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Just then there appeared in the glow from outside their circle a new face. They all turned to admit Captain Wade, the commander of Delta Company that had been borrowed from Colonel Honig's neighboring infantry battalion.

Everyone fell quiet. “Jerry,” Chandler said in an even voice, holding his hand out to shake. Wade ignored it, and looking into his grimy face and bitter eyes Chandler didn't ask why.

“They told me to join back up with you,” he said with almost a sneer on his face, “so I'm here.”

Delta Company had reported contact in the woods right after the initial fighting at the railroad tracks, and Chandler had detached them to clear the woods. Chandler was told to expect them to reattach at the Iput, but they were nowhere to be found when his task force effected its crossing and resumed its killing.

“You have anybody combat ineffective?” Chandler asked.

“Dead,
Major?” Wade snapped.
“Dead
and
wounded?”

Chandler had only meant to use the broader term for both, but he realized how inappropriate the euphemism was. “How many?” he asked.

“Thirty-nine dead, twenty-six wounded,” Wade replied. “Five of my thirteen Bradleys destroyed, two damaged and recovered. I can field one platoon and my headquarters section.” He looked around at the other officers, and Chandler was glad for the reprieve from his gaze.

“What the hell happened?” the Bravo Company commander asked in a soft voice, the other officers all looking down or away.

“We-e-ell,” Wade said with a deep resentment evident, “while you boys were out winning the war by gunning down cooks and supply clerks, we dismounted ‘cause the woods were too thick for the Bradleys and ran smack into a battalion of infantry. Had to call Lieutenant
Colonel Honig to come over an' pull our chestnuts outa the fire.”

“But why didn't you call me for help?” Chandler protested.

“I told you we were in contact!” Wade snapped.

“Everybody
was in contact!” Chandler snapped back, angry at the implication that . . . that those deaths were . . .

“By the time they threw the second company at us,” Wade said quietly, “and we realized what we were up against, you people were miles away.” Wade went on, describing his later “mop-up” actions against units that Chandler had bypassed, each of which bled casualties from his company. The Russians' light antitank missiles, it appeared, worked perfectly well against the infantry's Bradleys.

Chandler ached to explain himself to Wade, to describe the huge victory that had ensued, to suggest that there was nothing more that he could have done without dismounting his tankers and marching them into the woods on foot. But in the end, he just asked, “Where are your casualties?”

Chandler's Humvee skidded to a stop in the loose dirt. When he opened the door, the four aerials of the battalion commander's vehicle were still swatting at the air from the driver's abrupt use of the brakes.

Oh, my God,
he thought as the muffled sounds of agony easily penetrated the inflated polyurethane walls of the field hospital. Wade waited for him; Chandler hadn't realized that he had stopped walking. He looked at Wade, but Wade's face showed no sympathy. Chandler resumed his walk toward the sounds. Every step brought him closer, and with every step he heard a howl or a cry.

Over the next two hours, Wade introduced him to each and every man, wounded or dead. Wade knew his men well, and he told Chandler their dreams, most of which ended that night on a cold, stainless steel table.

Monk fell to the ground as the tearing sound of incoming cut through the air overhead. With his hands he kept clawing at the soil for depth right up until the shell burst in the treetops to his left. The force of the blast left him momentarily dazed.

Still, no death found him, and he rose quickly to his knees to
pick at the soil with his entrenching tool. Looking over toward where the dark smoke from the shell still hung in the high branches, he saw that a tree lay shattered under the thinning cloud. Monk at first thought that it had miraculously missed the line of marines of which he was a part.

Digging as fast as he could into the slight rise that formed the only usable elevation in the thick woods, Monk looked back up to see one of the new guys pulling up a branch from the fallen tree. The kid sprang straight up and then recoiled backward several steps, tripping onto his butt. Rising to his knees and staring into the tree, he grabbed his stomach and vomited what had to be the entire lunch they had just completed two hours earlier, their first hot meal in a week.

Wood splinters,
Monk thought and he shouted, “Who was it?”

“Adams!” one of the other cherries yelled back.
Adams,
Monk thought, trying to remember which one of the new guys Adams had been.

Another tearing sound approached from above, and they all dropped flat. This time the round fell short, but Monk heard the rustle of brush just to his left as a fragment came close.

Climbing back to his knees he saw the new guys standing around the area where Adams lay. “Dig, you stupid motherfuckers!” Monk screamed at them, incredulous that their work had come to a halt because of a casualty, with a Russian motorized rifle division not a quarter of a mile away and bearing down.

He looked down the line to the right to see the new lieutenant fresh out of platoon leader's class on the radio, the receiver pressed to his ear under his helmet. The woods in front of their positions erupted in fountains of searing hot flame and explosions, and the earth and air all around them rumbled. From flat on his stomach Monk heard over the explosions the roar of jet engines burst to full scream and then rapidly recede into the distance. The bombing run was so close he couldn't decide whether the jets were American or Russian, and he lifted his head to see clouds of black smoke and flame rising into the air in the distance, only the very tops of the clouds visible through the thin upper branches of the trees. Wave after wave of attack aircraft came in, repeating the violence and erecting a wall of fire some five hundred meters to their front.
A-6s,
Monk thought, listening and digging.
Nothin' else carries so much.

Monk looked over at Mouth, who grinned and nodded, obviously pleased to have someone else doing the job for them.

When the screeching whine of the last pair of aircraft had gone, the only sound from the woods in front was the loud crackle of fires. A heavy curtain of black smoke boiled high into the air all across
the broad front. From his left, cheers and whistles sounded from the cherries, and Monk looked over, aghast, to see that they were kneeling and standing, holding their weapons over their heads and pumping their arms into the air all around the fallen tree.

“Get the fuck
down!”
Monk yelled. “Stay low and dig!”
What could they be thinking?
Monk wondered in anger at their stupidity, watching as they began to scrape at the ground from a prone position, glancing up at him as if he was about to shout at them that they were doing even that wrong.

The first of their Claymore mines tripped. Falling flat and wiping his hands on his trousers, Monk knew now the Russians were only two hundred meters away. He heard the screams of agony from the wounded, their bodies torn by the hundreds of steel pellets unleashed by the Claymores that stood on tiny stands an inch above the ground and sprayed an arc to their front,
THIS SIDE TO ENEMY
written on them clearly in block letters. They'd only had time to lay trip wires for warning, not a good thick belt for area defense.

Monk brought his weapon up to the ready, his field of vision reduced as he sighted, one eye closed, down the length of the black barrel. Slowly he traversed the weapon left and right, searching. Like other times before, Monk knew that the first man he saw was dead. He'd train his weapon on him until the platoon opened fire, and the first squeeze of the trigger would end the man's life. For some reason, the thought troubled him more than ever this time.

There!
Monk thought, seeing a stooped figure moving forward cautiously to his right. He brought the SAW around and put the man's chest right atop the iron front sight. The sight, which wobbled all over the place at great range or from a standing position, was dead on and steady at sixty meters from the prone position. The man would die a few seconds from now. A great wave of depression swallowed Monk with the realization.

There were more figures moving forward up and down the line, but Monk stared at his man, so close that Monk could see his face clearly. It was black with grease or ash, but his eyes were wide and white. Monk closed his left eye again and aimed the heavy automatic weapon. He was so close that suddenly the man—the kid—became real. Nobody had told the boy that his life would end in these woods in Siberia. Nobody knew it, nobody but Monk.

Was he ready?
Monk wondered looking at the Russian with both eyes open, torturing himself with the thought.
Has he said his good-byes? Did he know how important, how vitally important, these next few seconds were to him? They were all he had left, and he shouldn't waste 'em. Did he see the trees, the blue sky, how green the summer forest was?

Monk could clearly see the Russian boy's eyes. He was scared. He closed one eye and aimed down the fixed iron sights.

Monk jumped at the sound of an M-16 firing a three-round burst to his right. Still looking down the sight, the entire line opened up. He half expected to see his guy disappear from his sights in a dive to the ground. But he stood there frozen while all around him men bucked and jerked before they fell or spun to the ground in the hail of thunderous gunfire.

Monk added a tiny amount of pressure to the trigger, so slight that he was surprised when the gun roared and bucked against his shoulder. When the shimmer of heat cleared from the gun's muzzle, the boy was gone.

Monk sprayed bullets from left to right now at the anonymous targets that jumped up and ran or crawled through shaking brush. He felt amazingly calm; it was a repeat of numerous previous fire-fights. All were bloody and violent, but all were the same. His mind was a blank.

On and on they came, and smoking hand grenades soon sailed through the air or bounced along the ground toward their line, exploding relatively harmlessly in the gaps in the line or thrown short or long.

“Pull back!”
Monk heard screamed from his right.
“Everybody back!”
the new lieutenant yelled, and Monk looked up to see him standing on the reverse slope of the small hump waving his arm frantically to retreat.

No! No!
Monk thought.
That's wrong! Not now, no!
But all up and down the line the firing died down and men began to pull up and head for the rear. To Monk's right, Bone let go a long burst from his M-60, the remainder of a 100-round belt flopping wildly through the new loader's hands as it fed the chamber with bullets until the end of the belt whipped up like a tail and the smoking gun fell silent.

Bone looked over at Monk as he rose, shaking his head and yelling, “Shit!”

Monk looked back to his left. The new guys blazed away from their positions around the fallen tree. They hadn't heard.

“Hey!”
Monk yelled, but not one looked over at him. To his right, the line was emptying; the marines retreated from the approaching Russians across the open forest floor at a dead run. Mouth yelled, “Come on, T Man!” from behind the line and resumed his run.

Monk looked back over at the cherries, who fired with single-minded ferocity from their positions. “Shit!” Monk said as he pulled back off the crest of the long, low hill and ran toward his three men
on the left. A grenade came bounding over the hill in front and he dropped. The grenade went off and a jarring thwack sounded off his helmet as the helmet's brim hit his jaw like a boxer's jab and his neck was jammed and instantly sore. He rose again to rush forward with the newly acquired agony of a headache, and by the time he got to the cluster of cherries, their heads were up and looking all around.

“Where the hell is everybody?”
one of them yelled back at Monk as he slid into the dirt behind them.

“We're pullin' back!” Monk shouted as the men ahead fired and a grenade went off over the hill in front of them. “Come on!”

“They're too close!” one yelled as he fired burst after burst from his M-16. Monk crawled up to the hill and peered over. There were Russians everywhere, almost to the line on both the left and the right.

“Ho-o-o-ly
shit!”
Monk said, and two of the cherries looked over at him in horror. Monk heard the scraping of dirt behind him and spun around to see Mouth.

“What the fuck's goin' on?” Mouth shouted.

“We're in the shit, man!” Monk shouted as he ejected the nearly empty magazine and loaded a full 200-round box. “Keep firing, Goddammit!” he said as he slid down the hill to where Mouth was. The tree that had fallen from the barrage earlier now lay across the middle of the position held by the five of them.

Monk yelled to Mouth. “You take left, I'll take right!” They waded out into the thick, leafy branches at the bottom of the hill and sank down, back-to-back and separated by the trunk. “What are you doin' here?” Monk asked.

“Fuck, I don't know, man. I was just followin'
you!”

“Shit, Sarge!” one of the men screeched as his shaking hands tried to seat a new magazine into his rifle. “They're comin' over on the right!” Dirt kicked up all around his position as the
zi-i-i-ng
of bullets flew over Monk's head.
This is it,
he thought in frozen terror.
End of the line.
He brought his weapon up and waited. It's a simple thing to die.