and there was a strong sense that he was to stay here until he had atoned for his sins. Dirac was an old Legion hand, trained in Guyana in the jungle and seasoned in Mozambique and Algeria. His skin was a weathered tegument the colour of cigars. He had the distinction of having been given three medals and demoted as a consequence of a single incident.
It had been a perfectly simple diplomatic escort job in North Africa, and with an inevitability which spoke to any modern soldier it had gone wrong from the beginning. The political mission was contradictory and insincere, which is fine until you make it the basis for a military deployment. As soon as you involve a professional soldiery, you have to be honest with yourself about your motives. The logic of armed conflict does not read between the lines. In politics, deaths happen incrementally, as a result of bad healthcare and debt. In war, on the other hand, death starts happening when you show up and continues after you leave. Death is not a side effect, and even if you refuse to count the dead they still pile up, and the people who loved them won’t forget: not their names nor how they came to die.
So here was Dirac in some crisis camp at the end of some valley, and here were the precious VIPs who were his flock, and the overworked and desperate doctors they were pressing the flesh with, and there was the press pack from around the world. All along the dry riverbed were the refugees in their hundreds of thousands, carrying their entire lives in a few bags. They were running pell-mell from a man called Gervaise and his militia, the Dogs of the Pure Christ, a hard bunch who’d seen what was happening in Rwanda and Congo and decided they liked it. The camp had a lot of French, Swiss and US nationals in it, so it was under the wing of the UN and had a token guard. The UN couldn’t get up speed for a full-on peacekeeping force, though, because a land war in Africa against an embedded enemy wasn’t anything the big powers wanted any part of. Dirac’s job was to escort the VIPs in and bring them back unscathed. He’d been armed accordingly: light weaponry, no big guns and definitely no air support. This was a humanitarian mission, which today meant for God’s sake don’t do anything humanitarian. The Dogs of the Pure Christ could read a newspaper and they knew the score too: kill who you like as long as you restrict yourself to your own. The camp was out of bounds – but the refugees trying to get to it were fair game.
The Dogs arrived on the third day of Dirac’s mission; a few hundred of them, with mobile artillery. They were very careful. They didn’t fire on the UN tents. They lined the ridges along the valley and glowered down at the pathetic worm of suffering below. It made great television, really pointed up the issues. And every night, while the VIPs were talking sincerely to the press pack, the Dogs lobbed shells down into the valley floor and cut the refugees to pieces.
Dirac didn’t take to it. It was monstrous, and vile, and it offended him on a personal level. He was a son of the Republic, he was a son of the Legion, and as far as he was concerned the Marseillaise didn’t fancy this sort of thing either.
Aux armes, citoyens
. ‘I want to do something,’ he told his regional commander. ‘This is shit.’
The regional commander knew his duty to the political apparatus. He was mostly a peacetime soldier, and he accepted what his civilian masters referred to as the wider picture. Permission to engage was not forthcoming.
‘This is shit,’ Dirac said.
An hour later he had said it quite a lot more and peppered it a few times with ‘
Je m’en fous
’, but he had a plan. He rounded up the few serious lunatics in his command and told them what he proposed to do, and they kicked the tyres of his insanity and pronounced it good, and that evening before word could get out or they could change their minds they made it happen. They sneaked up into the
It had been a perfectly simple diplomatic escort job in North Africa, and with an inevitability which spoke to any modern soldier it had gone wrong from the beginning. The political mission was contradictory and insincere, which is fine until you make it the basis for a military deployment. As soon as you involve a professional soldiery, you have to be honest with yourself about your motives. The logic of armed conflict does not read between the lines. In politics, deaths happen incrementally, as a result of bad healthcare and debt. In war, on the other hand, death starts happening when you show up and continues after you leave. Death is not a side effect, and even if you refuse to count the dead they still pile up, and the people who loved them won’t forget: not their names nor how they came to die.
So here was Dirac in some crisis camp at the end of some valley, and here were the precious VIPs who were his flock, and the overworked and desperate doctors they were pressing the flesh with, and there was the press pack from around the world. All along the dry riverbed were the refugees in their hundreds of thousands, carrying their entire lives in a few bags. They were running pell-mell from a man called Gervaise and his militia, the Dogs of the Pure Christ, a hard bunch who’d seen what was happening in Rwanda and Congo and decided they liked it. The camp had a lot of French, Swiss and US nationals in it, so it was under the wing of the UN and had a token guard. The UN couldn’t get up speed for a full-on peacekeeping force, though, because a land war in Africa against an embedded enemy wasn’t anything the big powers wanted any part of. Dirac’s job was to escort the VIPs in and bring them back unscathed. He’d been armed accordingly: light weaponry, no big guns and definitely no air support. This was a humanitarian mission, which today meant for God’s sake don’t do anything humanitarian. The Dogs of the Pure Christ could read a newspaper and they knew the score too: kill who you like as long as you restrict yourself to your own. The camp was out of bounds – but the refugees trying to get to it were fair game.
The Dogs arrived on the third day of Dirac’s mission; a few hundred of them, with mobile artillery. They were very careful. They didn’t fire on the UN tents. They lined the ridges along the valley and glowered down at the pathetic worm of suffering below. It made great television, really pointed up the issues. And every night, while the VIPs were talking sincerely to the press pack, the Dogs lobbed shells down into the valley floor and cut the refugees to pieces.
Dirac didn’t take to it. It was monstrous, and vile, and it offended him on a personal level. He was a son of the Republic, he was a son of the Legion, and as far as he was concerned the Marseillaise didn’t fancy this sort of thing either.
Aux armes, citoyens
. ‘I want to do something,’ he told his regional commander. ‘This is shit.’
The regional commander knew his duty to the political apparatus. He was mostly a peacetime soldier, and he accepted what his civilian masters referred to as the wider picture. Permission to engage was not forthcoming.
‘This is shit,’ Dirac said.
An hour later he had said it quite a lot more and peppered it a few times with ‘
Je m’en fous
’, but he had a plan. He rounded up the few serious lunatics in his command and told them what he proposed to do, and they kicked the tyres of his insanity and pronounced it good, and that evening before word could get out or they could change their minds they made it happen. They sneaked up into the
Similar Books
