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enough to play football, why the hell weren’t they healthy enough to fight?
    Maybe that wasn’t fair. And maybe the guards had pull that kept them away from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Dover knew which way he’d bet.
    The story almost pissed him off enough to make him crumple up the paper and throw it away. Almost, but not quite. One thing in chronically short supply was toilet paper. Wiping his butt with the football-playing guards struck him as the best revenge he could get.
    Later, he asked if Pete had seen the story about the Andersonville football game. The noncom looked disgusted. “Oh, hell, yes,” he answered. “Closest those bastards ever get to real Yankees, ain’t it?”
    “Looks that way to me,” Dover said. “I wondered if you saw things the same.”
    “Usually some pretty good stuff in
The Armored Bear
,” Pete said. “Shitheads who turn it out fucked up this time, though.”
    Maybe he imagined soldiers—sergeants like himself, say—sitting around a table deciding what to put into the Army newspaper. Dover would have bet things didn’t work like that. The writers likely got their orders from somebody in the Department of Communications, maybe in a soldier’s uniform but probably in a Party one. Everything in the paper was professionally smooth. Everything made the war and the news look as good as they could, or a little better than that. No amateur production could have been so effective…most of the time.
    But when the truth stared you in the face, what a paper said stopped mattering so much. “Reckon we can stop the damnyankees?” Pete asked. “If we don’t, seems like we’re in a whole peck o’ trouble.”
    “Looks that way to me, too,” Dover answered. “If they take Atlanta…Well, that’s pretty bad.”
    We should have stopped them in front of Chattanooga
, he thought glumly.
Now that they’re through the gap and into Georgia, they can go where they please
. The paratroop drop that seized Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge from the Confederates and made them evacuate Chattanooga was a smart, gutsy operation. Dover admired it while wishing his side hadn’t been on the receiving end.
    When night fell, he slept in a tent with a foxhole right next to it. U.S. bombers came over at night even more often than in the daytime. The heavy drone of engines overhead sent him diving into the hole even before the alarm sounded. Bombs burst with heavy thuds that reminded him of earthquakes. He’d never been in any earthquakes, but he was sure they had to be like this.
    Antiaircraft guns thundered and lightninged, filling the air with the sharp stink of smokeless powder. Dover listened hopefully for the concussive thud of stricken bombers smashing into the ground, but in that he was disappointed. Fewer bombs fell close by than he expected from the number of airplanes overhead, which didn’t disappoint him a bit.
    Then something fluttered down from the sky like an oversized snowflake and landed on top of his head. He grabbed the sheet of cheap pulp paper. The flash of the guns showed him a large U.S. flag, printed in full color, with text below that he couldn’t make out in the darkness and without his reading glasses.
    “More propaganda,” he murmured with a sigh of relief. If the damnyankees wanted to drop their lies instead of high explosives, he didn’t mind a bit. Had that been a bomb falling on his head…
    He stuck the sheet into a trouser pocket and forgot he had it till the next morning. Only when it crinkled as he moved did he remember and take it out for a look.
    Confederate soldiers, your cause is lost!
it shouted, and went on from there. It urged him to save his life by coming through the lines holding up the picture of the Stars and Stripes. Maybe U.S. soldiers wouldn’t shoot him if he did that, but it struck him as a damn good recipe for getting shot by his own side.
    If his own side’s propaganda was bad, the enemy’s was worse.
Look at the disaster