Rage & Fury

by Darryl Hadfield

  A dark, sickly face came into my view, the beard hanging off of it stinking and tickling my chin. I could see the rifle in the guy’s hands, and even though I couldn’t breath, I yanked Rage out of my sheath and jammed it in his throat. He went down immediately, but not before blood splashed across my face and chest.

  I slowly regained the ability to breath but still ached like I’d used nothing but my chest for the last grading – thank fuck for reactive body armor, but it still hurt like a bitch to get shot. I got back on my feet, stumbling slightly, moving towards the west again. I jammed Rage back into it’s sheath.

  I must have engaged a dozen different targets, multiple shots each. Unfortunately, as an infantryman and NOT as a new sergeant-I-mean-Platoon-Leader, I wasn’t used to carrying a pistol as my primary weapon; I was used to carrying a rifle. That didn’t work.

  When I pulled the trigger only to realize my pistol’s slide had already locked back, I swore and threw it at the enemy soldier who was bringing his own weapon up. Ohhhhhh no, you motherfucker, you are NOT shooting me again!

  Rage came back out, and I sprinted the dozen or so yards toward my enemy, barely avoiding his fire as he jerked the trigger, rifle held down at his waist. He started babbling something and looked like he was about to drop the rifle… Too late. Rage went up under his chin and pithed him like a frog. Yanking Rage out, the sneak continued – but I was getting tired, and my body was starting to suggest it was time to lay the fuck down and take a rest.

  I calmed my breath, oddly thinking about one of the forms Sensei Kim had taught me. I came around the corner of the last tent before the western edge of camp, and saw a group of guys clustered around one other guy. They were muttering something about “aloha a kabar” or some shit like that, and then they scattered in a hurry, except for one guy who started walking quietly but steadily… .towards me. What, these guys gonna attack with knives now?

  I ducked back, hoping he hadn’t seen me yet. He was headed towards my guys on the eastern wire, not really paying attention to much of anything other than stopping occasionally, sounding like he was listening for something. Strangely enough, the entire battlefield had gone essentially silent. Not even animal sounds – odds are, anything alive that could get the fuck out of there, already had.

  I followed him, trying hard to gain on him while he was stalking towards my guys, and then I realized that the other guys surrounding this one didn’t just watch him leave – they RAN. A calmer head and just enough light to get a decent visual on this guy sent visions of the last videos we’d seen on our pre-deployment workup about suicide bombers screamed through my head. I pinged Pangan immediately.

  Brice get everyone the fuck down, hard cover, suicide bomber!

  Wilco Sir.

  How’s that fucking flip manage to be so goddamn calm? We’re in a fucking battle! Flip? Yeah, whatever, he’s Filipino and it’s not racist when he says that about himself.

  I wasn’t sure how to address the situation but goddamned if it didn’t get worse. The bomber turned and looked right at me, then turned and sprinted towards the eastern wire.

  “GET DOWN NOW!” I screamed it out loud, not through my implant, as I sprinted after the bomber. I meant it for my platoon but it occurred to me that maybe this guy would stop in place.

  Or maybe not. He kept running, not stopping now. When I got close enough (which took a surprisingly little amount of time) I tackled him, scrambling to get his arms into an arm-bar, like I’d done so many times in Sensei Kim’s dojo. I wrestled with the bomber, finally setting the arm bar, and getting one fist around his like a glove so he couldn’t take his thumb off the deadman switch. Okay uhh… fuck. Now what?

  The insurgent was squirming, trying to get his arms away from me – and he was really pissing me off. I managed to contain him long enough with my legs around his left arm, and my left hand covering his right, so that I could reach around and pull out my knife. I eased Rage into his ribcage, into his lung and heart. I could feel, for the second time in my life, someone’s life blood bubbling around the blade I was forcing into their body cavity. I felt the skinny enemy combatant’s body relax and eventually go still.

  Pangan, situation is-

  The bomber’s vest was beeping, and beeping faster. This was not good.

  OH FUCK STAY DOWN!

  I manipulated the deadman’s plunger switch out of his right hand, clamping down on it good and hard with my own. My mind was racing – the amount of shit stuck on this guy’s body suggested there was a LOT of explosive there, and, it didn’t feel like Semtex or dynamite sticks… it felt like.. Goddamnit, this asshole is a fucking walking Claymore.

  I used a combat roll to get his now limp corpse into a firefighter carry, and started running as fast as my exhaustion would allow, pinging Pangan again to hunker down and cover up, that this thing was probably going to go off any second now.

  I kept running, the only thought in my head now was that I had to get far enough away to give them a chance to survive the blast. 30 yards, 40 yards, 50… I remember stumbling over someone’s body, it must have been the western edge of the camp where our troops had been overrun. Barely recovering, and stumbling a few yards more, until my boot slipped on an outstretched arm and I was falling, falling, falling….

  I tried to catch myself, I really did, but sometimes you’re lucky, sometimes you’re not.

  This was a “not” time. The body kept going, coming off my shoulders and falling at the same time, but I was hitting a pile of bodies and my hands instinctively opened to try to catch myself.

  I remember a moment of horror flashing through my conscious stream of thoughts, my Kevlar hitting that of another dead soldier’s, and then my body falling down in between two other dead teammates of mine. Next was the loudest noise I’d ever heard, and this was it - everything went black.

  Everything didn’t STAY black – but it did get awfully quiet for a while. I woke up on a stretcher or a cot, a tent ceiling above me.

  I couldn’t hear anything.

  Are you awake? I am Dr. Amato.

  Uhh.. yeah… where am I? WHY THE FUCK CAN’T I HEAR MY OWN VOICE!

  You’ve suffered some auditory damage as a result of the explosion, sergeant. Please calm yourself. We have an excellent grasp of medical science and you are, aside from a rather nasty gash through your body armor and into your lower back, plus two destroyed eardrums, doing surprisingly well. Using your implant to communicate is probably best for now.

  This was just text; we must still be somewhere outside of a major base – not enough bandwidth to handle voice comms.

  Jesus motherfucking Christ, what the hell happened?

  I’m sorry Sergeant, your battalion commander will be here momentarily to debrief you. I will be asking him to keep it very brief; we need to sedate you in a controlled fashion to begin the repair to your eardrums, as well as to patch up your back. How is the pain?

  It was at that point that the searing pain from my back decided to say hi. I groaned and when I looked and listened to the video afterward, I was whimpering like a fucking baby.

  Goddamn it hurts, Doc!

  I can’t sedate you just yet, Sergeant, but soon. Think of it as a good reason to keep your debrief short.

  At that moment, Lieutenant Colonel Bentley came into my field of view – my neck was sore and I wasn’t about to making any sudden motions, not when my back was already killing me.

  His lips were moving and then I saw the doctor’s lips moving too – and then I saw more text.

  Sergeant, I’m told they need to knock you out for some brief surgery and other repairs. You’ll be patched up and back on your feet soon. Well done; I’m sorry to say you are the only platoon leader I have left; the enemy rolled us up with a major offensive, and we lost all of A company except for most of your platoon, and two soldiers who are WIA and largely out of the fight.

  I’m the only platoon leader left in A Company?

  You’re the only platoon leader left in First Ba
ttalion. B company was wiped out at their FOB; a suicide bomber took out nearly everyone at zero dark stupid, no survivors except for PFC Tomas Goodred I think, who died in a freak accident on the way to the aid station when we finally got another unit in there to evaluate. C company has 19 survivors across the whole company; all at the squad level. Surprisingly, you appear to have lost only your platoon leader and Sergeant, and two privates – everyone else made it through, thanks to your actions.

  D Company?

  Gone as well – another suicide bomber, same time, same circumstance, they snuck in quieter and blew their entire FOB to shit.

  Headquarters company?

  Colo’d with C Company. Gone.

  Fuck.

  Pretty much. There is good news, but the doctor is saying you need rest and sedation so they can get you combat effective again. Congratulations on your battlefield commission, Lieutenant. We’ll talk more when you’re out of the Scratch and Dent Shop.

  Congratulations, Lieutenant – but we do need to get you fixed up; you have a platoon waiting for you. The doctor’s ID tag on the tail end of the note was the only way I knew it was him, since I couldn’t see him.

  Soon, I couldn’t see anything, and I was feeling really slee…..

  The next time I woke up, I felt… better. Not great, but better than I had been.

  Remember, “sometimes you’re lucky, sometimes you’re not?” Well, this time, I was wrong – I was pretty lucky after all.

  The bomber’s vest, yeah, had been loaded pretty heavy with explosives, and yeah, shrapnel. Turns out the gash in my back was from a fucking buckle on his suicide vest that was moving so fast, and had such a sharp edge, it sliced right through my soft armor, and embedded itself into my spine – any further, and I’d be the latest paraplegic – if not worse.

  I had, however, fallen in between two other soldiers, both of whom had body armor on that was ALSO protecting me to a degree, in addition to my own. I had a few minor nicks and gouges out of my hands, but that was tolerable. The gash in my back was the worst, and they’d stitched me up and had some quick-heal into it, and they said I needed light duty for about a month – walking was okay, but no leaning over – I’d tear the stitches out, or worse, I’d tear the muscles that had been re-attached in my lower back.

  Pangan’s battlefield promotion to Master Corporal was confirmed, and he was breveted to Sergeant, and left in place as my platoon sergeant.

  That was key, because the other survivors from the rest of the battalion – god, I still can’t get over an entire BATTALION going up in smoke like that – were rolled into what was now my platoon. With the 17 effectives from C company, we ended up having to work through a slight table of organization change – that was a lot more troops than you’d normally see in a single platoon.

  The PFC and the freak accident? Not Goodred. PFC Thomas Goddard survived only to fall off of the stretcher as he was being carried to the field hospital, a broken branch stub on a passing tree impacting his temple, killing him instantly. Unfortunately, his next of kin were never notified, due to repeated mis-spellings of his name. Parents of one “Tomas Goodrad” however, were highly confused when their son, thought deceased, arrived home after the deployment. That poor bastard had so many people mis-spelling his name it wasn’t funny.

  As it turns out, the “Scratch and Dent Shop” (I’d never heard that term before, till the Lieutenant Colonel had said it) was actually a new aid station that had been set up in our own FOB. By the time I was ready to reassume command, they’d reinforced the company, although 1st Batt was really just first platoon with a few supernumeraries attached to it. I had to shuffle some of the guys around – Brice was good, but hadn’t done his JELS (Junior Enlisted Leadership School) yet, and while he tried, sometimes you need something more than just a cool head in a fight and direction to make something happen. What he had done wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t optimal; I ended up shuffling around some of the 1st platoon senior enlisted (PFCs) so that a few of them had a chance to run a squad of their own. I had to; we had over another full section of troops now, most of whom were privates and PFCs, with only a single Corporal added to the fun. I’d never heard of a platoon with this many soldiers in it, before, but hey – there’s a first for everything.

  Turns out that it wasn’t just normal, it was expected, that consolidation would occur in the event of heavy losses.

  We continued our patrols in the area, albeit with a smaller patrolling force and much tighter security for the FOB. It didn’t hurt that 2nd Batt had been emergency deployed to backfill us in the Balkans; we needed it.

  Things eventually calmed down enough that we could return home, but despite an upbringing that had me very detached and disconnected from others around me as nothing more than a means to an end, I found myself hurting mentally at the losses we’d taken.

  Sergeant Satish had made it back while we were still in theater, and while he’d been senior to me when I was enlisted, the battlefield commission that Bentley had tossed me meant I retained command of 1st platoon for the time being. Thank god we were in theater; I wasn’t sure how I would have reacted to being saluted (which you DO NOT do in combat zones!), and it was already freaking me out a little to remember that when I heard “sir”, people were talking to me.

  The Manchin-Toomey debacle.. God. What an idio…no, what a cocksucker. That was fraternization that I suspect Colonel Haskins would never think to talk about in class. Then again, maybe he would – he did make a point of asking about me and girls, after all.

  I laughed at my own pun, with a small part of my brain wondering both how two such utterly incompetent people could rise to such positions of power, and another small part of my brain thinking it was more than a little insensitive to think that way about them – they were both dead, KIA. Lieutenants Price and Haberdasher, along with their entire platoons, gone. Not just them, but also entire companies who I’d never dealt with – but also some I had. Captain Kannegut and Lieutenant Bloggins? I had only been with them a short time in garrison, and it still didn’t seem real that they were gone.

  I didn’t ask because it would have been both awkward and inappropriate, but RSM Ballard and Colonel Watts weren’t on the KIA list; they were headquartered in a little city called “Zonkreb” or something like that, with 3rd Batt, doing the same kind of patrols I’d done with 1st Batt D Company in Chicago, what seemed like decades ago.

  The losses meant more debriefings after we returned. The battlefield promotions meant more education at some point. All of it meant more hassle; I much preferred Garrison – or even AOR deployment – to sitting in a classroom.

  I had no idea just how much hassle I was in for.

  Chapter 20: Above and Beyond

  I was already feeling kind of pissed, because while my intent of gaining rank and influence was happening, it was happening too fast, and too easy. Not that it’s easy to watch teammates die, but I’d somehow never expected the kind of battle we saw in Slana. That is, coincidentally, what it was referenced multiple times, in ways I was both embarrassed and disgusted to hear… “in the Battle of Slana…” “At the Battle of Slana”… fuck, people, just shut up about it already.

  The bad news started shortly after we’d returned to Garrison in Toledo. Never mind all the paperwork headaches for returning un-used ammo to the depot, reports to identify consumption rates per soldier of consumables like food, ammo, and fuel, all of which were MY responsibility now, thanks to this goddamn Battlefield Commission..

  I had to fucking file reports on how much goddamn TOILET PAPER was used. Who gives a shit? Literally???

  They were rebuilding 1st Batt, which had taken the lion’s share of casualties during our deployment, and we didn’t have a company commander yet. I’d bitched to LCol Bentley about it, and he laughed.. “Son, wait till you get to OCS, it gets worse.”

  I hadn’t even thought of that – I’d already done the enlisted side, and a part of me figured it would be basically the same thing for a j
unior officer. Ohhhh how wrong I was.

  So, yes, bad news: I got assigned to the S4, the logistics officer, to shadow him and get more detail about, as she put it, “beans and bullets.”

  More about that later, though – because there was a bigger headache coming, MUCH bigger.

  Lt Wolf, report to the commander immediately.

  - LCol Bentley

  Fuck. What’d I do now?

  I double-timed it to the regimental headquarters, in the door, and strode to Colonel Watts’ office, knocking once and saluting. “Mast.. Serg… Lieutenant Wolf, reporting as ordered, sir!”

  He looked up at the knock and returned the salute, laughing as he heard me stumbling through the ranks. “You’d better get used to that fast, son. You’re going to be saying it a lot, and to some very important people, very soon. Come in, have a seat.”

  I was getting real tired of surprises, and liked them even less than I like the known hassles that were thrown my way.