“I gotta go report to fuckin’ Ackerman,” Johnson said. He trundled away and left Stephie alone with her fire team.
The two men and one woman were all about Stephie’s age. They stared at their fire team leader expectantly. From inside the bunker Animal shouted, “Shut the fuck up!” as John had a chat with his new people. Stephie realized she probably should say something important. Impart some life-saving wisdom learned in the trials of combat. “Keep your heads down,” she said as she rose. Without being instructed, they followed her down the trench line to an empty ballistic shelter, which was carved out of the wall and covered with logs and sandbags. Stephie plopped onto the dirt inside the enclosure. It was intended for people caught under a barrage in the open trench in between the concrete bunkers that dotted the ridge every forty to fifty meters. One cherry almost knocked down the lone wooden support that braced the sagging roof above Stephie’s head. “Watch out!” she snapped as the private tried to straighten the support but only made it worse.
The cherries stood outside and began to shed gear without being ordered. “Can I go to the bathroom?” one asked. “No,” Stephie replied. “And keep your fucking heads down, I said!” With their knees bent and helmets ducked, they found it awkward to drop packs and remove bandoliers filled with extra ammo. “Names!” Stephie ordered.
“Dawson, Rick, Private,” blurted the guy with the squad automatic weapon. He had the complexion of a redhead, but when he accidentally knocked his helmet off his head Stephie couldn’t see any hair on his tightly shorn scalp. He was tall and seemed solid enough.
“Tate, Patricia, Private,” came the high-pitched voice of a rifleman/grenadier. Scared shitless, Stephie thought as Dawson helped the girl drop her pack. Stephie worried whether the slightly built Tate could carry her own load.
“Shelton Trulock,” said a slightly-built, bespectacled soldier, who stood with his knees pressed together like a child who needed to go to the bathroom. “You’re the president’s daughter, aren’t you?” he asked.
“Go take your piss,” Stephie replied. Trulock asked where the latrines were. “Fuck the latrines,” Stephie replied. “Piss anywhere. The latrines are for taking a shit.” Trulock arched his eyebrows at her foul language, then headed off. “Just keep your head down!” she hissed after him.
Dawson and Tate turned their full attention to Stephie. “Can I…” Patricia Tate began hesitantly, “Can I ask a question?” she finally said. Stephie nodded. “What’s… what’s it like? Combat, I mean?”
Stephie lowered her gaze to her lap. Ever since Atlanta, she and the other survivors had lived only in the present. No one had asked “What was it like?” because all had been witness. They all had their own memories and perspectives, which by tacit agreement had been locked up tight. In the week since their first bloody shock, no one had even mentioned Mason Street. What had it been like? she asked herself, but her mind refused to answer. She had the key to unlock the memory but chose not to use it. She looked up into the two anxious faces but said nothing.
Animal emerged from the bunker, stretched and yawned loudly, then urinated into the trench for what seemed like far longer than humanly possible.
“That’s Animal,” Stephie introduced.
“Gross,” Tate remarked.
“He’s our machine gunner. They’re different,” Stephie explained.
A scraping sound preceded Trulock’s fall from the trench wall onto the ground. The cherries ducked in unison as a distant boom rolled across the hills. The report from a large-caliber rifle echoed through the trees with a crackle. Stephie scrambled to the unmoving body of the replacement on the trench floor. It took a moment in the darkness for her eyes to gather enough data to form a picture of what had just happened. There was no point of reference for Stephie to begin assessing Trulock’s medical condition. There was no head attached to Trulock’s neck.
“You okay, Shelton?” Patricia Tate asked before hurling herself backwards and exclaiming, “Oh-my-God!” and subsequent unintelligible utterings. That set off sobs and jagged, panting breaths. Dawson clutched Tate to his chest as Animal knelt beside Stephie.
“Who the hell was that?” Animal asked.
“Some replacement,” Stephie replied from the bottom of a well of total shock. “Trulock,” she said. “Shelton Trulock.”
“That’s not much of a name,” was the extent of Animal’s eulogy. “I’ll get his body if you try to find his head.”
“There’s not enough left,” John Burns said upon arrival.
Stephie’s eyes sunk closed at the thought of all the boots what would trod across poor Shelton Trulock’s most precious remains. His head had become just so much refuse. Part of the litter and waste left behind.
“Shit!” Stephon Johnson cursed when he saw what had happened. “I’ll go try to get another one before they run out.” The exhausted man sighed at the inconvenience.
When Animal grabbed Trulock’s boots to drag him to graves registration, John stopped him and said he would help. The two lifted the body, and Stephie rose in a daze, almost fainting from light-headedness. Stephie stumbled toward the bunker, fighting tunnel vision, but stopped dry mouthed and in a cold sweat beside Tate and Dawson. Tate’s face was buried in Dawson’s flak jacket. “Keep your heads down,” Stephie warned yet again.
The upper branches along the ridge top across the river were touched by the first rays of dawn. As in ancient days, time moved by sundials instead of second hands. Gray half-tones were slowly replaced with vivid green pines. The sky was probably cloudless and blue, but Stephie couldn’t see it through the three-foot-thick firing slit that was angled down toward the river. There was barely enough room to insert into the slit the raised front sights and barrels of her M-16 and underlying grenade launcher.
Johnson, Burns, and Stephie stared across the foggy river bottom from behind concrete and rebar. Their bunker’s single chamber was thirty feet wide and fifteen feet deep, but its low, six-and-one-half-foot ceiling made it feel cramped and claustrophobic. Lying prone on the floor were nine soldiers: the rest of First Squad, plus the attached, two-man machine gun crew, a platoon medic, and Becky. Stephie’s two shaken, surviving fire team members cowered close to John’s two cherries. Johnson had been unsuccessful in getting a replacement for Trulock. Animal and his new assistant machine gunner lay on the hard floor around their weapon, which Animal lovingly caressed with an oiled cloth patch. Specialist Fourth Class Melinda Crane — their exhausted medic — slept at their feet directly beneath the firing slit. Becky sat alone by the wall next to the exit.
The river’s stillness was appropriate to the early hour, but it seemed to Stephie eerily quiet. Their bunker was roughly in the middle of their battalion’s position. The six hundred men and women manned a line along the half mile of river front that brigade planners had judged most easily forded. But the sandbars’ gentle banks and the wide beaches below their bunker had been laced with thousands of landmines. Huge antitank mines were built to fire straight up into the lightly armored undercarriages of Chinese fighting vehicles. Anti-personnel mines had been scattered about to protect them. The latter were modern-day Bouncing Bettys meant to maim but not necessarily kill minesweeping crews. When slender wires were tripped, the disks popped three feet into the air and sprayed eight hundred flesh-ripping darts in every direction.