Screaming Eagles (The Front, Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page B

cold night. Many of the trees were cut off about twenty feet off the ground, the splintered ends blackened thanks to tree burst mortars.
    He hadn’t needed to be be warned to find a foxhole as soon as shelling started. That was part of basic, and after being with the 101st for a few days, he'd grown used to spending a lot of time prone, on the ground with his ass in the air. Standing around in shock as a rounds fell around you was a good way to get peppered with shrapnel.
    Not that taking cover was any guarantee of safety. The first day, he and the other fresh recruit, Billings, had arrived to assist Baker Company. They’d come across a former hole where several soldiers had been caught as they'd huddled together. There was no way to tell if the red-colored snow was from flesh or scraps of clothing. The splatter of blood around the mortar blast told the whole story.
    Grillo had slept in a shallow hole next to Private Fahey, a man who managed to snore like a freight train. He’d spent most of the night huddled next to his new friend, and shivered under a thin blanket.
    When the 101st had been called in to support the 28th infantry from the German counter-offensive near the Belgium city of Bastogne, they’d been unprepared for the weather in more than one way. They were short on supplies, dressing for wounds, food, and of worst of all, ammo.
    He’d been sitting in a barracks for weeks after his, waiting for orders. When they’d arrived, he and several other men had been hustled through processing, issued weapons, and put on a truck heading toward Germany. The day they'd departed had been bitterly cold, but somehow rain had fallen instead of snow.
    The truck was fine for now. While he’d signed on to jump out of perfectly good airplanes, the reality was that it scared him to death. He’d never been good with heights, and there was something about falling that didn’t agree with his gut or constitution.
    Too late to lament it now. He was here in Europe, on the border of Germany, and instead of marching in with guns blazing he was cowering with a few men, waiting for a German counter-assault.
    His and Billings' uniforms were newer than anyone else's in the platoon, but that didn’t make them any warmer. His jacket felt threadbare, and his boots felt like they were frozen to his feet. The company's doc had advised him to loosen the laces every hour and walk around, so he didn’t get a case of trench foot.
    Grillo had spent a week in Great Lakes a few years ago while visiting his Uncle Steve, but that hadn’t prepared him for this biting chill. The wind had roared off the water and hit fifteen below one morning. Still, they’d gone out ice fishing, hadn’t caught a damn thing, and spent the rest of the weekend sitting around a fire playing cards and drinking beer.
    The Ardennes was a different kind of cold. Everywhere he looked was snow. Tufts of plants poked up from the white here and there, but so did tree roots and chunks of earth. Under the light snow was ice that had to be broken through to reach the earth beneath so you could dig a hole to cower in.
    He thought of his friend Eddie Elgin and wondered how the man was faring. He looked like a matinee idol, but those looks wouldn’t help him in the war. He’d be just another young soldier looking to put a bullet into an enemy.
    Grillo would never say it out loud, but he missed the training base. He missed having a warm bed, even if he was tossed out of it at all hours of the morning for maneuvers, or just to do some PT.
    Paths had been worn into the snow-covered ground the night before, but they were covered now by a fresh dusting of white. There was a fresh winter smell in the air thanks to the cold, but it was undercut by hints of exploded shells.
    Fahey let out an epic fart, then rolled over and tugged the blanket up around his neck.
    “Gonna give away our position with that kind of gas,” Grillo said. They were the first words he’d spoken since last