Foxhole Six-Sixty-Two « Lucas X. Wiseman Short Story

Foxhole Six-Sixty-Two had been dug for two people, but there were nine of us pressed inside. 

I was near the middle, desperately crawling to get away from the howling shells that fell like God’s own wrath, hunting for our souls. I was crushed between both the Scouts closer to the entrance who pressed away from the falling death with all their might, and shoved by those slightly more concealed who were fearful of being smothered by the mass of bodies. 

It was hard to breathe. 

But the sergeant was not afraid. 

A brutal woman, forged out of sharp words and blunt steel, she sat at the very front of the foxhole, watching. She gazed out at the searing plasma explosions, a falling clockwork rhythm made by the enemy laserfire. She seemed bored, giving the death-shells as much regard as a cat on a windowsill might watch the trees in the wind. 

The persistent bombing was steady enough to dance to, but she waited calmly. The reinforcements were coming, she’d told us before our retreat. We needed only to endure. 

“Coward,” someone whispered. “I’m a bleeding coward.”

It came from behind me, and as the Sarge turned, I felt the flush of shame and terror as she looked at me. I meant to shake my head, to gesture that it was not I who spoke, but the words froze in my throat when I saw her face. The left side was bloody and ruined. She would need a new eye, at the least. But instead of disgust or ire, she looked upon me with… kindness.

“No, that ain’t it,” she said. “You Scouts, all so young. Ya’ll shoulda been taught this: you can’t be a brave person. You can’t be that, any more than I could become a–”

Her words were stolen by an explosion mere meters from her. The assault became a withering rain; the waltz of bombardment transforming into a rollicking samba. And yet, she was still. The sergeant, calm and implacable, only flinched when the explosions tossed the dust of disintegrated corpses into her face.

 I closed my eyes, felt the thin earthen walls trembling above my helmet. As death fell onto us, we cursed and moaned and wept, all of us begging for the noise and the heat and the falling death to cease. Time became meaningless, there was only the raging bombardment, the crush of the soldiers ahead of me, the shoving hands of the ones behind. All of us squirming to get to safety, all of us wishing we had run just a little faster, so we could be further away from the falling death at the foxhole’s mouth. All of us terrified. All except her.

After an infernal amount of uncountable time, the bombardment lessened.

The sergeant continued.

“Y’see, Scouts? Life ain’t about what you are. You ain’t anything that matters out here. No woman nor man can make themselves into another thing just by willing it. You can’t make your mind stop screaming at you that you should run. You can’t stop it thinking of your lover, or your soft bed, or the last thing you said to your mother. You can’t control fear, or joy, or lust. None of it.”

“Then how?” I asked, my voice rising above the moans of we would-be shades, gathered and half buried already, simply awaiting delivery to the damned afterworld. “How can you stand it?” 

“I don’t,” she said, almost too softly to hear. The strain on me lessened as the Scouts at the edges stopped pushing back into the narrow safety of the foxhole and leaned toward her. I joined them, trying to listen.

“All you believe, all your definitions about yourself… they go away, here. No ‘you oughta’ and no ‘you should be,’ on the battlefield… In this hole. You do a brave thing. You do a courageous thing. You do a bastard of a hard thing. And that’s all there is.”

She turned her one eye onto us, a savage and brutal blue orb tinged with compassion. 

“Ain’t none of you cowards. Ain’t none of you brave, neither. You’re just folk, and when the time comes you don’t have to be brave. You don’t have to be strong. You just have to do a brave thing, or a strong thing, or a wise thing if you’re lucky.”

The shelling was ongoing, still waltzing through the screaming air, but we were quiet, now. We could hear her clearly.

“Simple as,” she said, nodding. “You can be scared, now. You can piss your britches and cry for momma, if that’ll make you feel better. But when the time comes to go up and over and take the fight to the bastards throwing death our way, you don’t gotta be anything. You just have to do.”

She looked up. The rain of the enemy’s ire had slackened into a trickle, a barely noticeable pop-thud-pop of shell and thrown earth.

“Now ain't’ the time for wonderin’ who you are, what you are. Now’s the time for doing. Do a brave thing, Scouts. With me.”

She stood, and we stood with her. She gave us a granite-faced grin, her weapon clutched in her mechanical hand. She led us out and up and over, onto the battlefield anew.

We nine, leaving a foxhole meant for two, charged.