SNAFU: Heroes: An Anthology of Military Horror

“We weren’t all that far from Paris. We’d been in a few skirmishes and were lucky enough to come out of them with our hides intact. Mostly we managed to survive, but we weren’t winning very much. There were only a handful of us to begin with. Jenkins was the Sergeant, and he was the highest-ranking soldier we had left at the time. Lieutenant Price had gotten himself killed only two days before, and we were supposed to be heading back to the field command. Only problem was, we couldn’t figure out where we were trying to go. When Price died, he wasn’t alone. Billy Sinclair was on radio duty at the time and he and the radio both got themselves blown to pieces. We weren’t exactly enthusiastic about the way our week had been going, if you can catch my meaning.”

He stopped for a minute and without a word went back into the house. He came back out with more smokes but left the beer behind. “There were only five of us left: Jenkins, myself, Toby Baker, you’d have liked him, Eddie, he was a little butterball from Ohio, but he had a great laugh and he shared it a lot. After him there was Emit Springer from New York and there was one last fella, a man named Jon Crowley. Where he was from, I couldn’t begin to tell you and I hope to never find out. In the middle of this entire snafu, Crowley was the only one of us who wasn’t sweating bullets. He was as calm as a man could be, and normally about three times happier than he had any reason to be. He wasn’t even part of our squad. He was just a straggler we’d sort of adopted along the way.

“Came out of the west right after everything went sour, and started walking in the same direction as us. Crowley was just as happy as a clam to run across us, and it wasn’t long before we invited him to join in on our march. We were on the same side, and he had better food than the rest of us combined. He’d run across a nice supply of sausages and bread the day before.”

Grandpa looked me straight in the face then, his eyes lit only by the glow of the ember he cupped in his hand. “Eddie, no man before or since has ever scared the hell out of me the way he did. There was something about him that just wasn’t right. He didn’t scare me all the time, only when he looked directly at me, or talked to me… or smiled that nasty, evil grin of his. And Eddie, he smiled a lot. The worse things looked, the more he seemed to enjoy himself.

“He wasn’t right, is what I’m saying. There was something about Crowley that made me want to hide under the sheets or call for my mother.” He cleared his throat, maybe afraid I didn’t know what he meant, but I did. “Anyhow,” he continued gruffly. “There were five of us left and most of what we had on us had been almost useless. Maybe we had a hundred rounds left all told, and were as lost as we could be. Knowing that Paris was close by and getting there isn’t the same thing. We had one advantage going for us… we were the good guys in the eyes of most the locals. There were a few who maybe didn’t mind the Nazis so much, or maybe had a deal going to report anything unusual, like a small group of American soldiers, but we hadn’t run across any.

“It was only a matter of time before we could work everything out and be on our way safely. At least, that’s what we kept telling ourselves and that’s what Jenkins kept telling us too. Lord, but we wanted to believe him.

“Not long after the sun had set, we got to moving ourselves from the field where we’d spent the day. We had to move at night because the Nazis sure as hell weren’t going to ask us how we were before they started shooting. You know what I mean, I suspect.”

I nodded my agreement. There were times when maybe the Viet Cong were too tired to look for us and times when we were too tired to look for them, and then there were times when we hunted each other like hounds with a fresh blood trail to follow. Maybe it was the phase of the moon or maybe it was just a vibe you picked up after a while, but sometimes you could tell when something was going to go poorly. You could tell when the enemy was in a killing mood.

“We’d only gone a couple of miles, tops, when we heard the convoy coming. Crowley heard them first, and in the darkness, with the moon above, I could see his smile when he noticed the sounds of vehicles rumbling past. His teeth flashed like lightning and his voice was amused when he spoke. ‘I’m guessing that those aren’t the good guys, fellas. I think we might want to make ourselves scarce.’

“He was right. The trail of German trucks that came past our little hiding place by the side of the road were huge. If it was less than thirty vehicles all told, you could have fooled me. Most of us kept our heads down, but Crowley laid in that trench next to the road and watched like a kid at a parade as every one of those loaded machines swept past us. How he managed to not get spotted is something I’ve never figured out.