We Happy Few | Band of Brothers

Chapter 33: Merry Christmas

Margot immediately turned her head away as Smokey gasped out. She couldn't watch another person die right in front of her. She just couldn't.

Jumping up, Annie grabbed Eugene by the collar of his jacket and dragged him along with her. For some reason, he seemed to be in a trance, but the woman wasn't going to let it get in the way of saving Smokey's life. The two medics hauled the injured man out of the hole and dragged him back further into the cover of the trees.

"I can't feel my legs!" Smokey cried out loud enough for everyone to hear—loud enough for Margot to hear.

Before anyone could worry about the wounded man, the German tanks emerged from the treeline. "Here they come!" someone announced. "Machine guns open fire!"

Margot's finger pulled back hard on the trigger as she sprayed the tanks and main-gunners. Some of her bullets hit their targets but most ricocheted off of the tank armour. Then the troops came out and it was terrifyingly obvious that Easy was outnumbered.

Running over to the chaos, Lipton looked down at Smokey as he sat in Annie's and Eugene's arms. He was weeping and hyperventilating, and Margot could hear his laboured breathing in between the bullets she was firing. 

Half of Margot's brain was focused on the approaching Germans, the other half was worried about Smokey. Turning her head, the machine-gunner watched as Annie and Eugene dragged Smokey further into the forest and back toward where a jeep would be able to take him into town. The woman locked eyes with her former partner for a split second before an explosion pulled her back to what was more important. 

Margot wasn't sure how many times she fired at the enemy that day—maybe one-hundred, maybe one-thousand—but she was sure that no matter how many Krauts she killed, it didn't make up for the one bullet that pierced Smokey.

Margot only came back to her senses fully when she was back at camp again, hours after the gunfire had stopped. Annie had approached her and pulled her aside, so immediately Margot knew it wasn't good news. "Smokey's alive." Annie got that part out first. "But he's paralyzed. Waist down, nothing."

Margot knew that she should have been relieved that he was alive, but she couldn't stop herself from focusing on the anger that coursed through her. Paralyzed wasn't dead, but then again, it wasn't fully alive either. Smokey and she had had endless conversations about their lives back home and what they liked to do, and it upset Margot to no end that he would never be able to do a lot of those things again. 

"Thank you." She nodded at Annie.

With a small smile, Annie moved to join the food line-up. What was for dinner was questionable like always, but it was food, and the female medic was starving. Margot, on the other hand, had no desire to eat at all, so she moved over to a tree and sat down at the base of it, her knees tucked up to her chest.

Before long she was lost in thought, her mind racing about this and that, her internal thoughts simultaneously reminding her of the horrible things she had witnessed while also chastising her for being upset about them. She was supposed to be stronger than this. 

As a silver cup dangled in front of Margot's face, she snapped out of her daze and looked up to see Toye offering her some food. Although she had no intentions of eating it, she took the cup out of politeness. "Thanks."

Before Joe could sit down beside her, the rumble of an engine caught everyone's attention and seconds later a jeep pulled up and Colonel Sink stepped out. "We're sitting down to a Christmas Eve dinner of turkey and hooch back at the division CP, but damned if I don't like ol' Joe Domingus' rancid ass beans better," he greeted the company, reminding Margot that it was, in fact, Christmas Eve. "Hello, Easy Company."