My breath wasn't steady. I heaved and heaved and my feet crunched the snow, my armor and my materials weighing me down.
I had dropped things along the way. Things that added too much weight. I could survive on my own, sure, but the conditions and my wounds were killing me.
Team Charlie and Team Delta was gone. Team Charlie was bombed in their camp. Not a single one survived the night. Team Delta was picked off one by one. I saw it happen. And I barely escaped. I'm the only one left from Echo. My closest friends died either from the cold, or from being killed.
We were stationed, teams Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, and Echo in Siberia for a covert operation. The public was not supposed to know about this. Alpha and Bravo were in the North just for recon, but some idiot in Bravo decided to raid a Red camp. Alarms sounded. And our cover was blown.
Thus I was stuck in Siberia, my fingers freezing, clenched into fists. I didn't have kids, or a lover to keep me going. I just had myself and my fear of hell. Helicopters would fly above me, and I had to hit the snow, as if I wasn't covered in it already.
It was Christmas Eve, my first spent on the field. And I was bleeding. A bullet hit my shoulder before I could run unscathed.
Just before my friend had been shot dead. May he rest in peace, that idiot. He actually had a family and kids. But he put himself in the line of fire to save me, a man with no one waiting for him back in California.
Why couldn't it have been me? I thought. His family has no clue their father is dead on Christmas. Long ago a child is born, and now a humble man dies.
I look up from a long trudge, and I see smoke. I stop and stare. I ruled out that it couldn't have been Bravo, but Alpha maybe? I swore to myself. I couldn’t have been that lucky to find a camp of my side, just in the middle of Siberian wilderness.
But I walked toward it, like it was the star of Bethlehem.
Every fiber of my being wanted to stop. Just stop. Lie in the snow and let the cold take me. I wanted to rest, I wanted to stop thinking, I just wanted the torture to end. I wanted the bullets to stop flying, and I wanted my friends to stop dying.
But the soldiers don’t get to choose. We’re just footmen. Disposables. Getting our call, we knew that we would be missing Christmas. But we needed to strike when they weren’t expecting us, and that’s during dead winter. So we trudged along and let the Red Army pick us off like seeds on a strawberry. My only hope is that Team Alpha made it out alive.
I saw tents the more I walked. Peering through the trees, I couldn’t tell if the tents were part of our side or not. It was all the same to me. I maneuvered myself through the branches and heard singing. Russian singing, caroling, whatever.
The adrenaline of staying alive seemed to fade as I saw other people. I was behind in their camps, behind the tents and the supply boxes. I could tell that they let themselves go, as bottles littered the ground around them. I peered from behind a tall box, then flipped my head back toward the trees as I heard rustling. My heart thumped against my chest as a man, barely over twenty, left from the back of a tent.
A medic. A Red Army medic spotted me, and he pointed a gun towards me, a gun he probably didn’t know how to use.
“Ne dvigaysya,” he muttered over the blowing wind. There was a language barrier. I didn’t know a lick of Russian. I didn’t know what he was saying, but I’d been through situations like these before.
I dropped my gun unto the snow. I reached into my pocket, which made the young man flinch, but I just grabbed my pistol and threw it on top of my other gun. Then I put my hands up.
“Shoot me,” I declared. I wanted it to end. I sucked in a breath as the young man pointed the gun at my head.
“Blyat.” The man seemed to swear, then put the gun back in its holster. I put my hands down, confused. But then I understood. He’d probably hadn’t killed anyone in his life.
“I. . .” the man started to speak English, but it seemed like he couldn’t find the right words, “I do not like to kill. To see people die. It is not what I work for.”
His English was choppy, but he got the point across. This is the man’s first job. I could tell by the way he was shaking. The point of a medic is to save people, but sometimes all you see is death. Greedy commanders are notorious for putting crappy or undertrained medics on the field. Just to say that they have them there, I suppose.
We heard the bubbling Red Army folks finally settle down, so now it was quiet besides the blowing wind against our cheeks.
I decided to make the first move. As in I sat down. I was vulnerable already, so I decided to give the old legs a rest. However my eyes, tired and cold, stared at the young fellow. You could say I was half jealous of his naïve innocence. Not wanting to kill. I knew that if it was me in that position, I would’ve shot any guy who’d step foot in our camp-with no hesitation.
The man just stared back, probably confused. Whether to trust a scarred, 30-something operative just sitting down in the snow. I knew he was too scared to do anything, so I took the chance to take a closer look at my wound. I groaned and took a layer of clothing off of my shoulder. There was a big gaping hole.
I looked away from the blood and took a deep breath. My heart pounded from the sight of my own blood. The man took a step closer to me and decided to crouch down to my level. I could hear his labored breaths. Through all those layers, a cross necklace danged from his neck. I watched it swing.
Then he touched me. He pulled back the first layer and saw all the blood.
“Not good,” he finally said.
“That’s right,” I replied, knowing he probably didn’t know what I even said.
He looked at me with striking blue eyes. “I can help.” As if I wasn’t a blue soldier in his camp. He started rustling around in his pockets while I leaned back in the snow. If he knew how much of his friends I killed, would he still help me? Would he still help me if he knew the atrocities I’ve done at the nuclear power plant?
“You can’t help me,” I said. Why was I even trusting him? A Red Army medic? But he continued. Maybe he didn’t even know what I said. Or maybe he knew and was pretending he didn’t. There was a lot happening behind those bright blue eyes that I, an American foot soldier, couldn’t comprehend.
I bit my frozen, cracked lips as the medic applied something to my shoulder. It stung, but the cold wind blowing helped it a little. The cross necklace swung, and I watched it go back and forth as he got the bullet out and applied the bandage.
Once he was done, he plopped down next to me and rubbed his hands together. I watched him with furrowed brows.
“Go back,” I said, a bit confused.
“No. It is Christmas. You can not be alone.” The young man handed me a canteen, and for some reason, I took his offer. I guessed this wouldn't be my first Christmas spent alone after all.
I smiled, knowing that it was just water. I screwed the top back on, feeling some sort of relief. Or was it joy? A random medic out in the field, and a wounded foot soldier, from two opposite sides sat together in the snow, their faces lit by one lantern, during a manhunt in Siberia- on Christmas eve. He must have known how much he would get paid if he brought me in, dead.
I turned my head over and watched him. He was staring at the stars.
Behind his wrapped-up face, I started to wonder if it really was naïve innocence. As a medic he would have to have known someone was going to die but try anyway. Or maybe he didn’t do enough to save him.
How much faith would a man have to have to help someone like me? How much of a good spirit?
You could call my little story a Christmas miracle. Or you could call this a story about a man too good for this cold world, with enough faith to save someone like me.
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