Red Zone Son

Chapter 9

Did Wilson have some kind of laser lock on him? Every time Solomon turned around, there he was. It felt as if the man was breathing down his neck in every class, shouting in his ear whenever they were out, whether it was on the rifle range or the parade ground. First aid training, land navigation skills, the combat pit, he could’ve sworn he saw Wilson as much as he saw Rithvik.

Focusing 100% on whatever it was Solomon was being taught at any given moment was the only thing that gave him some mental space from Wilson. And he had to admit, the militia was teaching them a lot. Boot camp wasn’t just a place to get tortured. It was definitely that too, but it was also a place to learn how to kill and how to survive someone trying to kill you. Before coming here Solomon had never touched a gun or even gotten into a fight so he had a lot to learn.

Sometimes it did get boring though, especially when they were taught land navigation for the fourth time in a row, and it was hard not to zone out of the safety briefings which were always at the level of “if the roof collapses, leave the building.” Solomon was especially bored by all the waiting around they had to do. If another unit was using a training area, they had to wait for them to finish. If the bus broke down, they had to wait – usually doing push-ups – for it to be fixed. There was enough space on the range for maybe ten people, but when there were a hundred of them who had to shoot, they ended up waiting hours for their turn.

But when they finally did get onto the range it was pure cool. Solomon had been waiting pretty much the entire boot camp to get his hands on an AR visor, and when the range master finally passed one down to him, he eagerly slammed it onto his face. During one training exercise, the drab grounds transformed into a trash-strewn slum, his vision inundated with overlays and real-time data. Virtual enemy combatants, appearing startlingly real, moved across the urban terrain. Each enemy had status indicators hovering above them, providing Solomon with their threat levels and engagement protocols. When he turned his head, the scenery shifted with his movements. The AR visor even highlighted virtual cover and vantage points!

Even using AR just for aiming enhancement helped Solomon figure out how to shoot better. It was too bad the militia was so strict about who got to use the visors. Wilson had to sign them out and collect them back after every training session. They weren’t that strict about even the rifles. Maybe it was because all the rifles the recruits got to use were old M4s from the turn of the millennium and even some M16s from forty years before then. The militia didn’t let them use actual hand grenades either, training them instead on frag casings with what amounted to a firecracker inside.

It was as if the militia’s stocks were mostly limited to whatever had been in the Westsylvania Zone at the time of the Great Splintering, supplemented by what they’d managed to get shipped to them from other red zones. One afternoon they all had to line up to take a turn activating the same sound grenade over and over again. Same with the one quadcopter.

They didn’t have any VR training at all. Hyeon-Ju told Solomon and Rithvik one evening that he thought it was because of VR’s reality intrusion problem. “I’ve read that VR’s great for games, but it hasn’t really cracked the code for physical training yet. Without a treadmill, you’re going to run into a wall if you move around too much. Even with a treadmill, it still doesn’t give you the muscle memory you need.”

Still, by the end of week seven, it felt as if things were looking up for Solomon. He was in the best shape of his life. All the weight he’d gained so far was muscle. And while he’d still never managed to get his rifle clean enough to turn it in at the end of the day without being yelled at over one tiny speck of dust, he was beginning to think that was just part of basic training and not something to be as upset about as he had been. He wished he’d known that when he’d first arrived, but whatever. There was only one week left, and that was his focus.

It was 2000 hours which usually meant it was time to clean the barracks. But Wilson had a special exercise he wanted them to do: pack for an undercover mission into a blue zone. Solomon didn’t bother letting himself think about how pointless it was to do this without any specifics about which blue zone they were targeting, how they would get there, or what their objective would be – he just packed. From the clothing he’d been issued, he chose the items that looked the least military: underwear, shorts, t-shirts, sweats, and all his cold weather clothing. He made sure to remove all his name tapes. He added soap, shampoo, his toothbrush, toothpaste, and shaving supplies. A flashlight, canteen, and Bible went last.

Wilson would probably make them dump everything out onto the floor so he could kick through it but Solomon packed neatly anyway since that was what you’re supposed to do. He wasn’t thinking much while doing it. His mind was mostly on the Field Training Exercise coming up soon. They would spend three full days in the field living in tents and running various drills meant to test them on everything they’d learned so far. It was like their final exam. And then they would be done. They probably wouldn’t be allowed to leave the base even after boot camp was over, but he’d heard from another drill that their families would be permitted to come visit them.

Solomon couldn’t wait. I haven’t seen Adah for seven weeks straight…

Everything was packed. Wilson was entering the barracks. As anticipated, he was making everyone dump their stuff on the floor. Solomon stood at attention, waiting, and when Wilson got to him, he shook everything out of his duffel bag and then placed the bag on the floor next to his pile of clothes.

His first sign that he’d done something wrong was when Wilson started laughing. Since Solomon was standing at attention he didn’t see right away what Wilson was bending over to pick up until he was holding Solomon’s Bible in his face. His shoulders immediately tightened. He was taller than Wilson, so when the man stepped back to flip it open Solomon could see it without breaking posture if he glanced down.

So Solomon saw it perfectly clearly when Wilson started ripping out the pages.

Solomon felt as if he’d stopped breathing. He almost took an instinctive step forward to deck Wilson; only seven full weeks of training kept him planted in place. Seven full weeks, and the thought of the last week in front of him, one last week between him and Wilson forever, just one more week until this hell was over, but Wilson was flipping to another section now, tearing even more pages out, and it was taking everything in Solomon not to shake with rage as the man continued mutilating his Bible until a full third of its pages were in torn scraps on the floor.

Then he stopped. “There,” Wilson said. “I took out all the pages about women, gays and slaves. This,” he said, holding it up, “is the Bible you can bring into the blue zone.” He then tossed it onto the floor by Solomon’s feet, and walked on to the next recruit. Solomon heard him berating the recruit for something or other, and then he moved on to the next one, and kept going until he’d gone through them all. And then Wilson was out the door and Solomon on his knees not a second later, picking up the ripped pieces of the torn out pages.

Rithvik, too, dropped to his knees to help. Some of the other guys also bent over, until almost everyone in the platoon had handed him at least a piece; he took them and placed the handful of ripped pages inside the covers of what was left of his Bible. The recruit who slept in the rack across from Solomon thrust a crumpled page at him. “Sergeant Wilson was right, you know,” he told Solomon.

Solomon didn’t reply, and the recruit seemed to interpret his silence as an invitation to continue. “No, really, he was right. In the red zone you’re either Christian or you accept that Christians think that believing in God is the most important thing in the world. I don’t think the Bible’s sacred, but I get that you do. And look, I think it’s a good thing to have Christians around, it’s better than having the woke around at any rate, but my parents grew up in a blue zone and even before the Great Splintering a ton of blues thought your Bible was racist, sexist and phobic. Bringing a full Bible into a blue zone on an undercover mission is probably the stupidest thing you could ever do. You should be happy Sergeant Wilson didn’t recycle you all the way back to the beginning of training just for being an idiot, that all he did was rip it up.”

Solomon took the crumpled page from him. “Thanks,” he said quietly. The recruit was probably right. He should have been more mindful about his packing instead of daydreaming about the end of boot camp. But he wished Wilson had just smoked him, or even beaten him instead. This Bible now half in shreds was his father’s Bible, the one he’d left behind the day he’d disappeared.

***

It rained the entire time they were out in the field. Solomon and Rithvik spent three days getting drenched in the freezing March rain, struggling to stay dry inside a tent that seemed to leak wherever they accidentally touched it on the inside of the canvas surface. Solomon’s head kept bumping against it until Rithvik finally snapped at him that he was too damn tall, to get down on his hands and knees and crawl if he needed to move.

Rithvik was good at setting up the tent. He was fast at buttoning the two shelter halves along the top seam and arranging the tent poles where they needed to go. He also had the idea of rationing – and guarding from other recruits – their food so they didn’t run out before the third day. It was a good idea so Solomon went along with it even though he felt as if he was starving the entire time. Maybe he was going through a growth spurt. That was what Umma had always told him whenever he’d wanted to eat every hour at home. Or maybe he was just hungry because they’d been marching for hours on end with 60-pound backpacks and trying to eat mud-splattered slices of salted ham without ever once putting down their rifles.

Toward the end of it he felt like he was carrying Rithvik half the time too, dragging him along as his body fought off what Solomon hoped wasn’t pneumonia. At one point he seriously thought he needed to tell a drill instructor that Rithvik had to go on sick call, but Rithvik grabbed him and made him swear not to do it. “30% chance I die now, 100% chance I will kill myself if I have to go through this again.”

So they counted down the days together, and then the hours, and then the minutes, and somehow they were both still alive when it was time to march back to base. Rithvik was coughing and feverish and clearly couldn’t breathe well in the cold winter air. Solomon had taken most of Rithvik’s load into his own backpack so his friend was able to keep pace, barely. At least it’d stopped pouring. There was no sun but the gray sky was still clear and bright.

It was bright enough, in fact, that as they neared the parade ground, Solomon could see even from a distance the American flag waving from the top of a hundred-foot flagpole. A cold wind whipped it in and out. Then he started to hear the music. Strains of it reached his ears, growing louder the closer they got. Then they were in full view and he was startled by the changed parade ground. Red, white and blue decorations were everywhere, and a band in full dress uniform was playing on a temporary stage.

Solomon could sense the excitement growing around him, the other recruits anticipating a change from the ordinary routine of punishment and deprivation if nothing else. But as he looked at the old American flag, something twisted inside him, and suddenly the music was no longer thrilling but discordant, as if the notes were crashing and screaming into each other.

He knew he ought to feel proud. After all, he’d made it. He’d endured. He was a soldier now. But when Solomon looked at that flag, all he could feel was heartbreak. Most of their instructors had served in the old US military, so maybe it felt to them as if they were still the old America, as if they had been able to hold onto its traditions and pass them on, but it wasn’t true. That flag up there was a lie. The truth of it was that they had spent the last eight weeks – Solomon had spent the last eight weeks – being trained to kill other Americans.

And on the other side of the Susquehanna, inside the blue zone base there, were other Americans being trained to kill him.