The Butterfly Forest

EIGHTY-FIVE

The moon was straight above us. It created an illusion of a surreal world, a place right out of a war zone with bombed tanks, broken buildings, and the smell of C-4 and burnt gunpowder in the night air. One rusted Abrams tank was flipped over on its side resembling a great leviathan with a bent snout. The main gun barrel bowed upward, the turret unscrewed as if someone had twisted the lid off a jar. There were fractured cinderblock buildings set among retired, broken airplanes and a helicopter missing its tail rotor.

I looked across the field, scarred and barren of plants. There were gaping holes left from the concussions of dropped bombs. It felt as if we had been dropped into a large painting of the lunar surface. A stark, lonely canvas textured in shades of black and white, of abject desolation, a still-life picture of rehearsed war.

Billie and I stood under a small lean-to and listened for our pursuers. We heard a whippoorwill in an oak and frogs by a pond. Water bugs skidded over the moon’s face reflecting from the dark water. There was a visible quiet in an isolated land full of moving shadows, potholed fields, and the pond bouncing moonlight back up into halos of gnats.

“Maybe we can take refuge in one of those block buildings,” I said. “If the buildings are still standing in the middle of a training field for Navy bombers, maybe they’ll withstand machine gun bullets. Joe, you’re going to have to use the shotgun. Just point and shoot.”

He nodded and said, “We may not have another option. Let’s do it.”

“How’s your arm?”

“I need medicine on it, and on you, too, on that wound of yours.”

“Where are we going to get medicine out here?”

“Many places.”

I saw the glow of flashlights bouncing between trees on the northeast side of the property. “They’re coming,” I said. “Let’s go.” We crisscrossed between bombed-out artillery until we came to a concrete block structure no larger than a small garage. It had no door, only open windows. No glass. Stacks of sandbags, at least four feet high, lined the exterior walls.

I walked over rubble and grit, spider webs clinging to my face as I stepped through the window into the dark of the building. Billie followed. A bat fluttered around our heads, its wing grazing across my hair. I saw it fly out the window. The single room reeked of bat shit and mold. I looked out a hole in the wall and saw a line of men approaching us.

“Here,” I handed the shotgun to Billie. “You’ll have to wait until they’re about eighty feet from us. At the rate they’re coming, shouldn’t be too long.” I ignored the pain in my chest, the numbness in my arm, and watched the men come closer. “They must have night scopes to have seen us come in here. Let’s wait for—”

A burst of machine gun fire hammered the block structure. Concrete turning to gravel, bullets plowing deep into the solid walls. “You okay?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

Billie held the shotgun with both hands, the ruddy bloodstain now the size of a pie plate on his shirt. “They’re coming,” he said in a whisper.

Under the moonlight I could see them, each man separated at least fifteen feet from the next. I had no idea which one was Soto. I felt my mind drift, as if it was separating from my body. NO! Not now. I blinked hard, fighting back vertigo from loss of blood, shaking away illusions that wouldn’t retreat. I looked out the hole and saw Iraqi troops approaching. I felt the muscles knot across my chest, my palm sweaty as I readied my Glock.

I could hear the quick orders, commands to kill. I could see the stealth flanking as men raised machine guns to charge us. I knew they would try to fire a barrage of lead in such force that we couldn’t return fire. And then one of them could make his way in from the side and empty his M4 into the window Billie and I had crawled through.

The F/A 18 Hornet fighter jet gave no advance warning. The Navy pilot’s computer had calculated the strike down to within a few meters of the target. I could see the exterior lights from the fighter more than a mile away in the eastern horizon. I didn’t know if he was circling toward us to practice night bombings. And, if so, was the target our bunker or something else? Right now I simply wasn’t sure if what I saw was real or an illusionist’s prop, a morbid one-act play from a theater of war I still fought during night sweats. I turned to Billie. “Listen! Tell me, do you see lights from a fighter jet banking and coming our way?”

“Yes, and coming damn fast.”

He scarcely said the words when we both peered through the hole like two rabbits looking out to see if the fox was coming.

It was. The Navy Hornet was coming fast and low — three hundred yards out. Two hundred feet above the ground.

Three seconds away.

The bomb exploded maybe eighty yards from us. Not far in front of the advancing men. The shock wave hit our bunker with the force of an off-center strike, a wrecking ball. Not hard enough for damage, but hard enough to shake the walls and kick up dried bat shit off the floor. I couldn’t tell if any of the enemy had been killed. The fire was a roaring hellhole. “Let’s get out of here!” I yelled to Billie. The sound from the jet caught up with its awesome destruction.

We crawled back out the window and ran for the darkest section of the bombing range. I felt the fire and heat penetrate the back of my neck, and smelled the odor of burning flesh and hair. I didn’t want to look over my shoulder. I didn’t want to see if the nightmare could catch me.