The Patrol by William Lapham

We walked in formation through a desert village. It smelled like an outhouse.  We broke down doors, cleared rooms, but found nothing warworthy, no cache of weapons or explosives, and nobody to shoot. I was in the mood to kill somebody for his country.

At the end of the street, we kept marching into the desert. We climbed a rise and took a break. Some of us smoked. The lieutenant looked back at the village with a pair of binoculars. “I’ll be a sonofabitch,” he said. “They’re back.” He handed the glasses to the sergeant.

“You’re right, sir,” the sergeant said as he fiddled with the focus knob. “You are a sonofabitch.”

“Leave my mother out of this, Sergeant.”

“What are your orders, sir?” the sergeant asked.

“We’re going back.”

“Yes, sir. Won’t they see us coming, sir, and bug out again?”

Most of us were not paying attention to them. Some guys had dozed off. Others were munching MRE’s. I lighted a second cigarette from the butt of the first. A cold beer would have tasted good, but we had no beer.

Nelson spoke in a high twang that originated somewhere south of Atlanta but north of Florida. Everybody liked to listen to him talk. He would make a great Southern orator someday.

“Why don’ we call in one ah dem fucken air strikes the Air Force do, suh?”

Crocker blew smoke and laughed. The laughter was contagious.

The lieutenant smiled. “Because, Private Nelson, an air strike would kill everybody in the village, including women and children. You wouldn’t want their innocent blood on your hands, would you?”

“No, suh.” Nelson said with a far off gaze. “Ah don’ reckon ah would.”

“Good, then. It’s settled. No air strike.”

“Yes, suh,” Nelson said. He had such a sad face.

“What about artillery, Lieutenant?” the sergeant said.

The Lieutenant kind of nodded and reached for the radio. He called for a fire mission he had apparently prearranged with the division artillery officer.

The explosion just happened. We didn’t hear the howitzer shoot, and we didn’t hear the incoming round whistle through the air like in the cartoons. We saw the shell’s effects before we heard their cause. War was surreal that way. Shit would happen and you wouldn’t know why right away. There were delays caused by distance, echoes caused by shadows.

When the dust settled, the lieutenant said he could see no movement in the village. When we walked back to the village and searched the rubble, we found nothing.

There was just an empty space where a house had been. The street looked like a dentist had extracted a rotten tooth: house, house, no house, house.

“Fucken arty is ack-rit, boy,” Nelson said.

Crocker laughed.

William Lapham lives in Michigan. He is a Navy veteran and a graduate of the Goddard College low-residency MFA program. He teaches Freshman Composition at Davenport University.