Entry 5

2000 hours         May 11th 2007                  

Today was a long, hot day of probably the least violent of my days here so far. I got up in the morning and reloaded and cleaned my weapon and dagger. I walked through all the trench barracks looking for Hal and the others. I found Hal in the wounded bay; he was shot in the leg. He would live, but several patriots we ran with did not. Out of the 20 patriots Hal and I ran with during the assault 7 are still alive. Not to mention almost all the anti-war, anti-draft, and anti-US traitors had been cut down during the assault. That’s the thing about war, if you don’t like it and don’t want to be there it will kill you. We had lost 44 men prior to the assault and had a total of 40 injured. Out of the 600 men in our battalion only 516 could go over the top that day. The assault had cost us 202 men dead and 76 wounded. Only 238 of our men remained functional. The war was taking its toll. Anyway Hal would live, we spent the whole day fortifying and repairing our newly captured position. It turns out the Arabs didn’t build a back up trench. So they have to dig a new 5½-mile trench. A sniper team detachment from the Marines is manning positions in our trench and they are picking the Arabs off like crazy as they tried to dig and build a new trench. I trust it’s going to be some time before we fight again. As you can tell I’ve been promoted again, Captain Voght says he thinks I can handle a squad. I’m in charge of 5 men. Most of the men in the battalion have cooled down and lost their protest attitude against the war and its cause. They’ll actually stop complaining and start fighting now. Voghts’ second reason for promoting me was my fighting ferocity, I wasn’t anti-anything. I had also killed 19 Arabs up till now, which is perhaps the highest kill ratio in the battalion. Anyway I got promoted, the Arabs are digging in, were sniping them off, Hal is in the sick bay, we’ve lost many, and reconstruction begins I’ve got to go sew my stripes on my uniform.