Christmas Tales From the Cotton Mill Town

Silent Night in the Ardennes   It was December 24th, 1944 and “colder than a well driller’s ass”, as Frankie’s Uncle Garn used to enjoy saying, mostly because it got such a rise out of Frankie’s mom. He dug wells, so I reckon he would know. The star-spangled night could have been like any of the others back in Fries when as a young boy, Frankie would lay in his yard at night and gaze into the heavens. The difference was the 20-year old was not in his southwest Virginia cotton mill hometown on the New River. Instead, he was half-a-world away. Instead of lying in a pastoral carpet of clover and Kentucky blue grass, he was sitting, teeth chattering, in a muddy trench with 300 other GI’s. They had shared this hell-hole for the last 96 hours, dugged-in, prepared for an attack that could come