When the captain wore the long cheetah skin hoodie that he had found in a bombed-out French museum he looked like some sort of mythical figure. His dead eyes were glazed over with the pain of war. His face was contorted with melancholy that came from drinking the bitter cup of duty.
In the heart of Belgium we held a critical crossroads for a week so that the US 2nd Battalion could escape encirclement and complete destruction. A terrible blizzard, a blanket of forever snow, had fallen upon the Rhineland and those crazy Germans began outflanking us when no one was expecting it. When the high-brass got around to it it was starting to look like a real blood-bath. They put a hurried plan together and it turned out that we were the sacrificial lambs of the US Army.
Eventually we stopped the German momentum altogether, but by then it had become clear that we were encircled. It was a matter of time before we were enveloped and destroyed. But the captain had other plans.
We had done our duty. If he could spare our lives he would do that. There was no shame in surrender if it meant that some of our boys would get to go home. But he also understood that the wrath of the Third Reich would fall on his head. He was the commanding officer of the unit that had so fantastically humiliated them.
The captain wasn’t a big name in the war. He was a trench-dweller like the rest of us. No medals. No mainstream biographers. But the man lives forever in our correspondence, where we tell the tale of one the grandest exit-stories in the annals of war-making history.
These were his last words before he surrendered himself to the crazy Germans: “Well boys, all good things must come to an end.”
Then he calmly walked down the hill with all the swagger in the world, draped in his museum quality cheetah skin.
The Germans were spooked. They probably thought it was a ghost, some demon-spirit.
“An American!” one of them finally said in celebration.
They took his white flag (he didn’t want to get shot before he could surrender his troops) and they beat him with the pole. They shoved a pistol down his throat. Then they built a small POW camp of barbed wire and wooden stakes right there on the country snow. They didn’t care how many of us would die of exposure. We huddled together like cows in the dead of winter.
But the Captain was nailed to a wooden pole, and lifted. It was meant to teach the Americans a lesson—that the Third Reich wouldn’t be denied. They would go on conquering for a thousand years, like the Roman Empire.
They beat and nailed the captain and left him there to die in the cold. But the nails weren’t of Roman quality. And so, in the middle of the night the captain wrangled himself off.
The guards were cozy in their warm barn. They weren't expecting a counter attack. Especially one from a single man. The Captain quietly dug out a wooden stake, pointy like the daggers that killed Julius Cesar. He waved at us and quoted Jesus: “For all who take up the sword will perish by the sword.”
He went up the picturesque hill. The Germans were celebrating their small victory in the small cabin. The captain waited by the window crouched like a fox. The right body eventually sat across from him with a pipe and a glass of scotch, a leader of men with a jawline like Mussolini. He was enjoying the wintry view. But when he looked closely across the frost on the glass he saw what appeared to be a ghost—a demon-spirit.
The captain pounced across the glass like an all-America Texan football star, and stuck the wooden stake on the neck. It all collapsed—the artery, the man, the war, as every gun in the room turned towards the American captain.
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