Omaha

• Finlay Taves, Grade 8
• Short Story
• 2021

The first wave was said to be the deadliest, nicknamed “the suicide wave”. They were to make a safe passageway for the others so they could take the cliff. Charles Prickett, at only 19 was one of the soldiers on the boat. The floor of the boat was flooded with a combination of water and vomit, as the tired passengers travelled through the early morning. Charles could just make out what the driver was yelling, “30 seconds.” He assumed that was when the doors would drop.
“15 seconds” he could hear the heartbeats of everyone else.
The lieutenant was screaming, trying to make the sound of his voice heard over the crashing waves, but it was no use. No matter what he said, nothing was going to calm down the men. The commander had already referred to it as the suicide wave.
“3...”
"2..."
"1…”
The doors dropped, the men in the front were instantly met with machine-gun fire, their lifeless corpses falling into the water, it seemed like it was quite deep. The lieutenant was killed so all the surviving men jumped off the side of the boat trying to escape the wall of bullets.
They sunk like stones, their equipment was dragging them down, Charles had his eyes open to undo the buckles on his backpack, he briefly looked beside him and saw a man drown.
He got back to the surface and was swimming to shore, as he was shot in the foot. Luckily, the bullet only took out a bit of his toe; but it still hurt like hell. He finally got to the beach and saw dismembered limbs all over the shore, as the cherry-red waves lapped along the waters’ edge. He knew he would have to run as fast as humanly possible to the seawall if he wanted a chance of survival.
Once he got to the seawall, he looked behind him and saw all the other men lying there motionless. A new boat had arrived and he felt bad for all the men there, they had no idea what they were in for, but neither had he.
He looked at the bunkers on top of the cliff and saw the man operating the machine-gun. He looked like he was laughing. Charles got his rifle from his backstrap, attached his scope and aimed for the bottom of the sandbags, he shot.
It all came crashing down and he saw the man inevitably fall to his death. He ran to the rendezvous point to try and take out the rest of the gunners. He assembled a group of any surviving comrades he could find, leading them forward in an ambush of the enemy’s trenches. They pointed their rifles in there and saw no one immediately. About 5 seconds they saw two men with grey uniforms coming out with their arms up and yelled “Nestrílejte, nejsme Nemci, nikoho jsme nezabil.” Not understanding a word, they were saying, they shot them right in the chest. They fell almost instantly.
Charles turned around to go towards the bunkers when he realised a gunner had noticed them. He opened fire and took out all the men he was with. Charles put up his hands in surrender. And out of nowhere, he opened fire again. Charles started running. He felt a splitting pain in his back and then his legs. He fell to the ground and tried to look at his wounds. He saw two red holes in his lower back and upper leg. The firing stopped. In fact, everything did for him.