In that last hard winter of the war, the farmhouse looked almost like a cabin for the enjoyments of the season. Those gorgeous drifts of snow would have burned your toes to stumps, if you had no boots. No one… Continue Reading
If I had awoken in no man’s land after my own apparent death, I would cry out too. Maybe not for help, exactly. Maybe just to break the silence. We all agonized as we heard a new voice rise above… Continue Reading
“Hey, I think we broke something,” he said, shaking me awake. Ann’s dad always looks like the snapshot she’d had of him, taken on the Burma Road: bare-chested, center-parted hair, broad smile, burly. The clock said 2:45. Ann’s side of… Continue Reading
Darren faced his greatest creation and failure. The torso and head of the mechanical man leaned in the corner of the basement. Even limbless and freckled by rust, the old prototype was an awesome sight. It dominated the room, as… Continue Reading
The red lights flashing through the windows reflect in my drink. The stories those shattered billboards tell are misleading relics of a dead time. It’s a shallow message, lost to the war that took my daughter, Sarah, and left of… Continue Reading
Half of the hysterical locals were convinced we’d come to do a My Lai on their village; the rest just wanted our rations. Conditions were typically deplorable. Years in the unremitting shit of war will do that. Everybody in the company… Continue Reading
On hearing of the Japanese invasion at Simanggang in 1941, and remembering the scrabble for metal in the last war, Mathie hid every tool he owned behind panels in the roof of his home. This way he calculated he’d have… Continue Reading
The bombardments had been relentless. Night after bloody night stuck down a hole in the ground, pissing into the rancid mud. It was a world filled with excrement, guts and putrefaction. Convulsive blasts on gun positions shattered valour. Private Martin… Continue Reading