‘…take any more of this motherfuckin’ crap! I quit! That’s it?’
‘Sit the fuck down!’ yelled the master sergeant.
Another shell crashed onto the hilltop. Andre was so startled by each blast that he feared death from heart attack. A light rain of rock dust drifted down around him. He curled up in a ball and braced himself while the master sergeant and the screaming man had their fight.
‘Put that Goddamn white flag down!’ the furious NCO shouted.
‘I quit! I’m goin’ down there and turn my ass over! Fuck this shit, man!’
‘Nobody surrenders till I give the order!’ the master sergeant yelled.
Another mortar dropped without warning. From his fetal position — every muscle hard as the rocks against which he lay — Andre looked up at the sky. That was all he could do. There was nowhere to go. Nowhere to hide. No shelter that would protect him from the random projectiles lobbed onto them. To his horror, he caught a glimpse of a plummeting mortar round.
Bam! It landed on the hill a safe distance away.
‘A-a-a-a-ah-h!’ came the blood-curdling screech. ‘Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!’
At first Andre thought a man had cracked. It had happened twice to men in his old company during artillery barrages. The terror and helplessness of lying exposed was too much. They just snapped and began to scream as if wounded. But that wasn’t the case this time.
‘Shit! Number sixteen’s hit bad!’ reported one of the men from Andre’s left.
A bursting mortar interrupted his calls for aid.
‘How bad?’ asked the master sergeant over the noise.
‘Bad!’ the guy shouted over the screams. ‘Took off his legs — both of ’em!’
‘Oh, shit,’ Andre moaned — jamming his eyes shut. Please, God, he begged silently. Please, please, please, ple-e-ease! He tried his best to shut the present from his mind. There was a thud. No burst. A dud. The screams went on, but Andre was far away. The trip to New Jersey with the Boys Club when he was nine. How strange the memory was to him now. He’d been so excited because they’d slept under the stars. It was a camping trip for a bunch of kids from The Bronx. It was the only time he’d left the city before boot camp.
The next shell that landed burst. Debris fell as Andre focused on that camping trip. But it wasn’t the same memory as he’d had before. It didn’t seem to have the same effect. He’d always thought back to that camping trip late at night when he couldn’t manage to fall asleep. He’d lie in his bed and imagine he was out underneath the stars. Now, however, he spent night after night under those same stars. But they’d lost all the magic — the sense of adventure — that had captivated him and the two dozen other youths. The stars now meant something different. They meant cold, and killing, and screams of pain… like those from the legless man.
Crump! came the sound of a burst in the dirt. Whole ledges of earth showered down around him. Andre jammed his eyes shut. The wailing man had fallen silent. ‘Hey! Listen to me! No, no, no! Open your eyes, man! Don’t go to sleep! Hey! No, man! Oh, Jesus, man — come on! Hang on! Don’t dose your eyes!’
Bam! Andre felt the thud through the earth.
Give it up, Andre silently advised. He’d seen it before. Men screamed in horror on first seeing their massive wounds. Then they’d grow quiet. Their eyes would get glassy. The sweat that had flooded from every pore gave way to shivering as if from the bitter cold of death’s grip. In basic they’d taught them that shock was the body’s defense mechanism to help staunch massive bleeding. But it seemed to kill more men than it saved. Sure enough, the soothing words soon came to an end. Shock was silence. Shock was private. Shock was death.
For no reason that was apparent to Andre, the mortars ceased their deadly rain. Out of ammo. Killed by counterbattery. Shifted targets. It didn’t matter which. The silence meant death for the man who’d fallen into shock. But it meant life for everyone else.
‘All right!’ shouted the master sergeant in what sounded like anger. ‘Count off!’
The rightmost man shouted, ‘One!’ The next guy called out, ‘Two!’ The next, ‘Three!’ Andre looked out over the rock — his armor. The hillside wasn’t crawling with a swarm of attackers. The Chinese weren’t coordinating an attack with the mortar bombardment.
‘Six!’ Andre’s neighbor called out — dissolving into hisses of pain from the effort.
‘Seven!’ Andre shouted, and the count continued. It went on until it stopped at number eleven. There was silence — a broken length in the chain of positions.
‘Eleven!’ the master sergeant prompted. There was no reply. ‘Somebody check!’
It took a few moments for the obvious truth to be revealed. Andre waited in silence with all the rest.
‘U-uhm!’ came the distressed voice of number ten — more of a sigh, or an exhalation, than a comment. But it made the rest of his report unnecessary. ‘He’s… he took a mortar! Right where he was layin’! Right in the back, it looks like! I can’t tell, really!’
‘All right, let’s go!’ the sergeant said quickly, moving on. ‘Number twelve, you’re now eleven! Sound off!’
‘Eleven,’ came the demoralized reply. It was the man who had been surrendering a few moments before. The count moved on, renumbering again from sixteen to account for the legless KIA. After reaching eighteen, the master sergeant shouted, ‘Okay! I’m nineteen! Hand out the ammo from the guys who bought it!’
A short while later, a guy appeared and asked Andre how much ammo he had. Andre’s magazines were all stacked at the base of his big rock. ‘Four full mags, plus seven rounds in a fifth.’
The guy’s face was pitted with small wounds. He lowered his bandaged head to look down at two blood-spattered magazines. The bandages made his helmet sit high atop his head. ‘You’re flush. I’m gonna pass these out further down.’
Andre nodded. The man turned to leave. ‘Hey!’ Andre called out. The guy stopped. ‘Who’re you?’
‘John,’ the guy replied, breaking into a smile. He held his hand out which Andre shook.
‘I meant your number,’ Andre said — pissed that he now knew the man’s name.
‘Oh. Ten. I’m right over there where that little tree is growin’ out of the crack in the big boulder.’ He was pointing. Andre looked out of politeness. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked Andre.
‘Seven,’ Andre replied. After a moment, the guy arched his eyebrows. He turned to leave — not nearly as upbeat as he had been before. ‘Name’s Andre! Andre Faulk.’ The guy turned back with a smile and nodded.
After he left, Andre wondered why the guy wanted to know his name. Or know anything about him, for that matter. Numbers would do fine as far as he was concerned. And he agreed when the master sergeant renumbered. It was far better than reminding them of each death every time they counted off. Andre was even glad he didn’t know what had happened to the two men whose earlier wounds had overcome them. He hadn’t once left his perch on the hill. He pissed in a far corner. Ate his meals beside a moss-covered rock. Fought from behind the granite boulder. His world was a ledge of dirt bounded by stone. It was barely wide enough for him to lie down. That was the way he wanted it.
He either lived or died right there. While events outside his ledge were important, he chose not to get too involved. Why should he? Why should he take on something more to have to deal with? He was emotionally spent already. As far as he knew, the two wounded men who had weakened in the night were now doing just fine. They could get new numbers and rejoin the others soon. Why look too deeply into it?