A Glibertarians Exclusive: North Country, Part III

by | Jan 24, 2022 | Fiction | 59 comments

A Glibertarians Exclusive:  North Country, Part III

The Netherlands, September 1944

There was a chill in the air as the Sherman rattled down a dirt road, bound north.  Three other Shermans and five personnel carriers followed Ted Paige’s Sherman.

The crew had a new tank commander, Staff Sergeant Ronald Hampton, a tough professional soldier in his forties.  “I’m here from the infantry,” he had told the crew when he joined the unit the month before.  “I’m not too familiar with tanks, but I know the tactics, so I’ll thank you all to help me along with the technical details.  Do that, see to your own jobs, and I expect we’ll get through this.  My job is to kill Jerries and get you all home safe, and I’ll do my best to get both of those things done.”

The day before, as the Canadians were waiting in an assembly area in Belgium, Staff Sergeant Hampton had returned from company headquarters with a new order: “We’re bound north again, boys.  Monty’s go at the Netherlands proved to be a fuck-up, so our division is going to help open the port at Antwerp.  At 0400 tomorrow we’re moving towards some place called Breskens.  The objective is to clear the Scheldt Estuary.  Get the tank cleaned up, check the tracks, there will be trucks coming around with fuel, ammo, and rations.  Get that done and get what rest you can.  We’ve got a few busy days ahead.”

Ted climbed into the Sherman’s turret.  Albert was already in the drivers’ station, cleaning his viewing periscope with a rag and a bottle of spirit.

“Monty,” Ted grumped.  “What an over-rated tit.  Who the hell thinks driving an entire army up one highway is a good idea?”

“Too bad it didn’t work, though.  We’d have been home by Christmas.”  Albert took a look through the periscope, grunted, and stowed the bottle of spirit and rag back in a toolbox.  “Sure hope my gal’s getting along all right.  Be winter soon, back home.”

“You don’t talk about her much,” Ted said.  He went about methodically checking the gunsight.  “Have to boresight the gun before we move out.”

“Yeah,” Albert agreed.  He looked thoughtful for a moment.  “I guess I don’t talk about her much, do I?  Kind of seems easier not to, I guess.  Don’t miss her so bad.  Figure on marrying her when I get home, always did, but now, sitting here, well, somehow she don’t seem quite real.”

“Well, you’re talking about her now.  So what’s she like?  You’re lucky, I don’t have a gal waiting for me.  Just my sister and my folks.  ‘Course I was in one of those houses back in France, you know, but that ain’t the same.”

“What’s she like?”  Albert reflected.  “Well.  She reminds me of my Ma.  Probably the strongest gal I ever met.”  He grinned.  “Oh, her hair.  Hangs to her waist.  Long, black hair.  Like raven feathers.  On a windy day it just blows all ‘round, hangs down in front, in back, all over.  Sometimes I reckon she looks more like some forest spirit than a woman.”

“You’re a lucky man, buddy.”

“S’pose I am,” Albert smiled.  “But we got work to do – best not sit here cackling like a couple of jaybirds, Sarge will get pissed.  Come on, I’ll help you boresight the gun.  If you shoot at a Kraut tank, I want to make sure you hit them.”

After two days of sporadic fighting, now, the Canadians were moving north again.  As usual, Ted was moving the turret back and forth, scanning the countryside for threats.  Staff Sergeant Hampton was standing in the turret with binoculars.  The sun was lowering into a gray sky.

“Don’t much like moving down a road,” Ted groused, for at least the tenth time that day.  “We’re sitting ducks.”

“Fields are flooded,” Sergeant Hampton reminded him.  The radio crackled, and the NCO spoke into his mike for a few moments.  Hampton dropped into the commander’s seat.  “We’re ordered to move into a village about a mile north on this road.  The infantry will be setting up a perimeter, and the supply column is coming up with fuel and rations.  We’ll probably be there for the night.”

“Could do with a bit of sleep,” Private McDonald muttered from the loader’s station.

“Once we’re supplied, we’ll let half the crew at a time get some rest,” Hampton promised.

The sergeant proved to be a man of his word.  It was good and dark by the time they were refueled and rearmed, and the tank thoroughly checked over.  “Corporal Paige and I will take first watch,” Sergeant Hampton announced.  “You three, get some sleep.  We’ll wake you in four hours.”

The tank was parked on a lightly graveled laneway in front of what looked to have been a stable, on the edge of the abandoned village.  As the other three crewmen climbed down, sleeping bags in tow, and crawled under the tank to sleep.

The four hours on watch seemed to last forever.  Ted conversed with Staff Sergeant Hampton some, then concentrated on watching the narrow streets of the village, even though he couldn’t see much.  Just after midnight there was a burst of firing off to the west; the angry chatter of German sub-machine guns was punctuated by grenade bursts and louder bangs from Canadian Enfields.  Somewhere a Bren gun hammered out a few bursts.  Then, things went quiet again.

“Keep your pecker up, Corporal,” Sergeant Hampton urged in a low voice.  “Jerry may well try something over here, too.”

Finally, the four hours was up.  Ted woke the rest of the crew.  Once they were alert, Sergeant Hampton simply wrapped up in his field jacket and went instantly to sleep in the tank’s turret, slumped in the commander’s seat.

“I’m gonna stretch out a bit,” Ted said to no one in particular.  He climbed out of the gunner’s hatch and dropped off the tank to find himself facing his friend.

Albert slapped him on the shoulder.  “Climb underneath,” he said.  “Ground’s hard but it’s dry.  Go ahead and use my fart sack, I left it down there for you.”

“Thanks buddy,” Ted grinned.  He crawled under the tank, pulled one side of the sleeping bag over himself, and dropped off to sleep.

A shout awoke him sometime later.  He came to fuzzily, wakened by shouting somewhere in the village; a voice shouted a challenge in English, followed by a loud bang and someone shouting back, in German.

“Oh, shit.”  Another burst of fire, closer, then the tank’s bow machine gun started stuttering.

He heard George Lesk shouting as he fired the bow gun: “Infiltrators!”

Ted heard a sound, strange, like stones hitting a tin roof, realized it was bullets bouncing off the tank.  A grenade went off nearby.  The German voices, still shouting, were drawing closer.

There was a stunning white flash, right in front of the tank.  Ted never heard the grenade burst, just a white-hot needle of pain in his right shoulder.  He rolled to one side, tried to get to his holstered revolver – like so much of their equipment, it was Yank-made, a Smith & Wesson .38.  His right arm wouldn’t respond.  He saw running feet up the street, growing closer, then the bow gun chattered again, making the feet withdraw.  Across the street another tank started its engine and rolled forward, spraying death from its coaxial machine gun.  More shouting, this time in English, as the infantry charged up the street, Enfield rifles banging away.

The bottom hatch clanged open.  “Ted!” It was Albert.  “Are you hit?”

“My shoulder,” Ted replied through gritted teeth.

Strong hands reached down, dragged him into the tank.  He found himself face-to-face with Sergeant Hampton, who ripped Ted’s uniform tunic open.

“Looks like it went through the muscle,” the sergeant grunted.  “Can you move your fingers?”

Ted tried.  It hurt, but he could wiggle all five fingers.  Hampton quickly, efficiently bound up the wound with a field dressing, then examined it critically.  “Good.  Maskwa, get the tank started.  Stations, everyone.  Paige, get back in the commander’s seat and stay there.  I’m not sure I’m much of a gunner but I’ll have a go at it.”

It proved unnecessary.  Stung by the Canadian armor and infantry, the German raiding party withdrew.  Before the regiment moved out the next morning, Ted was handed over to the medics.

“Guess you don’t have to plan a trip to Edmonton just yet,” Ted told Albert as they were loading him aboard an ambulance.

“That’s good,” Albert said.  “Hell, that’s nothing but a scratch you’ve got there.  You’ll get sewed up, get one of those new wound stripes to wear to impress the girls, and you’ll be back here in a week.”

“Let’s hope.”  He shook hands with his friend, awkwardly, left-handed.  “See you soon.”

“Don’t get too tangled up with all those pretty nurses,” Albert called after ambulance as it pulled away.

***

Please see for me if her hair hangs long

If it rolls and flows all down her breast

Please see for me if her hair hangs long

For that’s the way I remember her best

About The Author

Animal

Animal

Semi-notorious local political gadfly and general pain in the ass. I’m firmly convinced that the Earth and all its inhabitants were placed here for my personal amusement and entertainment, and I comport myself accordingly. Vote Animal/STEVE SMITH 2024!

59 Comments

  1. Ozymandias

    Damn. Well done, Animal.

  2. Yusef drives a Kia

    Great story, I can see it in my head, thanks again Animal!

  3. Fourscore

    Always good, Animal.

    …and the reason why I was Sig Co…

    Thanks

    • Bobarian LMD

      It’s also the reason you should always have at least a 4 man crew on a tank.

      The bean-counters always want to replace one of the crew with an auto-loader, because manpower is expensive.

      • Drake

        The Soviets did it – they always planned on using larger numbers of cheaper tanks.

      • slumbrew

        they always planned on using larger numbers of cheaper tanks everything.

        That’s my impression, at any rate.

      • Drake

        Yep – shock tactics to overwhelm.

      • Bobarian LMD

        Manpower was never really an issue with them. Being able to hose out the interior of the hull and install a new crew was a lot more important.

      • Animal

        Quantity has its own kind of quality.

  4. Bobarian LMD

    Best job I ever had…

    • ron73440

      Every tank marine I ever met said the same thing.

      In arty we had a lot of people that signed up for “Combat Arms” and the recruiter told them they would end up in a tank.

      They were not happy, no one has ever called artillery the best job they ever had.

      • Gustave Lytton

        Had a guy in the guard who was a tread head on active duty. Went through Ft Knox not too long after Stripes had been filmed there.

      • Bobarian LMD

        While I greatly enjoyed my time in the Cavalry, this was meant as a Call-Back to this movie.

      • Ozymandias

        My best friend in the Marine Corps started out as an artilleryman, then in FDC, before coming to college. We became pilots together, but his second tour was as a FAC with 2nd Tanks.
        He loved it, raved about his time as a tanker in the Abrams, after being both a cannoncocker and a Phrog driver.
        He used to say, “Bro, we get to wear flight suits and fire arty shells on the roll!”

      • Tres Cool

        +13 BoomBoom

  5. DEG

    Excellent work!

  6. ron73440

    Great story, Animal!

  7. db

    So, in the Theodore Edgecomb case, the Defense calls a police officer as a witness, asks a bunch of irrelevant questions apparently aimed at showing a police conspiracy to cover up exculpatory evidence. They have been implying this conspiracy throughout the entire trial but have evinced no real evidence to support the theory. They are trying to show that the cops failed to interview pertinent witnesses and failed to recover video evidence that they claim shows that the decedent had an altercation with the shooter prior to the shooting. The problem with this is that in the time frame and place that the supposed altercation took place, there is video that shows nothing happening.

    Anyway, this particular officer answers Defense questions and they get essentially no benefit out of his (IMO truthful) answers. Then on cross examination, the Prosecution asks this witness if he has any other jobs other than Patrol Officer. He says yes, he is the unofficial bicycle mechanic for the police department. The Prosecutor asks him what his qualifications are for that post, and he details years of professional bicycle work including for a charity in Chicago…establishing himself as a bicycle expert. The Prosecutor now begins to ask him questions about the Defendant’s bicycle, basically turning the Defense witness into a State witness establishing even further the State’s identification of the shooter (who had fled the state after the shooting and was captured in Kentucky six months later).

  8. creech

    Is it true the Canadians suffered more casualties, per population, than did the UK itself, in fighting WWI and WWII for “King and Country?” Makes you kind of relieved that George and the Boys of ’76 didn’t lose and all of North America be in the Commonwealth.

    • db

      IIRC, After WWI, Canada, Australia, etc. got together and forced a standard within the UK that they had to be consulted before UK took military action if their soldiers were to be available for use in the conflict. I’d have to go back and find the part of “A Peace to End All Peace” where I remember reading this.

  9. Sean
    • rhywun

      Well, that’s amusing but the DJIA did in fact generally go up during 2021 before tanking in 2022.

      • Swiss Servator

        Just had a presser where they were beating their chests over how well they did with the economy….opened themselves up for this.

      • rhywun

        Yup.

  10. robodruid

    Great story.

  11. juris imprudent

    From the dead-thread, LC1789 made mention of “massive election fraud”.

    I find that peculiar in that it seemed to have effect on one office only. All during the fall of ’20 we were treated to the prospect of a Blue Wave, and we didn’t even get a ripple. Just Trump, who could just as easily lost an honest election as a crooked one.

    • robc

      Trump and a handful of Senate races. So slightly more than one office. But if anything happened, it didnt happen down ballot.

      My theory is that IF it happened, it was the manufactured ballots with only one race voted on. Why you would go to the trouble of voting Biden instead of voting straight party Dem is beyond me.

      It is possible we had people smart enough to commit fraud, but too smart to do it right?

      • juris imprudent

        The Georgia senate races, right?

        And on the other hand you have the case of Rep. Fitzpatrick (R) here in PA that won his district even as it went at the presidential level to Biden. That’s very targeted election fraud, not massive.

    • grrizzly

      Most of the Republicans are reliable members of the UniParty. They didn’t appear to represent an existential danger to the system. No need to dial election fraud to 11 to get rid of them. Trump is a different animal.

      • EvilSheldon

        My response to this, is that Trump wasn’t any kind of threat to the system either. His performance in office bears this out.

      • grrizzly

        I don’t disagree that he wasn’t a threat. But the system definitely acted as if he was.

    • The Other Kevin

      I would imagine they looked at that sort of thing in the few places where they investigated, but I’m not aware of any results. If I had to guess, I’d say it would be easier to cover this up if it were just votes against Trump. An extra few thousand votes for president can be waved away, but if someone loses a town council race 2,500-6 that might raise some flags.

    • trshmnstr the terrible

      Here’s a (at least to me) plausible explanation that would account for such things.

      1) there is an underlying level of fraud that exists. It may flip a local election here or there, but it’s mostly used to keep D power over urban areas. The volume isn’t big enough to flip any but the closest statewide/national elections.
      2) there are people out there who want to expand this fraud to a level where it substantially sways statewide/national elections. This isn’t just a general desire, it includes planning and experimentation and coalition building.
      3) Trump was perceived by these people as a unique threat after he had knocked off the presumptive empress Herself.
      4) While they presumed that Trump would lose in 2020, they seized on the opportunity covid presented to ensure that he would lose. Down ballot wasn’t even on the radar and wasn’t particularly changeable given the tactics they were using.
      5) The shift from their original Fabian tactic to a fast leap was done haphazardly because the opportunity was made available so late in the cycle, which meant they had to prioritize defeating OMB over doing so cleanly, quietly, or in conjunction with throwing the downballot elections.

      How much of this is true? Don’t know. I’ve had enough conversations with people who know more than me and who are skeptical of the results that I’m fairly confident that there’s some amount of fire under the smoke. Did it change the result of the election in some of the close states? Not sure. It’s a fundamentally broken system if we can’t answer that question.

      • Semi-Spartan Dad

        I remember watching Trump lose total votes on election night. I forgot the state, but his vote total actually decreased from one iteration to the next on live tv. Several Glibs posted screenshots of this and the video at the time it occurred and in the weeks following. It was like the seen in Ferris Buller’s Day Off where the principal watches Ferris’s absence days decrease in realtime from 9 to 3. I forgot the system the stations use to update the vote…you can download the spreadsheets yourself, but this isn’t the case of an intern manually typing totals in.

        I’ve never seen this addressed anywhere. Even if this modification was something done in good faith, it shows the ability to electronically edit vote totals at will. And we’ve seen that the elections are intentionally held to prevent any sort of accountability in an audit trail.

    • R C Dean

      My take:

      The stakes are way too high for people to not want to cheat. The system is rotten with security holes and is borderline unauditable. Bottom line: there is cheating and its hard to catch.

      What attempts at audits have been made in the 2020 election are a parade of red flags. The immediate conduct of the suspect jurisdictions at the time of and after the election is a parade of red flags. The data on vote counting is a parade of red flags. No attempt at an audit has been able to validate enough votes to confirm Biden’s victory in those states. In the real world, that means the election failed the audit.

      There’s no getting Biden out of office – that’s a done deal. It would be nice if people learned from the Clusterfuck Election of 2020 and tightened up their election laws. The Republic relies, after all, on election victories being shared between the two fundraising wings of the UniParty, to keep the rubes distracted from their real rulers.

      • slumbrew

        The totally out-of-propotion screaming that accompanies _any_ attempt to improve election security is also a big red flag.

      • db

        There are motives for people to cheat.
        There are opportunities to cheat.

        In a system that everyone agrees involves a significant right (having a voice in one’s government) and is very important, “SACRED,” even, why in the world would we not want that system to be:

        Secure
        Auditable
        Verifiable
        Trustworthy
        Protected from Attack

        ???

        This is why I feel like people who oppose election integrity initiatives are foolish at best, verly likely dishonest, and active conspirators to undermine election integrity at worst: They simultaneously claim that elections are sacred, that they need not be protected, that their opponents are monsters that want to manipulate elections, and that there is no way the current system could be manipulated. It’s an insane line of argument.

      • juris imprudent

        Well the cries of Democrats about Republicans tightening up election conduct is what their nationalized voting [rights] campaign is all about, isn’t it?

  12. Sean

    LOL.

    Paging RC.

    • UnCivilServant

      Well, he’s not wrong.

    • Not Adahn

      “some people say that the Desert Eagle is a bit like me: too heavy, too slow, and generally useless. But is that really true? Yes.”

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTfiygXrRnM

      Since these guys and the former FLOTUS are the only Slovenes I’m aware of, I have a very high opinion of the country.

      • slumbrew

        One of the few pistols I have fired was a Desert Eagle in .357.

        Ridiculously big – I could _just_ get the tip of my finger on the trigger.

        (yes, yes, I am one of the… compact Glibs).

      • slumbrew

        I legit LOL’d:

        So basically it’s like a high end russian escort; costs a lot, high maintenance, but everywhere you take it, it will turn heads and it’s awesome when you put it in action.

      • Sean

        That was fun.

    • R C Dean

      I larfed.

      I guess there’s a lot us foot fetish dorks. All the instructors and students in Mrs. Dean’s class had ARs, and they all wanted to shoot her Tavor.

      • db

        These frickin’ euphemisms!

    • UnCivilServant

      You could have stopped at ‘is mad’.

    • rhywun

      Heavens to Betsy.

    • Tres Cool

      Whoopi looks like the product of an unholy biological union between Bob Marley and a Milk Dud.

      • rhywun

        She looks like she swallowed Bob Marley and a lot of Milk Duds.

    • l0b0t

      I love when Guinan slipped up and said “…it’s not funny to parents who lost their children to these vaccines.”

  13. Tundra

    Really late, but thanks, Animal.

    Another terrific chapter!

  14. l0b0t

    I had such a great time on the subway today. I only lost full phone service between 2 stations, instead of losing it as soon as I start walking downstairs. I got to chat up a really hot lady conductor and talked for about 10 minutes about CBTC, as there were new sensors installed on the tracks. And I saw the coolest rolling stock I’ve ever seen – the Track-Inspection Car. Huge lightbars and flood lights all over the front of the car and giant, sci-fi movie looking lasers underneath, scanning the tracks and ballast. It was pretty cool stuff.

    • rhywun

      The only special train I’ve seen is the garbage train. 🙁

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. Animal’s Daily They Call It Science News | Animal Magnetism - […] we start, check out Part 3 of my North Country series over at Glibertarians.  Once you’ve done that, let’s…