Dusk had turned to darkness. Still the guns continued to send out round after round, filling the air with smoke and the acrid smell it carried. He thought he heard screams in the night, but that might have been his imagination. How could you hear anything over the din of so many explosions? They came one upon the other until they coalesced into one mind-breaking tumult, leaving him sobbing uncontrollably with an overwhelming feeling of helplessness.
Startled, he felt someone shake his shoulder.
"Corporal! Hey, corporal! You okay?"
"What?" "Oh, yeah. Yeah."
Shit, he thought, I was back in combat again instead of watching where I'm walking.
"Damn, where the hell did that come from?"
"I don't know," the private replied, "but you damn near walked right into one of those duds, and it looks like an 8 incher."
That shook him up. After living through one of the heaviest artillery barrages in the Korean War, he had almost killed himself stepping on an unexploded round, one that he had probably called in during the TOT.
He and the private stopped to rest and trade loads for the remaining climb
up the hill. Dusk had arrived and they were still only half way to the top. The corporal took a sip from his canteen; his throat was suddenly very dry. Passing it to the private, he said, "Two more minutes, and then it's up the trail. We want to get to the FO bunker before nightfall." He lit a cigarette, savoring the tang of the tobacco as he inhaled deeply.
Once again he was back in battle, but now he was on the radio.
"Cease fire! Cease fire! End of mission!"
The reply came back from the Fire-Direction Center (FDC), "Roger. Cease fire. End of mission. Out."
As simple as that. Almost immediately the rounds stopped falling, leaving an eerie silence behind. Well, not quite. The ringing in his ears seemed to vibrate in his brain.
"Lieutenant? Sir, I don't see any movement out there, and there's no small arms fire. Lieutenant?"
He looked at the officer lying in the dirt of the bunker floor.
"Sir?"
The lieutenant didn't answer, and he wasn't moving.
"Oh, no!" he cried.
His team leader was dead, leaving him as the only artillery forward observer on the hill. This was too much! He had been in Korea only several months,
and in that time he'd seen the FO team decimated to the extent that he, a
17-year-old corporal, was the only one left. The only reason he was even a corporal was the simple fact that the other non-commissioned officers had been killed in action.
