Friendly Fire

By Chitrak Bandyopadhyay

https://youtu.be/_1elTAMqflY

The first thing he saw was a flash of white, and after that, came the slow, dull ringing in his ears. And after that, everything seemed to play back in slow motion. The pain was phenomenal- he could certainly feel it- the increasingly urgent sensation of skin being set ablaze, the innumerable, tiny pieces of shrapnel puncturing his flesh at various places, and the smell- oh that horrible stench of burning hair- he could sense it all in strange and excruciating detail. However, perhaps to preserve in him some capacity for rational thought, these feelings were kept at an arm’s length, and he could only experience them as if detached and from far away. A movie played out for him, with immense clarity, where each point of pain had been carefully recorded and transferred on, so that if not now, at a later date at least, it would have the chance to haunt him.

He felt himself lifted through the air, his arms and legs contorting. He tried his best to control their movements, but the force of momentum was too strong, and everything happening around him was happening just a little too fast- and with contrasting speed and lethargy he found himself hitting the ground; the impact sending another million pinpricks into his mental movie hall, his limbs bending and all but breaking in strange and vaguely unpleasant ways.

And then sensation came back. And he felt it all.

The urge to scream overwhelmed him as every feeling kept at bay up until now came rushing back to him all at once. He lay there exposed, burning from the superheated air and coughing in the toxic fumes of the explosion, and his body became one concerted wail of pain, and he screamed and he screamed.

In the end, it was a miracle that he was even conscious. Or if he had passed out at some point from the pain, he did not know. But the important thing was that he was awake when his group leader's silhouette emerged from the fire and smoke and began to speak. At first, he could hear nothing- nothing but the surprisingly soothing undertone in his commander's voice. This man, who had always kept a friendly distance, who was never harsh but always firm, spoke to him now as a father to a son, and it had the effect of calming him down. His commander's face seemed to materialize slowly from the blur, and two angelic blue eyes seemed to coalesce and peer down at him. His rough, soot-stained mouth continued to move, and slowly his words became intelligible.

"Son, I want you to focus on my voice. And when you can, if you can understand me, slowly raise your right hand and give me a sign."

After the third or so iteration, with grave difficulty, he raised his right hand an inch off of the ground, and shakily formed a thumbs up sign.

"Good soldier. Private, I am going to tell you your name, if it is familiar to you, nod ‘yes’."

And slowly, he nodded as well. He knew the name given, and it was indeed his own.

"Excellent. Now hear me son, I'm sorry it had to come to you this way, but this is the war- the very danger we've come here for. Now, you may feel overwhelmed by the pain or feel an urge to get up and lend a hand to your fellow brethren-"

He had not, in fact, considered the latter, but was seriously considering it now.

"- but right now, the best thing you can do- for your country, your comrades, and for all the folk back home- is to survive. Y'hear me? You're injured, and I need you to get yer sorry behind outta here..."

He spoke those last words with a wry smile. His words had so far tumbled out at an astonishing pace, but to the fallen private they had sounded measured and slow.

"Now, normally I wouldn’t move you- wait for a medic or something- but this here's a war zone now, and I need you to move it back to camp. You are not hurt too badly, y'hear? If I give you a hand and help you get up- could you do that for me, soldier?"

And with that the officer reached out his hand, and the soldier caught it with a firm grip. And as he was hauled to his feet, he was surprised to find that, indeed- though his left leg hurt, and his left arm felt limp and dull, and all over his body he still felt the sting of numerous cuts and bruises- he was, in general, alright and that with support he could stand.

His commander handed him the smoking remains of what was, probably, once a sniper rifle, and placed the butt under his left arm, urging him wordlessly to use it as a makeshift cane.

"Now I gotta go back and see who else survived and, if I'm lucky, maybe pick off a terrorist or two, but don't you stop to shoot nobody yerself, just limp on back behind the lines, y'hear? Okay. Now, good luck and may God be with you, soldier!" And with that, he disappeared once more into the smoke.

*

Safety was a razor's edge as he began to pick his way through the chaos, and he would just as soon have stayed there, lying in the rubble, if not for his commander’s utter certainty that explosive doom lurked in every moment elapsed. So, he chose to brave the dangers of exposure and began his long and arduous journey… somewhere; towards the vague promise of safety. He could not know where that truly was in this strange and violent land, but he knew it was not here.

So, at first, the fire was his only guide. He chose his path based on whichever direction seemed to burn less harshly in a given moment- the smoke around him precluded any second opinion. But, with time, the air around him began to clear, and his surroundings began to make a bolder show of themselves. Above him now, unfurled a beautiful clear blue sky, and in front of him lay an uneven terrain of rubble and urban waste.

Was this how the city always was? Was this how all the cities had been? His mind was still sluggish from his ordeal- whether the desolation around him was the child of poverty, terrorism, or an act of liberation, he could not say. Homes and storefronts lay dead before him, and the only sign of life was his broken form, picking its way among the pebbles and rocks.

*

He could not have gone very far before the rules of chance finally caught up with him, and a misplaced footstep sent him sprawling face-first into the dirt. His ears were filled with the deafening retort of his gun, which- apparently still functional- went off the moment it hit the ground. And lying there prone, for the second time in so short a while, he closed his eyes and contemplated what it would be like just to give in and let things end right there.

But his commander’s ghost was still with him and he had just placed his hands on the ground in a bid to stand when he looked up and realized that he had not been alone, and that he had now been thrown yet another twist in fate. In front of him, framed against the sun, stood the towering silhouette of a diminutive form. A very young man, dressed from head to toe in the garb of a terrorist. In his hands he brandished a gun, and on his face, he wore an expression of primal savagery.

So, this is how it ends, he thought, here on the ground, so far away from home. Existential lethargy welled up in him once more, held off just barely by his remaining institutional discipline. He looked up at that young man and his strangely beautiful face- a face torn up by hatred- and tried to judge from the corner of his eye whether his gun was more than an arm’s length away; even while he wondered whether any action he took right now would matter beyond defining the tone of his final moments in this life. The young man raised his gunsight to his eyes, and as the private stared up at that dirty gun-barrel, it took him all his strength not to look away.

And then a strange thing happened. He caught a glint of gold, reflecting off of the one tiny spot on the gun-barrel that still had some paint on it. And though it flashed for just a moment, the young man, framed against the sky like a dark specter of death, seemed to freeze in time. A light wind blew, tugging at the fringes of his clothes, and he remained motionless. Then slowly, very slowly, he began to lower his gun. His face, revealed once more, now wore a look of blank incomprehension.

The clouds of smoke and dust around them began to thin, and it seemed as if his face began to shine. It shone with the brilliance of joy. He left his gun to hang loosely by his side and looked down at the private and began to speak without pause in the local tongue. The words meant nothing to the soldier, but they were not hostile. Bewilderment overtook the private until glancing down at his own body, his eyes caught a flash of that same glint of gold. And suddenly, he understood.

A small black book, gilt around the edges with false gold, peeked out from his breast pocket, dislodged from its place by the trials of the day. It was a copy of the Holy Quran, a gift from one of the locals in one of the many towns they had crossed on their way here. His friends had treated the thing as a joke, burning their own copies back at camp, or using them for a variety of scatological entertainments. The private, however, had felt uncomfortable doing the same, and had saved his copy, hoping to dispose of it more properly at a later time.

His young captor now approached him. His demeanor, heretofore, showing only menace, for so small a reason, now exuded the warmth of kinship; his young face, so beholden to hatred and rage, had at first chance, given over to both joy and relief. He dangled his gun from its strap- his hands now seemed so small- and kept it away, as if glad to be rid of its burden. Then he turned to the soldier and bent close, as if to inspect his wounds. He spoke the whole time, chattering away, cheerfully, in that incomprehensible, alien tongue; as he tore of a piece of cloth from his ragged shirt when- CRACK!

The sound of the gunshot shook the private to his bones, and he had barely any time to comprehend before the young man fell backwards, his hands clutching at his chest, and blood gushing through his fingers.

CRACK! CRACK!

Two more shots for good measure and then deathly silence- save for the sound of two booted feet- as his commander marched into view.

"Things were gettin’ a bit too hot back there, so I decided to take my own advice and high-tail it back to camp; and good thing too-" the commander said, nudging the fresh corpse with one of his boots. “I reckon there’s been enough close calls for one day, huh, soldier? How about we head on back the rest of the way together.” With that, he looked down at the private and extended his hand. The private grasped it once more and allowed himself to be hauled to his feet. He placed one arm around the commander’s shoulders, and thus supported, they resumed the long journey back to camp. The commander rattled on to fill the silence, but the private never said a word.

By Chitrak Bandyopadhyay