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Could it be me trudging thru the worst storm in centuries, weather-wise and military-wise, simultaneous as it must appear to God or Generals?  Hip boots are sucked into the dark mud of the ancient Chickahominy River, pulling me back to where we all came from and where we return, the great history stored in the mud of ancestors compressed over time.  Simultaneously, I could see we were trudging through rivers of snow, our inadequate boots sucked us under in a call to our destiny on retreat to supposed safety in Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge.  

Caught by the tide, the motor in our skiff was not up to the task of pulling the recently homemade floating duck blind, sticks and branches bound to oil drums for floats.  In the Ardennes as in the Chickahominy we are led by the blind or leading the blind as was the case.  My sons and I followed the fluid gold of sunset to the disturbing conjecture, conjunction, confluence of the James of Indian lore, early European settlement, and another war of stubborn combatants for independence.  The independence was for some and not for others, always business and pragmatics playing an upper hand to morals as in the lifeline of manufacturing gods providing inadequate footwear for the battle that wasn't supposed to happen.  

Fixated minds, our generals and their intelligence officers, produced only rational scenarios for a desperate and irrational leader attacking in spite of their reasoned approach on the dawn of the sacrifice.  We were the sacrifice as was a similar coincidental sacrifice to The Archangel Gabriel on the night before the assault.  

Our beloved Glen Miller was lost over the English Channel, a Druidic sacrifice in a way to win a favor in war, a small compensation for a great loss.  How else could it have been possible without leadership to delay and defeat with uncontrived ability to improvise, to make do with engineers and cooks as soldiers, and with privates assuming the duties of commanders.  This makes sense now, not then, and purpose and meaning in history is a form happiness and solace even in the mud sucking Chickahominy.

At the confluence of the James and Chickahominy, we would anchor our Tiger Tank duck blind.  The daffy ducks would not know what hit them in the dawn's early light of the blitz.  Little did the German Command know that even though we were red, white, black, and yellow, we made the steadfast colors of red, white, and blue.  These are colors that did not run.  With losses as high as seventy percent for the 9th Armored Infantry Division, we held the blitz to a crawl.

Like the Fuhrer, we plotted against the winter foul in the Chickahominy.  Troops were replaced by our children, a new generation of hunters in an unexpected assault on the James River, Chickahominy, Ardennes, Bulge confluence.

The Fuhrer worked the slaves of conquered countries and children and friends to produce incredible machines of futuristic terror to duck and man.  Folk armies, hardened soldiers, brilliant generals, and SS Troop terrors planned to sweep through the Ardennes forest and hills to Antwerp and push us into the sea, Chickahominy, James in a demoralizing defeat worse than Dunkirk.  

Having properly reconnoitered our positions the night before, they pounded us with artillery, where we fortunately moved our phantom lines before the early morning wake up service.  Surprisingly we fought back, many task forces held to the last man.  

We endured, even with the complacent stupidity and arrogance of an unworthy leader who propped his feet on a cozy stove and said he didn't have time to be concerned with hygiene and footwear.  Many of his troops were disabled before the fighting began and his battalion was overrun.  

Constant streams of wounded visited me in my makeshift tent/operating room.  Geysers of blood were quickly staunched and held at bay with deft sutures and clamps.  Twenty-four hour days of stabilizing the wounded and sending them to the hospitals in the rear.  Thus materialized the stream of unconsciousness.

The wounded had a 95% or better chance if they made it to the Aide Station.  Sutures, clamps, blood transfusion, focus on the Christmas scrub pine tree to keep up the spirits.  It was decorated with spent shells by men who longed for peace, worshiped peace, but knew there was no chance for that now.

Neither did the children have a chance, I pulled the duck blind and the children in the boat in the cold damp dark with the able guidance of a full moon.  "Doctor's Children Die of Hypothermia," screamed the headlines, if it were to happen, but as in the Ardennes and Bastogne, we survived as did the ducks, despite the Fuhrer's and his Architect, Speer's, conscientious labors.  

Speer could not have designed such a formidable floating duck blind.  It could easily compare to the Siegfried Line.  Little did we suspect the empty oil drums would not keep us afloat nor the German military machine in a desperate attempt to defeat the wily ducks from the Home of the Free.  

We slept soundly, exhausted, waiting for the wake up service.  In their frozen beds, the children like the soldiers adapted or froze in tableau.  We would all die in time.  At least a soldier was dressed for it.  

Before dawn, we dressed as spies, the advance guard, to secure and disrupt by devious means.  Dressed in deceptive camouflage, we drove in silent, dreamlike, somnambulistic stealth to our destiny of supremacy over duck and the worst nature could throw at us.  We crossed the farmer's sleeping field of harvest stubble mines and treacherous clods in the dark to peer beyond the clay cliff to the juncture of rivers in a war of their own.  

The rivers collided and pounded one another over the centuries to make a form, their drawing in clay.  The clay came from the refuse of the sea that once reconciled the rivers in its pristine and overwhelming power.  In time, even the sea retreated to some unseen power and revealed an underlying disturbance in the opposing but complimentary forces in the meeting of two great rivers.

We searched in the dark for the behemoth duck blind, our Tiger Tank with monstrous 88 mm/12 gauge anti-aircraft-duck gun.  It was not quite the Graf Spee or Intrepid blind conceived by the evil genius of the Fuhrer's Architect, Speer.  Like Speer, I was lured by the glory of architectural feats beyond man or duck's dreams.

Was it a dream.  The sun slowly dawned on the ghastly observation that the duck blind was nowhere to be found.  We exhausted ourselves searching from summit to valley, across rugged terrain from river to river.  The elusive ducks mocked us.  Our heavy machinery was exhausted and defeated by nature.  Our gas runs out.  The ducks live on in the glory of victory.

Yet, we are a healing machine as well, chasing the battle; setting up our battle stations to save life on the heels of stations to deal death.  We preserve life in our station in life at any stage of species or duck.  Our patients return to battle a little wiser, a little more knowledgeable, a tad bit less destructible.  

Interminable patches shore up lives relayed to sweet surcease on half-tracks and any vehicle of any kind we could beg for or steal.  Where were the prized command vehicles?  We could have used them.

Overrun, we retreat to Bastogne, not knowing the way.  We could not follow a road that was targeted by German artillery.  My jeep with my collection of "New England Journals of Medicine" were targeted.  My prized journals were lost in the wanton destruction of civilization.  Where was the pope when you needed him?  He could save Rome, why not my journals?  

As we contemplated the barbaric nature of war, the ingenious idiocy, fresh troops right out of training marched to our rescue, around us and over the hill to battle a hardened enemy.  We heard the concentration of fire narrow in on the advancing heroes.  A few minutes latter, the same fresh troops returned in strategic retreat having encountered a column of tanks.  We followed with discretion, the better part of valor.

We were lost in the woods as we are in this place, if time is a place we are connected to the past.  There is something there we can't get at with words.  There is something unnamable that runs through everything even if we are unaware of it like the fireworks of the river's sunrise snaking a timeless and brilliant road.

Without a compass we followed a path just out of sight of the Fuhrer's troops on the road to Bastogne.  We were fired upon by machine gunners who livened our dance on bellies, true belly dancers.  For days, we wandered as the chosen people on the indecipherable path of God in the Sinai desert, delivered into the mortal dangers of freedom, dependent totally on the relationships with the unnamable, looking for a concrete and literal sign.  

"If only I had a compass.  We have a great map, but no compass," chanted Sgt. Saunders in our ritual search for direction.  "Yes, if we only had a compass," repeated Captain Riley.  Like the wayward children of Israel we groused in our aimless search for the promised land of Bastogne.  

Nervously, I smoked my last cigarette.  For all we knew with the cloud cover and having lost sight of the road, we could be first troops to assault Berlin.  Take them by surprise  I always say.  

The last cigarette was done as I felt the sinking feeling of time running out.  I patted my pockets in case I had stowed an extra pack for an emergency.  On the left side of my pants, I felt a cold lump in a small button-down pocket.  I didn't remember what I had stored there.  Perhaps it was a lighter.  I opened the pocket and squeezed out a round metal object, shaped like a pocket watch.  On the cover was the engraved symbol for the Boy Scouts of America.

A sudden mortification swept over me when I realized this was my Boy Scout Compass that I brought from home.  I also felt relief.

"Sergeant Saunders, here is a compass."

Saunders incredulous, "Where did it come from?"

"Don't ask incriminating questions!"

Thus we were delivered to the promised land of the interminable siege, Bastogne.  

Our ambulance driver was in Bastogne to greet us.  We thought he was lost having chosen to drive the ambulance through targeted roads.  Even with the red cross to protect him, it was dangerous.  

Sometimes, the red cross was respected unless of course it was the SS, who's job was disrespect.  The sons of the disowned son of Abraham, the SS, SOB's, whom we did not sob over, expedited ambulances to transport troops and ammunition.  Naturally, they assumed that everyone used the red cross for the same purpose, to disguise the nefarious actions of thugs.

It's not that we were the pure at heart, the Snow Whites of war.  With fire bombings that lit up whole cities and the atom bomb, we could be just as ruthless.  This is the quandary.  Was it worth losing many more of our troops than necessary against a fanatical military in a war we didn't want in the first place?

In Bastogne, we were adopted by the 101st Airborne.  We set up shop in the basement of a building across from Major Watts' headquarters.  I had a bathtub to sleep in, so I had clean dreams.  

Watts was a good officer concerned for his men and creative in strategy.  He expedited the supplies we needed, such as we could scrounge up.  As best we could we cared for cases of gaseous gangrene, jeep parts infestation of the body, instant shrapnel cauterization.  

Round the clock we worked without sleep.  One night, we thought we heard hobnail boots on a floor above us.  I thought it was an hallucination.  My sergeant wanted to check it out, but I was against it.  We weren't trained to do combat.  He insisted and I let him go with rifles and backup.  A few minutes later, I heard gunfire, shouting, and running.  

My valiant medical aides had uncovered a spotter for the Germans.  He had a radio to call in targets for the artillery.  The spy/spotter got away briefly, but he was caught a few blocks away. 

Watts made good with what he had.  He created operation SNAFU.  We were surrounded and there wasn't enough equipment or men to establish a complete perimeter of defenses.  

In operation SNAFU, all the armor was stationed in the middle of the city.  If observers called for armor to the North, armor snuffed out opposition in the North.  If it was South, armor rushed from the center to the South.

There was no question of surrendering.  Bastogne had to be held, or the Germans would push the Allies out of Europe.  General McAulfie knew this.  When he was asked to surrender, he replied with a note that said, "Nuts to you!"  

The German Generals were all scratching their heads trying to understand what "Nuts to you!" meant.  In the meantime, the cloud cover dispersed and supplies were flown in.  Air-cover improved defenses and the Germans were pushed back.  

Captain Riley's future brother-in-law was flying one of the Mustangs supplying air-cover.  

It was cold then as it is now and will be.  I taught my infantry, the sons, survival in the elements.  Nature taught truth.  It could teach nothing but truth in silence.  There were no words of deceit.  

The children read the book of ice with paddles they used to break the ice in front of the prow of the skiff in the early pre-dawn.  The children read the way to the wily duck.  

The children of peace lived an uneasy peace in the cold war that was to follow.  Would they learn the difference of cold truth and words of deceit?  Would they defend themselves, take what it may before it is too late?

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