all you ever needed to be,” he said softly, reaching up and brushing hair off my forehead. “That’s what you were, who you were, Cade. You don’t have to be some overthinking idiot like me. I kind of wish sometimes it could have been like that for me, but my brain has never let me have that kind of…I don’t want to say peace, but that simplicity you’re so good at sounds peaceful.”
“Just makes me one of those cogs ya were talkin’ about.”
“I was just as much a cog as you were, Cade. A cog who knows they’re a cog isn’t any happier than a cog that doesn’t realize it because he’s got a personal mission.”
“One I failed at, I didn’t save any of ya.”
“And I didn’t change anything. I’m right back to being under the thumb of the very machine I was trying to thwart.”
When he put it like that, it was easier to see how he had become so bitter and angry. “That’s why ya are the way ya are…ain’t it?”
“Bitchy and mean?” he asked with a laugh. “Yeah, well, I guess there’s some truth to that. For all that I tried to dodifferently, to changesomething. I’ve ended up back in the machine, bowing my head like a good little boy.”
“Hey,” I said roughly, gripping his jaw tightly. “There ain’t nothin’ wrong with doin’ things for the people ya care about, alright? Ya didn’t fail ’cause ya care for your family, Walker. Love isn’t a failing.”
