Archive of Our Own

Kathleen Kennedy Davis was not related to the Kennedys. Her mother, like many Americans, had been swept up in the Kennedy Dynasty nostalgia, that indescribable longing of Americans to have a royal family and participate in the pageantry of leadership spanning generations.

But Kennedy was dead. And, as she sipped burned black sludge that billed itself as coffee and waited, she had to admit his story might be an excellent metaphor for the country that elected him. He was elected to the highest office based off good looks and virile energy; he fucked everything that moved, he set an impossible goal for the country, he actually did it, and he had his head exploded in the middle of a parade of triumph.

“Officer entering!” called the adjutant.

Kathleen, and others with her, snapped to attention in their camouflage fatigues. Her coffee was placed on a side table. Shit, she forgot to mark her styrofoam cup as hers! Now she would have to risk drinking someone else’s, or go without the rest of it.

“At ease,” said the officer with a tired voice, taking a seat at the table. He would have been up for hours already, getting the briefing from the base commander, then selecting the team and the path of attack.

“At 0200 hours,” began the commander, and she snapped into focus. Now was the time to pay attention.

Now was the time to pay attention, she thought, incongruously.

Her bonds, dirty white bedsheets that had been cut into strips, held her firmly against the head of the bed. The laughing men behind her cut strips of her clothing off with a large knife, not bothering to slide the clothes off.

After all, it’s not as if they were seducing her.

These men were drugged, she realized. She had read about the young men recruited to be jihadis, desperate men with no way to feed their families, men told by fat politicians and corrupt businessmen that this was their ticket to Heaven as well as being the way to improve their families’ lot in life. Two birds in one stone, or possibly three: God, Gold, and Glory had sold the conquistadores on heading to the New World, had it not?

The blade reached her abdomen, carelessly drawing a line of fire across her stomach. She hissed with the pain.

But even this pain was nothing like that which would follow.

Kathleen had trained in Arab culture for years to one day work as an interpreter. She understood that every culture had its taboos, and its loopholes. Always, there were men that broke those taboos: oil princes, political fixers, lovers of young girls and boys. Caligula came from somewhere, after all, and his madness still ran deep under the surface of Western Civilization. And if that was so, would Arab Civilization not have its own share of darkness?

She knew all this at a distance, in an abstract sense. But she had never experienced how thoroughly vile the men who broke the rules were in person.

Her legs were spread forcibly, and then, without warning, foreplay, or lube, the first man entered her.

It was a very long afternoon, followed by a very long night.

They showed her an entirely new world. She had never been quick to condemn the ways of the jihadis, as cultural training always stressed acceptance of the ways of other people. How could a translator be a good translator without deep understanding? So she had understood, even as some part of her was uneasy, that the West was somewhat unique in discarding rape as spoils of war, even that some UN soldiers had secretly gone back to it, and that jihadis who claimed what their right hands possessed were not uniquely brutal or evil in the world she lived in.

But in this squalid hut, with her body bleeding from a half-dozen cuts, her virginal blood smeared across her legs, her attackers’ cum filling her holes, she knew with certainty that she had been wrong. The men joked easily, cruelly, about how the Americans sent maidens into the field to accept their dicks and show them the way to Heaven, that they were right to sign up for the jihad if it meant free pussy, that they would fuck and conquer America as easily as they had intercepted and conquered and fucked her. It was even funnier to them when they realized she understood, as if it was the punchline to a great cosmic joke.

“College degree?” one man said, smelling of sweat and amphetamines. “You have college degree? You study hard to put on soldier’s costume, come here, get captured, spread your legs, and get fucked?” He spent the rest of the night giggling about it. Occasionally he would mutter, “college degree” as he thrust into her. He spent extra attention on her after that — not that he got gentler, but he was more sure to probe every inch of her body, as if a woman with a college degree was an alien specimen, a true rarity, and he wanted to commit all of her to his memory. His close scrutiny was sickening, and she held her heart in her mouth hoping that he would treat her better, as if he would find some detail that reminded him that she, too, was human. As if he would cut her bonds and feed her soup and nurse her back to health. She remembered, afterward, hoping for his approval, and that was even more sickening.

Her instructors had been wrong. The entire premise of the field of Cultural Studies was wrong.

Nothing that produced this outcome could be accepted.

With an effort of will, Kathleen pushed down the memories. They would be back, of course. They always came back, and with them, her fear that one day, the men themselves would come back. She was discharged from her field team, the entire incident pushed under as many layers of bland and bureaucratic wording as possible. She was given a Purple Heart.

But it was not enough. It would never be enough to fill what was taken from her, to cover her shame. The gazes of other soldiers were burning pinpricks, staring into her and through her from a great distance like the Eye of Sauron. They didn’t know — they couldn’t — but she imagined they knew, that they were silently judging her, and it was horrible. What was I supposed to do? Die? Would it be better if I did?

Civilian life was even worse: people mouthed empty platitudes about “her sacrifice,” not knowing what had been torn from her, and went about their pot-bellied, intoxicated lives, unaware of the true face of the world. She grew to hate alcohol, ironically something that made her have more in common with the jihadis, and she hated the fact that they could agree on anything. The pretense of civilian society became grating, unbearable, the “Have a nice day!” and casual “Bless her heart” of it all. People saying things they didn’t mean, to hide hearts full of envy, greed, and lust for their neighbors. People sending studious, inquisitive girls out into the wilds to be torn to pieces to defend a disgusting day-to-day life that wasn’t even worth defending.

So she went back. Not to the front lines, of course. Not to the Army. No more forward bases for her, no running around in the dusty desert with recon teams, no translating illiterate peasants’ demands for hot food and water and generators, as if American soldiers were actually jinn who could make anything appear by waving their hands, bound by arcane rules not to just take what they wanted.

Kathleen reenlisted as a drone operator.

The men began to whisper about her.

She was the angry crocodile, the demon of the Nile, man-eating devourer of the dead. Never mind that the Nile was over 100 kilometres from their theatre of operations; never mind that it was an Egyptian cultural reference as opposed to an Arab or a Palestinian or Jordanian one. To the soldiers from the West, who needed an angry crocodile goddess (or demon) to label her with, this one fit the bill.

The Italian soldiers attached to her company had the strangest sense of humour about it. Somehow they had heard the Americans talking, and put their own spin on it.

“Bombardiro Crocodilo,” they began calling her. Sometimes they left little relics, small toy or model airplanes that had been modified to have the head of a crocodile.

It was meant as a testament to her lethality, she knew. She was very good at her job. She hunted down insurgents as if it was personal, which it most definitely was, and eradicated them with bombs like the fist of an angry god.

There were those that whispered that there was a denigrating side to this title as well. That it implied she was less than human. She would smile and thank them for looking out for her, and explain that this was war, and if a few weird names made her fellow soldiers get through the day, why, she was willing to be called somewhat strange names, as long as they had positive aspects.

And sometimes, in the dead of night, when she relaxed in the only way left to her, she would smile a cruel, jagged smile. They were right. She was something other than human.