Slow Recoil by C.B. Forrest Page B

strategic value. But to his son he spoke the truth. This village had fallen, such and such official had been hung from a telephone pole. He told Kadro of the reports from the front, what the men were doing in the villages to the women, the girls.
    â€œI am too old to fight,” his father had said, “but I will. To my last breath those bastards won’t touch your mother or your sister. I will burn my own home to the ground before I give them the satisfaction. There is no choice now, my son, you must fight. Either with our small army or with one of the units forming up… ”
    And so it was that Kadro joined a handful of his classmates in a paramilitary unit that was rumoured to be funded by a wealthy landowner with business connections in Russia and the Balkans—this never-seen entity referred to simply as “The Colonel”. They were a rag-tag jumble of farm kids and country kids who could shoot well but lacked any formal military training, no understanding of comportment. The commander of their unit, whom they referred to as “Captain”, explained to them their predicament.
    â€œThis is not the fucking regulation army, boys. You are not protected by any international laws or conventions,” the Captain told them, standing on the tailgate of a black half-ton truck. He was the only one among them dressed in full camouflage, new trousers bloused over new black boots, his grey and black beard neatly trimmed. “But that hardly matters now. This is not a conventional war. We have only one mandate, and that is the mandate as declared by The Colonel. We are to take back as many of our villages and to kill as many of the enemy as we can before we ourselves are terminated. Any questions?”
    Kad looked out now across the parking lot of the fifty-dollar motel. The sun was rising, giving birth to his purpose in this life. The burden of his brothers and sisters squarely on his shoulders. The load was heavy, but he didn’t mind. He had no family now, no past, no future. He was invisible; in fact, he had never been born. He turned and slipped inside the glass patio door and surveyed the room: the ugly artwork on the wall, the red shag carpeting worn from a million footsteps, the brown water stains painted like a map of Africa on the stucco ceiling, the cheap plastic cups wrapped in more plastic, the bed with its sloping mattress, the floral-print comforter.
    This was Canada. The word made him think of the UN and the blue helmets and the white troop carriers shipped to a war that was none of their business, these fresh-faced boys sent halfway around the world to stand at roadblocks and witness murder. Canada. Smooth cigarettes that did not burn your throat, soft beer, soft women. The place where people apologized even when it was you who bumped into them. That was the word that came to mind: soft.
    Out on Airport Road, a car backfired, and Kad ducked low, hunching at the shoulders. The automatic reaction even after all these years. His mind worked to decipher the sound, incoming or outgoing, mortar or something worse, something larger—an American five-hundred pounder sent to level a street, a block.
    â€œWe have to move,” Krupps says, kicking at Kad’s boots, waking him.
    â€œWhat about Ahmet? He’s too fucked up to move. He needs blood,” Kad said.
    Standing in the motel room and the fields of war all at once. Standing and seeing Krupps, seeing everything as it was, as it always will be. Outside the traffic of Toronto ebbed and flowed.
    â€œLeave him for the UN. Give them something to do for the morning, those bleeding heart blue helmets. Thirteen minutes, Kadro. Let’s move.”
    He took a final long haul of his cigarette, tossed the butt to the ground. He exhaled the tobacco and looked out across those fields. The places he had played as a boy, the small wonders of a boy’s imagination at work in those deep woods. The trees and hedgerows were forming