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Ethan grasped his Greaser tighter and scanned the tall grass where Gunny had disappeared. Silence had dropped on the deserted village. In the distance, he heard the chatter of excited birds, the panic of monkeys, and something big and heavy crashing through the forest.

Ignoring Gunny's orders to take the team home, he crawled into the clearing and knew that moving the grass was possibly giving his position away. 

A whump signaled a mortar firing. Ethan flattened his body, let go of his weapon, and covered the back of his neck with both hands. When the mortar round hit, the ground bucked beneath him and a hot wall of pressure rushed over him. Some shrapnel cut the back of his hands as it sliced the air above his head. Some hit the flak jacket protecting his upper body. 

As adrenalin surged, his heart raced. He wanted to run to Gunny's last known position but refused to give in to the urge. 

More mortar rounds dropped into the clearing around him. Then as quickly as it had started, the silence returned, leaving a ringing in his ears that he knew would linger for several minutes. 

The other four members of the team would wait to spot the enemy before returning fire. He looked at his hands and saw that the shrapnel wounds were only scratches. The bleeding was already scabbing over. Forcing his muscles to relax, he picked up the submachine gun and started crawling slowly through the thick brush careful not to move anything that would reveal his position.  

The shadows of one of the longhouses reached for him. He glanced up to see the sun slip out of sight behind a wall of fluffy white clouds clinging to the horizon. 

When he saw a trip wire less than an inch from his nose, he stopped and visually followed the wire to where it disappeared into the brush. He crawled along the line and found a claymore at the end. He took a moment to rig it so it would blow when the enemy came to retrieve it. 

Once around the claymore, he continued toward Gunny's last known location. 

He found Gunny's foot with part of a bloody ankle first. The boot was gone. 

The rest of Gunny's body lay a few feet away with one leg gone to the knee. Gunny's jungle fatigues had been shredded, and his body was a bloody pulp. Gunny's curled hands—a mask of bloody, bony fingers where the skin and muscle had been stripped away—covered his face. Ethan pulled the hands away and stared at his dead friend's untouched features. He had known this man for most of the eight years he'd served in the Marines. Leaning forward, Ethan kissed him on the forehead. 

"Gunny," Ethan said, "I'm taking you home." Before shouldering the body, he strapped the Greaser to his chest, and then glanced at the pilot still sitting at the top of a log that now dangled from the longhouse. A shiver ran through him at what he saw. 

A humid breeze ruffled the pilot's blond hair. The face was pockmarked and bloated, and the uncircumcised end of a penis peeked out from between his lips. Colorless nylon cord held his body to the front of the longhouse, and his crotch was black where the blood had soaked into the fabric after he had been castrated. 

"Fucking bastards," Ethan said.

§ “Running with the Enemy” was awarded an Honorable Mention in General Fiction at the 2103 San Francisco Book Festival

§ Discover a new world of Publishing–-the 2013 San Francisco Book Festival Event held on May 18 at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in SF.