Mission:Mojo Entry
By: Ricochet 

"I never had an easier time hating a man," Saunders’ voice was soft with grief as he faced the stoic officer. "And I’ll never have a harder time forgetting one..." Blue eyes bright with dismay, Saunders turned and trudged through a muddy slough, away from the uncaring colonel. Both the mud and the man made the sergeant feel soiled.

Dirty, starving and sleepless for three days, Saunders was beyond exhaustion. He crossed the crowded camp on aching legs, propelled by momentum alone. He needed to find his squad. On a battlefront half a world away from home, his squad was the closest thing to the comfort of family to him.

Sarge noticed a few uneasy looks as he made his way to his section, and he guessed the source of the odd glances. News of the lost patrol had arrived back in camp before he did. Saunders had gone on recon twice with a squad of men, and twice he had returned alone. In a way, he didn’t blame the soldiers for their superstitious scrutiny. He still couldn’t believe he had survived, either.

Memories trampled through his thoughts. Jenkins’ pale, fleshy face loomed in Sarge’s mind. With that narrow, resentful glare of his, Sergeant Jenkins didn’t hide his disdain for civilian inductees. "Shoe clerks" he called them with a sneer.

Saunders wrote him off as a loud-mouthed malcontent; a bully who’d worn lieutenant’s bars until he was busted back down to noncom. He and Jenkins had locked horns from the start of the mission. Even when trapped together in an abandoned mill while a German regiment bivouacked below, neither man budged from his opposing stance over the objective.

Yet when the mission soured and Saunders was moments from capture, none of their earlier animosity mattered. Making a split-second decision in a moment of crisis, Jenkins sacrificed his life to save Saunders. Entrusted with information for which Jenkins had paid dearly, Saunders didn’t stop running until he crossed Allied lines at dawn.

Now Sarge ducked his head and shivered in the hot sun. He’d seen men die before, but not like that. Not willingly embracing Death for a stranger they clearly despised. In a moving act of heroism, the prickly, bellicose sergeant had made a gesture worthy of the noblest knight of the realm. Yet in the stark reality of modern warfare, nobody cared.

"Hey! It’s Sarge!" With a shout, Billy raced toward Saunders, followed closely by Caje, Kirby and Littlejohn. At the commotion, the lieutenant stepped out of his headquarters. The stress Hanley had felt at his sergeant’s delay left his face the instant he spotted Saunders.

Still shaken by the colonel’s casual dismissal of Jenkins’ death, Saunders swallowed tightly as his happy squad surrounded him. He knew by the relieved grins on their faces that they would never forget him, no matter what. Just as he wouldn’t ever forget any of them.

After all, that was the least a soldier could ask of his brothers.

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