Brian G. Walsh

For Nazi Germany, the war is lost. For the men retreating from both the Eastern Front and their belief in Adolf Hitler's promise of victory, all they have left to fight for is their lives. There is no time to dwell on what went wrong, or to belabor the mistake they made following the bellicose braying of the fanatical Führer of Germany. Every waking moment is possessed of one thing: their tenuous grasp on life. Now the bloodied and battered survivors of several regiments have coalesced into a rag-tag group of soldiers led by the remnants of the 3rd Mountain Division. They must rely on their teenage sniper, a young man more at home making toys in his father's workshop than fighting in a global conflict that will decide the fate of nations and redraw the map of the world for generations to come. As they wait for the first light of dawn for their planned breakout, they are pursued by Russian troops to the small, shell-blasted village that was not worth the lives it to

According to Humanium.org, an estimated 10 million children have been killed as a result of war during the last 10 years. A million children per year! War is tragic enough to the civilians who are caught in its crossfire, but to the children, it is catastrophic. Children are often not old enough to even understand what is going on around them, which raises the level of fear and insecurity. And their inability to defend themselves makes their situation even more heartbreaking. In “Toy Soldiers,” one of the stories in “No Place For Mercy,” a schoolteacher-turned-soldier is faced with a tragic dilemma. His company has wiped out an enemy village, and he is leading his soldiers on to their next objective when he discovers that this village has some survivors: two small children. But this is no ordinary war, if such a thing exists. This is 1999 at the height of the Kosovo War between Serbs and Albanians. The objective is ethnic-cleansing, so there is no real rationalization

What is justice when dealing with extremely heinous crimes? Justice seems like a simple enough concept. You devise a legal code, with punishments set on an escalating scale depending upon the transgression. In theory, such a system seems to make sense. As a civilized country, you repudiate or at least extremely limit capital punishment to extreme crimes and circumstances. But what do you do when you are in the midst of a war, especially a 20th Century war within which crimes against humanity are being committed on a vast scale? Original photograph attribution: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flickr_-_The_U.S._Army_-_Battle_of_the_Bulge.jpg As a civilized people, do you refuse to allow emotion into your punishment, as reason and justice dictate? Or must extreme examples be made for extreme capital crimes? That is the dilemma facing one U.S. Army Captain Frank Decker at the University of Strasbourg in France during the winter of 1944. He is in charge of a forward