“I wanna see, Sarge. I wanna be the first Jewish officer east of the Elbe and maybe the first in Berlin.”

The young sergeant chuckled and a few of the other men nervously joined in. Sergeant Logan was big for an infantryman, nearly six feet tall, stocky and muscular, and with a shock of red hair that was kept out of view by his helmet. He had open, even features, and some, particularly his mom, described him as having a “friendly” face, whatever the hell that meant. He certainly wasn’t friendly with a rifle in his hands. Logan contrasted sharply with the shorter young officer’s pale skin and thin blond hair. Lieutenant Singer would be bald before he was forty.

Logan liked young Lieutenant David Singer. He had arrived only a couple of days earlier and was replacing another young lieutenant who’d gotten badly wounded. It was hard to realize that he, the old man of the platoon, was only a year older than the lieutenant’s twenty-three years. War had such a wonderful way of aging its participants.

“Can this thing go faster?” came a lament from the rear of the launch. Logan thought the voice was Crawford’s, but he couldn’t tell.

Lieutenant Singer responded. “If you want, you can get out and push.”

This was greeted with a few more nervous giggles and an offer to paddle with helmets. The jokes were stupid, but they broke the tension. Anything to hide the fact that they could be dead in an instant.

The water shallowed and the boat slowed, finally crunching up on the mud embankments. The men hurled themselves from their unwelcome craft and ran up the low embankment, fanning out like the veterans they were.

There was no need for either Singer or Logan to give any orders, and the two men prudently concentrated on staying out of everyone’s way. To his left and right the other craft disgorged their human cargoes as well. In a matter of moments, almost half of D Company was safely across and forming a defensive perimeter.