Before Their Time: A Memoir (7 page)

I read a lot, my habit, mostly tough little genre mysteries by Chandler and Hammett, but more serious stuff, too—a novel by Lion Feuchtwanger, for one, called
Success
(remembered from my parents’ library). The high-minded Central European aura of this book, its obsession with justice, has stayed with me all these years; the novel still sits on my bookshelf. I was susceptible to moral issues then, powerfully so, and still am. I believed in the universal struggle between good and evil. Innocent and guilty. Right and wrong. In choices and in “us and them.” That was how I saw the world: in simple, direct adolescent terms, for I was still an adolescent. That was why it was easy for me to hate the enemy.

Keaton and Fedderman also read, as much as I did, Ira maybe even more, and so did many other GIs aboard the
Argentina;
we were not exceptional. The ship carried the entire paperback Armed Services Library, for us an indispensable resource. Every time the SS
Argentina
crossed
the Atlantic from the States, it unloaded another well-read division in the ETO.

At sea, during those dreamy days of late August, we had no responsibilities. All that was demanded of us was that we behave ourselves. I felt this trust implicitly, and I think everyone else did, too. There were almost no dramatic incidents, no disturbances aboard ship. Harmony, Willis had called for during our unexpected little exchange; and we had it, with almost no perceptible strain. We were suspended in time and watery space, headed for a mysterious destination. We may have been caged on our ship, but it still represented a kind of freedom to most of us. I never wanted the crossing to end. I was willing to sail on to the end of the world in order to hold on to that serenity

But, of course, one morning ten days later we awoke to see a coastline. Green hills, modest cliffs, white beaches slowly came into view; an unexpected prospect. It was France, we were told, Normandy itself, close to the great bloody battlefields of D-Day. An electric hush fell over the ship as it began to slow.

Bern and Ira and I stood together on deck, gazing in silence at the Old World, powerfully resisting the idea of landfall. Just beyond landfall our whole future lay in wait. In the far distance, we could make out a small church with a squat stone tower, then some ugly pillboxes positioned atop a hillside, and finally a lone person, wearing blue coveralls, bicycling along a road that paralleled the shore. The bicycle looked as if it was barely moving. It was a first taste of Europe, never to be repeated, and I found it strangely moving.

The
Argentina
crept in a foot at a time. Overhead the gulls wheeled and stayed close. Fedderman, suddenly jittery,
began to tell terrible jokes, until Bern told him to shut up. Directly ahead lay Cherbourg, the old Norman city, the great port now preparing to welcome the Yankee Division. The rest of the convoy, we discovered, had peeled off overnight into smaller clusters, most of them heading for the United Kingdom, for Plymouth and Southampton and other ports. Operations in Cherbourg were still not normal more than two months after D-Day. Half the port was wrecked, the rest was barely functioning. Cherbourg could not yet dock a ship the size of the SS
Argentina
.

We began to gather, lining up on deck with all our equipment, shifting irritably from one foot to another, suffering nerves and stomachaches and impatience, the soldier’s oldest enemies. Behind us stood mounds of duffel bags, stuffed with all our personal possessions, including illicit goods, too, like whiskey and gin. Arch was striding back and forth in front of us, his eyes bulging like a predatory fish’s. He examined us, muttering under his breath. He checked our clothes, our equipment, whether we were clean-shaven. Did we pass muster? Were we okay? There was no comment, merely a nervous twitching, peculiar to Arch, back and forth. Behind Arch, Lieutenant Gallagher sauntered along, as though he didn’t know what to do with himself, his small-boned face almost lost in the depths of his helmet. He had a nice sunburn, and so did Captain Antonovich, from a pleasant ocean crossing on an open deck that was off-limits to the rest of us.

An hour passed. My back straps hurt; I loosened them. Alongside me, Fedderman was groaning quietly. It was a habit of his, a way of expressing anxiety. He had others, like clicking his teeth, very loud. Now his pack rested on his fat butt, way too low, and his ammo belt was down near
his groin. You couldn’t get near him without getting bruised by a piece of misplaced equipment. The saddest sack of all, as he had come to be marked by everyone in Company C. (Maybe Rocky thought he could salvage Fedderman when he agreed to take him into the squad. That was certainly possible; Rocky seemed to be attracted to the idea of redemption in others.)

It made me feel contemptuous, Fedderman’s sloppiness, his incompetence, his seeming lack of pride. Why didn’t he care more? I wasn’t much more competent at rolling a full-field pack, I could be a slob, too, but I cared and I tried and so did Bern Keaton. (Oh, how we cared; that part of us must have been insufferable to Fedderman.)

On the other side of Fedderman, Bern stood at rest, unusually calm, it seemed to me, for what was going on all around us. He was engrossed in
Of Mice and Men
. We all had books with us, stolen from the ship’s library. Fedderman was carrying Zane Grey’s
Riders of the Purple Sage
(he claimed to love Westerns, had a whole theory about their unacknowledged aesthetic value in the canon of American literature), and I had a copy of
The Pocket Book of Verse
stuffed into one fatigue pocket and Harry Kurnitz’s smart little mystery,
Fast Company
, in the other. I could still tell you the plot.

Down below, the engines suddenly stopped. A vast silence spread everywhere. Between the
Argentina
and the city of Cherbourg lay an expanse of choppy water, perhaps three hundred yards in all to shore. A stiff wind had begun to blow. Clouds were moving fast to the east, into the Norman countryside. Another half-hour passed. It grew chilly on deck and suddenly we realized that our officers
had disappeared. Then Fedderman’s teeth began to click; a horrible, foreboding sound.

“Okay, men, this is how we’re going in.” It was Arch, finally ready with our orders. “Pay attention. All of you.” He sounded oddly subdued, almost schoolmasterish, which was not Arch’s style. We could hardly hear him.

We were going in on Higgins boats, he told us, landing craft that had carried the infantry ashore on D-Day. He paused a moment, while we assimilated this. We would board the boats by descending the steep sides of the
Argentina’s
hull on a rope ladder that was being lowered in front of us at the very moment that Arch was describing it. I swallowed a momentary panic when I saw the crew at work, then began to focus on the problem itself, which of course was a familiar one. But there was no escape for me today, no KP or latrine duty to volunteer for. That was clear. This time, for the first time, I was going down the ladder with everyone else. Right. So be it. Amen. I glanced over at Bern. He had put his book away. I thought he was smirking a little. As I’ve said, Bern was good at rope ladders.

“We’re going to have to take him down with us,” he said, in a calm voice.

“Who?”

Bern nodded at Fedderman, who stood between us making a lot of noise, hyperventilating. He seemed to be blind to us he was so scared. Maybe, I thought, if I concentrated on Fedderman, I could forget myself. That kind of displacement had worked for me before, in other situations.

“You guys make a move without me, I’ll crush you,” Fedderman said, between his teeth. He took in a couple of loud breaths. His moon face stared straight ahead. His
rifle was dirty and he was beginning to lose things from his pack. A can of C rations fell out, bouncing on the deck. He was still hyperventilating, heaving away between Bern and me. To hell with him, I thought, looking away. I hated helplessness in others; it was too close to home.

And yet, in another twenty minutes, during which Bern and I put Fedderman together, stuffed his pack, hoisted it higher, tightened the straps, and pulled his belt up, we began the descent, along with fourteen thousand others. Of our group, Rocky went first, disappearing over the side of the ship like a silent wraith, which was how he had behaved all the way across the Atlantic, holding tight to himself for the entire journey. Willis and Johnson followed, Johnson carrying the BAR (Willis had won his point with Rocky). Ralph Natale and George Brewster followed them, also silent and grim. Then Barney Barnato lifted himself over the rail, pink-cheeked and flabby; as he disappeared over the side, he was grinning in a silly way, as though he had known this was coming all along.

Bern and I flanked Ira Fedderman even closer, gripping him by each arm, as he finally got himself over the railing and slowly positioned himself on the top rung of the ladder. He was shivering. So was I.

“Keep moving and don’t look down,” Bern ordered, and we started, our feet testing each rung, paced by those platoon members who were below us; we were crooning into Fedderman’s ear at every step.

“One foot at a time, old boy. Don’t rush it.” That was Bern.

“Don’t open your eyes. We’ve got you.” Me, lying.

“Not too fast now, you’ll step on Barney.” Bern again.

“Jesus, Ira.”

“Sweet mother of God.”

Minutes passed. An hour. All of eternity, it seemed. Then somehow, while the ladder slapped hard against the
Argentina’s
hull, we were at the bottom, or close enough. Men clustered like flies to the side of the ship on our right and left, jumping one at a time onto pontoon bridges that had been laid down, then into the clumsy vessels waiting alongside them. We jumped too, Bern first, then Fedderman, then me. One by one, knees buckling, we crashed on deck. A moment later, up near the prow of the Higgins boat, Fedderman stood alongside me, panting. His nose was bleeding. “For God’s sake, wipe your nose,” I ordered irritably. Fedderman looked startled but did as he was told. Then, as the vessel began to fill, Bern lighted a cigarette, hiding it in the palm of his hand, while Fedderman poked at his nose with his handkerchief, examining the bloodstains with a resentful look.

So you finally made it down the ladder, I remember saying to myself; you actually did it. The taste of that was sweet.

But we weren’t in Cherbourg yet.

Finally loaded, the boat headed for shore. A couple of hundred yards farther on, it began to slow, then suddenly came to a halt alongside a dozen others, each one jammed tight with troops, like ours. A couple of minutes passed. I could feel Fedderman’s massive presence behind me. The butt of his rifle slapped against my thigh, and Bern’s canteen—or Willis’s, I’m not sure—began to rub against my hipbone, creating a maddening pressure. Up ahead I could see square granite houses, with their shutters drawn. There were also a couple of shuttered depots and what looked like a half-empty market, with empty crates piled
in the middle of the street. A few bicycles rolled by, their riders glancing at us. Everything was out of scale, disproportionately small. The strange weight of foreignness was everywhere we looked.

Then the prow of the landing craft slowly opened; we drifted in a few more feet and stopped again, rocking in the surf.

“Holy shit,” Rocky said, eyeing the water that lapped at our feet.

“Okay, men,” Lieutenant Gallagher said, addressing us from the top of an oil barrel. Where had he come from? “This is the end of the line for you guys. Or maybe the beginning.” He paused a moment to laugh at his little joke, but he laughed alone; no one was in the mood for little jokes. “What you do now,” he went on, suddenly looking serious, “is head for those steps there.” He pointed to some stone steps cut into the side of a quay many yards off. “It’s all shallow waterfront from here on. You’ll find trucks waiting there for the platoon. Look for your squad leader. Stick with your buddies. Keep it orderly and keep it moving. And no business with civilians. I mean no business. Of any kind.”

I could hardly see Gallagher’s face as he spoke, lost as it was inside his helmet. Absolutely nothing of government issue fit him.

Then we were off, scrambling up to our chests into the dirty gray water, holding our rifles horizontally over our heads to keep them dry, sludging along step-by-step toward Cherbourg. For every one of us, I’m sure, making it across the fifty or so yards that remained was like trying to walk through water in our most dire dreams; our thighs
ached painfully and our hearts pounded double-time from the struggle to break through.

But we did break through minutes later, yelling with relief as we scrambled up the steps of the quay to the street. Soaking, we quickly managed to board one of the trucks waiting there, under Arch’s nervous eye. Bern and I hoisted ourselves up, shoving Fedderman’s stubborn wet butt ahead of us to give him some extra leverage. Then, just as we began to settle down, we had to do it all over again, because it turned out that we were on the wrong truck. Everybody was on the wrong truck.

“How about it, Arch,” Rocky complained as we milled around in the street, complaining too.

Finally, along with everyone else in the third platoon, we were pointed in the right direction and boarded the correct vehicles efficiently. The roll call proceeded: “Johnson (Yo!), Willis (Here!), Barnato (
Ja!
), Natale (Yo!), Brewster (Yo!), Keaton (Ho!), Fedderman … Fedderman …” then a third time, “Fedderman (
Ici!
), Kotlowitz (Here!)” By then, we were seated along the insides of the truck, facing each other, our teeth on edge.

Someone noticed that Arch had succeeded in remaining perfectly dry while getting ashore. We all wondered about that, muttering under our breath. “He probably flew the fuck in,” Fedderman said, smiling in that sarcastic way of his, but he echoed our feelings exactly. We all knew how inventive our master sergeant could be when it came to his own creature comforts.

In another moment, the second squad arrived, rowdy as always. They clambered into the truck, yelling and stepping all over our feet. (There were no sad sacks in the second
squad since Fedderman’s departure, no sissies.) We sat quietly. While they were rowdy we would get some rest. Let them yell and carry on.