We squatted in the frozen mud on the Pakistan side of the Khyber Pass. There were a hundred of us there on the hillside, American volunteers. We were part of the Nathan Hale Brigade. Our motto was: “We have no Regrets.” I had all sorts of regrets, but it was a good motto. Though the idea that we’d really had a choice about joining was stupid, I guess we’d had free will somewhere in there. We were dripping wet, filthy and homesick, and I was frozen to the bone, so I was reassured. Out there in the frigid Pakistani high country, despite the harsh conditions, or maybe because of, we felt as if we were closer to our final act of freedom. Here, perhaps, whatever held us, would release us, let us let go.

I was helping unload our ammunition from the back of one of our Bulldog tanks, Korean War surplus that wasn’t even a match for the Russian T-52, let alone the 72’s. A Pakistani military officer watched with growing disbelief.

“Sergeant,” he said in studied English as he inspected our meager supplies, “where is your quartermaster?”

“We have no supply officers, sir. We just load what we have on the tanks and fuel trucks.”

“Where are your food rations? Do you not eat?” Anger began to slip into his voice. “Or do you expect us to feed you?”

“No sir,” I answered.

“And look at your uniforms. It’s dripping wet, paper thin. You will certainly freeze to death.”

“We will not freeze,” I assured the officer. I was hoping my theatrical make-up was holding in the rain.

“Certainly you realize you will die out there, Sergeant,” the officer pressed.

“Someday you’ll die too, sir,” I answered.

“Do you take me for a fool?” the Pakistani exploded. “Mercenaries don’t actually fight! CIA lackeys! Your own government denies your very existence. You are out here for some other monstrous reason. But you will fail! The Holy Warriors of Allah will butcher you in their holy Jihad!”

He offered this last part with a hint of pride. If the forces of the New Prophet got through us, they’d roll through Pakistan, right into India. They had the Middle East sewed up. They were moving on.

“You have no food that I can see, you have no air support, your equipment is inappropriate for this terrain, and just out-dated – you command seems oblivious to attrition, logistics –“

“Yessir,” I said.

“We will not baby-sit a nest of decadent imperialist adventurers when my country’s very existence is in peril.”

“Yessir.”

“You are cannon fodder! Mere targets for the Holy Ones to practice their marksmanship on.”

“Yessir.”

“The American will to lead is dead.”

“Yessir.”

“The American will to fight is dead.” The Pakistani’s voice cracked.

“Yessir,” I repeated, reassured.

“Are you there, Sergeant Lazarus?” the speaker in my ear asked. I adjusted the microphone at my lips.

“Speak to me, Lieutenant.”

“I will keep the tanks behind the rise until after the artillery barrage. Have you positioned the missiles?”

“I got the Stingers on top of the rise, sir, to the right. Anti-tank missiles are here and to the left. The guys with the TOWS are hiding past the road so they can ambush the bad guys. Do the Holy Ones know we’re Americans?”

“Intelligence says they most certainly do,” the Lieutenant said. “Seeing as we’re the Great Satan, I’m sure we can expect their worst.”

Lester Stiff, my corporal, dug into the frozen ground like a crazed gopher.

“By God, I’m gonna dig all the way to Kabul,” he announced.

“Just make sure their artillery doesn’t blow us away,” I told him.

We expected them to make full use of their air assets. They would control the air, flying in troops to capture key positions, bombers would wing to major Pakistan supply depots and cities, hitting them with that wild combination of crude mustard gas and radioactively mutating bacteria that had served the Last Prophet so well in liberating the Middle East. Every True Believer was already a fifth columnist, every practitioner of Islam prayed to Allah that he was Muslim enough to assuage the Holy Liberators, for the Last One had slaughtered the infidels in Iraq, outsmarted them everywhere else, swept through Afghanistan, making the Taliban look like pacifists. Surely the New One, The Last Prophet, was sent by Allah to unite the Islam world and make it the New World Superpower. For us, of course, the Defenders of the Faith would rule the skies, thus they would rule the battlefield. But we of the Nathan Hale Brigade ruled death. Our death would rain down on the enemy, bludgeon their bayonets. They would burn their chopper fuel in futility. To conquer death you only had to die. Their suicide bombers had no idea.

Lester was pulling rocks and gooey frozen mud out of his hole that was plenty big for both of us, six feet deep.

“That’s about right,” I said. Lester stopped a moment and peered into the depths of our foxhole.

“I think I struck water.”

“Around here it’s more likely oil.”

“Reminds me of the foxholes in Korea. It was always cold.”

Stiff had been in Pyong Yong when the Chinese had come across the border. He looked about my age, though. He bragged about being well-preserved Lester was digging again.

“I’m gonna make the Carlsbad Cavern look like a used latrine.”

I looked down the hill to some positions farther along. Five of our Southern boys were making a makeshift flagpole and raising the Star and Bars of the Confederacy over their shallow defenses. I pulled off my helmet and switched channels.

“You hear me down there, Joshua?”

“Damn,” Joshua’s voice, a corporal in Qunatrill’s Volunteers, called back over my ear piece. “It’s plumb miraculous, ya’ know that? What hath God wrought?”

“What are you doing down there?”

“We rebel boys plan t’be the first t’fight. Plan t’fly the proud flag of our homeland.”

“Get a decent foxhole, Josh,” I countered. “The Holy Ones aren’t going to give you a chance to fight. They’ll blow you back to Kansas.”

“Hell, Sarge. We’s cavalry. Mole work ain’t what we’re a mind to.”

“Dig in, Josh,” I ordered and changed back to the main channel. I looked to my left with binoculars. Elements of the 442nd Infantry were dug in deep with the Buffalo Solders. To the right, the rock was too hard to dig into. Instead the men there had moved rocks and boulders to make bunkers. We were as ready as we were going to get.

“Those boys from the Bulge are good.” I opined. “Very ingenious.”

“Did you know there’s guys from Bataan over there?” Lester yelled up.

“You’re kidding,” I answered. “Well, now’s the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country, right?”

“A clear and present danger,” Lester yelled up.

“How deep is that thing now? I asked.

“Well, it depends,” the retort echoed up from the depths. “It’s about seven feet to the bottom, about five feet to the mud, and about four feet to the water.”

“All freezing cold?” I asked.

“Any colder and we could sell shaved ice to the Holy Ones.”

“Home sweet home,” I said, putting my water-proof gun tote next to the opening of the foxhole.

“MIGs coming,” someone said over the radio. I jumped down into the hole, knocking the tote down in with me.

Jets howled overhead, then streaked back low. The earth jumped and shuddered, flames flashed over our hole along with deafening sound. The sides caved in and rocks fell on us from above.

“These are the times that try men’s souls,” Lester bellowed.

“You bet,” I shouted back. “The Summer Solder and Sunshine Patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country.”

“Good thing we didn’t bring any of them along,” Lester said. “They’re all comfortable in their graves, I would think.”

I heard Stingers launching, horrendous explosions that lit what little sky we had, with every color of the sun.

“I wonder what my kids would have looked like,” I thought out loud.

“Ugly,” Lester answered back instantly. “They would’ve been ugly.”

Time and again the MIGs struck. The earth bounced around us. We were truly buried now. The Stingers launched with a muffled roar. Our tanks opened up. I wondered if they had any idea what they were firing at. Enemy artillery joined in.

“The choppers’ll be here soon,” I said, struggling to dig out of the heavy mud that had fallen on us.

“Wonder if this is how it feels to be stationed at Arlington?” Lester grunted, joining in the digging.

We’d just about cleared a path out of our hole when everything went quiet. We were both digging out our guns when we heard, then saw, the Russian-made choppers. There were dozens of them. I heard the Lieutenant tell the remaining Stingers to stand by. A yellow haze hugged the ground around us. It smelled like a mixture of potent fertilizer and puke.

“Gas,” I exclaimed.

“I thought it was invisible,” Lester said.

The Rebs down in front were gone. The Stars and Bars were nowhere to be found. The makeshift bunkers to my right looked pretty mashed up. Still men scrambled out, bringing heavy machine guns and setting up mortars. I had my gun out of the tote. I dug up my ammo, as well as a TOW anti-tank missile and its optical sight. Lester started digging out our hole.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“You want a decent grave, don’t you?”

Choppers with the red star and crescent of the Last Prophet on their sides came down in front of our rise. A Stinger took off and blew one away. Paratroopers with gas masks on piled out of the others. They were the elite Sacred Al-Queda of Qum. I could tell by their American Kevlar helmets that they had taken off the 101st Airborne, right before they beheaded their prisoners on the internet, live on TV. Hundreds of them. Very dramatic.

Gunships attacked our high ground. Stingers took off at them. I saw one of our guys fire at a chopper close enough to touch it. The pilot was good. He dodged the Stinger, which I though was impossible, then banked and raked the American position, throwing the offending infidel around like a rag doll. The American got to his knees and opened up with an M-60. He must have hit something important. The chopper fell away trailing smoke.

The Holy Ones moved with determination and faith toward our positions, screaming “All Akbar!”

We opened fire. They over-ran a foxhole down front, bayoneting the hell out of the two guys in the hole, who time and again got up and fired into the Sacred Defenders of the Faith. Hand-to-hand, the infidels clawed the gas masks off the Liberators’ faces. Other Holy Ones ran past the foxhole, charging up the hill like an irresistible ocean.

As they swept over the American positions, my guys rolled over and fired into the oceans’ backs. Choppers landed all around us. We could hear armor clamoring up the roads in front of our position. There were at least three thousand paratroopers against my men on that hill, outflanking us any way you looked. Two dozen of them charged point blank into my fire.

They reached our ledge. An AK-47 on full auto ripped up Lester’s chest. I pulled my knife from it sheath, even as I fired to my left at some Holy Warriors outflanking the Bataan Boys.

A chopper with a loudspeaker under it hovered nearby.

“Americans,” a voice boomed out in perfect American English. “Your position is hopeless. Surrender and you will be well-treated.”

“Nuts!” a Bastogne guy shouted back.

“Man, when they get a good line…” I heard lester grunt.

I turned back toward Lester, and there was this strapping youth, a child-man the size of a house with soft brown eyes peering through his gas mask, and a very long bayonet on the end of his Kalishnakov.

I thought, how horrible it will be to die so far from home on this frozen rocky ledge. It wasn’t fair to die for nothing without a fighting chance. Surely this wasn’t God’s will.

I grunted as the youth jabbed his spike home, right under my rib cage, right out my back.

But I told myself you can’t feel guilty about war. You just had to do your job. Just do it, like taking out the trash.

The kid fired his rifle, mistaking the animation in my eyes for life. The bullet’s exit left a gaping hole in my back and blouse.

I shuddered and hoped the kid died quickly as I stabbed into his throat with my knife.

Lester speared the kid in the back as the Holy One reeled away from me, and together me and Lester chucked him into a bunch of his comrades below us. Lester had a hole in his nose, his throat, his chest, stomach.

 “You all right?” I asked. Lester coughed a laugh.

“You gotta be kidding.”

The Korean vet fingered the trigger on his rifle. We went back-to-back and fired into the Chosen Ones, the Hole Ones, The Defenders of the Faith. Point anywhere and you could make a martyr.

A T-52 rumbled into view. Lester whooped and fell on the TOW missile. Being an older style tank, the TOW could work from the front. Just then a bullet hit me in the head, blowing off my helmet and cracking a hole in my skull. Damn, I thought, there goes my radio.

Lester’s TOW took off. The tank took it right in the crevice between the turret and the tank body. When the smoked cleared, there was no tank, just larger smoldering chunks.

Someone slammed a gun butt into my kidneys. I fell and swung around with my knife in one move, but the paratrooper had written me off. He grabbed Lester and shoved him down into our foxhole, then threw a hand grenade down in after him. The explosion blew out of the hole with a pop.

I came up and at the bastard as he turned around and faced me. The look of disgust, then overwhelming horror that came to that soldier’s face made it easy for me to sink my blade to the pommel in his chest. Put you out of your misery.

Yeah, I should have rotted into the soil a long time ago, somewhere in the jungles of ‘Nam, back when my heart stopped beating, back when I died pointlessly in the service of my country. But I didn’t, get over it. I’ve had to.

TOWs streaked down on fresh tanks that had rumbled onto the scene. Bulldogs trundled over our hill, firing down into the stymied, terror-stricken paratroopers.

The Great One, the Last Prophet, had sent his best. They had over-run our positions. They had practiced their war with religious fanaticism and martial skill. They had been willing to make the sacrifices, and still they had been unable to defeat our death. We shot them up, we plowed them back. We littered the hill, we put them in route.

A Bulldog braked and slid a few feet before stopping near me. The Lieutenant, a veteran from General Arnold’s Canadian campaign, leaned out the hatch of the tank.

“Ready to advance, Sergeant?”

“Don’t yet know, sir. Don’t know if I’ve got many men left.”

“Your helmet is missing,” the Lieutenant observed. “I’ve never much fancied these electrical devices. Gather up your men. It’s time to counter-attack.”

The tank trundled off, the Revolutionary War officer as comfortable in its cockpit as he was on a horse.

My men began running up. All had been hit. Some were missing hands and arms. A Nisei from the 442nd had lost his entire left side from the hip up, but I had never seen him so happy.

“I got forty-five of ‘em,” he crowed. “How many you get, Sarge?”

“Please,” I answered. “No body counts.”

“Here, Sergeant,” a trooper from Custer’s 7th said, handing me a helmet. “Cover your wound.”

“Your make-up is streaking,” a Marine from the Mayaguez rescue said.

Sure enough, my marble white skin and dead blue veins showed through the mortician’s pancake make-up. I noticed some of the guys were washing their faces in the muddy ponds in the crevices of rock. They had nothing to hide, nothing to lose.

Everything was going as planned. My men organized themselves without direction. This is when I turned to my foxhole, knelt down beside it and looked in.

Lester lay there blown open. His legs and arms looked like tangled balls of gory string. All his teeth had been kicked out, but one eye stared up at me, intact.

“What took you so long?” he said with a broken mouth.

We were quiet for a moment, then I sighed.

“We still don’t know what we’re doing here.”

“What did’ja expect? A lightning bolt? Descending angels?” Lester shot back. “We were called up. That’s all there is to it.”

“You just can’t out-guess the Big Brass, I guess,” I offered with a sigh.

“Damn it,” Lester finished.

Lester twitched like he’d been hit by the lightning bolt.

“Say, I feel it.” He looked up at me. “I think I’m gonna be able to let go.”

A thrill dashed through my cold veins.

“Ya’ think?”

“Yeah, yeah. Kind’a scary.”

“It’s what we all fear,” I whispered breathlessly, “and pray for.”

Lester nodded his broken neck, then coughed a laugh.

“I’ll tell you the truth, though. It’s been fun. I don’t think I had this much fun when I was alive.”

“I just wish I knew why I was a – zombie,” I whispered.

“You’re a very likeable zombie, Sarge,” Lester said, spitting a couple teeth out. “I wonder how it’ll feel to be really dead.”

“Those who believe will never die.”

“Now don’t go religious on me,” Lester countered irritably. He looked away for a moment, then said.

“I’m ready to go now.”

I stood up. I didn’t want to watch. For the rest of humanity this was the moment of defeat. Only we of the Nathan Hale Brigade could watch this instant and hunger for its victory.

With ghoulish fascination I watched the animation leave that single eye, then see Lester’s flesh become waxy, slowly melting off his bones, mixing with the muddy soil he lay in. It bubbled, fumed, until even the bones melted away. An acid hot smoke singed my nostrils. I took Lester’s shovel and began filling in the foxhole.

A Buffalo Soldier, not a World War One Infantryman, but a real cavalry Indian fighter, began helping me.

“Let the dead bury the dead, huh Sarge?”

He offered with a toothy grin. I looked around and saw my men. Without their make-up they were various shades of grays and ashen whites. They seemed to be in a big hurry, all excited to go. The Nisei from the 442nd started singing in a warbly voice, ‘My Country T’is of Thee’. I laid down my M-16 and picked up a Kalishnakov.

“All you men, gather up the enemy’s ammo. From now on, the Last Prophet is our quartermaster.”

We began to troop off after the tanks, everyone joining that long-dead Nisei singing ‘My County T’is of Thee’.