January Dawn

by Cody Lennon

  Before I could force my entire weight down onto the knife, I felt the blunt blow of someone’s boot on the side of my head. The world went dark.

  When I came to a few seconds later, I heard the soldier sitting across my chest say, “I’m going to bleed you dry,” as he placed my own knife to my neck.

  “Enough!” The Yankee Sergeant said. “You’ll do no such thing. Cuff him and bring them both back to the Captain. We’ll send them back to division on the next truck.”

  The soldier was disappointed at this command. As he stood, he slyly sliced the side of my neck with the serrated edge of the blade. A blanket of blood oozed from the cut, coating my shoulder in sticky gore.

  “You piece of shit,” the soldier said, with a charged kick to my groin. I rolled over in agony as another soldier cuffed my hands behind my back.

  They dragged me to my feet as three grenades landed at our feet, pouring out clouds of white smoke. By the markings, I knew they were Confederate smoke grenades. I hit the floor knowing that the bullets would be coming next.

  Rifle fire erupted from the surrounding darkness. The Yankees screamed and scattered as they were cut down one by one. I could hear the bullets whizzing a few feet above me. It was almost beautiful seeing the brilliant flashes of yellow and red light from the tracer rounds piercing the wall of the smoke.

  The Yankee soldier that cut my neck attempted to flee, but tripped over me as he turned to run. A bullet caught him in the ear during his fall. His lifeless body flopped on top of me. His troubles were over.

  In less than a minute, the smoke cleared and all the Yankees were dead or wounded. Alex, Shannon and Junior rushed in to free us.

  “You okay?” Alex asked, while freeing me from my cuffs.

  “Yeah, we heard you were overrun. We came to help.”

  “You’re doing a fine job of it.”

  I stood and looked over at Hayes’ bloodied body. I hope it was quick.

  “We engaged them right here. They stood up right out of the darkness and caught us in an ambush. Hayes was hit right off the bat,” Alex said. “There wasn’t enough of us. I radioed for help, but our connection was down. I sent Beau to get some help. We had no choice but to fall back. They followed and we fought them off. If we didn’t play dead when we did, their second push would have ended us. After they passed, we heard you guys tussling and we came running.”

  “Beauregard’s dead,” I said.

  “What?”

  “He found us and we were coming to help and he got shot in the leg. He was fine until he jumped on a grenade to save me and Carrigan,” I said painfully.

  “Hayes and Beauregard. Two of our best. Gone,” Junior said. Three. Elroy.

  It was only when I went to collect Hayes’ dog tag that I noticed something clutched in his hand. I pried loose his stiff fingers and found his uncle’s medal. It was covered in blood. I let it be. He got his wish and died for the country he loved. We could all be so lucky, as Hayes would use to say.

  “Teague wants to see you. The attack’s not going as planned.”

  “Why Teague? Where’s Elroy?”

  “He’s dead too. No time to explain. Let’s go.”

  Teague’s reconnaissance reports were wrong. The enemy had had an interlocking system of machine gun bunkers manned by a whole battalion of over five hundred men. Nearly five times what was presumed to be there.

  By morning, the Ninth secured the riverbank and got the rest of the division across the bridge. The assault succeeded, but at a great cost. Echo Company lost a quarter of its strength, including my buddies Beauregard and Hayes and our beloved Captain Elroy.

  Alpha suffered heavy casualties as well. Charlie Company fared the best. The Yankees had the railroad bridge wired with explosives. When Charlie tried to cross, it exploded, taking twenty men down with it. They fell back and waited in line to board the boats to cross the river. By the time they made it across, the battle was nearly over.

  It wasn’t a minute after the last enemy machine gun nest was cleared out when we gathered in formation and continued marching on. We didn’t need to be reminded that it was a foot race now that the cat was out of the bag.

  The mental marathon that is war was quickly bringing us to our knees. I battled the elements and the environment, fought off sleep deprivation and hunger and thirst, but my body was somehow finding a way to keep moving. It was all I had ever done. My whole life was a struggle for existence, fighting day by day.

  However exhausted my body felt, it was my mind that was reeling the most. It was pulling me down like an anchor. The deaths of my friends rattled and unnerved me, but I chose to keep fighting, so they did not die in vain. I told myself that I could not dwell on their deaths, or the anger that followed. Instead, I had to fight on, to celebrate their life and carry on the visions and dreams we once shared together. Hate would not rule me.

  We cannot fall so deep into despair that we believe that death is the only product of war. There has to be something more. Something good. Something worth all of this sacrifice.

  There’s no rest for the weary, I heard someone say as we marched.

  Only nineteen more miles.

  Chapter 18

  May 30

  Savannah was bare and smashed and beaten halfway to oblivion. Blocks upon blocks of rubble lined the streets. We marched with sullen hearts as our eyes were treated with the smoldering ruins of the very city we had been trying to save for so many weeks. A few buildings did survive. They were lone memorials to a time long passed. This was not the city I remembered.

  Operation Arrow Head ended in failure. The Ninth drove a spike three miles wide through the enemy’s lines, opening up an escape for the embattled forces within the city. But at a cost no one would soon forget.

  The fighting was especially brutal. Half of the Division’s manpower was effectively disabled in a matter of days. We marched onward through curtains of artillery, hailing airstrikes and relentless small arms fire. Thousands of our men were killed and thousands more were wounded in some of the worst fighting we had seen to date.

  Those wounded who could walk tried their best to keep up, those who could not, we left where they lie. There was no time to stop.

  It took seven days to link up with forward elements of the city defense. Word spread quickly that we had made it. Our glorious achievement was short lived, however. The enemy counterattacked. They flattened our rearguard with a full-frontal tank assault and reformed their encirclement. We accomplished nothing but to seal our fate with the rest of the city.

  The last of the beleaguered men of Echo Company slogged our way into the outer suburbs of Savannah. Echo’s ranks steadily dwindled to twenty-five percent effectiveness over that week. We were a raggedy bunch to see, torn and bloodied, walking down the middle of the street without a care, staring but not seeing, breathing but not living.

  Our hopes were chipped away little by little with every death and every step we took. Our mission, our goal to save the city was nothing but a fabrication, a constructed reality made to keep us fighting men moving forward like there was something left to fight for.

  The city was nothing but wreckage from a sinking ship. Was it all for nothing? Did Beau and Hayes die for nothing? And Elroy? All the violence, all the death, all the destruction. What was it all for?

  The hot afternoon sun beat down on us relentlessly. There wasn’t a single cloud in the sky to pray for.

  We walked in two long lines along the shoulder of the road. The remainder of our vehicles that we had left idled alongside of us, burning away the last of our fuel. The heat from their engines only worsened our misery. I reached up and gingerly touched the gauze pad taped over the cut on my neck. The medic stitched me up a few days before, but I think it got infected, because it constantly throbbed with pain.

  Alex swished his canteen around, dreading the sound of hollow swishing. He tipped the canteen until the last few drops of water fell into his mouth. His thirst for energy left him dizzy and he stumble
d over himself and fell to the ground. I helped him to his feet and offered him my canteen. He forced a hint of a smile and drank.

  Alex’s tired eyes were glazed over and sunken. The stress of combat was pulling at the very fabric of his character, dragging his soul down until it resembled nothing but a whisper of his former self. I worried about him.

  When we first entered Savannah, we lost all hope of Alex’s family being alive. Nothing could have survived the devastation that was inflicted here. We accepted this solemnly, but until we found out for sure, there would always be that last glimmer of hope deep in our hearts and far back in our minds. The only thing we had left to fight for was each other, because each other was the only certainty we had.

  We passed the Navy docks where the Jackson and the Sabal sat half sunken, smoldering and blanketing the sky in shadowy columns of black smoke.

  As we entered the city itself we met the remnants of the city defense, a motley crew of soldiers from the Sixteenth Armored and 102nd Infantry. They all looked as spent as we did. They were holed up in craters and piles of rubble waiting to give their last for the defense of the Confederacy. We exchanged jibes with them as we passed. The laughter died almost immediately. We had no energy for that.

  Down the road, we came across the scene of a recent airstrike. An entire street of small businesses was leveled and aflame.

  I stepped around the burnt body of a middle-aged woman that was lying in the street. She had one charred hand clutching her chest and the other extended in front of her as if she was reaching for help. What skin she had left hung in crispy edged patches. Such brutality did not phase me anymore. I had seen enough of blood and pain and death. I had experienced my fair share of each and I didn’t care for it any longer. I’m sick and tired of it all, I screamed to myself.

  My life was just a series of unfortunate events. And it all started on that damned plantation. Military life was similar to that of my miserable existence as a slave working for Mr. Stephens. I still worked to exhaustion and I was expendable to those who owned me. The only difference was that I chose this. I chose the army.

  Please, just end already.

  Ahead of us, there was a man sitting on the front steps of his half destroyed house. This particular street was pockmarked with shell holes, recent by the looks of them. We heard the man’s blood curdling cries down the block.

  He cradled his dead son in his arms. The boy’s body was covered from head to toe in blood. His little arms hung lifelessly to his father’s side.

  The man stepped out in to the street and presented his son’s body to every soldier that went by.

  “Is this what you fight for?” He asked. “Why do you continue to fight? Every day more and more are killed. Why? For what?”

  Bloody swaths of hair hung stiffly over the boy’s still face. He looked the same age as Lucas. Alex refused to look.

  The man fell to his knees in front of me.

  “He just wanted to ride his bike around the block. That’s all. Just to ride his bike.”

  I walked on by. There was nothing I could do.

  “He was just a boy,” the man kept saying as the line of soldiers walked by, staring forward indifferently.

  It was another few blocks before the man’s cries faded and the streets turned quiet again. All the storefronts were boarded up with sheets of plywood. Civilians stared at us behind hushed curtains. Stray dogs whimpered and scampered away. There was only the sound of war looming in the distance. The wind howled and the sun blazed, but we kept on walking deeper into the dead city.

  “Colton,” Shannon asked.

  “Yeah, buddy?”

  “Carry me.”

  “I would if I could.”

  Shannon was walking with his eyes closed, catching some shut eye on the run. A skill most soldiers learned.

  If we didn’t stop to rest soon, we’d all be too exhausted to stand, let alone fight. My long years on the plantation accustomed me to such fatigue, but I feared for my friends, who were fading in front of me. I lifted my helmet off my head and wiped my brow.

  We were half way down a four-lane street of a commercial neighborhood when the sudden crack of a nearby rifle shot made the entire company flinch and scramble for cover.

  “Sniper!” Alex bellowed hoarsely.

  I took cover with the rest of Second Squad behind an SUV that had its front end buried in a mound of shattered bricks. The building they belonged to was a heap of ruins.

  “Where did that shot come from?” Teague asked over the radio.

  “I don’t know sir. He got Pearson,” someone said.

  “Everyone keep your heads down. Squad Leaders deploy your sharpshooters.”

  “That’s you, Carrigan,” Alex said.

  Carrigan swung her rifle bag off her shoulder, zipped it open and methodically assembled her M24 sniper rifle.

  “Don’t get too comfortable boys. I’ll be done shortly,” she said, scurrying into the scrambled bowels of the buckled building in search of a perch.

  This sniper was good. After his first shot found its mark, he held his fire. Probably relocating and repositioning. A lot of work to get off one shot at a time.

  Shannon opened up an MRE and passed each one of us a salted cracker. We munched on our snack in the relative safety of the SUV and waited for the all clear.

  Snipers terrified me. They were skilled assassins trained in the art of distance killing. You don’t know they’re there until they let you know they’re there.

  Things were quiet until another shot crackled down the street. The radio chatter picked up for a minute, men yelled expletives up and down the street at each other and at the sniper, and then everything quieted down again.

  That shot missed its mark. An unnatural error from a talented marksman. His next shot would not miss. Nothing is as bone chilling as the silence one hears after the piercing echo of a bullet dissipates. Your heart skips a beat, wondering if the bullet found its mark.

  When our headsets buzzed online we all braced ourselves for what would come next.

  “Echo Actual this Echo One Six. Man down.”

  “Who?” Teague asked.

  “Hutchens.” Danny. Dammit.

  It was a sobering punch to our already dwindling spirits. Danny Hutchens was the company clown, loved by everyone for his upbeat attitude and unending smile. He left behind a wife and a three-year-old boy, who he kept pictures of in the liner of his helmet.

  Hutchens’ death proved to be too much for Alex. He let his helmet fall to the ground, held his head in his hands and sobbed uncontrollably. After the deaths of our friends Beauregard and Hayes and our dear leader Captain Elroy, we all had sunk into a deep depression. We had had no time to properly mourn our friends. This unwanted burden weighed heavy on all of us. Now…Hutchens.

  I wrapped my arm around Alex’s shoulders to comfort him.

  He grabbed ahold of me and said between sobs, “I’m sorry. I can’t do this anymore.”

  Shannon and Junior looked on, compassion and disbelief battling upon their faces. Alex was our leader, our go-to guy whenever we needed redirection or a pick-me-up. He was my best friend and seeing his heart ache like this tugged at the very fabric of my heart.

  “Yes, you can,” I said.

  “I thought I could, but I just can’t.”

  “You need to keep faith. We all do.”

  “What faith? We lost our faith a long time ago,” Junior said.

  “That may be, but we’ll find a way. There’s always a way.”

  At that moment, I remembered something I hadn’t thought about in several years. Something I never told anyone. Something I locked deep down in the recesses of my own mind. I spit it out and laid out my regrets for the world to judge.

  “Working the fields was the only thing I knew growing up. Day in and day out, I got up in the morning and didn’t stop working until I collapsed in my bed again that night. I did this every day ever since I could remember. Some days were better than others. Like w
hen harvest season finally came and I got to see what all my hard work had made. Or the joy I had when I bit into an ear of sweet corn picked fresh off the stalk. Or the day I learned how to drive a tractor. You should of have seen me. You would have thought I lost my marbles, driving around, a big goofy smile on my face, laughing, and thinking it was the dandiest thing in the world. I was ten years old at the time.”

  Thoughts of Mr. Jeffries flooded back to me. I could still see him standing there waving his straw hat and smiling at me as I ruled the world from behind the wheel of a tractor. I miss you old man.

  “But those days were few and far between. Most of the time I was sad and lonely. When you’re working out in the fields all you do is think. I thought about a lot of things, my family mostly. I tried to imagine what they looked like. I never knew my father. I never knew my mother. I don’t even know where I was born. All I knew was my life on that plantation. So I tried to imagine what my life would be like in the outside world. I pictured myself in a nice house with lots of land covered with beautiful trees. But the dream I cherished the most might not seem nothing special to you, but to me it was everything. When my stomach would grumble with hunger pains I would close my eyes and imagine myself sitting at a table full of family and friends with heaps of food set in front me. I’m happy and smiling and feeling full as a tick. When I’d open my eyes the hunger would be gone. You see, my life was no better than the dirt I worked in every day.”

  Alex quit his sobbing and listened. Junior and Shannon brooded in solemn disbelief. They had never heard me talk about myself so candidly before.

  “The scars on my back are a constant reminder of what my life was like before all this, before all of you. I feel them when I walk, when I sleep, when I eat and when I look in the mirror, they’re there. It’s a constant shadow and a pain that never goes away.”

  I took a deep breath.

  “When I was fourteen, I tried to run away. I didn’t make it a mile before I was caught. My master tied a rope around my wrists and my ankles, and dragged me all the way back. After dealing with thirty lashings from the bull whip, I was tied to a post and left to roast in the summer sun for two days. With no food and no water, with the sun beating down on me, with the blood running down my back, I lost all hope. I was done. I begged and cried for him to kill me. I couldn’t handle it anymore.