Call me mumbles. Why, you ask? Because I fucking told you to.
I was humping up this hill in shitbagistan, heavy load and thin air. I could hear the cherry private wheezing behind me. Wanted to tell him to shut the fuck up, but it just wasn’t worth the effort.
I heard the soft, echoing tick of a rock bouncing down the hill somewhere ahead. I held up, and the cherry bounced right into the back of me. I strained my ears, but didn’t hear anything more. The air was clear and cold. The sere mountainsides were resplendent in a kaleidoscope of colors ranging from shit brown to shit brown. We were up about five hundred meters from the valley floor, and the observation post was two klicks ahead. On the same level, but we’d have to go up and down at least a 1000 meters to get there. God forbid the trail follow the contour lines or anything.
From here, the whole valley stretched out below. A piss-poor excuse for a river meandered down the middle of it, not worth more than a creek back home. Two villages anchored either end. The residents hated each other, the next valley over, us, and the Taliban in descending order of fucked-up homicidal rage. Hatfields and McCoys with burqas, boy-buggery and opium.
I sensed the cherry about to open his stupid whore mouth. “Shut up!” I hissed. Couldn’t hear anything. Fuck this for a joke, I thought. I waved our little relief column forward. There’d been no reports of enemy activity for most of a month. The last, our lieutenant had been pleased to report, was over a fortnight ago. Fuck him and his word-builder vocabulary cards.
The fucktards from the lead platoon who were now probably sleeping in the OP hadn’t reported anything either. But then, they’d have only noticed if the Mahdi snuck into their sleeping bag and started pissing in their mouths. Fucking 4th ID. I heard the ticking noise again. This time the cherry managed to avoid a collision when I stopped. The longer between contact, the worse it always is.
I waved Ramirez up the hill. If he got up just a little bit, he’d be able to see over the hump the trail turned around as it followed the slope. Me, I just waited and identified likely bits of cover for every conceivable line of attack.
“Fuck!”
The cry echoed out into the vast space between our ridge and fucking Siberia. Ramirez was running and sliding down the hill, kicking up dust and rocks. We all turned our heads and let the mini-spicalanche bounce off our body armor and helmets. Ramirez skidded to a stop. His eyes were wide in his tanned face, almost bugging out. He looked goddamned ridiculous.
“Given up on stealth, have we Ramirez?”
“No, sergeant. I mean, yes, sergeant.”
“Glad we cleared that up. Can I ask why came careening down the hill instead of using the fucking radio?”
That gave him pause. He pondered that for a good long while, in fact. The hamster in its exercise wheel slowed and coasted to a stop. Ramirez looked merely blank and stupid again instead of panicked, blank and stupid.
“Sergeant?”
“Ramirez, why did you yell, ‘fuck’ and come running down the hill?”
He screwed himself up. “Dinosaurs.”
“OK.” Why me? Why, why, why?
“Were they the big plant eatering fuckers or the ones with the big sharp teeth?”
“Uh… the teethy kind.”
“Did you get a count?”
“Eighteen of them, sergeant.”
Holy shit. He listened, bless his heart. “Were they armed?”
“Small arms and what looked like RPGs.”
***
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