Bastogne 1944

Bastogne 1944 It was cold, so cold because they hadn’t given us warm clothes for the winter, or to die in: Germans and SS surrounded us and the aroma of their hot food and Heil Hitler! warm fur coats drifted by us as the freezer closed in, my Thompson was a cold block of ash and black metal but working well, so well, so very well and the drum magazine (music to my ears )had a hundred rounds and I started naming each bullet Fritz, or Franz, or Helmut, or Adolf then stopped at eight when I ran out of names and when they attacked we took them away, from their mothers and lovers and their pastors and brothers, made widows of their wives and whores of their sisters but all this was a long time ago and I remember the cold and the wind as they charged at us screaming “ AAAGGGHH!” which sounds the same in Hindi or Belgian or Yiddish or Scottish, as their warm chests exploded and bearded faces imploded and their meat and their teeth spread like confetti in the loud Thompson flashes , (like a party strobe) which was kind of unsettling to see them die like men for what they believed in: and the SS came out and shot all the wounded so they danced like devils to the tune of my Thompson gun (oh what fun) we caught one in braces with Lieber standarte sewn on his arm and we kicked him in rage and in pain then spat in his eye, until the Captain said, ” information!...enough, we don’t want him to die!” and the SS man let out a sigh as long as the sky then the morning came and I blew up my nose and blew up a tank then collected the dog tags from the blood soaked soil (watches from their dead and a dagger or two) then it hit me, the cold, like a spike in the dawn, so I put on a German coat of leather and fur not caring if the owner was dead or alive, (I had become a monster) but now I’m old with hands of paper and veins, when it’s warm in the womb of my den, I hold the things, I filched from the dead and remember the flash of the warm Thompson gun: and I’m cold inside ( will it ever be gone?)