All History in a Day by Ismael Hussein

What do bombs do?

They shatter.

How does the sky feel?

Broken.

Where do the bullets go?

Everywhere.

What do the children say?

Help.

What do the mother’s scream?

Stop.

What does the world say?

Nothing.

What does God say?

We don’t know, yet.

I don’t know tomorrow. I can’t see tomorrow. The war won’t allow me to. It’s only the day that is real, and it scares me to death, and the night is just the day without the sun, so I fear that, too. But I don’t know tomorrow.

When the war first broke out, I thought it was a bluff. Surely whoever calling the shots had gotten this one wrong. We were no adversary, so the idea that this could all be started over the first reservoir was hard to believe. It was just water, after all. Our water.

But you can’t reason with evil, I’ll tell you that much.

When I joined up at twenty-one, I was among the youngest in my outfit. But now kids are coming in at sixteen, sometimes even less than that. What a hell of a way to become a man.

The first rule of war I learned on the front line was: don’t move. Even when you think no one is watching you, think again. That’s how Johnny Jusang went out. It was outgoing mail for a while, until the bullets let up, and he decided to make his move. They got him right in the neck. By the time a medic reached him, there was so much blood pouring down his throat you couldn’t understand a word he was saying. I saw it happen up close. I was never a teacher’s pet in school, but I’m a real stickler now. There are just some rules that aren’t worth breaking.

Last night was by far the worst night in a long list of nights. The aid station was a horror show. In one corner, there were men and women and children, injured, blabbering, crying, shaking, stunned, seeking shelter. And in the other corner was agony. It was like someone shot the smell of burning hair everywhere. You have never seen so much flesh in your life. Bandages wrapped limbs that were already hanging halfway off. They would take fresh blood from the healthy just to give to them. That was if you were lucky. More often than not, when the medic reached the tent from the battlefield, the man was meeting his end. No amount of medicine could heal their fractures, exploded spleens, guts, kidneys, livers, brains, hearts. Everyone was going. If it wasn’t that night, it was the one after that. Better to save the care for the next man.

Even our graveyards don’t stay graveyards for long. When the enemy forces us to retreat, they find them and excavate them, one by one, we found out. They dig deep in the soil, like elephant trunks in the sand, searching for liquid gold. It’s the water that the enemy wants, and perhaps later, when scores are settled, the land, and their desire for it runs so strong that they are willing to desecrate a place of sanctity if it means they can claim the resource for their own, for their people, for their country, for their survival. Guess they don’t plan on going quietly.

These past eight months, I’ve seen the unthinkable.

I’ve seen my best friends mangled beyond imagination. I’ve seen children with frozen faces, atom bombs forever detonating in their eyes. I’ve seen survivors mourn entire families in a single moment. I’ve seen lineage lost in the rubble and ash. I’ve seen brilliant surgeons stumble the streets like zombies, courtesy of their own grief. I’ve seen intelligent men reduced to broken records. I’ve seen churches obliterated, mosques decimated, neighborhoods eradicated. They blow the life out of everything living.

On top of that, time fails to exist. There is no calendar for us, no semblance of sameness or schedule, no weekends, or holidays, or birthdays, or celebrations. There is hardly any space for those. And if there are, they are somber and meek and flicker like a candle flame that is blown out before you can bask in its glow.

The second rule in war: learn to cut your losses.

Some men gave it their all until their all was gone.

Protect the domes, we were taught, for underneath them lie the reservoirs. That is our beginning and our end. And in the beginning, we did. We protected the hell out of it. During that first month, God was great, the food was nice, and the enemy was crazy. The group I ran with wasn’t religious by any means, but in those early days, it really felt like we had Him on our side. Karma was heavy, and it weighed a ton. Our seesaw was up, theirs was down. We were righteous, entitled to our land and whatever comes from it. You want to just come and take all of that from us, well we’d like to see you try.

And try, they did. After the first month, we lost our steam. By the second month, our numbers faded. And by the time the third month rolled around, we were reeling in all areas. The enemy took four of our reservoirs like candy by a bully. We had no support. They overwhelmed us in every way.

But this is not to imply that everyone accepted this change gracefully.

Larry Kisper was the bravest kid I ever knew. He was also the dumbest kid I ever knew. The night the enemy had us surrounded was the night he flirted with fate. Rather than retreating like he was ordered to, several times, he pushed onward into enemy lines. “Odds are good tonight!” he shouted at the dark.

“Kisper, fall back!” barked Sergeant Murphy. “Right now. That’s an order!”

Kisper was scrimmaging for triumphant against the wind and the unknown. “Can’t do it, sir.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because they have it coming.”

Sergeant Murphy’s face became red in the blackness and his fists wagged at the insubordination. “Get your ass back here, now! I’m not asking!”

Kisper crouched lower, a rifle in hand, still walking away from the group. “Why should I?”

“Because,” yelled Sergeant Murphy, “they have us dead to rights, you idiot, that’s why!”

“Don’t tell me something I can’t see,” replied Kisper.

It was a silent night, and his words were said in an unbelievably smooth tenor.

Soon, we could no longer see Kisper. We were so far back by that point. And when the fireworks came, brightening the night into half day, we didn’t look away, we owed him that. And that was the end of Kisper.

In the foxholes at two, three, four in the morning were conversations of unrequited love, of forever ago guilt, and pinching regret. It was when the residue of war was less visible. I wasn’t above any of it, but I also never felt the need to pour my heart out, either. Sure, I’d think about my mother and hoped she was well and healthy and hoped that she didn’t know about where I was or what I was doing. She never wanted any of this for me, “But it’s our home,” I told her the day I enlisted, “if we don’t save it, no one will.” I can still picture her in my bedroom, up against the frame of the door. When you can’t talk, you start crying. That’s how bad news is, and that’s how my mom was, crying over me and war and a town an ocean away that was to be lost and taken forever, one that she grew up in. Her face had the months I was gone before I even left. In the foxhole I pictured her for as long as I could, as hard as I could, until the fresh memories of battle bruised my thoughts like invisible wounds.

The third rule of war: don’t expect sympathy, not even in the throes of carnage.

Bombs are a tradition devoid of thought. It doesn’t matter who it is; the explosions are trained to lack contemplation or mercy. They just are. Watching buildings fall like a deck of cards became so regular to us that we forgot to flinch at times. The mushroom clouds and the napalm fires at night held a moment or two of beauty, if they weren’t to our detriment to watch. In between the horror was an entire spectacle you had never seen before. Your eyes fought to look away and to witness it all. We were all historians. We acknowledged the fallen. And recorded their names where we could. Trying to find the next of kin was an exercise in futility.

There’s just so much history in a day.

As soldiers, we cleared homes that were destroyed, working back between the rubble when we heard a voice. That was the hardest part. Hearing the cries cut the air like a knife. Every now and again you’d feel something grip on your leg and look down to find a hand attached to something you couldn’t quite see. The saddest part was when night fell over us and we were forced to move out. There was just nothing we could do for the voiceless. And that pain never goes away.

There’s just so much history in a day.

When they started targeting the educated: scientists, teachers, doctors, activists, I thought it only was a coincidence. There’s no discrimination in destruction, right? That’s what they say. But the more outspoken they were, the more they were hit. They spoke their minds. The enemy wanted them to be mindful of what they spoke.  So any public objection or denunciation was met with 3,000 degrees worth of Fahrenheit. It didn’t matter if it was days later, or weeks, or months. Fahrenheit always found them in the end.

I’ve seen refugees find no safety in the places they seek refuge. I’ve seen innocent people, those caught on the wrong street at the wrong time, spend their last moments begging the enemy, hand on shoe, head on dirt, urine down their trousers, trying to transfer years’ worth of love forgotten by months’ worth of hate. Even just a reply from them was like rain in the desert. But appealing to emotion was a losing game. Their disgust was just too systemic for change. Those people either met their end right then and there, or they spent their remaining days as captives in a living hell, starved, beaten, defiled, disgraced, dismembered. It was all dependent on the mood of the enemy.

Personally, I think they disrespect humanity for the heck of it. And the world is in such disarray now that no one even bats an eye. It’s not their people that’s dying. The more I think about it, the less I understand. I mean, you’re telling me they’re willing to rid a whole people off the face of the earth because of what we have? Because of this thing that no longer falls from the clouds, as if we caused the drought in the first place. As if our choice to survive is unlawful to them. As if our existence is synonymous with their demise. It goes against common sense.

There’s just so much history in a day.

When the eighth reservoir was to be seized, Diggory Sims had this crazy idea of blowing it all up before the enemy got the chance to load up the water for themselves. It would be reckless, considering how out in the open the dome was, and how much ground we’d have to cover. It would have to be a five-man team, at least. Two men to lug the TNT, two for cover, and one to attach the explosives inside the reservoir, at minimum on separate ends, which would be a task in and of itself. The reservoir was the size of two football fields, with gallons and gallons of fresh water swimming between it. To finish the job in time before the enemy arrived would be a dance with the devil.

“I’m the fastest man here,” Sims told the group of us who entertained his idea. “Leave that part to me. We’ll stick it to ‘em real good. What do you say boys?”

But what he was selling we just weren’t buying.

That night, we watched from the hilltop as a half dozen tanker trucks rolled in and were filled to the top and left, all while Sims cursed underneath his breath.

The fourth rule in war: believe in a higher power. And if you don’t, play along.

It took me a while to learn that one. It was made difficult by the fact that there were just so many kids. So many. I look at how they’ve had less than a decade under their belts and the pain they’ve been made to endure and the sorrow they’ve had to sleep with and the terror they’re forced to wake up to and it breaks me to pieces. They experience new atrocities every hour, on the hour. They run like panicked birds from a railroad track. You can see the funerals in their faces. They cry without shedding a tear. How wicked is their present, and how cruel is the promise of their future?

I never thought of it as anything more than a failure of a deity. It angered me. I spent days raging against hope, against decree. But over time, the absence of faith becomes like a siren in the mind. And the noises from the shelling are loud enough. So, I try to believe in religion where I can. But I don’t believe in Him on a cliff’s edge. You know, the sort of people that ask for something and when they don’t get it on their time, they step right off a thousand feet. Believing in Him that way is just asking for trouble.

I knew I had an angel watching over my shoulder the time I tried to save Holt McCaffrey’s life. It was late in the night when I saw him, and to this day I still don’t know how I saw him.

But I did.

He had an exit wound in his back, and it was flowing like a river. I was no medic, but I knew to apply pressure to it. I knelt down and told him to keep quiet while I sprinkled a packet of powder on the opening. It was just the one I had. And Holt could barely speak at that point. It was a labor for him, but he took the time to tell me one thing: that he wasn’t gonna make it. But I wouldn’t hear it, so I took my coat off, then my shirt, and I tore it up in half and wrapped it around his lower back.  There was a fog cloud in front of me and I couldn’t see a damn thing. And calling for help when you can’t see any help is a lighthouse for the enemy. So, it was just me whispering and Holt listening, listening to me tell him how brave he was and how they’ll be sending him home after this and how happy his mom is gonna be to have him home again. Except I could feel the warmth of his blood each time I arranged the cloth from around his back. And I knew what was coming.

But what I didn’t see coming was the enemy.

A man came up from behind us. He must’ve had pillows for feet. He aimed the barrel straight at me. There was no need for assessment on his part. I was in no position to put up a fight, bare chest, a dying man in my arms. I figured I had borrowed enough time, so I gave the man a nod, and bowed my head. Religion like. Moment of truth. Holt had already gone stiff in my arms. So, I kept my eyes shut. And waited. On my way to glory.

It wasn’t until a half a minute passed that I opened my eyes and saw that the enemy was gone. Not a bullet spent. Until now, I can’t rationalize why. I couldn’t even if I tried. So, I don’t. I can only thank Him. Sometimes you just gotta find one thing to be thankful for.

**

The enemy is moving in on the last reservoir. Our orders were clear. Don’t let them.

But we’re a day late and a dollar short.

The enemy has the only support they need to finish the job. They’ll have no problem finding the right instrument to deliver the final blow, whenever that is.  Just like they didn’t yesterday, and the day before, and the one before that. Meanwhile, the bombs are still loud, the bullets are still fast, and insomnia has grabbed a gun and hat and joined the ranks.

I did a thing this morning where I pictured what the end of the war would be like. Do they blow horns? Do they shake hands? Who gets to break the news, and how?

What will they tell the mothers with child shaped holes in their hearts? What will they tell the fathers without houses to run? Who will tuck the orphans into bed at night? How do you look at a country that you no longer recognize?  Is there a vaccine for the grief, and if so, who administers it? Do they make second chances for funerals? Is this land ours again, or theirs? Is this what freedom is supposed to look like?

Is this what freedom is supposed to look like?

I’m only asking because I don’t know what things will look like on the other side. If I make it to the other side.

The fifth rule in war: Just one more.

Just one more sun.

Just one more moon.

Just one more loaf.

Just one more breath.

Just one more hug.

Just one more dream.

Just one more…

There’s just so much history in a day.

Ismael Hussein

Image: A glass of clear, clean water by pixabay.com