Slow Recoil by C.B. Forrest Page A

time shifted, played tricks so that even now Kad could close his eyes and actually smell the cordite, the blue-grey smoke from their guns—and then the other smells that came on, the stomach-curdling stink of death, the foul funk of bodies left to bloat and swell in the hot summer sun, a smell that settled in your mouth like a taste, something that stayed on your tongue for days.
    â€œThis,” Krupps said, handing him a pint of plum brandy, “is the only thing that gets rid of the stink. Drink it. And then smear some under your nose… ”
    Yes, life was funny. Kad’s brother Tomas had studied at a school in Chicago, because he was the smarter of the two, always reading these thick books, preferring conversation and debates to sports or roughhousing. And it was Kad who’d stayed home with the rifle and the grenades, the bayonet that he could mount on his rifle when the fighting got that close, that dirty. Kad was not jealous of his brother. He was proud of Tomas and happy that he had been spared these years of war. To see the world come to an end, to stand each day in the midst of the apocalypse. To have killed men, to have witnessed the cause and effect of the bullets stored in the belt slung across his back. Kad had seen the brochures for his brother’s school in Illinois. Ill-in-noise —how many times had he said that word as he tried to imagine this unknown world his smart brother had flown to with scholarship dollars. The fields that looked like a golf course, the thin white girls with blonde hair, always blonde. What perfect timing Tomas always had. He graduated and earned his scholarship—his ticket out—in the very months before the war came to their villages, to their homeland. At first it was the whisperings of independence that reverberated around the world.
    â€œI will come home to fight,” Tomas had told his brother in their last phone call.
    â€œFather will not allow it. You are the only hope we have… stay where you are.”
    Everything happened so fast. But not really. No, this was two thousand years in the coming. It was always there, as Kadro’s grandfather had said, this wound without stitches. When Bosnia voted for independence from Yugoslavia on February 29, 1992, the dominoes teetered. In the days following the vote, the Yugoslav Amy disbanded, looting the Bosnian reserve units of their weapons and ammunition, equipment and uniforms. There remained the fledgling and poorly trained Armija—the government army of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, or perhaps the 7th Muslim Brigade of the Armija for the truly devout. Neither option appealed to Kadro, for he was neither devout nor interested in guaranteed annihilation as part of an ill-trained and ill-equipped army fighting for a country so new, it had barely had time to ink a national emblem.
    The storm clouds gathered and the fates conspired. Yugoslav Army soldiers fresh from the killing fields of Croatia paused to catch their breath in Bosnia, there along the Drina Valley at the Bosnian border with Serbia. A pileup of tanks, artillery, personnel carriers, soldiers smoking and stewing and drinking in the local pubs—drinking and talking and fermenting their hatred, this notion of revenge for the homeland.
    The line of dominoes toppled and fell with the Siege of Sarajevo, the guns in the hills opening with salvos of artillery and incendiary tank shells. And so Kadro’s new Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina—recognized as sovereign by the U.S. and most of Europe—was truly a nation born into war. The days were merciless. It was mayhem. Kad’s father would meet a group of men at the tavern in their small village and return with updates, fragments of news. To his wife and daughter he would say only that the war would be over before it reached their town, and anyway, what did anybody want with a bunch of poor farmers this far from the city? They were but a dot on a map, of no