Free We Were Beautiful Once by Joseph Carvalko

to freeze.  One bolted from the line like a pulling lineman.  Others, spooked, scattered like darkened roman candles launched in random directions.
    â€œYou met the enemy, Mr. Sheer?”
    Snapping back into the present, Harry spoke into the cavernous silence.  “I heard shots coming from the other side.”
    Nick watched Harry’s eyes.  They leveled somewhere beyond the spectators.  In a flicker, lasting tenths of seconds, Harry added, “Piercing whistles, bugles...  a huge force...  Chinese Reds.”
    Then like that night when the saliva thickened, the words in Harry’s throat stuck, words to describe the enemy officer running at right angles, away from the charge, following the impulse to escape death.  Another pop and a .30 caliber slug tunneled deep into the man’s shoulder.  He staggered, his limb flopping aimlessly.  His band lost all semblance of order, scattering randomly, some hitting the ground.  The officer wobbled toward the wooded blackness that crumbled under the mass of retreating mortality.  Hector, a seventeen year old L.A. Pachuco who carried a picture of himself dressed in a zoot suit jitterbugging, tumbled forward, neck twisting, his heavy frame hurrying his descent into the frozen ground.  Slow-motion-like he fell and lifted like a half empty flour sack before resting.  Behind him, the enemy appeared; apparitions out of a smoky miasma.
    Following the deafening carbine chatter, Harry ran toward the right of the line where the action boiled.  Enemy reinforcements populated front, rear, and center.  Corporal Franklin first trailing him, flew passed him.  He fired without direction, shooting Franklin in the back, but before hitting the ground, the man’s face caught shrapnel and unwrapped from its skeleton  underpinning.  Blood, bone, gristle, a man with no face, the horror of twenty-five, fifty, a hundred or more Chinese charging across the paddy.
    Reports from a machine gun syncopated whatever empty intervals weren’t filled by small arms fire and bugles; men appeared and disappeared like cascading dreams, darkly magical, deadly real.  Two grenades exploded within tenths of seconds, and Harry felt warm blood flowing over his cold pubic bone, down his left inner thigh.  He ignored the sensation, turning toward a silhouetted mortar opening up on the left.  Arrow’s booming charge ordered the men to retreat into the dense woods, a Tommy gun droned on in the roaring chatter, until the Browning automatic rifle opened up, stuttering, spraying staccato-like over the full terrain, crisscrossing back and forth, pounding out the rhythm of a tom-tom played to a frantic crowd of beboppers.  The sky sizzled with yellows and reds from the ever widening mountain fires.  Dillard, a guy who nobody had believed when he had claimed to be an Olympic athlete, ran by like a gazelle for no apparent reason, except to maybe knock out the mortar single handed. He folded, doubling over, hitting ground face first, tumbling, coming to rest, peaceful, imagining starry constellations over Lookout Mountain, just outside of Cheyenne. In the next instant, he closed his eyes to the stars and the ghoulish condensing cloud that emanated from the entrails exposed to the cold black air.
    â€œMr. Sheer are you okay, sir?” Lindquist asked.
    Sheer stared beyond the well, to the open rear doors of the courtroom, standing room only, war voyeurs, vacant eyes staring back, heads upon necks stretched forward, suspended in poses of expectancy, one-hundred-fifty pairs of eyes, blue, gray, brown, rained in on him.  Eyes empty of the terror few men know, full of the starry visions of bloodthirsty citizens and generals, men in black suits who wallow in the glory of battle.
    â€œMr. Sheer are you all right?” Lindquist asked again.
    â€œYes, sir, guess the trip made me tired.  Lost my concentration.”
    Â 
    Harry remained