The Fire.

South Africa.

March, 1989.

Mshauri had been reduced to nothing, in the most literal sense. Where there had once been houses and huts, little fires with spits of meat turning over them, modern clothes hanging on decades-old lines, and little radios crackling with news of the war, there was only ash. Even the surrounding forest had been burned, the trees felled, their trunks cracked and flattened. Near where the village might have started, where we marched that day, the remains were laid out like jigsaw puzzles with half the pieces missing.

It had been raining for days when I was first allowed back, and the ash rose up in the rainwater and ran as a river past my boots, crowding the corpses, rushing down into the charred edges of the jungle. It was plain old rain, chilly as the mountains all around, but it felt as thick as blood on my face. Even the sound of water crashing down on displaced tin roofs could not drown out the screaming. Caterwauling. Crying. Guns going off and bodies thumping to the ground. One last breath coming out of Ford, in a sort of hiccup, as his body finally relaxed.

I knew the only sound was the rain, but inside I heard their final moments playing out over and over again. I felt the heat of the fire through the cold. I saw the blurry faces of their attackers, streaming out of the trees, and the empty eyes of the fallen.

"I told you not to come back here."

His voice came through water, from a thousand miles away, but somehow it broke through the orchestra playing in my head. Wilkins. He had survived one of the ambushes, and joined the retaliatory strike on the militia days later, while I was recovering.

He looked smaller when he was wet, with his uniform pressing down heavily on his frame. It weighed down his eyes, too, and his mouth, making him look sad.

"I told you not to come back here," he repeated, gentler this time. It was the tone they kept using with me, like they were afraid harsh words would shatter whatever pieces of my head I had managed to glue back together.

Wilkins was not like me. He avoided looking around, and focused mostly on his gun, a rifle he grasped in both hands until the veins hardened under his skin. He was in charge of me now and he wanted to stay away from here, but someone overrode his order and I was allowed to come and survey the destruction. In my written request, I stated it was essential to my recovery.

It was, in a way. Coming here woke the anger, so the cold could not touch me. I wasn't afraid, or ashamed, or upset by this, I was enraged. It was fuel, added carefully to the fire inside.

Maybe he saw that. Wilkins was a smart man, a caring man. One look at the lines of bodies made his whole frame shiver. Or maybe that was the rain. "Your orders came in, finally."

He had my attention, at last, when it had strayed so much in these last few days. It was hard to think when every word sounded like gunfire. But these words came through clearly, dimming the sounds of the village dying. Just like that, their hopeful hands fell from my shoulders, and the rain was just rain, and the bodies were just bodies.

Wilkins beckoned me back toward the jeep, the muddy all-terrain vehicle that had brought us here. One of the other affected soldiers was sitting in the back, looking out the window at the mess that used to be a village. His leg had been irreparably damaged by shrapnel.

"One last look, boys," Wilkins said, waving off the village as the jeep roared to life.

Fuller tapped the window, snorting, "What a victory to go home with."

Wilkins grimaced. Fuller was only here because he had nothing better to do while he waited to be shipped home. He volunteered for every outing, sat in the back of whatever vehicle, and made cynical comments until the other soldiers told him to shut up.

"What are my orders?" I asked Wilkins. We bounced around the edge of the village, and the bodies caught my eye again. "I put in to stay here."

"Someone thought that was a bad idea, soldier," Wilkins responded. Most of his focus had to go into driving this terrible terrain, but he still managed to offer me an explanation. "Best thing for you right now is a change of scenery."

"I don't want a change of scenery."

"Well, too bad. Orders are in. You'll be on your way to Washington come tomorrow."

None of that made sense. "Are you kidding?"

"No." Wilkins glanced over and gave a sort of half-smile. "You sent in a letter of interest a few months ago. Remember that?"

Everything had come out of focus when the ambush happened. I did remember that letter. It was to express interest in joining Delta Force, to continue my special forces training. But it felt like someone else had sent that letter, had that dream. When I tried to work up excitement, all I got was frustration. Months spent training, again, when there was work to be done here.

"You had a personal recommendation, by the way," Wilkins added, as if he sensed my disappointment, my frustration. "Your buddy Larry."

I would hardly call Larry my buddy. He saved my life in the jungle, and nearly sent me to my death right after. He came to the hospital, claimed to be a spy, and then disappeared. But the other soldiers seemed to know who he was, though no one could quite put their finger on who he worked for. He just seemed to have clearance whenever he asked for it. He got what he wanted. Wilkins spoke with something close to reverence.

It was a quiet ride from then on, because it took careful concentration and an hour of maneuvering to get back down the mountain, and because we both told Fuller to shut up every time he opened his mouth. No one needed to hear his sad remarks.

We were back at the temporary base, where I had been hospitalized and where more forces had congregated for the next task in this forsaken jungle, when I finally spoke again.

"Do you think they feel it, when it kills them?"

Wilkins shut the jeep off, and Fuller hobbled out of the backseat to annoy whoever crossed his path next. While the engine was doing its final whirs, Wilkins said, "When what kills them?"

"A bullet, to the head."

I was thinking about death, because it was all there was today. Death and destruction. Maybe in the coming weeks it would fade from my mind, and that fire inside would die down a little, but now the curiosity and confusion were fresh.

"Maybe, but only for a second."

When the bodies were recovered in Mshauri, most of the male victims had been killed by shots to the head. It was the women who suffered, and the children. But that was not something I wanted to bring up again. I would never be able to put that to words.

"Do you believe in Heaven?"

Wilkins thought on this one for a little while, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. He wore a cross around his neck, but that little emblem meant nothing in the face of what we had seen. He never even looked at it, never touched it.

"I think… it would be a mercy, if there was something like that. I hope there is." Wilkins looked over with those sad eyes, which I thought might never be happy again. He could be a million miles away from this place and yet still never escape it. He just cared too much. "If it is real, those people are there now, finally resting. If not, then their suffering is over."

It was not the answer I wanted. What did I want to hear, anyway? Did I really care about the people who had died, or did I just want them to stop haunting me?

"Mshauri was impoverished, besieged." Wilkins looked back at the steering wheel, now really trying to convince himself. "For years, they suffered. Even if something like this had not happened, they would be gone soon. Disease. Starvation."

Finally, I realized what was really bothering me.

"We'll never know, because they never had a chance."

I left the jeep, left the warmth of it, and walked back into the rain. I let myself get soaked again, appreciating the chill to soothe the fire inside, and retreated to my tent. I got to live alone because of my nightmares. One night they were so violent I flipped my cot into the wall and nearly broke the neck of the first soldier to come to my rescue. So I slept alone, without my gun, in a tent near the edge of the encampment. I ate alone, and cried alone, and denied all charges of being broken – it was getting better, one day at a time. Wilkins thought I was sad, but mostly I felt worthless, powerless, and frustrated.

In the days that followed, I prepared for my new mission in the only way I could think of. From dawn until dusk, until the fire inside died down into an ember and the trembling stopped me from walking a straight line, I trained. Running. Climbing. Marksmanship. The surrounding jungle provided plenty of opportunities to learn new skills. Physical exertion kept my mind off of the village, and my superiors seemed pleased that I was no longer sitting idle. Each night I lay alone in my tent, nude, radiating heat, feeling like a cartoon who had run his limbs down to nubs, and each morning I rose to the trumpet and started over again.

It was harder to cope on the plane, where we had to stay strapped in for hours and hours and the only soldier who talked was Fuller. Everyone else was either traumatized or infirm or dead, just bodies riding home.

He was cynical and annoying and never shut up when he should, but Fuller helped me come back into myself. He talked and talked about nonsensical things, giving me something to respond to, someone to hold a dialogue with. He whined about the food, I told him to shut up and eat. He whined about the hospital they were transferring him to, I told him to shut up and be grateful he was even alive. He whined about my tone, and I spent an hour trying to kick him from across the plane.

Right before we landed, while picking at the cast they had used to immobilize his injured leg, Fuller said very seriously, "Listen, when they ask about your dreams, tell them you sleep fine. Everything is fine. You've never felt better."

I had spoken very little about how I felt, and only then to the doctor in South Africa. His words startled me. "Why?"

"You wanna end up like me? Shut away in a nut house?"

I shook my head impulsively. No. I never wanted to end up like Fuller, with his bad leg and his sad eyes and the way just sitting up seemed to hurt his soul.

"Okay, then. Everything is fine. Go and have a good life."

We landed half an hour later, and while Fuller moaned in pain while he was extracted, I went silently with the soldiers who were escorting me from the plane. Families were gathered, waiting, and my escorts and I stopped behind them to salute as the dead soldiers were taken down the ramp. I didn't know them, had no idea what company they were with or how they had died in that awful jungle, but seeing them brought out that way brought tears to my eyes.

For some strange reason I searched the crowd for my mother. She had no idea I was back in the States, no reason to be here, but a childish compulsion made my eyes rove the crowd. One day those sad faces and sorrowful moans might belong to her, as they wheeled my body down a ramp and handed her a folded up flag.

It wasn't fair, the way those soldiers died.

The fire inside grew hungry for vengeance.