‘What?’ Patterson squawked. ‘No! Now it’s this kinda shit that pisses me off! It ain’t right! We been bustin’ our asses! Marchin’ and fightin’! Lost Chavez last night! Now they want us to go up that tall motherfuckin’ hill and help some lazy fuckin’ assholes get down?’
‘They’re wounded’ the squad leader said. ‘We’re evacuating ’em, fuckhead!’
Patterson wasn’t convinced. ‘Well… it’s down hill for them. We take care of our wounded. Let ’em evacuate their own’!
‘They’re all wounded! They came and got ’em out of an aid station! Told ’em to hang on to that hill!’
‘That hill?’ Patterson asked. He looked around to get his bearings. ‘But we just took this stretch last night.’
‘They got left behind,’ the sarge said as Harold drifted off to sleep. ‘Been cut off for a long time.’ Instead of yelling, the squad leader laughed as if at an hilarious joke. Harold opened his eyes and looked at the man. ‘Ain’t that the fuckin’ army! They fuckin’ ran off under cover of some wounded guys!’ He gasped for air amid cackles of laughter. He’d cracked. ‘Ain’t that just the fuckin’ way, man! God-damn! The Army fuckin’ way of doin’ every fuckin’ thing the most fucked up way you can fuckin’ do i-i-it!’
‘Hey, sarge…’ Patterson began.
‘Now, we’re goin’ up that fuckin’ hill! We’re gonna get them off it! And I don’t wanta hear another fuckin’ thing outa anybody! Now move it!’
Harold jumped to his feet with the others. The two squads headed up the steep hill in single file. The base and lower slopes looked like a moonscape. There were blackened holes. Shattered trees. Severed parts of human bodies thankfully charred beyond recognition.
‘Jesus Christ!’ Patterson said from just ahead of Harold. The dozen men skirted the edge of a half-buried boulder. Before them lay an open slope covered with Chinese dead. It looked as if a plow had tilled a cemetery lawn and disinterred the graves of hundreds. They wove their way in silence past bodies in various states of decay. Some lay twisted into awkward shapes. Others had died on their backs as if resting in bed. Some lay in rows — sheltered behind rocks where the death appeared organized. Others died in the open with arms and legs akimbo.
Stempel looked up and tried to imagine attacking that high ground. The only approaches were wholly exposed to fire. And the summit above was all bare granite rock. It was filled with crevices, hollows and notches. All would’ve blazed with staccato bursts at point-blank range.
No one said a word till they found the first of the wounded. ‘Got one over here!’ came a call. ‘Another one!’ called a man from the other side.
They brought them all up to the flat hilltop. The only guy that Harold found was dead. A white guy lying in a wide pool of dry blood. There must’ve been three hundred empty cartridges on the ledge. Some were lined up in neat rows of twenty-four. Hours of the day — days of the week — day after day. Unbelievable, Harold thought in amazement.
‘Need some help here!’ Harold shouted. He and another man hauled the dead guy onto the bald, breezy summit. They put him in a line of twelve other corpses. They then waited while the medics treated the wounded. A nurse and a bearded man’ with a television mini-cam helped out. Nobody said much of anything as they waited. The stench from the killing ground below was overpowering.
‘Stempel?’ Harold heard. He looked around. None of his squadmates had said a word. ‘Stemp!’
Harold turned to see one of the wounded, who was propped up onto his elbow and staring. Harold rose and walked over to the man. The recognition was slow in coming. The guy struggled to his feet and waited.
‘Andre?’ Harold tentatively said.
They stood face to face not knowing what to do. Andre laughed. Stempel threw his arms around Andre’s neck. Tears instantly flooded Harold’s eyes. They hugged each other tight. The only sound was the whirring of the mini-cam held by the long-haired cameraman.
Outside Nate Clark’s office, the mood was exultant. The French opened champagne and toasted the victory. The British solemnly raised their glasses to the fallen. After a respectful silence, there was a gush of laughter when the German commander shouted, ‘To the field artillery!’ and everyone drank. But it was a different story entirely in Clark’s office. Colonel Reed had been summoned and sat on the opposite side of Nate’s desk.
Nate struggled to put into words the things that he’d kept bottled up inside for too long. Even thinking them sent his mood spiraling downward. The sinking sensation he felt in his chest was almost physical. ‘Chuck,’ he said to his young aide, ‘no one should ever be asked to command troops in war. The toll it takes on the soul is just too great. The memories of the things you wish you’d done differently grow more and more awful, not less. You forget how exhausted you were. How confused things get in the fog of battle. How limited your options are when your back is pressed to the wall. In my mind almost every night I still see the faces of men who died in the platoon I commanded thirty years ago in Vietnam. And the burden of those memories is cumulative. Sometimes, it just reaches the point where it’s too heavy to bear. If that happens, you can no longer be an effective military officer. You’ve got to get out. Heal your wounds. Rest your psyche.’
Reed stared back blankly. Nate raised and re-read the short letter. ‘I hereby tender my resignation from active service with the United States Army. I will finish my tour, complete my duties and provide for an orderly transition, but I wish to remove my name from consideration for any promotion in next year’s cycle. My decision is absolutely final.’ Nate took a deep breath and handed the letter to Colonel Reed. ‘I’d like to take this opportunity, Chuck, to tell you that you’re the best staff officer I’ve ever had. And you’re one of the best tactical commanders I’ve ever seen.’
Reed opened his mouth, but couldn’t speak. What at first looked to be a grimace became an oddly misshapen and sickly smile. Reed looked away, set his jaw and clenched his teeth. When he finally spoke, his voice cracked and quivered. ‘It has been the greatest honor and privilege of my entire life to have served under your command, General Clark. I know you’ll want to stop me saying this, but no soldier did more to win this war than you did. It was your strength, your leadership, that held this command together during its darkest hours. I know it’s hush-hush, but I’ve heard you’re going to get your fourth star and succeed Dekker as Chief of Staff. I honestly believe that your promotion to the Joint Chiefs couldn’t be more deserved.’ Nate sighed. He was at a loss for words. Nate felt a kinship with Reed that inspired candor. But he couldn’t bring himself to describe the cowardly way in which he had coped with the psychological load. The burden that Reed couldn’t seem to bear. The terrible, invisible scars left on the young officer by repeatedly ordering men to their death. Nate was simply too embarrassed of the bandage that he still applied to ease his own emotional wounds.
He couldn’t tell Reed that his memories of the men who’d died were indistinguishable from his memories of the survivors. That in his mind those men were still alive. Healthy twenty-year-olds in the prime of their youth. Simple denial was all it was. At night — when his mind still raced with a million things left to do — he had silent conversations with his old comrades. The imagined talks had a calming effect. It was a mental trick he used to help himself fall asleep. To ease the rising tide of guilt he felt when his mind roamed. Nate exchanged jokes with them. Small talk. Complaints about army life. Those men — living and dead — were so familiar to him that they seemed like old friends. But Nate was too ashamed to tell Reed any of that. For Clark’s closest friend was a young Second Lieutenant named Chuck Reed, Sr.