#He is a being of logic and order who abides faithfully by the laws of grammar and punctuation

[outshinethestars]

That Time with the Anti-Tank Dogs

August, 1941

So, war is shit.  That’s not anything new.  War’s been shit since always, and I’ve always loved it anyways, but I’ve never been deluded about that fact.  War is bloody and a lot of it is boring and it smells awful. I don’t really like to write about the shittiness though.  There were all those kids writing poetry in the last war, a whole genre of books sprouted up about how much war sucks, and I won’t pretend I don’t have All Quiet on the Western Front tucked away in my stash of banned books, but that’s never been my thing.  I don’t write shit down to process. That’s way too… yucky. Emotions. It’s just not my style. My journal is supposed to be filled with awesome, and only awesome. This is about the awesome me , is the thing, not whatever messed up shit happens to be going on, so that later, whenever things are going particularly unawesomely, I can look back at all the stuff I did a hundred years ago and think “Fuck, I’m great”.  But, well, fuck it. I have to write this down.

So, yeah.  I was awesome, obviously.  Totally kicked the Soviets’ butts.  But this isn’t about that. I was fighting in the eastern front, being totally badass, making brilliant strategic decisions, sending my tanks out to destroy the enemy like the good little nazi officer I’m not, when suddenly there’s dogs.

These dogs had obviously never been in a war zone before, and they were terrified, running all over the place.  Four of them, though, were brave enough or disciplined enough or whatever that they managed to do what they were trained for, which was apparently to run underneath our tanks.  And blow up.

What the fuck?

No, seriously?

War’s shit, but it’s sort of predictable shit.  You get used to it after a while. There’s always new ways of killing people, and more horrible ways.  Gas was a bit of a shock but it wasn’t exactly a surprise. But strapping bombs to dogs and making them go kill themselves?  That’s an unexpected sort of terrible.

After the first few dogs blew up, we knew what they were up to, so we did our best to kill them.

I don’t know how it became my job to shoot puppy-dogs in the fucking face.  I know the world’s gone mad, but somehow it always manages to continue to go mad in new and exciting ways.

Well, we managed to kill and capture three of the dogs, despite the Soviets trying their damnedest to keep us from doing exactly that.  Guess they didn’t want us getting our hands on their new “high tech equipment,” but I’m honestly not sure why they bothered. That’s what makes me most angry, I think.  The whole thing was inefficient as fuck. The plan was badly conceived and even more abysmally implemented. Like, if you’re going to train up a bunch of suicide dogs you could at least have the decency to train them well.  What’s the fucking point of sending them out to die for nothing?

But none of that was the worst part.  No, the worst fucking part was this:

So these dogs were scared out of their minds, right?  So obviously they did what any terrified dog would do, they ran back to their masters for protection.

Six of them made it back to the Soviet trenches and exploded.

I’m not ashamed to say that I laughed, because talk about a plan backfireing.

If it weren’t so sad this whole thing would be fucking hilarious.  I know the propaganda people are going to have a field day with it.

But.  Just think about it.  What a way to go, killed by your own dog exploding because of the bomb you put on him.  It’s fucked up, is what it is.

But the very worst part was, obviously those guys knew they couldn’t let their bomb dogs back into their trenches.  So they shot them before they could get close.

Look, I said these dogs weren’t trained real well, they obviously couldn’t handle a real battlefield, but they were definitely trained.  These handlers had spent who knows how many hours with these dogs. Think about it, your dogs so scared and he comes running toward you looking to you for help, eyes brimming full of doggy trust, and you fucking shoot him dead.  I can’t imagine it.

I saw the looks on those poor guys’ faces.  Damn, I can’t stop thinking about it.

I’m glad Germany wasn’t here.

That’s the punchline, isn’t it.  Germany, whose government is committing atrocities that will be remembered and judged for a thousand years if the world is lucky, and I just can’t stop thinking about how glad I am that the kid didn’t have to see a bunch of dogs get shot. In the list of terrible things either of us have done, killing animals should be way down at the bottom.  But somehow we’re twisted enough that it doesn’t FEEL that way, killed humans so many times we’ve gotten used to it.

That’s the thing though, he’s just a kid when it’s all said and done.  A kid that I raised. Looking back you can draw the straight line of his trajectory from where I first scrapped him together into a bleeding kind of whole, and told him to make me proud, to become the greatest nation the world had ever seen at any cost, to now.  He’s not a monster, just young and enthusiastic and mislead and brainwashed. And he’s MY baby brother. At the end of the day, I’ll do whatever it takes to protect him, physically, emotionally, whatever, even fight this stupid war. Even kill dogs and innocents, if that makes me a monster so be it.

The world really has gone to shit.  Germany’s run by a madman, and so is Russia, and God help everyone stuck between us.  Meanwhile, I guess I’ll just try my best to look out for my brother and cry about dead dogs.