Pettigrew's face grew soberly amused. "Besides which, sir, do you realize we haven't had a lick of trouble anywhere within fifty miles of that village since the . . . ummm . . . incident. In an area that used to see firefights two or three times a day. The people there are scared shitless of supporting the other side now. Course, that will change as soon as word gets out that Stauer's on trial."
"There'll be no trial," McPherson insisted. He went quiet then, thinking hard.
"Go back to what you said before," McPherson ordered, rolling his hand in a backwards circle over his desk.
"We haven't had a lick-"
"No, not that. Before that."
Pettigrew thought hard for a moment. "You mean about reticence and our people, SEALs, Rangers and Marines?"
"Yeah . . . those." McPherson's face lit with a wicked grin. "So he wants a court-martial, does he? I wonder if he wants all those others, people just like the ones he committed mass murder for, court-martialed, too."
Man, you really do have shitty moral judgment, thought Pettigrew. Makes me glad I boffed your wife.
"And that's the deal, Wes," Pettigrew told him later that afternoon. "You retire, without prejudice, or Welch and his team, and Thornton and his team, get tried as accessories. Moreover, the red-headed bastard is going to turn your man, Mosuma, over to the Afghan authorities. They'll hang him, no drop."
"What a piece of shit," Stauer said with a sneer. "Almost makes me wish I'd fucked his wife."
"You mean you didn't?"
Stauer looked at Pettigrew with great suspicion. "You don't mean you did?"
"Well, what was I supposed to do? I gave her a ride home from the O club, where she'd been drinking, oh, to excess. Next thing I knew, her head's over my lap, and my brain is being sucked southward. Right on Riley Road. I fucked her in the post stables."
Stauer was about to chew out his long-time friend, viciously. But then, what's the point?
He laughed. "How was she?"
Pettigrew sighed. "Words can't describe, Wes. Words just can't describe."
***
"He'll do it, sir," Pettigrew told McPherson. "But there's a little problem."
"I see no problems."
"Well . . . both Biggus Dickus Thornton, Terry Welch, and the entire teams of both of them are punching out, too. That's Wes' condition; we have to let them go if we want to get rid of him and if they want out."
"Fair enough," said McPherson, relieved that the problem was going to go away. "Do they?"
"To a man, sir. Every one of them said the war is lost and it just isn't worth it. They said other things, too, but you don't want to hear those.
PART I
CHAPTER ONE
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
-Tennyson, "Ulysses"
D-127, San Antonio, Texas
Like watching fish in a tank, Wes Stauer thought, looking at the thin traffic making its way along East Evans Road and down Bulverde. No, that's not quite right. It's like watching paint dry. Not even enough cars on the road to provide the hope of a decent accident.
He watched one of two identical two-seat cars pass the other anemically and sneered, Battle Song of the Proletariat Specials. Painted "Green," of course.
He shook his head. He could afford a decent, which these days meant an imported, car. Most couldn't anymore, after the tax bite took. Indeed, most who could afford any kind of personal transport these days could only support one of the designed-by-committees-of-special-interests things, like those two seat jobs asthmatically chugging up the road in front of Stauer's house.
Stauer didn't really care that much about the tax rates, personally. His home was held by a corporation masquerading as a religious organization he'd set up in Lebanon once upon a time. He paid the corporation, which is to say, himself, a very modest rent. The rent just matched depreciation and expenses, so there was no tax burden there. Likewise most of his money was overseas where Uncle's sticky fingers couldn't get at it. Oh, yes, the Internal Revenue Service took a whopping bite out of his retired pay, but that, in relation to his overall finances, was "mere."
Unpatriotic? Stauer mused. It's never unpatriotic to keep your government from wasting your money on things that shouldn't be done anyway.
Not that he was necessarily all that illiberal in every particular. He wasn't really, at least as far as domestic issues went. Student aid, for example, to send someone to school to learn to be an engineer? Or a doctor. Or, just as good, a machinist or plumber or farmer? Those kinds of things he was fine with, though he was rather finer with them if there was some price involved; teaching poor kids or providing health care in Appalachia, for example. Or military service, of course.
To take a masters on the public ticket in resistingbadevilhonkywickednaughtydeadwhitemaleoppressionandrepressionlittleEichmannismbadbadbadidness? I'm not precisely enthusiastic about that.
And he had the strong sense that the money collected to help the poor and even out the playing field was, in fact, mostly being spent on upper middle class drones with sociology degrees, Who sow not; neither do they reap, and construction contracts for the very well connected.
Case in point, he mused, that program to pay school girls not to get pregnant. They pay a hundred thousand inner city girls a thousand or so dollars a year, each, and ten thousand social workers ninety thousand a year, each, to administer it, and half the girls end up getting knocked up anyway. Case in point, the senatrix from California whose husband somehow just managed to land a three-billion dollar contract to build wind farms in a place with no wind, because, unfortunately, the Senator from Massachusetts has a vacation home overlooking the place where there really is wind. Case in point . . . ah, what the hell's the use?
And it's not entirely fair to blame the President for this, either. It was building up for years, since the nineties, anyway. Maybe the eighties. And maybe President Wangai made it worse; but maybe he didn't, either. Nobody was going to make it a lot better. You drink enough; you get a hangover. You spend enough; you get broke. Maybe we could have spent our way back to prosperity. I doubt it, but maybe. But, if so, we'd have to have spent on the right things. We haven't.
At least it's a little better here in Texas. A little.
Stauer'd thought he knew why he'd retired to San Antonio. To use the PX and commissary, to have Brooke Army Medical Center nearby when the time came for that. That's what I thought I was doing.
It wasn't those things, though. Or, at least, it wasn't entirely those. What the hell did I want? The facilities-he mentally shrugged-yeah, okay, sure. But I wanted the facilities someplace where I wouldn't be reminded of what I was missing. No sharp young troopers, fit as a fiddle and ready to fight. No listening in the morning air for the distant cadence I can't join in any more.