Cannon Pizza

The American had been wining the war, thought the war was won, home by Christmas and all of that. But the shelling began one night, in the cold, and the war was on again, and they wondered if it would truly ever stop. They would advance during the day, get shelled at night, advance again during the day, and get shelled by night. They captured one of the guns one morning because the Germans had left in a hurry, and even though Headquarters had said for all captured guns to be secured they destroyed it out of hand. They pushed it into a deep ditch and packed the muzzle with dirt and mud then pulled the lanyard from behind a barn and blew the gun up. They had lost three men the night before, all three in the same foxhole, and the shell had hit right in there with them as they froze. It was two men, they found the dog tags, and then someone counted the number of boots and there were five boots so there had to be three men. They had to count heads to see who was missing to find the third man, and it was Bartkowski, who no one could remember very well because he was a replacement. But they advanced during the day and got shelled at night, until they came upon a river, and found the German guns being loaded onto wooden rafts made of trees. The Germans had no barges, were out of ammunition, and they hadn't had time to dig in at all. Shots were fired, but the Germans were caught in the open, and they knew it was over. One German soldier rushed screaming towards an American Sergeant with bayonet held high but the American Sergeant decked the German with his steel helmet. The German was a young boy in an older man's uniform, barely fourteen by the looks of him, and the steel helmet splattered his nose. He sat on the ground and cried like a child, because he was still a child, even though he had killed men it had been with artillery and he had never been close enough to an American but this once, and that had turned out poorly for him. Headquarters had sent down word that all captured guns were to be secured but the soldiers made the Germans finish load the guns onto the log rafts, helped them construct them in fact, and pushed them out into the river's current. When the rafts got into the middle of the river the soldiers opened fire and the rafts came apart, and the guns sank. One raft capsized and they watched it bob up and down as it went down the river. The German boy cried at the sight of the guns being sank but the older Germans were happy that it was over, finally, and they knew whatever happened they were done, and the war was done, and it was a relief. The Sergeant gave the boy a candy bar, as the boy sat crying, blood bubbling out of his broken nose. It had been a long time, a very long time, since someone had offered him candy, or comfort, or hope, and as he sat there he tasted all of that in the candy bar, and as they led him away to be put in a camp, the Sergeant wrote a note, and pinned it to the boy's jacket. "He's just a kid, don't hurt him.", the note read, and the Sergeant signed it.

It was years later that the Sergeant was a business man, who owned pizza restaurants in Brooklyn and the boy came to visit him. "Cannon Pizza" was the name of the restaurant, not the man, because of the guns they had sank, and his friends who had been killed by those guns, in that foxhole, the boy who fired the gun came to visit, and they were amazed at how close they were in age now. They parted as friends, and when the Sergeant died the boy came to the funeral, and cried again, and because of the bond that comes with such things, he could not be comforted anymore.

Take Care,

Mike