Pausing for a Smoke

I’d been riding in the first of a four-truck convoy full of soldiers down the Pan American Highway out of the capital in the dry January heat. We’d left at dawn, headed for Morazan to confront the forces of the insurrection. I’d been snapping off-to-war shots for a story, joshing and jostling with the macho teenagers in the back of the truck, trying to make sure that their rifles pointed skyward and not inadvertently at me, laughing at their jokes as they passed around water bottles and surreptitious joints, when we turned off onto a dusty track and stopped so that everyone could take a leak by the side of the road.

I leaped down and peed with everybody else but when the smokes were passed around and everyone lit up, I declined, “no quiero, gracias,” and took in a big whiff of the dried-out pine and tamarind that was hanging in the dusty air amid the hibiscus blossoms and the bougainvillea and the shiny, green banana leaves, and told myself it’d been almost six months and I was clean. And while I could see the satisfaction it produced for those teenage boys sucking on those fags, I reminded myself of the misery I’d gone through to get this far, and that it’d been worth it, and that it wouldn’t be worth it to have to go through it all again.

For some reason the first truck set off without me and I climbed into the second, with its identical cargo of armed adolescents. We hadn’t gone very far, grinding along the rutted roadway in low gear, slapped by overhanging branches, jolted and bruised, when the first truck hit an anti-tank mine buried in the dust and instantly disintegrated in a spectacular ball of flame and noise that cut every living one of those boys into seared and singed chunks about the size of a Sunday roast, and sent a splattering of blood and pieces over us like a brief, warm hail storm.

In the contemplative sadness that follows sudden, cosmic fear, in the stunned, stupefied, ear-ringing deafness of the aftermath, I watched mesmerized as the boy beside me slowly and meticulously extracted a knitting needle-sized splinter of human bone which was embedded an inch in his forearm like an arrow, and then, sucking at the oozing wound, offered me a Winston from the red and white pack he fished out of the baggy pocket on the thigh of his camouflage fatigues. I accepted, and was immediately hooked again.