War pig

This is another short story I wrote a couple of years ago.
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Most pigs don’t get a chance to do more than eat at the trough and run in the mud before their short little lives are over. Bacon, however, was no ordinary pig. He was the runt of the litter, and skinny, to boot. His brothers and sisters (there were six of them, total) were all so much bigger and stronger than he was, and so they got more of their inahin’s milk.

Where the other pigs were destined for lunch or dinner, Bacon found no place in anyone’s comedor. He was the odd pig out, strange in that he didn’t try to taste everything he sniffed. Bacon was a fastidious pig, picking at the trough and wandering about smelling everything he could. But not eating everything. Unless you counted the mangoes that fell from old Pablo’s tree. He loved those.

One day, a man clad all in green and shod in black boots came to Pablo’s Piggery, looking for a small pig — not for a meal, but for a pig “with a keen sense of smell, a pig we can train to sniff for bombs. One that can fit in small spaces. We’re all out of funds for sniffer dogs — they cost so much to buy and feed.”

Pablo, the piggery owner, was more than happy to sell Bacon to the man in green. “Just be sure to feed that one mangoes,” Pablo advised. “He’ll do anything for mangoes, of whatever kind.” The piglet didn’t have much of a future as a meal, after all, and profit was profit and that was that. Into a cage Bacon went, with the man in green, aboard a large truck through which the piglet watched the grass, rice fields and rough roads give way to a place full of men dressed the same way as the man in green clothes and black boots — men who were carrying long, shiny black sticks that went boom now and again.

“Bacon is an unusual name for a pig,” the man who bought Bacon said with a laugh as he picked the piglet up in his big hands and looked him over. “And you’re skinny for a pig. We will need to feed you up and teach you how to be a soldier.”

Bacon wandered the inside of the camp, for that was what he heard the men in green calling the place where he was. He was fed scraps from their table, sometimes fruit when the soldiers had them. He liked fruit, especially mangoes.

Bacon played catch with the soldiers, fetching sticks for slices of crunchy green mangoes. He loved the smell of them. Bacon was taught to smell different things: Leather and different plastics, plants and smelly, vile things that he sneezed mightily at. He was taught the names for these things: C-4, Primacord, TNT, fertilizer bombs, chemical bombs, nitro-glycerin and the plastics these are packed in. Each time he found the things the soldiers asked him to smell, Bacon got a mango, a whole fat mango, all to himself and he would enter hog heaven, snuffling and snorting and scarfing the fruit down, skin bursting to give him worlds and worlds of tart sweetness before he spat out the pip.

The training had made of Bacon a lean pig, a muscular pig, a pig agile of body and quick of mind. He was lean bacon, major bomb sniffing pig, clad in his very own army-green vest with the Philippine flag on its back and embroidery that read: Bomb sniffing Bacon on the back. He wasn’t much bigger than a mongrel dog, but he strutted proudly when called and would strike what was, to him, a snappy pose, his nose in the air: “Major Bacon, ten-hut!”

So it is told in stories and pig snorts back at the farm, where his training master would visit to tell Pablo of Bacon’s growing skill and prowess (his inahin overheard them, being a gossipy sow, and told his fat, lazy siblings just how smart and strong their bunso had become).

Bacon went into the field, at the head of the sweeper teams safeguarding the strike teams that came after them. He sniffed at logs and bags, at hillocks and inside houses. He sniffed out the improvised explosives that would have taken out his human comrades. He was a hero. It was his job description.

He was Bacon, major bomb sniffer, and he was the most macho little cocinillo ever born in his vest and flak harness. Bacon was never destined for human consumption, you see. He was meant to save lives.

Yes, Bacon makes everything better, especially in the fog of war. Long live Bacon, the war pig.