By John-Paul Marciano

     Sgt. Jim Hanson lay face down in the shallow hole he had dug a couple hours earlier.  About an hour after the sun went down, Jim crawled out when he couldn’t advance any farther under withering machine gun fire.

    He slithered forward about 150 yards closer to the German front lines to where he was now.  It was a chance he had taken every night for the last four nights.  He figured it was safer to be closer to the Germans when their artillery fired their nightly barrage and the rounds went over his head.  The problem with that logic was if American artillery answered back and the rounds fell short.

    That would turn the hole he dug into a grave.

    It was 2:15 a.m. July 22,1918 and what was left of Jim’s company found themselves just east of Berzy-le-Sec.  They had taken the railroad station by noon Sunday and were advancing on a sugar factory.  They began taking machine gun fire from an exposed left flank where a French Division was supposed to be and the advance stalled.

    Now here he was in no man’s land while German artillery probed to find the American front line.  For the past hour Jim pressed his body to the earth trying to make himself a smaller target.  His Springfield rifle lay in the hole next to him; useless in the black of night.  His gas mask was strapped to his chest and he used his body to shield his musette bag.

    Occasionally a German .77 mm artillery round would explode close enough to seemingly lift Jim’s body an inch or so before gravity took hold and slammed him back to the ground.  Stones and clods of earth showered him as he lay prone, afraid to move.  Long-range German artillery whined lazily overhead toward some unknown target in the rear.

    The cacophony from the bombardment helped drown out the cries of the wounded lying helplessly in the field behind him.  His nostrils were filled with dirt from pressing his face to the ground.  But even the smell of dirt couldn’t overcome the sickeningly sweet stench of decaying corpses which hung over the area.

    As suddenly as it started, the shelling abruptly stopped.  Jim lay on his stomach a few seconds longer and then rolled onto his back.  He stuck his filthy fingers in his mouth and nostrils trying to remove the dirt but to no avail.  Water would have helped but some Hun bastard shot a hole through his canteen that afternoon and now he had no water.  He could have stripped another off one of the many corpses he passed but he didn’t think it was worth the risk.

    “Bird Dog,” Jim called into the night.

    “Ho,” came a muffled reply.

    “Chicago,” Jim called.

    “Here.”

    “Honker!” Jim called a little louder.  A shot rang out.  Almost immediately Jim heard a thump in the pile of dirt he had pushed toward the German lines when he dug the hole.  A German sniper was trying to find the range.

    “Y’all right, Sarge?” Honker asked.

    “Yeah, fine,” Jim replied as he fumbled for his rifle.  He rolled onto his stomach and felt for the firing slot he made himself in the mound of dirt.  He gently placed his rifle into the slot and squeezed the trigger.  A German Maxim machine gun answered back spraying the area with intermittent bursts.  Jim shifted the rifle to aim in the general direction of the machine gun and squeezed off another round.  The Maxim gunner replied with another burst to the right of Jim’s hole.

    “Hey, Sarge!” Bird Dog called out.  “Quit screwin’ round.  Yer jus’ pissin’ ‘em off.”

    Jim squeezed off another round for good measure and dropped his rifle back in the hole.  He rolled onto his back and called, “Hillbilly?”

    No reply.

    “Hillbilly,” Jim called a little louder.

    Still no reply.

    “Hillbilly!” Jim called even louder still.

    “Sarge?” Chicago called back.

    “Yeah?”

    “Hillbilly’s. sleepin’.  I can hear’m snorin’ from here.”

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By J.R. Jurzynski

We called it Clarke’s pond and we were told not to go there.

Shimmying the fence or popping under where the nightly creatures made way was easy enough.

Once over or under onward through the front meadow, down an embankment, upstream along the brook, crossing a gravel road, onto the spillway.

Young legs and adventure were never tired.

A spit of water trickled down from a stagnated surface. Tall summer grasses hedged the sun’s side—pies and muck lazily trod by cloven hooves the other.

Upon the croak-it belched authority, “Mmwrava, mmrav, mrav.” 

The responsorial hymn, “Bbr, bbra, bbrava.”

A flat stone garnered from the gravel when properly flicked against the surface mirrored circular waveforms. Each new attempt a practice in the arts.

Always from the other side, from the yard, from beneath giant maples lining gravel, she would appear waving her cane in the air, summoning powers and yelling, “You kids get out of here.”

“Get off my property.”

“You don’t belong here.”

Not all scattered.

Eternally in her farm dress; fragile, strained, she would move closer down her gravel, raising cane and again, “Get off my property.”

“You don’t belong here.”

The land was hers yanked from history and as ancient as she was, she defended the right to call it hers.

Spillway separated bondage and freedom.

No longer a yell, nor raising cane nor vehemence she once more would offer, “You don’t belong here.”

Indelible etchings are unseparated by the sand.

We called her Rosetta.

Ω

By Ed Baranosky

    Chet Mc Donough is a jolly fun-loving fellow and when you meet him you can’t help but like him.

    In Fairfield, CT on any morning in 1944 at 7:30 a.m. on the corner of Knapps Highway and Black Rock Turnpike, if you were a high school student on the school bus, you would be sitting waiting for Chet.

     Invariably he would be running toward the bus with his untied tie around his neck and his shirt tails out of his pants. It was amazing to see how he held onto his books and lunch bag without dropping anything.

    Chet would never be there on time. The bus driver must have liked him because he never drove off without him. Chet was late for the bus his entire four years of high school.

    Graduating in 1947, Chet joined the Marines and signed up for three years. He was stationed at various posts around the world. His last assignment was in the Pacific on the island of Guam.

     In the second week of June, 1950 he was on a ship bringing him home with other Marines whose enlistments were also about to be up. On June 25, 1950 North Korea attacked South Korea. The UN passed a resolution to intervene to drive North Korea out of South Korea. The ship Chet was on was ordered to turn around and head for Japan. Destiny was pointing its finger at Chet.

   The North Korean forces were pushing into South Korea with surprising speed against South Korean and what small American army units that were there.  These forces retreated into a defense perimeter around the port of Pusan.

     Arriving in Korea in early July, the Marines were thrown into the Pusan perimeter with the South Korean and U.S. divisions, assigned to holding the perimeter against repeated attacks by far superior numbers of North Korean forces. Through extraordinary efforts they held on.

    The world finally got its act together and forces of the U.N. began to arrive to help. The fighting around the perimeter went on through the summer.

    On September 15, 1950 in a brilliant stroke General MacArthur, the commander of the U.N. forces, invaded North Korea at the port of Inchon. The intention was to cut across the peninsula and isolate all North Korean forces in the south. The move succeeded.

    In another stroke of genius, an amphibious landing was made on the eastern shore of the Korean Peninsula at Wonsan. Chet was with the Marines that went ashore. The Republic of Korea and American army divisions advanced along the eastern side of the Chosen Reservoir and the U.S Marines advanced along the western shore to a place called Haguri, heading toward the Yalu River, the Korean border with China.

     It was late November. The troops were saying they would be home by Christmas. Then the Chinese struck with 300,000 troops. MacArthur’s ego kicked in. He said “We’ll bloody their nose.” Against this onslaught all Allied forces on each side of the Chosen reservoir were forced to retreat. It was a fighting retreat during one of the worst winters recorded in Korea. On Christmas Eve, 1950 the Marines, the ROK and U.S. army divisions were evacuated at the port of Wonsan. Chet was not late for that ship. 

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