It was an American war. American soldiers were being sent far away to fight and die in a fierce war being raged against a vague and unknown enemy. It was criminal to suppose much of anything about the situation; musing about morals and conflicting viewpoints seemed to get people nowhere.

So it was that on a hot summer day, a platoon of American soldiers found themselves in a heated battle with their enemy on the outskirts of a small enemy village. The soldiers were leaving the village after checking it for enemies. The enemy found them in their village and became rightfully cross. They began to shoot at the soldiers. The battle took place across a large open field. Most battles weren’t fought this anymore. The Americans had better technology than the enemy, and were capable of killing large scores of enemy troops from a computer monitor that projected live video feeds seen through the eyes of a flying robot. The enemy did not. The country they were fighting in also didn’t have a lot of fields to fight on. Yet, here they were, clashing with one another across this great plain, peppering each other with machine gun fire. The Americans did not have any flying robots with them that day. They were flying elsewhere, killing other enemy soldiers who were attacking other Americans that were raiding other enemy villages. It was a mess.

The enemy fired across the void with a Russian made DSHK heavy machine gun. The rounds fired from this weapon could poke holes the size of softballs into human beings. These holes were very fatal. One American corporal by the name of Barnes knew this quite well. He had a friend killed by one of these holes several months back. His friend was a dad from Fort Wayne, Indiana. A family grieved for his loss several thousand miles away.
Corporal Barnes and his fellow soldiers returned fire. They were scared and surprised and angry that someone was managing to rain down all that hurt upon them. They took crack shots from behind low earthen walls and rocks and other forms of cover. Barnes ducked down behind a large cart. They were all missing their shots woefully. Bullets exited out of the barrels of their weapons at random trajectories, kicking up dirt and grass every which way. The field across which they fired was being planted with bullets.

The field normally grew potatoes.
And in all this heated action and loud, sudden chaos, whereas everyone else crouched and crawled and hid from the flying softballs of death, a single American soldier stood perfectly still out in the open. His name was Haversford and he was new.

He was 19. The soldiers liked him. He talked and joked often. This was his second taste of combat. The first had been a fluke. He was riding in an armoured convoy when it came under sniper fire. The gunner in his Humvee was hit in the chest and slumped down like a weighted bag of rice. He wasn’t dead, nor would he die from his wound. He would return home to a loving family. The man that shot him, on the other hand, would not live to see his family again. He was killed by a flying robot.

And now Pvt. Haversford stood in the face of sure death, as stiff as a totem pole and as docile as a sleeping cow.
Barnes screamed at him from behind cover, “Haversford! Get down! Get behind cover!”

Haversford stood perfectly still. Barnes screamed again, but Haversford remained where he stood. Barnes leapt from behind cover and grabbed him by his shoulder and dragged him back down behind the cart.

“Jesus man, did you not hear me screaming? You alright?”, screamed Barnes over the loud gunfire. Pvt. Haversford seemed to be in shock.

“Hey!”, Barnes screamed in alert, “Hey! What’s with you man? What wrong, are you hit?!”. He snapped his fingers in front of Haversford’s eyes, but there was no response. Haversford seemed to be oddly spellbound by some strange and profound sense of the violence which had ravenously consumed this moment in his life. Haversford had not been brave. Haversford had not been suicidal. Haversford had been still.

Barnes had no time for such a reaction. Barnes needed help in winning a war that made itself dangerous to him and his men in the form of bullets flying centimeters over their heads. He leaned in over Haversford and grabbed his shoulders tightly and said, “Hey, Haversford! Snap out of it, soldier! Haversford, come on! We need you back, soldier!”. He slapped Haversford and Haversford’s face came to life. Barnes was relieved. Haversford was not. A grenade exploded about 30 ft from them. A bell went off in Haversford’s head.

“Are you ok?’, Barnes asked.

“WHAT?!”, screamed a thoroughly confused Haversford.

Another grenade went off. Barnes assumed Haversford couldn’t hear him and leaned up against his ear.

“I said, ‘Are you ok?’”

“WHAT?! WHAT?!”

“HAVERSFORD! ARE YOU OK?!”

Haversford turned and looked at Barnes and mouthed a “what?”. Barnes’s face contorted in confusion. Haversford had heard him all along and now looked deep into Barnes’s eyes. Haversford had beautiful eyes. Barnes did not.

In an instant, Haversford jumped to his feet and grabbed his rifle. He made a direct dash across the open space towards the enemy gun emplacement. He fired his weapon madly on the go from the hip and wailed loudly in demented glee, yelling, “WHAT?! WHAAAT?! WHAT? WHAAAATTATTATAT?!?!”

The enemy machine gun nest turned its attention to Haversford, but the men manning the gun simply couldn’t believe what they were seeing. Haversford continued onwards, the bullets seeming to flow around him like waters being parted by a ship. The DSHK swung around the fire, but jammed and Haversford reached a high rock formation on the enemy side of the field. Barnes and his men could not believe what they had just witnessed. They blasted and ravaged the machine gun nest with small arms fire and grenade launchers as Haversford maneuvered himself up the rock. The enemy fighters turned to lit out and the gunners manning the DSHK were preparing to do the same when Haversford vaulted over a small boulder and met with them.

The field went silent, with a few random cracks still being fired as the battle tapered off. The Americans assessed themselves. They had three men wounded, only one being serious. A few men stayed to tend to them as Barnes and rest reluctantly advanced forward.

They found Haversford staring at the corpse of a young enemy fighter. Haversford had ambushed the enemy gun crew before they could escape and killed all three men. One was a boy. He had beautiful eyes.

Barnes tried to talk to Haversford after that. He chastised him at first for being so reckless with life and the lives of his squadmates, but then admitted that what Haversford had done was the bravest thing he had ever seen. Haversford was silent and disinterested. He ran his fingers through his dusty hair and stared at the dead fighter. Barnes sent the rest of the men back for a medic to check on Haversford.

Just then, a flying robot flew 3,000 ft overhead, as silent as a gnat. It was late in coming to engage the enemy militants and had not been called off yet. The flying robot had lousy eyes. It only saw in shades of black and white and grey. Everything that was alive was seen as bright white figures and everything else was black or grey. The flying robot had already spent up almost all of its ordinance and now only had a 4,000 lb bomb to drop. Radio contact had been cut off during the fight. All the operator had was a coordinate and an order to drop.
Barnes and Haversford never heard a thing.

A few days after the battle, when the area was devoid of people, a lone stag wondered down from the hills and grazed on the field. It picked over shell casings and dipped in and out of explosion craters as it came across the site of the battle. The stag stopped and seemed ponder the serenity of the scene. It looked at the hole were the gun emplacement used to be.

The stag cocked its head to the side for a brief moment and focused its eyes. It had beautiful eyes. It’s lips seemed to move. It said, “What”?