To win a war

To Win a War
By: Alejandro Peruga-Martinez

My social worker lit her third cigarette while my mother sobbed her lengthy goodbye into my shoulder. My father stood to the side watching me quietly, a glint of shame in his eyes. “Alright lets go”. I heard the social worker say as she turned around and walked toward the car leaving me to escape my mother’s grasp and carry the heavy suitcase that contained all the pairs and sets of clothing that I would need to complete my uniform.
The tie was tight against my throat as I got into the car. It had been several months since my dad had taught me how to tie my tie. How sad he must have felt that the first time he imparted this knowledge was for the court hearing for his eight-year-old son.
I didn’t really understand the whole hearing process at the time. “Attempted Murder” was not yet part of my vocabulary. What I do remember was the Michael Sheean had done something to make me angry and I had held his head beneath the water of the pool for one second too long till he had stopped struggling. After that there had been a whirl-wind of strange people asking me questions, evaluating and assessing me, until finally a somber man in a black robe gave my parents a choice: either I could be put away with the other degenerate children, or I could be banished to an academy in Northern Virginia. My parents, thinking to spare me, chose to send me to school rather than incarceration.
The social worker drove as though she had taken this journey many times before. She had a demeanor of quiet exasperation, as if she was doing me a great favor taking me to my punishment. I did not fully realize the choice my parents had made, but I knew that either way I was to be punished. We sat silently on the southward drive for what felt like an eternity. When I first caught glimpse of the academy, it was as we drove up the long driveway. It was a large rustic building that at first glance seemed to be a mansion except for the two flags, one red with a crest and eagle emblazoned on it and above it the American flag, flying from the massive flag pole at the end of the driveway.
The social worker parked her car in front of the main entrance and we made our way up the large stone steps and through an elaborate door and hallway to a small office with the words “admissions” stenciled on the glass. She exchanged words and documents briefly with the secretary sitting behind the almost comically small desk. She leaves me without even so much as a good bye.
“You will be in hall B bunk sixteen. Take the stairs on the right, drop off your things, and then make your way out to the blacktop for PT”, the secretary drones out without ever looking up from the documents she is so laboriously signing. I cautiously make my way through my new surroundings, walking up the stairs and down a corridor with stainless white walls whose cleanliness in some way made me feel dirty. I reached hall B and manage to find my bunk, placing my suitcase at the foot of the bed as were all other so aligned. Some how I make my way back through the maze to the door I believed led to the black top.
There was hardly anybody on the black top when I exited the building, just four boys sitting at the far end. Past the blacktop there was a field and I could make out the distant shapes of people running. I started to head towards the field when one of the boys sitting at the end of the blacktop called out to me.
“Hey you, you new here?”, the bigger of the boys says as he gets up and makes his way towards me, his three friends falling in behind him.
“Yeah” I responded as the bigger boys’ towers over me.
“Do you have anything to trade?” the bigger boy blurts out and his friends begin to snicker.
“Trade?” I ask unsure of what we could possibly trade. The boy stares down at me and I can see the rage gathering in his face.
“Don’t play dumb” he yells at me and his massive hand grabs me by the shirt collar,
“run your pockets”.
At this moment rage and fear swell in me, and I flail out only o feel the soft thud of the boy’s fist against my face. The first blow stuns me and knocks me to the ground; it is the kick to my gut from the boy’s friend that sends a wave of pain through me. I gasp for air beneath the kicks, which are coming in a barrage now, and slowly I get very sleepy and the blows seem to be like thunder from a far off storm. It isn’t until the next morning that I wake up in the cold sterile comfort of the infirmary wing. My body aches with innumerable pains and it is near impossible for me to move. It is several hours before a nurse realizes that I am awake. She asks me what happened and instinctually I reply “I fell”. The nurse looks at me sadness swimming in her eyes.
“That seems to be the reason why everyone gets hurt”.
I spend several days recuperating in the infirmary after which I am released back into the general populace with only a few unsightly bruises covering my body. I make my first friend that day after English class, which is my third subject. I am sitting down on the bench outside the cafeteria when he unexpectedly sits next to me.
“I see that Greg has gotten to you,” he stammers out behind long unkempt blond hair.
“He pretty much runs things around here since he’s the oldest, gets away with anything. I heard once he even killed a kid.” At this I feel a small swell of shame rise in me and I fight it back.
“My name is Matt and I’ll be happy to show you how things work around here.”
Matt kept me under his wing for a short time. He was a grad higher than me but was about the same height. Perhaps that is why Greg preyed upon him too. We became friends by sharing an innumerable amount of beatings and making sure that neither one of us was ever abandoned. Greg was one of the older kids. He had failed to graduate and spent most of his time doing what he pleased. There were only a handful of student that who would stand up to Greg and his idiots. Andrew and Josh were two of the older students who Greg did not want to mess with. For the first year they looked out for the younger students, often time intervening when Greg go out of hand. They however graduated a the end of the year leaving us no protection against Greg’s onslaughts which now not only came during the day but sometime during the night.
The only other person who Greg feared was the head administrator, Mr.Hernner, He was a short man who always wore the same deep blue suit and an eye patch, which looked strange, under his thinning whit hair. He walked with a cane to support his bad leg, and so made a loud clinking noise that always foretold his arrival. Whenever we would hear that noise Greg would stop whatever torture he was administrating and leave as though the incident had never occurred. I suspect that Mr.Hernner knew what was going on. When he asked us about our various injuries we always reported “I fell,” for the unspoken code of youth was never tell, for in telling you lost all respect, and in the end respect was the only thing that kept you from falling further on the food chain. Eventually I fell into a rhythm, some days I would be able to escape from Greg and his lackeys and other I would wear fresh bruises in quiet shame.
It was halfway through my second year that I was put in charge of the tool shed. We all had chores that we needed to complete. The previous year my responsibility had been helping the librarian organize the bookshelves, which had been rather nice, seeing as when you don’t have a TV you seem to get a lot of reading done. I had poured over almost anything I could get my hands on but mostly enjoyed reading history, which is why I probably excelled in class. It felt almost like a demotion to be put in charge of the tool shed but in the end it was perhaps fate.
I worked in the tool shed in the evenings, organizing and distributing the various tools. More than often no one would need anything and I was left to my own devices for hours at a time. Then one day Matt came sprinting into the shed out of breath. There was blood on his shirt.
“Hide me he’s going to kill me,” he panted as he tried to hide awkwardly behind a shelf. Not a second later Greg and his most loyal of lackeys Gautam burst through the door, a long cut oozing blood from his face, holding a small penknife in his hand.
“Where is that fucker?” he screeched, locking his gaze on me. At this Matt stirred and gave away his position. I had no time to react before Greg pushed me out of the way and Gautam grabbed my hair and pinned me against the wall. He fished Matt from behind the shelf and sent him to the ground with a sound blow to his jaw, then proceeded to pin him to the ground. He took the penknife in his hand and began to poke and prod Matt with it, allowing the blood to find its way to the surface through freshly punctured skin, all the time yelling,
“You think you can cut me and get away with it, you really think you can do that to me?” Matt began to screech like an animal, a sad pitiful high-pitched noise and that’s when I felt the rage fill my lungs. It was different this time though, where it had been hot and uncontrolled, it was now cold and calculating. My actions were as though they were not my own. In my mind’s eye I can see myself elbowing Gautam in the groin and knocking him to the ground, I can see how I pick up the monkey wrench and swing it at the side of Greg’s face, but it is the feeling of soft flesh, stretching sinew, and broken bone that I will never be able to forget. In that moment I realized how fragile the human body truly was, that we were no more than flesh bound to bone and I marveled in the violence as I sought my own emancipation.
It was all over in less than a second. Matt got up from beneath the now unconscious Greg soaked in his blood and we made our way back to our respective bunks the victors for the first time ever. It was not until the next day that I was called in to see Mr. Hernner. He sat in a large office, a tiny Cyclops behind and immense mahogany desk.
“Do you know what happened to Greg yesterday evening?” he inquired in his normal commanding tone.
“No sir,” I responded, willing myself to believe in my own ignorance.
“Well he seemed to have gotten injured in the tool shed about the time that you were working there, that doesn’t ring any bells?” he continued.
“Maybe he fell while I was out sir,” I said with conviction. At this he cracked a smile and said,
“that’s exactly what he told me, but off the record I want to know why.” That’s when I remembered something I had read in a World War Two history book.
“Sir, when the United States decided to use atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they knew that it would be an atrocity and that many human lives would be lost, however the loss of life if the war had continued would have been even greater. I wanted to win the war, not simply the battle, Sir.” At this he nodded and let me go,
As I made my way back to my bunk I understood that what I had done had been neither right nor wrong but necessary and it chilled me to the bone that I accepted it with such little remorse. It was rumored that perhaps I had killed Greg, but I had seen him being taken away in a van the very next morning towards a destination unknown. Though I had liberated myself I felt shame, shame that perhaps I belonged amongst the troubled youth that roamed the stainless white halls.