The target

“They told us it was a strategic military target. The drone did its job bombing the buildings of the explosives factory with surgical precision. We are now going to eliminate any possible resistance, taking prisoners if they are survivors”, explained the commandant to the troops. “Be careful searching because the enemy is ready to kill. Don’t hesitate to use your weapons if you are in danger. Understood?”
-Yes, Sir!
-Let’s go, then.
Piotr climbed into a truck with other soldiers to approach the target. He was 19 and never have been in combat before. They told him, back in his village near Moscow, that the Germans had invaded Ukraine and they had to go to help the liberation of their brothers. But since he arrived, he had seen no trace of German troops but instead, Ukrainian troops fighting against them. Everything was so confusing he didn’t know what to think if he was supposed to be allowed to think.
The trunk stopped, and the soldiers jumped down.
The drone had annihilated the place. If there were buildings once, they were no more. Only ruins and debris. No trace of human beings.
They began to advance cautiously, weapons ready to fire at anything that would move.
Piotr heard a familiar sound: a cow mooing.
-This is a farm, not a factory, he thought.
He stepped into something that cracked—a broken doll. Mutilated lying on the dust. He was still looking at that ghostly image when he heard his partner yelling: “Don’t move! And the discharging of an assault rifle. Piotr fell to the muddy ground in fright. But it had been his companion who had fired at something that moved among the ruins.
A faint moan, a quick gasp… Piotr got up and ran towards the pile of rubble, yelling: Noooo!
And there he saw her: another broken doll. But this one was flowing with blood. The girl was no more than eight years old. Her dust-smeared blond hair was still in braids. A white puppy under her lifeless arm barked furiously at him as if it could defend the body of its little owner from the intrusion of the giants in heavy boots, camouflage suits, helmets, and assault rifles who had just taken her life without seeing her even.
Piotr closed the little girl’s eyes, cursed the war, threw down his rifle, and began to run, chased by the shots of his comrades, knowing that he had nowhere to escape from that hell.
His family was told that he had fallen bravely in combat. But they never returned his body to bury it properly. He stayed in the ruins of a farm lost in the countryside that someone marked on the map as an enemy strategic target.

FFFC 214