Warfare

While Corporal Leahy explained the plan of action to our men I began to study the reactions portrayed on their faces. Within each one I could see a fire burning, a readiness for battle and a need for blood.

Some people live for their family, some for their friends. Theses brave, young Soldiers live for protecting the country in which theses loved ones reside. These brothers will fight, kill and will definately be killed for the chance for their family and friends to survive in a world without the fear of Death lurking at every corner.

The fire that I see ignited inside them will not leave their eyes until everything is done to stop this War. They see no enemy that is unreachable, no target that can be missed and no mission that will not be a success.

The situations in which these individuals are put into almost always have an ultimatum - Us or Them. One hundred percent of the time these men will choose Us. There is no room for error in this War game so every shred of guilt that's felt is transformed into another reason to carry on and make sure this War gets finished the right way.

With a loud chorus of "Hoorah" rippling throughout the Platoon I was pulled away from my musings and began delegating positions. At that current moment we were keeping cover among some thick pine trees situated to the left of the railway track we were following.

Our orders for the day were to touch down behind the German defences, in Normandy, take out as many men as we could while working our way towards a beach we had named 'Omaha' and attack from the rear while we had ships doing the same from the front.
We were to start by gathering all of our men but so far we were missing three, meaning we were to wait until dawn before declaring them M.I.A and moving forward with the march towards Omaha.

We had recently come across another slow-down on this mission. German Soldiers had seen some of our companies parachuting from the planes, despite us having the cover of darkness and sent men in our direction. As we were walking down the disused railway track our Scouts had spotted them gathering up ahead and we quickly gave our men the order to take cover within the dense forestry next to us. After we reassessed the situation with haste we had our next plan.

When I appointed positions for the men, we took them up and prepared to give off the ready signal by using an item called the "cricket". These items gave off a cricket sound and were originally used for us to identify our friendlies discreetly.

Suddenly we heard a roar from the oppossing side and were witness to supressive fire aimed for where we were taking cover. They had found us before we had the chance to follow our planned assault through.

After our initial shock of being seen, we reacted in the only way we knew how. We took the safety off our rifles and squeezed the trigger gently releasing rounds, shells and our revenge onto the Germans while trying to save any ounce of hope we had left.

Bodies lay all over the railway, riddles with bullets. Even casualties from both sides. We were lucky that our Platoon held more men than their Section.

The Germans had retreated to their Base once they realised how many men we had, leaving us with the opportunity to find our dead brother's dog tags and letters to be sent home to their families. Altogether we had lost three brave men and had two more in near a near fatal condition.

As this war will carry on we'll see more of our brothers leave our sides and we will feel no guilt while avenging their Deaths for we will always choose "Us" over "Them"...