The Lieutenant’s Pork Roast – By Mike Durant

“Here piggy, piggy, piggy. Come here you little sucker,” I mumbled as I sloshed through the muddy pigsty in the dark, trying to catch one of the little bastards. I had to be quiet. Johnny Reb was less than a half-mile away from the deserted farm, unaware that our troops were trailing close behind. I was there on orders. My lieutenant had yelled out, “Durant, go get some of those piglets we saw at that old farmhouse. I have a hankerin’ for some roasted pork. And, if you happen on one of those big fat turkeys we saw, that will well please the boys.”

Orders are orders, and I set off at a trot, as the lieutenant barked out, “And don’t get your ass shot.” At that, the whole platoon let out a howl.

That night I did catch one little skinny thing of a pig. It wouldn’t make much of a feast I told the men, and I promised to go back the next day and get four or five more if there was enough swine. The words had barely left my mouth, when I saw the lieutenant cock his head and give me a look. “What did you say? What do you mean if?” he said, clearly disappointed that I had caught only one of the many pigs I had told the troops I had tried to chase down. “No sir, sorry sir. What I said was ‘if only there was enough time.’”

There wasn’t.

Back at the farmhouse and scrambling around the pigsty the next morning, I stopped still at the sound of gunshots, a lot of them, and then bolted into a stand of trees near the farmhouse. With the exchanges of gunfire came screams of panic and pain. Moving as quickly as I could, I made my way back to camp, where I found six of my fellow soldiers alive and three dead. The lieutenant’s body I found next to those of two rebels. Blooded and curled into a fetal position, the lieutenant had the body of the piglet I had caught the night before clutched to his chest. It appeared as if he had been protecting the little guy.

Our dead buried, we built a fire that night and shared a few morsels of roasted pork.