Mumonkan, an ancient collection of Zen tales, speaks of all this with eloquence, but no one among us soldiers had Buddhist texts in mind, especially none of the amateur soldiers, society’s dregs, who were generally blasé about warfare. Professional soldiers, like samurai, are another story, and among them one may find connoisseurs of the Mumonkan and Hagakure, even lovers of the poetry of T. S. Eliot and the music of Edvard Grieg. Yes, it is one thing to be a samurai and altogether different to be an ordinary recruit who, when he opens his eyes in the morning, cares not a whit for himself or for the world. Meanwhile, the sobs and wails welling up from below, increasingly heart-wrenching as the day went on, forced the commander to ask himself, seriously, what to do about the mob of refugees, because, with their actions and, presumably, primitive mourning customs, they were eroding the morale of his soldiers. But he didn’t dare forget that seven, if not more, soldiers had already been plucked forever from their ranks, and this was a serious threat to the combat readiness of the unit and our ability to complete the tasks assigned us. By then our numbers had dwindled from the initial thirty-seven to a scant thirty, so duty shifts would be longer and each soldier would have more tasks and greater burdens, but the only thing the commander could say was to urge us to visit the little graveyard from time to time, halfway between the checkpoint and the latrine, to listen to what their late fellow fighters, now the young dead, had to say. And sure enough, when we went to the graveyard it was as if we were stepping into another world. Nothing separated the graves from us—we’d been thinking to put up a fence but there hadn’t yet been time; we did install a gate, and everyone who came to the graveyard, despite, as we said, the absence of a fence, always stepped in through the gate. The final gate, as the soldiers so fittingly called it, but in an informal conversation with the commander they made the point of saying we might add an exit gate on the other side, so whoever was leaving the graveyard, whether alive or a ghost, could use it. The commander welcomed the idea, but immediately said in a stern voice that there was no place for ghosts in his unit, nor anywhere else. And then one morning we found a flower planted on each grave. Not a footprint to be seen. Incredible, exclaimed the corporal who was assigned the task of investigating the case, because somebody whose feet never touched the ground must have planted the flowers. So what now? Were we supposed to start believing in angels, and was it even possible to believe in angels if we denied our belief in ghosts? “I will not hear talk,” said the commander, “of such things.” He didn’t care; others could decide according to their own needs and beliefs. At first we tried to establish why each particular flower was chosen: why was a violet planted on the grave of the soldier who’d been hanged, while on the grave of the corporal there was a tulip. On one of the graves there was a cactus, while the flower on another looked a lot like a wallflower, and on the last, a daisy. The cactus, of course, was the oddest choice. If the man who was killed had been, say, a Mexican, well then that could have made sense; was it possible the one who did this—one or more, regardless—had known something about these men the rest of us didn’t know? In the army you only begin to exist when you report for duty and are issued your uniform; everything that comes before that is nobody’s business. Maybe the soldier truly was part Mexican; just as one of us, without anybody knowing, could be Jewish. And if it were found out, what then? The other soldiers would make the man’s life a misery is what. They’d peck at him slowly, the way a chicken snatches and drops a kernel of corn before gulping it down with gusto. And that is how the Jew—hypothetical, or so we hoped—would be snatched and tossed, the difference being that by the end he’d look so bedraggled that no one would care to sniff at him, let alone gulp him down with gusto. The only one who’d fare worse than the poor Jew would be a person who was gay. There are some among us who will tell you a homosexual is the meanest category of human, a degenerate, an incurable lowlife, there’s no second chance for him, something you can always offer a Jew—the chance to convert to another faith—and once the Jew adapts (and Jews do adapt so handily to anything), nothing will stand in his way. Chances are a baptized Jew won’t become the Pope, but a bishop or a cardinal? Well, why not. We were happier believing that among us there were no such persons, and if there were, well that’s a no-brainer—in time they’d give themselves away. Truth is the mightiest weapon, no matter which side we approach it from. But enough about that, we’re at war, and such things are better left unsaid, as tales of homosexuals and Jews have long disturbed us. So let’s skip the cactus; after all maybe it was just a prank by some childish soul desperate to impress his parents, never noticing, meanwhile, that both parents died years before. Wh-wh-when did that happen? stutters the person, unable to mask his chagrin that he had no idea his parents were already dead. Luckily he didn’t blurt something idiotic like: “Why, I was just talking with my father, he says Mother has been under the weather lately.” The commander spreads his hands, says nothing. There are moments when words merely confound. And so, when the delegation of refugees came to the barrier once again, the commander refused, at first, to appear, and then, when the cries of the babies in their mothers’ arms became too heartrending, out he strode, decked in his parade uniform, and, while the eagle feathers on his cap bobbed before their eyes, he declared, staring up at the sky, “With God as my witness.” Rain began falling that very instant and for days afterwards it drizzled. Lucky thing we had no horses: they would not have fared well on such slippery terrain. But should this sudden downpour be understood as affirmation that God exists and was responding? Or was it a spectacular coincidence, as the commander would write in his diary that evening? Meanwhile a new delegation of refugees stepped forward, calm and stalwart, and offered their supplies of meat, sugar, and flour in exchange for beginning the work on their documents of passage. The lady translator was with him again, and she, too, was quiet as a church mouse. “She purrs like a kitten,” said the commander when he took her to his office for, as he put it, a “new round of talks.” The round lasted just over twenty minutes; when the door to the office opened, the translator and commander were grinning from ear to ear. The commander asked where the priest was, meaning the soldier who’d been a student of theology, and we all froze. Was the commander planning to wed? But it turned out he’d promised the refugees our priest would hold a requiem for the people who’d been killed during the punitive expedition. The chanting could be heard for a while, and when he returned, the priest refused to divulge any details; horror was written all over his face. All he’d say was that there were more victims than we’d thought, and that God clearly was not on their side. Someone yelled that he wasn’t on ours, either. “At least he had a glimpse of ours,” answered the priest, “and then he shut his eyes.” Whatever the case, when the refugees returned to the checkpoint the next day, there was nothing left of their gaiety; theirs was a procession of hollow people and the wind blew right through them. First they came up, one by one, to the table set up on their side of the barrier. There sat a soldier whose job it was to check their documents and fill out the form for each one. The information they were asked was the most basic, first and last name, date of birth, citizenship, blood group, medical history, and so forth. The soldier sat while the person giving the information stood because actually there was no better option. The other chair was taken by the woman who was their translator and who, bleary from the sleepless hours of the night before, kept dozing off and waking with a jolt when she’d start translating everything she could hear people saying around her. Once the form was filled, the person would be given a yellow slip with a number and they’d hand it to the next soldier, the one who manned the barrier. This soldier first entered the number into a large book in which on the first and last pages was written, in large print, “Checkpoint Crossings Register” and, in smaller lettering, the heading: “Entries” on the first page and “Exits” on the other. Then the soldier lifted the barrier and waved the people through with all the belongings they were carrying. There was another table beyond this where sat another soldier. He was also filling out a form, an affidavit for the registered person that in the new place, the name of which was not made explicit, he or she would behave in keeping with the local laws and regulations. The soldier entered the first and last name of the person arriving, after which the person signed it. Then the soldier stamped it, scribbled the information in a volume with nothing written on it, and smiled courteously at the now-registered person, who went over to a third table where sat the commander. He, too, smiled, though his smile was more like a grimace and sometimes faded altogether. Then the commander, leaning confidentially toward the person, would say a few words or sentences and hand them a brochure in several languages about the rights and obligations of refugees, published by the United Nations or some other international body, we weren’t sure which. In any case, the commander’s brochure made for attractive reading, because most of them who’d crossed over to the other side, to “our” side (though none of the sides of that hilltop were, technically, ours), sat down on the grass and leafed through it, poring over the commander’s brochure with rapt attention. The commander protested that the brochure wasn’t his, he was merely distributing it, but the moniker stuck, and this only confirmed that popular expressions slip easily into the linguistic corpus of new words or new meanings of old words and there they stay until the next popular new term elbows them out. The day moved on and with it, or rather following it, on moved the refugees who’d been processed. Fortunately there weren’t any clashes except in one case when the soldier filling out the first form bumped into the official translator, and she, probably waking from a happy dream, sent him straight to hell and said she hoped he’d hang from the nearest willow. Lucky thing she didn’t mention an oak or a pear tree; mythic sites like these should not be invoked in just any sentence, and even the mention of the willow was a little iffy, what with all that goes on with willows. A few minutes later the lady translator, as soon as she’d splashed her face with cold water, realized how rude she’d been and hastened to find the soldier, meaning to apologize. But by the time she returned to the table, she saw another man there and heard from him that the first (“your soldier,” the other soldier called him) had finished his shift and probably, said the soldier, had gone off to catch up on his sleep. The lady translator thanked him and headed for the sleeping quarters. If she’d known what awaited her there she probably wouldn’t have gone, but, as she later explained, she thought she’d run into the soldier at the door to the dormitory, rattle off her apology and expression of gratitude, turn around, and go. But the soldier was already there, lying on his cot and masturbating. This is certainly not unusual for soldiers, some of them masturbate several times a day, and group masturbations have been recorded with each soldier jerking off the soldier next to him, sometimes two at a time. It’s harmless fun, masturbating, harmless yet handy, since it eases tension, promotes physical relaxation, and stimulates the appetite. The soldier may not have known any of that, or was perhaps still unaware that she was standing there, or he may have been confused; whichever it was, when he came with a sigh and opened his eyes, he saw an attractive woman smiling down at him. His next move might be startling, but it certainly isn’t difficult to comprehend. He reached out swiftly with his left and grabbed her by the neck, and then, as he drew her to him and pushed her head down, he lifted the blanket with his right and exposed his half-erect penis. Later, when questioned, he did say it hadn’t occurred to him that she might be a genuine flesh-and-blood person—what, after all, would such a beautiful woman been doing in their quarters?—and only when he felt, and we quote, “her velvety lips on the head of my penis,” did he let loose. He pulled her head lower still which apparently so flabbergasted the woman that she fainted and sank to the floor next to the cot. The soldier wasted not a moment. He woke up a soldier who was asleep on the cot next to his and to whom he owed money—the sum in question was not stated—and asked him whether he’d like the debt returned in kind. The other laughed and, we quote, “told him to fuck off” and turned over, hoping to go back to sleep, but then the first soldier explained what he was up to and pointed to the insensate woman lying there on her back, her legs spread as much as her short skirt allowed, but enough so that at the top of her pale thighs they could see a flash of white panties and around them, strands of curly pubic hair. They grabbed her by the hands and feet, swung her up onto the first soldier’s cot, and then, first one, then the other, they shamelessly violated her. Later they claimed the sex was not against her will, that, in fact, she was awake the whole time and loved every minute of it, and as proof they said that during both, and we quote, “fucks,” the woman smiled blissfully and she only started screaming, writhing, punching, and scratching when she realized it was coming to an end. If they’d been able to find a third soldier, said the first two soldiers, the woman, and we quote, “would have gladly gone right on fucking,” which the woman denied as the most appalling accusation she’d ever heard. The commander, to whom they turned immediately afterwards, had no idea at first how to respond, as his mustache leered while the soldiers were telling him how they’d raped her. And besides, hadn’t he been alone with her for a full twenty minutes or more, and hadn’t both of them been grinning when they left the office? Was there a valid question as to whether the commander could be partial as a judge? This is a tricky one. Rape of the civilian population, regardless of age or sex, was punished severely, often by firing squad, but the commander was already undermanned and to give up two more men was a luxury he could not afford. When the translator heard his decision she nearly exploded, but by then the matter was done and dusted, and the commander no longer paid her or any of the remaining refugees any attention. They had all been issued their certificates of refugee status and could move forward. Theoretically speaking, they could have moved backward just as well, but nobody considered this as an option. In war one leaves at a run; it’s only in peacetime that one approaches at a walk, and we are now, as the commander put it, “up to our necks in war shit.” One of the two remaining corporals is supposed to have said: “Shit is shit, there’s no divvy