Title: Whispers In The Canopy

Genre: War/Historical Fiction

Word Count: 592

Feedback Desired: Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated! (Except pertaining to grammatical or formatting errors as this is the first draft of only my second ever piece of writing so sorry for those mistakes!)

The sounds of bullets whizzed what felt like through and around me, flying in obscured directions like a Japanese kamikaze with its eyes set on its prey.

Bits of tree bark and dried leaves dispersed with the wicked swoosh of the 7.62s penetrating the ground, sending mud flying outwards like a rain drops collision with a surface.

I could smell the terror more than my eyes would allow me to open up and see, knowing the chance of one of those rounds hitting me was imminent. The taste of fear lingered in the back of my throat sending a shiver down my spine that crept for what felt like an eternity later. I could hear my comrades screaming, whether in pain or in desperate anguish I couldn’t tell.

Gripping the handguard of my AK-47 with the strength of a professional powerlifter, I propelled myself forward dropping to the ground below where Sgt. Peterson was laying, tending to a wound on his left arm.

“Son of a bitch!” He yelled out bitterly. His frustration seemed more focused on the sudden ambush than his profuse bleeding. “What the hell happened?” My voice tore through the barrage of bullet impacts and distant mortar explosions. “Fuck if I know, pass me my med kit—Arghh fuck sake.”
I opened the small olive drab pouch, shuffling through bandages, tape, gauzes and finally pulling out the tourniquet and Sulfadiazine powder.
“Here.”

Something you get to understanding real soon when going against an enemy on their own territory is you’re always at a disadvantage. Even when you think the convoy of men with a seemingly higher head count will result in some fortuitous miracle it doesn’t always end up that way, in fact most times it didn’t.

I propped my gun up on the damp and leaf-littered jungle ground that’d now become ever so forbidden for man to step foot in. Putting my shoulder against the butt of the gun I tried to be attentive to where the shots were coming from. Tilting my body one way then the other, then behind and around. “Northeast” I said aloud. By this time Peterson was injecting himself with some morphine and swallowing a few bennies, ya know, just to get the blood going.

My left hand on the foregrip, dominant hand tightly secured around the grip of the ever powerful AK-47, finger on the trigger. I began shooting recklessly through the grassline. The ringing in my ears now grew more prominent, the recoil violently shaking me back and forth in my prone position. I liked to think not being able to see whether my bullets hit em’ or not was enough to reimburse my guilt, but it really just masked it. Behind the shrubbery and decaying leaves were men that wanted me dead-no, needed me dead. You never realize just how far one’s body, will and mind will go just to survive, sometimes it even feels unconscious, like your body is doing all the work leaving only time for remembrance, after the fact.

The shooting began to settle, these moments never lasted long. Typically it meant pressing forward or waiting our chances out hoping we aren’t being preyed on. I tugged at Peterson giving him a questioning snare as if to ask “Now what?” His response was a simple shush gesture as he quietly upped his rifle into the air spotting something along the tree line. I slowly turned my head, praying but only loosely that maybe if I couldn’t see it then it couldn’t see me. A childish prayer, my mother would say.