When it was over, the field was quiet except for the rain and the moans of the dying. Billy leaned against the smoldering tank, hands shaking. Jake walked over, a fresh gash on his cheek, his uniform torn.
Billy looked at the bodies. American and German, tangled together in the mud like brothers who had forgotten why they were fighting. “No,” he said. “But I’m still standing.”
The rain had not stopped for eleven days. It fell in a gray, weeping sheet over the Dutch countryside, turning the shattered roads into canals of mud and muck. For Private First Class William "Billy" Rourke of the 101st Airborne, the rain was just another enemy—one without a face, one that rotted your boots, your rations, and your hope.
“You okay?” Jake asked.
Jake finally turned. His face was mud-streaked, exhausted, but his eyes still held that hard, steady light. “Then we make them pay for every inch.”
“Fall back to the ditch!” Jake shouted.
Billy listened. Above the drumming rain, there was a low, mechanical growl. Tanks. German tanks. The rumble grew until the ground trembled. Brothers In Arms- Hell-s Highway
Billy crouched behind the crumpled wreck of a German half-track, his M1 Garand pressed against his chest. Beside him, breathing in the same wet, diesel-tainted air, was his squad leader, Staff Sergeant Jacob “Jake” Marino. They had been brothers since Toccoa, Georgia—through the jump into Normandy, through the bloody hedgerows, through the frozen hell of Bastogne. Now, September 1944, they were on a road they’d come to call Hell’s Highway.
Eddie turned, eyes wide as dinner plates. A burst of German fire caught him in the chest. He crumpled like a discarded puppet. The rain washed his blood into the mud before Billy could even close his mouth.
Jake nodded. He pulled out a crumpled pack of Lucky Strikes, lit two, and handed one to Billy. They smoked in silence as the rain washed the battlefield clean. When it was over, the field was quiet
“Billy,” Jake whispered, not looking at him. His eyes were fixed on the tree line fifty yards away, where SS Panzergrenadiers had dug in. “You hear that?”
“Eddie!” Billy screamed.
They ran, boots slipping in the slop, as machine-gun fire stitched the ground behind them. Billy dove headfirst into the drainage ditch, landing hard on his shoulder. Jake landed next to him, then Private Donnelly, then Corporal Hayes. But the kid—Private First Class Eddie Raynor, just eighteen, from Kansas—was still in the open. Billy looked at the bodies