A short quiz on the nature of battle:

Soldiers are…

• A) Prepared to die
• B) Willing to die
• C) Eager to die
• D) All of the above
• E) None of the above

The teacher’s edition they use in today’s Corps gives the answer as choice E. A soldier is nothing but an overgrown ragamuffin conscripted into a duty his adolescent brain can neither fully comprehend nor appreciate, and as such cannot be prepared, willing, or eager to do anything regarding his insignificant life. A soldier, they say, has nothing more than the knowledge that he will, potentially, be killed, and, more important, the belief that it will never happen to him. This is the Holy Grail of the military. Preparedness, willingness, and eagerness will always pale next to the mighty force of an irrational and unsupported faith.

The war was a bitch.

I’d love to type that without cracking a smile, but I can’t. The war wasn’t a bitch, despite what you might have heard; it was a bore at worst, a momentary diversion from real life at best. Two years of my life spent in near darkness, my body yoga-twisted into all sorts of unnatural positions, eyes glued to an infrared screen that rarely showed signs of life, movement, or anything out of the goddamned ordinary. No wonder my eyesight has dropped through the bottom of the statistical average. Had I known then where I’d be today, I would have taken on some artiforg eyeballs—the new ones from Marshodyne have zoom capability of 200× and near-perfect color enhancement. Sweet little babies.

Of course, had I known then where I’d be today, I’d have taken on artiforgs for damn near every part of my failing body. What’s another twelve mil in debt when you’re already running from the Union? They can’t leave you any more dead.

Mother didn’t want me to sign up for the war. Father thought it was a grand idea. Thanks, Father. Mother said it was dangerous. Father said it would build character. Thanks, Father. Mother based her opinions on neighborhood gossip and rumor. Father based his on his own stubborn ideology. Both were wrong.

Example: The Kashekians were a Persian family that lived across the street. Persians are what Iranians living in America called themselves after the first Middle Eastern war. Since the end of those first little skirmishes, Middle Easterners found themselves being subjected to snide remarks and sidelong glances from librarians and grocery-store baggers who thought they were doing their patriotic duty by snubbing the foreign infidels. It was grassroots prejudice, by golly, and it sure divided the “us’s” from the “thems,” easy as pie. So some bright Iranian came up with the idea of retrofitting their name to their language, and after a while, people up and forgot that Persians were Iranian and Iranians were Persians and the shopping-mall persecution came to a close.

This was a blessing for all Persians, but particularly so for the Kashekians, who wanted nothing more than to blend in with their adopted culture. The elder Kashekian was the spitting image of George Washington, only swarthier, and he passed his overflowing enthusiasm onto his family, perhaps genetically. When they took patriotic craps on their patriotic bowls, there’s no doubt in my mind, their shit came out red, white, and blue. On national holidays, when my family would sit on our faded sleeper sofa, eat Italian takeout, and stare mindlessly at the endless parades on the television, the Kashekians waved flags, held barbecues, and sang the national anthem ad nauseam. Father had to physically restrain them from erecting a miniature Mount Rushmore in the middle of our block one particularly fervent Presidents’ Day. America was still the great melting pot, and they wanted nothing more than to be the representative feta.

Their son, Greg Kashekian, was two years ahead of me in school, and was as all-American as any Persian could hope to be. Football star, straight-A student, homecoming king, prom king, and president of the senior class. I thought he was something of a prick, but the rest of the student body obviously disagreed with my assessment. He kicked my dog once. No matter. Greg Kashekian graduated from high school with honors and only one illegitimate child and, in an effort to complete his patriotic duty, joined the military.

It was through Mrs. Kashekian that my mother obtained the majority of her information about the war. Hers was not a dispassionate viewpoint.

Greg Kashekian died on his eighteenth day in the desert, one of the seventy-five hundred and some odd deaths during the entire nine-year African war. His passing was a fluke, an accident, a needle-in-the-haystack coincidence that nevertheless convinced my mother that the deserts of Africa were a killing field, sand stained red with the blood of young American boys such as myself.

Mrs. Kashekian did nothing to alleviate the situation. “My boy was a war hero,” she told my mother. “He died in battle, saving the other boys in his platoon. He took a bullet for America.”

Beautiful. Not true, but beautiful. I saw the official report, the condolence letter sent to the Kashekians. They kept it locked in a hidden safe behind a staircase, beneath a chair, under a pull-away section of carpet. Why they kept it at all is beyond me; a good paper shredder would have done the trick.

The autumn that Greg died, I had the good fortune of going steady with his younger sister Tilly, a knockout in a summer sundress, and she showed me the letter one afternoon in a state of post-coital candor.

It went something like this:

A year later, Tig—Sergeant Tyrell Ignakowski—would tell me in the privacy of a desert tent that Greg Kashekian died because “the Iranian imbecile didn’t know his dick from an ejection lever.” Sarge never was one to mince words.

I remember the day they tweaked me.

They came to my high school in full military dress, shining knights all gussied up for the next crusade. I was in the back row of the lecture hall, cracking jokes with Jake and a sixth-year senior we all called Turtle, but those dress whites shut me up right away—the glitter of the brass buttons, the crisp folds of the lapels, the blazing insignia on the left breast. This was power. Authority incarnate. Suddenly, they had as much of my undivided attention as my raging hormones would allow. Stacey Greenberg was sitting two rows down, and watching her cross and recross her legs took up at least a fifth of my brain, but otherwise, I was rapt.

“The military is not for everyone,” they told us. “It’s a special job, for special people.” I swelled with anticipatory pride. Only later did I learn that the students who had been called to the assembly had been culled from a list of the decidedly average—no failing grades, no honors classes. Lucky me, I fit the bill perfectly. Aside from a few B+ grades in my sophomore and junior English classes—hey, a boy’s got to excel at something—I was Johnny Normal all the way. Cannon fodder, so to speak. But at the time I smiled inwardly, for I was going to be given the option of holding a special job and becoming a special person. Keen.

I excused myself from the back row and took a seat down in front.

Someone once said that it’s the special people who are first up against the wall when the shit hits the fan. This is as good a reason as I can think of for keeping your butt firmly planted in the back row of any lecture hall.

The recruiter’s name was Lieutenant Medieros, and he was the proud owner of one arm and one stump. The good lieutenant, it seems, had lost his left arm at some point during his esteemed military career. He didn’t say how. He didn’t say when. We accepted it. It wasn’t so strange back then to see someone walking around with an empty sleeve hanging off his shirt like a garment worker’s error—some war or another was always raging in some godforsaken part of the world, and only the wealthy could afford prostheses. The Credit Union, still in its infancy, had not yet opened wide the jeweled gates of mechanical rejuvenation to the poor and downtrodden working classes.

But the lieutenant had a voice like a bazooka and a knack for manipulation, and within ten minutes we were eating out of his remaining hand. He held us, rapt and wide-eyed, for a full half-hour, longer than any of our instructors had been capable of for the entire school year.

I took notes.

Places we would travel: Seven continents, seven seas.

People we would meet: First world, third world, developing cultures, savages, heads of state.

Things we would do: Train, exercise, hike, fight, play.

How we would do it: To the best of our abilities—further than we ever knew we could.

Why we would do it: For the love of America. For the love of democracy. For the love of freedom.

I believed every word.

After the assembly, Lieutenant Medeiros and his officers sat at a rickety card table outside the auditorium to answer any questions we might have concerning a career in the military. A husky boy with acne scars pocking his fleshy cheeks had cornered a command sergeant and edged him into a one-sided debate about current military policy in Southeast Asia. The second lieutenant, the only female in the group, was taking her time with three or four others of her ilk; I noticed Stacey Greenberg speaking quickly, earnestly within the small group, and wondered for a brief moment if she was talking about me.

But Lieutenant Medeiros was free. Rushing up to his table, startling the man with my sudden presence, I spat out, “Do you think I’d make a good soldier?” I made a show of flexing my puny muscles, though I doubt they gave the slightest ripple through my cotton shirt sleeves.

The lieutenant leaned back in his chair and gave me the once-over, clucking softly to himself. He cocked an eye, sizing me up like a prize hog at the county fair.

“You play a sport, son?”

“A sport, sir?”

“You got sports in this school, don’t you?” He glanced meaningfully toward the gym entrance across the hall.

“Oh, yes, sir. Lacrosse. I play lacrosse.”

“You any good?”

I shrugged. “We came in fourth in interstate competition.”

“Fourth, eh? That good enough to get you a college scholarship?” he asked me.

“I don’t…I don’t know. I don’t think so, sir.” This was the first time the word scholarship had ever been mentioned in my presence. It sent chills through me.

“Your family got enough money to send you to college on their own?”

“No, sir, we don’t.” Same old story—father working hard to keep our family in the middle of middle class, grip slipping on that rung with every passing day. “Doesn’t the military pay for your college education, sir?”

He ignored me. “You must have some other skills. You want to go into a trade, don’t you? Computers? Mechanic? There’s some awful good jobs for mechanics nowadays, if you have the right training.”

“I—I don’t know,” I stammered, trying to force a grin to my lips. “I think I might like something like that, but…I don’t really know. I think maybe first I’d like to see the world, like you were saying. Travel. With the Corps. I think I want to join the Corps.” That’ll make him happy, I thought. For those few minutes outside the auditorium, I wanted nothing more than to please this man, this magnificent creature of warfare wounded so nobly in the heat of battle.

It took some seconds to retrieve my answer, and in that time I imagined all of the possible ways in which I could be rejected from the position, right there and then. Every possible fear welled up inside, and my stomach did a loop-de-loop that threatened to take the next available turn up my throat and out of my mouth; I stifled a burp as I tried to keep from drenching these soldiers in partially digested school-grade lasagna.

Finally, Lieutenant Medeiros shook his head as a sentence formed about the corners of his mouth—then disappeared just as quickly. “Take these papers home and talk it over with your parents.” He sighed, pushing a sheaf of letters toward me with his good arm. “You’ll make as fine a soldier as any.”

Lieutenant Medeiros tried to talk me out of it. I can see that now. It was a half-assed attempt, but he’d probably been trying and failing to talk boys out of joining the service for years, and after a while even the most passing effort can become a tremendous drain. But at the time I was blinded to all motives, hidden or otherwise, by those dress whites, those buttons, those lapels, and that beautiful shimmering insignia.

I signed up for the sake of a uniform. I was not the first, and I will not be the last.

Three years later, after my tour of duty had come to a close, I would once again join a profession with something less than the clearest of intentions, and I would once again have my judgment clouded by the accoutrements of office. Camouflage, knives, gas, guns—these were the privileged tools of the Bio-Repo man, and after two years of the military doldrums, I was ready to put myself to good use in the battlegrounds of America’s medical establishment. Not coincidentally, these are the same weapons I am using to defend myself now that I am on the run from my previous employers. The war hasn’t ended; it’s just changed venue.

Jake never seemed particularly taken by the soldiers who came in to talk to us that day. He called them knobs and jarheads and a bunch of other things I’m pretty sure he’d gotten from the movies, but he took his papers home just like me and had ’em signed and ready to go by the next morning.

When I asked him why he was signing up, he just shrugged and said, “Free food. A man’s gotta eat.” It was easily the best reason any of us had.

The first time I met Jake Freivald, he kicked my ass. Third grade, Mrs. Tone’s class, and we’d each been called upon to write a poem about our favorite time of year. I chose fall, partially because I liked the cool, crisp air of the season, but mostly because it was the first thing that came to mind and I didn’t want to spend too much time thinking about it.

When the time came to read my poem, I approached the front of the class and read my words aloud. It went something like:

Before I could get to the next line, I was interrupted by a voice ringing out from the open doorway leading to the hall. “That’s not a rhyme, idiot.”

The kid was bigger than me by at least a foot, and the heavy ridge of bone and flesh above his eyes gave him a distinctly Neolithic scowl, but there was something so plain about the way he’d said it that I thought at first he was joking. I continued with my poem, moving on to the next line:

“It’s not even close to a rhyme. I’m gonna kick your ass.”

He walked down the hall, my teacher’s only response a resigned sigh. “Go on,” she told me. “Finish it up and sit down.”

Three hours later, Jake caught me out by the bike racks and proceeded to lay down an ass-whomping of serious proportions. I got in a few blows here and there, and toward the end, I’m not proud to admit, I scored a glancing kick to the groin, but it only served to spur him on.

At some point, we were both grabbed by the lapels of our shirts and dragged down to the principal’s office, where we were forced to wait for hours, side by side, wondering what our punishment was going to be. After a while, we got bored of waiting and started shooting spitballs at the school secretaries, aiming mainly for the ones with big hair. After that, there was nothing to do but laugh and realize we weren’t all that different. By the time the administrator got to us, we were best friends for life.

I imagine if Jake hadn’t been walking by my classroom that day, or if the door to the hallway hadn’t been open, or if I’d chosen two words that actually rhymed, I wouldn’t be where I am today, and Jake wouldn’t be where he is. But he was and it was and I did, and our fates have been intertwined ever since. Beginning to end. One way or another.

Mother and Father threw me a going-away party the day before I was to report to Camp Pendleton for basic training, and it was a shindig for the record books. Not so much for the streamers and confetti and goofy party hats, but for the sheer number of girls who wanted to sleep with me before I went off to fight the enemy. There was something about my impending passage between civilian and military life that threw a flush into every girl’s heart and drew a blush on every girl’s breast. I didn’t encourage it. I didn’t resist it, either.

Father made a toast midway through the party, just as Sharon Cosgrove and I were emerging from the spare bedroom. “To my son,” he said, glass of vodka-spiked bug juice held high above his head, “who will learn what it is to be a man.” I smiled wanly, noticing with horror that the buttons on Sharon’s dress were misaligned, a slipup made in haste by my faltering fingers. The party-goers cheered, and Father continued. “May he fight valiantly for his country, may he bring distinction upon himself and his family, and may he rid us of the scourge of evil.” Drinks were tossed back, sucked down. Glasses were smashed in the fireplace. Father was always melodramatic when he drank.

But it was Mother who thought to add, in a soft, near whisper, “And may he come back to us in one piece.” She really knew how to bring down a party.

Basic training was basic training. No need to go into it, just a lot of yelling and grunting and yessir-ing and nosir-ing and push-up-ing and pull-up-ing and running and stumbling and panting and wheezing and falling and crying and getting back up and doing it all again the next day and the next and the next. It was a chore, a strain on the muscles, but it wasn’t earth-shattering. Not to me, and not in any meaningful sense.

Jake, perhaps predictably, was the star of the show. He had an indefatigable energy in whatever he did, whether it was playing sports or scoring chicks or staying up all night to talk about video games. I never heard him complain during basic, even when the rest of us grunts would carry on like housewives about our various aches and pains, and I only saw him flinch once, when a rifle misfired and he took a metal shard through-and-through to the flesh between his pinkie and ring fingers.

The fellow who slept on the bunk above mine was an affable guy from somewhere in Brooklyn named Harold Hennenson. For Harold, basic training was the be-all and end-all of the military experience. “You see how hard my muscles are getting?” he’d ask me. “Here, feel my triceps.”

What the hell, I felt his triceps. “Hard,” I said.

“As a rock.”

“As a rock.”

He’d drop and give the platoon fifty push-ups when no one asked him to. He’d clean the latrines. He’d take on extra KP duty. He was the gungiest of gung-ho, and he took the heat off the rest of us knobs who were just trying to make it through another day of backbreaking effort.

“See what I can do with my stomach muscles?” he asked me once, rippling his midsection in a tidal wave of abdominal strength. “See how strong they are?”

“They’re strong,” I told him, quite honestly.

“As a rock.”

“As a rock.”

Harold Hennenson would be killed when the tank he was riding in fell off the edge of the highest sand dune in Africa and burst into a fireball. He would represent another of those bizarre accidents that befell our servicemen during the War. He would receive a ten-gun salute. His ashes would be sent back home to his parents’ crumbling brownstone somewhere in Brooklyn.

What Harold didn’t know back then—what Harold couldn’t have known—was that solid stomach muscles—even those as hard as rocks—don’t do you a whiff of good when the tank you’re riding in falls off a sand dune and explodes.

Had a repo job back about ten years ago with the Kenton supply house—direct contract, not through the Union. Outside gig, a little moonlighting, not uncommon among those in my profession. Frank, our Union shop manager, didn’t care if we took on extra work, so long as it didn’t affect the pink sheets we’d been assigned by the Union. Frank was a straight shooter, a fair guy—I once saw him knock off 3 percent for a low-credit applicant, completely on a whim—and I still feel a bit bad about going dark on him the way I did.

Not that bad, though.

I’d signed on with Kenton on a limited basis to bring in three artiforgs that had gone past their in-house grace period by a good ninety days because their in-house Bio-Repo men were all busy on other high-profile jobs. Kenton’s been known to finance their own products outside of the Credit Union guidelines, and it’s well known that they’re more lenient with their clients. In fact, I’ve even heard of them requiring that the client be transported to a hospital, of all things, for some major extracts. That’s above and beyond federal regulations, and shows a real sense of empathy for their clients’ needs. Of course, you’ve got to have some serious equity in your home to even get into the Kenton credit office in the first place, but that’s neither here nor there. Ninety days is grace beyond grace, and I didn’t hold pity for anyone who welshed on a loan with straight arrows like Kenton.

The first two extractions were both livers, and they went smooth as, well, livers. The work was quick, cleanup unnecessary. But the third one was a stomach extraction, and I knew how messy they could get, so I brought along a few extra buckets, just in case: Two for the blood, one for the food remnants that were sure to be stuck inside the machine. The last thing I wanted was to muck up my nice repo apron with partially-digested cauliflower.

According to the pink sheet given to me a day before the extraction, the guy had opted for a new Kenton ES/19, a moderate-size stomach artiforg with an expansion/contraction option which would regulate the food intake and, in so doing, the overall obesity of the client. The device could be easily recalibrated to a new volume setting by means of an external remote control which the ES/19 owner’s manual suggests be kept out of the reach of children and small pets at all times. It’s a swell little machine, top-notch all the way, and worth every penny. Still, it’s a lot of pennies.

Pink sheet didn’t say whether or not the client’s natural stomach gave out or if it was an elective upgrade—usually it’s cancer with a stomach job, but the rumor mill is always abuzz with new tales of organ expiration, everything from solar radiation to overgrown Szechwan ulcers. Whatever the case, this guy had the Kenton ES/19 installed in January of the previous year, and then settled into a predictable pattern: Regular payment for one, maybe two months, dropping soon into sporadic bi-monthly cycles, quickly degenerating into check’s-in-the-mail promises. Calls were made, calls were not answered. Letters were sent, letters were returned unopened. Kenton gave him four months past grace ’cause he was some big muckety-muck over at the Tourism Ministry, but enough finally became enough and they called me in.

“You do stomachs?” asked the field rep, a slim blonde with a slight body who had dressed down to make her repo calls. She had obviously done her work, and knew how the average Bio-Repo man liked his women: Tight shirt, flared pants, hair teased to the sky. “We got you on our liver sheets, but there’s one outstanding stomach job, might be tricky. I mean, if you do that sort of thing.”

I gave my usual answer: “Everything but Ghost work. If the pay’s right.”

The pay was right.

Job started out as usual—scoped it, mapped it, gassed down the house, prepped the client—but here’s the thing: My scalpel wouldn’t dig. I planted, I swiped, I ripped into that flesh, but I couldn’t get much further than a centimeter or two down before I scraped against what felt like a solid plate of steel protecting his midsection. Impossible. I cut some more, taking no heed of the blood that had already soaked through the mattress beneath the client.

After fifteen minutes, I had worked that body like a side of beef, flaying away nearly every ounce of flesh on that man’s torso, and still I couldn’t figure out how to reach that mechanical belly of his. Time was running out. But as my portable suction pump cleared away the pooling blood, I saw that my first guess, improbable as it was, had been correct: A metal plate barred my way, bolted into his body via attachments to his lower ribs and pelvis.

Now, why would a man go through the hassle of having a lead sheet implanted across his torso? To protect his precious artiforg from repossession, I suppose. But, try as I may, I can’t see the purpose in this—the artiforg prolongs life, plain and simple. When your friendly neighborhood Bio-Repo man shows up on a doorstep to take an artiforg back to the supply house and suddenly finds himself stymied by a metal plate, he’s not going to put Humpty Dumpty back together again once he’s found he can’t get what he’s come for. He’s going to leave the donor dead or dying, with nary a look over the shoulder. Heck, we’re only trained in very basic paramedic techniques, and most of us play dice in the back row during the mandatory seminars.

Even if I’d known how to resuscitate the guy and sew him back together, I sure as hell wouldn’t have done it. The bastard could drown in his own blood for all I cared. He made me waste two pints of ether.

I broke his ribs, his hips, and his sternum, tossed the metal plate out an open window, and walked out of that bloody bedroom with his precious Kenton ES/19 artificial stomach tucked beneath my arm. Appalling.

Harold Hennenson never would have accepted a lead plate in lieu of strong, natural stomach muscles. And even if he had, it wouldn’t have helped him to be any less dead.

We went out on forty-eight hours’ leave one Labor Day weekend, me and Jake and Harold Hennenson, and had ourselves one rip-roaring hell of a good time. San Diego was the nearest big city, and we lit it up with the fervor of religious missionaries, intent on bringing our message of inebriation to all of the unsullied masses. I knew of two bars with closing hours well past the city curfews, and through conversations with regular patrons we found some after-after-hours clubs as well.

Sometime during that blurry bender, I up and got myself a tattoo on my right biceps, as anyone who is good and properly drunk must at some point do. It says WHEN THE BOUGH BREAKS in bright blue letters, and I still have it to this day, even though removal would take only ten minutes and twenty-five bucks at the nearest chop-doc shop. I don’t know what When the Bough Breaks means exactly, or why I would choose to have it indelibly inscribed upon my flesh, and I doubt I knew it even back in the tattoo parlor. But it scares small children and entices large women. I like it. It has style.

I have another tattoo now, of course—my Bio-Repo insignia, a small circle of black shot through by five golden arrows inscribed upon the left side of my neck. That one will never come off, no matter how many times a doctor takes his lasers to my skin. Long after I die and my flesh and bones have crumbled into dust, I imagine that it will remain, floating ethereally above my ashes, a message to future generations that I was a member of the most feared profession on the planet.

Plus, chicks dig it.