Before Their Time: A Memoir (16 page)

STILL, through it all, I remained untouched; I lived, safe in my levitating body, barely breathing, never moving. Not even when Natale, sprawled alongside Brewster maybe ten yards away, died with one final heave, still convulsing.

And where was Bern? Who had tried to escape to the rear? And why was Johnson no longer whimpering? And when would Fedderman shut up? The noise he made, choking from asthma and terror, calling for his mother. And the noise all the others made …

More time passed.

HOURS later, toward dusk, when everything was in shadow and the air had noticeably chilled, the medics arrived. I heard them before I saw them, moving around carrying stretchers and speaking in whispers. I had a charge of adrenaline then, before stirring into action. That
was what their unexpected arrival did for me. It brought me to life.

I dared to move a limb, then another, shifting my legs to the right. Nothing happened. There was no machine-gun fire, no mortar shells, no grenades, no snipers. This worried me for a moment. I looked for a trick. Had the Germans actually pulled back? Or were they still in position, waiting to pick the rest of us off? I moved again. An arm this time, both legs again, calamitously stiff, then my head. I had the beginnings of a leg cramp; a contraction moved from my calf straight up through my thigh. I knew what was coming and how painful it would be. The medics were poking around, looking for wounded bodies. There were not many on that rise. The medics had not yet seen me, or I them. But I heard them and I felt them nearby, poking around. The light was fading fast. Shadows were now black. We had been trapped for twelve hours, and it was very quiet. I didn’t want the medics to miss me. I wanted them to know that I was there. I called something to them and got to my knees.

“Don’t move.” A soft voice answering, full of anxiety.

I looked up. A clean young man was standing over me. He wore an armband with a red cross on it and carried no weapon. “Don’t move,” he said again.

“Is it over?” I asked.

“We think it’s over,” he said. “It better be over. Are you all right?”

“I have a leg cramp.”

“No wounds?”

“No.”

“Don’t play the hero,” he said. He kept glancing over his shoulder as though he expected to be attacked. “Which leg?”

I had been quietly moaning to myself as my muscles contracted. And now my other foot was asleep. I knelt there, waiting for the circulation to return, the muscles to relax. Now the moaning was involuntary.

“I don’t know that there’s anything I can do about a leg cramp,” the medic said.

“Tell me what’s going on.”

Two of the medics passed us then, carrying a body on a stretcher. They were slipping in the mud and trying to keep their balance. I didn’t recognize the face on the stretcher—somebody half-familiar, I thought, from another squad. Then, in another moment, the cramp was gone, a surge of unexpected energy suddenly went through me—perhaps the absolute last of my adrenaline—and I leapt up, touching myself everywhere, genitals first. Then I took a full minute to piss.

What I think I wanted to do was look for Bern Keaton, but I was afraid, and it was dark; we were all becoming black silhouettes on the battleground. Where would I look?

The medic was checking dog tags on some of the bodies, peering at them as he yanked them out of their shirt-fronts. “We’ll get this mess cleaned up by midnight,” he said.

I knew he meant the dead.

Without an exchange, I began to help the medic with a stretcher holding somebody from the third squad. I didn’t know his name. He looked dead to me—comfortable and slack from where I stood. Part of his lower jaw was missing, on the left side. One of the other medics was pouring some powder into the wound. The guy from the third squad didn’t move, didn’t flinch. I wanted to tell the medic
that he was dead, that the powder was useless, but I kept quiet. They were the experts, they were the medics. I only knew how to fire a BAR and an M-1, under certain favorable conditions.

The medic counted to three. “Now,” he said, and we picked the stretcher up. It didn’t weigh a lot but it felt lumpy. I still thought the guy was dead. In fact, I was sure of it. It was the lumpiness, as though there was no center of gravity to the body, as though the corpse was made up of nothing but pulpy tentacles. Then we were off to the rear, moving slowly as a few stars appeared in the east and evening really began to shield us. I felt invulnerable in that darkness. I was no longer afraid, and for a couple of seconds I was in a state of near-exaltation. The adrenaline again, I guessed. I tried to hold on to the feeling, but it didn’t last. We moved on. I was dragging my feet and telling myself, as fear began to return, that everything that could happen had already happened.

There was no more firing. The whole small valley, the horseshoe itself, was silent. I told myself that the Germans must have pulled back. They must have had enough for one day. And why not? They had won a splendid victory.

IT WAS a long trip. My cramped leg hurt. My hip-sore burned and I wanted a cigarette. By the time we got back to company headquarters, perhaps five hundred yards to the rear, I was visibly trembling.

“You’re shaking,” the medic said.

I couldn’t stop. The medic said it again, and I waved him off. “It’s just from carrying the stretcher,” I said.

Soon we were loading it onto a jeep for the journey back to the division hospital. Another jeep had left about ten minutes earlier, the driver said. I wanted to make the trip, too, as though I had been respectably wounded, something in the thigh, a piece of hot metal in the fleshy part. But I was intact and unbloodied, and a little contemptuous of myself for it.

There were troops hanging around, I saw, maybe a couple of platoons lined up in the dark. They stood there in silence, shifting from one foot to the other. I thought they were staring at me. Were they getting ready to head back to the horseshoe, to occupy it? Were they going to try to fill the gap left in the lines by the disappearance of the third platoon? Whichever, I thought, it was tough shit for them, and their faces showed that they knew it, too.

I soon discovered where Antonovich had spent the day. I found him inside company headquarters’ tent, standing in front of a table, facing me. He was as clean as a whistle. His field phone was off the hook, and he was blowing his nose violently. Then he hung up the phone. There were papers all over the place, as though someone had thrown them in the air and then let them rest wherever they landed. When Antonovich saw me, he began to moan. It was a terrible sound to hear coming from an officer.

“Sweet Jesus,” he moaned, waving his hands in front of his face, as though he was trying to erase me.

There was some movement in the tent. I saw the commanding officers of A and B Companies standing by, looking embarrassed. There were a couple of lieutenants hanging around, too, pretending that nothing was happening.

“Sweet Jesus,” Antonovich moaned. “Get this man’s name down. Somebody.” His voice rose. But he wouldn’t
look at me. “What’s your name, soldier? Never mind, I know your name. K something, right? Put this man in for a silver star. I want that in the records, in writing. I want it in C Company’s record. Tell me your name again, soldier. Ah, sweet Jesus.” And so on and on, for a while, looking away, blocking me from his sight.

Antonovich’s hysteria never failed him. His face was streaked with it, as though someone on the other team had just smashed him in the face with a football. His eyes were slitted, too, which was unusual for him—either to keep the world out at that moment or himself in.

“Just get me out of here,” I finally said.

I hardly recognized my voice. I could barely find it. I thought I was speaking in normal tones, maybe even a little softer than usual. But I was no less hysterical than Michael Antonovich, and the hysteria must have streaked my face, too. I must have looked wild—wild and filthy and mud-scummed. I realized that I was scaring everyone. I was the unwanted guest. Antonovich and his buddies from A and B Companies were clearly planning something big. They were in the middle of their own drama, I was sure, trying to decide how to salvage the disaster of the horseshoe, and I had interrupted them. Then I discovered that Arch was in the tent, too, cowering silently in a corner. That was how I saw him: cowering. I turned away. I wouldn’t look at him. Arch and I were finished. Let him despair. Antonovich and Archambault. What a team. I knew they wished I would just disappear.

A few other figures came clear. There was some major hanging around, somebody I had never seen before, with his oak leaves pasted to his shoulder as though he was a tree, somebody from battalion or regiment. He was flogging
himself on the thigh with a short stout stick, looking angry but not saying a word. Keeping an eye on all of us were two stupid-looking MPs, standing ominously on guard at the entrance to the tent as though they were not going to let anyone escape.

At least I was clean for this audience. I hadn’t pissed my pants. I hadn’t shat myself. I hadn’t run away, either. I had stayed with my buddies (as if there were a choice). I was a winner, all right. I had seen it in Arch’s fish-eyes. I could read it there. I could see it in all the others, too: in Antonovich, in the two captains, in the angry major, the MPs, the whole ragtag staff. A winner. They couldn’t wait to get rid of me. Then I left on my own steam, while the phone began to squawk on Antonovich’s desk.

When I got outside, I finally lighted up—my first smoke since dawn—and almost fainted when I inhaled. The clean young medic who was waiting for me had to hold me up, that’s how dizzy I was. It didn’t last long, only for a few seconds.

I LANDED at the division hospital an hour later, riding in the jeep alongside the guy from the third squad. The driver took a good look at him before we started and rolled his eyes at the medic. “Do your best,” the medic said, shrugging. Then I thanked the medic, and he shrugged a second time. I never saw him again.

On the way, an 88 ladder barrage caught us on the road, and the driver and I, without exchanging a word, left our wounded charge on top of the jeep, wholly exposed, and ran for decent cover at the side of the road. That’s what we did. Later, when the barrage was over, we found our ward
just as we had left him, untouched. But I couldn’t look the driver in the eye.

A Catholic chaplain greeted us as we drove into the hospital base by making the sign of the cross over the jeep. When he did that, something broke inside of me and I began to cry. The chaplain said something resonant in Latin and made the sign of the cross again, his hands sweeping gracefully over the three of us this time. I continued to cry and didn’t stop until they stuck a needle in my arm and finally put me to sleep. But first they had to cut my right boot off because my foot was so swollen from the cold and the wet; the left came off easily enough, almost by itself.

WHEN I woke up the next day, I learned that Bern Keaton and Roger Johnson had both passed through the base hospital an hour or so before I arrived and were already on their way to the UK. It was a thrilling piece of news, just what I needed then—the knowledge that they lived. Bern, I was told, had been shot through the left foot and needed an operation. Johnson had a wound in his upper arm, of the kind, apparently, that I had longed for myself—serious enough but not too serious. The guy from the third squad, with the missing jaw, was dead. He was dead when he arrived—dead, probably, before we left for the base hospital from company headquarters on our open jeep. And that was it, the whole roll call.

So there were three survivors from the third platoon: Bern Keaton, Roger Johnson, and me, our own little cluster of BAR men. It was almost too neat, too contained, as though the three of us, while occupying a certain small triangle on one side of the horseshoe, had been set apart—by
luck, geography, God knows what else—as a chosen few. All we were missing was Ira Fedderman, who, as I also learned that morning, was dead with the rest of them—close to forty in all, although I was never able to learn the exact figure—back on those small hills.

I WAS something new in the Yankee Division, a combat survivor, a prime specimen, and I soon discovered that important people at the base hospital were interested in talking to me. The division’s historian wanted to talk to me. The division’s psychiatrist also wanted to talk to me, and in fact was already tailing me around the base while I was having the first exchanges with the historian. Two competitors, clearly. They both lived by hearsay, of course, through other people’s stories, other people’s lives; that was how their professions were defined. And each one wanted something else from me, on his own terms and for his own territory.

HIST.: Tell me again what happened, private.

I was a private first class, not a private, but I didn’t correct him. It would make no difference anyway; it was only a nuance of rank. Instead, I grew stubborn. I told him again what happened, for the second time, becoming more and more excited as I talked. Excited to the point of throwing up at his feet, which humiliated me.

Hist. (politely looking away): Are you sure that’s what happened? Memory plays funny tricks. We hear other stories, you know. Think, now.

I did as he said. I thought for a moment or two, smelling my vomit, and I was still sure. I saw what I saw. I heard what I heard. I told him so stonily. I also had my own questions. Where had he heard other stories? From whom? I knew he was up to something.

Hist. (evasively): I appreciate the strain you’re under, know that, but it seems to me with everything that was going on the other day, as you describe it, you couldn’t possibly recall—

I interrupted him. I did not like the implications of his remark. I did not like the tone, either; I do not take easily to condescension. I was beginning to despise him for that; in my view, it was unworthy of a historian. Already, only an hour into our exchange, I was beginning to recognize in myself a perverse urge to mislead him, was developing a powerful desire to lie—a need, in fact. If he wanted a history that he could call his own, which would enhance the self-esteem of the Yankee Division, I’d give him one. But I told him the truth again, for the third time. “And,” I added politely, “I am not going to tell this story again. Sir.” I underlined the “Sir” and made him blush. He was a captain as well as a historian, and captains do not like to be rebuked by privates first class.