[ WP ] Write a story revolving around the butterfly effect : something incredibly small leads to bigger and bigger effects .

The stork steadily made his way north as he'd done every spring for nearly thirty years. Updrafts buffeted him as he passed over mountains, swamps provided food and a secure place to sleep, and now he was moving steadily downstream over the large familiar river. Only it was less familiar now; many of the cities straddling it were burning or destroyed, and the first and only intact bridge he'd seen so far was an hour behind him. Worse still, there were large numbers of the buzzing... insects? birds?... that had become so numerous over his lifetime. Although usually far above him the noisy things sometimes streaked down trailing debris and *fire*. He flew more warily, but the approaching mass of metal was far too quick to dodge and shattered him. 
 
 Even a bird as big as the stork should n't have affected the rocket, but it had been built of scrounged materials and frantically readied and launched on orders from Berlin. The impact had bent a steering vane on one of the tail-fins, causing the rocket to veer ever further from the course it would have followed otherwise. 
 
 The mass of American troops, armor, and engineers at the south end of the Ludendorff bridge had less warning than the stork before the V-2 struck in their midst, while the men on the north side of the Rhine could only watch helplessly as the bridge collapsed. The men in the bridgehead - a weak brigade - fought desperately against the German offensive but with mounting casualties and resupply and reinforcements impossible were forced to surrender. The survivors - the Aryans, anyway - spent the rest of the war in a POW camp outside of Cologne until their liberation by Zhukov's troops in October. 
 
 In 2005 the remaining US veterans of the Battle of Remagen met for the first time at the battle site, expressly invited by the new regime in Berlin. In their eighties now they wander about haltingly, taking in the ruins of the town, the wreckage of the bridge, still visible through the waters of the Rhine, and the V-2 crater, now a pretty tree-lined pond popular with birders because of the migrating storks that visit it.
