Interpreter #10

"These are the days of heroes"


Specialist Everet Gildge was scared shitless.

He'd been a corpsman for almost two years. His first tour had seen him thrown into the bloody, relentless fighting in Bagdad and Feleuja. He'd extended after that and been sent to RIS, a high, remote mountaintop hell where he'd seen rent flesh and scorched earth on 98 of the 140 days he'd spent there.

All of that he'd seen and adapted to and managed with - he thought - at least a modicum of professional remove. Hell, in Ris he'd carried a man up a cliffside draw after a mortar strike. Gildge had gone up and down the draw three times, toting meaty pieces of the guy to a nervous, waiting dust-off.

But nothing had prepared him for the Mech. In the last seven days the unit had killed 789 people, most of them innocent, many of them children. Specialist Gildge knew this because each and every rolling piece in the column had an in-dash Ex-Count readout. He could hear the whole column whooping it's appreciation as the death-works rumbled and the red Ex Count LED flickered and climbed.

They'd taken no prisoners and they'd developed no intel. They'd filed no sit-reps and they'd never visited an OP even to refuel. It was as if Washington had taken all tactics and strategy out of the mission, and just instructed the column to destroy anything and everything that crossed it's terrible path. In the The Mech's war, the bullshit didn't rate. The order was "kill" and the score keeper was the always visible Ex-Count led's.

***

In Bankuti they'd herded all the townspeople into a cave and rocketed the shaft for almost ten minutes straight. In Kandahar he'd watched the LT strap a family of four to the business end of a truck-mounted recoilless rifle and force the husband to scream out "fire in the hole!". In Kirkuk they'd gone house to house for five city blocks. He remembered finding the Interpreter at a top floor balcony, a laundry basket full of rags by his side. He was throwing little bundles of the clothing over the side, watching them fall, giggling as he went. A tremendous joint was clutched and burning, in his teeth.

The 'Terp - thoroughly engrossed in his task - had wheeled on him just as Gildge got close enough
to realize the bundles were not laundry, we're in fact moving, moaning, in some cases crying:

Fuckinnn...wanna hit bro? Take it yourself, though...

He jutted his face towards the horrified corpsman.

kinda got my hands full, Bro!

He laughed through clenched teeth and it made a sound like:

Sh ah sh sh sh sh sh

Gildge thought he saw one of the bundles twitch noticeably just before the 'Terp turned back to his work. Gildge - struck mute in revulsion - watched him suck in a huge, no-handed toke, shoving first the twitching bundle, then the other out into the void as he exhaled.

***

The Mech didn't seem to have a standard COC. Gildge hadn't seen anything even resembling an executive officer, there was only one non-com amongst them, yet the column was lousy with both civilian operators and plainclothes special forces. As far as he could see, The rolling horror that was 5th Mechanized seemed to be controlled - pillar to post - by the LT and his weedy, infant-throwing Interpreter.

And the weaponry...Everett Gildge was a pacifist but he came to the Corps a life-long handgun enthusiast, taught his way around them by his father, Jess, as Jess had been by his own father. By age 16, Everett could name, dissassemble, reconfigure, repair and fire almost 150 different types of personal ordinance. None of them could hold a match against the murderous sci-fi shit the Mech could bring to bear. His head spun and ached remembering back: He'd seen silent, triangular recon drones with no moving parts, miniature hand-held weapons that produced no audible report, but which could  melt any target, instantly, to liquid. He'd watched contact mines setting acres of once-lush forest ablaze at the press of a button. There was a flamethrower mounted on two of the tanks that sprayed a hellish discharge of molten aluminum and white phosphorous more than a football field in width and breadth. They'd used it to set the sleeping villages of Tathu and Tathi on fire. Gildge heard the screams every night since, and he could hear them still, storming his thoughts like line-infantry, stealing his sanity.

What in sweet fuckall - he wondered for the hundredth time that day - am I going to...

Then there was a loud noise, and Gildge looked for the first time and last time, at Tarantula Hawk.