Collateral Damage

(Note: this story is a part of my "Greenies/A Perfect World universe and was written a full two years before we were even thinking about going to war in Iraq, so please, spare me your comments about any parallels. It's just a story, people. The background is just a setting. The Chinese are just a likely foe under the circumstances I've envisioned.)

*

April 11, 2013

Roseville, California

The Roseville High School cafeteria was particularly crowded with students during the lunch period on this day. Every table was full and a few kids were even forced to sit in the corner, in plastic chairs usually reserved only for official assemblies. The crowding — while unusual — was not because of the special announcement Principal Bauer was going to make. Everyone already knew what the announcement was going to be, had been through such announcements many times before, and had little or no interest, other than a morbid one, in the words he would speak. No, the real reason everyone happened to be inside today was an unseasonable rainstorm that had been pounding the Sacramento region all that day. The students who normally ate outside had been forced in.

Principal Bauer knew this but didn't really care. His enthusiasm for such announcements had faded long before as well. They were all too common these days, especially in the last two weeks, since the Asian Powers' spring offensive against the Western Hemisphere Alliance had begun. Still, it was a part of his job and he walked with dignity to the podium at the front of the room where he asked for, and eventually received, the relative attention of the early lunch students, most of whom were juniors and seniors.

"It is my sad duty to announce," he said into the microphone, "that another member of the Roseville High School alumni has given his life for his country on the active front. May I draw your attention to the Wall of Remembrance?" He nodded in the direction of the south wall, which was covered with framed 8x10 photographs taken from yearbook files. Each one was of a Roseville High graduate who had been killed in action. With this latest addition, there were now 93 of them up there — 78 males and 15 females. And these were only the official KIAs. They did not include the 124 alumni who were listed as missing in action. Nor did they include the 84 who had been killed in training accidents or in non-combat situations. Nor did they include the 345 who had been wounded in action severely enough to be discharged and put on a lifetime disability pension.

"Newly unveiled on our wall today," Bauer continued, "is the image of John William Ringwell, Class of 2012. He was a member of the United States Army assigned to the 12th Armored Cavalry Regiment stationed on the active front in southwest Idaho. He was killed in combat two days ago during a tank battle with Chinese forces. Let us all bow our heads for a moment of silence in his honor."

Everyone dutifully bowed their heads and kept their mouths shut as asked. When the moment was up, Bauer invited them to pay their respects to the photograph as they left the cafeteria that day. He then made his leave, hustling back to his office to continue working on the budget reports for the next fiscal year.

At a table near the rear of the cafeteria, Eric Rowley sat with a group of friends. Eric, a senior, had turned eighteen three weeks before. He was technically old enough to be drafted now but, like any high school student, was still covered under the Primary Education Deferment that forbade the United States Selective Service from compelling him to go to war while he was still in school. The moment he graduated or dropped out of school, that deferment would expire. "Anyone hear how Ringwell bought it?" he asked his friends as he shoveled processed lunchmeat into his mouth.

"The dumb fuck was in a tank," said Tyler Bentley, another senior. "They burned his ass to a crisp. That's how the tankers always go."

"That's a fuckin' retreat," said Matt Smith, who was munching on a microwave burrito.

Tyler simply shrugged contemptuously. "That's what he gets for going low-pro," he said, which meant that Ringwell — who they all remembered as a shy, somewhat nerdy senior while they had been juniors — had chosen to go "low profile," which meant he had not volunteered for the service upon graduation, instead waiting for the draft board to call him. Low-pro was considered a pussy thing to do among the 16 to 19--year-old crowd. And it was also nothing more than a delaying tactic. Internet statistics showed that a graduating senior going low-pro would get nailed by the draft within six months anyway.

The statistics also showed that a disproportionate number were assigned as crewmen on tanks, which everyone knew was the most dangerous place to be in an extremely dangerous war. Ringwell was a perfect example of the statistics in action. He had been drafted three months after graduating and had been assigned to tanks in southern Idaho — the most active portion of the front line, where more than three million soldiers from the United States, Mexico, Venezuela, and Brazil were faced off against more than four million soldiers from China, Japan, Vietnam, and Korea. And now Ringwell was dead, burned to death by a Chinese-designed, Japanese manufactured anti-tank missile, just one of nearly a million Allied soldiers killed since the war had started a little over two years ago.

"I'm tellin' you," Matt said. "Put me on the fuckin' line with a rifle. I'll kill all the chinks they want and take my chances against the artillery. Fuck that tank shit. Can you imagine? Being stuck inside one of them death traps and burning to death? The dumb fuck probably never even saw it coming."

"That ain't propaganda," Eric said solemnly, sipping out of his milk carton.

Matt gave him a sour look. "What the hell do you care about it, Rowley?" he asked. "You're Mr. Valedictorian, aren't you? You and your goddamned 3.9 GPA. You ain't gonna be going to the line when you graduate. You get to kick it in some college for four fuckin' years and if the war ain't over by then they'll just stick you in the rear somewhere."

Eric blushed a little at this jibe. It was true that he was set to graduate with a GPA higher than 3.8, which, under current Selective Service Rules, would qualify him for one of the rare college deferments from the draft as long as he actually attended an institute of higher learning. Among his friends he was the only one with a high enough GPA, something that caused a considerable amount of resentment at times. "Hey, sarge," he said, utilizing the generic monicker that had recently replaced the word 'dude'. "Just because I get the college deferment doesn't mean I have to take it. I can still volunteer, you know."

"Yeah right, like you would do that," Matt said.

"I'm just keeping my options open," Eric said. "You think I want to be some pussy college student while all my friends are on the line? Fuck that shit."

This appeased Matt, Tyler, and the rest of the seniors at the table. Among the adolescents of the day — all of whom were constantly bombarded with patriotic songs, television shows, and armed forces recruiting commercials — signing up for the service was the "static" thing to do, what everyone strived for. Not even the 93 pictures on their cafeteria wall could dissuade them.

"You the commander, Rowley," Tyler told him, holding up his hand for a high five. "Fuck that college shit. Let's go kill us some chinks."

Eric slapped hands with him and then did the same with Matt. They all left the cafeteria a few minutes later, walking by the Wall of Remembrance on the way. None of them so much as glanced at it.

+++++

The rain was still coming down as he rode his bicycle home after school that day. His body was covered with a vinyl rain slicker decorated with the winter camouflage scheme so popular among teens these days. He kept his head down as the drops pattered onto him and his wheels sluiced through puddles in the middle of Cirby Boulevard. Every once in a while he would look around in wonder at the six-lane road he was on, trying to remember what it had been like before the war when automobile traffic had choked every intersection and the smell of exhaust had permeated the air.

There were no automobiles on the road now. With the gasoline ration set at one gallon per household per month, and with that one gallon costing 125 dollars, only the very rich could afford to operate their motor vehicles. Most of the cars these days were either rotting away in garages or had been sold for scrap iron at a hundredth of what they had originally cost. The Asian Powers — who had captured the Middle East, Siberia, and Alaska in the first few months of the war, and who still held them — had put a serious kink in the American commute. All of the domestic oil production from California, Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and all of the remaining foreign oil production from Mexico, Nigeria, and Venezuela, was being used to make fuel for fighting the war. The American economy had nearly collapsed in those first few months and was still quite far from recovery. If not for the suspiciously timely development of practical cold fusion to generate electrical power, there might very well have been mass starvation.

Cirby Boulevard ended at the intersection of Foothills Boulevard. Eric turned right here and was now riding alongside the Roseville Train Yard — the largest freight switching facility west of the Mississippi River. Miles of track stretched along the western edge of the Sacramento suburb, with hundreds of freight cars and flat cars parked or slowly moving from place to place. The war had made the yard a very busy place. The boxcars were full of artillery shells, tank rounds, machine gun bullets, rifles, and, of course, reloads for the AT-9 launchers — the laser-guided, shoulder-fired anti-tank weapon most responsible for the bloody stalemate that had developed on both the American front in the Pacific Northwest and the European front where the Brits, Germans, French, Spanish, and South Africans were pitted against three and a half million Indian soldiers. The flatcars all contained armored vehicles — M2A1 main battle tanks, armored personnel carriers, half-tracks, self-propelled 155-millimeter artillery guns, and mobile surface-to-air missile launchers. On the flatcars heading north or east, the armor was brand new, the protective covers still in place. On the flatcars returning from the front, the vehicles were smashed and burned, in some cases completely unrecognizable, on their way back to the southern California area for recycling.

The train yard itself was a frequent target of Chinese bombers operating out of bases in Southern Washington. At least twice a week Chinese pilots flying American designed F-15s or A-6s or Russian designed MiG-27s or SU-34s would come in low, using the Sierra Nevada Mountains to the east to hide from radar before swooping at rooftop level along the Sacramento Valley floor. Their weapon of choice were unguided 500 pound free-fall bombs that, when scattered among the parked trains, could disrupt the vital railhead for days, sometimes even weeks if they managed to hit some of the fuel tankers or the munitions cars. To counter this threat, the train yard was absolutely lousy with anti-aircraft weapons. Riding over the overpass that crossed a section of the tracking, Eric could see three fixed SAM sites, more than a dozen mobile SAM launchers, almost thirty heavy caliber flak guns, and about a hundred 23-millimeter AA guns within the boundaries of the yard. Despite all this firepower, the Chinese got their bombs through a depressing amount of the time, as was evidenced by the shattered remains of train cars stacked off to the southern portion of the yard.

Eric continued down the other side of the overpass and followed Foothills for another mile before turning left onto a two-lane street that led into the residential neighborhood where he lived. The houses here were all modest tract homes built in the late 1990s or early 2000s. All of the lawns were now overgrown and shaggy since there was no gasoline available to mow them with. Since it was a bit chilly today, many of the fireplaces had smoke coming from them because the cost of natural gas had more than quintupled since the beginning of the war. Many of the houses were just plain deserted, the occupants who could afford it having fled to safer living quarters. What made the neighborhood unsafe was not the crime rate — that was at its lowest level in history in the US since most of America's youth was now fighting the war — but the proximity to the rail yards. The Chinese did not go out of their way to drop their bombs in the middle of the residential zone, but it happened by mistake quite often. More common was that a bomber would be shot out of the sky by one of the yard's anti-air weapons and crash down into the neighborhood, wiping out a few houses or a strip mall.

In the last year, since the Asian Powers forces had pushed into Washington and Idaho and gotten themselves into bombing range of Central California, more than fifty homes had been destroyed, more than a hundred had been damaged, and nearly two hundred people had been killed in the five square miles of residential neighborhood adjacent to the yards. There was talk of condemning the rest of the homes and forcing the residents out for their own safety — talk that was met with sometimes violent protest by the residents themselves because they would be ineligible for any kind of compensation if the resolution were to pass. Eric tried not to think about what would happen if they were forced to leave. He and his mother were barely hanging onto their home as it was. They would literally have no place to go if they were forced out. Nor could they even hope a bomber would come down on their house one night and damage or destroy it so they could collect the insurance money. Such destruction was a direct result of an act of war and, therefore, not covered under the homeowner's policy.

The house where Eric lived with his mother was a two-story purchased nineteen years before, during much happier times when Roger and Elizabeth Rowley were young parents of a two-year old girl and Eric was a two month fetus in his mother's womb. That had been during the beginning of the dot-com boom when everyone was getting rich and mortgage companies were practically giving home loans away. These days, the house was a bit ramshackle, its paint peeling in many places, tiles missing from the roof, the chimney sagging. It was also almost completely worthless since it was in a neighborhood that would likely be condemned soon. His mother literally wouldn't be able to give it away, yet the mortgage company still insisted on receiving their $1148.43 on the first of every month. That was not a terribly high mortgage payment in this day and age, but it was somewhat steep for a widowed mother on top of her daughter's college tuition and books and all the other bills. Eric's sister, Megan, who was a junior at the University of Santa Barbara, helped out when she could, but most of the money she earned from her job as a waitress went for her own living expenses. Eric, too, helped out when he could. He had a part-time job as a clerk at a nearby hardware store. He turned over to his mother half of his weekly salary to help make ends meet.

Eric parked his bike in the garage and entered through the back door. The house was chilly because the furnace had been permanently shut down to save money and their firewood had long since run out. The aroma of cooking was in the air. It smelled like stew, one of the staples of their diet. Sure enough, when he came into the kitchen, his mother was standing before a pot on the stove, slowly stirring her concoction of jarred beef cuts and vegetables grown in her backyard victory garden.

"Hi, Mom," he said as he came up behind her and took a sniff. "How's it advancing?"

"About the same as always," she said tiredly, dumping a few pinches of salt into the pot. "How was your day?"

"It wasn't too much of a retreat," he told her. "Could've done without the rain, though."

She nodded, having barely heard him. Her attention often wandered these days, as if she wasn't quite sure where she was from minute to minute. The loss of her husband — Eric and Megan's father — six months before seemed to have taken much of the life out of her. Roger Rowley had been one of the civilian casualties of the war. A mid-level accountant, he had been standing on a loading platform one day with a hundred or so other people, awaiting the light rail train that would return him to the suburbs after a hard day of bean counting. Suddenly he had collapsed to the ground in a heap, the back of his head a mush of blood and brains. The police investigation and the autopsy would reveal he had been struck by a 23mm anti-aircraft round that had been fired more than twenty miles away, nearly five minutes earlier in response to a flight of Chinese planes streaking toward a fuel storage facility in the suburb of Rancho Cordova. The shell had missed the plane and come down in a ballistic arc, burying itself in his skull. He never knew what hit him. And, like the homeowners insurance, the life insurance company did not pay for claims caused by an act of war.

"You working again tonight?" Eric asked her, noting she was dressed in the ragged blue jeans and sweater that were the favored attire for the job she had taken after his father's death. She worked in what had once been a soup factory in South Sacramento but what was now one of the primary manufacturing points for the MREs the front-line soldiers consumed for their daily rations. It was a menial, low-paying job for a woman who held a bachelor's degree in Business but it was all she had been able to get.

"That's right," she said. "I'm working a double."

"A double? Jeez, Mom, you're gonna burn yourself out doing that."

"When they offer overtime, I don't turn it down," she told him. "We need the money. You know that as well as I do."

"I suppose," he said doubtfully. "Did you get any sleep?"

"I got enough," she assured him. "If I get tired I'll catch a few minutes on my lunch periods. How about you? Did they offer you any overtime down at the hardware store?"

He shook his head. "No, I'm barely able to keep the twenty-four hours a week they give me. Not too many people buying hardware these days."

"No," she said with a sigh. "I don't suppose there are. You haven't heard back from the Saving Center?"

The Saving Center was a huge food market that employed dozens of bicycle delivery boys to bring groceries to the elderly and the war widows with children in the absence of vehicles. It was a highly sought after job because it paid well, included tips, and, rumor had it, the young war widows were sometimes more than a little friendly with the young boys who brought them their groceries. "I'm on their waiting list," he told her, "but they probably won't be hiring again until summer, when the seniors they have working for them head off for basic training."

"Well, that's only a few more months," she said. "Maybe you can get three months work in before you head off to college."

"Yeah," he said vaguely. "Maybe I will." He didn't tell her that he was seriously considering being one of those seniors who would be heading off to basic training. After all, college would still be there after he did his four-year commitment, wouldn't it? And he would still have that 3.9 GPA on his record. He could do his part to help push the Chinese out of North America and then use the money he earned to start working on his dream of one day becoming a doctor. But his mother didn't need to know about this just yet—not while she still had two and half months to try talking him out of it.