A Lonely Resurrection

blinking rapidly, his eyes jumping from one face to another and then back again. They stopped on mine, and I thought it was because he knew I was the one who shot him. Later, I realized the explanation was likely more prosaic. He was probably just trying to make sense of my Asian features.
    Someone undid a canteen and extended it to him. But he made no move to take it. His breathing became faster and shallower. Tears spilled out of the corners of his eyes and he mumbled words in a high, strained voice none of us could understand. I learned later that battlefield wounded and dying often call out to their mothers. He might have been doing that.
    We watched him. The chest wound stopped sucking. The blinking stopped, too. His head settled into the wet ground at an odd angle, as though he was listening to something.
    We stood around him silently. The initial sense of elation was gone, replaced with a weirdly intimate tenderness, and a horrified sadness so sudden and heavy it actually made me groan.
    Same as me,
I thought again. He didn’t look like a bad guy. I knew that in some other universe we wouldn’t have been trying to kill each other. Maybe we would have been friends. He wouldn’t be lying dead on a jungle floor saturated with his own blood.
    One of the men I was with started to cry. The other began moaning,
Oh Jesus, oh Jesus,
over and over again. Both of them vomited.
    I did not.
    We took the ledger. It turned out to contain some fairly useful information about VC payments to local village heads and other attempts to buy influence. Though of course, in the end, none of that had mattered.
    Someone on the Huey that picked us up afterward laughed and told me I’d popped my cherry. No one talked about how it really felt, or what had happened while we stood in a silent circle and watched the man die.
    When the army was assessing my suitability for the joint Special Forces-CIA program known as SOG, the psychiatrist had displayed a keen interest in that initial killing experience. He seemed to think it was noteworthy that I hadn’t vomited. And that what he described as my “associated negative emotions” had dissipated. No bad dreams afterward, that was also considered a plus.
    Later, I learned that I was categorized as belonging to a magical two percent of military men who are capable of killing repeatedly, without hesitation, without special conditioning, without regret. I don’t know if I really belonged there. It wasn’t as easy for me as it was for Crazy Jake. But that’s where they put me.
    The average person is surprised at the extent to which a soldier has to deal with hesitation before the fact and regret afterward. Of course, the average person has never been required to kill a stranger at close range.
    Men who have survived close-quarters killing know that humans are possessed of a deep-seated, innate reluctance to kill their own species. I believe there are evolutionary explanations for the existence of this reluctance, but that doesn’t really matter. What matters is that the fundamental purpose of basic training for most soldiers is to employ classical and operant conditioning techniques to suppress the reluctance. I know modern training accomplishes this objective with ruthless effectiveness. I also know the training deals better with the reluctance than it does with the regret.
    I sat for a long time, picking through memories. Eventually, I started to get cold. I went back to the hotel, watching my back as always along the way. I took an excruciatingly hot bath, then slipped into one of the cotton
yukata
the hotel had thoughtfully provided. I pulled a chair in front of the window and sat in the dark, watching the traffic moving along Hibiya-dori, twenty floors below. I thought of Midori. I wondered what she might be doing at that very instant on the other side of the world.
    When the traffic began to thin, I got in bed. Sleep came slowly. I dreamed of Rio. It felt far away.

CHAPTER 10
    T he next night, I ran an SDR as usual on my way to the fight. When I was confident I was clean, I caught a cab to the Tennozu monorail station. From there I walked. There was no one else around.
    It was cooler here by the water. A sidewalk was being repaired, and a cluster of temporary signs advising
anzen daiichi!
—Safety First!—swayed stiffly in the wind, squealing like lunatic chimes. I moved across the rust-colored bulk of the Higashi Shinagawa Bridge. Around me was a network of massive train and