A New Year

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"Hey Gentile! Get your ass over here!"

Flavio Gentile shook his head, why did they insist on pronouncing his name wrong? But here was neither the place nor the time to correct the big sergeant who seemed to delight in tormenting the Italian kid from Philadelphia. Gentile jogged over to the sergeant.

"Yes, Sergeant?" He knew better than to call the man "Sarge," that drove him nuts.

"Yeah, the shitters over in 1st Platoon need cleaning, you go handle that."

"Uh, I'm in 3rd Platoon, can't 1st clean their own shitters? Sergeant?"

Staff Sergeant Vince Magnussen bristled, "Look Gentile, I say jump, you ask how high. I know which f**king platoon you're in. I owe Nelson over in 1st a favor, you're the favor. Now get your ass over there."

"Yes, Sergeant."

Gentile wanted nothing more in the world than to knock Rasmussen's block off, but he had no desire to spend time in the stockade either. So for now, he'd tolerate the man. After all, like his buddy Marchetti said, "Training'll be over in a few weeks, why piss anybody off? Save it for the Krauts and the Japs, whichever way we wind up going."

Marchetti was right, Gentile wished that Rasmussen was one of those guys who liked to take his trainees out behind the barracks for a little extra training. Shed the stripes, all that man to man stuff, but Rasmussen was a coward, he hid behind his stripes.

Every muscle in Stephen Hernandez's body was aching. He was used to hard work but the twenty mile forced march with full gear was much harder than he had expected. Along with the other members of his training platoon he was down on one knee, wheezing like an old man.

"Come on ladies, back on your feet. We need to set up a bivouac."

The men looked at each other, a bivouac, they'd been expecting trucks to take them back to camp.

"Sarge?"

"You do know what a bivouac is, Anderson."

"Uh, yessir, but aren't we going to ..."

"Thinking again, Anderson? What did I tell you about thinking Private Anderson?"

"Uh, I'm not good at it, Sarge?"

"Zackly, now get your shit together. Pitch your shelter halves, get digging a latrine trench, and get set up for the night. This is a field exercise, we march out, do some training in patrolling and such, sleep a couple hours, then march back to camp. Questions?"

Groans went up from the men, but they got to work.

"This is some shit, huh hermano?"

Hernandez turned and grinned at his "battle buddy" Juan Vaca. "Yup, classic Army shit, vato."

Hernandez wondered how his family would react to all of the Mexican slang he was learning and using. There were a quite a few Spanish speakers in the Army, but very few Spaniards. When in Rome ...

The Sanitäter rolled Kołodziej over onto his back, "Easy Jan, it doesn't look too bad, might even be a Heimatschuß¹."

Jan Kołodziej grimaced, no doubt the Sani thought he was being kind, thinking that Kołodziej was German rather than a Pole conscripted into the German Army. But at the moment he didn't really care. They'd never seen the Russian who had spotted them. Guy was a good shot, his first round had killed Paulus outright, his second had gone through Kołodziej's left side, having been deflected by the spare barrel he carried for the machine gun.

Anything to get him away from the vicious fighting against the Soviets would do. With luck, maybe he'd go to the big hospital in Warsaw. At least he'd be back in Poland. But it was a hell of a way to welcome in a new year.

¹ A wound which gets you sent home. Bad enough to require medical care not available at the front.