ayylmao

	I rode out with Christ's Army in December. I reckon it's late February now. The snow ain't stopped falling since we got to this hellscape. The temperature is hitting mighty lows and staying there. I reckon we'd have run out of powder and food weeks ago if'n we still had all our boys.
	The fucking Indians started laying into us hard the minute we stuck tent pegs into the earth. Half a score of us were gone by the first night. The rest fell day by day. There's six of us, now. The Captain, O'neil, myself, and the two negroes we tried to convince the higher-ups not to send with us. The sixth is an Indian medicine man that don't seem to've got the madness yet. Sounds like a bad fucking joke, right? “A savage, a mick, a coupla niggers, and two army men walk into a bar...”
	Six fools walk into an ambush, more like. 'S how we lost the last guy. Well seven fools, at the time. Now we're six. Johnny Reb went scouting for a coupla hours. Said he found an Indian camp with a fire still going. We packed up and tried to get to it, hoping we'd find some mostly-sane Indians like our chief buddy. Turns out Reb, damn him, mistook some smoking embers for a real fire. I took a look in the nearest tent and laid eyes on one of the hollow. It was a newborn, still attached to his late Indian mother by the birthcord. He was so young that his grey skin ain't had a chance to harden yet. I stuck the fucker with my bayonet before his cries could get too loud. Then I knelt and said a prayer for his poor mother. We don't pray for the hollow.
	Next thing I knew, I heard the Captain yelling to fire at will. I scooted boot outside and raised my rifle up to bear. At first, I didn't see anything through the snow. Course, my boys' rifles were throwing up a lot of smoke, which didn't help things. I took five paces and bumped into O'neil. Before I could ask where everyone else was something hot and wet sprayed all over my left side. It was Johnny. A hollow'd snuck up on us in the racket and slashed his throat.
	Johnny was the type of tall-tale-slinging bastard to tell stories of all the times he had whiskey with General Lee during the war. And the type of idiot to walk us into an ambush. But he was a brother of the faith and a brother in arms, and we all loved him for that. I'm glad we got a chance to bury him proper, though we probably wouldn't've if the Saints hadn't arrived.
	We fought hard til the snowfall died down a bit. Slowed just enough that we could see how shit our odds at getting out alive were. I was reloading and firing as fast as my fingers could work the gun. We were looking death in the eyes and making our earthly peace when a barrage of gunfire broke out from a small hill to our right. It turned out to be a group of Latter-day Saints. I never thought I'd be thanking a Mormon for much of anything, but they saved all our lives that day.
	The Saints are well-equipped, and their fort sturdy and well-defended. There were some tensions, at first. They don't love us Catholics, nor do we them. In the end, we all figured we didn't have time to hate each other with the Indians and hollow out in such great numbers.