are all under martial law. I’m the only one that will be armed 24/7. I will always have eyes on you. I will sleep here and observe you, and during the day, if you are approaching me, you will say, ‘Sergeant, I’m here!’ because I don’t want to be surprised and accidentally shoot one of you fuckers. The only one that will have a loaded weapon will be me and the guard on duty, and he’ll only have five rounds in his M16 clip.”
The room remained quiet for a couple seconds before Cowboy spoke back up. “Uh-oh, sounds like we got a new sheriff in town…”
The next day I went out to the bunkers and checked the sign in sheets for each individual bunker. I approached the first one and pulled the sheet of paper out of the little black box fastened to the right of the bunker door. I examined it up and down and saw that it was divided into two simple columns, one for your initials and one for the time you checked in, except this sheet was already filled out for the entire day, and it was only 8:00 a.m.
I put the paper back in the box and checked the next several bunkers. They were all filled out, some of them signed off for the next three days. Instead of routinely checking the bunkers as they were supposed to under the previous sergeants, they were wasting military time and ammo deer hunting. They may have been able to fool the previous sergeants, but they weren’t going to be able to pull the wool over my eyes. I went back to the guardhouse and called the men into formation out front.
“Has everyone been checking on the bunkers every two hours?” I asked with great volume.
“Yes, sir!”
“Bullshit! I just checked the bunkers, and you fuckers have filled them out for the next three days. I’m going to start spot checking your work every day, and make sure you guys are doing your job. Otherwise, I’ll send the whole lot of you back home!”
After that everyone started to fall into a steady routine for a few days. One night I went into the guardhouse and saw Cowboy reading a magazine.
“Hey, Cowboy, let’s take a ride. I wanna check out the ammo dump bunkers,” I said to him. When he got up from his chair, I handed him a shotgun and said, “This already has three rounds loaded in it.”
“Thank you, Sarge,” Cowboy said as we walked outside and jumped into the jeep.
Everything was quiet that night. All we could hear was the sound of the jeep engine, and all we could see was the headlights shining on the road ahead of us. The mood shifted when we came upon two figures dressed in black in the road about thirty yards away from us. Shit immediately hit the fan. Two bullets came through our windshield, spraying glass shards into our faces.
Cowboy hit the brakes, and as he was slowing down to a halt, I yelled, “Cut the lights, Cowboy, and answer back with your shotgun!”
I rolled out of my seat onto the road and lay down to make myself a low silhouette. After Cowboy shot off two rounds, I scanned the darkness for barrel flashes, so I could reply with my .45 pistols, but there was only silence.
“Cowboy! How much ammo do you have left?” I asked, never taking my eyes off the road in front of us.
“I only have one round, Sergeant,” he replied.
“Take the jeep back to the guardhouse, and don’t turn on your lights! Call the SDO (staff duty officer). Tell him to send the Calvary, and I mean everybody!” I said with urgency.
Cowboy jumped behind the wheel and quickly hit a U-turn and sped down the road we came through. I got up into a crouching position, pistol in hand ready to fire at any moment, and started heading in the direction of the fence that surrounded the perimeter.
As I got close to the fence I started to pick up my pace because I wanted to catch the intruders, but that was a mistake. Blam-blam. I hit the dirt immediately as I heard the distinct sound of an AK-47 being shot off, and I could see the flashing of the barrel through the brush. A couple bullets went whizzing over my head, and I sent a couple rounds of my own toward the flashes. They must have heard me while I was trying to rush up to the fence and fired a couple shots at me to keep me away.
The ammo dump fell silent again until I heard unidentifiable voices speaking in German. It sounded like someone had become entangled in the barbed wire fence and was frantically trying to escape.
Hesitant to start moving just yet, I slowly made my way toward the voices. What I was really hoping for was to catch them stuck in the fence and to hose ’em down, leaving them stuck in the fence like I had done before in Vietnam.
By the time I reached the point of entry, they were gone. Left behind was only a scrap of black clothing, ripped away by the tattered edges of the hole in the fence, and a trail of blood leading into more darkness. I turned around and hurried back to the guardhouse to be sure that the Calvary was called in. This was serious, and it needed to be investigated immediately.
I called command as soon as I entered the building and informed them that the intruders were gone. I gave Cowboy five more shells for his shotgun and sent him back to guard the hole in the fence.
About an hour later, two military police (MP) sedans arrived at the ammo dump. I greeted the MP captain and explained the whole nine yards of the event. They stayed at the ammo dump for a few more hours while they were going over the perimeter. The breach was patched as best as it could be with the resources that we had on hand. I was told that the Polish army would be called out soon to mend it properly.
“How do you know it was live ammo they were shooting at you?” the detective from the Criminal Investigation Department, or CID for short, asked me. He sounded skeptical when he said this to me, as if I could have been making it up.
“Just take a look at the jeep. The windshield is shattered. I don’t think a blank could do that. My jeep looks like Bonnie and Clyde’s car,” I told him.
“All right, well, that’s enough questioning for today. We’ll be back tomorrow morning to finish the investigation,” the CID told me.
When they came back the next day, we sat on the kitchen table discussing the assault further.
The Polish army arrived a while after to mend the fence and ensure that the bunkers were secured. Before the last of them were about to leave, one of the Polish workers approached me and asked if he could come back and cook soup for us because he was staying close by in the area. It wouldn’t be until later that I would find that he was secretly bivouacking in the woods on our land. The area was too hot for now with all the investigators around, so I told him to come back in a few days.
A couple nights went by, and he reappeared with a handful of odd-looking mushrooms. He talked about how he walked around the forest during the day and picked them from the ground. He intended to use them to make mushroom soup, he told me.
“How do you know that those mushrooms aren’t poisonous?” Ned asked him.
“Trust me, I’ve been picking mushrooms for a while, and I’m still alive,” he replied, with a little offence in his tone.
Ned and I didn’t wait around long enough to see if the Pollock dropped dead before we scarfed down some of that soup. It’s been a while since we had a real home-cooked meal that didn’t involve eggs or sandwiches. While at dinner, I thought it would be a good idea to get to know a little more about the bunkers.
“What is it that you guys do in the bunkers, exactly?” I asked the Pollock.
“We maintain the steel doors to make sure they function properly, and we rotate the ammo crates that have been out here for a while. Have you ever noticed those train tracks outside? If this was wartime, we’d be the ones sending the ammo out on box carts,” he explained. The entire time he was explaining this, I began to really question why they had these thugs guarding such an important war reserve.
“Wouldn’t it be kinda hard and inconvenient for intruders to come in and carry those heavy crates full of shells out of that hole in the fence?” I asked.
“Sergeant, they weren’t after those shells, they were after your stingers,” his reply was absolute news