ASSAULT FORCE

THE SKY IS a red broth crisscrossed with white streaks. Dirty colors flicker against dirty snow. Sound is a needle-stab in the brain. Crouched in his foxhole, Private Cáceres experiences no fear and thinks this spectacle is worth the price even if the price is fear. Suddenly the needle is withdrawn leaving behind a painful hollowness in his skull. One noise unravels from the general sound. A fistful of earth and snow hits Private Cáceres. Silence plugs his ears like rubber.

When he opens his eyes, the sky is searingly white and smooth. And silence continues, a silence punctuated by brittle dripping sounds — steps, voices, metal instruments. The ground is soft. The ground is a bed. There's a plastic hose stuck into his arm. His hands hurt.

A young doctor approaches, looking at him out of the corner of his eye.

"Take it easy," he says. "You're going to be all right."

"My hands," says Private Cáceres. "What happened to my hands?"

The young doctor's mouth twitches, he shrugs.

"They aren't there," he says smiling casually at a vase of withered flowers. "They aren't there anymore."

They weren'the only thing he had lost.

DAYS IN HOSPITAL seemed to last forever, a shadowy corridor tunneling into black emptiness. The emptiness was far away. Confined to his wheelchair, he couldn't even approach it. The corridor was opaque like bottle glass, and dark shadows moved behind the class. On occasion, the shadows would draw close. Their features flattened out when they leaned on the glass, and their voices sounded distant, as if wrapped in cotton.

There's something special for you today, a shadow would say. Chicken. Do you want me to keep another leg for you? And the shadow winked at him, ruffled his hair through the opaque glass. He looked at the blanket that covered him below the waist. Another leg for me, he repeated numbly. Or else the shadow would offer him o cigarette. He would raise his maimed arms and the helpful shadow would put the cigarette in his mouth, light it and share it with him. The glass slowly shattered. Alicia, the shadow said one day, that's my name And the voice already seemed to belong to this world, a world where clocks ticked and time did not bleed like a dying dog. Alicia told him stories about other war casualties, how they hod healed, or hadn't. He never said a word.

When he was better (or so they said) he spent almost all his time at the window. He was on an upper floor, and through the window he could see movement outside. It consisted of military trucks unloading coffins, choppers unloading corpses, wounded men lying in the park, jeeps coming and going, groups of uniformed women bringing parcels and flowers. The movement was no movement because the sound was missing. Sound would enter if he broke the window pane, but there would always be more and more panes cutting him off from real sound, the needle stab in the brain. In the middle of the park the flag fluttered in the wind. The wind was always blowing, so it never hung limply. Private Cáceres watched the flag flutter and probed his memory for something to snatch him out of his torpor, something to shatter the glass. One day he remembered the lyrics of a patriotic song and he thought it was funny. It was so funny that when Alicia passed by down the hall he began to laugh.

"I can see you're better now," Alicia said, approaching him.

"I wish I were dead," he said, suddenly looking serious. He made it sound like a question, and perhaps it was.

HE HAD TO go on living, or so they told him. When he realized that he had to go on living he wondered what was himself: the mutilated part, the remains, nothing but stumps, or the missing limbs. What had been sawed off what? He'd found out that you were made out of things that could stop being you. Those things were not you when they rotted in the rain, or the snow, or the blood-swollen soil or in the hospital offal. Or were they? Which was the mutilated part? Which was he? He was alive and the rest was dead, but that didn't seem to make enough difference. It was a mystery, and when he pondered the mystery he felt like weeping, and when he wept he thought about his hands and legs, which at least were fortunate enough not to have to cry for what was missing.

Sometimes he remembered women. When he saw the female nurses in the hall, some of them attractive, and he thought about women, he visualized mouths, half-open vulvae, curved moist surfaces.

One day just like any other, Alicia put a cigarette between his lips, ruffled his hair playfully, smoothed his blanket below his waist and looked him in the eye for the first time.

"Hi, babe. You look fine today," she said. It seemed she'd go on smoothing that blanket for ever and ever.

He glanced at her with an embarrassed look.

"Forgive me," he said.

"Why should I forgive you?"

'I can't.'

"What is it that you can't?" she said. She suddenly opened her mouth as if she had just remembered something and gave him a hard look, may be a look of disgust. She sighed, turned around and left.

Private Cáceres watched her go, and wondered if he had grasped her meaning. Somehow he didn't even know what meaning there was to grasp. He wept, and through his tears he saw the glass again. It was growing thicker but less opaque. The other people were no longer shadows. They had weight and density, and they had more weight and density than he had. He wanted badly to remember, but he only found tattered humiliating memories. A kid steals a magazine from a stand, and is caught red-handed. The owner of the stand does not punish him, does not accuse him in front of anyone, just threatens. When the kid goes back to the stand to buy the newspaper for his parents, he must face his shame again, since he doesn't know that the owner has already dismissed the whole thing as an innocent prank. How could he refine those memories, shape them after a pattern to make them coincide with a personality, something that could be solid and not merely preposterous? Now all his memories would be like that. Alicia's look would always be upbraiding and threatening him. Now he would always think of himself as being preposterous, a shapeless thing bouncing off a world of solid people. One day he had been crouching in his foxhole. He'd always been afraid, and had talked about fear with his buddies, but that day he wasn't afraid, or else he was ready to pay the price of fear, and a shell had blown him to pieces. It was preposterous and painful, and he wasn't even much of a hero, just an absurdly fearless man.

HE WAS LOOKING through the windows, watching the choppers land in slow motion in the buffeting wind, and thinking never again, and wondering never again what, when an officer came up to him. The officer lacked one leg, and his face was vaguely familiar. Private Cáceres remembered he had seem him occasionally in the hospital, talking to other patients.

"How are you feeling?" the officer said, taking a white metal chair and sitting down beside him. He handled his crutch as if it were a gun, or a privilege.

How am I feeling about what, thought Private Cáceres, but he didn't speak. He smiled vaguely, meaning perhaps not too bad. The man was a recruiting officer for MAIM special forces. Private Cáceres looked at the badge on his left arm. Then he realized there was a sleeve but no arm.

The officer took time choosing his words. No doubt he's heard of MAIM units, he said, even if he hadn't seen them in combat. Private Cáceres had, in fact, seen them in combat, but he didn't say anything. He knew MAIM stood for some kind of fancy title, he said. Missilistic Armored Intercepting Mover, the officer said, and wrote it down on a sheet of paper. Afterward he asked him if he was interested in that. Private Cáceres was thinking of sound, and also of women. He realized that the officer had not asked what his name was, and he didn't know why he found that so depressing.

"I agree," he said all of a sudden.

The officer looked at him curiously, cut short in the middle of a sentence. Finally he smiled and stood up. He didn't offer his hand, which would have been embarrassing for both. Instead he slapped him on the shoulder.

"Just one thing,' he snapped, as if he had just remembered it. "You aren't a Jew, are you? What was your name again?"

Private Cáceres, relieved, told him what his name was.

"All right, Cáceres. I'll send you the forms."

NEXT MONTH, HE entered a MAIM training camp. He arrived there in a military bus with other cripples just released from the hospital. All of them had white badges with their last names in red, not black, sewed onto the chest of their green fatigues. Red identified them as members of the special force. The controls of the bus were designed for disabled drivers, and their driver was an NCO with useless legs. He laughed continuously, and he had his radio on. The radio was broadcasting a show specially prepared by the enemy. A woman speaker was praising, in a mellow voice, the valor of those soldiers who, deceived by an unscrupulous administration, thought they were fighting for their country. She praised their valor, but told them it was to no avail because they had already lost the war. The NCO kept turning the volume up and down, as if he wanted to tear the voice into shreds. Later there were segments of folk music and the NCO hummed convulsively. When they arrived at the training camp, he turned off the radio.

"Here we are, kids," he laughed, turning the radio on again.

Private Cáceres, who was sitting near the driver seat, gave him a strange smile.

"Before the war I was a bus driver, then I enlisted," the NCO said, putting on the brakes as he opened the double doors of the bus. Private Cáceres was still smiling, thinking it was some kind of joke. The NCO turned off the radio. "And how about you, kid?" he asked.

At first Private Cáceres didn't understand the question. When he did, he also realized how long the war had been going on.

"I don't remember," he said. And he was honest, he didn't remember. Something had been killed inside him, or maybe that memory was inside his lost limbs.

The NCO turned on the radio. The woman speaker was describing the skill of the enemy commandos.

"What d'ya think of that broad? the NCO said. "Can you imagine her with a crutch up her ass?"

Their briefing began that day. They were divided into groups, and each group was under the command of a training officer. The training officers didn't treat them with sympathy or respect or anything. They treated them as soldiers. Private Caceres' training officer was a captain who lacked a leg and a hand, and he had no intention of hiding it. He showed off his mutilations with pride, and he too handled his crutch like a gun. His right hand had been replaced by a retractile four-fingered claw. He stood in front of the greenboard, a piece of chalk in his claw, and leaned heavily on his chrome crutch. He drew straight solid lines that were bafflingly pure. They weren't just technically perfect. They were lines without soul, without emotion.

At the very start, he described in great detail what a MAIM unit consisted of. Each unit was basically a minicopter with a very limited flight range, equipped with a great deal of short-ranged weaponry. Each basic unit was provided with the gear the individual trooper needed. None was like another. Each responded to a specific repertory of mutilations. The gear replaced legs and arms, feet and hands, buttocks and ankles, and was connected to the controls via plastic sections. Pedals, levers or buttons triggered off the weapons and steered the rotary blades. They were using state-of-the-art medical technology, the captain said, with an emphasis that seemed to underline their poverty, the sophistication of their poverty. A MAIM unit was much more costly than an infantry soldier, but less so than an armored car; as an antipersonnel weapon it was far more effective than high-power bombs, and much cheaper than a knocked-down plane. MAIM units worked perfectly as an assault force, but when grounded they were clumsy vehicles, huge, grotesque, four-wheeled chairs. Their rotor blades could be folded to ease transportation. The captain made drawings and explained all this in precise detail and later on he told them why they were there. They were there because a disabled ex-serviceman was a burden in peacetime, a costly expense for the government, a pain in the neck for his family, a living dead man. But they had something that wholepeople didn't have, and that was temper. They had been tempered like steel in the fire of battle. Tempered like steel, he repeated, as if he invented the phrase. They were there to give birth to the hero they bore inside them. They were not the refuse, but the elite. Those who thought otherwise could sign out and rot in civilian life, a lifetime of tears, pensions and contemptuous understatements.

The following day every one of them received his individualized unit. On the front of each there was an armored plate with a painted image, a rayless military sun.

THE TRAINING BEGAN at down. They were far from the front, but from the tarmac where they practiced they often saw jets flying toward the combat zone. The returning squadrons were always less numerous than the departing ones. Private Cáceres heard the sound in the sky and recalled his own noisy sky, and the needle-stab in his brain. He resented the silence. He though he had found a way out, a way of refining his memories, and sound was the key.

The captain made them stay in formation while they maneuvered on the tarmac. Each chrome piece, surface, plastic tube, had to be an extension of the soldier's body. Private Cáceres had hands now, hands made of steel. With his steel hands he clumsily propelled the wheels of his unit, he turned on the engine, and the air jet from the main rotor blew into his face where it was not protected by goggles or hit helmet. The captain made them drive rhythmically across the tarmac, as if they were rehearsing for a bizarre musical. The enemy must be ruthlessly destroyed, the captain said. Just as they destroyed us, he said. Just as they destroyed us.

SUNDAY WAS A day for rest, and they went to mass and played games. The priests celebrating mass and taking confessions were wholepeople, or so they seemed under their cassocks, and therefore they looked holier, or more unreal, or more alien. There were no wholemen in the training camp, and somehow a body without mutilations became a kind of freak. Sometimes Private Cáceres thought he saw a disapproving glitter in the priests' eyes, something which reminded him of Alicia' s hard look. The priests spoke of the peace of Christ, but there were no lulls in the war. The flaking exhaust of jet fighters streaked the sky, and their rolling roar came down like belches from a faceless mouth. That rolling roar evoked the flames, the howling, the spurting blood, the red-hot machines melting with dying men.

Sunday was a day for sermons. After the religious sermon, the camp commander too preached, speaking about patriotism and the desire to serve. He who has no patriotism or desire to serve, he said, is a truly disabled man. In mid-morning the captain preached in a casual way. That day he mingled with them just like any other soldier, but when he spoke he recovered his authority, always ready to help them give birth to the hero within. War is not inhuman, he said. Animals do not know how to wage war. Nothing is more human than war. Nothing, he said in a tired metallic voice, is more human than war.

Sunday was a day for sport. Before noon they played basketball. They formed teams, and they rode their MAIM units. Even the game was part of the training: they had to train those brand-new bodies to become soldiers. Real soldiers, the captain said. Anyone could kill, he said, but only they were the children of war. They owed their bodies to enemy shrapnel. We have this body, he said, thanks to enemy shrapnel. And he nodded at his retractile claw with pride and hatred.

Sunday was a day for jokes. They joked while they were playing. You cripple, they said when someone reacted slowly. You basket-case, they said when someone didn't catch the ball. They laughed a lot, too, new laughs, half-mouthed laughs, one-eyed laughs, laughs with half the face frozen in an indelible twitch of anger or bitterness. Private Cáceres had a whole face, and his facial muscles were in good condition, but his laugh had nonetheless stiffened. Not that it was a self-conscious or resentful laugh, but he suspected that for wholepeople it would soon be as impossible to understand as an ape's laugh. He had once read that dogs yawn to show gratitude to their masters. He didn't know if that was true, but he did know that in his case a yawn did not mean drowsiness or boredom. His face was just groping for some kind of feeling that had never existed before and was being born with them.

Sunday was a day for card-playing. Their games were a bit different too The gestures usually employed by gamblers didn't work, because they were conceived for whole, flexible faces, not for half-burnt or half-paralyzed masks. Those who had lost only one hand learnt to use their metal claws, and no one would help them do it. When their time came, there wasn't going to be anyone to help them under enemy fire: nervous vibrations locked-in to metallic vibrations would make the difference between life and death. Those were quiet games, without laughter or cheering; words sounded like treadmill repetitions of player-piano music.

Sunday was a day for comradeship. Comradeship consisted of trying to come to terms with yourself as you faced your own image in others. When their moment came, there would not be much coordination in combat, just radioed orders, a target, and the will to hit it and survive. Individual actions would prevail. Comradeship was a shattered mirror.

THE DRILL BECAME more intense in the last weeks of training. Some of them had not make it. Some of them had not got used to urinating and defecating regularly in the built-in tubes of their units; even though no observer would have noticed anything, they still felt naked. Some of them just wanted to go back home. Suicide was already painted on many of their faces. The rest were only biding their time, waiting for their own opportunity to kill and maim. When and if they spoke, they never asked each other where they had been before, how they had been wounded. They had never existed before. They were being born just now.

MAIM units hovered like swarms over the enemy defenses. The average casualty rate per mission was about fifty per cent. That included not only the ones knocked down by enemy fire, but the ones accidentally knocked down by their own comrades, those that ran out of fuel, and those that crashed because of mechanical failure, which was not uncommon. The trick was to look for the shortest path to the target, to use the ammo to maximum effect and so be safer during descent. They carried little fuel because less fuel meant more payload, and besides that it kept them from wrecking missions out of on excess of individual zeal. MAIMs opened up gaps, and through these gaps the infantry and armored cars could penetrate with minimal losses.

'Why hasn't the enemy adopted some kind of counterpart of our MAIM units?' Private Cáceres asked once.

They had tried, the Captain said. Not with the disabled. They had used mobile units driven by wholemen, but those hadn't paid off. They were costly, because of the high losses, and their actual yield was insignificant. They lacked the momentum, the courage, the will to make it at any price. Patriotism, he said, that's what it takes. On the other hand, wholemen were not the true children of war.

Drill was not battle, but it looked much the same. Those who survived the training were seen off by the captain one rainy morning, in a simple ceremony where they were congratulated by the camp commander and blessed by a chaplain who glanced doubtfully at them. On the armored fronts of their units, next to the rayless sun, there was an inscription in red: THE HOLY VIRGIN WILL PROTECT US.

WHEN THE PLANE opened its cargo doors, Private Cáceres saw snow and black dots on the snow. The plane had turned around in an arc and now pointed away from enemy lines. Balloons of block smoke burst in the air. MAIM units made clumsily for the doors. They would parachute down and in midair would turn on their engines.

Private Cáceres tumbled downwards and opened his parachute once he was in a horizontal position. He felt the jerk of the cordage and saw some of the others had got entangled in the strings and were crashing to the ground. The air was raging with explosions. A cold wind marked with hot gusts blew against his face. But he stopped looking around, because the trick was to look ahead. He didn't try to avoid enemy missiles, since he knew that the small amount of fuel he carried meant he must trust his luck rather than his fear. He waited, and when he was near the ground he unfolded his rotor blades, turned on the engine and released the metallic frame to which the parachute was hooked. He was flying low now, in a straight line. The snow ahead was crisscrossed with violent scars. The scars were trenches, and beyond the trenches bulked something dark that looked like a warehouse or a field hospital. He pressed buttons and levers, twisting his body frantically, keeping the most powerful explosive for the last moment. As he approached the enemy positions, the fire curtain grew much denser. His veins were boiling and throbbing as if they stored an excessive amount of blood for a body that didn't need so much. When he was close, he launched his missiles. The wakes of missiles launched by others in his own squadron blazed by. One moment there were tents, tanks and camouflage nets down there, the next there were only flames and bodies twitching in mid air like peeling wire in a thunderstorm.

He landed on muddy snow and waited. He saw other troopers descend a few yards away. Some of them were in flames. To the rear, the first infantrymen climbed out of the maxicopters to comb the terrain. All around, the dirty snow was streaked with blood, as if the earth were menstruating to renew itself. He was feeling the needle-stab in his brain. Noise was drilling through his eardrums as if his head were an echo chamber. The radio inside his helmet was barking orders. And far away, on the smoky horizon, choppers in flames rained from the sky like manna.

ONE HOUR LATER the maxicopters brought down the maintenance people. These were efficient technicians who frowned as they worked with the urgency of mechanics at a speed track. They replaced the fuel tank of each intact unit, adjusted the loose pieces, threw away the useless ones, fitted new rounds of ammo, signaled their OKs, and checked the falled units looking for pieces that could be salvaged. Later on, the MAIMs took off again from consolidated terrain. They advanced one hundred yards, opened up new gaps in the defenses, harassed the fleeing enemy, or just reconnoitered the area. To stop them you had to blow them up: none of them flew back or landed on Noman's land, where they would be too vulnerable. If the pilot died, he usually went on shooting and he often crashed into the defense lines. Each stage of the battle soon became a routine for Private Cáceres. Taking off, flying in a straight line, dropping bombs, biding your time during lulls. Only in his last stage could he afford to watch the battle, motionless as a fossilized skeleton. And in the meantime he remembered, of course he remembered. But the warm caresses, the salty dampness, the half-open lips could not compare with blood and oil and smoke. A new feeling was creeping, like pins and needles, into his steel claws and into his chrome legs. He was slowly purging himself. After all, the spectacle had been worth the price.

Endriago

TIME COULD NO longer be measured in weeks or months, but in jumps and shocks, a time of scorching fire. Tidal forces were tearing earth and sky apart, and Cáceres was one Cáceres among many. And suddenly there was silence.

It was a vast silence that covered the burnt land, the snow darkened by mud and blood. Private Cáceres loved those silences that punctuated the moments of glory. Suddenly everything come to a stop, the thunder of ordnance fire, the whirring of choppers, the roar of jets, the screeching of metal caterpillars —and this hush evoked the aftermath of creation, the peace of the seventh day. A long time ago the earth had thrown up its bleeding bowels, soiling itself with its own excrement. When it had exhausted its energies, its bowel grew bright and glassy, and in certain strands of its crust the earth preserved those memories, geological layers of peace followed by new outbursts of violence. If you studied that crust, you'd surely discover that the earth was proud of its mutilations.

During those silences the sky was a tense membrane, and everybody waited. The POWs waited behind fences, their faces distorted by the cold, by the memory of cold; they waited for a transfer, a plate of soup, a cigarette. The combatants waited; they cleaned their guns, walked about irritably, hatted their time away. The wounded waited, and so did the dead, and so did the earth.

And so did the MAIMs, but it was a different kind of waiting. MAIMs moved grotesquely over the soft snow, like big coleopters, and waiting was like killing time on Sundays. No one got near them, no one talked to them. They were only glanced at with awe and hatred. Could it possibly show on their faces? Could it be that the great visions were somehow engraved in their retinas, the soil fertilized by corpses, the choppers in flames raining from the sky like manna?

But this time silence went on and on. It was like a heavy curtain, and it had the smell of fear. The windy sky was obscenely blue.

THE MAXICOPTERS ARRIVED by night, sweeping the snow with white beams that suddenly glared pink and were soon reduced to a dusty light beneath dark bulks that screened off the stars. Several maintenance people dismounted urgently, waving lists in their hands. They called them out by one, which was funny, because MAIMs were never called by their names, actually they weren't called at all, but received radioed orders, though these orders were the same for each of them, and it was even rumored that the orders were prerecorded, because in fact they sounded like rhythmical exhortations. And beside being funny it was impractical, because most of the people in those lists were no longer there.

THE MAINTENANCE PEOPLE ordered them to line up in front of the maxicopters. Their rotorblades were folded, and in they went, one by one. The maxicopters soon climbed up into the night and flew off toward the rear. Inside the cabin everybody was quiet, dismay hanging in the air.

The maxicopters returned to base in the harsh glare of spotlights. They landed, unloaded and took off again immediately, returning to the front. MAIM units from different squadrons were concentrating at this base. They had to wait on the tarmac, in the noise and the wind, and afterwards they were taken to a huge shed surrounded by cans of burning pitch.

Indoors, the shed was illuminated by naked bulbs radiating a dusty yellow glow. At the back there was a lectern with a mike. They waited for a couple of hours, while the shed filled up with MAIM troopers. Outside the buzz and hum of maxicopters went on and on. Several MPs were walking up and down the empty aisles, wagging their white clubs. There were no MAIM officers.

At last a colonel wearing fatigues and a helmet came in. He was a wholeman, red-faced and panting, as if he had more urgent things to do. He went up the lectern and adjusted the mike.

Your fatherland is grateful, he said, and Private Cáceres felt his stomach churning. We will soon be signing a fair peace, and your fatherland is immensely grateful for that. A fair peace, thought Private Cáceres uncomprehendingly. Through his bleary eyes he still saw the choppers in flames raining from the sky like manna. Future generations, the colonel said, will know of your feats and will engrave your names in the great book of our people's history.

While the colonel talked, the maintenance staff were pushing wheelchairs down the aisles, while others helped MAIMs get rid of their chrome attachments. They worked hurriedly, just as when they were under fire. Extricating the combatants from their mobile units, they settled them down in their chairs and pulled off their white badges with their names in red. Others dismantled each empty MAIM unit, stacking the useful pieces into big boxes: guns, prostheses, helmets. In the meantime, other staff members laid cables along the side of the shed, and they put what seemed to be explosives in the corners, and between the girders.

Not only have you inflicted great material damage on the enemy the colonel said. Not only have you inflicted great material damage, he repeated, as if he didn't know how to go on. You have given them a moral lesson, he added firmly, a lesson in manhood and courage. Now you'll be giving them a lesson in good will and peace. The words echoed dryly in the yellow light of the bulbs. When his turn came, Private Cáceres was released from his unit and settled in a wheelchair. Every scar in his body throbbed like a wounded animal.

The address come to on end with on exhortation that sounded like a rebuke. When they were taken out of the shed, all of them had contorted faces. Unceremoniously, almost in secrecy, the maintenance staff pushed them over to another airfield, where several aircraft were waiting. Whirls of dusty snow swirled over their bulky shadows, and orders and shouts got entangled in those whirls. One after another, all the chairs were wheeled aboard the planes.

The turbo-engines snapped into life and the roaring of the plane silenced the roaring of the wind in Private Caceres' mind. While the aircraft taxied along the runaway, he looked at the shed flickering in the light of the burning tar. The maintenance staff were still unrolling wire while others took the big boxes out, dragging them along with ropes.

The plane took off and described an arc as it flew over the tarmac. Down there, beyond the window glass, one shadow beckoned to another and a series of explosions demolished the shed even as they were climbing up. The flames threw a shivering glare over the swirling snow, and that was the last they saw of the combat zone.

In the whirring silence of the dark cabin, absent-minded faces, one Cáceres after another like images in a shattered mirror, were bracing themselves for peace.

Hello, a parrot-voice kept saying inside their all too similar heads.

Original title: Primera línea

Translated by the author and Daniel Weissbort

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