None Left Behind by Charles W. Sasser

Author:Charles W. Sasser
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780312555443
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

THIRTY-THREE

Sergeant Ronnie Montgomery knew the score as soon as he spotted the short, square figure of Chaplain Jeff Bryan get out of a humvee at Inchon late the same afternoon of the explosion. The chaplain would be spending the night counseling with Second Platoon, which had been relieved of all duties because of the blow it suffered. The death of even a single soldier made a major impact in limited warfare, unlike at Gettysburg, Normandy, or Hamburger Hill where soldiers were so busy surviving they failed to immediately grasp the enormity of their losses. Casualty rates were so proportionately higher in previous wars because it took hours, days, sometimes weeks for a wounded soldier to reach a hospital. Part of the modern U.S. Army’s creed that no soldier would be left behind included the promise that if you were wounded on the battlefield, the army would do everything it could to save your life and not let you die. A soldier who reached a hospital within thirty minutes of being wounded had a 99 percent chance of surviving.

Of course, there was always that one percent.

Chaplain Bryan took Montgomery and Lieutenant Dudish aside. “I’m sorry,” he began. His eyes were red. Messer and he had been close. “Your boys didn’t make it.”

Montgomery stared back, feeling numb, dead. The platoon’s losses were still sinking in.

“Damn it,” he managed.

“You all right, Sergeant?”

“Yeah, yeah. I guess. I knew Given was . . . that he wouldn’t make it. But Messer?”

“He died on the medevac. He was DOA when they took him off.”

“This is so . . . Pardon me, Padre. This is so fucked up. Did you know about his nightmares? Is it possible that someone can predict his own dying?”

“I think it must be possible. Do you want me to tell the platoon?”

“We’ll tell ’em,” Lieutenant Dudish volunteered. “They’re our boys.”

Montgomery didn’t know what to think, what to feel. But he knew he had to hold it together. He kept hearing Colonel Infanti’s words: “How you react when you lose a soldier—and it will happen—sets the tone for the rest of your men for the remainder of the war. If they see you fall apart, they will fall apart.”

Relaying bad news to the platoon without breaking down was the hardest thing either Lieutenant Dudish or Sergeant Montgomery had ever done. Sergeant Messer was liked and respected. So was Nathan Given once he got himself squared away and stopped playing the company shitbird. Now they were gone. They had people waiting for them at home, people who would now wait forever.

Delta Company took the deaths hard. Soldiers in the new company formed at Fort Drum only months before out of misfits and castoffs from other units had gotten tight. Emotions of bewilderment, survivor’s guilt, rage, and despair painted themselves large on drawn faces filled with shock. There was a lot of quiet time, a lot of mourning. Many of the guys, like Specialist Brandon Gray, went off to themselves and wept, throwing themselves on their bunks or crouching with their faces in corners.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.