Amayehli

December 2019 The dawn seemed painfully slow in coming this winter morning, as if it too was reluctant to witness the carnage which was about to take place. The rising sun finally brought light, but little warmth, to the weary Chinese soldiers and their Iranian and Syrian allies manning their ragged defense lines. The snow was falling heavily, adding to the thick white blanket that already covered the mountains and bent the branches of majestic old trees toward the ground. The soldiers shivered in the frosty morning air, as did their adversaries poised in the mountains above them, but the Chinese and Middle Eastern troops shivered even more from pure fear; the fear that the great breakout was about to occur with their massive army beaten and sent reeling to the sea. Their positions had been pounded relentlessly for hours by artillery that they had not even known that their enemy possessed in large numbers. Now they wondered what else they didn’t know about and were not prepared for. The Chinese led occupying forces had faced these people in the mountains all too often over the Past six years and they knew of their determination and ferocity. The clashes had first occurred when there were only small roving bands of ill-equipped and poorly armed guerillas to contend with. Then gradually these same guerillas had formed themselves into companies and battalions and finally into an army of deadly rebels. Nothing appeared to faze them; not death, not torture, not deprivation. They fought for something that had rarely been truly seen on this planet called Earth, and something that their adversaries had been trained to hate and yet failed to comprehend; they fought for freedom. These rebels had fought skirmish after skirmish with the Chinese and their allies, small fights initially, and then larger engagements that soon turned into full-scale battles. Now, for the first time, it was the soldiers of the occupying army, the current “masters of the universe” who were on the defensive and faced with possible defeat. With a breakout from its refuge in the Great Smoky Mountains, the largest of all of the rebel armies could link up with other guerilla forces operating all over the United States and Canada. If they succeeded, then the grand design of the occupation forces that thought they could control the entire world would be shattered. Global conquest would be relegated to the status of a myth, unachievable when there were people who truly loved liberty and were willing to fight and die for it. Who were these people anyway? Their oppressors had been told that they were a decadent people who had abandoned their God and sought only material comfort. They were supposed to believe in nothing. Yet here they came once again, as they had against the British in 1776 and the Nazis and Japanese in the 1940s. It was now five minutes after dawn, and the very mountains trembled as the booted feet of over three hundred thousand men and women began to move. Freedom had again become a possibility in America.