Pinecone Grenades and Problems

In the Alaskan wilderness, the sounds of mock gunfire echoed off of frozen birch and pine trees. Within a snow-buried junkyard, there was a war going on. Four boys were fighting that war and victory was teetering on the success of the current battle that was raging on. Four soldiers fought brave against their imagined enemy that marched across the world in what seemed as endless ranks. The four were the only hope for humanity; defending against Nazis.

Many of the boys adventures were like this current battle. Those four boys against the hardened soldiers of the Nazis; who were men that marched as the epitome of evil. Evil in trench coats, which worked as camouflage that contrasted the bright colored and mismatched snow suits that the boys wore. Those snow suits were special issue of course, only the best in the United States Military got to wear them. Their inventory of weapons was of random objects that had been gathered for use.

That day, that is today, they found themselves fighting the notorious Iron Bull, a commander who specialized in tank tactics and bad breath. They heard about that breath, which billowed green apparently, through reports of torture survivors. Only their imagination allowed them to see the German issuing orders for captured to spill secrets while noxious gas flowed gratuitously from his mean mug. Imagining the Iron Bull had brought snickers to the boys because they had decided he was fat German, who's belly spilled over the cinch of his belt. He also had a terrible German accent, but hey, they hadn't gotten to hear the man talk yet. Iron Bull would get a chance to address them during the start of his final wave, in which the four boys would giggle at his words. Words that were always the same in some sort, commanders claiming they were bringing the final vision of Der Fuhrer. That vision is what they were headed towards now if the surrounding army succeeded. The boys fancied themselves as the final solution to Der Fuhrer and they laughed together in hope to delivering the final line, which still needed to be decided, that would mark the end of the war.

Lieutenant Aberdeen Butts was the leader of the small outfit and himself carried an assortment of water guns as his armament. The tallest of the group, he commanded the most respect, the others too afraid to fight him for the position as long as his size mattered. The soldiers blended in well with the pale pillars of birch trees.

“Protect the rear flank.” Butts barked out.

The smallest of the heroes, Private Wellington, was the only one to acknowledge the order. He was the puny one, and, therefore, took the brunt of the bigger boys brute tomfoolery. Chances were, his eagerness to kill Nazis would go unappreciated and the other boys would chide him for seeking glory. Private Wellington fired away from the cover of their snow fort, with a hockey stick that looked to cumbersome to be used as a rifle. Each shot was methodical as an effort to conserve precious munitions. The reasoning being that the battle could end with him being the last fighter.

Sergeant Patrick Dess lost it with the eagerness of Private Wellington. Shoving the other boy away, his red face burned under the cool air.

“Get out of the way, this takes a real man.” He would say, but in private the others would laugh at Patrick; snickering that he was on his way to being two.

The sarge, as he was called in the squad, felt his position was alway precarious. He took sported a .50 caliber machine gun, which was really a brandished big stick, the kind that almost looked like a log and blasted away with his Ratatatata. This noise only broke between breaths.

“There are too many of them Lieutenant.”

“Keep firing numb nuts, we will make it through.” Butts, with his ever-growing leadership abilities. His words spoke of a reassurance of victory and it added crescendoing effect on the voices of his men, the blasts of guns marked by the fog on their voices. Butts continued his reassurances.

“Keep firing, we got’em on the run.”

They did not have their enemy on the run. Those words marked the final stage of the battle, signaling that the end was ever nearer than before. In their imaginations, they conjured the clicking of treaded tracks across the ground. A German Tiger Type 3 Tank made the noise as it appeared between two hills of buried junk. Corporal Vetter, the final member of the group, was responsible for what they imagined. Before every battle, there was a briefing, which often had the corporal showing off drawings of the enemy. This current living drawing had three turrets and almost impregnable armor.

Spilling out of the top was the nemesis of the week, The Iron Bull. With a mustached face and a cigar that burned slowly out of his mouth, he stopped the tank in order to perform a customary greeting.

“Zoldiers, you has been a sorn in zee side of Der Fuhrer fur too long.”

He was abrupt as he went into a tirade of how the Third Reich is impossible to defeat and that the Fire Team would meet their end here and now. The tank gave a roar, the engine billowing black smoke before the tracks began to move the tank.

For Private Wellington he imagined that the fat man sticking out of the top of the tank, presented a hefty load that the tank grumbled under. It lurched forward towards the small soldiers and the Iron Bull shifted with the sudden change in movement.

“Alright boys, here comes the Iron Bull. Let’s give that fat bastard something to remember us by on his journey to-HELL”

The boys all screamed in unison, signaling their commitment to the cause: the war, to the destruction of evil. They all fired in unison, watching in vain as their bullets bounced off of the hull of the tank. It was a massive armored monster, circling them as a shark would draw to blood in the water.

The fat man laughed hysterically, yelling out profanities that the children were too young to utter in front of parents.

Corporal Vetter stifled giggles, trying to keep it together as each took a turn voicing the Iron Bull. He was the clown of the group and he carried just one weapon. It was a Tommy Gun, and it was an assortment of wood nailed together, but his pride with it was the sliding action that would eject the round magazines he had made out of old movie reel tins the junkyard had supplied. Eventually, the Sarge would get annoyed with the giggles and with a heavy hand, would show the corporal the error of laughing in war.

“This is serious,” he would yell at the smaller boy on the ground.

“I-don’t-care.” The corporal laughed a lot, which eventually brought Private Wellington to laughing too. Imagining the absurdity of a fat man, wobbling around, yelling curse words with a heavy German accent. Amazing that a man like that could yell over the roaring engine of the monstrosity bucking under his weight.

The boys were all eventually reduced to laughing in the snow, for a moment forgetting the troubles of their imagined war. Enjoying the
sound of each others laughter as it drifted through the junkyard. Then abruptly as it had begun, the Lieutenant signaled them all to knock it off with a wave of his gloved hand.

The temperature had fallen and the sun was giving way to a gray haze. Breath now came out in thick fog, a sign of their exasperation. Each sweated under his snowsuit, and that helped them feel the chill in the air. The Iron Bull had been stalling and each knew what for. Nightfall under the Nazis held even more dangers, and if Iron Bull had any of the interesting monsters the Germans now possessed, the night meant that there were worse things to come.

“We can’t beat him.” The sarge spoke in mock fear.

“Shut up fatso, we can do it.” The corporal, who got his own smack back at the bigger boy for earlier. The reply was a growl and bitter glare.

“Knock it off you two. We still have the grenades if we need them.” The lieutenant spoke regal, trying to show that he wasn't afraid of the time-scale. If the Iron Bull could be defeated, those unspeakable things could be kept at bay because there would be no leader.

Private Wellington had the grenades, they were his responsibility. Stuffed, in a satchel that he had stolen. Well, borrowed really. It had been in a storage bin, stuffed in the attic at his house. Now, it held the grenades, which were not real grenades, but pine cones. They were abundant in the snow, buried underneath the pines trees. All you had to do was dig to find them. This deep in winter, the cones were often frozen solid, but the private had taken the satchel home full one day, allowing them to defrost in the heat of home.

The treads of the tank still clicked as they dug into the snow. Apprehensive the boys watched, trying to formulate a plan of attack. Those grenades would have to be used to defeat their current foe.

Sarge said something about throwing the satchel out under the treads. If the crippled the tank, they could rush it. The problem with that
idea was all the machine guns that poked out of slits in the armor. Everything was going to be impossible and the sunlight was giving way to the night. Time was running out and the boys teeth began to chatter with the oncoming onslaught of cold. It seemed, there was more than one enemy that day for them.

“Private, could you pop a grenade at him if we provide cover fire?” Butts asked the question, giving way for the private to do something heroic.

“Aye sir, and I will do it with spunk too.”

“You’ll do it like a girl like you always do. Screwing it up somehow.” Sarge was still bullying the smallest of the group, his only way to seeing his relevance remain strong in the group.

“Poor Sarge, why don’t you eat one of your candy bars. It’ll help you calm down.” The corporal shouted angrily at the Sarge.

“Everyone, knock it off, we have to get this done.” Again the lieutenant spoke, but with a harshness of tone that forced civil behavior. No one, it seemed, wanted to face the wrath of their leader.

“Private, get those grenades ready, we need to blow this up. I know I for one don’t want to face the consequences if we fail to defeat him here. He is the last of the Snow Barons, and we are close to the Spring Campaign.”

“Aye sir, I am ready when you are.” Wellington tried to sound brave, but his squeaky voice sounded like a mouse.

All four knelt with weapons pointed at the tank, which had stopped now, and the Iron Bull was heaving in exhaustion. The toll of continual shouting had finally taken a toll, leaving the Iron Bull wheezing. He was hunched over, trying to regain his composure. Honestly, the boys imagined the scene as lacking in evil’s commitment and more of a comical setting.

“Let’em have it boys,” Butts shouted.

The three boys, in agreeance to the plan, began their barrage of ambitious gunfire. The Iron Bull perked up, aware at his exposure. Private Wellington used the distraction to move over bombarded snow hills and out of the direct line of sight of the German.

Black smoke billowed out of twin smoke stacks, signaling that the Iron Bull was ready to begin his torment of the soldiers again. Wellington took out a grenade, he knew how to do this. It would be quick he told himself, trying to keep the courage up. He didn’t want the Sarge to be right. He rushed the monstrous tank from behind,

Night had almost fallen and in its almost final triumph of day, Private Wellington pulled off his most heroic feat. He climbed up the back of the tank and looked at the two exhaust pillars of the tank, which was a buried dozer. The twin holes were just big enough for the grenades to slide down into. He held each grenade at the holes, milking glory for all it was worth. A howl sounded in the distance, and the grenades fell in.

It was that moment in which the Corporal and the Sarge hit the peak of their grievances. Sarges’s grumbling had pushed the Corporal over the edge and one too many fat jokes, something along the lines of “Lard Ass” and the fight was on.

Butts, well he just watched as the two boys pummeled each other, taking a bewildered interest in how each was able to bloody the other through cushioned gloves. Never before had the group of friends been fractured by a fight. Still, the two fighting boys and the Lieutenant were oblivious now to the exploits of the fourth member.

Wellington, was too far away to see the fight and continued on with his mission.

“Fuck Him, and fuck his superiority.”

Wellington said these words to himself, the only brave words he had when the grenades fell into the heat of the pipes. He shot at the Iron Bull, who’s surprise was evident on his face. The shots missed the bulbous walrus of a man, but the grenades went off with twin resounding thumps. Screams of terror and pain immediately erupted in more profanity laced insults. But the Iron Bull, met his fate there, burning as flames licked up his rotund body, burning him to crisp.

Wellington’s yell of triumph brought the fight between the Sarge and Corporal to a halt. The Private would ask what was going on as he ran back to his friends. The three boys looked at the smaller boy in bewilderment, brought back to the war in the Alaskan cold. They had forgotten the boy had been sent on a solo mission and his success took them all by surprise.

“Nothing Private. Great job by the way. That goes for everyone.” Butts took his role as the leader seriously, but his words wouldn’t fix the fracture. The fight wouldn’t be forgotten, and now an unspoken tension perverted the group of friends.

“Hey, so-that’s it?” Wellington was disappointed. Being the youngest, he had missed something, but the older boys refused to clue him in to the problem. He studied the reddening faces of Corporal Vetter and Sergeant Doss wandering why they had fought and his inexperience to the older boys was apparent.

“Yea we did it.” The corporal said these words through swollen lips, but he smiled, trying to brush of his anger.

“Fuck, let’s get some cocoa, it’s getting dark and cold.” Sarge said with a blackening eye. He was wheezing a bit, more from exertion than pain. The suggestion illicited no takers.

“Well, that’s it till the spring. Can’t play in the melt,” Butts stated and he trudged away from the group through the packed snow.