A.K Broznitsky (he/him) // Contributor
He had joined the people’s army young, enlisting as soon as he turned of age. He wanted to serve his country and his leader, who he had admired ever since he was a young boy. After a year he had finished basic training and became a private. With his uniform nicely pressed, rank insignia glittering in the sunlight, he and his fellow soldiers marched a military parade, the leader watching on and the people cheering. The young soldier had been so filled with pride that day.
His assignment was at the nation’s biggest prison, a place where the most degenerate of criminals and the most dangerous of radicals were kept locked up, away from the innocent citizens of the nation. It took everything within him not to shoot them when he first saw them, those wretched creatures in their rags, hair wild, nails dirty, teeth yellow, bodies gaunt and pale. They were lower than the prisoners of war captured during the ongoing conquests. They were once citizens that had turned from their duty of upholding the nation’s values and instead had stolen, murdered and spread lies about the land of his ancestors. He practically jumped at the chance to be put into the firing squad rotation. There, alongside four of his compatriots, he served his nation, putting an end to the misery of whoever the leader or the high command deemed deserving.
Whenever a firing squad carries out its duty, of the five men assigned, one is given a blank. This is so that members of the squad can always maintain some amount of innocence, to keep their conscience clean. What the young soldier did not know is that for every execution he was present for, by some sheer luck, he had always received the blank. Some cosmic force had ordained that he, amongst the other guards of the prison, would remain innocent.
This innocence continued, unrealized by the young soldier. When the execution of the seven men and women who had stood in protest in front of a column of tanks had been televised, the young soldier’s rifle had a blank. When the leader had finally caught the mastermind behind the revolution, the rifle bucked in his hands like it had fired a real round. Even when a prison riot boiled over into a prison break, the young soldier had arrived late, and was never able to fire off a single shot.
When the frontline broke and the nation went on the defensive, his rifle remained fully loaded but never fired, resting on his shoulder as he stood watch outside the prison. When the revolutionaries and their foreign coalition allies closed in and the warden ordered the execution of the remaining prisoners, he had by chance been assigned to guard the evacuating staff, and so wasn’t present for the hasty killings. When the invading force had finally cornered the last holdouts of the people’s army, his commanding officer had ordered him and the rest of his platoon to surrender. He had handed over his rifle to the stern-faced coalition soldier, magazine full.
The prisoners, the degenerates and the thieves and the traitors, were set free. The trial of the high command began, and he watched from the television in the coalition prison camp as each and every one of them denied their actions and blamed their superiors. With a dry mouth, he and his compatriots watched in silence as a coalition report showed the leader, the man who had united the nation and forged into the greatest empire the world had ever seen, being grabbed by a screaming mob of revolutionaries and lynched. His body was dragged through the streets, down the same street that he had marched down all that time ago, with the same crowd cheering.
He, alongside a few hundred other soldiers of the people’s army, was marked as one who had committed “war crimes,” for which the punishment was death. There was no trial. In long lines they were led en masse by the revolutionaries to the same wall he had fired blanks at. He watched as each man ahead of him was led to the pockmarked surface, blindfolded, shot and dragged away. When it was his turn, nothing special occurred.
They marched him to the wall, tied a rag around his eyes, then left. He stood there, his breathing uncontrollably shallow as he hyperventilated, hearing the revolutionary captain order his men to ready their weapons, aim…
He had never fired a single shot, never really killed anyone, never really committed any of those crimes they accused him of. Surely there had been a reason to keep his hands clean? Surely whatever cosmic force had ordained him to always receive a blank would spare him, right?
The revolutionaries fired. None of their rifles contained blanks.