Free The Grapple by Harry Turtledove

Jews are kikes and Chinamen are Chinks and Irishmen are micks and Mexicans are greasers and Italians are wops and even Poles are lousy Polacks, for God’s sake. I don’t get too excited about it. Hell, my brother’s married to a white woman.”
    That made Cincinnatus blink. “Work out all right?” he asked.
    “They’ve been married almost twenty years. People are used to them,” the other driver said. “Every once in a while, John’ll hear something stupid if he’s standing in line for a film with Helen or out at a diner or something like that, but it’s not too bad.” He chuckled. “Of course, he’s my
big
brother—he goes about six-three, maybe two-fifty. I don’t care if you’re green—you want to be careful what you say around him.” He was of ordinary size himself.
    “Does make a difference,” Cincinnatus agreed. He wondered if John Butler was named for John Brown; with two s’s in his first name, Douglass Butler was bound to be named for Frederick Douglass.
    Before he could ask, somebody shouted that their trucks were ready to roll. “Got to get moving,” Butler said. “I want to parade through Nashville or Birmingham or one of those places. And if I hear some Confederate asshole yell, ‘Freedom!’—well, I want to pull out my .45 and blow his fucking head off.”
    He sounded altogether matter-of-fact about it, the way a U.S. white man would have. But for the color of his skin, he might as well have been a U.S. white man. He seemed as sure of his place in the world and as comfortable with it as any white man, whether from the USA or the CSA. Cincinnatus, whom life had left forever betwixt and between, envied him for that.
    He climbed into the cab of his truck, slammed the door, turned the key in the ignition, and put the beast in gear. South and east he rolled, back toward Findlay. No shellfire fell on the road this time. U.S. guns, or maybe dive bombers, had silenced the Confederate batteries that were shelling it. Cincinnatus approved. Unlike Douglass Butler, he didn’t want to use his .45 for anything. He had it. He could use it if he had to. But he didn’t want to.
    What if Jake Featherston was right in front of you?
He glanced over to the pistol. Well, you could make exceptions for everything. Dream as he would, though, he didn’t expect to be sharing a diner with the President of the CSA any time soon.
    When he rolled into Findlay, he got waved through the town. “What’s goin’ on?” he called to a soldier with wigwag flags.
    “We broke through again, that’s what,” the white man answered. “They need their shit farther forward.”
    “I like that,” Cincinnatus said, and drove on.
    Shells were falling not far from the new unloading area, but they’d been falling in Findlay and beyond it only a couple of hours before. The men who hauled crates out of the back of his truck had an air of barely suppressed excitement. They didn’t seem to think the Confederates would be able to slow this latest push.
    Do Jesus, let ’em be right,
Cincinnatus thought. That Ohio should be liberated didn’t matter so much in and of itself—not to him, anyway. But he could see that U.S. soldiers would have to clear the Confederates out of their own country before they started doing what really did matter—to him, anyway. If the United States were going to lick Jake Featherston, they would have to do it on Featherston’s turf.
    Cincinnatus thought about the last time he’d driven trucks full of munitions through Kentucky and Tennessee. He thought about the Confederate diehards who’d shot up his column more than once. Then he thought about U.S. artillery and bombers blowing all those people to kingdom come.
    War was a filthy business for everybody, no doubt about it. Cincinnatus wanted a little more filth to come down on the other side. He didn’t think that was too much to ask.
             
    B rigadier General Irving Morrell was a man in a hurry. He always had been, ever since