Author's Note: There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell. – William Tecumseh Sherman

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"This is war we are talking about, boys! And I do not believe you boys are ready. Because war means death! Ten, twenty, thirty corpses, right in a row. Have any of you ever seen that many dead bodies layin' out in the sun? Have you, Private Watkins?"

"No, sergeant."

"You, Private Boleski?"

"No, sergeant."

The big man's head whipped back and forth, surveying the line, almost angry now. "Anybody?" A pause. "Private Simms?"

A jolt of electricity shot through me. I stared straight ahead and shouted my answer, good and loud, like he'd taught us. "No, sergeant!"

"Hmmfph," he snorted, like he'd knowed it all along. "So you se—"

I weren't done though, "But I seen that many layin' out in the rain."

Dead silence greeted my interruption.

I could still see 'em, in my mind, though my eyes were on the horizon past the end of the exercise yard, like the Handbook said they should be. No sunshine on that gray afternoon, 'cept the yellow of Grace Anne's hair.

And it had ended up waterlogged and muddy on the creek bank.

Dead, all of them dead.

Every last passenger.

Every last one of them white.

Dead silence, there and here.

You coulda heard a pin drop, even though we were standing on the grass of the parade ground.

There were two ways the drill sergeant could take my interruption. As the truth, or as backlip. I braced myself. I knowed which way Pa would'a taken it, had he been there.

"Squad diss-MISSED!"

I was surprised, but not so surprised I ain't waited.

"Private Simms." The drill sergeant's voice was only jest loud enough so's I could hear it over the other men moving again.

I drew my eyes from the horizon back in towards him. "Sergeant?" What had gotten into me?

Yet what I'd said was no more than the truth.

"Did you really see thirty dead bodies lying out in the rain?"

I heaved a sigh and saw him nod as though I'd said yes. "I helped lay them out," I explained.

He wasn't angry at all. He looked so kind, so concerned, I wondered why anyone ever complained about their drill sergeant. I think I loved mine.

"When?" he asked. "What happened?"

I told him. About the bus, about the bridge, about the passengers dead in the water, and how we dragged them out of the bus, out of the creek, to lay them on the grass. It had been a pitiful sight.

I told it briefly, not the way I'd told it that time I'd been asked to write the whole thing out, but just the facts of the accident and the deaths.

"How old were you?"

"Ten."

The drill sergeant raised a hand to pinch the bridge of his nose. "I was wrong, private. I guess you are ready to face this war, after all."

He touched my arm comfortingly, then walked away, but I just kept standing where I was, looking out at the horizon again, but what I saw was those white faces slack with death, turned blue, turning purple.

The sergeant was wrong.

I wasn't ready to see something like that again.

If that was war, then I wasn't ready.

No, suh, sergeant. I wasn't ready a't'all.