I'm Still Standing

I'm Still Standing



Chapter 1

A POW

“I’m hit! I’m hit!”

It was like a line in a movie. But I was saying it. I had felt a hard thud against my left ankle, then a searing burning sensation through both of my legs, but I had no idea how bad it was -- only that I didn’t have time to check it out. My legs felt torn and wrecked and I could feel a warm pool of blood forming at the bottom of both of my boots. My toes were swimming in it, and it hurt like hell. Under other circumstances, I would have curled into a fetal position, grabbed my wounds, screamed for help, been paralyzed in pain and fear, but as much as it hurt, there was too much stuff going on to pay any attention to it.

It was Sergeant James Riley’s idea to take cover under the five-ton tractor trailer I had ridden across the desert. As usual, he had sounded completely confident and sure about his idea to crawl under the huge vehicle to get away from the barrage of fire that surrounded us. It might have been his stoic attitude, or maybe it was the BCGs -- the Army-issue glasses that supposedly made you look so undesirable they were nicknamed Birth Control Glasses. Those glasses and Riley’s confident attitude colored everything he said with the hue of wisdom and made it easy to follow his commands, so Specialist Edgar Hernandez, the driver of the truck I rode in, and I had hit the dirt and low-crawled under there with him without thinking twice.

There hadn’t been too many other options. We couldn’t tell how many people were shooting at us. It could have been hundreds judging by the amount of fire. However many there were, they wanted us dead and they surrounded us. No one shooting at us was wearing a uniform. They were just men, most of them in Western clothes -- shirts, jeans, athletic shoes. Some wore traditional robes and sandals. It wasn’t the army I had expected to call an enemy in this fight. They were just men, angry, screaming, deadly men who outnumbered us in a big way and they were killing us, killing my friends.

We had wandered into their killing field like lost lambs. Our convoy of eighteen vehicles had driven down the narrow streets of this medium-size city. Buildings towered over us as we made several turns, stopped a few times, and were obviously confused about where we were and what we were doing. We had given themplenty of time to gather their forces and surround us. We had almost asked for this.

A constant barrage of bullets was pinging off our vehicles, nearby buildings, the ground all around us. They were lobbing mortars, and the heavy explosions made the ground leap beneath me. It had to have been like shooting down into a pen of trapped animals. We didn’t have anywhere to go, no escape, and little defense. The shots were coming so close, you could hear the zipping noise they made as they whipped past us to hit something solid a fraction of a second later. I was only halfway under the truck when the bullet struck my legs.

Copyright © 2010 by Shoshana Johnson