Stephen C. Satterly, II – Author

By Stephen Satterly, II, August 1986

Explosions rocked the earth, slamming plants, animals, and minerals alike into the ground. I couldn’t believe the fury of the artillery bursts. A great gout of earth would erupt skyward, followed by a tremendous crack. With each crack, I felt as if a giant was crushing me. Air would be pushed out of my lungs, my ears felt like they were caving in, and my eyes would almost pop out. If it kept up for much longer, I thought I would go insane.

I looked over to my foxhole partner. He was slouched against the foxhole wall, calmly reading a letter from home. My panic ebbed as I watched this oasis of peace in this desert of war.

Abruptly, the shelling ceased. The silence was painful to my over-stressed ears. I warily scanned the fields to the front, looking for the nameless, faceless Enemy.

“My girlfriend has left me,” a soft drawl said from across the foxhole.

Startled, I looked at him. He was calmly looking over his rifle at the field, conducting his own search. His letter was open in his left hand, his right being on the trigger of his rifle.

“That’s too bad, ” I said, not sure of what else to say.

“Not really,” he replied. “If she doesn’t want to wait for me to return, then we weren’t meant for each other.”

He crumpled up the letter and threw it to the floor of our fighting position. His gaze lifted to mine, and he slowly grinned. “She says she left me for a hairdresser.”

I looked at him in mock disgust and exclaimed, “She chose some effeminate hairdresser over a lean, mean, fightin’ machine?”

He laughed softly and said, “Yeah. At least she gets free perms. All I could give her was good sex. Guess she has her priorities slightly askew.”

I grinned and said hopefully, “Maybe she’ll get AIDS.”

He looked at me, then started to laugh. Unexpectedly, I found myself laughing with him. Suddenly, the tension we had felt during the shelling began to dissipate.

Our laughter gradually faded, then fell silent as we stared again at the field. On the far edge of the field, six hundred meters distant, we began to see indistinct black blobs protruding onto the sea of green grass.

I stared at those abstract manifestations of the Enemy, mesmerized. So intent was my gaze, that I missed what he said.

“What?” I asked as I continued to stare.

“I said, how many have you killed?”

I glanced sharply at him, but saw he was deadly serious. Strangely embarrassed, I looked at the dirt in front of me and said, “None. This is my first time.”

“That’s what I thought.” There was no recrimination in his voice, just a calm statement of fact. “I’ve killed thirty-five myself.”

I was impressed. “Oh, really?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I can remember each face.”

I looked at him and was surprised to see a look of deep sadness on his face.

“Why do you do it?” I asked, puzzled.

A few questioning sonic cracks sounded around us as the first rounds passed over our heads. I saw him lean forward, then slightly jerk as his rifle fired.

“Thirty-six,” he said in an emotionless voice. He then looked at me and answered, “At first, I killed because I was U.S. Army, and they weren’t. It was my sworn duty to ‘uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States.’ I killed because I was told to kill. Then my buddy was killed, and it became personal.”

The Enemy was very close now. The bullets passing over our heads sounded like a swarm of angry hornets. We both snapped off a couple of shots, and I felt surprise as I saw a man who had been in my sights fall dead.

My mind retained his face. I was shocked by the clarity of my sight. I saw his brown eyes, bloodshot from lack of sleep, the detailed whiskers on his unshaven face, his slightly crooked nose, his full, thick lips, and the waxy shine of the green and brown paint on his face. I also saw the blood spray up from his throat as my 5.56mm bullet tumbled its way through tissue and cartilage. The look of surprise in his eyes was the worst part of it. “Not me!” his eyes said. “Not me! I’ve got a wife! I’ve got a home to go back to! I can’t die! Not m–“

Overcome by guilt, totally oblivious to the fight going on around me, I bent over and retched. When my sight cleared, I found myself staring into what was left of a human face. The right side of my companion’s face had disappeared, courtesy of a 7.62mm bullet. The bright blue eye that remained had the same deep sadness he had before the firefight.

My guilt was washed away by a black hatred that welled up from the darkest recesses of my soul. “How dare they!” my mind screamed. “How dare they take away my friend! They had no right!”

My whole body throbbing with fury, I grabbed my rifle and stood up. Lifting my rifle to my shoulder, I fired it on full automatic, emptying my thirty-round magazine in a matter of seconds.

“Motherfuckers!” I screamed as I killed three men. My rifle was empty as a fourth man charged at me, the hatred on his face matching the hatred on my own. It didn’t matter that he was a Russian or that I was an American. We didn’t care who started the war or who was winning. We killed and wanted to kill because we hated each other, and we hated what we had become.

Drawing my bayonet, I leaped out of my foxhole and ran at the Russian, screaming obscenities at the top of my lungs.

My dead friend was right. This had become personal.