A Life Under the Dome
Vega did not want this. Her life was amidst a constant war in a region that knew only conflict it seemed. The Middle East was a festering wound on a bruised world. Now though, there was another. Vega watched a new burn flare up on a television screen in a shop window in the heart of Tel Aviv. She swore she felt the six nuclear weapons' shockwaves reverberate below her feet through the stone road, through the core of the hurting Earth.
The news network airing the footage was in disarray. Repeating on the screen was a clip someone had shot from a far off warship. The flash was incredible and when it relented, the red brown mushroom filled the horizon. Vega’s cellphone rang. She answered it, never taking her eyes off the television. A crowd had accumulated around the shop window, all of them seemingly answering their own calls and texts in a vein attempt to gather information.
“Horbert,” she said into the phone.
It was the military. Everyone was being recalled. Apparently the Israeli government was getting jumpy, worried Palestine would take advantage of the situation… or ISIS, or Rouhani, or the Taliban, or the countless other sects and groups that made this region their violent playground.
Vega vowed long ago that she would fight to defend her country, no matter the cost. After what happened to her family, to her mother, she promised she would bring an end to her people's suffering. The Jewish people always slept with one eye open, ready to fight; ready to defend. But, this was not defending. This was not fighting. This was meaningless slaughter, both here in the Middle East and now on the Korean Peninsula. There was no sense in what was being repeated over and over again on the television. Vega did not want her life to be one of solely fighting for a land that would never see peace, at least not with current politics and tactics.
The Iron Dome was cold and served as a constant reminder that life could end with just a quick bang. Vega did not want to live under a dome. She joined Unit 669 to save people, not kill them, yet that’s all she seemed to be doing as of late.
Vega’s thinking was interrupted by two F-16’s flying low over the city. The whole world was going on high alert. Nuclear silos were ready to open, awaiting the word for mutual mass destruction. The Iron Dome wouldn’t be able to stop that.
Another video clip began to play, this one much closer to ground zero in one of the affected cities. She didn’t know which one it was. It looked to be shot from a suburban house looking towards the city’s downtown. At first, the camera showed a birthday party, filled with children; then the flash came. The camera fell to the ground as it filmed skyscrapers snapping in two and vaporizing. There was no sound with the video but Vega imagined the children screaming in pain from the heat. She clenched her fist in anger and narrowed her eyes in frustrated confusion.
“We best do this to the Iranians before they do it to us!” shouted a man behind her in Hebrew, pointing his cell phone at the television.
Vega hung up on her call and slowly turned around. The man looked right past her at the fires on the screen.
“This will happen to us if we continue to sit by and let them have their uranium. We have to act first!”
His shouting was making an already agitated crowd more uncomfortable. Vega approached him slowly.
“Sir, lower your voice please,” she said calmly. “Your words will not help change anything, at least today.”
The man looked Vega in the eye. He was slightly taller than her and was sweating through his thick black beard. “You want this to happen to us?” he asked in an aggressive tone. “If it happened there, then it will surely happen here one day. And what does our government do? They sit by and let a foreign deal determine our future. Our soldiers - ”
Vega punched the sweating mans throat, kicked the back of his knees and brought him down to the stone road in a headlock. As he choked Vega whispered into his ear.
“Before you speak ill of your country’s own protectors you should know one of them currently has you in a headlock. If you wish what has happened today upon anyone you are no better than those murders who committed this act of genocide. Our people have already been at the center of one genocide, do you really want to be the bearer of another. War has rocked this bloody land for thousands of years.”
Vega tightened her grip around the man’s throat. “More fighting will only thicken that blood and, eventually, you will certainly drown in it. We will all drown in it. Our mission should not be to spread this.”
Vega forced the man to look at the television. “It should be to stop it, at all cost. That’s what it means to be a soldier. You are a savior of men, women, and children, not a destroyer. At least… that’s what it should be.”
With a grunt she released the man from her firm grasp. He fell to the floor choking. Vega stood up. She did not want this hostility. She did not want this anger. She wanted peace in both her life and the world and now, after so long, she realized she would never find it being what she had always lived to be… a soldier.