While we were eating breakfast, I got messages from Cornpone and Shauna. Cornpone told me our old squad was part of a rapid reaction force base about five hundred miles north of Teskor, he sounded excited, it was a damned good assignment. Way better, he said mockingly, than babysitting hamsters. I had to agree with him. The fireteam had replaced me with a new guy, a guy from North Carolina, and Cornpone said the new guy was a huge improvement over me, since the new guy had a proper Southern accent, instead of my Downeast drawl. Shauna reported that her unit was temporarily at a logistics staging base almost a thousand miles to the east. I wrote three messages to her, erased them, then sent a simple note. The odds were that we wouldn't see each other for a long time, maybe never, and I tried to respond in a way that was friendly but not too friendly, so she wouldn't feel she needed to make any special effort to keep in touch, and then it would get awkward.

By the third day of us ‘patrolling’ the village, we were all starting to feel more than a bit foolish. For a patrol, we would put on full battle rattle, our zPhone earpieces, cameras and microphones, tinted goggles, and march down the streets, rifles ready, a finger poised near the safety, trying to look tough as we walked past neat little houses and barns, well-tended fields, and the school, all the way out to the edge of the village, then turned around and walked back. It was not easy to look tough as hamsters sat on their front porches in the morning, sipping tea and waving to us. Or working in the fields and barns, and pausing to wave to us as we walked by. Or the hamster children waving excitedly, eager to see the strange new aliens. Us.

To show the hamsters that our fireteam had serious backup, once or twice a day that first week, a couple Buzzards and Chickens flew over at low altitude, circled the village, and resumed heading west. The gesture was supposed to give my unit confidence also, but after we watched the aircraft disappear over the western horizon, it only reminded us how isolated we were.