At War

• George Taylor, Grade 3
• Short Story
• 2021

On one quite ordinary morning 19 year old Mike was lying in bed; all night long he was thinking about doing war training and joining the army force. When he got up he called his mum and talked about it, she said it would be hard work but he should still try. So the next day he signed up for it, and he really enjoyed it.
4 days later there was an alarm going off in the army base. He was confused, so he asked his friend, Harry (who had been training for a year and a half now) and he said there was a war about to start. Mike was stressed, he had only been training for four days! It was World War 3, he hoped he had done enough training so he wouldn’t die when he was only 19!
The captain said they needed to get on the battlefields. He was scared. He whispered to himself “I can do this.” He always said that when he was afraid of failing. He was also excited but not as much as scared. He heard a speeding bullet that whistled three inches away from him. He ducked down beneath some metal, then he quickly stood up and fired. He shot an enemy! He kept trying but only got one more. Mike stood up, dashed from the metal and threw a grenade at a group of six enemies and knocked five out, the other one was now chasin’ him with a blade.
Mike was really stressed now because he hadn’t been taught what to do in this situation, then he thought. He grabbed his blade and quickly did a backward roll rising up behind the enemy and STAB! The blade dug into the enemy’s flesh and blood dripped out. He fled guiltily from the bleeding person, grabbed his F88 Austeyr assault rifle and kept shooting at other people that weren’t on his side. He then saw something discarded on the ground. It was enormous. ‘Is it a… machine gun?’ He wondered. It was, he’d done some training with these; he hopped on it and held the triggers. “This is fast,” he said aloud.
When he’d finished with that he remembered that Harry said that he would pick him up in a tank at 1:30pm; Mike checked his watch, it was 1:27. He had to wait three, no two minutes now. He was excited about getting in the tank with Harry. Then an enemy came sprinting up with a… was that a, a… 50-caliber rifle? He was so scared at this point but then something hit him and he got knocked out. He turned around, it was a man with blonde hair driving a tank, “Harry!”
He screamed while jumping into the tank “Thank you so much!”
Harry let Mike drive the tank and not surprisingly he was a natural at it. He shot the enemies like a skilled maniac then in two years’ time they won!