Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2014 (25 page)

Matthew Johnson tells us "Rules of Engagement" is his second story on a military topic for
Asimov's
("The Coldest War," February 2009, was the first). He says, "My actual military experience is limited to working on the Canadian Ministry of National Defence's Y2K preparedness project 'Op Abacus'—a far cry from the high-tech on display in the current tale. A collection of my short stories,
Irregular Verbs,
will be out from ChiZine Press in May. It will include 'The Coldest War' and most of my other
Asimov's
stories."

It was not much of a fight, as bar fights go: not even enough to get Kevin Bishop, Tony Cervantes, and Tom Hollis thrown out of the bar in which they had spent the afternoon and evening of July ninth. The three soldiers had been drinking at The Swiss Bar and Grill, a bar popular with college students on weeknights, but largely taken over by military on weekends when their implants relax the usual restrictions on alcohol. Bishop, Cervantes, and Hollis had served together in the 23rd Infantry Division of the 2nd Infantry Brigade (more often referred to as the 23-IN), mostly in Somalia and Yemen, and two of them were still on active duty. Fire team Chinook had survived the worst that the war and al-Shabaab could throw at them, but before long two would be in prison and one would be dead.

The immediate cause of the fight was money. Bishop, who had ordered the last two rounds, had revealed that he was unable to pay his share of the night's tab. The entire 23-IN had been flush with back pay when they had come home from deployment in Yemen, bringing a welcome stream of money into the city's bars; it was not unusual during that period for John Pratt, the Swiss's owner, to make two or more bank runs per night, each time with a duffel bag full of money. (Soldiers in the 23-IN pay for almost everything in cash, due to a widely held belief that their implants track direct payments.) Two months later the money was beginning to run out, and for Bishop—who was no longer receiving combat pay and was also making regular payments to the city's
ghat
dealers—it already had.

There are two common reasons why soldiers, especially regular infantry, enlist in the army. One is self-improvement: though some join with an eye on pursuing a military career, many more do so for the neural implant that, after their tour, opens doors to otherwise unattainable jobs. That was why Hollis had joined, and why he now had a job with the city that paid well enough for Bishop to expect him to pick up the tab. When Hollis stood up and dropped a twenty on the table, just enough to cover his share of the bill, Bishop punched him in the side of the head.

"Get away from me," Hollis said. Bishop leaned forward and started swinging wildly with both arms. Hollis held his forearms up to ward off Bishop's punches until the buzz in Bishop's head got loud enough to make him stop. Tony Cervantes took Bishop by the arm, led him back to his chair and poured him a beer from a neighboring table's pitcher.

"What do you want from me?" Hollis asked, shouting to be heard over the dance remix of Julee Cruz's "Hipper Than Me," that summer's inescapable hit, playing on the Swiss's speakers.

Bishop drank his beer in one long pull, until the buzz quieted enough for him to talk. "I want you to have my back for a fucking change," he said.

Bishop had joined the infantry for the other common reason, because he—and his parents—feared that it was either the army or jail. Though he had never had any major trouble with the law, when Bishop turned nineteen he was no nearer to finishing high school than he had been five years before, and his father had given him a choice: he could join the army or go on the street, but he could no longer live at home.

There is surprisingly little connection between the reason why a soldier joins the military and his performance there. Though Bishop found basic training difficult, once he had passed that and been fitted with his implant he thrived. There was an appealing simplicity to army life: if you followed orders and didn't make trouble, you were "squared away"; fail in any of those respects and you were a "shit bag"—the lowest of the low, and subject both to constant harassment from superiors and fellow soldiers and to buzz from your implant. Though he had occasional run-ins with superiors, when he was deployed in Yemen he found a way to make use of his natural rebelliousness as a "pit bull," someone willing to do things and take chances other soldiers wouldn't, and was promoted to Private First Class and recommended for an Army Achievement Medal. Now that he was back home, though, and unable to return to active duty until he had been declared medically fit, he was falling back into old habits: he would later say that it was only the fact that Cervantes, his team leader, was in the same situation that had kept him from getting into serious trouble.

If Bishop was fire team Chinook's "bad cop," Tony Cervantes was the good cop. He had not needed the army to provide either money or stability: his parents, Daniel and Anita, started an implant fund for him when he was in middle school. If he had wanted for anything, his father told me, it was focus. After his high-school football career failed to lead any further he had spent a year doing little but sleeping and playing video games before settling on the army.

"I was against it at first," Daniel Cervantes told me. He and Anita still live in the home where Tony was raised, in the solidly middle-class Albuquerque neighborhood of North Valley. "I served a tour in Iraq when I was his age, and I saw what it did to a lot of kids. But he told me that he needed something like this, something that would give him a purpose like football had, and once I saw what the idea of it did to him I changed my mind." Between enlistment and basic training Cervantes began to train on his own, lifting weights and hiking the Sandia mountains with a full backpack. His size and his attitude made him stand out during training and, once deployed, he was promoted to Sergeant and put in charge of a fire team that consisted of Kevin Bishop, Tom Hollis, and himself.

The incident that had left Bishop and Cervantes in medical limbo had taken place more than a year before. The 23-IN's base, FOB Gambit, is in Ta'izz, or "Brooklyn"— soldiers have nicknamed all of Yemen's cities after New York boroughs, due to the mud-brick high-rises that make them look like a sand-castle version of Manhattan. Their main duty in Yemen is counterinsurgency: as part of the mission to root the al-Shabaab out of Yemen and Somalia and make the Gulf of Aden safe for shipping again, Cervantes' team conducted daily "block parties" in which they would cordon off an area and go door-to-door, taking a census of the population and comparing it to intelligence. Mostly these would follow a schedule, moving in a grid around the city to keep tabs on as much of the population as possible, but at other times the mission would be a follow-up on some fresh intelligence. On that day fire team Chinook was one of three fire teams dispatched in a Stryker personnel carrier to a neighborhood centered around the Abu Walad stadium, following a tip from one of the interpreters or "terps" who worked for the Division that a high-value Shabaab figure was hiding out in a house there. (Though implants provide near-simultaneous translation, the army still relies on interpreters to provide a friendlier face and to catch subtle cues, such as a speaker's tone of voice or body language, that might be missed by a non-native speaker.) Now the terp, a Somali man in a black-and-white
keffiyeh
and a borrowed ballistic vest, was whispering directions to the driver as the Stryker crawled along the narrow road. Though there was no other traffic the vehicle moved in fits and starts, stopping periodically when one of its slaved drones detected signs of an EFP. Bishop began bouncing in his seat.

"Keep your shit together," Cervantes told him.

Bishop tucked a wad of
ghat
between his teeth and lower lip and began working it around his mouth. "Sorry," he said. "I'm just buzzing."

I first met Kevin Bishop in the visiting room at Washington State Penitentiary, where he is currently serving a death sentence and awaiting execution. His trial received some attention in the media, but the local papers had covered it as a straightforward crime story: I only became interested when I learned, through a friend in the military, about Bishop's experiences in Yemen, and found out just how remarkable it was that he was in prison at all.

A decade ago, servicemen were not an unusual sight in the penitentiary. Since the introduction of the Hybrid Warrior implant program, though, violent crime by military personnel in Tacoma—as well as everywhere else that the 23-IN has been posted—has dropped to almost nothing. When I asked Bishop why he thought it had failed in his case, he explained that there were three ways around the negative reinforcement the implant uses to control behavior, which soldiers call "the buzz."

"The easiest way is to drown out the buzz with drugs, booze, or both at once," he told me. Though he says he no longer chews
ghat,
his gums and teeth are permanently stained green. His fingers twitch constantly, seeking out any object—a pen, my notebook, a cigarette—that they can use to beat out their rhythm. "That's why so many guys started chewing
ghat,
so if you have to violate the rules of engagement—like maybe shooting somebody you know is a Shabaab, but they haven't shot at you yet—you can ignore the buzz long enough to do it." The other method was to trick your implant: "If you can make yourself believe, I mean really believe, that the Shabaab had fired on you even though you hadn't heard it, or that a girl wasn't a whore even though you were paying her for sex, sometimes your implant will let it go." The problem with that method was that to trick the implant you had to trick yourself, and you might wind up married to a Ukrainian bar girl, as Tom Hollis had.

And then there was Dirty.

"Dirty" Dunn, known as Daniel to his mother if no one else, was a legend in the 23-IN as the man who had, supposedly, hacked the buzz. "Hacked" is something of a misleading word, because he had done nothing to modify his implant's hardware or software. Dirty's method, instead, was to start the week leading up to a leave with a series of small but increasingly frequent violations of the Code of Conduct. "He'd stop polishing his boots, stop making his bed, even stop showering, just put up with the shit his CO gave him—and the buzz, which would get worse and worse," Bishop explained. "As soon as his leave started he'd go to a drinky bar and get pissed, do whatever drugs he could find, get in a fight, and have a whore do things to him 'til it hurt—and when he got that far he didn't just feel the buzz, it was as painful as hell. Then, when he'd broken every rule that he could without being put in the stockade, he'd go back to base, shower, make his bed, shine his shoes, and then he'd have the greatest orgasm of his life."

Kevin Bishop never tried Dirty's method, but he told me he had no doubt that it worked: like every soldier he knew how much of a relief it was after he had heard an AK-47 fire, or an EFG go off, when the implant allowed him to fire his weapon. Being in a situation where he was anticipating something like that—such as riding in a Stryker on the way to a block party—could bring on the buzz even if he wasn't doing anything wrong.

The mud-brick skyscrapers in a traditional Yemeni city are built without any space between them, making literal "blocks": as the Stryker neared its target the streets between became too narrow for driving, so it slowed and turned 90 degrees to bar the way in and out. While one of its drones turned in a tight circle overhead, watching for an ambush, the others set up a perimeter around the area that was to be searched that day.

"Bella Bella will stay by the Stryker and handle any PUCs," Staff-Sergeant Brenda Hamm said to Cervantes and the leaders of the other two fire teams. "Aleut takes the left side and Chinook the right." So long as the Stryker was rolling Hamm, the squad leader, was in command of all three fire teams: once they were on the ground Cervantes was expected to lead his team on his own unless he got direct orders from Hamm. "Have fun."

Cervantes saluted and then turned to Hollis and Bishop. "Bishop, keep your drone heeled and stay on me. Hollis, get your Raptor up—I want a map of that building before we set foot inside."

Hollis nodded and shut one eye, making mental room for the feed from his drones. Each fire team in 23-IN is made up of two regular infantry and one drone operator, who has an upgraded implant that lets him multitask between multiple drones as well as what they're doing on the ground. "Vehicle's clear," he said a few moments later.

"All right," Cervantes said. "Let's see what Brooklyn has to throw at us today."

Even after he had left Yemen, Bishop had little trouble maintaining his
ghat
habit. Both Tacoma, the nearest city to Fort Lewis, and Seattle, which is not much farther, have large Somali communities, and while
ghat
is technically illegal it is not a high priority for the DEA. After he and Cervantes were moved out of the 23-IN and reassigned to the Warrior Transition Battalion, Bishop began to chew
ghat
nearly all the time. "I was always buzzing," he told me. "Every day we'd get our tests and our scans and wait, just kill time all day, and every day it got worse."

The purpose of the Warrior Transition Battalion, or WTB, is to provide specialized medical care for soldiers well enough to be out of the hospital but not currently able to return to active duty, as well as education and training for those granted medical discharges. Some critics, however, say that the main focus of the battalion's staff is looking for reasons for soldiers to be "chaptered out," or discharged without benefits. The more common name for the battalion within the army, the "shitbag brigade," suggests that little sympathy is felt for the soldiers there.

Bishop and Cervantes were constant companions during their time in the WTB, amusing themselves as best they could with ping-pong and video games at the base's rec center during the day and drinking at the Swiss in the evenings. In the first few weeks, when it seemed like they would soon be returning to active duty, their conversation was focused mostly on stories and events from their time in Yemen. Later, when that prospect became less likely, they would discuss what they would do when they were discharged. Bishop's plans grew more grandiose as the time passed, from joining the police force to robbing drug smugglers near the Canadian border. Finally, when even being chaptered out began to seem impossibly remote, Bishop became focused on finding more immediate sources of both action and income.