The client wished for a biography of his life, especially focusing on his time at war, where he served as an engineer. This excerpt is from an account of a vehicle blocking their main supply route during a bitterly cold winter.
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What stands out in memory is the sameness of it all: white ridgelines, black scars of blown bridges, and that narrow MSR—our only lifeline—threading through the ravine like a vein. We spent days on that road, hauling whatever our company could carry: wreckers, tools, spare parts scrounged from vehicles that had already frozen to death. Nothing behaved the way it should in that cold. Not men. Not machines. Not even metal.
The word came down the line: vehicle disabled, blocking the road. By then we understood what that meant. Everything behind it piling up, everyone in front of it exposed. I took my toolbox—half of it filled with hand tools from the Second War, because new issue never reached us in time—and went forward with Rourke.
The truck was jackknifed across the road, nose buried deep in a wind-packed drift. Rear tires hung over the other edge. A mortar fragment had chewed the steering gear clean through. The tie rod was bent so sharply it could’ve passed for scrap banding.
Rourke studied the mess and said, “If she won’t budge, we blow her.” He said it plain, almost gentle.
We set up the M62 wrecker while the infantry spread out along the rock walls, rifles aimed upslope. The Chinese were close, but their fire came in thin, probing cracks from the cliffs. They were feeling for us.
My gloves were GI-issue leather shells with wool liners, and were stiff as boards by then. I could barely form a fist in them. The trick was to work by memory, not by feel. You trusted the pattern your hands learned in better weather. The cable was rigid with frost as we dragged it from the wrecker’s drum and looped it under the truck’s front axle housing.
“Give her tension!” I called.
Delaney eased the throttle. The wrecker engine gave that thin winter whine—carburetors never liked that altitude—and the cable drew tight. The truck shifted a fraction. Then another.
Machine-gun fire erupted from the ridge. Not the probing kind this time. Sharp enough to drop us into the snow. I remember seeing my breath billow from under the truck’s bumper as I tried to shield my hands, foolish as that was.
“Keep pulling!” Rourke barked.
The wrecker groaned, but the truck barely moved. Ice had fused the front wheels solid to the road, built up under the axle in layers. We didn’t have minutes to spare, and even if we’d had them, our hands weren’t fast enough for the work. In that cold, a man’s dexterity slows down before his courage does.
“We need to break the ice! Axes!” I yelled.
Nothing happened for long minutes. I wondered if they hadn’t heard me, nobody was responding, or we’d somehow lost all our damn axes. When Rourke appeared and shoved one into my hands, I nearly dropped it. My fingers didn’t close around the handle the way they should have. We swung anyway—awkward, off-balance swings. The heads bounced off the ice-packed rubber. Chips flew. More fire hit the snow above us.
Then, with a sharp crack, the ice under the axle gave. The truck lurched. Delaney pulled again, and the winch line sang under tension as the vehicle slid just enough for the column to pass. By some grace it didn’t tip into the ravine. It settled against the shoulder, crooked but stable.
“Good enough,” Rourke said.
Before I followed him, I remember thinking how close we’d come. How, if that truck had been one inch more frozen, I would’ve set a block of Composition C under her and walked away before lighting the fuse. Engineers like to save things. But we didn’t always get to.
When the column creaked forward again, I jogged back to the wrecker. And I looked at that abandoned truck—half-buried, half-saved—standing crooked in the snow. A reminder of the decisions we made out there. Not the glorious ones, not the kind people carve into monuments. The other kind. The quiet, miserable, necessary ones.
