The War After Armageddon by Ralph Peters

to cook enchiladas in Ensenada. Watching them blotch up, go bald, get skinny, and die. And his mother worrying about
him
all the time she was dying.
    When the captain had come down to ask if the platoon needed to be pulled off the line for a day or two, Garcia had looked at him in shock, then fear, then suck-on-this annoyance. All in the space of ten seconds.
    “Naw, sir. We’re, like, just getting into the motion, you know? We’re cruising.”
    “Your Marines okay? You sure?”
    His
Marines.
    “Hey, sir. They’re Marines. They’re good to go.”
    “The platoon’s at sixty-five percent.”
    Garcia stared at the other man. At this man who threatened to take away his platoon. Who wouldn’t say shit when battalion sent down some hotshot to take over. Staff Sergeant McCullough, maybe. Or some gunny who wanted to play lieutenant for a week.
    “They’re feeling a hundred percent, sir,” Garcia told him. “We just need an ammo drop.”
    He knew he wasn’t speaking for every one of his Marines. Some of them wanted to move out and mix it up, while others would’ve been glad for any excuse to go below decks and sleep until it was all over. But this was what they’d signed up for. He wasn’t going to let anybody just walk. They had
business
to do.
    It was screwy, but he felt two ways at once. Since the fight in the village the night before, he felt closer to his Marines than ever before. And he felt apart from them, too. Separate. In a new way.
    Down in the valley, some tanks were duking it out. The 155s were dropping closer in now. Garcia couldn’t see the fight as he walked, but smoke rose and thinned, veiling the horizon. His back hurt pretty bad. But you just kept on humping. His elbow was half-fucked, too. It didn’t matter. He felt like calling cadence, like singing out.
Un poco loco
.
Hey, ma, I wanna go,
Right back to Quantico . . .
    Well, the platoon was too spread out to hear him. With the big boys clanking in between them. He called cadence to himself, anyway.
    A wave of tiredness hit him, almost stopping him cold. Then the buzz came back. Just like that. But his damned back hurt. Too loaded down. Lugging all your stuff around, like some homeless bum back on the block. He looked, enviously for once, at the Army grunts riding by, sticking up through the hatches like Mexican kids standing behind the cab of a pickup.
    Same exhaust stink, too.
    Garcia just didn’t want to come out of this with any kind of injury that would put him out of the Corps. Instinctively, he liftedhis forearm to kiss the Virgin of Guadalupe tattoo underneath his sleeve. But he caught himself. And just made like he was wiping the sweat from his face and resetting his helmet. Dying would be okay. He could handle that. He had what the skinny redhead instructor bitch at the community college called “Latin fatalism.” Like the name of some perfume you paid five bucks for off a street vendor. To give to some
chica
so new to the hood she still thought in pesos and didn’t know perfumes were all about serious labels.
    Yeah, Latin fatalism. Splash it on me, dude. Just don’t let me end up a geek crapping himself in a VA hospital.
    He knew now that he didn’t ever want to leave the Corps. Since the nukes came down, the Corps was his only home. He sure wasn’t going to take off his boots for very long down at his grandmother’s. If anybody else wanted to be a full-time Mexican for a living, let them. He was an Angeleno. Even without his city.
    And he was a Marine.
    He saw the firelit face of the Jihadi he’d shot. Clear as any photograph. Clearer. And he just wanted to pull the trigger again.
    Garcia wondered if he was some kind of psycho. Were you
supposed
to get this buzzed?
    Hand signals relayed back from the head of the column. Take ten. Garcia passed it on. But he didn’t want to stop. He was exhausted. Beat. But he didn’t want to stop.
    He walked back to check on each of his Marines and told Barrett to change his socks.