1 . Name: Otherhazards @ 2010-11-26 18:43

Alone in a VA mental hospital, RED Soldier does some thinking.

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He’d had Syphilis, they told him.
Soldier didn’t remember catching the Syph, but that was to be expected, they said. After all, he’d had it, unknowingly, for a very long time.
The fog was clearing now, in patches.
Memories, like a glimpse of the enemy through pungent, low-hanging artillery smoke.

Krakow.
Boot-prints in the snow, and a blood trail.
Gunfire, clear in the fog.
A fire, and the grubby, smiling faces of his allies beneath the rims of their helmets, and the rich, homelike scent of canned pork and beans.
The sudden turnover of the engine of a Jeep, and tires spitting mud as it peeled out.
Mud. A night of sleet, and a wetness creeping in through a crack in the leather of his boots as he marched.
Dustbowl.
Dust when he breathed, like two chalkboard erasers clapped together.
A strange tingling of electricity over his body as he died.
But he had NOT died, the doctors said, because if that was true, how could he still be here?

He’d been in the Special Forces, they told him.
ARMY Special Forces.
That made sense, soothed something deep in the Soldier’s troubled mind.
But even as he thought it, he KNEW that part of his history wrong.
He’d been alone, and there were enough real ex-Special Forces men here at the hospital to compare stories with that he knew THEY were never alone for long. They worked in smaller groups, that was true… but never ALONE. Not for a whole tour of duty, like he had.

Maybe he’d been Captain America, Soldier reflected. He FELT like he could have been Captain America, and if he’d broken from the shell-shock afterwards, he fully understood why the Army would feel justified in keeping him hidden like this.
MEN needed HEROES.

There was a war to fight, that would never change.
They’d told him HIS war was over, and they’d kicked the Krouts to kingdom come, and blown the hell out of…
But that was a lie, and the Soldier knew it. He’d heard lies like that before. He’d been captured, held in a bunker made up to look like a US Army stockade, right down to guards’ uniforms, and the steely-eyed sincerity of an ersatz Lt.Colonel who’d been his interrogator.
He’d said the war was over too. He’d told them that he’d never break, that they could do what they liked to him, they could never break his American spirit…

And then that night, after lights-out, the woman had come. The one whose harsh, authoritarian voice he still heard in his head, and who Dr. Bryman said was his mind’s way of telling him he had unresolved troubles with his mother.
Soldier had smelled the smoke of her thin cigarette first. She’d never touched him, then or afterwards, and she spoke to him like he was a cockroach she’d like to crack under the heel of her patent-leather high-heeled shoe.
But she’d told him the TRUTH, and that was what really mattered.

The fighting on the Polish front WAS over, but as Soldier had thought, the WAR itself wasn’t. New lines had been drawn, conquered Germans and Commies conscripted, and the fighting was now hottest at a place the other troops were calling… Dustbowl.
OTHER troops, she’d promised him.
He would have allies, like minded men who would test new weapons on the field of battle, and fight to the death to protect the American way.
He would die, she’d said, but he would die fighting.
And she hadn’t lied about that.

Dustbowl.
The word rang in Soldier’s mind, with the glory of a thousand explosions. Death, and destruction, and weird science, and fighting, conquering blue-clad, dark reflections of himself and the other men of his unit. Peter Pan, beset by his own homicidal shadow. Plastic, nonsensical battles that had finally set his troubled mind at peace...
And then sometimes he remembered other ways the battle would go, and the Scout screaming as he ran towards the enemy, and the blood of the enemy Soldier on his hands, and his trusty shovel, because there could be only one…

He remembered quiet nights with the Engineer after the days battle was ended, guarding the man, lest the enemy spy backstab him in his workshop after everyone else had gone back to the barracks. He remembered dropping a wrench that the Engineer had asked him for, and the thoughtful frown on the Texan’s forehead when he asked Soldier how long his hands had been unsteady like that.

He remembered the Engineer running down the hall towards the respawn room after his blue-coveralled doppelganger, and an electrical explosion that had blown all the lights, and the Sniper yelling through the brightness of an outside door to stop gawkin’ about, they had a JOB to do…

He remembered when the colors broke down, and blood made everyone a red, a formerly blue-shirted scout weeping over a dying Pyro too badly burned to identify… Both Medics, shaken but determined, flanking their only surviving Heavy…
Sniper looking through his scope at something far across the canyon from where they were hiding after burning the enemy base, and saying that the spy had gotten out okay, and why wasn’t that cheeky French bastard making for the rendezvous..?
But everyone came back, didn’t they?
Everyone ALWAYS respawned…

Here in the VA Hospital, there was no respawn. Men muttered to themselves, and cried into white, institutional pillows in the wards at night, and put forks through each other’s shoulders if they were approached from a direction they weren’t facing. They didn’t hate each other, for the most part. They tried to talk each other down, to keep each other safe from all threats, real or fantasy…
But they died, and they raged, and sometimes they killed each other or themselves without meaning to.

Like PFC O’Leary, who thought that drinking liquid silver was the only way to ward off the fairies that were making him insane, and in whose room they found eleven broken thermometers, the Mercury carefully removed.
Like Lt. Constanza, a tank commander who someone had convinced that the VA Hospital was a dream, and who’d beaten his head in against a cinderblock wall in an effort to wake himself up.
Like Private Hill, who Soldier had found in the shower bled ghostly pale, long, washed out ribbons of blood fanning out around the skin surrounding his forearms, still tacky to the touch. The way a carefully-sharpened nail file had fallen out of the young man’s dead hand, and clattered sharply on the floor when Soldier had touched his shoulder to see if he was still alive. Whatever Hill’s reasons had been, they had died with him that day, an unspoken mystery.
Suicide was for the WEAK though, and Soldier had been captured before…
If he lived long enough, if he seized his chance when it came… he’d get out of here too.

It was the one thing he hadn’t told Dr. Bryman, the one thing he kept close to his heart like a burning coal hidden in a sardine can.
Escape.
Not back to Dustbowl, because it might not be there, THE WAR had moved by now, he was almost sure of it. Not back to Poland, either, the Nazis had been conquered years ago. He’d have to keep his head down. Gather intel. Blend in, so whoever was keeping him in the VA Hospital couldn’t convince the MP’s he really was an escaped loony, and drag him back here.

Dr. Bryman was teaching him how to blend in.
Dr. Bryman said that wearing a military helmet all the time was somewhat disturbing to civilians, and that it wouldn’t stop some modern forms of artillery anyway. He’d told Soldier to get used to wearing a cover with a brim instead, and had given him one. It was like a Scout’s cap in olive drab, with two tiny holes in the fabric on the front side, where a rank insignia had been removed. Dr. Bryman hadn’t told him who the cover had belonged to, and Soldier hadn’t asked. He had, however, commandeered the metal dish out of a mess kit and used it to reinforce his civilian camouflage helmet from the inside.
Dr. Bryman had given him a nonplussed look at the cover’s slightly bulky, too-rigid shape at their next session, but he’d never ordered Soldier to take the protective metal out.

…That was more or less when Soldier decided that whatever horrible conspiracy had removed him from his rightful place on the field of battle, Dr. Bryman wasn’t part of it.
Dr. Bryman didn’t quite grasp the simple idea of respawn, and he kept trying to interpret each of the men Soldier had fought beside at Dustbowl as pieces of Soldier’s feelings that were trying to come to terms with him, but generally speaking… the man listened.
That part was important.
He let the Soldier in on a TV news briefing that one of the other doctors said he shouldn’t be allowed to hear, one about a war in Southeast Asia being over…
He explained that Soldier’s mind would not get any crazier unless he was weak, and he LET it go that way.

Dr. Bryman also agreed with the Engineer that it was the Syph that had made it hard for him to think clearly in the first place, not some inborn weakness or battlefield crisis point.
Dr. Bryman thought the Engineer was his super-ego, whatever that was, but even somebody who believed in hippie crap like super-egos and inner children knew better than to argue with the good sense of an Engineer.

He –might- have caught the Syph in Poland. There had been a few women then, women who said they liked his American accent, or how his uniform fit him, or who had lost a husband or father, or brother to the Third Reich. Their faces, their braided hair and soft hands… none of it was clear or individual in his memory. Smeared, like finger paint… had these women been with him at all? Was she real, or a lithographed poster he’d seen in a theatre marquee?
…Did it matter?

The WAR mattered.
HE mattered.
ESCAPE mattered.
He’d see the Engineer first, use the mind that Engie had given back to him by telling Medic to do something about the curious unsteadiness of his hands. The Engineer would know what had happened. Whether they’d won Dustbowl or lost it. Where the other men of their unit were now.
…The Engineer would know.
And he’d bust out of here sooner or later, Soldier smiled, to himself.

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