Death. I was so sick and tired of death. By April of 1945, I considered death, not the German Wehrmacht or the SS, to be my real enemy. I was a twenty-one-year old medic assigned to Rifle Company I, Third Battalion, 157th Regiment, 45th Division of the Seventh United States Army, and though it was obvious we were winning the war I did not count myself among its victors. My job was to save lives, not take them, and I failed many more times than I succeeded.
On Saturday, April 28th, we were approximately thirty miles west of the Bavarian capitol of Munich. The Nazi war machine was convulsing in the final grip of its death throes and nearly every German man, woman, and child was fighting with suicidal desperation to defend what little was left of their precious Fatherland. And every day I bore witness to the desecration of one more law, ethic, or code of humanity as we journeyed one muddy step at a time into the depths of the abyss.
That afternoon, the other company medic stumbled upon a wounded German boy. The child couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen and was huddled tightly on the frozen ground curled in the fetal position while clenching his stomach. This medic was fresh off an LST at Marseilles−six feet of smiling, buck-toothed, corn-fed Omaha farm boy. Full of idealistic fervor, he was quite vocal in his belief that we were all on a sacred crusade to save Europe from fascism.
“There, there,” the Nebraskan said tenderly, kneeling beside the boy and softly brushing his dusty hair off his mud caked forehead as if he were calming a newborn calf on his daddy’s farm. “You’ll see, we’re going to get you all fixed up in no time.”
I’d just stretched my legs and was walking over to assist him when I saw something that froze me in my tracks. There was a double black thunderbolt crudely sewn onto the boy’s upper right shirtsleeve. Up until to that point, I’d never suspected the Nazis would recruit children for combat, but all the Nebraskan medic saw was a wounded child writhing in unbearable agony. His senses were so consumed with seeking the source of the boy’s pain that he never noticed that the innocence naturally native to a child’s eyes had slowly transformed into a cold, calculating stare. And that stare was now fixed upon him with a boiling ferocity.
He never heard the first word of my scream.
The Diary Of an Immortal (1945-1959) Description:
During the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp in April 1945, a US Army medic discovers an ancient immortality formula designed for Adolph Hitler.
After smuggling the formula out of the camp, he begins consuming it and eventually traces its origin back to a monastery in remote China where he encounters other immortals intent on world domination.
