When he came down and stopped rolling, he looked around. There was Herk, blood running from his nose but otherwise seeming all right. There was Squidface, who hadn't even lost his cigarette. And…there was Zeb the Hat's head, attached to one shoulder and not much else. The rest of what was probably his body lay thirty yards away.
Herk got a good look at that and lost his breakfast. Armstrong had already seen a lot of bad things, but his stomach wanted to empty out, too. Squidface's lips silently shaped the word Fuck. Or maybe he said it out loud; Armstrong slowly realized he wasn't hearing very much.
Squidface said something else. Armstrong shrugged and pointed to his ears. The PFC nodded. He came over and bellowed, "He was a hell of a good guy."
"Yeah," Armstrong shouted back. "He was."
That was about as much of a memorial as Zeb the Hat got. Armstrong dragged his two pieces together so Graves Registration would know they went with each other. The surviving soldiers helped themselves to Zeb's ammunition and ration cans-he didn't need them any more. Armstrong took out his wallet and found his real name was Zebulon Fischer, and that he was from Beloit, Wisconsin. The billfold held only a couple of bucks. Had he had a real roll, Armstrong would have sent that to his next of kin.
More shrieks in the air announced another salvo of rockets. Armstrong went flat again. These screaming meemies came down off to the left, not all around him. He had more of a chance to dig in, and used it. The Confederates in this part of Georgia didn't seem inclined to let U.S. soldiers come any farther.
After the rockets slammed down, Armstrong breathed a sigh of relief: nothing bad had happened to him or his men. Then shouts came from the left. He needed a little while to make out what people were saying. The first salvo really had pounded the crap out of his hearing. After a while, though, he got the message: Lieutenant Bassler was wounded.
He swore. God only knew what kind of half-assed new man the repple-depple would cough up. Then somebody said, "Looks like you're in charge of the platoon, Sergeant."
"What the hell?" Armstrong said. Two of the other three sergeants were senior to him.
"Yeah, you are," the soldier insisted. "Same goddamn rocket got Borkowski and Wise. One of 'em's dead-looks like the other one'll lose a foot."
"Shit." Armstrong had got a platoon before, and the same way-everybody above him got wounded or killed. That was the only way a three-striper could command a platoon…or, if enough things went wrong, a company. He didn't really want the honor. As usual, nobody cared what he wanted.
"What are we gonna do?" the news bringer asked, something not far from panic in his voice. "We stay here, Featherston's fuckers'll just keep pounding the shit out of us."
"Tell me about it," Armstrong said unhappily. The Confederates would be loading up more screaming meemies right this minute. If he ordered a retreat, his own superiors would tear the stripes off his sleeve. They'd call him a coward, and he wouldn't be able to prove them wrong. Which left…"We gotta move up."
They would have to take out that machine gun now, like it or not. He didn't, but he was stuck. Squidface came to the same unwelcome conclusion: "That goddamn gun's gonna have to go."
"Uh-huh." Armstrong nodded. "You've got the squad for now."
"Fuck of a way to get it," Squidface said, but then he nodded, too. "You don't want the platoon, either, do you?"
"Not like this," Armstrong answered. "Keep the guys spread out. And watch that Herk, for Chrissake. He'll get his ass shot off before he knows what's what."
"I ain't his goddamn babysitter, for cryin' out loud." After a moment, Squidface nodded again. "Well, I'll try."
Armstrong hadn't gone very far before he realized the machine-gun emplacement could murder the whole platoon. It had an unobstructed field of fire to the west. No way in hell would they be able to sneak up on it. He yelled for the wireless man and got on the horn to regimental HQ: "This is Grimes, in charge of Gold Platoon, Charlie Company. We need a couple of barrels to knock out a nest at square, uh, B-9."
Some uniformed clerk well back of the line asked, "What happened to what's-his-name? Uh, Bassler?"
"He's down. I've got it," Armstrong growled. "You gonna get me what I need, or do I have to come back there and tear you a new asshole?"
"Keep your hair on, buddy," replied the fellow back at headquarters. "We'll see what we can do."
That wasn't enough to keep Armstrong happy-not even close. Yet another barrage of screaming meemies roared in. They were mostly long, but not very long. Armstrong damn near pissed himself. He knew plenty of guys who had. You didn't rag on them much, not if you had any sense. It could happen to you.
Half an hour later, after still more rockets-again, mostly long-the barrels showed up. Without getting out of the foxhole he'd dug, Armstrong pointed them toward the machine-gun nest. They clattered forward. The machine gun opened up on them, which did exactly no good. There was no place for advancing U.S. soldiers to hide. That also meant there was no place for C.S. soldiers with stovepipe antibarrel rockets to hide. The barrels shelled the machine-gun nest into silence.
"Let's go." Armstrong hustled to catch up with the barrels. So did his men. Anyone who'd been in action for even a little while knew armor made a hell of a life-insurance policy for infantrymen. It could take care of things that stymied foot soldiers-and it drew fire that would otherwise come down on their heads.
And the ground pounders were good for barrel crews' life expectancy, too. They kept bad guys with stovepipes and Featherston Fizzes from sneaking close enough to be dangerous. Barrels that got too far out in front of the infantry often had bad things happen to them before anybody could do anything about it.
"Come on, Herk!" Armstrong yelled, looking back over his shoulder and seeing that the new guy wasn't moving fast enough. "Shake a leg, goddammit!"
"I'm coming, Sarge." Yeah, Herk was willing. But he didn't understand why Armstrong wanted him to hurry up. He wasn't urgent and he wasn't alert. With the best will in the world, he was asking for trouble. Armstrong figured he'd buy a piece of a plot-or maybe a whole one-before he figured out what was what. Too damn bad, really, but what could you do?
Meanwhile, the Confederates with the screaming meemies were still lobbing them where the U.S. soldiers had been, not where they were now. Before long, the rocketeers would find out they'd goofed-with luck, when the barrels put shells or machine-gun bullets through them.
Armstrong trotted on. He heard a few bursts from up ahead, but nothing really bad. The bastards in butternut all carried automatic weapons. Nothing you could do about that. But if there weren't enough of them, what they carried didn't matter. And, right here, there weren't.
W hen Sam Carsten thought of prize crews, he thought about pigtailed sailors with cutlasses boarding sailing ships: wooden ships and iron men. But the Josephus Daniels was shorthanded because a couple of freighters that would have gone to England or France were bound for the USA instead.
Sam gave Lieutenant Zwilling the conn so he could straighten out some of the complications detaching men had caused. He was talking with a damage-control party-damage control being something about which he knew more than he'd ever wanted to learn-when Wally Eastlake, a CPO who'd played one of King Neptune's mermaids when the destroyer escort crossed the Equator, sidled up to him and said, "Talk to you for a second, Skipper?"