For Those Who Die as Cattle

Few things will set man aside from beast, the least of which is anatomy. Both have a heart to beat out the rhythm of their lives, both have the instinctual drive to live, both feel pain, both bleed and both know fear, they in short have much more in common than in difference. But for some of these men I feel no more sorrow upon their deaths than I would have felt would we have lashed a cow to the pole and shot her instead. I feel the remorse of a life wasted, of the pain and fear this creature must have felt before death and the sympathy one feels for a being departing on a profound and endless journey of which the being knows nothing about. But I feel nothing more for these that scream and beg and plead.
         
These men, their names breathed in heavy sarcasm drenched in contempt. Men well known in the village for many years, men who now proceed to vomit up whatever dignity and honor they spent decades of manhood working hard to attain. What is so precious about this polluted air that would make them give so freely that which separates them from animals? What great cause is there here for them on earth anymore. They’ve already disgraced themselves.
         
These were the great rebels in the hills that we sent food to for so many years? These are the heroes of the people who brazenly defied the foreign soldiers? They don’t seem so brazen or defiant as they plead for their lives. I find great disappointment in these men, the heroes my parents often spoke of as one day liberating the village from the Western enemies. Maybe if they hadn’t been made out to be more than mere men, perhaps… but no I would despise them still. I would despise them just the same. They are men of our village and they are crying and kneeling their heads down before the enemy’s boots and they are no men of our village anymore. I may not have spent five years in the hills battling these men but I do not beg for my life while hugging their ankles either.
         
They cry like children who know no better, and children are not far from the cattle, chickens or pigs. They cry like men who no longer care to be men, men who would be cattle, chickens or pigs merely to live, but it is only their instincts, nothing else, if they were reasonable men they would die for their cause as they once killed so ferociously for it.
         
I remember these men well from when I was just a young boy, when I ran and played in the same filth as the livestock. It was at the start of the war, they came down from the hills, they came for a man who had been informing the Westerners of our troops and their supply routes. They had seemed so tough and just and honorable. They had not been cruel, they had been curt and serious with the man as these Westerners were now with them. They had come down and questioned him briefly and them pushed him against a small hill and shot him. They buried him in a shallow unmarked grave.
         
I remember my uncle who had been a prominent man in the village had asked the guerillas, “Perhaps, I could get the man a proper grave and headstone?”
         
“What does he need a proper grave for,” The leader who is now begging for his own life had said callously. “He’s a traitor, no one will come to put flowers on any traitor’s grave.”
         
And my uncle had left it there not wanting to become a traitor without a proper grave himself. But my uncle is gone, despite his best efforts he too became a Westernized traitor. But he was at least permitted a headstone.
         
These men from a nation very far away have apparently already held the trial they claim everyone to be entitled to because the leader of the guerillas is already being tied to the pole. These Westerners are extremely productive, they held their trials, erected three poles in the village plaza and arranged all their soldiers in parade style lines. The firing squad is made of up seven of the biggest men and it is already waiting in the middle of the plaza facing the triangular set-up of the three poles.
         
But there is a difference in some of these men. Some of these men are going to die as men while the other seem to want to die as cattle. No this one is crying too, he asked for his life but he does not renounce his cause. No this one is a true man. This one will stand and face the firing squad without giving up his cherished cause. Without surrendering his honor or dignity or duty he will now surrender his body. He is crying and one feels both pride in this man and sorrow. He will not die well in the old cliché manner, he will not refuse the blindfold he will not smoke a cigarette at an insolent angle but neither will he give up his cause. He will not give up his principles and his spirit and those are what makes a man different from a beast. These other men have already surrendered all of those things to the hated enemy along with their bodies and weapons. They are not men, these strong rebels, the symbols of the struggle and everything brave in the world, they are just beasts made to look like men in all the propaganda, no doubt many years from now their faces will be plastered on poster and on t-shirts, but they wouldn’t be if only the world could see how they acted on their dying day. It makes you think back on all the heroes of the old revolutions, those self-less fear-less martyrs and question their validity. No man here today dies like those old heroes were said to have died. Not a man is stoic and brave walking to the pole. Many are up until the rope bindings are fastened with their hands behind their backs and around the pole. None of them are strong once the firing squad is at the ready. But some are still men even after the bullets tear the life from them.
         
They do not kiss the enemy’s boots. They do not forsake their cause, they do not forsake anything and they do not apologize for what they have been unapologetic for all along. These are men, but they are very few. Most will sob and repent anything, repent what they are, repent who they are like they are sins. Most men will give anything for more life, their instinctual drive for survival will override their sense of right and wrong and men who have “selflessly” and “nobly” killed for years in a war will break down and beg for life on the day of their death. But they do not deserve life if they do so. They deserve nothing but death like the cattle. For a man who will kill for a cause but not die for that same cause is nothing more than a murderer and an animal.
         
The leader is still crying and begging and forsaking and repenting when the firing squad fires one volley into his chest, all seven bullets striking and killing him instantly. The rifles swing nearly imperceptibly towards the brave one who will not forsake anything and they fire the same volley with the same effects. I hope to see a ray of light come down from heaven and hurry this noble man’s spirit to heaven but instead he slumped down the pole in a state of death, his hands still bound behind his back and around the pole. They swung again, with military precision and fired a third volley into another one who was ignoble and had decried everything he’d fought for the last five years. And he died in the same manner. All three of them, one good and two bad, died the same, died as cattle are slaughtered and I was disappointed at first. I thought the good one should have been spared, should have been blessed and anointed in holy oils and lifted body and all to heaven like the holy men in nearly all religions.

The fifth man in the firing squad broke ranks to vomit and two more followed his lead. They ran quickly to the bushes to hide their humanity as though it were shameful. And they vomited like men ought to upon killing a good man.
But I knew about the good man who had died. He was a distant cousin of mine, but so was nearly everyone in the village. He was young as nearly all good men are. It takes time to corrupt a person so that is why most good people are young. He was naïve and an idealist. The other men I knew too, they were older and had been good once too, but had been bad for a very long time. The reason why there is so many more bad men than good is because a good man is easy to kill, a bad man isn’t. There are many ways to kill a good man but none to make a bad man good.

Three more men were selected to take the place of those who had become sick on the firing squad and three more men were selected to take the place of those who had become dead on the poles. The executions continued smoothly. After the first violent series of volleys the blood had been spilt and the horror had passed and no more soldiers became sick. Then all the rebels were dead. The good with the bad, the wrongfully repentant with the rightfully steadfast, and all died as cattle.
What more can a man do upon entering something so universal as death, except die as though he were a mere beast. But many men still will retain till death what no beast can claim, dignity and principle.

                                          *    *    *    *    *
The village stunk, it smelled like all the other villages. It smelled like shit and human body odors. You gagged when you first smelled it but you started to get along with it, but never use to it. You would learn to ignore the sickening smell as best you could and breath in only through your mouth and live with it but it wasn’t like you ever got so used to it that you forgot it was there.

We were dragging about thirty or so of the pitiful enemy. They were crying and moaning and begging for their lives like only humans can. They knew you feared, they knew you loved, they knew you hurt and they knew you were just like them. We had an understanding between us that we both had a right to live but one of us would die anyways. He knew he would die and I knew I would live and this made it all the more harder. Looking at me he said the only real word he knew in our language, please, he begged, please. And he meant it. He meant it with all the sincerity that any man has ever spoken to me with and I respected him. I would live, I would love and hate and breath and eat and sleep and be happy and be sad and I had the great privledge to do all these things while he would have none of it. We are a race that have cheated ourselves out of so much.

I dragged the one who was the leader of the band. We had surprised them at their camp in the hills and we took all of the ones we didn’t kill in capturing the camp. We killed many but captured about thirty of them. They were tough small men who were much older and much sadder looking than I had imagined they would be. These weren’t the same things that hunted us at night, they were not the same things that I often had nightmares about, these were real men. They had all those things I never expected in them like feelings and pain. But then I thought, these were the men that hunted us at night, these were the men who killed the men they captured and these were the men we would have to shoot.
 
There was a speedy trail in which every man was condemned to death, every last one. While the trail was being held and the men condemned to death began to cry more seriously the three poles outside had been set up to shoot the prisoners on.
The villagers watched on wide-eyed but blankly, they couldn’t be read. They had seen so much of this and they might not have even cared anymore. And the men begged and I felt horrible for these brave men who had sacrificed for five long years in the hills, the men who had bled and risked so much for a better future but now saw their share of everything they fought for crumbling away. And with great humanity and righteousness they cried and begged against the injustice. But there was nothing to do.

They shoved me into the firing squad and I couldn’t object, I would be a traitor if I objected. They pushed me into line and told me to train my sights on the sad old man I had led down from the hills into the village. They told me to kill the man who’s only wish in the world was for life. The man who would be killed on his own soil by foreigners, one of the worst injustices in the world.

Some boy next to me in the firing squad called him a coward and my knees were weak. My head was light but the man would be shot and it would be better for it to be quick so I aligned my sight on his chest with the rest of the men in the line. The man was no coward, he was a man, and that is why he cried. I heard the word coward again somewhere behind me and my stomach began to rebel.

“Fire!”

I fired and my stomach turned as the old man who had been the leader slumped down, deep into the great mystery that I myself am terrified of.

“Second target.”

I realigned my sights on the boy who never begged, never renounced anything though we told him to. The boy who was beaten and would not declare his cause unworthy. The boy whom had only a cold cruel sense of duty, the boy who had no knowledge of life and only of duty, the boy whom I had no liking for, but the boy who I had great pity for.

“Fire!”

I shot him and I felt something rise up in my stomach and I forced it back down. The sweat was beading on my forehead, my heart was pounding and I felt such sadness that I thought I would cry. The sights were shaking as the thin mist of smoke and dust cleared from in front of us to reveal the boy slump down in death. But though there was great difference the two men’s life there was no difference in their deaths.

“Third target.” The officer said again, it sounded like it was right in my ear,

The trembling sights were put over the third target’s chest. It was a large chest and it was very close so though my rifle shook, I would not miss. The last final order to fire was like a great din growing ever larger in my stomach, my chest and my head until I felt like I would pass out. Then came the order.

“Fire!”

My rifle crashed in the volley with the rest but before the dust cleared I was running I couldn’t see where I was running, I only knew I was running away from the evil scene. It started coming up before I was halfway to the bushes. I threw up on my uniform and into the bushes and was so sick I didn’t realize anything around me. But then my head cleared with the crash of another volley. I looked back to see that my empty place had been filled in on the firing squad, as had two other. The boy who had called the first victim a coward had disappeared, I didn’t know where, but I assumed he’d become sick too.

I looked around, conscious of my filthy dirty state but not caring, and I saw the remaining twenty-four prisoners sitting solemnly under guard, some crying silently but all having given up hope for leniency. Some stared at me with blank eyes, neither sympathy nor commiseration in their eyes. I looked at the townspeople and they looked at me with idle disinterest. I looked at my comrades and saw only contempt. And I looked at the pile of vomit at the bottom of the bushes and felt only human.

I sat down in the mud by the bushes and watched the executions feeling not at all right because men were being shot before a firing squad. I was ashamed, but not because of how I acted, but because of how they acted, the villagers and the soldiers. I felt lost and alone and tossed into a world that wasn’t at all mine. Because these men, men in all senses of the word, died as cattle.