by Rex Coker

Created on: June 15, 2009   Last Updated: June 22, 2009

Henry Smith sat with his back against the earthen hill topped with miles and miles of thick hedge rows. The hedge rows seemed to go on forever down the narrow roads that lead from the beaches from where he landed a few days earlier. Henry looked over his weapon, a M1 carbine rifle he had cleaned the night before they were to move inland. He would have given his eye teeth for his trusty shot gun at this moment in time with the hedge rows almost touching each other from their places on each side of the narrow road. A good old scatter gun would even the playing field considerably but the shot gun had been ruled out by the "Geneva Convention by laws" and the weapon was consider not to be used in trench and front line war fare where hand to hand combat may happen.

Henry fixed his bayonet over the muzzle of his M1 and he could sense the enemy being close, but in these hostile surroundings you could never tell just how far or how close they really were. Only the sounds of German soldiers talking and playing their head games of intimidation by speaking English to make the Americans think one of their own was dying or injured. It was a method they used to lure you out into the open so they could get a shot at you. When the Americans would not fall for their plights, the would sound out in anger and call the soldiers "Dumkopfs' or swine hund's". The little German vocabulary Henry did know came from the sounds of the dying enemy and those words were self explanatory. mien Gott and lieber Gott had sunken into his mind at the horrors of battle as the enemy lay there dying within a hands reach.

For the moment most of the troops were under cover and out of sight from the enemy snipers. Henry could hear sporadic gun shots with the rounds whistling over head, but when you tried to distinguish where it came from it was already to late for some unlucky soldier who stuck their head up to far. The ground was bleached with blood stains from the bodies of two men that had fallen prey to this tactic and Henry was not about to fall for any of the Germans sly games of killing. Still the sounds crying out for help wrenched at your soul and Henry knew it was heartless in the way of killing any man, but he also knew that as cruel as war is, it is no time to take chances with your life. One had to reason with them self on the terms of what they would do when confronted with the fact of killing another human being.

Henry remembered the earlier days before the war started back in his

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