[ RF ] In the heat of a battle , a soldier stops to save a young child that wandered onto the baddlefield .

battlefield but whatever. 
 
 Pvt. McCoy pressed himself up against a crumbling stone wall. A Jerry machine gun sprayed the alley way wall opposite him. He had become lost in the corridors and back alleys of the small Norman town when artillery had began to pound it to snuff out the G.I.s advance into Nazi territory. 
 
 McCoy had run down an alley and dove behind a knocked out armored car to escape the hail of shrapnel. He hid from the flying fragments for what seemed like hours. When the shelling stopped, he wiggled out from under the burned out hulk to find that his comrades had moved on some time before the barrage ended, the only evidence of their presence being a few cigarette butts and.30 caliber shell casings. 
 
 He wondered through out the town, now eerily silent, until the MG 42 drove him into cover. Bullets chewed into the stone next to him and across from him, showering McCoy with fragments of stone. A flash of movement caught his eye, a mother was running down the street caring a bundle, and practically dragging a toddler behind her. 
 
 `` NO! STOP! GET BACK!'' he screamed at her, but she either could n't understand him or did n't hear him. 
 
 The Jerry swung his gun and pulled the trigger. A stream of tracer chewed into the mother, blood exploded from her into a crimson cloud, the bundle fell to the ground and her body fell atop the toddler. 
 
 Pvt. McCoy, vision blurring through tears, could only watch as the Jerry fired another burst into the corpse. In the silence that followed, McCoy thought he heard a child crying, then there was a movement under the body. The child was still alive! 
 
 In that moment, Pvt. McCoy forgot all his training as an infantryman and ignored every instinct that millennia of human existence had pounded into his genome to keep him alive. All that mattered to Pvt. McCoy was that child's life. 
 
 McCoy stuck his head around the corner and saw the smoking barrel of the Machine Gun jutting from a second story window. He pulled back primed a grenade and stepped out of the safety of the alley. 
 
 McCoy, back in the states, had been a starting second baseman at his high school. The grenade flew through the window and detonated in a flash of white phosphorus. A Jerry screamed as white hot flakes began burrowing into his skin and smoke billowed from the building. 
 
 Pvt. McCoy dashed into the street, firing bursts from his m3 in the general direction of the Jerrys as he sprinted towards the remains of the mother. He slid to his knees when he neared her and grasped what remained of her shirt to roll her off her child. He belatedly realized that the bundle she had dropped was bleeding. The sobbing child momentarily forgotten, he pulled down the blanket that swaddled bundle. Inside was an infant, its tiny skull caved in by the fall. 
 
 Pvt. McCoy almost threw up on the spot, but he managed to suppress the urge to hurl his guts across the remains of the mother and child and scooped up the toddler. He sprinted back to the alley way clutching the child to his chest knowing that every second he was n't in cover was another second for a Jerry to put a bullet into him and the child. He practically dove behind the wall. 
 
 `` It's going to be okay,'' he whispered to the toddler when they were finally safe, `` It's going to be okay'' 
 
 McCoy did n't know who had more tears on their face, him or the child who had just lost what remained of his family
