Fog lay heavy over the ravine, clinging to the pine trunks and barbed wire like damp breath. Somewhere in that gray nothingness, two units waited—boots sunk in frozen mud, fingers tight around rifles, hearts steady with the familiar rhythm of men who believed they knew who the enemy was.

They were wrong.

Hours earlier, these same men had shared cigarettes, traded jokes about home, and marked the same maps with the same grease pencils. Their insignias were different, but their mission had been one: hold the line, delay the advance, survive until relief arrived.

Now, a single crackle over the radio rewrote everything.

Static hissed, then a voice—strained, urgent, unfamiliar.

“Red Sector compromised. Enemy uniforms sighted moving south through the ravine. All units, engage on contact.”

Lieutenant Aaron Hale lowered the receiver slowly. His jaw tightened, not with fear, but with confusion.

Red Sector.

That was supposed to be held by Fox Unit. Their allies. Men he had eaten with two nights ago. Men who had helped carry Corporal Jenkins back after a mortar blast took his leg.

Hale looked toward the fog-choked tree line. Shadows shifted—helmets, rifles, movement disciplined and careful.

Just like Fox Unit moved.

“Sir?” Sergeant Miller whispered. “Orders?”

Hale hesitated. Training screamed obedience. Instinct screamed doubt.

Before he could answer, a shot rang out.

One sharp crack. Then another.

A body fell in the mist.

And hell opened its mouth.

Bullets tore through branches, snapping wood and flesh alike. Men dove for cover, shouting warnings that dissolved into screams. Someone yelled, “Cease fire!” Someone else screamed, “They’re attacking!”

Fox Unit heard the same chaos from their side.

Captain Daniel Reiss stared at the radio, disbelief curdling into horror as reports flooded in.

“Incoming fire from Blue Line!”
“They’re wearing our patches!”
“Captain, we’re taking losses!”

Reiss knew Hale. Had shared coffee with him not twelve hours earlier, sitting on a crate and talking about wives, about the strange quiet of civilian life they both missed.

This couldn’t be real.

Then a round punched through the dirt inches from Reiss’s face.

“Return fire!” someone shouted.

Reiss opened his mouth to countermand it.

Too late.

Machine guns roared to life, stitching the fog with fire. Mortars thumped, their hollow coughs echoing through the ravine. Explosions bloomed, throwing earth and bodies into the air.

Within minutes, the ravine became a slaughterhouse where no one understood why they were dying.

Hale crawled through the mud, blood soaking his sleeve. Miller lay behind him, gasping, a red stain spreading across his chest.

“Fox… it’s Fox Unit…” Miller choked. “Their callsign… I heard it…”

Hale felt something inside him tear loose.

“Cease fire!” he screamed into the radio. “Cease fire! This is Blue Line—we are engaging friendlies!”

Only static answered.

Command was silent.

Or worse—listening and doing nothing.

Through the thinning fog, Hale saw a figure sprint forward, waving an arm, shouting something he couldn’t hear. The man wore Fox Unit markings. His face was familiar.

Captain Reiss.

Hale stood, throwing his helmet aside, raising both hands.

“Daniel!” he yelled. “Hold your fire!”

A sniper, unseen, fired.

Reiss collapsed mid-step, a dark bloom spreading across his chest.

Hale dropped to his knees.

Something cold and final settled over the battlefield.

No one knew who fired first after that.

It didn’t matter anymore.

Rage replaced confusion. Fear replaced restraint. Orders were attachés no one trusted, voices no one believed.

Men fired at shapes. Shapes fired back.

Grenades arced through smoke, landing among former friends. Screams echoed off the ravine walls, mingling with the metallic stench of blood and cordite.

Private Lewis from Fox Unit found himself face-to-face with a soldier from Blue Line behind a shattered tree. They froze, weapons raised, eyes wide.

“I know you,” Lewis said hoarsely. “You… you play harmonica.”

The other man swallowed. “Yeah.”

Neither fired.

A shell landed nearby.

When the smoke cleared, only one of them was still breathing—and he would never forgive himself for it.

By nightfall, the gunfire slowed.

Not because the order came down.

Because there was no one left to pull triggers.

Bodies lay tangled together in the ravine, uniforms indistinguishable beneath mud and blood. Radios crackled weakly with unanswered calls. Flares burned out, leaving darkness thick and absolute.

Hale stumbled through the wreckage, rifle hanging uselessly at his side. He stepped over Miller’s body, over men whose names he had known, whose laughter still echoed in his ears.

At the center of the ravine, he found Reiss.

The captain lay on his back, eyes open, staring at nothing. Hale knelt, closing them gently.

“I tried,” Hale whispered. “God help me, I tried.”

Footsteps crunched behind him.

A handful of survivors emerged from the dark—men from both units, weapons lowered, faces hollow.

No one spoke.

They didn’t need to.

At dawn, command finally responded.

Aerial reconnaissance confirmed the truth within minutes: no enemy force had ever entered Red Sector. The report that sparked the engagement was traced back to a misidentified patrol and a misrouted transmission—an order meant for another front, another day.

Too late.

When reinforcements arrived, they found silence.

No battle cries. No resistance.

Just a ravine filled with the cost of a single mistake.

Weeks later, Hale sat alone in a field hospital, hands shaking as he wrote letters he knew would never be enough.

To Reiss’s wife.
To Miller’s mother.
To men whose families would be told their sons died “in action,” without ever knowing the truth.

Official records would call it a tragic engagement. A fog-of-war incident. An unavoidable outcome of chaos.

Hale knew better.

He remembered the moment he hesitated.
The second he chose to believe the order over the man he trusted.

At night, he dreamed of the ravine—of fog lifting to reveal familiar faces aiming rifles at his heart.

And every time, he woke with the same thought burning through him like shrapnel:

Sometimes, the deadliest enemy isn’t on the other side of the line.

Sometimes, it’s a single voice on a radio—
and the men who obey it without question.