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I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, do you?
It goes like this....








A GHOST STORY

I met Sergeant Robert Swindler right after the terrorist invasion of the eUSA in 2013. We joined the same AIM resistance unit. AIM is sort of a unified command for various militias. He had a good-looking avatar. A few (cough) years younger than me, he also had an obnoxious way of curling his lips when he was thinking of something nasty to do.

Something like this:


Swindler had been part of Easy Company before the invasion. Since I was previously with Libertad, there was naturally some lighthearted rivalry. The usual meaningless banter. Swindler got notorious for going over the top and making it personal. He quickly became the bane of everyone in our AIM squad.


The fracked-up bit was that Swindler knew his dookie inside and out. No doubt about it. His technical and tactical know-how was top notch. He could quote the Rules of the Game like nobody's business. Even worse, he had a knack for combining kick-ass command of tactical knowledge with superb ass-kissing skills.

If there were merit badges for this kind of thing it would look something like this:



Swindler was one of the youngest players on the squad and he was fast-tracking. And we all knew it.


* * *


Swindler understood that promotions come fast in wartime. He was looking for glory, awards, and a place in e-history. Hell, we all wanted a little of that. But what most of us wanted was to just avoid being perceived as sewage by our fellow players. Swindler seemed to care very little for such niceties.

On the contrary, laying sledge in everyone's way was his "thing".

I could tell from the first few days together that something would eventually break. We were assigned to monitor the Serbs' movements in Cincinnatti.

You know, the evil Serbs, blah, blah, blah. Whatever. We choose among opposing armies, all of which are either frankly murderous, or professing, with varying degrees of fraud, to be for Peace and Justice, right?



The eRep War. It's all Stinky Log Theater in the end. But we play along because we're part of a team. Hoo-ah.


* * *


It was impossible not to feel animosity toward a guy like Swindler who refuses to participate in a night watch. He believed his position as squad leader earned him a certain amount of comfort.

But it takes more than grumbling to relieve a squad leader. We turned to mockery and plotting. But something held us back from doing anything really devious or mean. At some level, we felt like we were all swimming in the same crud. His way of managing it just turned out to be a lot of codswallop -- backed up by an arrogant streak a mile freaking wide.


As it turned out, the old saying "We often give our enemies the means with which to defeat us" came true. That's where this story really picks up...


* * *

Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty in the moonlight overthrew you



We were holed up in the battered remains of the P&G headquarters in downtown Cincy. AIM Supreme Command had told us to maintain an outpost there. My team had been sent to the upper floor so we could recon the whole downtown area while First Squad, led by Swindler, camped out on the first floor.

It was a gutted two-tower office building. The darkened hallways were cluttered with all kinds of paperwork spilling out of file cabinets.

Family photos torn from cubicles by rampaging Serb and Hun looters lay on the ground like discarded baseball cards. Anything worth anything had been stolen. What wasn't had been destroyed for childish pleasure. Smashed monitors. Torn up office chairs. It was like a bizarre Orwellian nightmare.

The smaller P&G tower had been reduced to almost nothing due to constant shelling. We were living in absolute squalor, but at least we had whole 'nother building to fire the rear thrusters. Soldiers in combat can be remarkably disgusting. The smaller tower was full of rotting feces. Piles of it. There had been boxes of Charmin in there, evidently, at first. You know, P&G's trademark TP. So that's how it became, quite literally, a shit hole.


* * *

The sounds of war were so ever-present, they became a kind of silence. Constant fireworks displays of tracers. Flashes of light from explosions would rattle what was left of the windows and cast an eerie pallor onto our animated faces as we smoked final cigarettes and lay down to rack for a few hours.

We called it The Wild West. It was scary. The city seethed directly outside the walls of our citadel, and we were desperately outnumbered.




* * *

Appleby and Farmer bunked next to me. We huddled together in the blackness and spoke in whispers. Eventually we'd found the remains of a neighborhood pharmacy and its sleeping pills. We had nothing to help us block out the war outside.

Appleby was introverted unless he was drunk. Farmer was a born talker. A big guy with a sense of humor, we usually got along, and I often got tasked woith talking to him because he never let it go if he thought someone was mistreating him because of his race.

Swindler had tried ever since day one to "break him", but one thing you can say about Farmer is he doesn't break for anyone. Dude was built like an ox too. He and Swindler had a hate-hate relationship.

We usually shot the shit until achieving something like sleep.

A strong wind whistled through the hallways, doors would slam open and shut and windows would screech open. At least three times I got up, grabbed my weapon and walked down the hallway, peering into empty rooms. I wasn't sure if I was looking for Serbs or ghosts, but I knew my M-249 auto fired 850 rounds a minute, and if that didn't stop whatever was after me, then I had a problem nothing was going to solve.





Two in the morning a window crashes open in our room and a metallic clinking rolls through the room. "Grenade!" someone yells. Appleby rolls into to corner, covering his head. Farmer just squeaks, accepting his fate. I'd lept into the hallway and was prone, aware that my friends were all about to get blown to kingdom come.

Silence.

Then yelling: "Man, frick this fricking place! This is fricking poopie doobles!" I crept back in and found Farmer leaning over a Coke can, shaking his head.

Appleby finally pipes up: "Quinn, this place is fracking haunted! I can't sleep here."

I agreed. "Let's get the freak out of here." With my consensus it became unanimous. We'd go downstairs, even though that meant automatic and unrelenting ridicule.


* * *

Washington, Ramirez, Gleason and Creed all hit us with a full stream of steamers when we explain why we're there.

"Frucking pussies," Gleason drawls without even rolling over or bothering to look at us.

I shoot the yukky with Wash and when it was his turn to go to the front gate for guard, I joined him. "Gobbers, brother, don't look like I'll be sleeping anyway." He was happy for the company.


Just as the sun started lighting up the Ohio, the radio crackled to life and I heard Staff Sgt Swindler's voice break through the static.

We were instructed to wake up some of the guys.

"Where's Swindler been all morning?" I asked.

"Dunno. All I was told is he went with Alpha Team to go get some grub."

"Does Main know they're out there?"

"Dunno man," Wash answered, sounding like he couldn't be less interested.


A few minutes later me, Creed, Ramirez and Farmer are weaving in and out of traffic like an ambulance, gunning through Cincy in our beat-up tricked out Humvee, head-to-toe in body armor, and jammed in together like lincoln logs. Swindler had showed up and ordered us into the vehicle.

"Hey Sarge, where we going? What's the deal?" Surprisingly, Swindler turned towards me and was actually smiling.


* * *

"Man, we hit a house this morning. Brood and Whitabix are still there. The place is full of weapons and money! No freaking bootycakes, man!"

Creed started at Swindler. Brood and Whitabix were alone somewhere in the occupied city. Swindler had just left them someplace.

"What house?" he asked. I had a sick feeling.

"Some local Polack came in with a tip last night when I was at the gate. Said there were Serb terrorists in this house down the road. We went to check it out and were compromised by the owner, so we just took it. Right up here past this light on the left.. yeah, here, on Mohawk."

He sounded like a kid who has just gotten a brand-new ten-speed bike.



Creed says "Sarge, this is pretty far out of sector. How did you get Main to okay it?"

"I didn't tell them. Dude, you gotta see this crapola. There's like a million simoleons there."

We all wanted to be heros and make a big bust. Somewhere in the back of my mind, an angry voice chided me. Farmer kept staring at me.

Great piles of trash ten feet high littered the corners. The stench of rotting food was compounded by the fact that all the trash had clogged up the drainage system. Streams and lakes of sewage crisscrossed Cincy. Children ran back and forth through the sludge. Some of the kids cheered as we roared by. Others threw rocks.







Baby I have been here before
I know this room, I've walked this floor
I used to live alone before I knew you.
I've seen your flag on the marble arch
Love is not a victory march
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah



We came to a stop in front of nondescript brownstone.

"Creed, you and Farmer stay with the fifty. Quinn, Ramirez, c'mon!" Swindler yelled back at us, already bounding up the steps and in the front door, which hung ajar like a gaping mouth.

"Friendlies coming in!" Swindler yelled. I followed closely behind. The house was lavish and upper class. There were thousands of dollars of audio and video equipment nestled in between leather couches and an antique dining table. A glass chandelier. On the floor sat two locals with their hands flexicuffed behind their backs. One was young, maybe sixteen, the other looked to be in his late twenties.

Whitabix had his rifle absentmindedly trained on their backs.

"Look what we found," he said with a smile.

"Yeah."

"Hey Quinn, you gotta see this." It was Brood calling from the next room.

"Holy Kiki". I made a low whistle. On the bed, arranged concentrically, were seven AK-47 rifles, three revolvers, two Glock automatics, and three large grocery bags loosely jammed with money -- two with dollars, one with euros. It was a joke. Fives and tens. Probably not more than a few thousand bucks at most. Lord know what euros are good for in Ohio, even during wartime.

We took turns posing with the loot, money in our laps. We must've looked like bank robbers from a Slavic gangland movie.

* * *

I searched the rest of the house. Nothing remarkable on the second and third floors. Then there was a commotion outside.

Regardless of the semblance of control, we were still six soldiers alone in an occupied city, well outside our little secured zone. The yelling outside reminded me of our tenuous hold on the current situation. I ran downstairs.

"You're not goone frickin' believe this man," Swindler said to me with that upturned lip. Next to him, Brood and Ramirez ushered in three more POWs they had managed to collect, apparently without much effort.



"This fudpucker lives here -- came right up and told us. And this is his cousin and his mother. They don't want us in their house." The last part was full of sarcasm.

The mother appeared to be at least well into her sixties. She was ranting, raving and spitting on us. As far as I could tell, she was yelling in Polish but it might've been some other language. I took her by the arm and instructed her to sit down.

She continued her tirade until she got tired and then seemed content with sending the evilest possible looks our way.




Once the additioanl guests were secured, Swindler and Ramirez, with help from the rest of us, started loading shit into the Humvee. Cameras, radios, boom boxes and other electronic equipment. The 9 MM's just vanished from the bed at one point. Presumably slipped into someone's belt.

They stripped everything they could carry. It was ridiculous. The electonics were all crapulous. The money was minimal. Pocket change, really. And it wasn't like there was anyplace open where we could go spend it anyway.

* * *

I imagined my mother's nasally Boston accent saying to me, "Phoenix, remember you're a good Christian boy." It was the first time during the resistance war that I was really and truly embarassed by our behavior. We were looting the house of some small-time, two-bit Polish criminals.

We jammed the prisoners, ourselves, and the loot into the Humvee and careened back to the P&G tower downtown.
Swindler radio'd ahead, "Be advised, we have five prisoners, four rifles, one pistol and a large amount of money."

Main said they'd send a truck to haul away the take and the prisoners. Washington just shrugged when he saw us walk in. I sat and talked at the prisoners while we waited. It didn't take long to establish that, with the exception of the mother, they understood English just fine.

"Man, my baby is in the hospital," the cousin explained to me. "This stuff is to help pay for treatments."

The company commander burst in waving his Baretta. He was the only person in our unit I hated more than Swindler.

"You boys did great today," he told me.

They loaded all the loot into a truck and then we got the prisoners loaded up too.





Maybe there’s a God above
But all I’ve ever learned from love
Was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you
It’s not a cry you can hear at night
It’s not somebody who has seen the light
It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah


I was too tired to deal with Farmer's frightening silence or Appleby's curious looks. As the sun got low on the horizon and shadows started to stretch their fingers out to reach us we pulled ourselves back up to our little haunted home away from home.

When darkness fell so did I, exhausted. Frick the ghosts. I was asleep almost at once, and slept unusually well.

* * *

The next day a special operations squad from Main showed up. They segregated each of us who'd been involved in the operation and started interrogating us.

Swindler had been called first, then Brood and Whitabix, followed by the rest of us. It made sense. Sgt Swindler was responsible for the whole thing. It had been an unauthorized operation and it had been his call.

Ramirez was bullshit. "I'm getting fricking deep-fried," he told me. "Quinn," he said, "It's even more complicated. That isn't platoon leader quizzing us. Its some spooks from the Company. The fricking CIA."





I knew how things worked. Swindler would get a slap on the wrist. This poor college kid was going to be turned into pudding.

Turned out Swindler was even more devious than we'd realized. He'd hidden all his loot as soon as we'd gotten back to P&G tower.



* * *

I had a long talk with Creed and Gleason about it later. I didn't want to narc on anyone. But this was some smelly seaweed.

Eventually I found the platoon leader and told him everything I knew. I felt like the biggest piece of shit ever.

He slapped me on the back and said, "You did the right thing Quinn" and then left me alone to wallow in my guilt.






The next few days were mighty awkward. Rumors flew everywhere. Ramirez got a summarized Article 15 -- a slap on the wrist, really. The rest of us got off scot-free.

Swindler was relieved of his command and restricted to quarters. Eventually he was busted down one rank to a buck sergeant and assigned to a different platoon. Rumor has it he developed a 'condition' that precluded wearing body armor and he spent the rest of the war monitoring radio from a command post.

He never confronted me. We passed each other every day until he was moved out, but never spoke again.






* * *

Months later, when we were back in liberated New York, us soldiers were being met by friends and family. Was looking for a familiar face when I saw a sign "Welcome to the Free Zone Staff Sergeant Swindler". It was being held by what was obvious a proud mother.

My face flushed with shame. I'd done the right thing for the wrong reasons. I'd wanted him gone and had gotten my wish, but there was no way I could ever make any of this right.










I did my best, it wasn't much
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch
I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you
And even though it all went wrong
I'll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah