Victory

Very few of us returned that day. Of the fifty men sent to take the village, less than a dozen made it back. On some days I feel guilty about being in that minority. Some days I thank God. But a day doesn't pass that I don't think about it in some way.

I crouched down in the foxhole, holding my breath as red-hot bullets whizzed overhead. Conway lay on the ground, sobbing huge, heaving sobs. I didn't blame him. Dumb kid lied his way into the war at 16, then found out it was nothing like the movies.

"Come on, Private! On your feet!" Yelling at the fresh meat was the only thing that kept me from losing it. "You won't shoot anyone down there!" Groeler laughed. The big sergeant from Iowa laughed at everything lately. We all had our ways to cope. Conway looked up just in time to see Groeler's face explode. Nobody laughed, then. We all just hunkered down, waiting for a break in the firing. All of us except for Conway. He was on his feet, firing like a madman. That's what it takes somedays.

The letter Conway wrote to his girlfriend the morning he died sits framed on my desk. The dumb bastard had written to break up with his girlfriend after meeting a pretty little girl at the last village. No one had the heart to tell him that the girl took a liking to most of the soldiers that came through, and I didn't have the heart to mail a Dear Jane letter from a dead man. Took me most of a night to copy his handwriting and write something more appropriate. We were back in that village a week later. The girl didn't even ask about Conway.

Over the next week we managed to advance a total of twenty yards. Sixty feet and six men dead. Hell of a thing to spend your life for ten feet of land. Still, some of them spent it for less.

Ripping cloth. Somehow, over the explosion of mortar shells, I could hear the sound of ripping cloth. There was dirt, blood, and God knows what else in my eye and a burning sensation in my gut. In the movies you don't feel the fiery sledgehammer sensation of a bullet slamming into your body. You don't smell the sweat, the piss, the rotting flesh of infected wounds. No actor I ever saw looked anything like how I felt. If I'd known that bullet was going to keep me in the foxhole, keep me out of the ambush that wiped out thirty-two men for ten more yards, I'd have kissed it after Slim cut it out of me.

You hear a lot of talk about what it takes to win a war. It's all about attrition. You kill enough of them, or they kill enough of you, for tiny pieces of land. Do that enough times, in enough battles, and you've won the war.




The End