The Battle of Gwinnett County (2)
Not a one of us would’ve come back from Norcross if it hadn’t have been for the non-coms. The officers were all newly-minted brass. All of them were eager to prove they’d mastered the demands of being an officer. Most did it by giving back to the senior brass exactly what they wanted to hear – that is, exactly what the brass had already been saying. Those sorts were useless but had the advantage of getting themselves pretty dead pretty quickly. A lot more dangerous were the ones trying to prove their mettle by doing something new. I mean, you have to give them credit. They knew right away this was a different sort of war. But while they were experimenting, looking for the magic new tactic, us grunts were dying on the ground.
Like I said, anyone made it out of Gwinnett alive, he owes it to a non-com. In my case, it was Master Sergeant Donovan. Donovan came out of Five Points, the meanest rotten neighborhood on the whole island of Manhattan. You might think that, him and me being Irish, and him being from just across the river, that Donovan and I would be almost like family. Not to Donovan, though. To hear him tell it, being from Brooklyn was like being from Mars – no, worse. At least Marty didn’t root for the Dodgers. He gave me the most hell than anyone in the unit – more, even, than Jorgensen, the big dumb Swede from Wisconsin. Any son of Brooklyn was the spawn of the devil, he let me know. I hated him with all my heart, for three days.
Then we made contact with the walkers, and suddenly everything he’d been screaming came back to me, and saved my life.
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