Free Weapons of Mass Destruction by Margaret Vandenburg Page A

wounds. His Vietnam buddies swore by this ritual, a kind of good luck charm to protect life or, at the very least, limb. When the wounded recovered, they returned the bandana to its owner. Trapp always packed several in his ruck, hoping not to use them. Planning to get them back if he did. The platoon had never lost a man before.
    Wolf led the way down the stairwell. Everybody else had congregated in the entrance hall of the compound. The attack still raged, unabated, AK-47 fire punctuated by RPG explosions just beyond the doorstep. If anything, the pace had picked up and the din was more deafening. Wolf radioed the tactical operations center again, confirming their readiness. Then he gave the signal, obeying his superiors with the same blind faith his squad mustered to obey him.
    “Go!” Wolf shouted. “Straight ahead and just keep running!”
    When they burst out the door, they saw a column of US Marines covering their flight with the legion of weapons they themselves had simulated during the shoot-out. In the distance they heard tanks grinding forward, already beginning to discharge missiles overhead. The enemy’s feeble attempts to defend themselves melted in the ensuing conflagration. Their remains, if there were any, would be impossible to distinguish from the rubble. Trapp thought of Evans as he sprinted to safety, hanging on to Wolf’s promise that they would return to honor his body.
    The bombardment only lasted fifteen minutes. Even so, it was probably overkill. The squad watched from a safe zone three blocks north as smoke cleared and relative silence made their ears ring. A bird chirped outside the window of their refuge. Several men laughed at the innocent absurdity of the sound. They laughed because they were alive. Sinclair marveled at the resilience, or indifference, of nature. During Operation Iraqi Freedom, they had decimated one of the few desert towns that made the mistake of resisting the inevitable. As they prepared to move on to the next target, a pair of snakes slithered across their path. Apart from avoiding sticky pools of blood, they seemed oblivious to the death and destruction wrought by their human counterparts. Was their sphere so separate that the violence of war didn’t register? Not that it mattered in the grand scheme of things. Survival compelled them all to carry on as though nothing had happened. To acknowledge the enormity of the carnage would be to die of fear alone.
    A single building was left standing. Wolf and Trapp exchanged nods. There are times when the military actually becomes the well-oiled piece of machinery it aspires to be. Everything had worked perfectly. Scouts located the cell, the advance guard held the line, and tanks hit targets with the selective precision of snipers, leveling everything in sight without disturbing Evans’s mausoleum. The various appendages of the battalion had communicated as one mighty soldier, preserving his body so that he, alone among the corpses strewn across the battlefield, could be honored.
    Corpses. They avoided using this word in reference to America’s fallen heroes. It was too impersonal. Too morbid. Men like Evans were exempt from the finality of death. Their bodies were shrines, not corpses, even when they were mangled beyond recognition. The tomb at Arlington Cemetery didn’t honor the disembodied idea of an unknown soldier. Someone was actually buried there. No matter how nameless and faceless, his body was sacred. Enduring. A physical reminder that the bodies of lost warriors, wherever they were, were unforgotten. Patriotism wasn’t just an abstraction. The nation was built on the flesh and blood of men willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for causes that never die.
    Sinclair joined Wolf and Trapp at a bedroom window. They offered him a Camel. He dipped a chew of Skoal instead. They stood surveying the smoldering remains of the neighborhood until Trapp stubbed out his cigarette.
    “I’m going back in,” Trapp