Three Little Snowmen
Timothy Willard
Book One of the Damned of the 2/19th
Published by DimensionBucket Media, LLC
http://www.dimensionbucket.com
This book is a work of fiction. Any names, places, people, or incidents are products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblances to actual locales, or persons (living or dead,) is coincidental.
“Three Little Snowmen” || Damned of the 2/19th Book One
Copyright © 2010 by Timothy Willard
Cover artwork by Christopher Warren.
Copyright © 2018.
Copy edits by Tyler Peterson & Carlie Trantham
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical mends, without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews.
ISBN: 9781791771980
Published by DimensionBucket Media, LLC.
First Edition · January 2018
http://www.dimensionbucket.com
CHAPTERS
Lexicon
Prologue
Atlas & Hate
The Deafening Sound of Silence
Short
You Know What Time It Is!
Tits & Blood
Wake Up, Aodan
Lifting
A Day In the Life
Till That Day
Booze, Dark, & Secrets
Joyful Dancing
Questions for the Living
Calories Per Step
It Contaminated Us All
Taking Stock
Sweep & Clear
Fall Back & Regroup
Contested Territory
Fight Or Flight
Just Across the Street
There’s No Place Like… Home?
hate Hate HATE HATE!
Warm Water
Not. Down. Yet.
A Hammer & A Radio
From Bad to Worse
Friendship in the Dark
Acceptable Losses
T Minus Eight Days
From Bad to Worse… again…
In the Dark & Cold
YOU CAN’T KILL ME!
Tell Me You Love Me
Use Until Destruction
Kurt Russel Time
I’ll Take You With Me
Don’t Leave Me…
Hold me, please…
In the End, There Was Only Each Other
It’s Never Over
END
About the Author
Prologue
It is 1984, and the Cold War has gotten warmer.
The shadow of Vietnam still looms after a decade.
There is a deep divide between combat arms and support soldiers.
Doctrine is uncertain and soldier confidence in it is low.
Civilian and political confidence in the US military is still low.
Tensions between the Soviet Union and NATO are at an all-time high.
There is no doubt that the Soviet Union and NATO will eventually come to blows. It is not 'if' it is 'when'.
The US Department of Defense only cares about numbers to offset the Red Steamroller's overwhelming numbers.
Strategic locations must be manned at all costs.
The Fulda Gap is the most important strategic location in Western Germany.
2/19th Special Weapons has a critical task in holding the Fulda Gap.
To hold the Fulda Gap, 2/19th will use nuclear and chemical weaponry.
In a Total War situation, there is no such thing as a civilian target, everyone must die.
The barracks that 2/19th lives in overlooks the Gap from the frozen height of a mountain, less than five hundred vertical feet below a glacier.
My name is Anthony Stillwater.
My friends call me Ant, a nickname I have long forgotten the origin of.
I am 18 years old.
I am a Corporal in the United States Army.
I am a squad leader and site leader for 2/19th Special Weapons Group.
I am in complete charge of a 125 bunker ammunition site known as FSTS-317, AKA Atlas.
I handle, supervise, and store thousands of chemical rounds and hundreds of nuclear rounds at Atlas.
If so ordered, I will enable the use of those rounds on all targets within my area of operations. Civilian and military alike.
Because of that fact, my name is on a KGB hit list and I am an Army-sponsored terrorist target.
I have been shot twice.
I have been stabbed three times.
I have been blown up and badly injured once by a bomb planted in a nightclub.
My life depends on equipment made by the lowest bidder.
Nobody cares about any of that.
Nobody cares about me or any other enlisted man or NCO of 2/19th.
I am a dead man walking.
I live in Hell.
I will probably die here.
...nobody will care.
Atlas & Hate
"There are no chemical or nuclear weapons in
Western Germany. The United States will abide
by the nonproliferation treaties."
FSTS-317
Restricted Area
Western Germany, Europe
24 October, 1984
The bunker was warm, despite the five feet of snow on the ground outside. The climate and the humidity controls on the bunker were partially responsible, but the real reason had more to do with a side effect of the nuclear weapons stored in the bunker than any intentional reason.
Sure it was radiation, and radiation was bad for you, but it wasn't like I was going to live to get out of Western Germany anyway.
The official line was "there wasn't any nuclear weapons in Western Europe", but looking at a bunker full of eight-inch artillery rounds, all of them between 25-kiloton peewee's to 250-kiloton armor division busters, I couldn't hold back a slight smirk.
If we have to use these, nobody will care anyway. There won't be anyone left to care.
The thought slithered through the fatalistic track my brain always ran through. The little lizard who lived at the base of my skull, a mental construct of the urges and reflexes handed down from my reptilian ancestors, reacted to the fatalism. He opened one eye, yawned, stretched, looked around, then went back to sleep.
No danger.
Hey, he had millions of years of experience. I may be a hammer head, but I'm smart enough to listen to him. Back when he was in charge, if you didn't listen, you got eaten. He'd been asleep since Copper Window, which meant we'd been pretty safe since then.
The playing field might have changed, but you still got eaten.
The nukes in the bunker just meant that things took a bigger bite.
I could see Specialist John Bomber walking between the stacks of nuclear artillery rounds, hear the thudding of his boots on the concrete, and the distinctive clicking of the little device he held in his right hand as he walked between the stacks.
It was red, curved to fit in the hand, with four press studs, usually used for keeping track of the cost of the groceries someone put in their cart. We used it to quickly and accurately count the huge stacks of ammunition by pallet. Then, with some quick arithmetic, you got how many rounds there were.
SPC Johnathon Bomber, my best friend, stopped at the gap between the two massive stacks of shells, set his counter down, pulled out his green notebook and a pen, and quickly did the math for how many 75 kiloton eight-inch rocket-assisted artillery of that particular lot num
ber we had.
I waited until he was done with the math before calling out to him. "Finish that shit up, we're leaving Atlas today." John looked up at me, his expression wary. I knew what was going through his mind. Whenever we had to leave Atlas, AKA FSTS-317, it was inevitably for a good old-fashioned Uncle Sam Ass Fucking.
"What? Does the Chief want to publicly sodomize us instead of doing it out here?" Bomber asked, referring to Chief Henley, who had left us out at Atlas from May to now and raked in two Meritorious Service Medals on our fucking work, specifically for "Service above and beyond normal duty in the refitting of FSTS-317, tireless efforts, and a work ethic that gave credit to the entire Battalion."
In other words, he worked us like slaves, belittled us, starved us, denied us medical care, and got fucking medals. As far as I was concerned the red and white ribbon signified the broken bones and spilled blood of Atlas, and he mocked me and my entire crew walking around in his Class-A's all the fucking time showing it off.
One of these days, I was gonna stab his fat ass right through his MSMs.
Sighing, I shook my head. "No. They're sending most of the crew to Graf with the rest of Group, three volunteers for Rear Detachment back at the barracks."
John snapped his notebook shut and walked toward me, stopping in front of me and reaching out one of his big Texas meat hooks to squeeze my shoulder. My right arm twitched, John saw it and smiled. He knew what had just happened. He'd been with me since Basic Training.
I'd gone to sweep his arm away from me and bury my fist in his stomach. He'd taught me not to flinch back – him and Nancy had taught me that a touch wasn't a prelude to an attack. But I still twitched.
What could I say? I was fucked up.
We both ignored the twitch as I looked at him while he spoke. "I'm short, brother. Do me a solid and let me go to Rear-D. You send me to Graf, you know a fucking tank will run me over or something."
He wasn't kidding. There had been twenty of us in the barracks when it burned down. Of those twenty, eleven had been killed to date. Bomber was the first one of us to come up short, he'd only enlisted for two years Active Duty and had completed twenty-two months, making him under sixty days, a double-digit midget. Being short was practically a death sentence, being part of the First Twenty made it almost assured.
Thinking, I turned away from him, waving at him to follow me as we walked out of the massive bunker and into the short hallway. I ignored the shaved hairs on the back of my neck trying to stand up and the tension between my shoulder blades. The little lizard had one eye open, watching out for things.
It's just Bomber. Go back to sleep.
Once we reached the inside of the small hallway we turned around to lock the bunker up. Without being told Bomber grabbed one of the hanging loops of chain, waiting for me to grab the other. Together we started pulling on them slowly, at first, as we fought to move the massive ten ton door, then faster as momentum worked for us. It took about five minutes before the door slammed shut with an echoing boom. I pulled the lock off the shelf, slid the flange into the slot, then dug my keys out of my pocket to lock the brick sized hardened case steel lock.
By the time I was done Bomber was standing by the chains on the outside of the external door. He grinned, tapping his toe, his breath pluming out in front of him in the German winter cold. We were silent as we used the chains to shut the second door, then he waited for me to lock it, slide my keycard, and turn on the security system.
We walked up-range, a mile and a half walk on a slushy road, for a while before he spoke.
"Well?"
"Yeah. You, me, and I'll ask for a volunteer." I told him.
"Thanks, brother." He answered, reaching over and socking me in my shoulder playfully. We both ignored the fact I stepped into it then rolled my shoulders at the same time.
Right at that moment there was a spiteful buzzing noise followed by a sharp CRACK. Both of us stopped, turned around, and glared out at the 1K Zone that separated East and West Germany from one another.
"Watch it, asshole! You know the rules!" I yelled, shaking my fist.
"Don't make us come out there!" Bomber added.
We stood there for a moment, but no more bullets came our way, so we continued on up the road.
"Ivan's feeling frisky today." Bomber noted.
"Yeah. Probably freezing his ass off out there in the snow and wanted to see if he could get us to dive into the snow so we'd be cold like him." I answered. "At least they replaced the dude we killed with a competent sniper."
Bomber snickered, making me grin.
In June, an East German sniper who had been a shitty shot or had been having a shitty day apparently forgot the rules: he could put a round over or by our heads to remind us they were there, but any hits and the gloves came off. He'd shot SPC Westlin, one of my crew and a member of the First Twenty, in the stomach when she'd taken off her Kevlar vest to strip off her BDU top and work in her brown T-shirt.
Bomber, SPC Nancy Nagle, and I had hit the dirt, crawled through the grass, under the fence, and into the 1K Zone while the rest of the crew gave us cover fire. The fire had kept him pinned down until Bomber and I had reached him to teach his friends a lesson.
I'd cut the stupid bastard's throat myself and left him in the 1K Zone.
Ivan had recovered the body, I'd reported the incident, they probably reported it to the Kremlin, and nobody gave a shit.
Even though Westlin bled out in the Blackhawk on the way to Nuremburg.
Just another "training accident."
Just another casualty in a war nobody cared about or even knew was being fought.
Just another day at Atlas.
"Glad we're leaving, I just know that idiot would put a round through my forehead my last week here." Bomber griped as we passed Forklift-17. It was half-buried in the snow, sitting mournfully at an angle in the ditch. Something in the engine had gone out, I'd notified the mechanics, they'd told me to fuck myself, and we'd pushed it into the ditch.
"No problem, John."
"Thanks, Ant."
When we reached the fence at the top of the road snowflakes were dancing down again, covering out helmets as we pulled the gate closed and locked it.
DEADLY FORCE IS AUTHORIZED was in bright red, four inch high lettering, underlined at the bottom of the sign.
They weren't kidding about that line.
I sure as shit wasn't when it had come time to grab my rifle.
We walked past the warehouses full of everything my assigned units of 8th Infantry Division and 3rd Armor Division needed to fight World War-III, the covered area where the forklifts, extra semi-tractors, cranes, and other vehicles the Army had given me and I couldn't give a shit less about, and the fuel station. I glanced over the vehicles and noted that the people I'd assigned to check over the vehicles had either done it or just wiped off the date of the last time and put up today's date on the windshield.
Probably the latter, the lazy fucks.
Who was I kidding? I'd have done the same thing. Fuck those vehicles.
Snow crunched under our boots as we turned the corner of the low slung cinderblock building and where we parked vehicles came into sight. Our CUC-V, a Chevy pickup truck with a plastic cover on the back, was sitting there covered in over a foot of snow. I could see the footprints where someone had gone over to the truck, the Gypsy Wagon, and probably yanked open the door to shatter the layer of ice I could see on it.
The other truck was a German model with military markings.
"Looks like Fritz is here." Bomber grunted.
Nodding to him, I shifted my rifle where it was body slung across my back so it quit thumping against my Kevlar helmet. It rattled against my LBE belt, and I adjusted that too. I'd gotten used to the fact my Kevlar was under my parka instead of on top of my field jacket.
"Hold up." Bomber held his hand out, turning to face me. He was silent for a second, staring at my face. "What's up, Ant? You don't get this quiet unless it's something
bad."
He was right. While I didn't speak much when I'd first joined the military, a legacy from my mother's hand and her lessons that children (especially boys) were to be seen and not heard, I'd been getting better. Normally, when we walked up range I held a conversation with whomever I was walking with, but this time I'd been silent. Whenever I got stressed I immediately defaulted to quiet mode, and John knew it.
"I don't know, John." I came clean. "I think... I think... Hell, I just got a bad feeling. You sure you don't want to go to Graf?"
"I go to Graf, I ain't making it to my date." John said. "Come on, Ant. Besides, who do you have to watch your back at Rear-D?" Both of us pulled the slings of our XM-16E's off our shoulders, over our helmets, and dropped the slings onto our right shoulders, grabbing the sling to hold the weapon tight. It was habit, second nature, when we entered a building.
I shook my head. "Fine. I'll take another volunteer, and we'll go back to the barracks."
I pushed the door open to see the rest of my crew busy packing everything up to head back to Group. Counting John and me, the entire squad weighed in at thirteen members; five female soldiers, eight males, all of them mean as Hell and trained killers.
...My family...
With a snarl Nagle threw me my rucksack, which I caught in the air, turning the momentum into the motion to throw the strap over my shoulder. I smiled at her, knowing the glare back meant that she wasn't happy with leaving Atlas, not angry at me. She had a serious attitude problem, and hated most of the other female soldiers in Group, Hell, in the military. She'd earned that attitude the hard way. She'd volunteered to be part of our MOS when they'd opened it to female soldiers, and out of 23 female soldiers she was the only one that graduated. For two years she was the only female soldier in NBC Warfare Field Specialist, sent to the Big Red One, and from what the rumor mill had whispered and from what more than a few motherfuckers had bragged about, she'd pretty much been tortured. To the point, where a month before they reactivated 2/19th, she'd walked into a barracks room with her M16A1 and put a magazine into four men. They'd covered up the crime, covered up the reasons (which Nancy never talked about), and gave her the choice of going to Leavenworth or 2/19th.
Three Little Snowmen (Damned of the 2/19th) Page 1
