The wounded were organized at the first line of defenses on Sniper Hill. The more seriously wounded were carried up to the next casualty collection point halfway up and protected by a large rock that jutted out the side of the steep slope. Past the rock lay the trenches that had been dug up to the top of Sniper Hill, passing various improvised defensive positions.
The defense of the hill was made easier because there were only two accessible trails upward: the western route and the eastern route. The hill was too steep to ascend safely without using either of these routes. But then again, at least some of these creatures out to kill us had wings.
The Rangers, mainly the sniper and mortar teams, had fortified these trails as best they could for the majority of the enemy, not given to fly. Holding the giant rock about a quarter way up was left to a rifle squad, while both heavy weapons sections pulled back to the trenches on either side of the hill.
Below, the orcs and other monsters were boiling up from the ruins of the defenses at Phase Line Charlie, clearly unsure if we had pulled back. The snipers targeted the heavier elements like the trolls and ogres and either put them down or wounded them badly. Occasional boulders were flung up into the dark night to land on the side of the hill and go rolling back down. Little damage was done, but it was clear the orcs staging down in the woods and gully at the bottom of the hill were going to have to deal with those rolling rocks.
In gas masks we watched the battle suddenly grind to a halt as the enemy dealt with the invisible chlorine gas. With night vision we could see them struggle, and we ceased fire just to conserve ammo and let the gas deal with as many as it could. Ten minutes later there were a lot of dead down there. But as suddenly as the chemical death came, a windstorm arrived out of nowhere and drove the lingering gas off to the west. It wasn’t a natural wind, like some night breeze that comes up unexpectedly with the night. This felt hot and dry like a desert wind. And it smelled of sulfur. You could feel its sting in your eyes even through the filters of your mask.
I checked my watch. It was just after 21OO and I was with Kurtz’s weapons section. No one had assigned me to any position and the sergeant
major hadn’t appeared, so I’d just followed Tanner and the rest of the section up along the eastern trail to the first defensive position. Above us were a few more defensive chokepoints and then the top of Sniper Hill and the mortar teams. We were running out of hill, and the word was… ammunition too. The first sergeant came by and made sure we all had some, redistributing what little we had, making sure everyone had at least three mags. I tried to spread mine out between Tanner and another Ranger, but the first sergeant insisted I keep that much.
We got the “all clear” over the net and doffed the gas masks. Some complained about itchy skin and said if we’d gone to full MOPP we’d be fine. Others reminded those guys that MOPP 4 was a hassle.
At that point we were still running NVGs there in the fighting positions. To the naked eye we must have looked like the orcs below in the gray-green darkness, pushing past each other, handing out supplies, and in my case trying to dig in deeper. Kurtz had put me to work with an entrenching tool to expand our fighting position beyond the access chokepoint.
A few minutes later Specialist Rico opened up with the two-forty on a group of orcs below who were trying for the rock the rifle team was holding while the last of the wounded were moved upslope. Rounds from the heavy machine gun smacked into the gaggle of orcs attempting to push forward. The blazing burst tore them to pieces and left their lifeless bodies all over the approach to the rock. Then Kurtz yelled at me to get back to work while he attached a new belt to feed the team’s two-forty. There weren’t a lot of
7.62 belts left and soon the command came down from Captain Knife Hand to conserve and only engage if they pushed the trenches directly.
Word was we had five more KIAs on Phase Line Charlie. I didn’t hear any names I knew.
I was digging dirt and tossing it outside the trench for all I was worth when the fireballs from below started slamming into the hill all around. The first one I didn’t see at all. I only heard Brumm swear and shout “RPG!”
Except it wasn’t a rocket-propelled grenade typical of the launcher system every band of hajis in the world seemed to have on hand to take out light-skinned fighting vehicles, helicopters, and defensive fighting positions. This… this was just a big ball of fire. I saw it streak overhead and slam into some trees farther up the hill. The explosion was terrific and in an
instant the trees were consumed in an expanding cloud of flame that mushroomed out over the slope and pushed a gusty blast of hot air down across us. It didn’t smell like gasoline or explosives. It smelled like brimstone and burnt charcoal. An ancient and earthy smell that felt as old as time itself.
Another fireball slammed into the western side of the hill, just missing the heavy weapons section over there.
“Pull the two-forty down!” shouted Kurtz, and Rico made to move the ammunition belts he’d linked. “They know where we’re at and they’re targeting. Switch over to cover the trench.”
In seconds the two of them, Sergeant Kurtz and Specialist Rico, had the medium machine gun repositioned toward the chokepoint that gave access to the trench from below. Meanwhile Brumm and his SAW took the position where the two-forty had been and scanned downslope. The Rangers below were being dislodged from the jutting rock. Orcs in armor and ogres with big double-bladed axes were swarming the lower position.
An arrow slammed into the dirt berm where the two-forty had been. It planted there and quivered and I could see that the feathers were oily and dark. Like a raven’s.
Exposed, Brumm began to dump fire from the SAW below the jutting rock to drive off further waves of attackers and allow the Rangers down there to pull back into the trench and get upslope to the fighting positions. Tanner threw himself down into the dirt at the lip of the position and started engaging while Kurtz pulled the M32O from its holster and got it into action, hitting the enemy with launched grenades.
Two minutes later the survivors in the rifle squad came through our position and moved farther upslope to man new defensive positions. The enemy was now using so many fireballs that night vision was washing out with streaks of blazing incoming intense light and also the fires that had started along the slope around us. I had no idea where they were coming from or what was producing them. The air was thick with drifting gray smoke and the flames were creating gusty drafts of hot air all along the face of the hill.
Brumm had just come down from the firing position to load his last drum for the 249 when Tanner noticed the stoic gunner had been struck by an enemy arrow. Out of Brumm’s shoulder stood a black arrow fletched
with crow feathers. The wood was gray, and the point disappeared inside his fatigues.
“Brumm… think yer hit, man,” remarked Tanner as though he were commenting on nothing more than the weather.
Brumm grunted and muttered, “Ain’t nothin’.”
Kurtz was up from next to the two-forty and shining a red light into Brumm’s wound. He shouted at me to take the assistant gunner’s spot next to Rico. I lay down in the dirt and got close to Rico, slinging my rifle over my shoulder.
“Nah,” whispered Rico as he made small checks on his gun while keeping an eye on the narrow opening not fifteen meters away that led into our trench. “Keep your rifle down next to you on the ground so you can get it up and into action if I need to clear a malfunction.” I did as I was told, and he showed me exactly how to keep the linked ammo aligned with the feed tray so the weapon could continue to operate smoothly while working.
“They’re comin’ up now!” shouted Tanner, who’d taken the initial fighting position the two-forty had been placed at and was taking random shots as opportunities provided themselves.
This was now our OP, our observation position, and it allowed us to see what the enemies below were doing. They could either try for the trench, or try to come up steep open ground, exposed to fire. Tanner was standing, and he’d step up to the lip of the trench there, take a shot at someone and scan the situation. Invariably a couple of black fletched arrows would come whistling up at him and he’d drop back down onto the floor of the fighting position and give us a quick situation report.
That had just happened before he said, “They’re comin’ up now!” “Here they come,” hissed Rico in the same instant and then added a
few Spanish words that indicated exactly what he thought of them. Something about milk and feces and their mothers. I’d heard those phrases before, but I’d never understood their usage. I guess it was a cultural thing.
But it was clear Rico was looking forward to their impending meeting with his “Novia.” The M24O machine gun he was assigned to wield.
I was thinking about those words because even in their vulgarity they were comforting to me. Just breaking them down and hearing their ethnic pronunciations in my head felt safe to me. Comforting. Because right now, what would happen in the next few minutes, this was going to be the
opposite of that.
The orcs came first, throwing themselves through the narrow opening. Their wide, almost frog-like mouths bristled with rotten fangs and drooling thick saliva. They had shorter legs and more barreled chests than the orcs we’d faced in the gully. Their tattered leather armor was emblazoned with a rusty red fist holding a dagger.
I saw the bloody fist as clear as day even without NVGs, which I’d removed once the fireballs and fires got too intense and started to blow out the night vision. The firelight was throwing itself right against that section of the trench, and everything that stepped into it was illuminated as though taking center stage in some bad off-Broadway play.
Whether Rico noticed the bloody fist on their armor or not, I didn’t know. And he didn’t care. All I knew was he opened fire with a short burst, found his range was good, and then started to carefully and methodically murder them. This was a machine gunner’s dream. Nowhere for the green things to go except through the chokepoint set up in the hill’s defenses. The weapon barked and then spat forth a long burst that raked the incoming orcs with sudden explosive impacts that caused sprays of blood, bone, and gore to paint the walls of the trench down there.
They croaked and barked, and that was as unholy a thing as I’d ever heard. One threw an axe as he died, and it slammed into the side of the pit above our heads. He twisted away as Rico hit him, as though he might just run off, and then the specialist hit him with a new burst, sending a couple of rounds through that one’s spine. The thing collapsed and lay in a heap.
More came to take its place.
And more died in the face of the relentless two-forty at close range.
I could hear Kurtz shouting for Tanner to engage certain targets along the slope and close at hand. It was clear the orcs were now trying to hit us from both the trench and the slope. Above the thunk and thunder of the two- forty I could hear the ringing fire of the MK18s as I let linked ammo feed through my gloves, keeping the river of it as smooth as possible and flowing into the death machine. I made neat piles of the brass linkage below and to the right of the machine gun. Every dozen or so bursts I would take my right hand and push the piles down and spread them out so they didn’t get so tall as to interfere with the ejection and potentially cause a malfunction. The trench was too close and too tight for it to do anything but
bounce all over the place and occasionally land somewhere it shouldn’t. Like down your shirt, fire-poker hot.
A second later lights of all colors swarmed the trench and began to shift about. Like some kind of technicolor dancing light show from the 196Os. I thought I was having a stroke until I realized everyone else saw them too.
More orcs tried for the opening again and Rico burned through another two feet of belted 7.62 ammo, tearing them apart as they came. I checked the ammo cans and found we were running low. Kurtz had already made sure there was another belt linked and ready to go, and when the time came Rico made it happen and I watched so I could do it in the future.
I had my MK18 up and was firing from the prone. One orc tried to poke his head into the trench, and I fired at him, missing with the first shot and hitting with the second. It scrambled back into the darkness, and the chaos and distraction of the dancing lights gave it enough time to get away from me.
When the next surge came, Rico opened fire, but one of them tossed some kind of clay container filled with oil at us. A flaming rag was corked in one end. The toss fell across the side of the trench in front of us and sent burning oil speeding everywhere across the thick dirt.
I was up on my knees as quick as possible, grabbing the entrenching tool I’d left sticking out of the dirt nearby. I shoveled dirt on the flames and batted at them to put them out.
In the same moment Kurtz got hit by a rock. It knocked him back into the trench and across my legs. When I turned away from the portion of the access trench we were covering with the two-forty to look at him, he glared at me with bug eyes watering and a red face working in anger and rage. He hissed something, but the wind had been completely knocked out of him by the thrown stone.
“Tanner!” shouted Rico between bursts of fire. “Gonna need to help Talker with the barrel change.” I looked over to see the barrel of our two- forty glowing slightly red and smoking in the cool night air. Even I knew that wasn’t good.
The orcs were pushing forward, snarling and croaking as they came over their dead in front of us, literally pulling themselves into the face of our fire. Upslope, another fireball hit one of the fighting positions and I
could hear men shouting over there. Someone was on fire.
There was nothing you could have told me at that moment that would have made me believe anything other than we were about to get overrun and hacked into a thousand pieces. They were pushing our flank with everything they had. The ones in front of us carried scimitars with wide rusty blades. And I kid you not, lightning, an actual lightning bolt, walloped our fighting position, its thundercrack sound shattering the protection our headsets and FAST helmets provided.
Tanner was bent over me, all three of us squeezing into a trench meant for one person, handling the barrel change when the first orc to reach us swung something that wasn’t an axe. Later, when talking with PFC Kennedy and recounting the whole battle from our perspective, he’d tell me the weapon had most likely been a flanged mace and it usually did “one- dee-six damage.”
I had no idea what that meant.
I only knew that the wide-mouthed bellow-roaring orc who’d suddenly appeared out of the smoke and ruined bodies along the trench had slammed down a weapon right on Specialist Rico’s helmet. More were coming in.
There was a hollow thunk and I was sure Rico’s bell had just been rung by the orc with the heavy mace. The blow was so hard it drove the Ranger’s face right down onto the two-forty and shattered his nose.
Kurtz came in over the top, gasping out commands we couldn’t hear and firing at the orcs now filling the trench to get us. Kurtz had his version of the famous World War One trench gun out, slam-firing into the snarling faces of the orcs.
Later I’d find out almost every Ranger had brought a personal weapon along for the ride. They’d known this was a one-way trip into the future and they’d all wanted some backup for close encounters of the weird kind. For Kurtz that would be a matte-black short-barreled shotgun with a Raptor Grip like something out of a Mad Max movie. The Mossberg Shockwave. It carried six shotgun shells and it went off in fast, loud, concussive booms above the roar of the surrounding battle. Five shells cleared the assault as Sergeant Kurtz pushed forward, working hard and slam-firing the weapon as fast as possible. In just a few brutal seconds the utterly surprised orc assault was checked, and Kurtz fired the last round, one-handed, into an orc war chief trying to crawl away from the mess in the trench. Then the
sergeant was falling back and thumbing in more shells as a new cohort came to try their luck against us.
Tanner grabbed Rico and heaved him off the gun while bellowing at me to open fire on the next bunch.
I’d fired a two-forty once. In RASP.
And again, I’d imagined on that one range day long ago that I’d never actually have to fire one again because all linguists do is talk to the indigs and find out what the insurgents are up to. So here I was, not doing anything like I’d planned.
Plan, meet life. Sorry, plan. You just got rolled.
Suddenly I was more alive than I’d ever been in my entire life. I’ve done a few things in my short time on the face of the planet. Jump school was crazy fun. Sure. Sidra Paradides was crazy fun, and dangerous, and that somehow made the weekend we spent together in Paris one of the top ten things I knew I’d think about when I was old and ready to shove off someday. One time I drove a Porsche and hit a hundred and eight-six miles an hour. That was pretty cool. That was with Sidra also. All the crazy times were with her. She laughed like a lunatic as we raced through the fog and rain and pretended there was never going to be a tomorrow to live for. That “now” she was always talking about was everything then.
I’ve done those things.
They were exciting… in another life.
But there has never been anything in what I consider a too-short life as of the writing of this account, that even compared with full cyclic rate of fire on an M24O. Full rock-and-roll on.
There. Is. Nothing. Like. It.
This was the unreality of the situation. Looking back it was real enough, but not the mundane reality of remembering that time you took out the trash or saw that majestic view. Those things you remember with your brain. This moment is remembered on a cellular level, an ancient level. There were so many dead orc bodies, spent, broken, and twisted in my narrow and close field of fire that without anyone telling me I just kept pouring fire into the rest of the orcs pushing through that opening.
As has been noted, I have a lead foot and a lead trigger finger.
And yeah. I was screaming at them. And Tanner was dying laughing and telling me to “kill the whole tribe, Talker,” and of all the things that will
ever happen to me for the rest of what remains, that moment was the most Ranger moment I ever hope to have.
There was nothing like it.
When death was so close and coming straight at you and you just smiled back at it and kept pulling the trigger on a blazing murder machine.
There is no normal after that moment. There’s no going back.
Later I talked to Sergeant Thor about it. About “normal” being gone.
And this was his reply.
“There is a normal after that, Talker. But it’s the new normal. Normal is relative, as in, what’s normal to the spider is pure terror to the fly. Be the predator, always, Talker. Always. That’s normal for a Ranger now.”
In short order the belt was burned short and Kurtz, still clutching his wicked trench gun, had to come up and croak at me to, “Cease fire, Talker! Ain’t no more.”
I think he’d been hit in the throat by the thrown stone. His eyes were still watering and red and he was opening and closing his mouth like he was trying to suck air and not getting much in return. The look in his eyes was pure murder and as I lowered the weapon and surveyed the trench full of ruined monsters, I came back to myself. I tried to hand the big machine gun to Tanner, but he just backed away, holding the ammo belt and box. He’d followed me up. Laughing as I fired and couldn’t stop.
This is madness.
Kurtz took the two-forty away, gently, almost reverently, and then he looked me in the eyes, nodding once. The look of murder gone.
“Good to go,” he croaked. “Killer.” This madness.
This is fun.
