Measures of Absolution

Chapter Five Taps

Jackson hasn’t taken a leave in almost two years. She has no family left to visit, and even if she did, they’d be in Atlanta-Macon, and she has no desire to return to that place in this lifetime. So she takes the maglev back to the Burlington base, which has a rec facility on the lakeshore. She spends two days eating, sleeping, and using the entertainment suites. By Day Three of her five-day leave, she is bored out of her mind, so she takes a shuttle back to Shughart. Better to report to duty early, even if it means having to count towels and clean optical sight modules, than to spend another day drinking shitty soy beer in front of a holoscreen.

When she walks back into the squad room, Priest and Baker are there, playing cards at the table.

“You two okay?” she asks.

“Yeah,” Priest says. He runs his finger across his forehead, where a thin, pale line marks a fused laceration. “Few dings here and there. Grayson and the Sarge got the worst of it.”

“Stratton and Paterson got the worst of it,” Jackson says. “What about Hansen?”

“Her shoulder joint is blown,” Baker says. “Three weeks rehab.”

“We’re on light duty,” Priest says and gets out of his chair. “Top says we’re off the line until the squad gets a debriefing and a psych eval.”

Of course, Jackson thinks. They’re not going to let us anywhere near a loaded gun until the shrinks and the Intelligence officers have cleared us.

“Top said you were on leave for the week,” Baker says.

“I was,” she says. “Cut it short. Ain’t shit to do out there.”

“So what do we do now?”

Jackson opens her locker and takes out her knife and a sharpening stone. Then she walks over to the table and sits down in the chair Priest just vacated.

“We get the edge back on,” she says. “Downtime ain’t gonna last forever.”

She gets her medical clearance the next morning. One of the resident TA MedCorps docs looks Jackson over, checks the medical data from her armor, and pronounces her physically fit for unrestricted duty, as if she couldn’t have determined that by herself. The psych eval and Intel debriefing are equally superficial and cursory, standard “how does that make you feel?” psychobabble bullshit, some half-trained shrink checking off boxes on a form. She gives him the answers she knows will let him make his marks in the right spots.

The Intel debriefing doesn’t even have any sort of point. Her helmet camera captured everything much more reliably than her memory did.

“Forty-three,” the battalion’s intel officer tells her at the debriefing.

“Excuse me, sir?”

“Forty-three kills,” he says. “Your tally for Detroit. All good kills on armed hostiles. You did well.”

Is that supposed to make her feel better, give her pride or a sense of accomplishment? Lighten her conscience, maybe? If anything, it has the opposite effect. Those were not soldiers of a foreign army. They were welfare rats, with no armor and mostly antique weapons. They may have come out on top because it was a thousand of them against four squads, but they paid dearly for their victory if the rest of the company had kill counts anything like Jackson’s. Next time the TA goes in, there’ll be more of them and they’ll be much more determined, because now they know they can win. They almost got a drop ship with a full armory and loaded ordnance racks. Jackson has no doubt they’ll try again. She would.

No, there’s no way to look at this as anything but a disaster. Going back to that place will never be the same. It might as well be a different country now.

Jackson knows that telling the Intel officer these things wouldn’t make a difference. It’s like all the staff officers live in a different reality, one with its own language and customs and laws of physics. What the fuck does it matter that she killed forty-three of those shit-eating, savage sewer rats? There are millions more.

Exactly a week after Detroit, the company commander summons Jackson into his office.

“You’re the ranking member of your squad at the moment,” Captain Lopez says to her when she takes the chair he offers.

“Yes, sir,” she replies. “Sergeant Fallon isn’t back from Great Lakes yet.”

“And she won’t be, not for a while. Anyway, I have orders to send people to the funerals. I’m sending Lieutenant Weaving to PFC Paterson’s funeral. I’ll be attending Private Stratton’s. I want you to accompany me as the representative from his squad. Send one of the other privates with the Lieutenant. Your pick.”

“Yes, sir,” she says. The military has probably already reclaimed all the money in Stratton and Paterson’s accounts. Their families won’t see a penny of the money they earned while in uniform. If you die before the end of your term, it all goes back to the government. Not that it’s ever more than a number in a database somewhere. So why would they even go to the expense of sending funeral delegations? It makes no sense to Jackson. But she’s just a corporal and Captain Lopez is the company commander, so she salutes and obeys.

In the old days, they sent dead soldiers home in caskets, big wood-and-metal troughs large enough to hold a body. They’d put flawless uniforms on the corpses, complete with all the ribbons and decorations, even if nobody ever opened the casket before the burial. That sort of waste seems obscene to Jackson—burying a good uniform with a dead soldier. Never mind the idea of burying a body whole, dedicating dozens of square feet of precious unspoiled ground to park a corpse in perpetuity, even after body and coffin are long gone.

These days, the mortuary’s incinerators reduce a body to just a few cubic inches of fine ash, and they pack it into a stainless cylinder small enough to fit into a magazine pouch. Stratton’s cylinder is engraved with his name, rank, branch of service, and dates of birth and death. Captain Lopez carries the little capsule in white-gloved hands as they board the shuttle together the next morning. Jackson bears the flag they’ll be presenting to Stratton’s next-of-kin. It’s folded into a tight triangle, with the NAC’s star, maple leaf, and eagle exactly in the center. She also carries a small padded case with all of Stratton’s awards, which aren’t many. He had just started his second year or service. The family sent a son to Basic Training a little over a year ago, and now they’re getting back a little capsule full of ash and a few pieces of alloy and cloth ribbon worth maybe twenty dollars altogether.

Corporal Jackson doesn’t like any of this. The stiff Class A uniform she only wears a few times a year is scratchy and smells of locker dust. The seats of the shuttle are uncomfortable, and she doesn’t like the thought of an hour-long flight alone with her company commander. But she figures that she owes Stratton at least this inconvenience. She knows that he would be itching to make fun of her in that Class A monkey suit, but that he feared her just enough to not have dared.

Stratton was from eastern Tennessee, so the shuttle doesn’t have to go too far from Dayton. On the flight, the Captain asks her about Stratton. What was he like? Any anecdotes we should share with the family? How did he do on the ground during the drops? Did he get along with his squad mates? Jackson answers the Captain’s questions with a growing sense of disgust. She realizes that even though he didn’t know Private Stratton at all, he’ll use her information to talk to the family about their son’s accomplishments as if he has a personal connection to every member of his company. It’s all so transparent, she thinks. Trying to pretend that you gave a shit about that boy. If you had, you wouldn’t have sent him out into the middle of a riot without proper intel or air support.

The funeral is the most gloomy, depressing event she has witnessed in a very long time. Not just because they’re burying a twenty-year-old kid who was her responsibility, but also because of where they lay him to rest. Stratton doesn’t even get an outside plot. They stick his capsule into a receptacle on the wall of one of the many underground cemetery vaults of the K-Town Public Cemetery. They lock and seal the compartment, and the little door is barely big enough to hold a palm-sized memorial plaque. They’re storing what’s left of the kid in a space that’s smaller than the valuables compartment of his military locker. Jackson didn’t know him very long, but well enough to know that he probably would have chosen to be scattered out of the open tail hatch of a drop ship on the way to another deployment, not locked forever in a little hole in the wall along with ten thousand others.

Stratton’s parents are stone-faced during the whole thing. His father, tall and imposing, takes the flag from her without a word of acknowledgment. When Captain Lopez holds out his hand to offer thanks on behalf of a grateful Commonwealth, Mr. Stratton throws the folded flag at him. It smacks into the Captain’s chest and falls to the ground, still folded into its tight triangle.

“You can take that and stick it up your ass,” he tells Captain Lopez. Then he turns to Jackson and takes the case holding his son’s medals out of her hands.

“I will have those,” he tells her. “But I have no use for that rag. Or for you. Now get the hell out of here and leave us with our son.”

Jackson knows this is deep, desperate grief talking. She knows the man doesn’t hate her personally, that his hate is aimed at the uniform she wears. Still, she feels a surge of shame and anger. She liked the kid, served with him for over a year, tutored him, shared meals and played cards with him. She doesn’t deserve this loathing directed at her. But there’s no point saying any of it to this grieving and angry man who is no longer a father thanks to some overconfident desk pilots at Battalion. The TA didn’t kill his son, but they put him in front of the gun that did.

Next to her, Captain Lopez bends over to pick up the NAC flag Mr. Stratton tossed at him. Jackson turns and walks out of the cemetery vault without waiting for her company commander. There is nothing more to say or do here. Maybe someday she can come back here and talk to the Strattons, tell them about the anger she will always feel for failing their son and surviving the battle when he didn’t, but today is not it.

On the way back to Shughart, she doesn’t speak another word to the Captain, and he doesn’t ask her anything else, which is good because she won’t have to tell him to go fuck himself. She considers telling him anyway, though. Thirty days in the brig seem like a good start at penance.