by Gary Beck

The machine gun fire from the drones was so intense I couldn’t get my head up to see if the enemy was advancing. The one thing I had learned in the field was my helmet might look good on the late night news, but it wouldn’t stop a bullet. The grunts were smiling about me when they didn’t think I was looking. To them I was just an old fart they were stuck with, so they had to look out for me, making them risk their asses if I drew fire.

One of the kids, I don’t think he was seventeen, asked me before we moved out:

“How come you’re going with us, instead of a robo correspondent and a drone eye?”

I looked at him, tight in his gear, a combat vet before he even shaved.

“I’ve been a war correspondent for more than twenty years. It’s my job.”

I didn’t tell him I was the last of an extinct breed, a live human who actually went to the fighting. The truth was the robo field correspondent with the accompanying drone ‘eyes’ saw a lot more then I did. The network kept me on more as a curiosity than an effective reporter. Some of the viewers still liked me huddling in a foxhole, shellfire landing around me so they could barely hear me.

Marge, my producer, an ice cold bitch if there ever was one, had hoped to be rid of me when I was wounded in Yemen. The grunts laughed at me when they carried me to a medivac and one said:

“What’s a matter with you, old guy? Don’t you know how to take cover? Next time stick to the rear.”

I did bring them under fire when they carried me to the chopper. Marge would have left me to bleed out. If she thought about me at all, she probably hoped I’d buy the farm in Bolivia, she could say something nice about me, for the first time, then work with a hi-tech team and get great material.

Well eff her. I didn’t know anything else except to go on the next front line, even if I was finally realizing how obsolete I was. Maybe I could get a job as a robo correspondent driver. I did know the terrain they had to work… Nah. I’d go out of my mind twiddling a joystick. Sometimes I thought of the old days in Syria and Iraq, where I’d hang out in the Hilton bar at night, exchanging war stories with my colleagues, even though most of them never got out of the hotel… And there’d always be an adoring girl, a hottie from some NGO, intent on saving the world, showing her sincerity by spending the night with me.

But that was a long time ago. Now I had to stay alive, spite Marge and write a good story if I wanted another gig. There was always another war. I just hoped they’d still need me for the next one.

Gary Beck has spent most of his adult life as a theater director and worked as an art dealer when he couldn’t earn a living in the theater. He has also been a tennis pro, a ditch digger and a salvage diver. His original plays and translations of Moliere, Aristophanes and Sophocles have been produced Off Broadway. His poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in hundreds of literary magazines and his published books include 40  poetry collections, 16 novels, 4 short story collections, 2 collections of essays and 8 books of plays. Gary lives in New York City.