Blood Lily Company - Afghanistan, year 1

LVI

The R&R went back home, and we all had had a great time. Well, I told you we started our days early, but that morning, some of us had trouble opening one eye, let alone both.

We knew we still had one peaceful day – or almost – before setting off on patrol again. In fact, that day, we had to check our equipment, select our rations, make sure we had enough ammunition, water, clothes, to change a little. We usually took underwear and socks and a tee-shirt or two, because if we stink too much, a good dog can follow us, which can get downright dangerous.

In the mess hall, because Lin's office is really too small – and then Fatso was busy preparing our weekly shopping list and there seemed to be a few items that were hard to get. Between the Ops room and Lin's office, which are separated by the armory, always locked with a code, known to officers and NCOs and I got lost again...

So. I was telling you at the very beginning that we rarely use the Internet. It's not only to avoid detection and hacking, although that helps. It's also because our connection to the Web is via satellite and it's bloody expensive. Our personal smartphones, if they had not been tampered with by Jo, could have tried to connect to 7G, which is the most modern here, while, in Europe, China, Russia, they use 9G and are working on the next one, not 10G but 12G. Because yes, of course, they are skipping two generations. It's too much, there's nothing that demands that much capacity as streaming video did in the heydays of 5G a century ago. Even video games settle for 7G, even virtual reality is okay with it. But no, more, always more. Finally, nothing has changed...

Okay, so I got lost again. I didn't remember being this disorganized in writing essays for my Baccalaureate. Ah, right, I'd forgotten, I didn't make it to that Bac, since, at the age my classmates were passing it, I was playing GI Joe under the flags of the 1st Infantry Regiment in Strasbourg, paying for my stupid prank at Balard. While my classmates were passing a general Bac, option Sciences or Geopolitics, I was passing a professional one, option obstacle course, forced marches and kicks in the ass.

Fuck! I got lost again! What the hell! I'm going from Lin's office to my not-Bac! And I can't even accuse the Icelanders of putting my head upside-down, they were in the mess hall setting up the patrols.

ANYWAY.

So, between Lin's office and the Ops room, we pulled an Ethernet cable between the two rooms, running flush with the ceiling. So there is a laptop in Lin's office, a satellite-link box in the Ops room, connected to the radio, and it's from this laptop that Fatso places his orders for equipment and his phone calls – VoIP ain't dead! And it's been great for over a hundred years –, getting upset trying to get said stuff delivered. And since her office is small, and he was loudly complaining about the parentage of the guy at the other end of the line, the officers and NCOs had preferred to exile to the mess, much quieter, even if Dio got up at one point to go and close the office door.

I was called in to play with the holo-table, I had loaded a local map. When he'd be done ranting against the guy at the commissary and finished insulting his lineage and the hairiness of his ancestors – a connection with chimpanzees, it would seem – Fatso would come and update the map with the ownership deeds to the various poppy fields. When the Taliban seized power in the 1990s, they had almost completely eradicated the cultivation of this plant, which sap is used in the manufacture of opium, morphine and heroin. The American intervention had made this culture flourish (!) and despite various attempts to return to power by the Taliban, it remained. So, you will tell me, it's good to eradicate poppy culture. Yeah, sure. But reread your history books and you will see that between the two evils that were Islamism (religious intolerance, "holy war", sacrifice of the others) and opium addiction, in the end, opium addiction was the less lethal since it killed only its victim... Even if, in truth, it wasn't so good either.