I read on.
This was my doing, and I’ll take care of the baby. Know this, I’ll love the child more than enough for two parents.
Perhaps it would have worked out differently in the end if you’d stayed. I know I lied to you, and you may never forgive me for that. But that’s history, and who knows what the future holds; I don’t.
I’m sorry you’re there, and I’m sorry I may not be here when you return. If I’m not, it means I got caught up in the mess I created. And I don’t want you involved in any of it. So, please don’t try to find me.
Just know this, when our child is old enough to understand, I’ll tell him or her about you. Maybe he or she will want to meet you. If so, I’ll make sure you meet.
I pray you being a daddy will provide you with a purpose to survive that Hell you’re in.
Be careful and come home in one piece. And please pursue your dreams and get your degree.
I will always love you,
Sara
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Having just left chow which I couldn’t eat, my body was numb from the cold walk to my tent, and my mind whirled from Sara’s letter. I sat on my cot in our tent near the just completed runway putting on a second pair of socks.
I was going to be a daddy. I had trouble grasping what that meant. At eighteen, I wasn’t ready to be a father. But I hadn’t been ready to be a Marine or a killer either. I guess that’s what life did to you. You adjusted to whatever it threw your way. That had been the sum of my experiences so far.
A daddy. Was I supposed to feel different? Feel anything? The thought of being a father was so foreign. It was as if it were happening to someone else. Not me.
Sara and I had been careful. Apart from that first time. Or so I’d thought. What did I know? It’d been almost four months since I’d enlisted. She had to have gotten pregnant just before I joined the Marines or she would’ve known about this before I shipped out. If my assumptions were correct, the baby would be born next spring.
Sara had to be showing.
“How did this happen?” I wanted to say out loud to no one in particular. Just to get it out. Maybe if I shouted it, the words would carry off some of my anxiety, which I sure in the hell didn’t need any more of in this land of death.
Sara said the news was supposed to give me something to hang on to, a purpose. Closing my eyes, I tried to imagine what it would be like to hold a tiny human being in my arms. A baby boy or girl, a life Sara and I had created. Just the thought of me creating a life overwhelmed me.
But Sara’s letter wasn’t about her handing me a baby to hold, or us loving it together. Her letter—
“Hey, man, you alright?” Sculini asked pushed up on an elbow on an adjacent bunk, staring at me.
I wasn’t alright, but I didn’t know what to say. I nodded.
Gunny stuck his head through the tent flap. “You boys pack up, we didn’t come here to sunbathe, company’s re-taking East Hill tonight. We’ll meet at the base of Blue Hill in fifteen minutes.”
His words pushed my jumbled thoughts aside. I’d save my attempts to conjure up what it’d be like to be a father for when I needed to get my mind off the constant cold.
“But . . . but the Chinese occupy that hill,” said Smith, a stout Ohio kid, with half of an ear missing from frostbite.
“That’s why they call it re-taking,” Gunny cracked.
My trembling hand dropped a sock. We were being ordered up a damn hill held by who knew how many Chinese. I was never going to get to see, hear, or touch my child.
“Gunny, I hope I live long enough to one day hear some good news from you,” Sculini said.
“Me too.” Gunny’s head slid out of the flap opening.
Wordless, we all packed and headed for Hill Blue, which someone had nicknamed Blueberry Hill, after the Glen Miller hit. It had begun to snow.
By the time we joined the rest of the company at the foot of Blueberry Hill, the sun had set. In addition to the diminishing light, it was snowing so hard you couldn’t see ten paces.
“Gather round, men,” Gunny yelled. “Captain Chalmers has a few words.”
I had only seen our captain a couple of times, and although I couldn’t recall his name, this wasn’t him, this guy was much shorter. Word was our previous commander had been hit on the trip up here, through what someone had since named the ‘Hell Fire Valley’ on the Main Supply Route.
I was probably fifteen to twenty feet from the captain, and, in the dim light of his map reader, all I could see in the near white-out was a bundled body under a helmet.
“Gentlemen, we need this airfield. The only way to keep it operable is to take control of East Hill. And that’s what we’re going to do.
“Drydale’s 41 Commandos will take the right flank and Company B of the 31st Infantry will take the left flank. And we, gentlemen, will assault the southern face.
“Platoon A on the left, B in the middle, and C on the right. Platoon D will be held in reserve. This will be a Class Three assault. There should be plenty of holes on that hill; so go hole to hole with cover fire. You know the drill.
“Our artillery barrage will commence,” he glanced at his wrist, “in thirty minutes and last for fifteen. Lieutenants, in the next twenty minutes position your men in the drainage ditch at the base of the hill. The attack will begin fifty minutes from . . . time check . . . now. Godspeed.”
“What the fuck?” Tony whispered, standing next to me as the company divided into platoons.
My mind was such a jumbled mess of emotions interspersed with overwhelming waves of fear of whatever awaited us on that friggin’ hill that I hadn’t noticed him.
I’d been lucky to survive defending holes in the ground. I had never assaulted anything. I killed assaulters, lots of them. They were targets in the open, climbing a hill; easy targets.
“Why is our platoon in the middle of a frontal charge going up that fuckin’ hill crawlin’ with Chinese Regulars?” Tony asked rhetorically. “It ain’t fair.”
He didn’t need me dragging him down any further. “Based upon how those bastards who attacked us on the MSR were dressed, I’d be willing to bet that over half of them are either frozen to death or suffering from frostbite by now.”
“Ya got a point, Mick.”
“And I sure wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of what our artillery can shell out. No way. We’ll probably walk up that hill.”
Tony nodded though he’d clamped down on his lower lip.
In the light of Sarge’s flashlight, I glanced around as our platoon formed up, and I was surprised to see that we were almost at full strength. But then I noticed the man who had cooked my chow, several of the truck drivers who’d survived the trip up the MSR, plus men from supplies, graves’ detail, and the aid station; all armed for combat. Command was utilizing every available man. I wouldn’t have been surprised if I saw a chaplain with a rifle.
Huffing and puffing steam clouds, roughly twenty minutes later, our platoon was in the drainage ditch Gunny said was about a hundred yards from the base of East Hill. We couldn’t see anything.
I hated sitting on the frozen ground and waiting in the darkness. Nothing but time on my hands, time for my self-control to wrestle with my fears about the damned assault. Time to think about Sara back home, possibly on the run by herself and pregnant.
“Mick, do you believe in God?” Tony whispered, breaking a long silence.
I thought about all the bloodshed. About holding Frankie’s dead body. About mowing down row after row of soldiers, men like me, fighting for a different master, but men just the same. “I don’t know. It’s not a good time.” I took a breath. The man was nervous; he needed to talk. “I’ll tell you what I do believe in; I sure enough believe in Hell. Just look around you.”
“This is the perfect time to discuss God. We could die tonight.”
“We could die any night. But tonight I gotta stay alive.” I normally kept my personal life private. But secrets held no value when your
tomorrows were questionable. “I’m gonna be a daddy.”
“What?” Tony’s voice raised an octave. “Wow! I didn’t even know you were married.”
Maybe I should’ve kept the subject to myself. “Uh, I’m not. But regardless, I’m going to have a child. Me . . . a dad,” my voice had dropped to almost a whisper. “This is big.”
“Fuckin’-aa. So you gonna get married when you get home leave?”
I hadn’t thought this though at all. “Home leave?” I asked trying to dodge the subject. “What’s that?”
“Whenever we get back, I expect a wedding invite.”
“Sure.” As if there was much chance of any of that happening.
“Hey, you two chatterboxes, shut the fuck up,” a nearby voice called out of the darkness.
Thank you, whoever you are.
There couldn’t be much time left until the barrage. Then I had maybe fifteen to twenty minutes before—I wondered what it felt like to get shot. Was there life after death? Maybe Tony was—big guns boomed in the distance, and then shells whistled over our heads, followed by grounding–shaking explosions.
My reaction to shelling was always the same; I tried to get my whole shaking body under my helmet.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Though the ground-shaking shelling made me clench my teeth, I hoped the barrage would continue until there was nothing left alive on East Hill.
Then, fifteen minutes of brain-jarring blasts later, the silence followed until the dreaded, hushed command of “Forward” was passed down the line.
The heavy snow continued to fall. I climbed out of the ditch, like all of the other abominable snowmen around me, and moved toward the hill. Hunkered over in a crouch, I foot-felt my way in the dark. I prayed the Chinese couldn’t see either. But I knew they knew we were coming. Men always followed a barrage.
I got to the base of the hill and started climbing on trembling legs, my boots slipping in the snow. The locked and loaded BAR seemed extra heavy tonight.
The noise of hundreds of boots crushing snow seemed so loud to me. The enemy had to hear us.
My hands were shaking worse than ever, when the shit started, and it would, I doubted if I could aim my rifle.
Five minutes, maybe ten, passed, and we had to be close to half way up this fucking hill. As I climbed, I checked for cover in what little terrain I could see. Everything was white, the ground, the sky. The white blended together such that at one point I wasn’t sure if I was going up or down. My inner ear was confused by what I couldn’t see. There weren’t any apparent places to hide at the bottom, but the higher we got the more shell craters appeared, many brownish-black holes in the whiteness.
The line of snow-covered Marines continued upward, crunch, crunch, crunch.
Our orders were not to fire until fired upon. And I was sure the enemy had the same orders we always had when defending a hill; don’t fire until commanded. And that command never came until the enemy was close enough to slaughter.
How in the hell would we see the enemy? With this extremely limited visibility, we’d be on top of them before we saw them. This was suicide.
Crunch, crunch, crunch; each numb step closer to the waiting death.
I had to think about something else.
I wondered what Sara would name the child? I doubted I’d ever get a chance to offer any suggestions.
We had to be near the top.
Focus, Mick, focus.
But if I got the chance, and it was a boy, I would like to name him Randall, my Dad’s middle name. That’d be cool.
God I was cold.
If a girl, well that’d be up to Sara. I’d known a girl named Andi, and I thought that was neat.
Flares lit up the white skies above us, and I dropped into the snow. Heavy machine-gun fire erupted from all directions above us.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
I rolled into a nearby shell crater, already occupied by a Marine. Then a body thudded into me.
“Make room, Mick,” Tony said.
“Even with the flares, in all this snow, how can those gooks see anything?” I asked, as I pushed over against the stranger to make room. “I can’t see their gun flashes. How can they see us? They must be firing blindly.”
“Shit, they’re as scared as we are,” the unknown grunt said next to me.
Just the thought of them being scared too, for some reason, calmed my nerves. But when the mortar rounds started exploding just below us, my shakes went into double time. I knew the Chinese would walk the shells up the hill.
“Charge,” someone yelled.
Tony and I glanced at each other. This was it. What the fuck difference did it make. It was either death by mortars or gunfire.
The grunt next to me stood up and ran up the hill.
Tony and I followed.
Running in the thick snow up hill, carrying a heavy weapon and what seemed to be tons of ammunition, was like trying to run up a dung hill with my dad on my back.
Snow was kicking up all around me. Then I saw what I both feared and sought, gun flashes from above.
They could see us.
And I could see them.
I tripped over a body and fell.
I eased the body over in the red snow. It was the grunt that I’d shared a hole with seconds ago. He had multiple chest wounds and was dead.
“Sorry, buddy,” I said as I slid down behind the dead Marine and started firing my BAR in spurts at the flashes. Tony dropped next to me, also using the grunt’s body as a shield.
A grenade exploded close by covering us in snow and dirt.
More flares ignited overhead, and I could actually see enemy soldiers firing machine guns from their hole above us. We were that close; too damn close.
“Cover me, Mick” Tony yelled.
I sprayed a slow arc of shots at the Chinese gunners as Tony rose to his knees, lobed a grenade, and dropped to his belly.
We ducked below our dead comrade just before the hand-tossed bomb exploded. We’d need to find new cover.
I peeked and, in the light of another flare, saw a tangle of bodies and body-parts yards in front of us.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Great throw.”
Bullets thudded into the dead Marine’s body. We had become a target for a burp gun shooting gook in another hole just left of the now silenced machine gunners.
I slammed a fresh mag in and methodically returned the fire.
Tony looked over his shoulder. “Fuck, the gooks are walking the mortars up the hill. What’ll we do”
I glanced left and then right. There was shell crater five yards away up the hill, closer to the enemy defenses on the crown of the hill.
“Shoulder your weapon, and let’s try to slide our friend in front of us to that hole to your right.”
“Okay.”
The heavy snow made sliding the dead Marine somewhat easy for the adrenaline-filled Tony and me. Countless bullets pounded into the dead man’s body.
We dropped into the hole leaving the body above us.
Tony and I picked separate targets and threw grenades.
The explosions eliminated the enemy in our immediate front.
We picked new muzzle flashes to shoot at. There were many.
I stole a second to scan our flanks. There were Marines all around us in holes firing and lobbing grenades.
Snow, dirt, and body parts were flying all around us as the Chinese lit up the snow-hazed sky with flares, fired burp guns, and tossed grenades down the hill. And their mortars kept coming closer and closer. It was either advance or die.
Tony and I lobed grenades up the hill in between firing rounds at the Chinese replacements who had filled the holes we had quieted minutes early. And I was nearly out of grenades.
The sky over the left side at the top of East Hill was lit up by dozens of flares. The enemy’s intense focus on us shifted, pulling my attention left as well.
There was a rush of Chi
nese on the left side of the hill, many leaving, others charging, as the 41 Royal Commandos crushed the flank and routed the Chinese.
I concentrated my fire on the charging Chinese. If the Commandos were successful, we could take the hill.
The enemy’s mortar fire, that had been creeping up the hill toward us, swung left into the British advance. Then a huge swarm of Chinese rushed the Commandos and pushed them off the hill, but at an extreme price. Dead Chinese soldiers covered the snow on the left side of the top of East Hill.
Then the Chinese mortar fire was adjusted to concentrate on the right side of the hill. Company B of the 31st Infantry must have been pressing the flank.
Someone yelled “Charge”, and I did, as did all of the Marines on the face of the hill.
More Chinese took up positions on the top of the hill, and to avoid certain death from their intense fire, I dove back into the crater hole I had just left.
Marine bodies dotted the terrain close to the top.
A whistle blew and hand-signals were given to withdraw.
I slid down the hill to another crater and reloaded.
I crawled to the top of the hole and sprayed covering fire at the mass of Chinese on top of the hill as other Marines retreated. Ten or twelve of the enemy decided to charge the withdrawing Marines. My rounds dropped several of them while the remaining dove for cover.
Our withdrawal plan, like our advance, was working; half the fire teams found cover and then provided cover fire for others as they retreated, each man with a firing zone.
My hand searched for a mag. “Tony!” Where was Tony?
I looked around and—oh shit—I couldn’t see him.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
Fumbling my last magazine into the BAR, I sprayed rounds at the enemy positions immediately in front of me.
More flares went off, and then I saw Tony, just above my position, snaking on his belly toward me.
A Chinese soldier, with his bayonet fixed, popped out of a hole and ran down the slope toward Tony.
Mickey's Wars Page 10
