Duke of Yan (1)
The sand-mixed wind drove straight into my nostrils. It was a landlocked country without a single sea, yet the sandy air reeked of rot. The official deployment had long ended and the reconstruction support teams had all withdrawn, but I and a handful of nameless old men remained, surviving day after day inside this hell.
The lukewarm water in the CamelBak hadn’t been properly cleaned in so many months that I couldn’t remember when. Now it was used for betting on who would get diarrhea first after drinking it. The streets of Baktra, riddled with IEDs, throbbed with the metallic stench of blood, the thick reek of gore, and the ammonia bite left behind by gunpowder.
It had already been months since any official mission came down. I had no thoughts, no purpose, and I couldn’t remember how long I’d been watching crows peck at the corpses dangling from streetlights. Then Korean drifted from behind me.
“Captain, when are they saying we’re pulling out?”
A young man in a threadbare uniform spoke. The body that had been powerfully built only a few years earlier was now emaciated like a dried anchovy. Two cavalry swords bought in the local market hung at his waist, lashed together with parachute cord.
Sergeant Lee. One of the company members who, like me, had stayed behind in Afghanistan without a name.
“I don’t know either. Maybe when headquarters runs out of room to hang another star on the main entrance?”
“…Fuck. Let’s play a round of baduk. Hundred-thousand-won pot.”
“Again?”
“We don’t have anything else to do, do we? The Americans will handle the fighting. We just keep building schools like always… build… building… we have to keep…”
“Sergeant Lee, the American kids being stupid isn’t a one-day affair, and there’s still plenty of work left. Get your head on straight, take the boys into the city, and grab a drink.”
“Is there anywhere left that sells alcohol in an Islamic country?”
“…Date palm liquor seems to be allowed. What was it again…? If it isn’t made from grapes, it isn’t wine, so liquor brewed from dates doesn’t count as alcohol? Something like that.”
“Ha. Dragging decent people in just for drinking… Damn it, I don’t understand a single thing anymore. I’ll take the boys, get some kebab and a drink. You all right holding down the fort, Captain?”
“One of us has to stay. I’ll go tomorrow.”
“Then I’m off. Live long~”
“Serve long~”
I returned the sloppy salute with equal playfulness and watched the administrative officer’s back disappear down the street. The crow on the streetlight had vanished. Or… had there even been a streetlight? I couldn’t remember.
In those days there were no mirrors in our barracks. We had thrown them all away. And we tried never to look one another in the face.
Sergeant Lee. KIA. Killed by local rebels.
I returned to the barracks where no one was left. I checked the gunpowder stacked in the storeroom, cleaned the rifles caked with sand, opened a tin of rations to fill my stomach, then washed my hands until they were clean.
As always I sent the routine report over the radio that never answered, then added the fresh page to the stack of reports the signalman would collect. Supplies had increased, so maybe today I could manage a shower.
It had been a long time since it last rained.
---
“Brother!”
Though the autumn rainy season had ended, the sudden midnight downpour proved that everything the Liaodong army had endured in training had not been meaningless dog work.
They pulled iron rods and mallets from their packs. The A-frame tents issued to each squad blocked the raindrops well enough. In every tent a few poor souls who had lost the betting pool were out digging drainage ditches with shovels.
The cavalry sheltered beneath large camouflage nets with their horses, while some soldiers deliberately stood in the rain to wash the mud from their bodies.
“Brother!”
“What?”
“These are the men who have followed us since Changliao. They are veterans now who carry their own weight.”
“If they’ve been with us since then, it’s been more than five years, hasn’t it?”
“That’s right. Some left wounded, countless new faces joined, but most are still the same people from back then. My own subordinates followed me from the Tak Army as well.”
No wonder they moved with such crisp efficiency. Five years would put them around staff-sergeant level. Or first sergeant? It was thirty years ago; the details had grown hazy.
Memories carved into bone like training never faded with time. But useless scraps—how much the salary had been, at what year of service promotion came—those had been erased long ago. He didn’t carry himself like a private or corporal, so he was probably staff-sergeant rank.
Oh… A regiment-sized force composed entirely of staff-sergeant-level veterans. The sight swelled my chest even though I had created it myself.
“They are warriors each worth a hundred men. Brother, tell me now. What exactly do you intend to do with this army?”
“I’m going to stop war.”
It had been a long time since the old thoughts surfaced, and the words simply came out. My mind kept going where it usually stopped at I don’t know.
War is a terrifying thing. If there were no patriots, if no country in the world had men who loved their nation and their race, then young men would not shoulder rifles for country or kin and march to the battlefield. There would be no need for cannons, tanks, or nuclear weapons. No compulsory military service, no training camps. Mothers would not lose their children to war. Young people could love flowers, love nature, love their lovers, love rainbows. They would cherish and love far more, and the world would become beautiful and warm.
It was a story I had heard from a pastor on an airplane once. I agreed with every word.
“I will create a world without war.”
I still had no clear idea how to make such a world. It wasn’t that I had stopped thinking; no answer came no matter how deeply I searched. I hoped the clever scholars at the Yan Research Institute would eventually find it. Until then I had built an army that would not lose to anyone… though sometimes I wondered if it would be more peaceful to have Sister Hualian simply tear all human civilization to pieces.
In the past a man named Mozi had said: if the whole world were shattered into fragments no larger than villages, and no one’s offensive power exceeded another’s defensive power, war would never occur.
It was a laughable tale. Machine guns, bombers, nuclear bombs—most weapons of mass destruction had ironically been created for defense. The thinking was that if a weapon existed that could kill human lives as easily as stepping on ants, people would fear it too much to attack.
It was a laughable tale. Every weapon, shields included, could be used for both attack and defense. And the men who started wars never stood on the battlefield. Death there was merely a matter of numbers decreasing. The commanders never understood the terror ordinary soldiers felt. When allies were torn apart by friendly bombs it ended as one line in a report. Torturing men to death was simply a quick, convenient means to victory.
The act of war itself never changed. Therefore, until the researchers found the answer, I would crush every figure who tried to start one. That was the decision I had made, and I had gathered more than enough experience to carry it out.
“…Then shall we return to Hulao Pass?”
“No. We will stop Yuan Shao’s army. And we will seize the seas of the Central Plains.”
“You realize this contradicts what you just said, right?”
“Yuan Shao’s power base lies in Ji Province. Since I swallowed the entire province, he will certainly dream of revenge. Luoyang… Hulao Pass does not fall so easily.”
To break Hulao Pass one must fill the moat with corpses and stack the walls with their bones. Who would pay that blood price? Who could shove their own men into the ditch and endure the humiliation of submitting to another warlord? Who could order their subordinates to die like dogs for the sake of rival warlords?
The anti-Dong Zhuo coalition was nothing more than a boat with too many captains. They could haul the vessel onto a mountain, but there was no leader capable of dragging it all the way to the sea. The campaign against Dong Zhuo would fail, and once the alliance dissolved, Yuan Shao would lead his lackeys in a war to reclaim his headquarters. I could see it as clearly as if it had already happened.
“For now… there is still no problem. When the anti-Dong Zhuo coalition collapses, that will mark the true end of this country.”
In other words, as long as Dong Zhuo endured, the realm could continue to balance precariously on the edge of the cliff. It could still preserve the spirit of the age known as the Emperor.
“…Looks like my vacation will have to wait. When winter comes I’ll need to make a quick trip to Luoyang.”
Dong Zhuo was a warlord. The kind that was all too common in the twenty-first century. He could steal a country but had no talent to govern it. Though he had seized the spirit of the era, he could not hold that power for even a full year before igniting civil war.
If chaos erupts in Luoyang, could you save my brother?
Because I had not stopped thinking, every kind of thought flooded in.
“I had forgotten a few things I needed to do.”
I should never have married. I should never have relaxed because You Province was a frontier. I should never have forgotten that happiness had never been a concept meant for me.
I don’t know.