War!

         The shores washed with the white foam of the sea, water splashing, feet pounding with the surf. Major Han L’One paced distractedly in response to the cries of his men calling to him from behind. Will they stop their bellyaching? he thought. But the cries continued. L’One and his men had sailed across the long ocean, marched across humid deserts and hacked their way through jungle forests to reach this spot, the site of their final confrontation with the enemy, a confrontation wrought with finality; here, he thought, was to be the final resting place of countless souls. More of them, of course, but still....there was blood to be spilt. The culmination of their hatred of their foe was to be pressed into this engagement with the pressure of one thousand vices. Beauty! The beauty of such a flawless machine, and such a glorious victory that awaited. But something was missing, something escaping him and something of which he needed greatly to continue. What was it? he thought. Oh yes, he realized. The Code! What the hell was the code?! He remarked at the irony of the situation: Two sides primed, aimed and ready for the extirpation of the other...to armies that had been trained to kill, and two generals trained to lead...and thousands upon thousands of weapons in the eager hands of these men trained to kill...locked! he thought. Locked because of the damn beauracracy, locked because he was missing the damned code! He thought with spite of what puritanical idiocy had brought him to this. Had brought them both to this. Whose asinine idea it could have been to engineer weapons of such power as could cut a tree in half with a bullet the size of a ball bearing...of rifles afixed with grenade launchers and flame throwers...of rifles designed to replace ten ordinary weapons and allow his infrantry to quickly and expertly wipe out the other side...and then to outfit these devil’s hands with a code...an ordinary, pedestrian, and archaic passcode like so may ancient compute systems of the 21st century. A code he couldn’t break. Some simpleton potentate had designed these weapons with a code, given this code to some bigger simpleton, a man who had gotten himself killed stepping on a mine as they breached the forest and reached their final place of confrontation. And now they couldn’t move. He grew angry. “Does any one know the code?!” He shouted. “Doesn’t anybody else have it??!” No one answered, as no one had been answering his cries for the past 18 hours. He knew the answer. The code was lost...no one had it. But one simpleton of elevated importance was given such a thing, and now that man was dead, the code dead along with him. Blast these weapons, he thought. Their futuristic scope and their utter uselessness. Had they been outfitted with a simple bayonet, he thought, he could lead this rabble against the enemy, teaching them the art of real war. He could teach them to get their hands dirty. But no, he thought, no such confrontation would ensue. Without the code these guns were useless, and not one of his men, nor him were allowed to possess even as simple a weapon as a dagger. These guns were the be all end all, and they were allowed to possess only this. What were they to do, pick up rocks and bludgeon the enemy to death? Have an old fashioned fist fight? There were lives to take and men to kill. How was he to do it? His musing angered him. His men shouted in the background, the shouts of eagerness and exasperation. His concentration was broken by one of his sergeants walking up to him.

“What is it?” He snapped.

“Sir, this is madness. We’ve travelled weeks to get to this point, and now we’ve got them beaten yet we can’t proceed. What are we to do?”

“I don’t know,” L’One said.

“But we must fight!”

“We must,” he said. “But how?”

“There must be a way Major.”

“Yet oddly there is none. Our weapons are locked, locked by that dreaded password, the one man who was to unlock it dead. And the rules of engagement are simple yet well defined: We can’t engage them, and they aren’t to attack us, not while we’re unarmed.”

“Unarmed!” The sergeant scowled. “Each man here has but a politician’s year’s salary in his hands!”

“Yes,” L’One retorted. “And of what use are they? Each gun is locked up, as useless as a woman’s corset on a baboon.”

         The Sergeant shook his head. “What are we to do?”

“What is there to do?” He asked. “This may end unexpectedly.”

         The Sergeant looked at him curiously...behind him his men became more and more animated...they beckoned his response...begged for his answer. What to tell them. How to tell his men the news, that after weeks of travel and millions spent on weapons that now lay useless in their hands that they may not be able to fight. It was unfathomamble to him. Their voices raised, reaching a crescendo that was difficult to withstand. The Sergeant continued his gaze; L’One looked to the hills, where hoards of his enemy lay, looking down, the news as unexpected to them as to himself. He shook his head yet again.

“Major?” The Sergeant repeated. “What are we to do?”

“I’m spent,” he said, slumping his shoulders. “There is nothing left to do. We’ll have to tell the men that after weeks of travel that we are unable to engage the enemy, not because of cowardice but because of circumstance. Our strange yet present set of circumstances forbids this engagement.”

“So we can’t fight?” The Sergeant begged incredulously.

“I’m afraid not Sergeant.”

“What then?” He said. “What of the enemy?”

         L’One let out a sigh, looking at the Sergeant, then to the hills teeming with adversaries and finally to his men, where his gaze lay, shaking his head once again. He turned to the Sergeant, and in the manner of a man coming to grips with a dismal, hopeless yet unavoidable conclusion turned back to the Sergeant. “I suppose we shall have to be friends.”