The Day the War Came

By Sam Cui, aged 16

The crickets chirped outside the window of Mustafa’s room.

It was a quiet Saturday night. Mustafa had just sung his children to sleep. They liked his songs. They said it made them feel calm and comfortable in bed. He wasn’t sure if it was flattery or not, but nevertheless, it made him feel proud.

In a military airbase far away, the crickets chirped outside Marvin’s barrack window. It was a quiet Saturday night, but Marvin didn’t feel calm. “It was just a Saturday night, it’s still Saturday.” He said aloud into the darkness. “Oi, quiet down. I’m trying to sleep,” said his flight leader in the bunk below him. “I can’t. I feel anxious.” Marvin replied. “Everyone feels anxious before his first combat mission.” The man said. “Just try to sleep.” Sleep. Slee…

Sunday, dawn. At 4AM, Marvin was dragged up from bed. Somehow he made his way over to the mess room to have breakfast. Somehow he managed to drag himself to the briefing room and listened absentmindedly to today’s strike plan. Somehow he lumbered over to the equipment storage room and squirmed into his flight gear. He suddenly noticed what he was doing. He was putting his flight jacket on backwards. Marvin shook his head to wake himself up. He stumbled over to the flight line, where his magnificent jet awaited him on the tarmac. There were missiles under the wings this time. Real missiles. After his flight leader’s customary morale-boosting speech, the squad climbed into the fighter jets and rolled towards the runway.

“Trigger 3, clear for takeoff.” A flight of 15 jets took off into the rising sun, thundering defiantly as they soared towards the blue.

The day the war came was when a stray shell landed near the town and exploded. It was close, but not that close. Nobody expected that bombs and rockets to fall onto their streets, into their houses, on a Sunday, to grant them their one-way ticket to heaven, or hell. That was the day when the war came. Nobody in this peaceful Middle-Eastern town expected to be harmed by the war. Yes, they knew that trouble was afoot. It started on the day  they saw their leader announce on the town’s public TV that they would be expanding their territory. After that day, there were times when smoke billowed up on the distant horizon, but they never heard anything. Then, one day, tanks flying their flags rolled past and through the town, as the people cheered them on.

Mustafa woke at first light. His children were still fast asleep. He decided not to wake them up. He decided to get up and get dressed. He decided to go for an early prayer in the Mosque. He made his way to the door. The sky was unusually blue, even by his standards. A good sign. The main street in the town was a bustling and busy one, with peddlers going up and down, shouting relentlessly although it was only early morning. Mustafa was afraid, as he walked by, that they might wake his children. On the left side of the road, Mustafa saw the shops and booths, with newly imported commodities piled up in heaps. In the middle of all, this was a mosque. That was his destination. It was a majestic structure compared to the dirt-packed brick houses he saw beside him. With its golden onion-tipped roof and its four surrounding pillars, it was the most prominent building on the street. On the other side of the road, more dirt-packed and brick walls with some gaping holes doors glared out at the streets. Nothing to note here. The street here is your average Middle-Eastern community, if not made grander by the mosque.

 He took off his shoes and walked into the mosque. It opened onto a courtyard surrounded by porticoes, essentially a roof with pillars supporting them, Mustafa thought. In the middle, were some basins to collect water for some purpose unknown to non-believers. He entered the prayer room and walked towards the wall of the qibla, orientating himself towards the holy place of Mecca. He had had the good luck to visit the city in person and pray at the grand temple. He had prayed for peace and prosperity to come to his family and his country back then. He thought, I should pray for the same thing in these troubled times. People look, but he sees. He saw a blown-up jeep out on the desert, with a soldier who lay dying beside it, his legs nowhere to be seen. He couldn’t help the soldier, only comfort him as the grim and eternal darkness and cold settled over the him. His eyes. Mustafa shook his head. He remembered those eyes too well. It was unsettling to think how the flare of life had escaped through those open sockets, as they looked into his, unseeing, the body growing colder. No. I shouldn’t think of such things, he told himself, and concentrated back on the prayers he was about to deliver.

“Alpha 5, you’ve got a bandit on your six!”

“Alpha 4, bank! Bank!”

“Fox 2!”

“He’s onto me, I can’t shake ‘em! He’s got a lock on me! Alpha 5 Baili…”

“Alpha 5 is down!” Marvin was sweating profusely as he yanked the control stick left and right and listened to the yelling on the radio. Gotcha! He thought as he aligned his plane nose with an enemy aircraft’s exhaust pipe. Suddenly his radar began beeping loudly. “Missile. Missile. Missile. Missile.” The mechanical voice boomed inside the cramped cockpit. His squad leader was yelling something over the radio. It sounded like trigger 3, bail out… He looked up at the rear-view mirror mounted at the top of the canopy. He saw a streak of white smoke.

The only thing that the inhabitants of the town heard was a low, distant rumbling. People rushed out of their houses. A sharp-eyed fellow spotted thirteen distant black dots. One of them was trailing black smoke under its belly. As he shouted in surprise and pointed for the people to see, the dots started to close in and become more prominent in form. Jets. Fighter-bombers and escorts from another place, another nation, made in another country. As more people streamed onto the street, the jets pressed on. Six of them peeled off to the side, three to each side, like a butterfly opening its wings. It was a magnificent sight. Suddenly, the crowd saw smoke trailing and flashes from under another jet’s wings, and rays of light arching towards them. Suddenly the rumbling was upon the town. Houses collapsed as they were racked by explosions, and fires broke out everywhere, as people screamed and ran for cover. The jets were above them, past them now. A survivor glimpsed the mosque, still standing, but then he saw black objects falling from the sky. One landed near him; the rest fell towards the mosque. There was a flash, and he saw no more.

The desolate street, an eerie silence. Survivors and stragglers began to drag themselves out of the ruins, wounds and gashes oozing out a dark red substance. The mosque was gone. The buildings were gone. People stumbled and fell, their faces hit the dirt and never rose again. Two children were shouting and weeping for their father.

One plane crashed in the desert. When some villagers found it, it was already burned black. There was no pilot in the seat. There was no parachute. Just a soot-black helmet, laying sideways on the sand. It had a ‘3’ inscribed on the side of it. Back at the air force base, the commander’s voice sounded over the radio. “…Lastly, I would like us all to rise for a moment of silence to commemorate Trigger 3 and Alpha 5, known as Marvin and Thomas to their friends. They fought valiantly today. They will be remembered.”