“Roberts,” Johnson said, “I’m putting you in the lead of Fire Team Alpha.”
The words cleared Stephie’s head of the morning’s grogginess. “What?” she shot back. “What kind of…? Me? What about John? He’s a PFC.”
“No,” Johnson corrected, “he’s a corporal, and he takes over Fire Team Bravo. I just made sergeant and got First Squad. And by the way, Roberts, you’re a private first class. Congratu-fuckin’-lations.”
“What kind of bureaucratic army bullshit is this? They’ve decided it takes three people to lead — what — one person? Becky Marsh?”
“We got replacements,” Johnson explained before heading off down the trench. John and Stephie followed. The main fighting line ran along the crest of a ridge that overlooked the river 150 meters below. The walls consisted of packed brown earth shored up here and there with wooden timbers that had been yanked from a rail bed and countless numbers of sandbags. The crude drains on the trench floor were quickly being clogged with run-off. Stephie walked along the higher and drier edges, not down the sloppy center where mosquito-infested pools of water stood.
Overhanging the trench, in stark contrast to the squalid slop in which they dwelled, swayed verdant South Carolina pines. Every so often their scent wafted down to the soldiers’ depths, replacing the stench of human filth. Stephie breathed deeply of those cherished few breezes, which transported her far away from that awful place.
They turned off the main defensive line into a narrow communications trench that dropped away steeply as they descended the hill. Railroad ties had been laid across the floor every so often, but they failed in both their purposes. They neither stemmed the mud slides washed loose by the rain nor — slick with mud — allowed for sure footing.
At the bottom of the hill, they scaled a rough-hewn ladder made of discarded packing crates and rose to ground level. There, they were careful to remain within the twisting path marked by twin lines of stakes topped by tiny strips of dangling cloth. The mines to either side of the clear pathway were supposedly inert until activated by an engineer’s signal, but no one was willing to risk their life on a supposition.
As the small group approached a newly carved but already rutted dirt road, they heard terse commands being issued in low voices. A mass of helmeted soldiers stood in dark ranks. The groaning brakes and grinding gears of the last of the trucks that had brought them there betrayed the driver’s desire to get the hell away in a hurry. Headlights flashed briefly through narrow slits in black tape across ranks of several hundred infantrymen.
Johnson got in a line that led to a laptop computer, which, like its owner, sat atop an empty ammo box. The squeaky clean replacements—“cherries”—had long been the objects of derision by Stephie and her hardworking comrades. The embittered survivors of the bloody clash in Atlanta had felt that they needed rest to recover from the shock. It should have been the cherries, fresh from boot camp, who did the digging. Those same cherries who now stood in loose ranks and clean uniforms. Stephie’s cheek twitched as she frowned at their nervous laughter, which was quieted by an NCO’s surly growl. The fuckers had been sleeping in beds, taking showers, using bathrooms with toilets, Stephie thought, while they had been living in the muck like animals.
“I need seven,” the newly minted Sergeant Stephon Johnson reported.
“Seven? For one squad? You can have five,” the staff sergeant with the laptop said. In the dim starlight and glow from the computer’s screen, he held his hand up toward the road with five fingers spread. Five privates, fresh from training platoons, were cut from the herd. The three men and two women gave their serial numbers. The staff sergeant tapped on the keyboard. “Okay,” he said, “you five are in First Squad, Third Platoon, Company C, Third Battalion, 519th Infantry.”
The five cherries grinned at each other on hearing the official-sounding news, which obviously seemed to them to hold great import. One even muttered the important data repeatedly under his breath in an effort to commit it to memory.
“My name’s Sarge’ Johnson,” their fearless leader slurred. “This is Corporal Burns and PFC Roberts. Safe your weapons. Keep your mouths shut. Keep your heads down. Don’t touch anything. Stay in line. Le’s go.”
Stephie and John followed Johnson, the sergeant/father-figure in the cherries’ new world. The five replacements followed the two fire team leaders. “Stay inside the flags,” Stephie cautioned as they marched single file through the minefield. The clear path through the flags was well-worn and would be obvious to any Chinese who attacked from the rear. But the safe lane wouldn’t do them much good. The barrels of machine guns protruded from two sandbag-roofed nests on either side of the ladder down into the slit trench. Their interlocked fields of fire would lay waste to any Chinese who circled back to envelope their stretch of the line after a break-through.
The eight soldiers descended one by one into the brown gash in the earth and made their way up the rear slope of the ridge to the main defensive line. The going was slow, as the cherries labored up the hill under heavy packs, which occasionally got caught in the narrow confines of the slit trench. Each time the hapless cherries slowed the procession down, they drew curses from Johnson and Stephie. That was especially true when the fucking idiots stopped to take in the novel sights of an aid bunker, a command bunker, an ammo bunker. The cherries whispered remarks to each other like tourists in a cathedral.
“Shut the fuck up!” Stephie snapped. Their chatter came to an abrupt halt.
The higher up the ridge they progressed, the lower the three veterans stooped. The replacements marched, by contrast, parade-ground erect. “Keep your fucking heads down!” Stephie warned in an incredulous, shrill tone. They bent low, but raised their weapons to port arms as if Chinese might drop from the trees. Stephie shook her head and rolled her eyes at their cluelessness.
When they reached the main trench, they passed an observation post. The gaggle of cherries stopped to gawk at the several flat-paneled displays, which glowed brightly from the dark sandbagged enclosure. On the screens, the cold black river beneath their line snaked through glowing white terrain. A lounging soldier with a joystick panned a camera across the front and stopped on any mysterious, bright-hot shapes. The camera sat atop a motorized mast raised above the trench a few meters away. Its actuator emitted a faint electric whine.
“Would you keep up!” Stephie whispered. “Je-esus Christ!”
When they reached their squad’s bunker, Sergeant Johnson knelt at the thick walls of the entrance. The others joined him on the floor of the trench. The cherries — careful to avoid muddying their uniforms or gear — squatted. Stephie sat on the driest spot she could find. Johnson said, “Roberts, you get Marsh and two ’o the cherries.”
“I can’t deal with Becky!” Stephie objected. “No way!”
“I’ll take her,” John volunteered, then looked the five replacements over: three men — two with squad automatic weapons — and two women. “You and you,” he said, picking one man with an SAW and one woman, and leading them into the dark bunker. One cherry collided noisily with the concrete bend in the passageway and cursed.