me and what army

stories by Michael Van Vleet

Me and What Army

STORIES BY MICHAEL VAN VLEET

FIELD GUIDE FOR IDENTIFICATION AND RECOGNITION OF

STORY OBJECTSGiant Ants Burning at Night......................................2

Invasion of the Righteous...........................................5

In the Trenches, Rot Sets In........................................6

Green Grass, A Terrible Garden................................9

We Are Men of Action...............................................12

A Message From Our Sponsor.................................16

A Flower Blooms in Violence...................................21

The Sound of Zippers................................................23

The worst thing about being in the Army is peacetime.

During peacetime, they come up with all sorts of crazy stuff for the unit to do. During a war, it’s easy. They hand out fl ashcards with pictures of what a typical enemy looks like and if you come across that enemy, you shoot them until they don’t move. Or, if you happen to be out of bullets, you can crawl through the mud in the dark with your knife in your teeth and slit their throats. That’s allowed, too. But when there’s no war, they have to keep us busy. And then we end up driving Jeeps out in the middle of the desert looking for monsters. The fi rst year I signed up, it was giant insects. They gave us fl ashcards with pictures of ants and other pictures of mushroom clouds. They said nuclear radiation had caused ants to grow larger than their exoskeletons should be

able to handle. According to our scientists, the ants wouldn’t be able to move at the size they were growing to. Their exoskeletons would collapse under their own weight. Also, ants don’t have lungs. They just have tubes in them, air tunnels. These wouldn’t work if they were too big either. So we had science on our side. We drove around the desert in our Jeeps looking for giant, non-moving, non-breathing ants and when we found them, we were supposed to shoot them, then light them on fi re. This was to keep them from ever getting it into their heads that maybe they should defy science and get up and breathe and walk around and eat taxpayers. It’s taxpayers who pay our salaries, we were reminded. So we should keep all taxpayers alive and paying taxes.

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During our fi rst week of patrols, my unit found two of them. Giant ants. Just lying there. We camped out around them and waited until night so that when we burned them, we could really see them burn. They burned so bright the stars dimmed and our sergeant told us stories about the last war. About island-hopping in transport jets and crawling through caves. He said he landed on an island where the enemy had taught monkeys to throw grenades at our troops. The enemy had colonies in the South that had had their local economies restructured to an agrarian, banana-based economy just so they could bribe these monkeys into fi ghting on their side. Giant bomber planes blacked out the sky with carpet-bombing runs of bananas. Our boys never had to hunt for food as they could pick enemy bananas right up off the ground during missions. Sarge told us the biggest enemy was dehydration, as all that fruit gave our boys the runs something serious. They were killing grenade monkeys just

to skin them and use their fur as toilet paper. It took too long to get resupplied with the real deal, so they had to make do. Another time, we weresupposed to drive our Jeeps in the desert and fi nd a single scientist who they said had been changed by radiation. There was a lot of radiation in the desert back then. Even during years we weren’t at war with anyone. I asked the Sarge, “Has he become giant, like an ant? Or has he become a human-sized ant that we must set on fi re?” The Sarge said no. This scientist had just injected himself with something that belonged to our great nation, against all protocol. Because of that injection when he got angry, his face would get really red and he could run for hours. The Army was worried he would run so far he would make it to China or some other country full of people who hate us, so we had to kill him. There are countries out there full of people who can’t sleep nights because they keep thinking about how they would like to kill us all. They hate the TV we watch and they hate

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how much we love our pets and children. If their strange gods existed and could grant them wishes, they would love nothing more than to run like this scientist could run. They’d run across our borders, a red-faced horde of madmen. And they would smash our TVs and our pets and our children. To prevent this from happening, we have to make sure those enemies never get their hands on our runaway scientists. It was hard work. He could run really fast. Sarge wasn’t exaggerating. We once fl ipped a Jeep while chasing after him. It’s hard to steer when you’re going that fast. But once we caught him, nobody really minded about the Jeep. Acceptable losses.

The desert is a beautiful place, I found. It has a kind of quiet that gives you room to think at night when you’re oiling your weapon. I don’t think I regretted the time I spent out there. I was still able to use the satellite phone to call my parents once a week. It’s just that it doesn’t seem right, though, taxpayers spending so much to train me every year, making sure I have nothing but bullets that will fi re straight and true, putting printers to work running off thousands of fl ash cards, just so I can hunt monsters instead of enemies of my President. I guess that’s all I’m getting at. A war would be nice. A break from this desert. Or at least, a new desert to drive around in, guns blazing, bodies blazing at

night. That’s all I’m getting at.

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Invasion of theRighteous

We arrived planetside, guns blazing, except for Ace who prefers to do “research” before even loading his blaster.

He tapped away on his laptop happily until a jaw, spinning and smoking, landed on his keyboard. I was like, “Dude! Oh fuck!” which is as close as I’m likely to get to apologizing, you know. I should know better than to be aiming my gun at the faces of enemies when I’m so close to delicate electrical equipment. My gun works just as well when burning holes into the trunk of a body. I do not have to detach limbs. Detaching limbs is a choice and it is choice and it is choicea choice I should not be making. Ace reminded me of this and for that, I am grateful. The locals were restless and we could tell because they opened fi re immediately as we touched down on top of the tallest local structure. Also, Ace’s pre-raid research said that reviews of the local theatre scene indicated heavy undercurrents of rage, paranoia and anti-imperialist sentiment in most current stage productions. If a planet’s actors and playwrights get uppity, the whole world gets uppity. It’s a recipe for disaster. And if the recipe is disaster, then we’re a touring company of master chefs. Our blasters are frosting tubes with decorative tips. And this now-subdued city, full of the smoking bodies of locals, is a baroque wedding cake. Ace, that bookworm, only has four medals. And he doesn’t even wear them. I wear every single medal I own even though these suits are really thin, like tin foil made of plastic. When my blaster is drawn I have to aim carefully because my arms are heavy with medals. I am the fucking best.

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Iwas told a lot of things about what war would or would not

be like. During basic training, my commanding offi cer told me most of them.

He said it would not be: a) a cakewalk b) a walk in the rain c) a tea party d) a dick-sucking party

It would be: a) hell b) the route to manhood c) our patriotic duty and cause for celebration d) a cock-sucking nightmare

So imagine my surprise when the bus drops me off at the war and everyone’s already got the trenches dug. I was looking forward to shoveling. I’ve always been a little chubby so I fi gured some shoveling would do be good. And I could teach everyone the chain gang songs I learned from watching prison

movies. The other day in the trenches, I was talking to a guy about reconnaissance protocol, but then he was shot and one of his eyes rolled down my government issue shirt and I said to myself, “Self, you’re just gonna have to read the manual to learn these techniques.” Sometimes the Army is very much a sink-or-swim kind of place. You have to be self-motivated. The next thing I said to myself was, “Get down you fool! They’re shooting at all of us!” Besides self-motivation, there’s always the enemy to keep you motivated, of course. My commanding offi cer here is one of those fancy new soldiers you’re not supposed to call “zombies” but everyone does at the mess hall. But when we call them zombies, we have to whisper, ‘cause they can hear like the dickens.

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Basically, Uncle Sam only has us for a few years and he wants to get his money’s worth so you’re not allowed out early unless your parents are rich. If you die in the fi eld, the docs bring you back and make you better. Like, you remember all the security codes, even the long ones, and you no longer feel pain or fear. You really enjoy shining your boots, even with all the mud around here. The formerly dead do not look like Frankenstein. They look like they used to look but with some staples on whatever part of them was shot when they died, ‘cause the docs can’t fi x that, not even with putty. I have a great gun and I’m meeting new people, which is great. Also, I’m now in a band. We’re not bad. The one time we tried to play a venue (Trench Tango-Xray), we got gassed out, so now our gigs are considered unlucky. I’m getting good at drumming on a few tins of rations, too. I have a whole tiny drum set made up of ready-to-eat kits and could drum with my bayonet and a Swiss Army Knife.

So far, the war is pretty cool and I’m looking forward to getting some shooting in. Let me tell you, life here is not like Beatle Bailey, no sir. You try and sleep on the job here and you’ll wake up with some doc shoving electrodes in your head and then people giggle when you walk by, your eyes bugged out from not having to blink in fear anymore. I’ll write more about the front later if I have time. And just like I promised, if I get anything shot off, I’ll try to mail it to you. Take care of yourself. Don’t forget to enlist when you get the chance. I’ll put in a good word for you with the band. See you when you get out of boot camp! I’ll do my best to still be here and not be patched together with colored wires and a whirring machine that helps me breathe! But if that happens anyway, please don’t stare. It won’t affect my drumming at all. If anything, the new lungs will work as a metronome and I’ll be better than ever. Write back soon.

Yours,Pvt. H323-332

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Our commanding offi cercame into the tent to tell us about how the

war was going, but we were all like “Shut the tent!” and “Please be quiet, we don’t care anymore!” The war had been going on for such a long time that I imagined my parents waiting patiently for my return, taping all my favorite shows on TV, videotapes covering every table and chair and they can’t fi nd anywhere to sit, they miss me so much. I remember back when they taught us how to use a bayonet. It takes practice, actually, though you’d think it would be easy. Ribs are the tricky part. You hit them wrong and your blade will skid to the side and then the enemy isn’t dead, he’s just beside you and that’s how he likes it. And our sergeant, whose name I totally forgot and I’m sorry, he would shout at us and

we had to answer him really quick. He’d be all “WHAT MAKES THE GRASS GROW, SOLDIER?” And I’d be the quickest to answer: BLOOD AND GUTS MAKES THE GRASS GROW, SIR! Then I’d stab the practice enemy right in the middle of his chest, the bayonet blade slipping in just underneath where the windpipe branches off into the lungs, splitting the bronchial tubes. If you do it right, you can place the blade near the duodenum so that if the enemy hiccups while dying you can actually feel your rifl e wiggle. The practice enemies don’t twitch, though, so you have to pretend. So anyway, I used to think about how wonderful it would be, just after the war was over, to just sit for awhile and maybe have a picnic among all that grass, green as a golf course,

GREEN GRASS,A Terrible Garden

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and all because we emptied out the guts of our enemy and that’s how nature works. I was thinking it would be nice to start a garden and if we have any prisoners left over, we can take a few out into the garden when we need to and open them up to feed the plants. But we’re here at the war now and there’s nothing but sand, sandy ground, sand in the air. No fucking ground or sky, just sand enough to make your lungs itch. That’s why we asked

our C.O. to be quiet, because we’re just sick of it. Sick of it. My eyes crunch when I blink, there’s so much sand. Also, I wasn’t given a bayonet here. Instead, guys in different tents set up these computers and click things and then we’re told that the enemy has just been blown up. This war totally sucks. I would give anything for just one green shoot, my hands slippery with blood and wholesome dirt.

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WE ARE MENOF ACTION

The Sarge told me I needed to process the prisoner by

the end of day and so I snapped to attention, saluted, said “SIR YES SIR!” and then grabbed the prisoner by the knot of his blindfold to lead him away. Prisoners are a relatively new phenomenon to this unit. Prior to this month, we spent all our time marching to and fro. We also set up a barber shop unit on the side of base closest to the enemy so they would be convinced we spent all our time worried about our hair. And no time at all worried about them. It was a crafty and psychological ploy and I hope it worked. The amount of gel in my hair makes it itch all the time. I brought the prisoner back to the cells and from my back pocket pulled out the latest issue of GI SOLDIER ADVENTURES, an instructional comic book they give us. It’s about the adventures of Green Recruit, a

decent but dumb guy who has a lot to learn. He’s learning to be the Gruff GI, the closest we can aspire to being real-life super-heroes. Not that we’re gonna wear capes or anything. It’s just that Gruff GI knows what to do in every situation. And he can even shoot someone in the face and not spend days crying about it afterwards, unable to sleep, which makes him better than all of us. I skipped ahead to Chapter Three, which is where Green Recruit learns how to use the Limb Trim machine, this new piece of tech that we got shipped to our unit special from Back Home. It’s a handy gizmo. It’s only for use on prisoners and even then only on the ones we don’t think would be reliable witnesses in any sort of world court. What it does is this: As the comic demonstrates, you get

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a prisoner to stick his arm in it, for example, then press the green button. BUUZZZZ! ZAP!Zap!ZAP! and the arm comes right off. Sticking out of the prisoner’s shoulder is a plastic seal and a doorknob-sized ball. And the arm, which slides out of the machine’s chute, now has a sealed off socket that fi ts the ball.No blood! No problem! BUZZZzzzz! ZAP!Zap!ZAP! goes arm number two next and VOILA! You’ve got an unarmed prisoner. You can pop the limbs back on them for offi cial photographs and they even work pretty good still, but the important thing is one strong yank takes them back off. It works with legs too. So setting down the comic, I talked to the prisoner and said I really needed him to put his arm in the machine for me. And he was very cooperative, es-pecially after I said that I would kill his daughter if he didn’t. Which wasn’t true. I wasn’t the one who took him prisoner so I don’t even know where his house is, never mind where his daughter might be. But to convince the prisoner,

I told him that before I killed her, I would teach her. I told him I would set aside an afternoon and tell her I was going to teach her math. But I wouldn’t teach her anything except nonsense. Just show her charts and graphs and 2+2 equals whatever I feel like, different every time. And just when she’s convinced she’s stupid and will never know math, I’d kill her. Even blindfolded, he managed to put his right arm in the machine and BUZZZ! ZAP!Zap!ZAP! it came off. I didn’t even have to tell him that I would not be swayed if his daughter would bring me an apple as a present. Wait. Do his people even have apples? I don’t think they have apples. I don’t know how they live. BUZZZ! ZAP!Zap!ZAP! and his other arm came off and I patted his head and thanked him because the end of day was approaching and I was one step closer to being a Gruff GI. Then we did the legs, which I promptly put back on ‘cause I wasn’t going to carry him everywhere. We went to go visit Sarge and I said “SIR, mission accomplished

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and the SUN has not SET, SIR!” and he looked up at me with a mouth full of mashed potatoes. I had found him in the mess tent. The prisoner stood next to me, knobs coming out of his shoulders. “You did good, kid,” said the Sarge, swallowing. “You sure that blindfold is secure on him? It wouldn’t do for the enemy to know where we eat.” I assured him it would be taken care of. I hadn’t read all of GI SOLDIER ADVENTURES, but there was probably a chapter about how to handle prisoners who have seen too much. Maybe there’s a machine to take care of them. I fi gured all I would have to do is tell him that if he knew where we ate, we would cook up something so tasty that his daughter would smell it and come to get some. And then we would remove her limbs. And then we would send her limbs back to our country where the world’s fi nest tattoo artists would decorate them with fl ames and demons and naked women. Then they would ship the limbs back and she could have them back. Tattooed and

ridiculous. Do her people tattoo themselves? Would that be offensive enough? I have no idea. The sun was setting and I put the prisoner in a cell. I tied up his arms and took them with me, stowing them under my cot. On my back, waiting for lights out, I wondered. I wondered if I really could be a teacher. I wondered if the Limb Trim hurt as much as it looked like it did or if prisoners faked it a little. I would fake it, if I was them. I wondered if the arms under my cot were gonna squirm around on their own when I really needed to sleep. A soldier needs his rest. Busy day tomorrow. Probably have to use that machine again on someone new. Apples, far from home. The teacher’s edition has all the answers in it. Disarming theenemy like action fi gures because we are men of action. Tired. I really, really didn’t want those arms to squirm around down there. I’m a light sleeper. There was going to be a lot of work to do.

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Today, we gathered in the mess hall where the A/V boys had set up a projector and a wide screen. But tonight wasn’t movie night. Thursdays are movie nights. Monday, which today was, is usually just night patrol, like every night that isn’t movie night or a holiday. The metal folding chairs creaked under the unit’s weight, soldiers greeting friends as they fi led into the tent and beat sand off of their shoulders. Fingers dug deep into ears to try and knock the silicate out. It never worked, but it couldn’t hurt to try. When we started out, only our sergeant yelled all the time, calling us “sissy mary” and “worm face,” so that we’d hustle faster and kill more of the people who live in this country. But the longer we’ve stayed here, the more sand has worked its way into our ears, so now we all yell.

“PASS THE SALT, JACOBSON!” we might say at mess. “HUH?” someone might reply. Maybe not even Jacobson. Then there would be a quick mime show on the theme of salt, to get the message across. Suggested associations for such miming would include swinging an imaginary pick-axe as in a salt mine, waving arms to indicate the rolling salty ocean, or knocking on a door while drinking a caffeine-free beverage to indicate Mormonism from Salt Lake City. “OH, SALT!” And then the salt would be passed with a rueful pointing at ears that haven’t worked for months. Many of the boys keep diaries and I wouldn’t be surprised to fi nd them full of entries about how once they get their leave, the fi rst thing they’re going to do is buy an armload of Fleet

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enema kits and use them on their ears. I sat in my seat quietly, waiting for whatever they had to show us. Normally, I’d be out among the dunes by now, night vision goggles on. It was what, 2200 hours now? I should have at least two kills. I should have two more faces that will look at me sadly when I close my eyes to sleep. And when I get those two more faces, I hope I can pick them out, because by now I’ve got a small crowd of resentful enemies who haunt my dreams. It gets harder and harder to pick out the new guys. Finally, the lights lowered. The projector spat up a fl ickering image on the screen and the boys quieted down. The image was that of our President. The man who decided that we should be out here with the sand fl eas. “My fellow Americans... brave soldiers of our armed forces... and support staff. I thank you for your service to your country.” Next to me, Lance had pried his boots off and was pouring sand on to the fl oor. There was a quiet tinkling sound whenever

sand bounced off the cross bar that connected the front legs of his chair. “Today, I bring to you a message of thanks... and of congratulations... and of hope. Because of your continued efforts, that country that you’re in... well, it used to be a real mess.” The President grinned, lopsided. I guess he fi gured we all knew that. “But now it’s the kind of mess we know how to deal with. Shaky political alliances? Tricky stuff. Burnt out buildings and a shattered infrastructure? That.... that we know how to fi x. And you folks of the armed forces deserve a lot of credit for that burning and shattering. Bless you.” Thank you very much. “But today... we’re turning a new corner with the backwards inhabitants of the country you are all visiting. Today we are to start a new initiative wherein we stop killing them on sight and start befriending them. And once we know who our favorites are among them, we will give them guns and train them to kill their own if it’s required to keep

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order.” Now there was a good idea. I fi gured that anything we could do to increase the numbers on our side was fantastic. After all, that experimental program we had where we reanimated our dead didn’t really work as advertised. We spent half our time trying to get the dead guys back on their feet. It’s tricky enough to stand when you’re dead. Standing in shifting sand is even tougher, all your dead limbs sinking in and responding too slow to the impulses of the gear that’s keeping you alive. Another thing hurting our numbers was the fact that news got out about the zombies. The fact that even if you died you’d have serve out the rest of your tour was hurting our recruiting rate. Even for college credit, not a lot of guys wanted to stick around and risk ending up a shuffl ing, heavily-armed zombie. I don’t know what their problem is. If my death can be postponed, I’m all for it.Electrical pulses pushing my cold limbs. Some four-eyed tech

who almost got deferment for general womanliness running me with a remote control. Anything is better than facing The Big Black because I caught a bullet from some rowdy local who doesn’t appreciate all the good we do. This war is taking forever to be over with. I feel like in previous wars, the thing that helped them be over were the survivors. People who left bits of themselves on the battlefi eld. Every man who left an ear, a leg, a set of limbs on the fi eld and lived... every one of them went home and became an anti-war advertisement. But we don’t leave many sur-vivors these days. I have two pistols in my pack that, if fi red, leave nothing but shadows on the wall. One is in case the other one stops working. I have heard that if I should manage to break them both, more are available for the asking. I can make shadows until every wall in this fucking country is black. Instead of the color of sand. Sand and more sand.

A Flower Bloomsin Violence

Donald puked all over his rifl e, so I’m pretty sure

Sarge isn’t going to put a gold star next to his name today on the company roster that Sarge keeps on a clipboard. Sarge really wants us to work for those gold stars. Not to take them for granted. These new rifl es are pretty fancy, too. The cool thing about them is the physics, which I don’t get, but when you shoot the enemy it gets pretty hilarious. How it looks is like this-- say I’m up on the roof of one of their fucking chalky-mud primitive huts, little bugs chewing up my legs and crotch like usual. (I hate this country and the vermin who live here.) Along comes Johnny Bugdick, enemy soldier, below me in the trash-strewn street, munching a burger like he earned it. I’d line up the cross-hairs right above his left ear and pull the trigger and Bam! For about

two seconds I’d be deaf and below, a chunk of meat would leave the right side of his head and stay there. He’d stay there, upright, the red mist and bone hanging off of his head like a fl ower tucked behind his ear. Festive. He’s frozen there, knocked outta time for as long as it takes the bullet to shed its temporal charge. Between his teeth, the burger. In his pubes, some very confused, slowed down bugs. For all I know, his brain still trying to think “Yum! Good burger! This will give me energy to kick the foreigners out of my backwards country so I can go back to beating my wife, kicking neighborhood children to the ground and slapping animals that look at me funny.” And what we’re left with is an instant propaganda statue right in the middle of the road for all the locals to see. When we fi rst started using these new rifl es,

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the locals would try and take the statues away to bury them, but they learned quick that they couldn’t do it. Whoever gets close enough to a temp-bulleted corpse slows down too. It’s a localized effect. The company used to laugh because after a successful fi refi ght, we’d go back to the mess hall, play some cards, come back the next day and some dumbass local is there, stuck to a corpse, looking surprised and trying to let go... very, very slowly. Anyway, today Donald got jumped by some teenage resident-turned-combatant who was wielding a broken bottle or something. Donald was taking a piss against a wall when the kid rushed him, yelling. Which is a mistake. If you’re gonna jump a man while he’s pissing, you should probably do it quietly. Most of us soldiers spend our piss time making sure our urine isn’t showing blood. We’re distracted, but we’re not deaf. Donald spun at the sound and pipped the kid’s face on instinct with his temp-gun. Unfortunately, he was then pinned against the wall by the

kid’s now-frozen body. That’s how we found him, bloody bits of the kid’s face drifting closer and closer to him as he yelled for help. After we managed to stop laughing, Fagen got Donald to promise him a week’s worth of desserts to pull him away from the kid’s demolished spray-fl ower face. Another day, another statue. And Donald coulda got a gold star from Sarge for that kill, no problem, if he hadn’t chucked. I mean-- great refl exes to shoot a local with your dick still hanging out. But it’s bad form to pitch your lunch just because you got a little speckled. Or at least puke quick, before the squad gets there. Then you can blame the statue. Or say it’s local puke, some passerby who fl ed in the face of our determination to share with them the gift of freedom. Anyway. Best part of the whole story is that some of Donald’s piss is still there, slowly but surely soaking the statue’s leg. I hope the locals seriously get the point. We’ll gladly piss on all of them. We drink lots of water and have plenty of ammo.

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We had to get the prisoners of war out of the fi ghting arena for several reasons. 1. They were totally hungry all the time and since they didn’t have any fi ghting to do, they always got to the mess tent fi rst and ate the crunchiest bacon. I’ve never eaten so much fatty limp bacon as I have since we captured them. I’ve even asked Pvt. Leftoe, who’s pretty quick on his feet, to save me a place in line, but even he can’t get to the tent before the prisoners have already lined up out the door and halfway to the showers. 2. The prisoners show us pictures of their family and kids all the time, but when we take out our pictures, they act bored and go fi nd something else to do. 3. As our handbooks say, we’re supposed to be 200% focused on killing the enemy because that is our job and guts makes the green grass grow and who doesn’t like grass? So having enemies around

we’re not supposed to kill is distracting. It’s not staying “on message.” I had just fi nished opening a can of dry rations for Wonderpup, our company’s mascot, when I heard some of the prisoners’ jabbering from somewhere past the security tents. I didn’t know how long they had been talking, because I had been concentrating really hard. Sometimes the rations for Wonderpup are hard to open because you have to insert a key and turn it slowly to peel back the metal and if you twist too fast, the key will break. Then you have to use a knife, or tiny explosive charge, which isn’t what they trained you to use them for but you have to be fl exible. Anyway, the prisoners have their own language and culture, apparently, so whenever a few of them start fl apping their gums, I get curious. So I got up and went to go see what was happening and Wonderpup

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came along after me, the lucky ammo belts we let him carry dragging rows in the sand under his belly. Our C.O. was talking to the prisoners as I walked up, saying that we had to send them away from the front for their own protection. The best way to do that would be if they would climb into our standard issue body bags and allow us to zip them up for easy storage. One of them was translating for the others and when he was done, they started yelling and falling to their knees to punch the sand, which our handbooks say is a sign of displeasure in their “culture.” I stepped in. “Really, it’s not that big a deal, fellas. Most of us soldiers were shipped out here in the bags ourselves. I remember mine fondly. Best sleep I’ve had the whole war. Very roomy.” Then, to prove how much we trusted the bags to safely transport their contents, I grabbed Wonderpup and with everyone watching, put him

inside a bag and zipped him up. I put a hand up to my ear and made like I was listening really hard. “See? He’s not even barking. How bad could it be? I’ll even send him with you to prove it’s safe. And he’s our mascot and good luck charm!” Finally, the prisoners were won over and they gathered their stuff and pretty soon our company was busy zipping them all up for the journey. All the black bags except for one were piled up in a truck that then disappeared down the road. We watched the cloud of sand the trucks had kicked up slowly drift and settle. Then I ran over and let Wonderpup out of his bag. He looked up at me sadly as he climbed out, but I’m sure I can get him to forgive me. Because the next time I go to the mess tent, I know I’ll fi nally be able to get crisp bacon and Wonderpup can certainly have some. That dog is a hero. A true hero.

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The cover image is by Kieran Mangan, all rights reserved on his behalf. The book design and additional artwork are by Amanda Summers. The works of fi ction are licensed by the author under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA. Many of these stories appeared in rougher forms online at Lost Time Incident and ymi.diaryland.com. But even if you read them there, these versions are better. I swear on my mother’s grave. She’ll be pissed to hear that, though. Don’t tell her. Seriously. She’s not even sick. Those wishing to contact the author can reach him at [email protected].

me and what army

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