Folk startled him. For a moment Bannon lost his balance and almost toppled off the gun mantlet. He had fallen asleep. The darkness that enveloped them told him this fearful day was finally over. That didn’t mean his responsibilities were at an end.
The short nap only accentuated his exhaustion. Looking about, Bannon saw that the ITV had pretty much burned itself out, though it was still glowing red as small fires consuming the last of its rubber. Through the trees he could see smashed Soviet vehicles were also burning. Some were like the ITV, red and glowing. Others were still fully involved with angry yellow flames licking at dense black clouds of smoke rising above them and into the still night air. The shattered and skewed trees and tree trunks added to the unnatural scene.
“Captain Bannon, the battalion commander wants to see you,” First Sgt. Harrert, who was standing on the ground in front of the tank, called out. The two men looked at each for a moment as Bannon collected his thoughts.
“Are you OK, Captain?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m OK. Give me a minute to get my shit together. Where is the Old Man?”
“He said he’s back down where you last saw each other. He wasn’t sure how to get in here and didn’t want to throw a track finding a way in.”
“Are you finished here, Sergeant?”
“Yes, sir. The other ITV was still running. Newell is going to drive it down to the maintenance collection point. We’ll turn it over to the infantry there. 55 is still operational. The only real damage was to the antennas. We replaced them with the spares we carry around and made a radio check. 55’s good to go.”
“And the bodies?”
“Folk and I moved them over out of the way and covered them with 55’s tarp. The location has been reported to S-l. We’ve done we can do for them. I think we’re finished here, sir”
Harrert’s last comment came across more like fatherly advice than a statement of fact. He was right, of course. The hilltop had been a dumb place to put a position. It took three men killed to convince Bannon of that. He had no desire to invest any more here.
Gathering himself up, Bannon came to his feet, stood upright on the front slope of the tank and stretched. Squatting down closer to the first sergeant, he then told him to pass word on to the XO to move 55 over to the 2nd Platoon position. Harrert was to follow the XO over. Once 55 was settled in, the first sergeant was to pick up the XO and the 2nd Platoon leader in the PC and bring them over to 66’s position to the right of 3rd Platoon. A runner would go for the 3rd and Mech Platoon leaders. No doubt there would be some new information to pass out once he had finished with the battalion commander. There might even be a change of mission. Even if there weren’t, he still wanted to gather the leadership and assess the impact of the first day’s battle on them and their platoons.
With nothing more to be done there, 66 pulled out of the old headquarters position and began to carefully pick its way through the debris until they reached the logging trail. Once on the trail it only took a couple of minutes to reach their former position. They did not pull all the way up to the berm this time, but stayed back in the woods about ten meters. The other tanks had also pulled back just far enough so that they could still observe their sectors without being readily visible to the other people across the valley. The battalion commander was waiting as 66 pulled in.
Not surprisingly, Bannon found he had been right on both counts. Colonel Reynolds, who had just returned from a meeting at brigade, was there to provide an update on the big picture and give him an order for a new mission. Rather than pull all the team commanders back to the battalion CP, he was making the rounds and passing the word out himself. Besides, Bannon suspected, like him, Reynolds wanted to gauge the impact of the first day’s battle on his principle subordinates.
The first item the battalion commander covered was a rundown on the battalion’s current situation. Team Yankee had been the only team to engage the enemy within the battalion task force. For a moment, Bannon wondered why the colonel bothered to inform him of that brilliant flash of the obvious. Team Bravo had been badly mauled by artillery, losing five of its ten PCs, two of the four ITVs that had been with them, and one of the four 1st Platoon tanks Team Yankee had attached to them. The destroyed tank had taken a direct hit on the top of the turret.
The armor on a tank can’t be thick everywhere, and the top is about as thin as it gets. None of Alpha 12’s crew survived. Of the remaining three tanks, one had lost a road wheel and hub but had been recovered and would be back up by midnight. Because of the losses, the trauma of being under artillery for so long, and the loss of its commander, Team Bravo had been pulled out of the line in order to allow them an opportunity to regroup. D Company, held back by brigade as a reserve, had moved up to replace Bravo along the front line trace.
Charlie Company, to the left of Team Yankee, had had an easy day. They hadn’t seen a Russian all day. Nor had it been on the receiving end of any artillery fire. The battalion commander told Bannon that the Charlie Company commander and his men were chomping at the bit, waiting for a chance to have a whack at the Reds.
In a dry and even voice Bannon told the battalion commander that if the gentlemen in Charlie Company were so fired up for action, they were welcome to Team Yankee’s position, including the bodies. This cold, cutting remark caught Reynolds off guard. He stared at Bannon for a moment before letting the matter drop by moving on to the battalion’s new mission.
In the colonel’s PC, Bannon received his new orders. On the wall of the PC was a map showing the brigade’s sector. The battalion task force was on the brigade’s left flank. 1st Brigade, to the north, had received the main Soviet attack and had lost considerable ground. The attack against the battalion, Reynolds stated glibly, had only been a supporting attack.
Bannon thought about that for a moment. The Team’s fight had been a sideshow, unimportant in the big picture. As that thought rattled around in his exhausted mind, he felt like screaming. Here the Team had put its collective ass on the line, fought a superior foe twice, and had three men killed and five wounded in an unimportant sideshow. His ego and pride could not accept that. What was he going to tell Lorriet’s mother when he wrote her? “Dear Mrs. Lorriet, your son was killed in a nameless, insignificant sideshow. Better luck next time.”
Ever so slowly, he became aware Reynolds and Major Jordan were staring at him. “May I proceed?”
The battalion commander’s curt question didn’t require a reply, not that Bannon would have been able to give one. The irrational anger he felt over Reynolds’ revelation was simply too great to allow him to do so in a manner that would have been, for lack of a better term, civil.
“The 1st Brigade would be hard pressed to hold another attack,” the S-3 informed Bannon in a workman like manner. “Intelligence indicates that the Soviet forces in front of 1st Brigade had lost heavily and are no longer able to attack. A second echelon division, the 28th Guards Tank Division, is moving up and is expected to be in position to attack not later than dawn tomorrow. The Air Force has been pounding the 28th Guards throughout the day, but hasn’t slowed it. We have the mission of attacking into the flank of the 28th Guards Division as soon as they were fully committed in the attack.”