Chapter 7: The Ramp and the Roar
The thunder of the bombardment rolled on, a promise and a threat, as the Normandy Dawn drove them all, relentlessly, toward the screaming dawn.
It was a sound that got inside the teeth. The deck shuddered with each distant concussive thud from the battleships behind them, a giant’s fist hammering the coastline. The metallic taste of the gum was gone, replaced by something coppery and dry. Fear, Castiel diagnosed, had its own particular flavor.
They filed up onto the main deck in a jerky, silent queue, the world expanding into a gray hellscape. The sky was the color of a dirty wool blanket, low and shredded by black smoke. The sea churned, a frothing gray-green expanse littered with ships—monstrous battleships, sleek destroyers, and an endless swarm of landing craft that circled like eager water beetles.
The cold air was a shock after the hold’s fetid warmth. It carried the stink of high explosives and wet rust. Dean stood beside him, squinting at the shoreline now visible as a smudged, tan line punctuated by sudden flashes of orange and white. “They’re still throwing a party over there,” he shouted over the wind and the guns.
“The bombardment is on schedule,” Castiel yelled back, his words snatched by the gale. He checked his watch, a pointless gesture. The schedule was a fantasy now, a pretense they all clung to. The beach had a name on his map: Omaha. It looked like a raw, open wound.
A bosun’s whistle cut the air, shrill and urgent. “Medical Battalion! Here! Load now!” A landing craft, an LCVP, bobbed violently beside the gangway net, its blunt nose slamming against the transport’s steel hide with a sound like a dropped anvil. Men began clambering down the net, their boots slipping on the wet ropes, their bodies heavy with saturated wool and equipment.
“You heard the man!” Dean barked, his medic’s voice instantly cutting through the broader noise. He slapped Peters on the back. “Down you go, kid. One hand for you, one for the King.” He didn’t wait, simply grabbed a rope and swung himself over the side, descending with a reckless, simian agility that made Castiel’s stomach clench.
Castiel went last, the map case strapped tight across his back. The net was slick, the ropes digging into his palms. The landing craft below bucked and yawned, a thirty-foot drop into a steel tub. He focused on each knot, each foot placement. A man fell from a net farther down the line, his scream cut short by a thick splash. No one stopped.
He dropped the final feet into the craft, landing hard on the deck. The air here was all spray and diesel exhaust. The thirty-six men of his platoon were packed in, knees to chests, a tangle of rifles and fear-wide eyes. Dean was already near the front, to the right of the ramp, his bag between his boots. He gave Castiel a tight, meaningless nod.
The coxswain, a navy man with a face like old leather, gunned the engine. The craft pulled away from the transport’s shadow with a lurch that sent them all swaying. Suddenly, they were alone on the water, a small, vulnerable shell in the vast, heaving theater of war. The sound of the big guns was sharper now, a rolling, continuous thunder that vibrated in the chest.
Water sprayed over the gunwales, icy and stinging. The craft began its run, slamming into each wave with a jarring, punishing crash. Men vomited over themselves, the seasickness paste no match for this violent pitching. The sour smell mixed with the fuel oil. Castiel focused on the coxswain’s back, on the compass point welded to the console.
“Ten minutes!” the coxswain screamed without turning.
Dean was working already. He nudged the man next to him, a Private named Collins who was retching dryly. “Hey. Look at me.” Collins’s eyes rolled. “Not at the water. At me. You get sick, you get sick. Just don’t choke on it.” His voice was calm, a flatline in the panic. He passed out more gum. The simple, ridiculous act of chewing gave some of the men an anchor.
The coastline grew. Details resolved through the spray and smoke. Pale bluffs. A church spire, broken. Tracers began to arc lazily from the high ground, lovely and deadly, sketching lines of red and green across the gray. They looked harmless from here, like fireworks. The metallic ping of a rifle round striking their armored bow plate said otherwise.
“Five minutes! Check your gear! Prepare to disembark!”
The order triggered a frantic, clumsy rustling. Bolts were worked on rifles, packs were re-shouldered. Castiel’s mouth was desert-dry. He ran through the rally point in his mind: exit the craft, move thirty yards up the beach to the first seawall, establish the aid post in the lee of a concrete anti-tank obstacle. Simple lines on a map.
The craft shuddered as it hit a sandbar. The engine roared, straining. They were in the surf zone now. The noise transformed. The deep-throated naval thunder was joined by the sharper, faster crack of field artillery and the insect-like whine of machine gun fire. A landing craft two hundred yards to their left vanished in a geyser of water, smoke, and fragments of steel and men.
No one spoke. The sight held them in a frozen silence.
Then came the sound Dean had described. A high, hydraulic whine, like a beast in agony. The front ramp began to lower. Gray light flooded in, and with it, the full, horrifying symphony of the beach.
It was a wall of noise—the relentless brrrp of MG-42s, the shriek of incoming shells, the concussive crump of mortars, and underneath it all, a chorus of human sounds: screams, shouts, raw commands lost in the wind. The ramp slammed down into four feet of churning, frothy water.
“Go! Go! Go!”
The world dissolved into a single imperative: move.
Castiel was first out, as the manual demanded. The cold of the water was a shock, punching the air from his lungs. It pulled at his legs, his sodden wool trousers becoming anchors. He forged ahead, his carbine held high, the water dragging at his thighs, then his waist. A bullet snapped past his ear with a sound like an angry bee.
He stumbled onto wet sand, the gradient steepening. The beach was a chaos of obstacles, wrecked craft, and crawling men. Bodies lay twisted in the tidal wash, some moving, most not. The air smelled of salt, cordite, and a sickeningly sweet undertone of blood.
He turned, yelling, “This way! To the wall!”
His men spilled from the craft behind him, a stumbling, frantic line. Dean was among them, one hand on his bag, the other shoving a dazed soldier forward. Tracers stitched the sand around their feet, throwing up little puffs. Peters, the kid from the hold, took a step and his leg folded under him. He went down without a sound.
Dean didn’t break stride. He grabbed the back of Peters’s webbing with one hand and hauled, dragging him through the surf like a sack. “Up! Your leg’s fine, it’s just scared! Move it!”
They reached a slight depression, a gutter in the sand carved by the tide. It was scant cover, but men were piled there, pressed against the sand, frozen. A sergeant from another company was trying to rally them, his voice hoarse and breaking. “We gotta move! They’re picking us off!”
Castiel bellied down beside him. The seawall was still sixty yards away across open, beaten sand. A German machine gun nest, emplaced in a pillbox with a slit view of the entire beach, had the area zeroed. Every few seconds a burst would kick sand into the air, or find flesh.
“We need to suppress that nest,” Castiel hissed.
“With what?” the sergeant cried, gesturing at his handful of men, some without rifles, one sobbing quietly.
Dean crawled up beside Castiel, his face smeared with wet sand. He wasn’t looking at the pillbox. He was looking at Peters, who was clutching his thigh, his face white. A dark stain was spreading through the wool.
“He’s hit.”
“I see it,” Castiel said. The aid station was a million miles away. The plan was ash.
“It’s the femoral. He’ll bleed out here in three minutes.” Dean’s voice was clinical, detached. He was already unstrapping his bag.
“You cannot set up here.”
“I’m not setting up. I’m stopping a bleed.” Dean’s eyes met his, and there was no argument in them. It was a statement of fact. He ripped open Peters’s trouser leg with a razor from his kit. The wound was a ragged, pulsing hole. Bright arterial blood pumped out with each heartbeat.
Castiel looked from the kid’s terrified face to the pillbox, then back to Dean. Winchester had already placed a thick compress on the wound and was leaning his full weight on it, his hands quickly becoming slick and red. He was a perfect, stationary target.
Cursing, Castiel unslung his carbine. He tapped two men beside him, privates he barely knew. “You and you. On my mark, fire at that slit. Three-round bursts. Don’t stop.”
He raised his own weapon, the sight picture wobbling. He’d been a marksman in training. This was not a range. “Now!”
The three rifles cracked, spitting sand towards the distant concrete slit. It was a pathetic response. The machine gun fire stuttered, shifted momentarily. A burst tore into the sand five feet to their left.
Dean worked. He didn’t flinch. He pulled a thick, metal clamp from his bag—a hemostat. His bloody fingers probed the wound, his expression one of intense, impersonal focus. Peters screamed, a high, animal sound.
“Hold him,” Dean snapped.
Castiel dropped his rifle and threw his weight across Peters’s chest, pinning him. He could feel the boy’s heart hammering against his own. Dean’s hand delved deeper, his lips moving as if counting. Then he clamped. He twisted. The pulsing fountain of blood diminished to a sluggish trickle.
Dean packed the wound with sulfa gauze, wrapped it tight with a bandage, and tied it off. The whole operation took less than ninety seconds. He slapped Peters’s cheek. “You’re not gonna die today, kid. Not from that.”
He looked at Castiel, his breath coming in short puffs. “Now we move him.”
The suppressing fire had stopped. The two privates were hunched down, reloading with trembling fingers. The machine gun’s attention had returned, methodically searching.
An artillery shell landed twenty yards behind them in the surf, showering them with water and shattered debris. The concussion was a physical blow. The world narrowed to this patch of sand, the cold, the metallic taste, the weight of the kid under him.
“We can’t carry him across that,” Castiel said.
“We’re not going across,” Dean said, his eyes scanning the beach laterally. “We’re going sideways. That gully runs east. It gets deeper.”
It was tactical sense, born not from a manual but from a quick, brutal assessment of the terrain. The defilade was minimal, but it was movement. Staying was death.
“Alright,” Castiel said. He took Peters’s left shoulder. Dean took the right. “On three. You two,” he yelled at the privates, “cover us as we go, then follow.”
They crouched, then ran, hunched over, dragging Peters between them. His screams were lost in the wider noise. They staggered along the waterline, using the slight curve of the depression. Bullets chased them, hissing into the wet sand at their heels.
After fifty yards, the gully deepened into a shallow runoff creek that cut perpendicularly up the beach towards the bluffs. It was clogged with bodies, but it offered real cover. They collapsed into it, gasping. They had moved parallel to the seawall, not towards it.
Castiel checked his compass. They were off the rally point. Isolated.
Dean was already checking Peters’s pulse at the neck. “He’s in shock. Needs plasma, needs a surgeon.” He said it without hope. Those things were somewhere beyond the wall of fire.
More men began to filter into the creek bed, leaderless, wounded, drawn to the scant sanctuary. A corporal with a shattered arm. Two riflemen supporting a third with a chest wound that bubbled pink foam with each breath. They looked at Castiel, at his officer’s bars, with desperate, expectant eyes.
He had a platoon to find, an objective to secure. He had a medic who was now collecting casualties. The orderly plan was a ghost.
Dean sat back on his heels, wiping his bloody hands on his thighs. He surveyed the five wounded men now in the creek with them. He looked at Castiel, and that familiar, maddening grin touched his lips. It was all teeth, no warmth.
“Looks like we just established the aid station, Lieutenant.” He gestured around the bloody, three-foot-deep ditch. “Welcome to Post Number One.” He turned and began ripping open a fresh bandage packet with his teeth, his movements already shifting to the next man, the next wound, the immediate, terrible task at hand. The bombardment still hammered the high ground, but down here in the ditch, the war had been reduced to its simplest terms: a man, his hands, and the blood he was trying to stem.