Our troops retrieved their weapons from the vehicles and went scurrying out through the woods as the distant firing and pattering of bullets encouraged them on. The howitzer was turned and set up in the road. The truck pulling it had already run over the cattle gate, flattening it. A three-strand barbed-wire fence on ancient, half-rotted posts ran away on both sides of the gate. The artillery officer, a captain, came over to confer with Grafton. “Not yet,” the admiral said.
I went into the woods, trying to show the civilians how to take advantage of cover, advising them not to fire their weapons, but to wait. Some of the fools huddled down behind a bush or sapling that wouldn’t stop a BB, so I moved them to rocks and behind big trees. Inevitably a few of them began banging away at the distant crest, wasting ammo; they probably had no idea how far their bullets would drop at that distance. Some were shooting into the air at a thirty-degree angle; maybe they were trying to hit Camp David.
One guy was walking around like it was Sunday afternoon in the park, shouting to his fellow warriors, “Hang tough. We’ll kick the shit out of those stupid sons of bitches.”
“Get down, you idiot,” I told him.
He looked at me with distain and struck a pose. “At this distance, they can’t hit—”
Whap! There is no sound on earth like that of a bullet striking a living body.
I heard the sound and saw the hole appear in the side of his head. Blood began leaking out. He swayed like an old oak in a storm, his eyes fixed on infinity, dead on his feet. He fell beside me.
He had a nice rifle, an old 1903 Springfield with a four-power scope. I laid it across his chest and moved on, shouting, “You morons get behind something solid and stay down! Save your ammo!”
After twenty minutes of that, when I had positioned the men and women who had made the climb on the left side of the road, I went back to the pickup.
“Get out your sniper rifle, Tommy, and look at the people on the crest,” Grafton said. “When the action starts, shoot anyone who looks as if he is directing troops.” That was always the advice to snipers: kill the officers.
“Yo,” I said and got out the best rifle, deployed the bipod, filled my pockets with cartridges, and set up using a pile of dirt that some snow scraper had deposited there in past years.
I lased the crest. Three hundred fifteen yards, give or take.
“Start shooting, Tommy,” Jake Grafton said.
I picked out some fool who was standing up looking this way with binoculars and let him have it. After the recoil, I didn’t see him. I scared or hit him.
I had fired ten shots when Grafton said, “Do you have a machine gun in the truck?”
“Yes.”
“Put it up there and get ready.”
I had no more than gotten the bipod deployed and the belt in it when the howitzer began firing at a high angle. I saw the shells popping on the crest. Then the mortars opened up, dropping their shells along the crest too.
This is it, I thought. They’ll break for the woods behind them and we’ll charge up there to take the crest.
Grafton was running to the left, telling everyone who would listen that we were going to charge the crest, but to stop there. In all likelihood, the people on the crest would retreat to the woods on the other side and be waiting for our bunch to charge them.
But…
I was astounded when the enemy on the crest stood up and began running downhill toward us. They charged, at least two thousand of them, screaming at the top of their lungs and firing wildly. They were dedicated Soetoro fanatics, not professionals.
I hunkered down over the M249 and began firing bursts. They went down in handfuls. To my right and left the woods came alive as the civilian volunteers let loose with everything they had, shotguns, rifles, and pistols.
The charge broke halfway to the trees. The ground was carpeted with people when, suddenly, the survivors began running back up the hill en masse, some of them carrying and dragging wounded people.
I shot the whole belt at them as the howitzer banged away to my left and the mortarmen dropped their shells among the survivors. Then the artillery shells that had been popping viciously moved their aim point and I no longer saw the shells land. They were obviously shooting to land their shells on the back side of the ridge.
All along our line a shout went up and people who thought they didn’t have another erg of energy left in them left the trees in a trot, charging up that hill. That’s when my admiration of the American volunteer went through the roof. By God, they had guts.
They swarmed up that hill.
Sarah motioned to me, so I grabbed the machine gun and belt and got in the back. She put the truck in motion and I hung on. I wanted to change the belt in the machine gun but with the uneven ground tossing the truck around, there was no way. I grabbed my M4 and squirted a burst at any of the enemy who paused in flight to shoot at people charging up the hill.
When we made the crest, it was empty. The enemy was running down the other side. Sarah stopped the truck. I dumped the carbine and grabbed a belt of ammo and slapped it in the M249 as bullets snapped around the truck. People running, guns blazing: it was the damnedest battle I have been in yet, like something from an American Civil War movie, blues versus grays. I dismounted, set up the gun, and shot at the retreating people dashing into the trees on the east side of the bald.
“Hose the tree line,” Grafton shouted. He was outside the truck, crouching, watching everything. “They may have an ambush there.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him run over to the howitzer crew and point. In seconds the artillery shells began falling just back of the treeline: explosions, clouds of dirt, trees falling. The mortarmen came up to the crest in the pickups that they had used to transport their tubes, recoil plates, and ammo. After taking a moment to get set up again, they began lofting shells into the woods below.
To my amazement, our guys who had scaled the crest stopped for only a moment to get their breath, then set off running downhill for the trees.
I finished the belt and got another into the gun, which was getting damned hot.
Grafton jumped into the truck and Sarah raced it downhill. I sprayed lead, then grabbed the gun and followed them.
She stopped forty feet from the edge of the trees. I threw my machine gun in the bed and picked up my M4.
Willis Coffee came running up. Grafton shouted at him, “Get some AT4s and shoot them into the trees.”
“We’ve got about a dozen.”
“Get them running for Camp David.”
Willis did as he was told. Stood in the bed and launched the rockets as fast as he could.
When our troops were no longer in sight, Willis got down. Our guys and gals had gone into the trees. They had literally jerked the old fence posts out of the ground rather than climb over or through the barbed wire.
Grafton, Sarah, and Willis each got an M4, and we trotted toward the trees. We hadn’t taken five steps when Willis grunted and fell. I stopped and went back to check on him. He had taken a bullet in the chest. He looked at me and said, “Tell my wife…”
“What?” I demanded. “Tell her what?”
But he was dead. I realized then that I really didn’t know Willis Coffee very well. And I would never know him better. “God bless you,” I whispered, and ran on toward the trees.
Dead and wounded lay everywhere. We disarmed the wounded and kept going. Our troops were in front of us, driving the enemy toward the perimeter fence somewhere in the woods ahead.
When we hit the fence, it was down. Who tore it down I never learned. It was down when we got there and that was the reality of it. We kept going.
Somehow in the woods amid the smoke and bodies, we lost Grafton. He must have run on ahead. I was too old a dog for loping through the woods when people could be hiding behind any tree praying for a good shot at their pursuers. Ahead I could hear the cacophony of gunfire. Bodies lay every which way, a lot of them shot in the back. The wounded were groaning. The rocky forest floor looked like hell’s half acre.