“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“Come on, you should be celebrating. Still, I understand how you feel. I don’t know if it’ll console you or not, but you’re getting a week’s leave and clearance to return to Earth too.”
“I don’t want it,” Amata said, his voice hoarse.
“Right. It’s a busy time of year for us. I appreciate your consideration. But you’re excused from work tomorrow. That’s the day you’ll be decorated.”
“So I have no choice in this?”
“It’s an order.” Captain Gondou looked away from Lieutenant Amata. “Accept the medal. That’s an order.”
The captain looked down at his clasped hands on the desktop, then up at the smoke curling from the cigarette butt smoldering in the ashtray.
“Dismissed,” he said. “Go to the station and tell the other guys. They’ll probably be happy for you.”
Amata left the command office without a word. He didn’t think his coworkers would be happy for him. If anything, they’d be shocked. Maybe they’d congratulate him, but even if he got the medal it wouldn’t improve the way they were treated. Even the way he himself was treated wouldn’t change. There was nothing to be happy about. There probably wasn’t a single one of his coworkers who would take pride in his getting it or even look at him with envy. There just wasn’t any profit in it. Amata grew depressed. Although the other men wouldn’t be jealous, they’d definitely treat him differently from now on, like he wasn’t quite one of them anymore.
As he entered the station, the familiar cigarette smoke-filled warmth enveloped his body. Usually, the atmosphere would relax him, but right now the mood was a little strange. The guys playing cards at the table, the ones lying down on the cots, the ones reading, the others sitting on the floor or leaning against the wall as they drank… They all looked at him as though a stranger had just come into the room.
Word had already spread.
One of the guys at the table threw down his cards, stood up, and yelled, “Hooray for Lieutenant Amata!”
“Hooray for what?” Amata asked, playing dumb. He sat down on an empty cot and took out his flask.
“Give that cheap shit to the snow to drink,” said one of the guys leaning against the wall as he lifted his glass. He tilted his head in the direction of a bottle of scotch laid off to the side. “Compliments of Lieutenant Colonel Hazer. He said that you’re the pride of the Corps. A hero shouldn’t drink cheap booze, Lieutenant.”
Why couldn’t Colonel Hazer mind his own damn business? Amata shook his head, then swung both feet up onto the cot and began drinking his own cheap whiskey. The cheerful Colonel Hazer’s responsibilities included being their supervisor, and now and then he’d show up and maybe join them for a card game or two. Still, no matter how friendly he was, he wasn’t one of them. Because he never had to endure the snowstorms. On the surface, they all smiled at him, drank with him, smoked with him, and let him win some money at cards, but the truth was that they couldn’t stand him. Hazer himself seemed satisfied with the arrangement.
As he began to sink into despair, Amata could imagine what it had been like when Colonel Hazer had come to give them the news. He probably said something like, “Gentlemen, congratulations! One of your own has been awarded the Order of Mars! A true hero has appeared from within your ranks. You should be proud!” And then the guys would be wearing big grins on their faces, while inside they wouldn’t give a crap. That idiot. If it wasn’t for Hazer, he might have been able to keep the news of the award from the others. The Corps was trampling on the little bit of peace he had. He should have expected it.
Returning to their card game, the players began talking in exaggeratedly loud voices.
“So what’s an Order of Mars, anyways?”
“Dunno. I think it’s a medal of valor.”
“Then why’d Amata get one?”
“Why do you think? ’Cause he’s a hero, ain’t he?”
They laughed and then went back to their usual stupid chatter. About how someone had gotten into a fight with some woman and had his arm broken, but no, that was just some story he’d made up to get out of work, and how could he humiliate himself that much just to get out of work, and was it still snowing outside…
Lieutenant Amata drained the flask, dropped it on the floor, and closed his eyes.
THE WEATHER ON the day commemorating the founding of the FAF was a Class 2 winter storm. The 3rd Mechanized Snow Removal Unit was ready for deployment. After being told to disregard the commemoration ceremony, the motor graders and the secondary rotary plows were divided into teams and sent out to face the white devil. They came in only to rest and refuel and were immediately sent out again. As it grew busier and busier, with more and more vehicles breaking down, tanker trucks were brought out to do hot refueling—pumping gas directly into the plows’ tanks while the engines were still running. The huge airfield was like a battle zone, but with snow and ice as the enemy, not the JAM.
While his coworkers were on the ground freezing, Lieutenant Amata put on a uniform he’d never worn before and headed for the ceremony hall. The huge underground auditorium was warm, like another world. In fact, it was hot enough to make him sweat, and he found it almost as oppressive as being in the middle of a blizzard.
As he stood in line with the other medal recipients and listened to the congratulatory speeches being given, he frowned occasionally. Each word of praise from the loudspeaker seemed to bore painfully into his hungover brain. The scene in the stiff and formal ceremonial hall didn’t seem real to him at all; there was no snow here, no numbing cold. The stern attitudes of the generals and the faces of the soldiers there to receive their commendations… They all seemed to exist in a different dimension from him. They looked like dolls, like they weren’t alive. He had to keep reminding himself that the scene before him wasn’t a fiction.
When he thought about it, though, this entire war seemed to be a fictional one. The JAM had never shown themselves to humans, and a ground grunt like Lieutenant Amata couldn’t begin to imagine what sort of enemy they were. He would watch the fighter teams take off and return, but what the enemy planes looked like or even whether or not they existed was beyond him. He didn’t think about it, either. To him, the most pressing concerns were getting fuel for his grader, or stopping the cold wind that blew in under the bent door, or how he would have to buy some more whiskey soon because he was almost out. Stuff like that. The snow and the cold were the lieutenant’s enemies. Not the JAM.
The JAM, an enemy the lieutenant had never seen, was beyond him. But the FAF was equally so. And now this huge, unknowable thing was giving him a medal. It was like having a monster from his dreams appear in front of him shaking a bell. All of it, all of it was utterly unreal.
We’re all dolls, he thought, the generals, the medal recipients, and me, too. Just gaily dressed mannequins in a shop window, whose sole purpose was to entice the passersby to come in and spend their money. He was being used to sell the idea of fighting spirit to the soldiers in the field, an immobile doll inserted into a make-believe world.
At last, his name was called. With a feeling of grim resignation, he walked forward and saluted the general presenting the medals. As the general, his chest plastered with ribbons and decorations, took the Order of Mars from his adjutant, Lieutenant Amata saw his eye fall on the snowflake-shaped insignia on Amata’s uniform. A look of doubt clouded the general’s face, and Amata felt a jolt of alarm run through him. Wasn’t this farce of a ceremony being conducted under the order of the command staff ? Why would the general be surprised by it?