Unidentified soldier. Soldier #41836702
Unidentified.
I never thought I'd live to see the day when my best friend became nothing but file work in an office. Just another leaf of paper in a tree of death, those souls flooded out of full filing cabinets that have no room for soldier #41836702's last piece of artwork. I never thought I would get to experience what it felt like to have a friend die without being known, not even by his own team. Hell, I could probably send the enemies a photograph of him and have a hand-written apology for what happened. Those damn bastards would give me more comfort than everyone that I considered to be one of my own.
Unidentified.
They never asked anyone. If they had just spoken to us, sent us a letter, posted a goddamn flier on the fucking bulletin board in the mess hall, I could have claimed him for who he was. I could have told everyone that he was living no more than twenty-four hours ago, and he had a name. He had a name, a face, a personality, a family.
I was his family.
He was mine.
They didn't take into consideration the fact that his own partner might want to know of his death from somebody before walking into his assigned room and seeing a new soldier moved into that now-empty cot. Nobody who lived in that room questioned where that guy had gone, and nobody probably realized something was missing but me. It wasn't just a feeling of loss that I experienced when I realized he wasn't coming back to his cot, and he was certainly never going to step into the mess hall and cringe at the line of soldiers waiting for the food that shouldn't even be fed to animals.
It felt like something snapped inside of me, a sudden ripping of flesh that I couldn't feel but wanted it to be happening anyway. I wanted to feel pain, because if I didn't, I had no right to call myself his best friend. I wanted to hurt so I could feel a cheap imitation of what he must have gone through when a simple guard mission turned into a brutal attack. While he was out there with thirty-two other men getting ripped apart with bullets and fire, I was inside playing a friendly game of poker with a couple of teammates on standby with me.
The alarms never went off, so nobody knew. Something had evaded all of our systems, and we hadn't known until the eastern wing collapsed in on itself and killed fifteen men, and seven women. Everything was suddenly encased in blinding red, but I didn't find out until after we came back. I had just assumed he would have been fine, and I would have seen him with a couple of scratches and bruises on his cot when I stepped through the door. I just assumed that I would see him and walk the distance to my own cot, six men separating us.
I just assumed he would give me his customary wink when I stepped through the door, then he would fling his arm over his eyes and go back to sleep, everything in order. He would make sure I was okay while I would make sure he was okay, and then I would sleep without dreaming because nothing bad had happened to my best friend. Nothing had happened to the one person I had grown to love as a friend, as a teammate, as a partner.
But something had happened.
Three days after the attack, I had seen his body for the first time after troops had gone off in search of possible survivors. As soon as they stepped out of the base, I sent a prayer to him just in case he was alive and well enough to make noise so he could be found. I wanted to cry then, because I somehow knew that he wasn't okay and he wouldn't be coming back into my life ever again. My only true friend in this place was taken away from me, and because of that, I was suddenly alone in a world where I needed to trust and be trusted.
Just a piece of paper.
The damn bastard left me with a huge responsibility that made me hate him for two seconds too long. His mother's crying over the crackle of the telephone as I told her had killed me in every possible way I could think of besides the only one I wanted it to be. I wanted to die, but her crying wasn't enough to give me that pleasure. A war was going on, after all, and soldiers can't breakdown as soon as a friend is killed. We wouldn't have an army, then.
But I did die, if not physically, then emotionally and mentally.
The soft whispers she was sending into the phone were enough to bring me to my knees in the hallway of the reception station. I could almost imagine her frail form sitting on the floor of her nice little kitchen with its yellow flowers and white curtains, clutching the phone and staring at the picture of me and her son that she kept on the counter. I knew that one all too well because that's the only photo of us where we have our fatigues on; dressed and ready to kill, his father had commented with cheer. His mother had simply told us how handsome we both were.
That woman that made us pancakes and blueberry muffins in the morning was the complete opposite of the one I spoke on the phone with during that bright, painfully sunny Friday. She sounded terribly sick and tired, her voice rough and hoarse, but it was the words she spoke that upset me. Hearing her normally-cheerful voice spitting out everything that I never would have expected from her really hurt me, and she knows that today.
Why didn't you stop him?
What kind of friend are you?
Why did you let this happen?
How could you do this to me?
He loved you!
You were supposed to protect him!
You promised me you would protect him!
You promised he would come back!
You promised!
Dammit, you loved him...
I loved him.
You did this.
I hung up on her as she screamed that I was a liar. I've tried calling back, but never once has she returned my calls, the phone line eventually turning into an untraceable number. They had written me out of their lives as easily as my team had written him out of the world. There was nothing I could have possibly done under the circumstances, and all I have to face is the troubles of threading my life back together without his family to be my extended family.
His body had been retrieved after quite some time had passed, and by that time, I felt like I could have gone on with life as quietly as possible without breakdown. They brought him in, along with twelve others, and they put them in the morgue and searched for identification so they could call the families. Only six of those thirteen families got notified that their son, their husband, their wife, whatever, had gotten killed in an "unfortunate" accident that couldn't have been avoided. Those other families never heard one word about anything, going on with life like they had when they finally accepted the departure of a family member. When that housewife stops getting those letters from her husband, or that girlfriend from her boyfriend, mother from son, then they'll know something is terribly wrong, and they will be shattered, too.
His tags had been gone when they got him, and they only checked him a little to see if he had them in the first place. When they noticed he didn't, they checked a little box on a little piece of paper, and sent it up for filing upstairs in the paperwork section of the base. They took that piece of paper and shoved it under "U", and that was the end of another soldier, another life... another existence.
When I had heard that they had recovered some bodies and would be checking them for their I.D.'s, I made my way to the morgue and just watched. Nobody was opposed to me watching, so I stood on the other side of the separating glass and witnessed them poking and prodding everybody, searching in pockets, rifling through wallets. When they uncovered the fourth person, I knew instantly that it was him I was looking at. He was suddenly the cold, indifferent person laying on the metal table like they were doing nothing but dreaming.
I watched them poke and prod him without saying anything at all because I had no right to interrupt with other soldiers' line of work when mine had nothing to do with it. They took off his burnt coat with the numerous buttons on them, each and all having nothing to do with anything serious. One was a smiley face and another was a button that I had given him to add to his collection. I can still hear the ring of his laughter as I gave him the black-on-white "Kick Me" button and kicked him as soon as he repeated the words.
He had an iron-on patch on his left hip, close to the top of his issued pants, that I had also given him as a gag-gift. It's a dark blue patch that has French nicely embroidered across the surface. One thing I know about him is he wasn't good at French back in the Academy, and he never got better, but it roughly translated out to be "I am a woman who knows what she wants." I had bummed it off another soldier who had gotten it from another soldier, who had gotten it from a female nurse, who had gotten it from her boyfriend.
I had always intended to tell him what it meant. He would have been so embarrassed.
I had wanted to tell him that he was, in fact, my best friend.
I had wanted to tell him that he was a great soldier.
I had wanted to tell him that I dreamed of him sometimes.
I had wanted to tell him that I loved him like he loved me.
Unidentified.
Soldier #41836702.
Unidentified soldier.
At the morgue, I had wanted to bang against that glass window and tell that bastard not to mark that box, to erase it because he was making a mistake. I had wanted to scream out that that wasn't some unidentified soldier just because he lost his dog tags during battle.
I wanted to scream at them and tell them to address him by his title because those bastard doctors were at a lower rank than him, and I knew it.
I wanted to kill everyone that touched him in such an impersonal way because he deserved more than that. He deserved to be held and needed to be treated like a human being and not some doll that the doctors play with for two seconds before moving to the next. He needed to be loved, and he never got to experience that.
I wanted to do everything in my power to make him known, but I didn't.
Mueller wouldn't have wanted that.