The crowd of ragged Confederates on the White House lawn had doubled and more since he went in to confer with Lincoln. The trees were full of men who had climbed up so they could see over their comrades. Off in the distance, cannon occasionally still thundered; rifles popped like firecrackers. Lee quietly said to Lincoln, "Will you send out your sentries under flag of truce to bring word of the armistice to those Federal positions still firing upon my men?" "I'll see to it," Lincoln promised. He pointed to the soldiers in gray, who had quieted expectantly when Lee came out. "Looks like you've given me sentries enough, even if their coats are the wrong color." Few men could have joked so with their cause in ruins around them. Respecting the Federal President for his composure, Lee raised his voice: "Soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia, after three years of arduous service, we have achieved that for which we took up arms-" He got no further. With one voice, the men before him screamed out their joy and relief. The unending waves of noise beat at him like a surf from a stormy sea. Battered forage caps and slouch hats flew through the air. Soldiers jumped up and down, pounded on one another's shoulders, danced in clumsy rings, kissed each other's bearded, filthy faces. Lee felt his own eyes grow moist. At last the magnitude of what he had won began to sink in.

The lieutenant of the youth's company was shot in the hand. He began to swear so wondrously that a nervous laugh went along the regimental line. The officer's profanity sounded conventional. It relieved the tightened senses of the new men. It was as if he had hit his fingers with a tack hammer at home.

The gunman on the roof was a teenaged boy, maybe sixteen years old. I could see him scanning for targets, his back to me. He held an AK-47 without a stock. Was he just a stupid kid trying to protect his family? Was he one of Muqtada al-Sadr's Shiite fanatics? I kept my eyes on him and prayed he'd put the AK down and just get back inside his own house. I didn't want to shoot him. He turned and saw me, and I could see the terror on his sweat-streaked face. I put him in my sights just as he adjusted the AK against his shoulder. I had beaten him on the draw. My own rifle was snug on my shoulder, the sight resting on him. The kid stood no chance. My weapon just needed a flick of the safety and a butterfly's kiss of pressure on the trigger.
Please don't do this. You don't need to die.
The AK went to full ready-up. Was he aiming at me? I couldn't be sure, but the barrel was trained at my level. Do I shoot? Do I risk not shooting? Was he silently trying to save me from some unseen threat? I didn't know. I had to make a decision.
Please forgive me for this.
I pulled my trigger. The kid's chin fell to his chest, and a guttural moan escaped his lips. I fired again, missed, then pulled the trigger one more time. The bullet tore his jaw and ear off. Sergeant Hall came up alongside me, saw the AK and the boy, and finished him with four shots to his chest. He slumped against the low rooftop wall. "Thanks, dude. I lost my zero," I said to Hall, explaining that my rifle sights were off-line, though that was the last thing going through my mind.

"Lee stepped over two bodies in gray and one in green, walked inside. The fellow whose head and torso he had seen from the street had fought from a window here. Bullets had chewed up the wall opposite that window; the picture that hung there was no longer recognizable. One of the bandsmen who guarded Lee looked around and said, "Take away the dead men and it ain't so very peculiar

"Officers with lace on their gray sleeves and civilians in black claw-hammer coats bustled in and out of Mechanic's Hall, as if the place were an ant's nest, with some workers going forth to forage and others returning with their spoils. Luke pulled up right in front of the building. A Confederate with the two stars of a lieutenant colonel on his collar shouted, "You damned stupid nigger, what do you think you're doing, blocking the-" The words stuck in his throat when Lee got out of the carriage. He pulled himself to attention and snapped off a salute that would have done credit to a cadet from the Virginia Military Institute.

Lee turned and said, "Thank you, Luke," before he returned it. The black man smiled a secret smile as he took the team around the corner to find a place to hitch it."

'Sam, Sam, pick oop tha' musket,' The Sergeant exclaimed with a roar, Sam said 'Tha' knocked it doon, reason tha'll pick it oop, Or it stays where it is on't floor

And then, startling in its crisp transatlantic tones, a voice said: “Stick ’em up.” They swerved around. Schwartz, dressed in a peculiarly vivid set of striped pyjamas stood in the doorway. In his hand he held an automatic. “Stick ’em up, guys. I’m pretty good at shooting.” He pressed the trigger — and a bullet sang past the big man's ear and buried itself in the woodwork of the window. Three pairs of hands were raised rapidly.

I fired at the Japs for the next two hours and a half. All I did was shoot at every one I could find. You dont knock 'em down out of the air. That plane is doing close to two hundred knots, just a flick, and he's gone. You might not get fifteen or twenty seconds- that's a long blast. I kept firing till the last Jap left, but I did lots of things in between. There were lulls. I said to Sully when he showed up, 'Get those God damn things, those bomb-handling carts, out of here!' And he said a stupid thing: 'Where shall I take 'em?' I said, 'Take 'em out and disperse 'em in the brush. Whatever you do, don't put 'em all in one place. And immediately I went back out and fired some machine gun again. Next time, I come back, there were those God damn things all in the corner. They hadn't been moved. Well, I made up my mind I was gonna kill Sullivan. I thought he lost his nerve and ran out and hid someplace, because there was one or two cases where guys hid in the bushes.
Well, what happened, he had gone off to find the squadron truck. He was doin' exactly what I told him. I didn't have to shoot him. And you could never find that fuckin' truck. Always somebody's got it off somewhere else. He finally traced the truck and come back to the hangar with it, but now he needed the tractor to get the squadron door open. It was a brand-new hangar, and you needed the tractor or all three hundred men in the squadron to open that door.'

Five minutes ago I heard a sniper fire: Why did he do it?… Starlight overhead — Blank stars. I'm wide-awake; and some chap's dead.

I could hear us firing, I could hear M-16s, I could hear hand grenades going off, I could hear heavy machine guns going off, hear the AK-47s, and you could hear the North Vietnamese talking and you could hear us yelling and there was organized chaos. I'm talking about branches falling, small trees falling from the intensity of the firefight and you don't dig in, you just go take 'em on, and whoever's got the biggest toys is going to win.

I just don't remember. I'll tell you one thing I remember: When it got close to the end of the day, I told somebody in my company we were going back up one more time, and I found a whole four-man machine-gun crew, all of them dead. So we started lifting them up, dragging them, trying to get them off as fast as we could. Marines don't leave their dead. That was our way. We had to get them out. I don't know what the hell they were killed by. I didn't get a chance to follow up. Anyway, I was pulling a guy by his shoulders, over rocks and through brushes and stuff, and all of a sudden I look down at what I'm pulling, and he's naked. His pants were ripped from shell fire and then got torn off as I dragged him. And I thought, "Shit, even in dying up here you can't have any privacy." There was no dignity in death. You could see the enemy. They were going around, dodging behind bushes and stuff, hiding. I lost every weapon I had. I lost my .45. I lost my carbine. I had at least one M-1 that I lost. I would pick these guns up and use them on the way up and then, when you're busy getting a stretcher or moving wounded, you shitcan your weapon. I ended up the whole day not only hauling stretchers, but with a BAR, a Browning Automatic Rifle. I don't know how that happened.

When I was inspecting the guard of honor and as I walked past one person, I saw through the corner of my eye some movement. Then I saw a man reverse his rifle at me. I ducked down a little bit in a reflex action. By my ducking, he missed my head and the brunt of the blow came on my shoulder below the left ear.

Meadlo said he crashed through the door and “found an old man in there shaking. “I told them, ‘I got one,’ and it was Mitchell who told me to shoot him. That was the first man I shot. He was hiding in a dugout, shaking his head and waving his arms, trying to tell me not to shoot him.” After the carnage, Meadlo said, “I heard that all we were supposed to do was kill the VC. Mitchell said we were just supposed to shoot the men.” Women and children also were shot... He has some haunting memories, he says. “They didn’t put up a fight or anything. The women huddled against their children and took it. They brought their kids real close to their stomachs and hugged them, and put their bodies over them trying to save them. It didn’t do much good,” Meadlo said.

As Sergeant walks past he was swinging his arms, And he happened to brush against Sam, And knocking his musket clean out of his hand, It fell to the ground with a slam