XIV. Odious

I was in a hospital tent. It was the kind erected in a hurry and torn down a few days later, to be carried on the backs of its former patients to some other wet battlefield. Red splattered the bleached canvas walls, and low cots sat in two rows of eight. On each cot, a perfectly human-shaped bundle lay wrapped in formerly white sheets, now yellowed with age and marred with holes. I was the only exception, tucked off to the side, lying on my back with my abdomen wrapped in bandages and doing everything I could to keep my mind occupied. I lay stiff as a board, like my fellows all around, and cried when no one was looking.

You should count yourself lucky you survived, with an injury like this.

I was lucky. Whenever he came in to check on me, the doctor put his hand on my shoulder and told me over and over how lucky I was. He explained in great detail what had happened in that jungle, how rapidly my friends had fallen, how lucky I was that the landmine had gone off when it did. He said I was lucky my hearing came back in the days after I woke, and lucky I had come across the mystery man in the woods, who they knew of, but could not explain to me.

But the whole idea made me sick. With the pain, there was a profound guilt. I had missed most of the shots aimed at me, while some of my squad mates had returned riddled with bullets. In the explosion, instead of breaking my leg, I sprained my wrist. How did that make me worthy of surviving? Some of those men had wives and children, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers who loved them. I lay awake for hours wishing they had lived and I had not, and then hours more wondering if there was really life after death, like my mother wanted to believe.

I was wrapped in these thoughts the first few times Larry came to visit. He showed up on the fourth day, put his hand on my head, remarked "You are one tough son of a bitch," and then talked to the doctor for a while. He came again two days later, looking rougher, his uniform a little less crisp, and sat by my cot for a while, talking about things that I barely heard.

On the eleventh day, the fog cleared, and his entrance provided a needed relief from the plain silence of the tent. He was crisp again, clear, and smiling.

"You look like you finally waded out of that mud, kid."

Larry was a part of my thoughts on the hardest days. I questioned why he saved me, how he had known where I was, and why he had sent me off alone with a hole in my stomach. I could have died. I should have died. In some dreams he was the hero, and in my nightmares he was the jovial villain, clean cut and sympathetic, but determined to make me live through this.

He was older than me, his hair longer than military-issue, combed back, resting above his ears and puffing at the top. His uniform was camo, but vague when it came to rank. He looked so out of place in the jungle, and his nonchalance was haunting. I had so many questions, but all that came out of my mouth was a raspy, "Why?"

His face changed, and he seemed to know what I meant, even though I scarcely knew. He sat beside my cot, crossing his legs on the ground, and set those grey eyes on me.

"We heard the gunfire, and I saw you in the woods."

Again, and louder, "Why?"

"Nothing but luck. I know that's not what you want to hear, but it's true." Larry had a grim voice, his mouth in a flat line, his cheeks worn with scowling wrinkles.

It must have been what my mind wanted to know, because that sent a jolt through me. I had no more tears, not after mourning them every day since I woke, but if it was still possible this information made me feel emptier.

Larry saw that, and he said, "Save me all that existential shit, and try to hear what I'm saying. Everyone is dead. All of them. You survived. There's nothing you can do to bring them back, nothing you can do to help. Some of them are on planes headed back to the States and some of them are rotting out there with maggots in their eye sockets – and there's nothing you can do."

His words were biting, but they unlocked a new feeling inside. It was not just grief and guilt anymore, but anger. Pure, red rage.

Larry's eyes glinted like a cat's, "But you can avenge them. I know you want to. I see it in you. You want to fill that void inside, let go of all this frustration, blow some gibberish-speaking thugs' brains all over the ground. You want justice."

He was right. I wanted to find the people who did this and kill them. I wanted to forsake the goodness that my mother insisted she saw in me and blanket the enemy with bullets.

Larry pulled a small flask from his chest pocket and took a swig, a dark emotion in the backs of those grey eyes. His thoughts were impossible to read. "I read your file while you were getting your beauty sleep. You spent a lot of time in Russia, a few weeks in the Far East. You lost a man out there, too. War is a tough business."

Ford was the first, and now there were more. I could see their faces, their smile, hear their voices alongside the crackle of a fire – whispering, murmuring, gurgling.

Larry went on, "We have a mutual friend. Your drill sergeant in Basic."

His words surprised me, "You know McKinney?"

"I was a marine, once upon a time. We served together." Larry smiled a grim sort of smile, and took another, longer drink. "McKinney was a straight-shooter, as tight-laced as anyone. When they told me you made it back, and I found that old man in your file, I thought it had to be destiny."

"What?"

"You and I, crossing paths." Larry set his flask down, and held out his hand. "Michael Westen, it is an honor to meet you. My name is Larry Sizemore, and I'm a spy."

I took his hand before he finished talking, and jerked it away when he was done. A spy? He had to be joking. When I heard that word I thought of crisp black suits and gadgets, and fancy drinks in wide-rimmed glasses, not a guy in camo pants gulping liquor in South Africa. He was just wasting time, time that I could be using to get back on my feet and hunt those monsters down.

Larry smiled at my reaction, at my impatience, "You and I have a lot to talk about, but consider surviving that gunshot your first test. You passed." He got to his feet, gazed at his flask for a moment, and then decided against drinking anymore. "McKinney ever show you that stupid lighter of his?"

Numbly, I nodded.

Larry snorted, and then looked sidelong at the bodies to the right of him, tucked and folded like oddly-shaped bedsheets. "It was an anti-protest saying, against the hippies and do-nothings who sat at home with their signs while American soldiers were dying. I was sixteen when I went to war, and we chanted it back at those tie-dyed bastards."

And then he did the oddest thing. He laughed, and the smile on his face was genuine. He looked at those bodies and repeated that saying with a dim, dry tone.

"We the unwilling, led by the unqualified, to kill the unfortunate, die for the ungrateful." Larry looked back at me, and dropped that smile, and seemed sinister all of the sudden. "Your superior is gonna come by later and ask you if you want to ship home. I want you to say no. You have to man up, got it?"

I nodded, having had no intention of going home after I recovered.

"This bullshit general they sent tried to let this whole thing go for a little diplomacy."

"What do you mean?" I sat up, and then dropped myself back onto the cot when pain shot through my abdomen. He couldn't be serious.

"I mean, they wanna sweep all this under the rug." Larry motioned to the bodies, and then settled on me. "But you can sleep easy. I took my boys out there the day before yesterday and wiped that little guerilla group off the playing field. That's my gift to you."

I thought of the flashing, the unknown faces, the shouting in the jungle, and the cold eyes of the people they had taken from me. I thought of the village, Mshauri, of the way it felt when their hands touched my arms as I walked past. His words gave me a strange satisfaction, and also a chill, because he had killed over a dozen people. And he was calling it a gift.

"Rest up, kid. I'll be in touch."

"But you said…"

"You'll get your revenge. It doesn't stop here, Michael. The world is full of scum. We make up for the people we lose one mission at a time."

And just like that, Larry was gone. He slipped out of the back of the tent, and the nurse looked up briefly before going back to work on his clipboard. I was left there with the bodies, with the people I had come to this country with, and a hole in my stomach.