The enemy had captured Pvt. Alice Brown and Abda while they were hiding in an irrigation ditch, up to their noses in freezing, dirty, bug infested water. She, an American soldier, had been driving a 10 wheel (2 1/2 ton truck) in a convoy headed up to a village in a steep canyon, east of Jalalabad, Afghanistan. Her truck was hauling bottles of water and a water filtration plant, along with various food items. They were supposedly the relief column after much of the village had been covered by ice and rocks in a slide.

There were six other trucks, with armed vehicles in front and in back. They were supposed to have air support, but the weather ceiling was right on the deck so they couldn’t get to them. The new” see through anything aircraft instrumentation” boys were supposed to have been here, but they were late getting out of Germany. The V-22 IV’s had been greatly improved, and then they mounted special equipment and the word was that only a Tornado would stop them. They were supposed to sport a new gun with ultra-accurate, but slow fire, where one round would take care of business, rather than a burst of 30 cal. Hmmm, that remained to be seen.

You’d think that after more than 22 years fighting in Afghanistan that we would have better weapons. HMMMM

The closing down of the weather was a surprise, but there was no place to turn around, so for now they warily trudged on, hoping for the best.

The first Alice knew there was trouble is that her truck ran into the back of the truck in front because it suddenly stopped. The next thing that happened was an AK was pointing at her, and the man behind it, speaking broken English, ordered Alice out. There was shooting and yelling up front. It looked like the enemy had gotten the drop on them.

And many of those behind Alice in the convoy were captured too. As soon as the man holding the gun on her seemed a little distracted, she dropped to her belly, rolling under the truck and out the other side. She looked around a little before jumping to her feet and running, then dropped to roll under another truck. As she rolled to her feet on the other side of the vehicle, her left breast struck a frame member and the pain was like getting kicked in the balls. Yeah, she knew how both felt because she had transitioned MtF in College. The job climate was so bad that she had to go into the Military almost right away. Officially, discrimination between men and women was outlawed, and especially with so called T folk, but they seemed to just love putting pseudo women to the test. So, she got Artillery, and as soon as they saw her in Afghanistan, they put Alice over in headquarters on convoy duty, where she’d likely die in the first week.

As the pain eased, she ran for it. Knowing that there was no civilization behind her, she tried to work her way around the chaos, and toward the village they’d passed along the way. Her scarf might gain her a little safety, but she needed to get her uniform covered as soon as possible or she’d be dead. One of those blue Burqas would be the best maybe. The Geneva convention only worked when both sides observed it.

It seemed a miracle that an hour or two later, she made it to the outskirts of a village, the weather having cleared some, she found a partially collapsed home and ducked inside. That is where she found Abda and as soon as she saw Alice, she became very excited and hugged her but then insisted that Alice put on a Burqa. After listening to her a while, Private Brown began to understand a few words in the language and vowed that if she ever got out of this, to look up her language teacher and tell them how lousy they were at teaching the Afghan language.

The two had been keeping quiet in the half-collapsed stone and mud hut when they heard shouting and some shooting. Peeking out the doorway, they fearfully watched the enemy marching some of our troops into the village. As they came on, Abda led Alice out through a hole in the back wall and out into a grain field. They snuck along for a while but then one of the enemy sighted us and began yelling; running after us. Survival was unlikely, but despite the cold weather, they ducked into a flooded ditch to try to hide. He immediately walked right up to them, ordering the women out.

He marched both women into a hut that was occupied by several other women and children. Inside, he spotted Alice’s military boots and immediately stripped off her Burqa. “Infidel woman, I will have you before I cut your neck”. His smile was sickening.

Alice was already confused due to Hypothermia.

He stepped outside, while still watching them and shouted something to another fighter.

In the back of her terrorized mind, Alice dimly listened to a dull thrumming that she’d heard before, but could not place.

The man was no longer alone when he came back in. “Remove your cloths”, He said to Alice in heavily accented English. Considering the circumstances, Alice did not feel that cooperative, in spite of her foggy mental state, so decided to try to escape. She stood up as if to undress and then punched the guy square in the face, forgetting all her killing punches to the nose or to the throat. He went down but before she could get to the door, the other fighter hit her on the head with his AK-47.

She wakened to find that her pants were partially gone, around her ankles, and she was face down, with her rear in the air, on the dirt floor of the mud building. Her hands were now tied behind her, and the man had just mounted her, painfully probing at her sex. “Well, at least I will die a real woman, I guess”, She dimly thought to herself.

As consciousness left her, the distant thrumming was much nearer, and then were slow “pops” from the armament, she supposed. As she drifted off, she realized that she was hearing the Raptor IV and those silly pops were the new doomsday weapon.

“Well, at least I’ll get a proper burial”, was her last thought.

Later, as soldiers were picking up their wounded, they found Alice, still with the Afghan on top of her. She was bleeding heavily from her vagina, a serious looking neck wound and another wound on the side of her head. At first the medic thought she was dead, but his life sign unit said that was not so.

“Here, help me get this asshole off her and get her into the “V”. Maybe we can save her”.

Epilogue.

The IV hooked to her arm was jokingly said to "make a broom handle sprout". With short stops at her base, Germany, and finally the US, she was finally in the OR, to repair her wounds as much as possible. In Alice's case, that meant healing her neck wound, and a brand new 3D printed set of fully functional female organs.

Three months later, a smiling Alice walked out of the hospital, having survived her first period. She felt empowered to have the real thing in her but felt very unsure that she would have chosen to have menses. She wasn't so sure that the menses weren't a bit of revenge on the part of the woman who invented the printed versions of the organs and made them work, um "fully".

A year and a half later, Private, now Lieutenant Alice Brown piloted her V-22 VI into a different village in Afghanistan to provide relief to an area greatly damaged by a 9.0 Quake. The war was effectively ended while Alice was still in training, but even so, the weapons in her aircraft were HOT, and would remain so even when they were on the ground. The equipment had already ALERTED twice on livestock on the way in.

It seemed odd to see both Russian and Chinese soldiers working alongside Western medical troops trying to find survivors. The full story was not out yet but the arrival of an emissary at the UN from an unknown place seemed to have the world quivering ...

The end.