II. "The Glorious Cause"

PART EIGHT

Gabriel Audaz winced as more sweat fell into his eyes.  It was a fierce and bitter sensation he could not stop.  The salty perspiration dripped off the loose strands of his black hair and down his face in endless rivulets.  He couldn’t wipe it away.  The half-limp body of the wounded sergeant was tightly encircled by Gabriel’s left arm, urging him along the uneven terrain.  Gabriel’s right arm was trying to keep the man from slouching forward, his had pressed tightly against the older man’s wounded side.

    The morning was already warming up, hinting without subtlety at the blistering day that was making its arrival.  The valley walls bounced with the echoes of a battle somewhere ahead.  They could hear the rattle of machine guns, muffled by the rocks and dirt consuming the distance between themselves and the source of the violence.  There wasn’t much of that distance left.  The stench of smoke was drifting down the valley.  It was all Gabriel could smell.

    He brought their lumbering pace to a stop.  The bedrock under his tired feet trembled with the boom of a heavy blast that was more like fading thunder by the time he could hear it.  His ears perked at the sound of shifting pebbles, dislodged by the traveling vibrations.  Gabriel’s eyes shifted and scanned in every direction he could turn his head.  He spotted the smoke, thick and gray, as it climbed over a rise less than a mile away.

    “Tread carefully, Corporal,” mumbled the sergeant in Gabriel’s arms.

    Gabriel regarded him briefly.  He nodded once, “Yes, sir.”

    They didn’t speak anymore as Gabriel carried them up the valley.  Gabriel blinked away more sweat as his eyes searched left and right, watching for anything out of the ordinary.  He had to smirk at that thought.  I should be looking for anything, he told himself.  We’re the one’s out of the ordinary.  What really is ordinary in this place, anyway?

    Gabriel suddenly stopped.  Gray tendrils of hazy smoke curling and snaking in faint breezes began to lazily stretch around them.  His gaze was transfixed on a sight beyond the bitter fog.  It took a long moment for the sergeant to realize they had stopped.  He shifted, dragging his mind out of the semi-conscious state he kept falling into.  “What is it?”

    Gabriel gestured with his chin in the direction of a nearby slope.  Several tattered parachutes were strewn across the dry mountainside, their fabric frayed by the nighttime gunfire and stained red by the blood of their owners.  A few bodies remained amongst tangled canopies and the brush.  Gabriel looked away, breathing heavier.

    “Oh,” the sergeant said, wearily taking in the scene.  “Pray for them if you like, Corporal.  But do it in your head and let’s keep moving.  If we stand here too long, we’ll end up next to them.”

    Gabriel blinked.  “Yes, Sergeant,” he said distantly.

    Gabriel quickly readjusted the sergeant’s weight against his body, then started forward on the littered trail.  The tide of of battle had violently swept through the area.  Bullet shells glistened in the sunlight between the sinewy shadows cast by the thickening haze.  Blood, still damp in places, dotted the dirt under their feet.  The small trees and spiny bushes bore the brunt of the upheaval.  Snapped twigs and fiercely broken branches with ends in jagged splinters stretched across the valley.  The light of a fire caught Gabriel’s attention, visible at first in the corner of his eye.  Within a few paces, he was able to look down a shallow gulch leading off to the left from the rough trail they journied along.  One of the Ospreys lay in a smoldering heap of charred, smoldering wreckage, its parts strewn along the blackened, scarred walls.

    A torrent of gun fire echoed down the valley.  Gabriel’s breath caught in his throat.  He had glanced away from the sight of the crashed plane for just an instant, distracted by the crack and rattle of dueling rifles.  When he finally looked back toward the wreckage, Gabriel’s eyes locked onto the silhouetted figures scurrying past the glowing debris.  He squinted, spying signs of weapons in their hands.  He noted their direction, aware it was the same as his.  Gabriel stared ahead at the column of smoke climbing into the sunlit sky.  With each lumbering step, the choking mass crew thicker and disconcertingly closer.

    “Do you want to pray with me,” a distant voice asked, echoing in Gabriel’s mind.

    With few exceptions, everything seemed to happen all at once in Gabriel’s life.  He understood that his sexuality was something that had always existed within him, and its development was something naturally incremental.  But his realization of it seemed to have come on suddenly in his memory.  The ongoing conflict that ensued within himself he remembered being just as sudden and dramatic in its appearance.  His fixation on becoming a soldier and a leader seemed to happen in the blink of an eye.   He had found a picture of his grandfather one day.  At the same time, he had begun reading about George Washington.  Gabriel recalled an instant desire to follow in the footsteps of the two inspiring men.  His mother had not spoken of the near-stranger in the wrinkled, faded photograph.  It wasn’t until she realized her son would not be shaken from his decision that she opened up about the army captain his father had named him after.

    And now, all at once, those skills he had read about and imagined emulating, then began to learn and comprehend as something tangible in basic training, were being put to the test.  Gabriel, with the wounded sergeant on his arms, had just rounded another bend in the cold, dry valley where more burned and broken plane parts littered the dusty landscape when the hell he knew was coming opened up.  The hazy streamers of smoke had begun to swell into lung-rasping patches that rolled above the ground.  It partially obscured the dispiriting field of lifeless bodies sparsely strewn over the blood and bullet-riddled sand.

    Gabriel was trying not to focus on them.  He was trying not to spot the American flag patches on the shoulders, or the haunting gazes of their open eyes.  He had to lead himself and the sergeant around more than a few laying in their path.  Gabriel knew his mind had to stay sharp.  He had to keep himself aware, his senses up and alert in the bitter smoke polluting his field of vision.

    “I...I want to be as honest as possible in my life,” Gabriel heard his own voice echoing back to him from the recent past.  “...with you, with everyone...with God especially.  Yet, I can’t help but keep this inside and I’m so, so very afraid that I’m going to die-”

    NO, Gabriel shouted to himself.  He was losing his focus, his grip on the present slipping again.  He felt his heart racing in his chest.  A shot rang out somewhere.  It was close, the quick blast of firepower a single, deafening pop in the smokey air.  Gabriel stumbled over something.  He wanted it to be a rock, but he knew that it wasn’t.  He couldn’t stop himself from yelping in surprise and fear.

    “I’m so very afraid that I’m going to die before I can accept who and what I am.”

    At the same moment his thoughts began slinking back into that memory on the beach, another shot tore through the gray veil of smoke.  Dirt was erupting into the air before the crack of hot noise had filled the valley.  The bullet had missed the two soldiers struggling across the terrain by less than half a dozen feet.

    Gabriel turned his head in the direction he thought the shell had been fired from.  Through the thinning curtain of smoke, he spotted the handful of figures gathering hurriedly together.  One already had his rifle raised and sighted.  The others flanking him were following suit.  Dark muzzles at the end of paint-chipped barrels exploded with light and noise.  Bullets buzzed with white-hot speed as they hit the dirt at Gabriel’s heels.  There was nothing he could do but run.  With the sergeant braced against him, there was no way Gabriel could return fire, even blindly.  He tried to zigzag unpredictably, sidestepping the close shots getting closer and simultaneously avoiding tripping over the mounds under the smoke, the bodies of his fellow soldiers already fallen.

    More shots broke through the wafting pockets of smoke, tearing through the air across the valley.  The noisy barrage of deadly shells angrily peppered the sandy floor in every direction around the fleeing, breathless corporal carrying the half-awake sergeant.  Gabriel didn’t know how long he could last.  The rifle fire was coming on without stop, a rapid hail storm of lethal and furious tenacity.  Words he didn’t understand were shouted somewhere close through the smoke and over the gun fire.  Gabriel’s ears perked at the sound of the wind changing slightly for just an instant.  It was like the smokey air was wrapping around and then bouncing off of something in the same instant.  He caught a glimpse of what was unmistakably a grenade.  It spit out of a rolling waft of smoke, sailing over his head but not far enough to make him feel better.

    The palm-sized bomb shaped slightly like an egg exploded in the dirt behind and to Gabriel’s right.  Tiny pebbles became molten shards that sprayed across his back and neck.  Gabriel gritted his teeth.  He felt the bloody sting of the shrapnel digging into his calves.  He was luck and knew it.  With a deep breath of the choking air, Gabriel pushed himself, with the weight of the sergeant against him, forward.  The wind shifted once again.  It was the sound of more grenades tossed without aim into the sultry mist.  A deafening fissure of smoke, dirt and debris exploded loudly to Gabriel’s left and then ahead and to his right.  One more grenade detonated behind him, the valley floor tearing open in Gabriel’s wake by mere seconds.

    His ears were ringing like mad, the earth-shuddering thuds of each little bomb burst causing his ear drums to send a shrill cry reverberating deep into his skull.  Gabriel wanted to scream but didn’t want to waste the breath.  He could barely hear the heavy pounding of his racing heart.  There should have been no way he heard the figure suddenly come forward out of the smoke, closing the distance that had separated them in the valley.  Even with his heart furiously pumping fresh blood into his straining, bleeding legs, there should have been no way Gabriel had the strength or agility left to get away.  The odds were stacked against him.  And yet, Gabriel’s path through the valley stayed true.

    In the thickening, burning haze he saw the shadow move across the drifting veil a mere second before the figure appeared.  He had seen the old Russian assault rifle raise in a hurried instant before the nameless shape of the enemy squeezed the the dinged and paintless trigger.  The warm, late morning air brushed against Gabriel’s face as he surged forward a single, panicked step.  It wasn’t much.  But, it was just enough.  The bullet already leaping out of the aged barrel skimmed the smokey air where Gabriel and the sergeant should have been.  Instead, it sliced like a razor through fabric alone instead of flesh.  Gabriel still felt the blistering heat radiating off the slender, little body as it sailed millimeters above his skin.

    His hurried push out of the bullet’s path made his next step unbalanced.  Gabriel stumbled unstoppably, his body, along with the sergeant’s, falling forward into the sloping landscape.  A fireworks display of gunfire illuminated the gray vapor around them.  Gabriel squinted at the maddening din consuming the mountain air.  The enemy soldier behind them stiffened, his heart stopping as a steady shot ripped into his chest and then through his back.

    Gabriel didn’t watch the bearded man fall backwards into the dirt.  There was no time to lay low and watch the scene play out around them.  Gabriel peered ahead, spotting a handful of soldiers in uniforms matching his own.  He spotted the raging fires of exploded vehicles expelling the thick columns of smoke into the hauntingly colored sky, partially lost somewhere above him.  They had finally arrived at the heart of the bloody battle that had developed across the length of the valley.

    “...I’m so, so very afraid that I’m going to die before I can accept who and what I am...”  Gabriel heard his memory echoing in his mind once more as he rose carefully to his knees.  The flesh on the backs of his legs burned in that simple movement.  He wanted to cry out from the pain that doubled in intensity as he began to drag the sergeant closer to their fellow infantry men.  “...Before I can finally put my demons to rest.”

    As Gabriel used all of his strength to pull the wounded sergeant across the stirred sands coated with a mire of muddy crimson and ash and pitted by the rock-jarring explosions, he couldn’t help but recall Isabella that night on the beach.  Even as violent gun fire was exchanged in noisy streams racing past him, Gabriel remembered the feeling of being in the warm embrace of his best friend on that late, windy evening.  It gave him something else to focus on as he closed the painful distance toward the infantry.  The bursts of their rifles were like beacons home in the raging storm of death in the darkening valley.

    “Do you want to pray with me,” Isabella had asked.

    Gabriel nodded, “Yes.”