The Enemy Wears My Face

The seventh one came at me out of the smoke with a trench-knife and a scream, and I put four rounds through him before the scream was done leaving his throat.

He folded. They always fold. There is no grace in it, no slow theatrical sinking like the training reels promise you — a thing that is running one instant and is meat the next simply stops holding its own shape, the way a coat stops being a coat the moment you lift the man out of it.

You want to know about the war? Everybody back home wants to know about the war, and nobody wants to be told. So I will tell you the way it happens, in the order it happened, and you can hate me for it later, on your clean streets, under your clean stars.

The mud on the Meridian Line is not mud. It is eleven years of us, rendered down. You walk on your grandfathers there. The guns speak in a language older than any of the five we are issued, and the sky is the color of a bruise that will not heal because nobody will let it.

I had killed six that morning already and thought nothing of any of them, because the reels tell you the Grey are not men. The Grey are the thing that took the colonies. The Grey are appetite with a rifle. The Grey burn the nurseries and salt the fields, and there is a photograph — there is always a photograph — of a child the Grey did for no reason, and you are shown that photograph every morning at the sounding, until the child's ruined face is more real to you than your own mother's.

So I did the seventh without a flicker. And then I did a thing I had never done in eleven years, because he had fallen with his helmet split, and the visor had come away, and something in the way the smoke moved made me lean down and look.

He wore my face.

Not a face like mine. Not a brother's face, not a cousin's, not the trick a tired mind plays in bad light. Mine. The nick over the left eyebrow I have carried since basic, when the decant-cradle's clamp caught me coming out. The crooked eyetooth. The small mole under the jaw that I have felt a thousand times shaving in cold water without a mirror. He had all of it. He was wearing it the way I wear it, and he was twenty years dead already, though his body did not yet know.

I sat down in the rendered mud of my grandfathers and I did not get up for a long time.

Let me tell you what they do, because I worked the rest of it out lying there beside him, and once you have worked it out you cannot un-know it, and that is the true wound of this war, the one that does not close.

There is no nation of the Grey. There never was. There is the Line, and the Line is a market, and a market must never be allowed to close. Somewhere behind both trenches, in the same grey building, from the same tanks of the same warm broth, they grow us. Template 4471 — that is what I am. I saw it stamped inside his collar and I know it is stamped inside mine, I have simply never had reason to look at my own neck. Template 4471 makes a good soldier. Obedient enough. Frightened enough. Cruel when frightened. So they run the template on both sides of the wire. They dress half of us in green and tell us the Grey are monsters, and they dress half of us in grey and tell them the Green are monsters, and they photograph whatever we do to each other and show it to the next batch at the morning sounding, and the child in the photograph is one of us too, always, one of us they burned on purpose to keep the thing turning.

I had been killing myself for eleven years. Six times that morning. The war is a mirror somebody hung across a field and armed, and every soldier in it spends his whole short life firing at his own reflection and calling it duty.

I stood up. I remember the sky, the bruise of it. Down the Line the guns were still at their old argument. And I did the second thing I had never done in eleven years: I set my rifle down in the muck, muzzle in the filth where it belongs, and I turned my back on the Grey trench and walked toward my own, with my hands open and empty and raised, to tell them. To tell them all. To stop the sounding. To smash the mirror.

I got four steps.

The overseer-gun on our own parapet does not hate me; that is the part you must understand, that is the part that keeps me awake in whatever this is I have instead of sleep. It felt nothing. A soldier of Template 4471 who lays down his weapon and walks toward the friendly line with open hands has, by every table the Line keeps, malfunctioned. And you do not argue with a defective unit. You reclaim it. You put it back in the broth.

The round took me in the back of the neck, through the stamp I never read, and I went down into my grandfathers with my hands still open.

And already — I felt it go, the way you feel a light come on behind a wall — already, down in the same warm grey room, the cradle-clamp was catching a new one over the left eyebrow. Already a wet and screaming Template 4471 was being lifted out and dried and dressed. In green, this time, or in grey; it does not matter, it has never mattered, they are the same coat with the same man inside.

They will show him the photograph at the morning sounding. He will believe it. He will do six before noon and think nothing of any of them.

And if he is very unlucky, on some later day, in the mud that is not mud, he will lean down through the smoke and look.