It’s a nice office. Clean. No plywood walls. No makeshift shelves for the inevitable binders. A real desk. Two metal chairs in front of the desk, an actual upholstered chair behind, in which the man dressed in khaki, not a uniform, sits. This is the Major’s office, but the man behind the desk isn’t the Major. Just another contractor.

The Lieutenant shifts on his feet slightly. The man behind the desk keeps reading the plastic-encased report in front of him. He taps at something with his pen, pauses, jots down a few words in the margin. The Lieutenant keeps his eyes on the wall behind the man. He could bore a hole in the wall with his stare. He concentrates on breathing evenly. Finally the man grunts to himself, looks up.

“Be seated.”

The Lieutenant sits. The man looks at him with a level gaze.

“Was it eight or nine?”

The Lieutenant clears his throat, keeps from fidgeting, looks right at the man, returns his gaze.

“You’re asking about the casualties, sir?”

The man nods, expressionless.

“We were told the village was friendly, sir. We didn’t expect… that is, we…”

He can’t keep looking at the expressionless eyes, raises his head slightly, shifts his sight to a point just above the man’s head.

“It was nine, sir.”

The man nods. Sighs.

“How many of ours?”

The Lieutenant suddenly notices his sight is growing narrower. Literal tunnel vision. It hadn’t been like that in the field, coming up to the village. Never. Never when he was out in the field. Hadn’t been like that at all. Then, always, his senses were sharp, his hearing acute, even his sense of smell heightened, tracking the shifts of charcoal, goat and the muskiness of human habitation in the slight wind. Then, he always felt so alive.

“We lost two, sir. Two wounded.”

The man nods again, toys with the cord of the field phone on his desk.

“I’ve read the report multiple times. And from what I understand, the villagers did not start the shooting. That correct?”

“Yes, sir. However…” A brief sudden memory, like a shaft of light breaking through cloudy skies. Mike looking at him with confusion as he held the stump of his hand, the afternoon quiet destroyed by the roiling clouds of smoke and dust, the concussion lingering like a poisonous aftertaste.

He continues. “However, we got an IED. That started the entire… situation. I believe there was an inadvertent discharge of one firearm as a result, which put the entire squad on edge…”

He stops. The villager had run right at Phil, yelling something. And then he wasn’t running anymore. And then the dirt and dust turned that dark brown underneath his body as the life poured out. And then the little kid had come out of nowhere. And then someone, behind him, he wasn’t sure, had fired. And then, and then…

And then the rest of it.

The man behind the desk finally looks away. He seems tired. Thinks for a moment.

“It’s alright, lieutenant. Alright.” He pulls out a yellow pad from a drawer, writes something on it. Looks up.

“We used to have a saying. We destroyed the village in order to save it.” The man pauses, stares hard, right into the Lieutenant’s eyes. “We don’t do that anymore. It didn’t work out too well.”

The Lieutenant forces himself to return the man’s gaze. He doesn’t care what will happen to him, but he feels ashamed. He let them down, he now knows. All the guys. Dishonorable discharges at the least. Maybe worse. And maybe he does feel bad for himself, too. Why was the bomb there? It was supposed to be a friendly village. Someone should have told him.

The man writes on the yellow pad, continues, “I’m recommending a transfer. Effective immediately.”

The lieutenant stares. He can’t believe what he’s hearing.

“That’s… that’s it?”

The man stops his notations on the pad. Looks up.

“Of course not. That’s just the beginning. There’ll be an inquiry. How it ends up…” the man shrugs his shoulders. The lieutenant sits. He waits. And then he sees another, the third one. Clutching at his shoulder, crying something. And then the fourth. A woman, he believes, half-glimpsed looking out a window before falling away into the interior gloom with a confused expression, time slowing the droplets in the air. And then…

“You hear me Lieutenant?” The Lieutenant stares at the man behind the desk. He seems to expect a response. The Lieutenant strives to remember a response. There’s something he should say.

“Someone should have told me, sir. We expected a friendly village.”

The man behind the desk looks at him for the first time with a hint of humanity, nods, as if to himself. The Lieutenant looks back at him, and can’t understand. It wasn’t his fault, after all. They’d been told the village was friendly. How could it be his fault? This report. An inquiry.

Finally the man looks away, sighs. “Well, it isn’t friendly anymore. Dismissed, lieutenant.”

The Lieutenant gets up, salutes, turns. He walks out of the office, down the hallway, out the door. The late afternoon sun slants against his eyes. He takes a deep gulp of air. The clear blue sky looks dark to him, and there is no scent on the breeze. He doesn’t think of the villagers.

For now.