Hi Pointy O/T and FWIW "How the USSR's Fall Unleashed a Neocon Goldrush to the Heartland" https://open.substack.com/pub/simplicius76/p/how-the-ussrs-fall-unleashed-a-neocon?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
Blood brothers.
He’d messed up and knew it too. Nearly walked them into a minefield, but still had enough smarts to duck like fuck when the debollocker blasted smartly out of the ground to explode at a yard height. It took some meat off him. That was okay. He knows the way these things work out. He’s on his back, isolated, powerless, out there alone and a bit boomed out and doesn’t have the strength to do any tying off. He knows he’s going to bleed out in a short while.
Well, at least, it’ll only be him. He sees the boss man starting to enter the danger zone and shouts across at him. “Don’t you fucking dare”.
He can see what the boss is doing and it’s clever. He’s walking in the exact footsteps of the pointman. That way, it’s practically guaranteed he won’t be stepping on anything untoward.
He’s a big bastard but picks his way daintily through the minefield. He gets to his friend. There’s no obvious quick and easy first aid to be rendered, because there’s too many small holes, so he lifts his friend over his shoulder and starts making his way back out of the situation.
“Just put me down and fuck off” his friend tells him. “Just let me die”.
They’re just getting to the edge of the glade when they trigger a second one.
This one isn’t your usual anti-personnel effort, but something bigger. It’s all up in the air, blast and trauma. Some sort of improvised anti-track device but on a hair trigger pressure plate.
The boss is down. One leg shredded, the other one gone. Arterial spray everywhere. He took most of the damage rather than the guy he was carrying over his shoulders. It becomes a matter of getting the both of them the fuck out of there.
There are too many difficulties to handle, just too many. He grabs him by the collar and starts crawling, dragging him to safety while all the time shouting medic, medic. His own strength is starting to fail him, but you go all the way down the line for a friend.
Somewhere along the line, he kind of knows his friend has gone way because the blood stops pumping, but refuses to accept it. It may just be a fucking body, but by now he’s bloody madly determined to get his friend to safety. He’s furious, crying, in shock but won’t give up.
“Why didn’t you just listen to me. Why didn’t you just fucking listen to me?” he demands of a dead man. He knows his mistake has got his friend killed. In despair, he starts to crawl back into the minefield as an act of atonement, but his comrades wrestle him down and give him two good stabs of morphine ampules to put him down and out. His war is over.
He made it out, his friend didn’t.
©Pointman
Pointman's 
Sounds personal Pointy.
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Tough one to put in writing.
Thank you.
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Duck Duck Go Andrew Charles Mynarski VC. The various links tell it better than I can.
So many times acts of heroism go unknown when nobody who witnesses them survives. This Canadian airman thoroughly deserved the only VC won by 6 group Bomber Command in WW2. The man he fought so hard to save, dying in the process, survived by a miracle to tell of Mynarski’s selfless act.
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Is this part of a larger work, or is it a stand-alone short story? In any case, it is gripping and chilling, really well done. In a way I don’t like your writing… it makes my scribbles seem amateurish by comparison.
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I know the feeling. He can pack a lot into a few hundred words and it’s somehow too well observed to be labelled fiction.
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