David Healey
Sniper Ridge
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Chapter One
Caje Cole heard a distant rifle shot and thought, trouble.
The thing about trouble was that it always seemed to find him. He couldn't avoid it. Here in Korea, trouble was about as hard to lose as his shadow.
Cole froze, listening for more gunfire, cocking his head toward the faint echo. His gray eyes were so clear that they looked out at the world with the ghostly gaze of Civil War soldiers in old photographs. His eyes also glittered with something like excitement now. He sniffed at the air. Deep down inside him, some part of Cole actually welcomed the trouble to come.
"Spread out," he warned the others. He was with a squad of a dozen soldiers. They were all good men, and he knew that he could trust them not to get each other killed out of sheer stupidity. However, exhaustion from humping up the steep hill had dulled their edge.
"C'mon, that's a long ways off," someone grumbled.
"If you can hear them shooting, then it ain't far enough," Cole snapped. He didn't bother to explain that the same rules applied to both gunshots and thunder. If you were close enough to hear either one, then you were close enough to be struck by a chunk of lead or a million volts of electricity — both of which had about the same result.
Cole was nominally in charge of this squad, which had been sent out to reconnoiter the hills beyond the U.S. and U.N. position near Triangle Hill. One thing about their platoon leader, Lieutenant Ballard, was that he was big on reconnoitering. Cole supposed they were lucky that the lieutenant hadn't decided to lead the squad himself. If that had happened, there was a good chance that none of them would have been coming back. The lieutenant probably had more pressing business, anyhow, like having to shine his butter bars.
Reconnoiter. That there was a fifty-cent word if he'd ever heard one.
Cole muttered, "Dang officers."
"What are you going on about?" the soldier to his left wanted to know. It was Pomeroy, another WWII veteran who'd had the bad luck, along with Cole, to find himself caught up in this Korean mess. Whereas Cole was lean and knotty like a locust fence post, Pomeroy was chunky with weight he'd put on after the last war and hadn't managed to lose in this one. Considering the lousy food and the constant exercise, that was something of an accomplishment. Pomeroy was breathing hard from the climb up the steep trail. Cole got a whiff of Pomeroy's fresh sweat and wished he hadn't. To be fair, didn’t none of them smell too good. He took a couple of quick steps to stay upwind.
Pomeroy was also a veteran of the disaster that had been the retreat through the frozen landscape surrounding the Chosin Reservoir. Pomeroy had lost a couple of toes to frostbite for his trouble, but like an idiot, he had gotten himself sent back to Korea, when he should have been on his way back to the States. Cole shook his head, just thinking about that.
Off to his right walked Tommy Wilson, who had also been at the "Frozen Chosin" but who had managed to keep all of his toes, if not his innocence. Baby-faced and boyish, the kid looked a lot younger than he was. Cole recalled how he had seen this kid scream like a banshee as he plunged his bayonet into the belly of an enemy soldier. Still a teenager, the kid was definitely growing up fast here in Korea.
As much as he did, in fact, enjoy the company of Pomeroy and the kid, Cole would have preferred to be alone. But in the United States Army, there was no such thing, even when reconnoitering.
They moved higher onto the hill, onto open ground that was too rocky to grow much more than brambles and scrub trees. Scald was the word for this kind of barren landscape back home in the mountains.
Cole cast a nervous glance at the sky. The Corsair pilots tended to drop bombs and napalm — flaming jellied gasoline — on anything that moved in these mountains. From the air, it would be hard to tell them apart from a Chinese or North Korean patrol. So far, the drab sky appeared empty.
"What are you thinking?" Pomeroy asked quietly, which for him, sounded nearly like a shout. Pomeroy was a regular bull in a china shop most days. He was also going deaf from being too close to things that went bang. But the landscape and stillness at the top of the hill compelled them all to silence, as if they were in a church. Even the birds had fallen quiet.
"The lieutenant told us to take a look-see, so I reckon that's what we'll do."
"We could go back and tell him that we didn't see nothin'," Pomeroy said. He hawked and spat something thick and phlegmy into the dirt. "Wouldn't be a lie."
"Let's see if we can figure out who is doing that shooting."
"Screw the lieutenant," Pomeroy said. "Let's head back. We're pushing our luck as it is. You know as well as I do that if we run into anything bigger than a dishwashing detail, we're toast out here on our own."
"Don't get your knickers in a twist just yet."
"It's gonna be dark in a couple of hours," Pomeroy persisted.
Cole looked around at the squad. He could see from their faces that they were probably thinking much the same thing as Pomeroy. They’d be glad to return to the relative safety of the American lines. He saw faces pale with tiredness under the grime and stubble. "Let me just go on up here and take a look. Then we'll head back. Kid, you come with me."
Cole started forward, moving toward a higher point in the scree, from where he hoped to get a view of the next valley below. If he didn't see anything, they would turn around and head back. Even Cole didn't want to be caught out here after dark.
Not for the first time, Cole considered what a strange war this was in Korea. He almost missed World War II, just thinking about the difference. In Europe, the objective had been rather simple: land on the beach and push across Europe, all the way to Berlin. With a few exceptions, such as the Battle of the Bulge in the snowy Ardennes Forest, the American and Allied troops had mostly pushed forward as the Germans steadily retreated. Of course, the Germans had not given up easily… in June 1944 in particular, it had seemed as if each acre of ground was hard won and soaked in blood.
Here in Korea, the war was more like some deadly football game. Both sides pressed back and forth, sometimes taking ground and sometimes losing it. Instead of yardage, they mostly fought over possession of these godforsaken hills and valleys. It was hard for an average soldier to define the objective, whereas in the last war, everyone in uniform knew that the goal was to march into Berlin or Tokyo.
Reaching the high point, Cole could see for miles. But it wasn't the distant mountains that caught his attention. In the valley below him, he could see a good-sized Chinese patrol about to attack a much smaller American squad. Like Cole's own group, they had likely been sent out to reconnoiter, but had gotten more than they bargained for.
That explained the rifle shot that they had heard earlier. Now, there were more and more shots. The distinctive cracks of rifle fire carried clearly on the clear air.
He and the kid had both crawled out onto the flat slab of rock, keeping as low as possible. No point in becoming a target for any pilots or sharp-eyed enemy soldiers. There were more than the soldiers in the valley to worry about. It was likely that a few pieces of Chinese artillery were hidden in the hills. Those big gunners had itchy trigger fingers.
"Look at that," said the kid, practically into Cole's ear. "It's like we have the bleacher seats at a football game… one that's a long ways off."
"Ain't no game," said Cole, who had never sat in the bleachers or been to more than a pick-up football game — neither of those things existed back home in Gashey's Creek. "Our boys are about to get wiped out."