Nearly forty minutes later, Childers found himself comforting a lot of wounded soldiers at the aid station, doing his best to try and help calm them down and reassure them.
“Hang in there, soldier. You’re going to be OK. You got yourself a ticket home,” he said to one young man who’d taken a gunshot to the stomach. He stayed with him until one of the medics was able to give him some pain medication.
Childers moved to another soldier, a man who looked to be in his late twenties whose left leg was missing. The soldier still had the tourniquet tied on, since someone who had been more critically injured was being treated first. Childers looked at the nametape and saw that the man was a sergeant with the last name Brice. He walked up and grabbed the man’s hand; he gripped back hard and looked at him with an intense expression of pain written across his face.
Unintentionally shouting because his hearing still hadn’t fully recovered, Sergeant Major Childers yelled, “Sergeant Brice, I want you to know how proud I am of you! You did the best you could. Now hang in there until the doctors can help you. You’ll be back home with your friends and family soon enough!”
When he finished speaking, Childers saw a tear run down the man’s face, though he couldn’t entirely hear what the man said in response. Childers pointed to his ears, and the soldier nodded and mouthed, “Thank you.”
A minute later, Lieutenant Colonel Schoolman walked into the aid station and quickly spotted his command sergeant major and waved to get Childers’s attention. As he got closer, he pointed at his ears; Schoolman nodded and then signaled to one of the doctors. The two of them talked for a minute before the doctor waved for Childers to come with him. Once he sat down, the doctor examined his ears with a standard otoscope.
The doc dictated a note for him, which a nurse dutifully copied it down so it would be legible. “OK, so it looks like you did puncture your eardrums, but if we treat it properly, I don’t think there will be permanent damage. I’m going to put some drops in your ears to help make sure it doesn’t get infected. This might sting a little, but it’s really important that you keep using these drops twice a day for the next two weeks. You’re going to have to sit out for a week or two while your ears heal, but you should be able to rejoin the combat soon.”
Childers breathed a big sigh of relief. For a little while, he’d thought he might be permanently deaf.
An army medic filled out some information about what had happened to him and what they had treated him for. The medic must have seen Childers’s left eyebrow rise quizzically, because he suddenly explained, “This form makes sure you get your Purple Heart.” Holding a hand up, he quickly added, “When you retire, you’ll also want this noted in your medical jacket for the VA, so no complaints.”
Lieutenant Colonel Schoolman patted Childers on the shoulder. “When I heard you’d been injured and taken to the aid station, I thought you might’ve been shot again. I’m glad to see it’s only your hearing that suffered.”
Shaking off his squadron commander’s concern, Childers replied, “How’s the rest of the unit doing?”
Schoolman’s expression soured. “Rough,” he answered. “We’re taking a lot of casualties, but we’ve managed to push the Russians across the river. The regiment is going to hold operations at the edge of the river. We’re not going to try and cross. It appears we’ve pushed a large portion of the Russian Army to either the Petrogradsky District or the southern half of the city. At this point, we’re just going to keep them encircled and force them to surrender or run out of food and bullets.”
Childers nodded at that assessment. “I like the sound of that, Sir. This city combat is brutal. We can’t take much more of this, or we won’t have much of a unit left when it’s done.”
“The hard fighting is over with for now, Sergeant Major. Why don’t you stay here for a little while longer and keep consoling the wounded? I’ll see you back at headquarters in a couple of hours, once you’ve had a little bit of time to recoup — and that’s an order.” He shook Childers’s hand and then left to go tend to the rest of his squadron.
The fighting continued around the city as the Allies tightened the noose around the remaining enemy units in St. Petersburg. After the first thirty-six hours of block-by-block fighting, the V Corps commander had his forces keep the enemy encircled, but he refused to grind the rest of his fighting force into the ground in a house-to-house fight with the Russians. He wanted to keep as much of his combat power ready and available for the march on Moscow. The Russians, for their part, employed hundreds of snipers throughout the city and the surrounding suburbs, making sure the Allies knew they hadn’t been defeated yet.
Winter Wonderland
The snow swirled around the column of vehicles, making visibility beyond half a kilometer difficult, if not impossible — not that there was much to see this deep into the Russian interior. After 40 Commando had secured the city of Arkhangelsk, the battalion pressed inland. Once they pushed beyond the beach and the port city of Severodvinsk, they met virtually no resistance. Now that they were ashore, the harsh Russian winter began in earnest, pelting them with subzero temperatures and wintery mixes of snow and ice.
“How anyone can fight in this is beyond me,” thought Sergeant Philip Jones as he lit yet another cigarette. Fortunately, the heater in the BvS 10 or Viking all-terrain tracked vehicles worked like a champ, pumping out hot air that kept the Marines inside nice and toasty.
40 Commando had been on the road now for six hours, and judging by where they were on the map, Sergeant Jones guessed they had another two hours of driving before they’d reach their first waypoint, the city of Vologda. Once there, they’d hold up for a couple of days to let their supply lines catch up. The city would be turned into a logistical supply base as the Allies continued to advance ever closer to Moscow, their ultimate goal.
When they got to within forty kilometers of the city, the weather finally let up. The swirling snow stopped, and the sky started to clear. What the Royal Marines saw next caused them all to take a moment and admire. They were about to enter a forested area that looked like something out of a magazine cover or movie set, complete with a beautiful display of the eerie and colorful northern lights. The trees were iced over with a dusting of snow, providing an almost surreal look to them, alien to what they had been accustomed to seeing thus far. For a brief moment, they forgot there was a war going on.
After allowing everyone to take a short bio break and stretch their legs, the convoy started to move again. Two of the Vikings were in the lead, quickly followed by a pair of Challenger tanks and a pair of Ajax armored scout vehicles. Following the armored vehicles was a long column of Vikings, Ajax and Warrior vehicles intermixed with a few Challenger tanks and some air-defense vehicles in case some Russian jets decided to pay them a visit.
Twenty minutes went by as the convoy drove deeper into the woods, and they continued to follow the M-8 Highway. Sergeant Jones shifted uncomfortably in his seat, his right leg falling asleep from the lack of movement. They still had another ninety minutes before they were scheduled to take a short break to stretch their legs again. Just as he found a way to extend his right leg to try and stretch it in their cramped quarters, the tranquility of their journey was broken. A loud boom reverberated through the ground, the shockwave of the blast slapping their vehicle hard. They veered slightly to the right.