The Cannon Fodder Generation: The Ballad of Timmy

By Thomas Miller
Timmy wasn’t dumb, not really—just shaped that way by the world. He could lift an engine block but couldn’t spell “engine.” He believed what he was told, every last pixel of it. That made him perfect.
By 2037, the rich had gone to the moon colonies. The clever had gone underground. What was left was the new army—kids raised on short clips, sugar, and screens. They called it Peacekeeping Mission 29, but everyone knew it was World War III wearing a different hat.
When the recruiters came to the high school with free pizza, Timmy thought it was the best day of his life. They promised travel, honor, “hero status.” He signed his name with a grin and a greasy fingerprint. He didn’t ask where the war was. Didn’t ask who started it. He just wanted to belong—and belonging was enough.
They didn’t train him the old way. No drills, no maps, no history lessons. Just a headset. “It’s like your favorite game,” they said, “only real.” Timmy smiled wide. His kind of war. The news called them The Brave Ones. Behind closed doors, they called them what they really were—Cannon Fodder.
Civics was gone. Literature, replaced with AI summaries. Thinking for yourself? Too political. They didn’t need thinkers anymore. They needed bodies that followed orders and reloaded fast. And Timmy was good at both. He believed the screen. He believed the flag. He believed the voice that told him who the enemy was this week.
He didn’t know what country he was in when the missile hit. Didn’t know why the villagers screamed at the flag on his shoulder. He thought they were cheering. Then the air turned red. The noise became something alive. Joey—his best friend, barely eighteen—was hit in the face. A clean hole. Timmy just stood there, rifle shaking. “We were the good guys, right?” he asked. No one answered.
Back home, the parades rolled on. Plastic flags. Plastic smiles. The paper called him a hero. “Local Boy Serves Proudly Overseas.” His mother cried every night waiting for a letter that never came. Online, his picture went viral. #BraveTimmy trended for a week. But nobody remembered the boy himself. He wasn’t a hero. He was a headline. And headlines fade.
The night the sky split open, Timmy pulled out his cracked phone. His face was half in shadow, eyes wide like a child again. “Hey,” he whispered. “It’s me. Timmy. I think we were lied to. They said it’d be like a game. Said we were fighting for freedom. But I don’t even know what that means anymore. I just want to go home. If there’s a home left.”
He hit upload. The signal blinked. The drone strike came a second later. The sky burned white. The video never reached anyone. The satellite fried first. Then Timmy.
They called them brave. But bravery without wisdom is just obedience dressed in flags. They marched the Cannon Fodder Generation straight into the teeth of the machine—kids who knew how to shoot but not why. Raised to consume, not question. Fed dopamine instead of truth.
And in towers far above the noise, the architects of it all watched from their filtered domes, sipping imported air, whispering to one another, “As long as they’re too dumb to ask why, they’ll never say no.”