im, the commander cursed with a gasp, spun on his heel, and returned to his office. We stayed outside and spoke in whispers. The sun climbed higher in the sky, and the day warmed. Clouds of flies swarmed around the latrine. They hung in the air like clusters of grapes, and soon the sentry’s entire body had begun to look more like a blackened mummy. The commander finally came out, and when he addressed us we could smell the drink on him. He set two men to digging a grave, then other soldiers joined in and soon the grave was ready. “The priest,” said the commander, “where’s our priest?” He was referring to a soldier who, after three years as a seminary student had transferred to the school of natural sciences and mathematics to study physics and chemistry. The commander dispatched four soldiers to fetch the dead body, and soon they returned, toting it on the door they’d pulled off the latrine hinges, and behind them swarmed and quivered the clouds of flies. “Quick,” said the commander. “Make it quick.” The “priest” began mumbling and chanting, the murdered sentry was rolled into the grave, the military-issue shovels scooped in the dirt, and, in the time it took to clap two hands together, a mound of black and greasy soil piled up before us. Only later did someone think to poke an improvised cross into it, but we never learned who. Nor did we find out who killed him, because after the first rumors of some sort of forest avengers lurking in treetops and waiting for us to drop off to sleep before creeping in and murdering someone, a question arose, which nobody uttered aloud, but which struck all of us as a genuine possibility: what should we do if it was one of us who’d done him in? We don’t know who first thought of the question, but afterwards it could easily be seen traveling from soldier to soldier, always scribbling the same astonishment on their faces. In the evening the soldiers tossed and turned for hours, sleepless, chilled by the thought that if the killer were already in their midst they might be next on the list. They dropped off to sleep in the most varied postures, on the floor by their cot, with elbows on the windowsill, or by the front door—a cigarette between fingers, until, in the end, the commander flew into a rage and said he’d ban all smoking. And even if he hadn’t blustered as he did, smoking was on its way out. Whoever still had a pack tucked away hid it like a snake hides its legs; as there was no opportunity to stockpile tobacco, the same fate awaited them all. It’s easy to imagine that this worry was what pushed the men to talk among themselves about how to make their way back through the forest. We won’t just sit here, will we, waiting for someone to stab us, one by one, in the back? They called for the commander to do something, and, after conferring with his officers, he ordered the formation of two squads of scouts. The squads were identical, three men each; one (in each squad) carried a light machine gun, while the others were armed with lighter weapons and hand grenades. The squad leaders were also issued flare guns; what with the total lack of all communications this would be their only way of signaling their location if they were in crisis. The commander wanted at first to assign Mladen to one of the squads, and the soldiers themselves assumed he would, but then the thinking prevailed that Mladen should be reserved in case there was a search for one or both of the scouting parties. And so it was that the next day at dawn both squads lined up by the checkpoint barrier, one on one side, the other on the other, heard what the commander had to say, saluted, and marched off down the hill. As we’ve already said, the distance from the checkpoint to the foot of the hill was almost identical on both stretches of the road, and the groups reached the points where the road curved off into the forest at nearly the same moment. Once they were all out of sight, a hush settled over those of us who still stood around the checkpoint. The first to speak was the commander, who asked what there was for dinner, though he knew the answer every bit as well as all the rest of us: mac and cheese, beet salad, and a large chocolate-chip cookie. This was when someone thought to ask whatever had happened to the tattered scrap of fatigues found in the bushes, did anyone know? “Yes,” said the commander, “of course, we examined the uniform, or, I should say ‘the scrap,’ since somebody had ripped the uniform to shreds.” This was followed by a thorough disquisition on how many scraps there had been, the force required for ripping them, and, ultimately, how there was nothing left to suggest where the uniform had been manufactured and obtained or who had worn it. The only item available to shed some light, though a feeble light rather than a strong one, was a tarnished token with the number 5 pressed into both sides. “Such tokens,” explained the commander, “are usually used for public telephones or metro rides, but there are no insignia to suggest which city or state uses such a token. And perhaps it’s no longer in use,” continued the commander. “It may be a vestige of some long-gone time, a memento, perhaps, that its former owner held on to for years and then forgot in the back pocket of his discarded fatigues. Who knows, he may be searching for it anxiously as we speak, rifling through everything he owns in vain.” The soldiers’ faces fell and they patted their pockets where they, apparently, carried similar mementos. One soldier asked to inspect the token, and it quickly traveled from hand to hand, but no one could say anything about it. There were several arbitrary guesses that don’t merit mention. Better, now, a word about the strength of the forces assigned to guard the checkpoint. We’ve said nothing about this so far, and later there may not be time. So, under him the commander had a cook and a nurse, and three ten-man units, each with a junior officer as leader. The nurse also served as clerk, quartermaster, radio and telegraph operator, and probably even more. No longer, however, could we speak of three ten-man units; the murder of the sentry in the latrine meant there were two fully manned units and one only partially manned. Perhaps the word “murder” was not the best, as there had been no official statement yet as to cause of death. A few wanted to call the murder a suicide; to do so would relieve the army of responsibility, but in this case that would have been ludicrous. The gash on the right side of his neck could never have been inflicted by the sentry himself, especially as he was right-handed. A suicide would have been easier on the rest of us; there’d have been no need for special caution when we used the latrine. But knowing someone had ambushed him while he was in there groaning and straining to expel his waste, the soldiers began going to the latrine in pairs, sometimes even in a gang of five or six. And while one of them sat inside, the other or others would stand guard. Night, however, posed a problem: no one dared venture out to the latrine in the dark, so we prepared a small room to serve as a nighttime toilet. The two, three buckets were carried out as soon as we woke, emptied, and cleaned for the next night. Fortunately, the soldiers were mainly young men, and there weren’t many who had to slink off to the buckets at night, but nevertheless all soldiers were assigned to the duty of hauling them out and emptying them—not a task they enjoyed, but if everybody could be happy all the time there’d be no army, right? The commander was unbending and ready to punish anyone who disrupted the order; he was right there, the next morning, to carry out the first bucket, sloshing with urine and excrement, and dump it down the latrine. In the evening, when the daily orders for the next day were read out, he’d announce who was on “sanitation” duty for the next morning, and they were dubbed “shitty granny” or “shitty gramps” by the soldiers. But these nocturnal forays remind us that we need to explain how we managed once night fell. First, we had a few kerosene lamps, standard issue for rustic bivouacs, places where there’d probably be only intermittent electric current and other power, and beyond that every soldier was issued a package of slow-burning candles, and there were also plenty of extra candles in the squad depot. Kerosene lamps and big candles, flames in the night air, created a romantic mood and who knows what someone might have thought when seeing so many flames flickering in the dark barracks. More eyes might have been watching than we knew. Hence the difference between us and “them”: they always knew more about us than we about them, especially when it came to numbers. Whatever the case, the next morning we found a dead raven. One of its legs had been crushed, its wings snapped, its beak plucked out. The soldiers pressed around it, shouted and cursed. They were more unsettled by the dead bird than by the latrine sentry murder. “Whoever they are, they’re not human,” said one soldier, “they’re monsters and they deserve to die!” “Now!” shouted other soldiers and gathered around the commander when he came over to see what was up. They pointed to the raven, but apparently the commander was not as alarmed; he told them to pull themselves together. “Our men are out in the forest,” said the commander, “and until they return, no one moves, understand?” The soldiers mumbled something conciliatory and returned to their duties. The sun beat down mercilessly, most unusual for the time of year, and some of the soldiers quickly tanned to a bronze, but there were others whose backs, arms, and shoulders, and, I should add, faces became a mass of blisters. “We won’t be sleeping tonight,” thought the commander, but then the cry went up: “Here they are, they’re coming!” When the commander ran over to the checkpoint there they were: the squads had apparently each lost a man. In each, the two surviving soldiers were carrying a third. They toiled up the hillside and we, while they were still far away, could hear their labored breathing and choked coughs. Each squad reached the barrier at almost exactly the same moment, and someone remarked that somehow, somewhere in the forest, each must have taken a wrong turn: each returned to the same side of the checkpoint from which they’d left. But when the men were told, they insisted doggedly that they could not remember one path intersecting another nor that they were ever in doubt about which way to go. “The forest was hushed,” said one of the soldiers, “and we took care to honor the quiet. Had we run into the other squad, our conversation would have sent out shockwaves like a bomb blast.” This may explain why both soldiers were killed by arrows, an old-fashioned yet deadly weapon, the fletching still protruding from their chests. The commander fumed and swore up a storm, using curses even the worst drunks and bastards would have been proud of, though, obviously, nobody could blame him. Everything might have been different had we known why we were there, what we were protecting, from whom. What could possibly have been the point of a checkpoint on a road that no one ever traveled, which may have run in a circle? Or was its sole goal an illusion of passage, a chimera of progress, a launching pad for new victories, yet a trap, bait for the gullible, a carbon monoxide van to swallow souls, inside which people died from a surfeit—not a shortage—of air. Or, as one soldier put it, everything is so unreal precisely so that we won’t figure out that “our side” was actually attacking us, unaware, perhaps, that we’re “theirs.” Who is “our side” in this war, anyway, where we’re making this guest appearance, where even we have no idea what we’re up to? Wouldn’t it make more sense for us to march home and put this all behind us? “No, no, and no,” scowled the commander. “There will be no homeward march. And besides,” he asked, “where would we march to, and how—does anyone know? The telephone lines are down, the radios dead, we have no carrier pigeons to take our messages out, and even if someone were to set out for the headquarters, which road should they take to get there? Is there such a road?” The commander summoned the clerk and issued his order for the next day: we were to spend the whole day searching for a solution to our outlandish predicament. “We owe this to those who’ve died,” announced the commander during our modest repast: a big roll and a small tin of sardines for each of us. During dinner something else happened, a story flew from ear to ear that men from one of the squads, only two of them, had caught sight of village dwellings in the distance through a haze across a clearing. One of them even swore he heard cows mooing and dogs barking. It was still early, wisps of fog swirled among the trees and over the meadows, but from the chimneys of the houses rose puffs of smoke, the household was up and about, probably at breakfast, and they’d soon be going out to tend to their morning duties. The soldiers, the two, even saw a front door slowly open, but then the order came to move on and off they went. They quickly told the squad leader, and he heard them out but wouldn’t go back. That, he said, as the two soldiers reported, would give the advantage to whoever was following them, and there definitely were people, sad to say, who were out to ambush them without mercy. The commander heard the rumors and called the two men over. He asked the corporal who’d escorted them to step away because he didn’t want any part of their conversation to leak out. He questioned the soldiers closely about the houses and farmyards they’d seen, and he even sketched a house in a few quick strokes to see if it resembled what they’d seen, despite or because of the fog, which had enticed them with its swirls. Once the soldiers had told him what they knew, the commander, as they later said, took from a drawer a map that had been folded and refolded many times, smoothed it out, placed a compass on the table, and gauged something for a time with the compass and a protractor. Of course, he might be mistaken, but if we gave him the benefit of the doubt, he said, then where those two soldiers said they’d seen houses and outbuildings, there was nothing, or, and now this really was strange, said the commander, there once had been houses like the ones they described, but—here he stopped and stared away into the distance—the whole area had been flooded a little farther north to make a reservoir for a hydroelectric dam that was never, said the commander, put into operation. Are you sure, he asked, now standing in front of the entire company, that the houses you saw weren’t under water? But the soldiers were quick to dismiss this idea, and that what they’d seen might have been a mirage. Both laughed aloud as if they’d spent a whole evening practicing this in tandem. Someone said, “Let Mladen have a look,” and they all hastened to concur. Mladen knew how to survive in the forest, so he’d know where to look and what to see. A spat later flared up about whether he should go alone or with an escort, but the commander interrupted this as it ended—or almost ended—saying we were out of time. A person alone is always more efficient than two or three. “In the old days,” said the commander, “many an expedition floundered because the leader would have to keep track of an oversized crew: cooks, dog handlers, natives, masseuses.” Then he suggested we ask Mladen whether he needed an escort. As far as he was concerned, said Mladen, an assistant might be helpful, but he was better off on his own. He’d be speedier and more effective, with no worries about what to do if his assistant were hit or, god forbid, killed, or, worse yet, captured and interned. “Well then,” said the commander, “get ready and off you go. The sooner we know the truth about the houses and village, the sooner we can wrap this up.” But a few soldiers noticed discrepancies between what the commander said before and his sudden tale of a power plant, and all this while waving the mysterious map. Where had it all come from is what the soldiers and others wanted to know. If he was commander, he couldn’t be oblivious one minute, and then all talk the next as if he were a history expert. Then they all clammed up because Mladen appeared. Though nightfall was still hours away, he’d smeared his face with black paint; nothing gives a person away, he said, like moonlight shining on your fac