“He was just a kid!”
“No, no, no—” Billy tried to scramble out of the ditch, but Jake grabbed his harness and yanked him back.
“They’re coming,” Billy said, his throat dry.
Billy listened. Above the drumming rain, there was a low, mechanical growl. Tanks. German tanks. The rumble grew until the ground trembled. Brothers In Arms- Hell-s Highway
Eddie turned, eyes wide as dinner plates. A burst of German fire caught him in the chest. He crumpled like a discarded puppet. The rain washed his blood into the mud before Billy could even close his mouth.
They ran, boots slipping in the slop, as machine-gun fire stitched the ground behind them. Billy dove headfirst into the drainage ditch, landing hard on his shoulder. Jake landed next to him, then Private Donnelly, then Corporal Hayes. But the kid—Private First Class Eddie Raynor, just eighteen, from Kansas—was still in the open.
What happened next was not strategy. It was fury. The squad crawled through the ditch until they were parallel with the lead tank. Jake pulled the pin on a fragmentation grenade, waited two beats, and lobbed it into the tank’s open commander’s hatch. The explosion was muffled, but the tank lurched to a stop, smoke pouring from every seam. “He was just a kid
“Not yet,” Jake said. “We’re the Screaming Eagles. We don’t leave until the job’s done. And neither does Eddie. We carry him home—all of them. That’s what brothers do.”
The mission was simple: hold the corridor. Keep the road open so British tanks could roll up to Arnhem. But simple was a lie war told you so you’d keep moving.
“Fall back to the ditch!” Jake shouted. Above the drumming rain, there was a low, mechanical growl
“Eddie!” Billy screamed.
Billy looked at the bodies. American and German, tangled together in the mud like brothers who had forgotten why they were fighting. “No,” he said. “But I’m still standing.”
When it was over, the field was quiet except for the rain and the moans of the dying. Billy leaned against the smoldering tank, hands shaking. Jake walked over, a fresh gash on his cheek, his uniform torn.
The rain had not stopped for eleven days. It fell in a gray, weeping sheet over the Dutch countryside, turning the shattered roads into canals of mud and muck. For Private First Class William "Billy" Rourke of the 101st Airborne, the rain was just another enemy—one without a face, one that rotted your boots, your rations, and your hope.
Jake finally turned. His face was mud-streaked, exhausted, but his eyes still held that hard, steady light. “Then we make them pay for every inch.”