“You’d think all these lousy chinks would be half deaf already,” Zelenko said, and then blew the horn hard into the same ear. “And that’s for Gomez.”
Gomez was his buddy, killed a week before. They’d found his body dumped on the bank of a frozen stream. He’d been tortured and then shot in the back of the head. Zelenko blew again. The boy crumpled to his knees, crying miserably, and Zelenko had his buddy, Morra, wire together his hands behind him so he couldn’t shield himself. Then he blew the horn again. He did it three more times, and with such vehemence that his face grew flushed, as if he’d inflated a roomful of party balloons. But on the last one the boy hardly flinched. The ear was dead. This angered Zelenko, and he struck the boy sharply with his pistol. The boy fell like a tablet of stone. Fresh blood pocked the snow beside his head where he lay. His narrow eyes were open, his lips moving slowly and mechanically but making no sound. Zelenko was leaning over him with the horn to start on the other side, balling his chewing gum to plug his own ears, when Hector suddenly rushed him, knocking him over, sending him sliding on his back a dozen feet down the hill.
“What the fuck!” Zelenko cried.
Morra jumped him and Hector punched him once, hard, in the kidney, and the man fell to the ground. The others stood aside as Hector lifted the prisoner. The platoon knew him to be unhesitating in battle, vigilant and tireless, never cowed under fire, and no one made any move to stop him. He could lead a squad or even the platoon, if he weren’t so laconic. The boy groaned heavily when Hector slung him over his shoulder, and then lost consciousness. Hector carried him up the path that curled around the hill to the reverse slope, where the field HQ and mobile hospital were set up. Zelenko cursed at him, shouting that he was a stupid mick, a dirty queer, a chink lover, but Hector ignored him.
After the prisoner’s wounds were dressed and his arm relocated in its socket by a medic, Hector took him to the command post. The officer in charge had Hector search the prisoner again, and when he did he found something hidden in a rip in the lining of his jacket. It was a tiny notebook; a photograph was tucked inside. He gave it to the officer, who had the interpreter inspect it.
But it was nothing; just a personal diary. It was written in Korean, and apparently the boy contended he was a southerner, first conscripted by ROKs before being captured by Communists and reconscripted again, but the interpreter either didn’t believe him or didn’t care; he was a Communist now. The interpreter handed the diary and the photograph to the officer, who glanced at them quickly before tossing them back to Hector. While they interrogated him, Hector examined the writing, its lettering very neat and small, and then the photograph. It was clearly a portrait of the boy’s family, his parents and himself and other siblings. What surprised him was how well dressed they were, respectable and attractive, and that they wore Western clothing, suits and dresses. They could easily be one of the Remington Arms Company managers’ families, except that they were Oriental.
The boy was only very briefly interrogated. The intelligence officers had already collected enough information from some other prisoners and aerial reconnaissance over the last week about the strength of the enemy forces. The officer told Hector they had no use for him: he was just a bugler anyway, one of their many expendables. Normally, he would have been sent along with other prisoners to a rear holding area at battalion before being transferred to a POW camp, but there were very few enemy (only two others) taken alive from the assault, and with the promise of an even larger human-wave attack that night, and with no transport available or forward holding area or cell, no one could be interested in his final disposition.
“So where should I take him?” Hector asked. The intelligence officer didn’t look up; the other officers in the tent ignored him, too. Hector didn’t ask again. He knew this meant he should walk him back to the forward line and, at some point, shoot him. It happened all the time, and was practiced by them and the enemy alike. So he did walk him away, the kid trudging miserably ahead of him. He didn’t look back or try to engage or beseech him, which Hector was glad for. He’d killed at least a half-dozen of the enemy in firefights, a couple at very close quarters, but it was always just the flash instinct or response, and he had never had to think the killing through mechanically. Where to stop to do it; whether to have him kneel or stand; whether to give him a moment to prepare or do it without warning; shoot him in the body or the head. The boy was skinny and short but his shoulders were quite broad and Hector tried to focus on this, the suggestion that he was a grown man, a genuine soldier. But it was no use; he looked like any boy wearily ambling home. The early April day was quickly warming and the temperature had risen to forty-five degrees and Hector became uncomfortably aware of the paired alternation of their schussing feet on the softened snow, a rhythm soon to be soloed. Maybe it would have been better (for himself) to have let Zelenko have his way; it would be over already and he would be in the dugout now, warming up his canned rations over a Sterno, maybe cleaning his rifle, writing his short weekly letter to his mother, in which he never said anything new or described much in detail but wrote anyway, in general terms, about the weather, the food, if only to get to signing his name, so she would know he was alive.
They reached the point where the path turned and led around a large, outcropped boulder. Hector told him to stop. The boy did so. He offered the diary and photograph to him, but the boy refused, shaking his head.
“Take it, okay? I don’t want it.”
The boy kept shaking his head, as if he understood that to do so would be his end. For it was his end. It was surely here that Hector ought to do it, if he was going to do it at all; there was something of a precipice as the path jutted out, below it a five-meter fall-off to a natural shallow bowl in the hillside. After he fell into it Hector could simply leave, would not have to drag the corpse someplace else, and it would be over. But he didn’t want to do it. Why should he? Maybe he ought to let him go, let him run away and say that the prisoner had escaped.
But suddenly the boy turned from him and stepped closer to the edge. He wiped his eyes and then simply stared out into the valley, the bright, snowy hills starkly etched against the flat blue sky. It was as if the boy, too, now recognized the suitability of the spot. He must have long realized he wasn’t meant to survive this war. He wasn’t even meant to kill, bugler that he was. On the other side of the hills were his comrades, thousands upon thousands of them, regrouping and resting before another wave attack tonight, and Hector could almost hear the boy thinking about his fate, whether it was better to die like this, one-to-one, rather than sprinting forward in the darkness in a suicidal throng, with just a tin horn in his hand, screaming with a primal fear, his body tensed for the smash of bullets. Hector stepped closer to him. He leveled his rifle at the boy, the barrel nose a mere foot from his bloodied ear. He’d graded out as a sharpshooter but his hands felt numbed now, the gun hollow and light in his grip. The boy’s shoulders tightened, anticipating the shot.
But there came voices on the path behind them. It was Morra and Zelenko. Zelenko’s eyes lit up on seeing them in such a pose, but before he could say anything the boy recognized his tormentor and leaped from the spot. He landed down in the well, just as Hector had pictured he would. He began screaming like a child. One of his legs was clearly broken, the foot craned grotesquely back behind him.