Goliath

“You’ve served in the Armed Forces your whole life, but you’ve never really experienced war, have you, Commander? Like your military leaders, you’ve become enamored of the bloodless campaigns of twenty-first-century technology. How easy it is to build missiles and warplanes when you don’t have to deal with the atrocities your investment has wrought. Press a button, drop a cluster bomb, and read about it in the morning paper. War has not been waged on your soil for almost two hundred years. You’ve never inhaled the scent of burned human flesh. Or crawled through the cinders of a communal grave, through ashen bone and chunks of rotting limbs, attempting to identify the remains of a loved one. You’ve never had to watch, helpless as a baby, as a family member is dragged away and beaten to death before your very eyes.” Tears glisten in Covah’s eyes, blotting out the intensity of his glare. “You’ve never … stared into the face of an angel, forced to watch as her innocence is gutted before you, your precious child …” He shuts his eyes and wheezes through gritted teeth, forcing his anger to staunch his grief.

The older Albanian turns to Gunnar, taking over for Covah. “Mr. Wolfe, these things are difficult for Americans to understand. The Serbs butchered entire families as if we were livestock. These were not the actions of soldiers, but deliberate acts of vengeance—an ethnic cleansing, ordered by Milosevic himself, that went far beyond even the most brutal of military tactics. My name is Tafili. My family and I lived in Kapasnica, a neighborhood taken over by the Frenkijevci, a paramilitary unit run by the secret police. Belgrade’s military chiefs used the Frenki Boys to depopulate our cities. The Red Berets, as we called them, had orders to torch our homes and kill any resident in as brutal a manner as possible, if we refused to leave. But the Frenkijevci enjoyed their work a little too much. In the end, entire families were rounded up and slaughtered.”

The Albanian shakes his head. “People hear about these atrocities. They question how human beings can perpetrate such evil upon others. As ceasefires are instituted, their disbelief turns to ennui. But the survivors … we’re forced to live with these horrors forever. What the rest of the world fails to see are the invisible wounds—the mental anguish, the depression. You cannot just pick up the pieces and go on after your family has been slaughtered. You cannot just turn your back when the perpetrators of these deeds run free. Your life … every thought, is scarred forever. Awakening from the nightmare, one becomes consumed with—”

“Revenge …” Covah stands, taking over the conversation. “My beloved wife’s uncle is so right. Lying half-dead in the hospital, all I could feel was my blood boiling with rage. Tafili came for me as soon as I could walk. We joined the Kosovo Liberation Army. The rebels gave us machine guns, then assigned us to a hit squad. On our first night out, our leader led us to the home of a man, a tank commander, who had murdered many of my wife’s people. We dragged the butcher from his house, kicking and screaming, and beat him to death right there on the stoop of his home.”

Covah pauses, massaging his forehead, fighting to maintain composure.

“As I participated in the act, I looked through one of the windows of his house and noticed a child, a little girl, perhaps a few years older than my youngest daughter. She looked up at me—a lost, frightened lamb—an angel … like my own dead children.”

Covah closes his eyes, shaking his head. “The look in that child’s eyes burned into my soul. My senseless act of vengeance had robbed her of her own father, of her own innocence. I realized at that moment that I was not the cure, but part of the disease, a disease that feeds on hatred. At that moment, something in me changed. I became sickened with our species, and I knew I had to do something drastic—something that would force the human race to change.”

“How?” Gunnar asks. “How can you change the human race using nuclear weapons?”

Covah rubs perspiration from his hairless brow. “Gunnar, you know me to be a man of law, a man who cherishes social order. I have learned the hard way that men who have no investment in society have no stake in peace. They thrive in chaos, and trade in violence. They murder and deceive to acquire life’s bounties, and refuse to abide by treaties, unless it suits them.”

Covah circles the table, placing his three-fingered right hand upon the shoulder of each crewman he passes. “The men in this room represent entire populations, populations whose lives have been rendered meaningless by oppressive governments and murderous factions disguised as freedom fighters. These men and their families were victims, by-products of violence, good people whose only crime was that they happened to be born into tyranny, or caught within the crossfire of rebel guerrillas in a land ruled by criminals.”