The bed jolted and I remember hitting my left shoulder on the truck wall hard enough that it went numb. My arms tightened around Pete just before we started to tip over. I wanted to close my eyes, but they stayed open, taking in the sight of some of the guys waking up. A few of us screamed. The truck kept rolling and the canvas caved in on us. I threw my hand over my face, wondering where I'd put my helmet and why the hell I didn't have it on. I still had Pete pulled against me, though I could feel gravity fighting to rip him from my grasp.

For a second I thought about Yancey, and his broken ribs, and how, if he hadn't already been dead, this roll over would surely have done the deed.

My back hit something hard and knocked the breath out of me. Then my head cracked on something else and my ear started ringing. I felt blood fill my mouth, followed by a sting at the end of my tongue. The noise, beyond the ringing, was terrifying. Almost as bad as a tornado, and a little like a train wreck. I tried to breathe, choked on my own blood, coughed so hard I thought I would throw up, then felt three different bodies land on me.

When the truck stopped moving I thought it might have been upright again. I was laying on my stomach, face pressed into wood, both my hands up by my face with my elbows bent. My arms were the only thing giving me enough room to breathe. I tried pushing up. My left hip screamed at me, my back and shoulder came alive with pain that took my breath away and I lay still again. Stillness made the pain go away but it didn't help make the breathing any easier.

The ringing in my ear had started to die down and I could hear men moaning over and around me. I tried to listen for shouted commands in German, or gunshots, or any sign that we were in danger of something worse than the mess we were already in.

A second later the canvas on the back of the truck was ripped open and light flooded into the bed. I saw the top of a silhouetted head, bouncing into view as someone climbed into the back. Boots scraped on wood and I heard Kirby call out. One of the guys on top of me moaned, and then the weight was lifted just a little. By the time the driver had me unburied most of the guys were making noises and trying to help themselves out of the way.

The driver tried to roll me over to the left but I stopped him, begging him through panicked breaths to let me do it myself. I rolled in the other direction, feeling a hard, burning pain pulling tight across my hip and chest. I didn't want to think about what I'd done to myself. When I tried to sit up I felt tears come to my eyes. I froze halfway up and the driver had to help me the rest of the way.

It took me a few tries to ask the driver what had happened, and even then I was panting like a dog in heat.

"Mine...in the road. Under the snow." The driver said.

I forced my eyes open and looked him over. He was drenched head to foot, maybe in snow. Maybe there was a river or a stream that he'd been thrown into. His hat was sending streams of water down his face and they were thinning out a ribbon of blood from a wound I couldn't see.

"You ok?"

"Hit my head. Think I busted my hand." He said, holding up one of his gloved mits. It might have been my imagination, but I thought it looked swollen.

"What about the truck?" I asked.

He shook his head at me. "Dead in the water."

Beyond the driver's shoulder I could see Kirby trying to sit up. He was pulling TJ over while he did it, and his eyes were roving, trying to make sense of everything just like I was.

"How far…" I couldn't get the rest of the question out. The pain in my side had started to sort itself out and I could feel the distinct grind of bone on bone. I caught the tail end of a sympathetic wince from the driver.

"Ten miles."

Ten miles to battalion aid. Might as well have been 10,000. Half the men in the truck couldn't walk before we'd hit the mine. Now all of us were bunged up so bad we'd be lucky to survive the night, between the risk of shock and hypothermia.

"Don't...don't suppose you've got a radio..or a handy-talky or somethin'." Kirby said.

"Radio." The driver said. "I tried it. Maybe I can fix it. But I need..a hand." He said, again holding his gloved hand up.

Kirby craned his neck to look at me, still holding onto TJ like he was a life sized baby doll. His eyes went from me to some of the others, and I could see him knocking each one of our names off the list. Finally, Kirby started to lay TJ down on the truck bed, mumbling that he would help the driver with the radio.

"I'll bring it back here." The driver said, crawling back out of the truck.

"We need to get these guys out of the truck. Need to build a fire." I called after him. I don't know that he heard me. I tried moving again, picking out what motions hurt and what ones I could stand the pain. Topher was beside me, turned on his left side. One of his hands had clamped down on his leg wound and he was breathing hard like a fish out of water. I thought about the long list of things that could have gone wrong with the wound during our tumble, and the even longer list of things that I couldn't do about it.

The pain died enough that I could half crawl over to Pete. The kid was dead. His neck had snapped. I wondered if that was because I'd been hanging on to him. If I'd let him go, would he still be alive? I turned away from him before I could chase that white rabbit too far.

The more I moved the sturdier I felt. Everything but my back, hip and my ribs was starting to fade into a dull throb as Kirby and I laid TJ and Topher out flat on the truck bed. We covered them with blankets and I started working my way to the end of the truck bed about when the driver came up with the radio.

"What's your name, anyway?" I asked, finally tired of having no way to refer to the man.

"Tibbs." He said. "Corporal Ivan Tibbs."

"I'm Doc, that's Kirby, TJ and Topher." I said. "The other two...well they're dead. But they're Yancey and Pete."

Tibbs didn't know what to do with that last bit. I tried a smile that Caje always says makes me look like I'm constipated, patted the corporal on the shoulder and eased my way down to the ground. My hip wasn't broken, much as it seemed that way, but I was certain that I bruised or chipped the bone. As soon as I had weight on it, it felt like a mistake. Fighting through the foot of wet snow on the ground wasn't going to make it feel any better. But if I could get a decent source of heat going, I figured I could use the snow to take down some of the swelling and pain.

While Tibbs crawled up into the truck, dragging the heavy radio with him, I looked around the patch of woods where we'd ended up.

The truck had rolled all the way over because we'd been tossed down an incline. At the base of that hill was a dark, shallow stream bed running parallel to the road. Streams usually fed into ponds or bigger rivers, and rivers were favorite settling spots. If we followed that stream far enough we might find a house or a farm. I took a step and couldn't stop the shout. It echoed around the trees, and scattered some songbirds and my eyes welled up again in response.

I've had to ask the question, "How's the pain?" more than a few times in my army career. If someone had asked me that question standing out there in that damned cold forest I'd've slapped them. "It's a horrible, awful, living thing gnawing at my brain," I'd've said. "Can't hardly live with it, but I'm living in spite of it."

"Doc...ain't no place for you to go out here." Tibbs said from behind me.

"There's gotta be a...a barn or a farmhouse around here." I said back, squinting against the bright sunlight. "We need a source of heat pretty soon if we're gonna make it past dark."

I tried another step. This time I knew what was coming. I gritted my teeth and bore down on the pain, reaching my hand out to steady myself on a tree trunk. I managed a couple of more steps, but by then I had to admit it was a pointless journey. I was moving laterally on an incline. I couldn't see up or down the road because it was about thirty feet away, above my head. I couldn't see up or down the incline or up or down the streambed without descending or ascending. And I knew walking straight and true was about all I had in me. I turned around slowly and retraced those handful of steps.

There were quiet chirping sounds coming from the radio, and neither Kirby nor Tibbs looked ready to give up on it yet.

I thought about the heat problem. Trying to find dry wood was pointless. The engine on the truck, if it could be counted on to run, might give off some heat. We could erect the canvas cover over the engine block and make a kind of shelter at the front of the truck and hope we didn't all die of suffocation.

I thought about how the cooks heat the KP cans during mess. Three trash cans full of water and soap that the guys were supposed to clean up their mess kits in...when they used them, which was rare. But one of the cooks had let me look down the smoke stack once. They heated the water by sinking a pipe down into the can, and lighting a fire under a slow, constant drip of gasoline.

I thought about what was on the truck. What I could take apart and use to make my slow drip heater. And just how far would I get with my backwoods tinkering before I blew us all up. Just as Tibbs got a squawk out of the radio that sounded like a human voice, I shambled to the side and looked at the gas tank.

There was no sign of leakage underneath, and no holes in the tank that I could see. I could smell a little bit of the fumes but given the complete roll over, that made sense. So we had gas, and maybe we had a heating source.

I came back around the side of the truck about when Tibbs started quietly requesting that the radio respond. His call-sign was White Carriage and he started out by calling for Carriage House. I shuffled over until I was even with Kirby and gently probed the swelling around his knee. He jumped a few times and begged me to take it easy. What I didn't get was a lot of complaints about trying to tear his knee off, or being a sadistic psychopath. The less creative Kirby got, the more pain he was in. Still, he was doing pretty good.

The faint sounds that Tibbs got out of the radio were encouraging but they weren't improving. Tibbs tried a few more calls, then switched the unit off and turned to look at me. "Maybe up on the road it'll be better."

"Maybe up on the road you could find us some shelter." I said, not wanting to belabor the point. I caught Kirby's head snapping to, and saw him send Tibbs a worried glance. The driver hadn't detected the irritation in my voice, but Kirby had.

"Yeah." The corporal said finally. He took the 1911 out of its holster, checked the clip and the round in the chamber, and tried to hand it to me.

"I'm a non-combatant. I don't want that thing." I told him.

Tibbs chewed on the idea for a second then put the gun back and eased out of the truck. He pulled the radio out with him and I caught the wince as the weight of the unit pulled at his shoulder. He probably had a strain there as well.

"Kirby, hand me your belt." I said, grabbing Tibb's hand before he could start up the hill. He hissed at me, but stood still while I felt over the swelling and the abnormal lumps. Broken or cracked, and probably some of the tiny bones in his wrist had broken too. The swelling would only get worse, and I wanted to stuff his glove full of snow. Instead I made Kirby's belt into a simple sling and helped get Tibb's hand settled into it. It put the driver's hand a little higher than his heart. Better than nothing.

"We're behind the lines, but you should stay in the truck, and stay quiet as you can." Tibbs said. He looked uncomfortable while he said it, and I figured he'd never had any kind of command before.

Kirby met Tibb's eyes and told him to be careful. They hadn't known each other for longer than ten minutes but I figured that if the two of them survived this, they'd end up buddies.

Before he left I had Tibbs help me back up into the truck. While I lay gasping for breath, I could hear Kirby priming the M1 he'd taken from Little John in exchange for the BAR. Tibbs was out of sight in short order, but we could hear him grunting softly and crunching through the snow. Kirby's head tilted a little and I felt him focus his attention on me.

"Think he'll make it?"

I stared at the snow beyond the truck. There were small shadows collecting in Tibb's footprints, and little flickers of snow coming down.

"He's got to." I told Kirby.

After a little while it got too cold to keep the canvas open and the tailgate down. Kirby, Topher and I managed to get it all secured and we were soon huddled together at the back of the truck, buried under the blankets. Topher and I were on the outside with Kirby and his M1 and TJ on the inside. It wasn't a hot summer's day at the fishing pond but we were warm enough for two of us to sleep at a time. I put the ration bag under the blankets between Kirby and me and after about an hour we opened a few more cans.

Kirby started talking about the best meals he'd ever had, describing each glistening roast and sparkling glass of champagne. He wasn't much of a wordsmith but with three other hungry guys hanging on his every word he didn't need to be. The rest of us chimed in with our best holiday meal. Just thinking about how my mother made turkey, with a crisp skin on the outside, and melt-in-your-mouth white meat on the inside made my stomach ache.

"That turkey...and the canned bread-and-butter pickles."

Topher had laughed then. "I never had turkey in my life. But the fish, shrimp, lobsters, clams. To die for, man."

"I'm a red meat man," Kirby said, his eyes closed in the ecstasy of the memory. "Thick, juicy red steak, potatoes, caramelized onions and some of that A1 sauce on top."

"Fresh baked bread…" TJ said, and all four of us groaned softly in mutual appreciation. "My ma made friendship bread. It was sweet, fluffy and we always got a slice of the heel with thick butter on top, as soon as it came out of the oven."

"Friendship bread?" Kirby asked, a smile coming to his lips. That smile was a warning that a bad or dirty joke was likely to follow. "What's it do, win wars?"

Topher grinned, and TJ chuckled. The movement jarred his shoulder and he winced. "Nah...you share the batter. It has to ferment for a week or two before you can make the bread. Before you do, you split the batter in half, and you give some to a friend so that they can make their own."

Kirby's face screwed up into a confused look of astonishment and I laughed. My ma had made friendship bread a time or two as well. It was a great way to stretch what you had, and share with the community. The batter could be made into just about anything, too. I didn't bother to share that part with Kirby though. It was more fun to watch him wonder.

"That's what I want. A roasted chicken, some friendship bread, Doc's pickles and some of Kirby's mashed potatoes."

"What about my lobster?" Topher asked.

"Stuff your lobster." TJ said, with a smirk.

It felt good to laugh. It had eased the pain, warmed the back of the truck, improved a pathetic meal and helped us to forget where we were...and just how screwed our situation was. It took its toll on our energy though.

Topher was the first to nod off again, then TJ. I did what I could to keep Kirby awake, but the conversation died little by little until Kirby's chin hit his chest. I picked up his M1, let it rest across the length of my thigh with the barrel pointed at the canvas opening in the truck and sang as many of the hits of 1941 as I could remember, my voice no louder than a whisper.

I was humming Glenn Miller's "Elmer's Tune" when I heard the footsteps coming toward the truck, trudging loudly through the snow.