The Most Beautiful Birthday Present

This war was nothing like Titus had thought it would be. His basic training had been more strenuous and scary than anything he had encountered so far in this forsaken place. He had witnessed the leftover of massacres, atrocities, genocide. At no time had his own life been in peril beyond getting indigestion from all the gory things he saw.

The beautiful country of Yugoslavia had suffered under years of civil war, the world community standing by in useless peace talks that the civilians on the grounds didn’t feel any of. It was the year 1997, the fighting officially over, but the country was destroyed, lives lost, and millions of people displaced.

Titus was disgusted by every single aspect of this war. It was a hate crime on a massive scale, and a scandal to him that the NATO and especially the USA had not stopped it sooner. He wanted to go after the leaders who had started the war and ordered the torture, rape, and killing of so many. Treaties made it illegal. All that was left to him and his comrades was to find sick people and put them on planes and trains to other parts of Europe for treatment.

Walking through a countryside that still showed scars of war with burned soil and broken trees, they discovered a huge prisoner camp almost in the middle of nowhere. Thousands of people who did not know the war was over were kept behind fences, nearly starved to death. Their captors were just a handful of Serbs with machine guns, keeping terror in the camp. They ran off into the forest when Titus’ detachment arrived.

They cut through the chain link fence and immediately started sorting the people into categories. There were those able to walk and still with some strength left. They would get a ride on a truck to the next town and be on their own. There were those emaciated and weak who would be brought to a refugee camp to be fed and receive medical care until they could go out on their own. A third category would be flown out by Black Hawks and go straight to an airport for evacuation to another country.

The stench of human misery choked Titus. He walked through the camp, searching for those too weak to come to them. He found a woman in labor hidden under tarps. She had been too preoccupied by her own condition to notice the movement in the camp. When Titus lifted the tarp, she was too far into it to move her to a cleaner location. He threw his backpack down and called for help.

Careful, hoping not to scare her, Titus crouched between her legs. He lifted her skirts and saw that the baby’s head was crowning.

“Push,” he said and made a gesture with his hand that he hoped would explain to her what he meant.

She had no choice. Nature was taking its course. Minutes later Titus delivered the head and with a couple more contractions, the whole body of a tiny newborn girl. He wrapped her into a sterile blanket and gave her to her mother. He picked up the woman with her baby in her arms and carried her to the waiting helicopter. She was strapped to a gurney and flown out.

Weeks later, Titus was in a German hospital in Stuttgart to receive a vaccination. The hospitals in Germany were still welcoming the sick and displaced of that war. Families were out to catch fresh air in the mild summer weather with their ill children or relatives.

A woman called after Titus in broken German. “Hey, Soldat, Amerikanischer Soldat!” American soldier.

Titus turned to the voice. It was the woman who had given birth in that filthy prisoner camp. She sat in a wheelchair by herself under a tree.

He walked up to her. “You’re still here?”

She pointed to her hips. “Kaputt.” broken

“Where is your baby?”

She pointed to the pediatric wing of the hospital.

“Can I see her?” Titus asked. She nodded, so he pushed her across the lawn to the entrance door.

The little girl was still in an incubator. Her tiny body had hardly grown since he helped deliver her, but on the monitors he could see that she was strong. A very thin feeding tube in her nose and the monitor stickers on her body showed the amount of help she still needed to make it over the mountain.

The German nurse who had brought him and the mother to the incubator told him in flawless English, “It’s amazing to have you here. This little girl and her mother owe you their lives.”

“I was just doing my job.”

She shook her head and showed him the baby’s chart. The mother’s birth date showed that the day she gave birth to her child was also her birthday. She was only nineteen, but looked at least thirty. The war had taken its toll on her.

The nurse said quietly, “You gave her freedom. The most beautiful birthday present.”



850 words



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You receive a valuable birthday gift from someone you've never heard of -- what is the gift, who sent it, why ....... ? First or third person is okay.