Princes of War by Claude Schmid Page B

foot’s boot. Kale threw up, the bile landing on his hand. He whipped his hand in the debris.
    Then he saw another boot, on the other side of the still-intact interior wall that separated the two rooms. The front wall—the one facing the road—and a portion of the ceiling on that front side, had disintegrated because of the explosion. Kale crept forward on his hands and knees. Stay down. Stay down. Bile burned his mouth. Whose foot was that? He kept pushing ahead, instinctively more than deliberately. Someone started screaming for him to stay down, to let others do it. An inner voice urged him to let others do it. But he kept moving forward toward the boot and maybe to the man that must have owned it. More loud talk, yelling, most of it unintelligible.
    This other boot he saw was toes up, heel down, suggesting the attached owner was knocked down flat on his back. Rubble encircled it. Kale could see the leg attached to it. Something thin brown and flat lay there too. Then he saw it was nothing, just pieces of paper torn in the explosion. He felt a sharp pain in his left hand. He lifted it. A metal shard stuck in the lower center of his hand. He brushed it away, more annoyed than angry. A dry smoky burning odor overwhelmed his sense of smell.
    Kale struggled to focus his eyes on what remained of the house’s interior, and where the body lay. Part of him wanted to help the person, but another part of him resisted. No involvement meant no blame. Could he avoid being accused of poor performance if he stayed down, stayed out of it? But he wanted to do right, wanted to be the hero. He kept moving but stayed down. He sought to avoid shame more than he wanted to be a hero. He crawled, trying to keep the rest of his body low to the ground.
    His eyes glued on the body he thought was Sanders. The man’s uniform, or whatever that was, had turned grey from dust and debris, hardly recognizable. Kale reached out with his hands, tentatively exploring with touch and smell. He felt a gritty wetness. Then he saw. A pile of broken masonry chunks mixed with fetid ooze lay on the ruin of what had been a man. A new realization struck him. It wasn’t Sanders. It was Ramirez.
    “Medic!” Kale screamed, but did not hear his own voice. Did the others hear it? He screamed again. “Medic!!” It was the first time he’d tried to speak.
    He remembered a strange raw smell, like a freshly opened can of fish soup. He choked on the smell, and again spit out thin bile. What was below him was an extinguished life, finished, incomprehensible, and it lay beside him. He resisted looking at what remained of Ramirez. He remembered feeling confusion—not revulsion, not panic, more amazement, mystified at the horror of it all. He had never seen anything like this before.
    “Anybody hurt?”
    Somebody standing above him shouted.
    “Shit!” the speaker answered his own question. It was Lee, a Wolfhound medic. Kale saw Lee move around the room looking for bodies.
    “Here!” Kale heard himself say.
    Lee came to him. “What is it?” Lee asked cautiously, the tone of his voice signaling he’d rather avoid the answer.
    “There,” Kale answered, cocking his head towards Ramirez.
    “Callicut and the other man are dead,” Lee told Kale. Lee’s eyes spilled tears.
    “They’re in the back, back there.” Lee said, as if he never wanted to go back, and cocked his head in that direction. “Very little left of them,” he added softly, as if whispering a secret.
    “Ramirez,” Kale heard Lee say in a whisper as he looked down at the body Kale lay beside.
    Lee went to his knees and brushed away debris that covered Ramirez’s body. Lee stopped, exhaled audibly, staggered by what he saw. “Shit,” he said, “shit!” like he didn’t know where to start. “Shit,” he said, again and again. Ramirez’s mangled upper body hardly resembled anything human. What could he do? Lee sat back for a second, very still. Then he leaned forward, plucked a small piece