Chapter 2.B

Gravity immediately tried to rip me down and I precariously grabbed onto the rope with a more sturdy grip. The trench knife came in extra handy since I was able to not drop it due to my fingers being ran through the rungs on the brass knuckle portion. I just had to be careful to not cut my own rope with it in my haste to get a better grip. I slid it back into its sheath and carefully shimmied down the rope. Being 16 made this extra easy since I was light and full of stamina that the older guys couldn’t match. I hit the ground and Neff wrapped me in a giant hug, this was the most emotion I had ever seen out of the guy.

“You… You..” he stammered.

“What Neff?”

“You saved my life Ozzy, the parachute… I wouldn’t have thought of that.”

“That’s what friends are for buddy. Besides you saved me when you threw me out of the plane, but... Johnson… I just wish we could have helped Johnson.”

“Maybe he pulled the cord on his chute too.”

“Yeah maybe,” I say, not really believing it. He was losing too much blood. The bushes rattle behind us and I immediately go for my gun only to realize that it’s still stored in a waterproof bag secured around my waist, no no no. Neff’s sub-machine gun is also secured in the same style. As I struggle to get my weapon free Neff reaches down and grabs a very large fallen branch and throws it like an Olympian throwing a Javelin. Despite the awkward shape, and the dead leafs sticking off of it, the branch flies true directly towards the offending bush. A second before it hits Sgt Rowe rolls out, the branch narrowly missing him, and aims his M1 Garand directly at my face.

“Stand down privates!” he shouts before lowering his weapon slightly. “You about took my damn head off with that throw. Get your actual weapons out, this isn’t the gladiatorial games, we are at war!” I comply with the order as fast as I can and get my own M1 Garand loaded and ready. Neff gets his own weapon out, a Thompson submachine gun that takes 50 round stick magazines. In the movies and the papers all the gangsters use those enormous drum magazines, but those things are finicky and jam often. That’s why the Army uses the more reliable stick mags.

Sgt. Rowe walks over to us, “As pissed as I am that you two didn’t have your weapons out, I have to begrudgingly admit that that was one hell of a throw Neff.”

“Thank you Sargent!” Neff replied excitedly.

“Hell of a throw sergeant?” I asked, questioning his word choice. I thought this guy was religious?

“I’m religious, that doesn’t mean I’m a saint. I can curse if I damn well please, the Lord understands that I am only human. Now enough horsing around, let’s keep our voices down and our eyes peeled as we make our way to the rally point,” said Sgt Neff while pulling a compass and map out of his bag. “Gather round!” he barks in a rough whisper. I got the point, from this moment on we had to keep our voices down. Once we were nearby and he had the map spread out before him in the dirt he pulled out his flashlight with a red filter on it. The red light would be impossible to see from a distance at night, it was an Army trick to view maps at night without giving away your position to the enemy.

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“So look here,” said Sgt Row, pointing his finger at a specific spot on the map. “I think we are in this region. We were a few minutes out from jumping at our actual drop point which is up here, but then the plane was hit. So we are now roughly in this region. Our rally should be just west of us. We will have to just move that general direction until we hit a landmark. At which point we can shoot a more accurate heading with the compass.” He stood up with his compass to his eye and then pointed his finger in what I assumed to be west. “That way, spread out just enough so that one landmine can’t kill us all.”

Well that was a terrifying thought and something I hadn’t even been considering… I popped my bayonet onto the end of my rifle and started poking at the ground at random intervals as we walked. For some reason I found the concept of being defeated by an inanimate object before I even saw my first Nazi to be humiliating. There was no honor in that. The moon was barely out which made it exceedingly hard to see. I was okay with that because it meant if I could barely see, then the Nazis could barely see me. This left noise as the only way to expose myself to the enemy so I tried to move silently.

I could just barely see Sgt. Rowe moving through the trees next to me, unfortunately I could hear Neff just to the right of him moving like an elephant and snapping branches at random. Sgt. Rowe must have come to the same conclusion as me because he hissed in Neff’s direction and threw him the hand signal to move quietly. Sgt. Rowe then looked over at me and gave me the signal to bound forward. Another classic infantry technique for small teams like this. Each man ‘bounds’ forward one at a time and scans in all directions. Then the next in line bounds past him and does the same. It’s a good way to move quickly without exposing your entire combat element, and it always leaves the bulk of your element in a ‘watch’ type position which is meant for scanning for potential enemies and covering the advance of those moving forward. In a three-man fireteam like this, we always had two men scanning as we moved. Sgt. Rowe was smart to use this tactic, so far he had repeatedly shown himself to be a proficient NCO. For the third or fourth time that night I came to the conclusion that I was extremely grateful to have him with us.

We moved that way for a while, bounding forward through the dark trees as quietly as we could. It was hard not to fall into a mindless rhythm with repetitive activities like this, but I had to remind myself that doing that could get you killed and that had been stressed hardily by my combat veteran instructors during training. Complacency kills and the first time I fall into a rhythm and start waiting for my turn to move instead of accurately scanning could be the time that I miss something and get myself and my friends killed. Stay alert Ozzy.

There I go again with referring to myself by that name, but I hadn’t chosen that name at random had I. No, there had been a very good reason for that particular name choice… My attention was snapped back to the sergeant as he held his fist up. The universal sign for stop, he was in the forward position of our small formation, he could see something we couldn’t. He turned around and looked right at me and Neff and waved his hands towards himself and then put one finger on his lips, come forward quietly.

I did as he asked and soon all three of us crouched shoulder to shoulder. I could see why he had alerted us now. Just ahead of us the trees ended and a clearing started. The clearing ahead was a small circle and resting smack dab in the middle of the circular clearing was a wicked looking little church. Most of the windows were broken and the whole church was slanted in one direction as if the wind had bent the entire structure. Mold and strange looking mushrooms grew on parts of it, large spiderwebs crawled from the ground up to the eves on it. It looked very haunted and evil. And at the front of the church stood two Nazi sentries...