Have you ever had the cold steel of a three fifty-seven magnum pressed against your chest, with its hammer locked back and an assailant gripping the trigger, and screaming at you, telling you to prey to your God before he pulls the trigger? I have; but let me start from the beginning so I can clear this whole complicated situation up for you. For starters my name is Samuel Bardock, an African American war veteran who did his service for the marines and decided to become a mercenary, because I have always loved the thought of doing something that could change the course of a country’s well being, without having an irate hot headed general barking orders at me.
On December 1, 2010, I boarded a train in Dasseldorf and made the long trek to Bonn, where we picked up Kevin and Alex Saint, the twin brothers of the group, that have been mercenaries since they were nineteen. The train traveled to Frankfurt where we stopped for the night. The next pick up would occur at Stuttgart where we would pick up an old girlfriend / best friend of mine, Ayah Ishido, an air force pilot and support gunner. This petite little Japanese girl will not hesitate to take a life if it means saving one of her teammates. She even saved me a few times.
As I sit in the back seat of this train car, staring out the window, I can’t help but to feel the effects of the long train ride on my body and getting annoyed at the fact that Kevin has been singing old folk song for the last three hours straight. Finally arriving in Stuttgart, the conductor announces over the intercom where we could pick up our supplies and what platform we needed to be at to board the next train. After the four of us had grabbed our supplies from the small four-man army outpost stationed in this halfway decrepit train terminal, we waited patiently for our new train to arrive. Three and a half hours later the train arrives. As we all boarded the train I noticed that the conductor had a stern almost distressed look on his face. When we finally started moving again, I made my way to the conductors cabin. As I approached the door slowly I paused for a moment and could hear the sound of someone crying. As I slowly pressed the door open, the engineer jumped at the sound of the door creaking and turned around, and we stared at each other for a few awkward moments before I proceeded to ask him what was the matter. With tears in his eyes and a cracked voice, he said, “I don’t know if my wife and my children made it out”. Made it out of where, I asked. With a short whimper, he said Berlin. Then I realized that this mission just got a little tougher. So without saying a word, I turned my back to the devastated engineer and walk swiftly back to my team’s train car. I could hear them on the other side of the door listening to the news report on the radio about the disturbing events that just took place in our final destination, Berlin.
Sitting there in this immense train car we all found ways to taking our minds off of the dangerous mission. We played card and told old war stories. Making it to Prague, we picked up Nathaniel Lopez and rode straight through to Berlin. Pulling in to the station we could see devastation to the once beautiful city. For few hours we looked around the station for any survivors. We went back to the platform where we were dispatched earlier, put on our vest, loaded our weapons, and preceded to venture outside. As we stood there, gazing at the work of the Russian’s laying waist to the city, we were bombarded with many different emotions, hatred, anger, fear and sorrow.
For a city this big, it had taken on an eerie and quit atmosphere except for the occasional brick falling, the sound of steel beams folding under the pressure of the unleveled dilapidated building, cracking fire and that cliché worthy, eerie drop of water every few seconds off in the distance.
Staring at nothing but devastation and blood splattered snow, Ayah and I look to our left and saw the bodies of a little girl clutching a teddy bear held in her mother’s arms, with two boys lying next to them. Ayah laid her head on my shoulder and begins to cry. Deeply disturbed by this horrible sight not only as a soldier, but also as a Christian, I could not help but to shed a tear. But as I looked at these pale faces, I noticed that they looked familiar. Then I realized who they were. I had seen them earlier in a picture hanging in the conductor’s cabin. They were the distraught train engineer’s family.
