“California Conquered What the Krauts Couldn’t” by Todd Anderson

Boot camp was a bitch in heat. The young man with interrupted college had matriculated enough units while at Rutgers, and more importantly, had stripped down and reassembled his M1 under immediate duress from his D.I. in impressive enough time so that he entered the war a second lieutenant. Suddenly, he found himself a second-wave replacement for one of the many brave Americans fallen on the beaches of Normandy.

It was his lot to take part in the brutal Battle of the Bulge, then to continue fighting across Belgium and on into Germany itself. He found the life of an infantry lieutenant to be a strange, sandwich-like existence: on top were the big mucketymucks, the guys with more than just these lousy bars on their collars, guys who loved to remind you that “Shit runs downhill, pal” all the time; then underneath him were the grunts, the ones that he himself got to remind “Shit runs downhill, pal” all the time; and here he was, sandwiched in the middle, the meat between upper and lower bun, made rawer by the day by all of this.

On one occasion, he was in the bombproof bunker with some of the big boys, the mucketymucks, an actual general, and two colonels. He had made first lieutenant by then, but he was still stuck being “gofer.” Never would he forget that message that came for the general. 

“Go get it, lieutenant. Bring your ass straight back.”

“Yes, sir.”

The lieutenant ascended the steps that led outside. He took the message for the general from the fresh-faced corporal. The first lieutenant turned around, took two steps back inside the bunker—a massive explosion knocked him down and knocked him out. When he came to—not sure how many seconds or minutes he’d been out—he shuffle-footed back outside to see what the hell had just happened. And the young, fresh-faced corporal whose fingertips had just touched his fingertips was smeared all over the outer steps at the entrance to the bunker like red chunks of unspread jelly atop slices of sandwich bread.

Already it was mounting up inside him. “Battle fatigue.” He chuckled inwardly at the phrase. So less blunt than the old “shell shock.” He knew that’s why they changed it. Euphemisms keep us going in this war, he knew. That’s what keeps us from going WHACK-A-DING-HOY, as they say back in Jersey. Like those accidentally dead, blown-up Belgians–not exploded human beings: Collateral damage, said the outgoing dispatch he took from the acting captain. Yeah, that guy. Him, what got to be acting captain, when the actual captain got blown up. And then shortly after, the acting captain got it, too. Also blown up. The lieutenant was learning a lot about this life (subconsciously, he really was): about acute stress on the human body, being so chronically close to violent death for this long. He had a little stockpile going inside himself.

On another occasion, he was riding shotgun in the jeep on that recon mission. The driver to his left, another green corporal (he should have seen it coming); behind him in the backseat, the two colonels. Big mucketymucks. Then all sound in the world sucked away. The jeep was a little boy’s Tonka toy tossed haphazardly through the air. He was a ragdoll flying and twisting in the wind, with Raggedy Andy limbs flip-flapping in the air; and then all the air in the atmosphere sucked away with the blunt trauma of his rib cage violently hitting the ground.

Mortar blast. Like the bunker. Like the captain. Like the acting captain. 

You never can hear those damn things.

When he came to this time, from this, his latest concussion, the jeep was upside down with still-spinning tires, engine still revving, some five or six man-lengths from where the lieutenant found himself sprawled atop the hard dirt and crab grass. Acute groans coming from the driver over there; the driver having hit the ground closer to the wounded jeep. Back behind the jeep, the still-stunned first lieutenant saw the bent-up bodies of both colonels. No groans there. Looks like they bought it.

Before the lieutenant could collect his broken wits, before he could gather into himself the oxygen that had been pounded out of him upon impact, he heard them coming. Then he saw them coming, their gray uniforms, their beveled, half-dome helmets like walking dickheads of death, rifles at the ready, and the slant-handled, pencil-barreled pistol of the one on point. The young American lieutenant’s first and only instinct was to play dead. The lead German infantryman approached and kicked one of the folded-up colonels in the gut.

He waited a moment, listening. Then the Kraut stepped over to the other American colonel. Another boot to the abdomen. Quiet, knowing hand signals. Knowing nods. The Kraut stepped over to the prostrate driver, the young corporal, and kicked him violently in the stomach. The wounded man gave a gurgling groan, and the gray clad belly-kicker raised his Nazi pistol and shot the man in the forehead. More silent hand signaling, more nods beneath death-dick helmets, then all three Germans were coming his way.

They’re coming! his mind raced.

The young American lieutenant started hyperventilating. Desperately, he fought a battle within his own body to quell his breathing. 

They’re coming! Play dead! Play dead! he urged his panting chest. Oh, God! God! Don’t let them get me!  PLEASE, GOD!

Eyes tightly squinting, lying limp on his side, looking as stiff and deathlike as he could muster and feign, desperately holding back his breath. Don’t move anything! He was at the lowest place on earth and all the shit of the world was running downhill at him. This was it. He would be buried in it, right here, right now. For good.

Frantically, he prayed to the God that he did not yet know.

He tightened his abdomen to receive the kick from the German boot. It was violent and brutal. But he held his breath and did his damnedest to make no sound. The next moment was an eternity in two seconds: Did they buy it? He looked up through squinted eyelid slits and the tear-soaked wire-mesh cage of his own eyelashes. He saw the pistol pointed at his forehead, and he knew it was all over. Everything. Over. Martha would receive the news. She would marry someone else. Someday, she would.

—Just then the sound of a Detroit engine, and the German about to shoot him in the head, and the two other dickheads of death—they fled in the direction from which they had emerged. The young American lieutenant craned his groggy head to see the Sherman tank crest the top of the closest hill, headed right for him, of all places.

He would always remember this his entire life: And later, he would fulfill his need to know this God to whom he had just prayed. This God who had spared him.

The young American lieutenant saw all of this and more; a little too much more. Like the time in that broken, bombed-out Belgian bodega, seething and spitting, the enemy also seething and spitting, bulging eyeball to bulging eyeball, strangle or be strangled. He would never talk about that time. Not with anyone—except the shrink. And all the while, with his container filling up to the brim with this thing they’re now calling “battle fatigue,” the volume swelling higher and higher within, spilling over the edge of inside himself–though he had no way of knowing, not for years. 

Still, he would do it all over again, shell shock or not—or battle fatigue or whatever the hell you want to call it—he would sign up again for the sake of his country, if given another chance, because he knew what he was fighting for: He was fighting for freedom, he was fighting for his family. He was fighting for Americanism and for the American way of life, and for the family that he would later have, too. He was fighting for rugged American individualism, for the kind of life he left back home in Jersey, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, for liberty. Yes, most of all for LIBERTY!

After VE Day, he came home to his native New Jersey, married Martha, and began filling her up with babies as soon as he could. One night, while having another nightmare, he rolled over on top of her in bed, grabbed her violently around the neck and began choking her, choking his wife and high-school sweetheart brutally by the throat, coming very, very close to killing her before he woke up and was forever indelibly horrified at himself. 

Germans were still there in his head. And he couldn’t get them out. 

So, it was decided: He had to see the shrink at the V.A. He would have to do so for a long time, if he didn’t want to kill in his sleep the woman that he loved, the mother of his child and of his children to come. And so, the lieutenant began to see the shrink.

It was belatedly discovered that his little boy was terrified that he would come home one day with a shriveled, shrunken head on his normal-sized dad’s body. He realized they had to stop calling it “the shrink” in front of little Dennis. 

But, in time, the shrink, and the passage of time, helped the American lieutenant to heal his head.

When the former first lieutenant was finally recovered enough that he could trust himself not to violently murder his loved ones, he and Martha decided to leave New Jersey for the allure of the golden California coast. It was the 1950s. Doo-wop music and car hops bringing burgers on roller skates, drive-in movies and leather-jacket greasers, sock-hopping poodle skirts and sled-like cars with jutting metal eyebrows and swooping wings and protruding appendages, front and back–cars lowered so close to the street that a deck of playing cards could not be slid underneath. 

They were partaking in the pelf and prosperity of post-war America, and now they were doing so from sunny California. The whole God-blessed thing he had fought for, for freedom and the Bill of Rights, for Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion, Freedom of the Press, the Right to Be Secure in Our Persons from Unlawful Searches and Seizures, for the Right to Bear Arms—all of the things for which he had come within millimeters of being violently, brutally killed all those times. He had gone through all of that so his children could grow up in a safer, freer world, a world in which the vulnerable would be protected from butchers and genociders and concentration-camp guards and those who would seek to stamp out God-given, unalienable rights.

But he had moved to California. And California would change. And now the great-grandchildren of the young American lieutenant have no awareness whatsoever of how or why their great-grandfather nearly died all those times, and why he melted down with battle fatigue so badly after he got back. But some of his descendants have now dyed their hair to resemble the colors of Sno-Cone Slushies, and some of his descendants don the metal nose rings of Bronze-Age galley slaves, and all of his descendants vote for pedophile and sodomite politicians who promise to pass more and more legislation to rip apart and suck out the bloody pieces of unborn and partially born babies of inconvenience to California fornicators, and all of his descendants vote for politicians who will pass more and more legislation to forcibly inject everything and everyone with experimental poisons for the profit of their Big-Pharma Corporation gods; and the pedo politicians elected by the descendants of the lieutenant will pass more and more legislation to encourage and protect fellow pedophiles who dress up in women’s clothing and enter into taxpayer-funded schools to get their jollies reading titillating “young adult literature” to schoolchildren with their balls hanging out underneath miniskirts.

And these elected pedos and “progressive” reprobates will pass more legislation to brainwash little boys and girls into having their genitalia permanently mutilated against their parents’ wishes, and they will pass more legislation intended to throw into prison any parent who has the temerity to speak a dissenting thought aloud to any Marxist school board member. These progressives, elected by the descendants of the lieutenant, will pass more and more legislation to render law-biding citizens helpless, taking away their unalienable right to bear arms, and pass still more legislation to allow criminals to rob and steal with impunity, so long as their looting doesn’t amount to more than a thousand dollars of stolen items a pop.

Still, the Marxist-progressive pedos WILL militarize of the police force, and train this dangerous standing army in the how-to’s of best circumventing the Constitution—how to ignore the criminals, and to instead focus on those pesky law-abiders—especially the ones that claim to have any “unalienable Constitutional rights.” The California legislators that the lieutenant’s descendants elect will pass still more legislation to arrest and prosecute anyone who “spreads misinformation” about so-called “established science”—let the First Amendment be damned. Worst of all, the “progressive” Californian Marxists will continue to commit the most egregious and shameless election fraud of any state in the nation, so as to form a one-party, despotic supermajority, to the gloating glee of the lieutenant’s debauched descendants.

The great-grandchildren of the young WWII lieutenant, with every passing election, give their imprimaturs and their endorsements and their votes to all of this. And if they don’t have their way about it, the lieutenant’s descendants can “peacefully protest” with bricks and rocks and arson, demanding that they get their wanton way.

They must have their violent and brutal perversities, while also demanding that the few protesters left on the other side, who don’t see things the Marxist-progressive way, are rounded up and put into camps. These great-grandchild descendants, these modern-and-progressive Californians, they do all of this while the bones of the once-young, once-brave, once-shell-shocked American lieutenant who gave rise to them all—gave them their very lives with his loins and with his gun and with his luck to stay alive at not being killed all those times—spin violently within the coffin of his grave, six-feet down in the hard California clay, under their progressively goose-stepping feet.

All of this is made possible after this great-grandfather sacrificed so much of himself for them.

Todd Anderson is a Christian and conservative Constitutionalist currently living in the foreign, fallen, pagan nation of Gomorrahfornia. He enjoys fishing, gardening, and figuratively documenting the disintegration of society. One day when the Lord gives him the go-ahead, Todd will flee to the Ozarks or the Southern Plains and will surround himself with as many hillbillies and hound dogs as possible, if they’ll have him.