Sand Ratz; Tankers of the lost brigade
Sand Ratz; Tankers of the lost brigade
(inspired by Darude's "Sandstorm")
The heat of the desert is a small concession toward the cold bitterness that is a soldiers' heart. We think that by marching, by obeying without pause, will allow us not to dwell on these wicked things in our souls.
We were soldiers,
Therefore,
We were wrong.
The winds scathe horribly, sandblasting all uncovered flesh until it becomes scarlet like a sunburn. pulverized rock underfoot devours greedily without yield, hiding most everything inanimate it touches, rarely divulging a prize of a half covered mummified corpse of a long-dead troop from either side with dried rheumy grapes for eyes, and the occasional scorpion crawling lewdly from the mouth.
Death does not smell so bad here, but its initial shock demands reverence, nonetheless.
We were just glad, all things considered, that we had a corps of armor and tanks assigned to our brigade.
Sixty mean large-cannoned A.S.P. (Assault Service Platform) with large howitzer guns to blow a gap in an enemy's defenses wide as an elephants' asshole.
Sixty rugged anti-aircraft quad-gun, incendiary shell firing; Hornet class APC's.
Both types on steel-titanium CAT alloy treads, billowing black smoke from pipes in the rear portion of each vehicle.
A thousand soldiers marched on the outer fringes of the path, sandwiching the armored units between.
This, our first mission, would not come easily. We hear the engines of our tanks rumble like a train boiler at full speed. We hear the small bumping noise of the APC's like the constant beating of synthesizer-like leather bound drums in a rainforest. And all the while, as our hearts beat nervously in our chests at a thousand miles an hour, sand is turned aside noisily like an enormous salt-shaker, the tank treads sink neatly in, creating odd nifty rows of tracks.
Enemy planes pass by overhead, strafing the shell-like armor of the vehicles and some unfortunate soldiers below. APC's open up with almost electric sounding quad machineguns, raking the sky frantically for the fighters above.
Almost a rapid, low, guttural,
Breep! breep! breep! breep! breep!
With each press of the dual joystick triggers of the mounting on each APC top.
The armored contingent stops as the planes go by, leaving, as huge black-painted tanks of an enemy force meet us head on. For a moment, aside from echoes of the dun colored raging winds, all is silent.
Then our two lead tanks each fire a shell toward one of their armor, the thumps of the launched artillery sounding almost like a giant basketball being dropped. Then another shot from our tank, followed by a burst of an APC at the enemy troopers in their smoke grey uniforms, cloaks, and bug-eye gas and sand masks. A couple fall down as the rest scramble for safety behind the ugly masses of grotesquely painted enemy tanks.
All hell breaks loose as our armor exchanges fire with their tanks and soldiers through the almost blinding morass of a sandstorm passing through. As the guns fire, and smoke drifts over our area from burning vehicles of both sides, me and a few from my platoon take shelter under the burning husk of a disabled and aflame APC, as tracers fly through the air and glass is sprayed all about; created by tank misfires into sandbanks.
My mind drifts, as it inevitably will, to our last fantastic night of leave in Cairo. A dull bloody sunset at our backs then, thousands of desert furs vacating the market for the night and preparing for prayer hours later.
Of course, us being soldiers, religion is the farthest thing in mind for our week of "rest." No, what my chaps take me along for is a nice drink and a quite-well, one would say "interesting" show.
An ally under this wreck with me taps my tanned shoulder, disturbing my reverie.
"Goddamn it! Are you okay?"
"Why?"
"Well, shit. You been staring blankly at that damn torn caterpillar tread for half an hour! The fight is over, now. Where the hell your mind at?!"
"Sorry. Thinkin about Cairo."
The grizzly bear winks at me, his Bren machine gun held cradled in his great arms.
"Shit, Haron. Been thinkin about that one, too!"
A ricochet from an enemy bullet kicks up a small fountain of sand by my forepaw.
"Fuck! Look out! Maybe we didn't get them all."
"No shit, Sherlock." I muse.
"Keep digging Watson." He responds.
Then we have a short laugh over it.
The last black tank explodes outward from the force of a deep-penetrating armor piercing shell. The crew was probably killed by that blast.
Nearby, a coyote. A Captain. Pops the top of his tank, assuming command of our much weakened force. The Lt. Col. had been killed in the fight, when his own armor had been obliterated by an enemy soldier with a scud.
We had maybe three-hundred able troops; tank crews included.
We had twenty tanks; including two captured big blacks of the enemy force.
We had fifteen APC's.
And a motorcycle with sidecar.
"Scavenge whatever artillery you can from our destroyed armor and theirs, get any supplies or gas they have, and take all their maps-if there are any left." Ordered the Captain, who sat smug and solemn in one of the heavily armored tank killing black Mambas.
We had to wait here until a sufficient number of our wounded died before we could go on. Morbid as that sounded, we couldn't leave wounded behind, and we couldn't take them in what few armored vehicles we had left.
The bear, Jake, is at my side already, as we wait out the long night among the screaming and the wretched smell of cooked meat and flash-fried glass. Jake pulls a nice slender bottle from his beige cape.
"Shit! I thought you were sharing that for a special occasion!" I protest.
"This IS. We're still alive. What's more important to celebrate than that?"
"Goddamn it, you kook. Hand that fucker over to me."
I reach boldly forth and snag it from him; tearing the cork off the bottle with my pointed teeth and taking a nice gulp of a rare burning ambrosia of fine spirits. DAMN! It felt like lava going all the way down. Cherry and cinnamon aftertaste lava, oddly enough.
"Okay, shit for brains. That's enough. You wanna get drunk on duty?"
"Sure. Maybe the Captain will kick my ass all the way back to Cairo!" I joke.
"Well, anyway. Maybe you should clean that up-it looks like shit."
Jake is pointing at my Lee-Enfield carbine, which looks quite horribly choked with sand in the receiver.
"Why don't you do what all the rest of us tried?" He muses.
"What? You mean stick a dick glove over the end of my rifle?"
"Sure. And put them on your OTHER gun all the time, too, Casanova!"
"Oh, fuck up. That dactyl bitch was one night and you know it!"
"Yeah, but her present to you lasted a whole week!"
The present he referred to was a nice comfy case of Gonorrhea, complemented by two nice "fun" doses of penicillin in both my red-furred fox asscheeks.
Such happy memories. They inevitably draw me back to where I last dreamed.
A flourish of transparent silk covered feminine curvaceous lust. Dachy girl was one hot fuck, all unpleasantness considered. Open-aired building, fine ornamental rugs, a giant decorative fountain, and vined exotic plants hanging lithely on each dais, as tall indoor palms poked out of the skylight roof. Drinks, dates, and steaming mutton for the guests of this lodging, as they peer at the most startling beauty of all; a pterodactyl wearing a lime see-through vest open about her shoulders, nice orange tassels hanging off her succulent b-cup perky tits. She wore transparent forest green pantalets barely hiding a nice wet sopping cameltoe through her clear translucent thong.
Her cheeks were flushed. She clapped tiny cymbals on her fingers, shaking her hips erratically-and bells sewn into her beltline rang in amusing rapture.
She danced, and as she did, the last thing I had on my mind was a compliment to her art; it was instead to her body. A body that swayed in the desert wind like the most supple of palm fronds. We got drunk to this eroticism, accepted it as another portion of our impromptu vacation from the frontline. Why the hell not? We're soldiers, male, horny. Why deny what we had before us when these libidos of ours were suppressed at any other given time?
So, I didn't justify the urge for my body to fuck something female. I just went up to dachy in my drunk stupor, handed her (probably overpaid) a large sum of my paycheck (where the hell was I going to spend my wad out in the desert, anyway?) and only had to say two words that she would understand;
"Feaky-feaky?"
She coos at me, amused.
"Soldier want feaky-feaky?" She coos at me, amused.
I nod in horny elation.
"Feaky-feaky cost three-hundred dolla"
Fuck! this is one high priced Gahob! But I'm super randy from running around cooking in great heat, pawing off into the sand to some fantasy I have in mind, so having the real thing before me, I'm eager to say,
"Fuck it, feaky-feaky three-hundred dolla."
And just like that, little miss green dressed, brown scaled dachy Gahob (whore) gets her wad of bills and leads my drunk horny ass to her room upstairs.
When you're that yiffy, you never think of simple little annoying things like STD's.
Or condoms.
A giant smashing noise erupts from nearby. I assume its another enemy assault-
-I really wish it fucking were.
The lead tank, the black mamba with the Captain inside-
-It fell into an enormous funnel-like sinkhole of sand, where waits a giant pair of mandibles that tear through the tank armor as if it were aluminum foil. The tank is cut jaggedly in half, leaking gasoline all over the creature and the sand at the pits' bottom.
We are witness to the impossible. Nothing grows that big. Waiting in that steep-sloped hole is the whale-sized form of an enormous-
"Ant lion!" Someone nearby screams, as jaws continue to munch through black steel with a horrible ripping sound of a demolition derby.
For a moment, all I do is stare, as it crushes metal and flesh alike in brutal attention between powerful jaws. That is, until I see a private nearby with a single-use emergency flare attached to his belt, and remember that the monster killing our commander is soaked in gas.
If nothing else, this will prove to be a matter of revenge and deterrence.
I aim, pulling the cord and letting loose the orange ball of sizzling light. It floats downward eerily slow.
Two giant eyes focus on the flare, staring at it in fascination, temporarily paused in it's deed.
So too, does everyone else in my combined unit look upon the glowing orb adrift,
Before it touches neatly upon the tip of one mandible, visiting sudden explosive flaming hell upon the disproportionate monster below!
It screeches, and it cooks; one giant fancy viking bonfire for us all to watch in our morbid fascination.
Soon, all ends as it is fried black and the exo-skeletal head has melted and fused to the newly glass-formed sand.
"What the hell happened?" I ask Jake, who is conveniently nearby.
"The Captain-he and his crew got dragged down there when this thing popped up out of fucking nowhere!"
Glances fall eagerly on me. Soon, I have everyone's attention, and I don't know why.
"What the hell's wrong with them?"
Jake gives me a curt salute.
"Your the ranking officer, Haron-you just got promoted."
Fuck.
One Lt. in charge of three-hundred weary troops.
Fuck fuck fuckety fuck fuck fuck.
Part two; Desert Faux.
The next day brings an unusual sight. I command in one of our tanks, not liking the idea of riding around in a giant black shell. You just have to understand that being in a black tank in the desert is like putting a bulls-eye on your ass and saying, 'hit me here!' At least in a white tank, it would blind my enemies as they tried to target me. A black tank is just like a nifty period on a giant, almost plain, piece of paper-you know where to spot it easy.
"Sir! Enemy armor coming this way!"
I look out toward an expanse of sand dunes, to long unkempt lines of charging black mambas.
"Shit! Shit! Spread our ranks, we'll take out as many as we can while they're grouped tightly together!"
They get closer, almost marching on us.
"Sir?!"
He's likely asking for permission to dump a shell in their sorry asses. I hesitate.
This is weird, so surreal. They normally would fire upon us by now.
"SIR?!!" The mouse loader in my tank is begging.
No shots fired from them, and yet they are only twenty meters away. Not their usual tactics at all.
The first big blacks change gears and zip right through gaps in the defensive line to get around behind us.
What the fuck?
Huge clouds of sand follow the black dots on the horizon at the rear.
We ignore this strange encounter and continue onward in their wide tracks.
"I want to see what the fuck makes an armored division run away like goddamn boy scouts."
"I don't, Sir." Said the mouse, with his grimy, now beige tinted tanker goggles on.
"Oh, fuck you, private. That wasn't a request."
"Sorry Sir."
"Get Jake and Rick up here. We're going to decide on a course of action."
"But Sir, if a thousand black tank-killers ran away from something, why should we, with no less than forty armor, dare go into the jaws of hell?"
"Because I'm fucking in charge! You don't like it, get someone better-Oh, wait, that's right! Your all goddamn privates! There IS no one better. Better buck up there, boyo. Come hell or high water, we're going that way. It might have even been some of our comrades."
The mouse, of course, was unconvinced.
"Yes, Sir."
Among other things, we ARE introduced to our allies.
Or perhaps, they introduce themselves.
The tanks are amazingly loud in this place where no wind blows. The breeze, it seems, even holds itself in reverence to this place. It is a shadowy cool place nestled like a sand crusted valley between two great tall cliff faces on either side.
"One owes respect to the living. To the dead one owes only the truth. Voltaire, Sir." Declares the mouse in an almost unsanctified intake of hushed breath.
"What truth can we owe THESE war dead?"
We are basically passing, clamoring through an enormous landscape of broken shredded apart tanks, parched mummified bodies, and sandstorm polished heaps of shiny white bones. Old, almost archaic examples of armor are laid out before us like a grotesque war museum. Here sinks an American version of the Stuart, with the gunner's dried husk of a body dangling lewdly from a gaping hole in the Stuarts' side.
"Why do they not rust?" Muses one of the soldiers on foot, as he lifts a doughboy helmet off a dead G.I.'s skull crumpled in a curt pile of his own skeletal remains with the end of his Enfield bayonet.
"Stop fucking around over there!" I scream.
"Sir? These guys are deader than shit. What's the harm?"
I cock a P38 pistol kept in my waistband and deliberately point it at him.
"Here's the goddamn harm, you asshole! Stop fucking with the bodies you morbid bastard, and let's just get the goddamn hell out of here!"
He turns a little white, dropping his gun right into the pile of bones with a dull clatter.
Fuck.
"They don't rust because you need rain and salt. How often does it rain in a desert?" Muses the studious mouse loader from by my side, riding shotgun.
Now our slow funerary procession comes upon the nearly outward peeling remains of an old nazi Tiger tank. Two gas masked heads pop out from the odd twisted steel of the enormous machine, old Kar98's in their bony clawed hands, ashen barely furred skin peeling to expose the tarsals beneath.
I think a couple soldiers actually puked from that one.
We are in essence surrounded by destroyed tanks and old soldiers' remains.
There is an old Renault with a bulging hole where a Mauser anti-tank bullet penetrated and chewed up the crew inside like a crazy flying rubber ball.
There is an old Sherman with the bottom blown out from a giant five-hundred pound German teller mine. Bone fragments occasionally sift down like hourglass sand; perhaps telling us our own days in tanks are numbered.
Another Sherman with a bulldozer plow welded on front shows signs of being hit by two 88mm Panzerfaust rockets right on the turret, effectively flinging the tank commanders' upper torso from the top, while pulverizing his legs.
On the far left is a massive train engine looking A7V of the ww1 German army. Only twenty of those were built.
A walk through here is a magical view into the past of armored warfare.
Little did we know, as we amble slowly through, already halfway across,
That a dream can turn into a nightmare real...
Fucking...
Fast.
Through the near silence among our machines comes a mechanical whirring of scraping rusted joints. I strain to hear, as a massive tank shell violates the air only inches from my head!
It came from the left; from that unusually squat A7V I had been admiring only ten minutes ago.
"Turn this thing and hit that armored brick over there!"
The turret of my lead ASP tank, which I command from right outside the top hatch, begins to slowly rotate, stopping in the direction of the A7V. The cannon rises with the sound of powerful electric motors to aim right at the damn ugly antique thing.
"Are we aimed and loaded?"
"Aimed and loaded, Sir." The mouse prompts.
"Blow that tank back to the goddamn first world war where the fucker belongs."
"Yes, Sir!"
The great gun recoils backward, shaking me horribly, as black smoke erupts from the rear of the tank from a special hose leading out of the breach. The shell takes half a second to impact the side of the A7V, erupting with a metal rending tear of black fog and orange flashes of blaze cooking inside it like a toasty hearth.
"Body count! You and you!"
I deliberately point at the guy who had been desecrating the one body some time ago and his friend by him.
They hate me. Definitely hate me. But could they have done a better job in my seat right now?
The two stooges, short one Moe (probably me, being the brains and all), sidle up to my position nervously some time later.
"They're all dead, Sir."
"Good. Good work every-"
Mr. Necrophile climbs the side of the tank, up the treads to fearfully tug on my tan sleeve.
"Sir. You don't get it. They were all DEAD. A dozen mummified Germans are roasting in that thing like kabobs!"
"Bullshit. Nobody gets up after being dead for over two-hundred years. It must have been some guerrilla who used the tank gun to attack us, and then he ran before we could blow him away. I order you and fifty others to spread about between these rusting hulks and see if we can't find who's fucking with us."
"Sir..."
And he pleads. He begs me to reconsider. His eyes declare that I'm making a serious goddamn FUBAR.
"Take fifty soldiers and mop this asshole up!"
Oh, he wants to disobey, to mutiny, AWOL. But calm wisdom washes over his features, as he realizes that this shit has to be done, and no superstition should get in the way.
Fifty soldiers do as I say, going further out along wrecks of iron and steel, but never out of sight. No, never out of sight; I begin to have my own ideas about how creepy this place is.
Soldiers come back to the force in eager droves to false protection. Forty-nine come back. The last guy had been taking a leak somewhere and went missing. Where could pissy have gotten to, I muse dispassionately. Surely he didn't plan to desert out here?
Hahaha; desert in the desert.
The big gun of one of the wrecked tanks farther off to the right fires something round quite accurately into the side of my command vehicle; it's the crushed, charred remains of a decapitated head. A head that looks strangely fresh compared to the corpses about.
Shit...
I stare at the singed, bleeding out thing blankly for a moment.
Someone found pissy for us, and sent me a calling-card.
Some real sicko fuckers out here.
I look forward, towards our escape route, only to see that a crippled black mamba has found it's way in our path where there was no blockade before.
At first, I had my fear, but now, my body shakes from this inexplicable strangeness surrounding us.
That's when it hits me-
We ARE surrounded.
The dead attacked us, after all.
But why?
"Boldly they rode and well. Into the jaws of death, into the mouth of hell-rode the six-hundred. Charge of the light brigade, Sir." Declares the mouse.
"What did you do before all this shit?"
"Me Sir? I was a librarian working in an ivy league college."
Typical! A Harvard snob!
"Why are we here? Do you think it is destiny that we should discover this unmapped graveyard?"
"Destiny Sir?" The mouse repeats uncertainly.
I go into the bowels of my own tank, shoulder aside the remnants of my crew, and fire a shell, which impacts the mamba tank in our way and makes it rock a little, as broken treads now slide off the heavy duty gears, aside from that, it still sits lazily barring our way.
"Yes, destiny," I muse wryly.
I pause in speculation, aware that my next words, as ill-conceived as may be, but impassioned nonetheless, may disturb what amounts to a giant yellow-jacket nest.
Then I am standing tall on the turret of my ASP, paws cupped over my hands to declare a focused message for all to hear (and I mean ALL, dead or alive.)
"Destiny...That we should send all your undead sicko fucking asses back to the darkest pits of hell, where Satan can ass-rape you, you goddamn freaks!!!"
Rusty turrets of decaying, broken-down tanks aim (or try to aim) at me, standing on my pulpit of hellfire sermons.
I tap my chest boldly.
"That's right! Get a piece of this, you goddamn undead fucks!"
I jump down as whistling shells sail neatly by, almost striking, but not quite.
"You couldn't hit shit when you were alive, and I guess being dead didn't improve that too much, did it?!"
"Sir?" Replies quite anxiously, the Harvard mouse.
"Everyone fire at will! We'll give them a sending off they won't soon forget!"
And deep down, I felt pride and arrogance.
Pride that I was tackling a job the enemy had been too chickenshit smitten to handle.
And arrogant because I thought myself better than some dusty half-dead fuckers.
Rusty turrets explode from scored hits by my armor. APC's rake the random corpses about the place, even thought they showed no sign of life.
"Fire! Fire! Fire! Leave no rusty hull intact, leave no body undisturbed!"
Soldiers throw grenades into several different armored husks, as shells are constantly exchanged.
A turret nearby blows up my ASP with a lucky shot. Harvard mouse and my loading crew are dead.
Vengeance smolders in my heart like the baking sand of mid-day heat.
I take one of my grenades, saunter wrathfully forth toward this asshole turret, and let the round m67 roll neatly down into the cannon barrel.
"A peace offering from the world of the living!"
Perhaps I should have said 'pieces,' as the turret blows outward from my grenade and the newly loaded shell within.
I am so pissed, there is no room for fear in my soul, strange as that sounds.
To the dead we owe the truth,
But one truth is most apparent, in this battle that never, in all likelihood, could have realistically happened.
Oh, well Sir, we got our asses handed to us by some dead guys, but don't worry; we got them back.
That truth is,
"Don't you DARE fuck with the living!"
Hours later, I realize I have been outsmarted by a bunch of dead dudes. The sun is going down, bathing our prison in amber light. We cannot go forward-the black mamba is in our way, and the path is too narrow for one of my vehicles to push it away. We cannot go back-there isn't enough time to go the whole way through before darkness hits. We have to destroy what we can and wait out until the morning.
That morning is the most long-sought I have ever wished for.
When the moon greets us, it is to a bittersweet animalistic echoing cackle. It sounds so creepy-unnerving to hear such an unnatural call.
The call of the dead.
Bits of steel rattle restlessly all around, as we huddle, all of us, close to the safety of our tanks and campfires built up in the gaps between.
Weird things laugh out there, whisper with dry, raspy voices, bang on the hollow hulls of rusty wrecks. All about us, surrounded,
Like a fiesta for the dead.
Dio Del Los Muertos.
We all shiver-
-But not because its cold.
My arrogance is gone; I had Mr. golden sun watching MY ass.
A femur bone is flung precariously toward me, glinting ever so oddly by firelight with a dull polished shine. I pick up this sick thing and toss it back wherever the hell it came from in the shadows. A dark, hollow, almost guttural gagged and dry voice utters toward me,
"Danke." In it's weird fucking creepy, almost hushed tone.
Then another invisible voice bubbles forth like tainted liquid, almost gasping slickness towards going hoarse,
"Where's my legs? Who has my damn legs?" The voice sounds almost southern, maybe Texan, as we hear something in the dark only feet away from us, dragging itself through the sand with a smooth, almost scratching noise, and see a hint of a tattered and faded pair of G.I. pants blown off at the hip.
Is this the sort of hell beings of war will forever face?
I wanted my foxy ass out of here, ASAP!
And maybe, if I came out of this land of death mostly sane-mostly there-I might write this experience into my memoirs-
-As a sci-fi/ horror.
Part three; Moby Dickhead
First the giant bug, then the army of dead; now this.
I begin to wonder what insanity feels like. It creeps slowly onto me in the form of the ugly and stocky black mamba tank among our ranks, which whispers criticism to me.
(How many guys you lose today, Haron?)
"Fuck off. How the goddamn hell should I know?"
(The coyote would.)
"I'm a goddamn Lt.! How could I be prepared for this?! How could ANYONE?!"
(Officers are trained to THINK, you fuck-off rent-a-soldier!)
"I can't-I can't deal with this!"
(You better learn fucking fast, or more will die by your indecision)
"FUCK...YOU."
The encounter with the dead brigade had occurred days earlier. Now, I have guys falling down and dying with thirst and vehicles choking down, starved of gas. Food shortage will hit in two days at our current rate.
But the worst thing is that I'm not the only one who's crazy.
Soldiers have frequently peeled off our force to go alone in the desert chasing ghosts of lakes.
The first real oasis we hit, and I realize that we can't account for one third of the infantry, five APC's, and eight ASP's.
And one motorcycle with sidecar.
That left us half the tanks, ten, and seven APC's.
Rick is also gone, and Jake is severely dehydrated.
The only one not thirsty is me;
Privilege of rank (not that having water all the time has helped me think all the clearer.)