Inferno at Turkey Knob (el. knyga) (skaityta knyga) | Carl Williams | knygos.lt

Aprašymas

The mountain priced them by the load. They priced themselves by the pace. The mountain lost.

Hill 382. The Amphitheater. A fortified outcrop the riflemen have started calling Turkey Knob. Together they form ground so lethal the men who fight there give it the only name that fits: the Meat Grinder. Three hundred open yards under a concrete blockhouse that fires at arithmetic, and every load of ammunition the line needs must cross that arithmetic by hand.

Corporal Levi Okray of the 34th Marine Depot Company reads killing ground the way his grandfather read the Savannah River, and he gives his carriers an order no rifleman would guess could save lives. Walk. Never run. Spread long, never bunch. Give the mountain nothing worth the shell. His crews cross the draw forty times, and the pace never breaks, and the mountain, which prices everything, cannot find their price.

Among the carriers is Private First Class Nathaniel Lanier, a fifth-grade schoolteacher from Orangeburg, South Carolina, twice-qualified expert with a rifle the Corps never once let him carry into a fight, who writes his sister Celia every day and teaches his squad at a cook fire that a mind starved to what others say it is worth will miss the day it matters most. And on March 9, the mountain finds him anyway.

What his company does next, the pace held exact in his name, every crossing entered to his account, a nightly roll call that answers present and accounted for over a man already in the ground, becomes the beating heart of this series. And late that night, a first sergeant certifying a dead teacher's estate finds what a mother sewed into a field jacket lining, never meant to be read.

Forty runs up the draw. They kept counting until the mountain stopped.