Monsters of the Week

Esto no es lo peor.

(originally published as "This is not the worst.")

I didn't bother to remember the name of the village; after a while, this stops being the sort of detail you care about. It was a village in the eastern end of the Chaco, behind the lines of our armies, and after we got through with it, it would eventually be part of someone's cattle ranch in northeastern Argentina, and whatever the people who once lived there might have called it would be completely immaterial. It was enough to know there was a village there, now, at least for the time being, and that it was close enough to Camp Fontana that we'd probably be able to be back in our bunks tonight instead of sleeping in the field.

We'd gotten a good early start – Lieutenant Herremanns leading usually made patrols like this go smoother – and showed up in the village square, such as it was, about midmorning. No outriders, no firing, no mad charge in to seize whoever passed for a caudillo around here, just a small cavalry patrol coming in at a trot before anyone could notice or spread an alarm. There was a war on, but this is how wars work, in the main: not with grand lines of battle drawn up across from each other on a plain crafted to mimic a general's sand table, but with a handful of men showing up with guns, insistent to be obeyed. Herremanns ordered half of the patrol off their horses and started opening up houses; the rest of us, including me and Wilbur, he sent to secure the perimeter and make sure any Paraguayan soldiers didn't escape.

We trotted out to my best guess of where the limits of the village might be – pretty much, the limit of the cleared land before the scrub jungle started filling in again – and kept an eye out for any possible sharpshooters, anyone attempting to flee into the bush. Wilbur stopped to give his horse a drink at one of their wells; stopped, looking around, it was clear this village was dying no matter what we did or didn't do to it today. The fields were lying waste, the jungle crawling in: all the men who'd be able to work them were either dead or off running away from General Campos in the hills east of Asunción, and all the animals the women and children might have worked them with had either been commandeered by the armies or eaten to stave off starvation. From back in the center, there was some disordered noise, wailing or screaming, and then a couple sharp barks: shots fired.

That changed things. Until now, this had been a "Village Reorganization Patrol", encouraging the villagers to evacuate either down to Corrientes, where they wouldn't be getting in anyone's way, or east into Paraguay, where they'd stop being our problem unless the frontier got redrawn again later. Once shots were fired, the standing order allowed the army to assume it was under threat from partisans or guerrillas: before, anybody could be allowed to leave in good faith, but now anyone running away from the village could reasonably be assumed to be an enemy combatant, or attempting to communicate with the enemy. Any non-Argentine male of military age was either a deserter, and thus an enemy combatant who might rejoin his unit at some later time, or a spy who under the laws of war could be killed at any time for any reason or no reason. The barks came faster, more regular, and the screaming increased as Wilbur swung himself back into the saddle. Of course, anyone who resisted was obviously a combatant, and could be shot down where they stood.

This was usually about the time someone tried to run into the jungle: they always did, there was always someone, some poor native boy who'd decided it was better to starve to death at home than with the army in the field – there had to be, or the rumor that got our patrol moving would never have started. And they always ran, even though in my experience they never got away, and usually ended up with their hysterical mothers or grandmothers assaulting the troopers and getting shot themselves for their trouble. Sure, if they didn't try to run or hide, they'd die all the same, but at least they might be able to say goodbye to their families before we shot them in their own front yard. And there it was, a flash of white by one of the huts at the edge of the village, low to the ground, darting towards the fields and the jungle beyond.