Ordinary Heroes (29 page)

When we were done digging, we cut boughs from the surrounding fir trees and laid them in each hole to form a base. A few pine branches were left at the edge, to be used, when the men were allowed to sleep, as a roof to catch the snow. There was no question that German forces were out in the woods, because when the winds bore down from the north, we could smell their fires, a luxury I couldn't allow if we hoped to maintain the element of surprise.

Each platoon had responsibility for a flank in our three main perimeters, and we set up a watch schedule and ordered the men to turn in, which many were eager to do, becadse they were still warm from digging. As I was to learn, it was possible to be too cold to sleep.

Biddy and I took the same hole, which appeared to have been the former command dugout, its architecture a tribute to German precision. It had been cut in a perfect trapezoid that allowed two men to fire side by side, but left more room for living behind them. The face was reinforced by a log retaining wall into which a ledge had been cut for personal possessions. I put books, some hand grenades, and my razor there, not that there was much chance of running water. It seemed odd to be unpacking as if this was a hotel room, but that thought was cut short by Biddy's cursing.

"Left my toothbrush in town," he said. "N
o s
have, no bath. Least you can brush your teeth. Damn." I understood at once that the toothbrush was an emblem of the security we'd relinquished on this quest for a man who'd turned up dead, and I offered him mine.

"We can share it," I said. "It won't be the worst of what we share in this hole." With orders to remain out of sight, we weren't going to be making any trips to the latrine during the day. And Biddy and I were past the point of pride or privacy. The last of that had passed when he scraped me off that snowy field with a load in my pants.

Biddy, though, seemed struck by the gesture. He stared at the brush as if it was burning, before he took it.

Near 9
:00
p
. M
., when most of the men had settled in, I heard the rumble of motors behind us, and one of the machine gunners on the point demanding the password. I had motioned Biddy and one of his squads forward, but he came back explaining that it was Signal Corps. They had driven up the road without lights, a fairly daring maneuver in the heavy darkness left by the thick clouds. The signal team was here to extend lines for field telephone connections for me running to Algar, and to each platoon. I was relieved not to be out here alone, but the signalmen reminded me to use the phones sparingl
y a
nd only in code. Communications by ground wire were subject to interception sometimes a mile away, a radius that almost certainly included the Germans in the woods. We also had a backpack radio, the SCR-3oo, in the event we were forced to move.

Before turning in, Biddy and I both inspected positions. He went to look after his platoon, while I checked the forward strongpoints manned by the Browning crews.

"Flash," a gunner called.

"Thunder," I answered, the password G had been using all week, according to Meadows. The Browning crews' holes were dug deeper and rounder than the rest of ours. In the most visible location, the men needed to be. entirely below ground level but able to swing the gun in a full circle in the event of an assault. I found each of the three crews pretty much exhausted. The men lay in the holes with their feet sole to sole with the boots of their mates, a device to keep them from falling asleep.

Returning to our hole before Biddy, I could feel at once that my pack was not where I'd left it. By flashlight, I found it had been ransacked. An extra pair of field pants was gone and my second gloves, too. I had already decided to give up what I wasn't wearing, but I regretted that a thief was the beneficiary. He'd taken personal effects, too, including three of the letters from Grace I had been carrying. And the card from Gita.

The adjoining holes, where I'd heard voices when I was coming up, now had fir boughs and ponchos drawn over them. I debated my options, then ran down to Sergeant Meadows to tell him someone had acquired' some of my gear. He said it had been going on in G Company from the beginning.

"Don't ask me to make it sensible, Captain. Stand and die beside a man then steal his stuff, I know it's crazy. I'm just trying to tell you that you're not the first."

"But this didn't happen unnoticed, Sergeant."

"Probably not, sir." He looked away and back. "They don't like anybody new, Captain, and new officers most of all."

"Because?"

"Because you don't understand, Captain. Listen, these men will fight for you. I've seen them. They're good men, every one of them, and they'll fight because they know they'll die otherwise. They hate you because they hate being here. Only way out of a rifle company is dead or wounded. It's like those turnstiles that only go in one direction. They let you in, but you can never get out. There ain't a man here, sir, who doesn't start praying at some point, God, please let me get wounded so I can go home. Plenty of them would give up an arm or a foot. I'm telling you what every soldier thinks. And what you're going to be thinking, too. And I can see just looking at you that you don't believe it. And that's why the
y h
ate you, Captain. Because you hold a better opinion of yourself than they have of themselves, and they know they're right. But don't worry about it, Captain. None of this will matter much, if we don't have battle. And if we do, they'll be fine with you afterward."

I spent two hours too riled to sleep, and then got up for night guard. As an officer, I wasn't required to take this duty, but we were too shorthanded to stand on formalities, and I thought it would be good for morale. On the way, I stopped in the pump house, a brick box dug into the hill that flanked our rear, fully embedded in the earth to keep the hydroelectric pump from freezing. There were no windows on the single exposed wall, just a half-size wooden door, which my men had broken open. Inside, I found most of the soldiers in the second squad from Meadows' platoon, who'd chosen to play cards by the light of a Coleman lantern rather than sleep. They jumped up and I put them at ease. The pump, an old black hunk of iron, reached down into a well hole, and the men had fanned out around it. I took a moment to ask each of the eight soldiers where he was from, but I got the same surly responses, and headed out.

"You a Yid, Captain?" When I turned back, nobody in the pump house was looking at his cards. The speaker, staring hardest at me, was a Mississippi boy, a private named Stocker Collison.

Every candidate in OTS learns the same thing.

Rule one, make sure they respect you. If they like you, that's okay. But if they don't, fear will do.

"Is that a Southern term?" I asked Collison. "Just askin."

"Does the answer matter to you, Collison?"

Of course it did. It probably mattered to half the men in the company, maybe more.

"No, sir."

"Good. What time you stand guard, Collison?" "At oh three hundred, sir."

"Why don't you walk the perimeter now to be sure everything's okay.)
,
He spent a long time looking at me before departing. The other men remained silent. I had been better at this than I'd imagined, but I knew whose manner I'd instinctively assumed. Teedle's. I would have to think about that.

I had drawn guard with the platoon of Sal Masi, a shrewd little guy from Boston who was my third sergeant. He'd been promoted from corporal on the battlefield and still had the doglegs on his uniform. Along with two of Masi's soldiers, I had watch on the rear hill, a position I'd assigned myself because it was at the highest point we occupied, and thus the most exposed to the wind.

My spot was about fifteen yards from the pump house, and the tin chimney that poked through the roof was designed to vent the pump's heat in the summer, but now it funneled the sound from withi
n a
s if it were being broadcast. On their first night here, the men inside clearly didn't realize that. As a result, I spent much of my two hours on watch listening as the north wind carried along the squad's conversations, including their commentary about me, which began when Collison got back from his snowy trip around the perimeter.

"Jesus fucking Christ, Collison. Why didn't you just ask him to stick out his pecker so you could check?"

"Man oughta say what he is. He ain't got no call to hide it."

"Hell, man, you're white trash and I don't see you wearing a sign.

"Aw, go soak your head, O'Brien. The thing with the damn Jews is you don't never know when you got one.''

"That's bull, Collison," said somebody else. "You can tell by lookin. You just haven't seen any 'cause you're an ignorant Mississippi peckerwood."

"You got no call to talk to me like that, Marshall."

"Whatsa matter, Collison, did he hurt your feelings? I'm gonna cry, I'm not kidding. I'm crying already. I ain't cried like this since I read My Friend Flicker."

The line, from O'Brien, a thin sharp-faced kid from Baltimore, provoked a storm of laughter inside the pump house. Encouraged, O'Brien took off on Collison.

"Know the difference between a zoo in the North and a zoo in the South?"

Collison didn't answer.

"In the South, they don't just write the name of the animal on the cage. There's also a recipe." The uproar rocked out again. "Know what they call a Mississippi farmer with a sheep under each arm? Huh? A pimp."

Apparently O'Brien decided Collison had had enough. The men went back to playing poker, largely silent except for the grousing when somebody won. Without that distraction, and with nothing to see in the farm field that lay ahead of me, I worried. I worried mostly about whether fear would paralyze me in the midst of combat as it had when I jumped, and what would happen then to the men I was supposed to lead. The moment in the plane had drifted with me all day, like the lingering weakness from a fever. It had taken something away from me, from everything I saw and every breath I drew. I was a coward. I didn't expect myself to be unafraid. But I had been dashed to discover that I could not overcome it. The man who had volunteered to jump, the American who believed in the right things, had no control over the other part of me. It was as Gita had been trying to tell me when she lifted her skirt. Everything except instinct was a pretense.

Hoping for other thoughts, I began searching the sky. The clouds to the south did not look quite a
s t
hick. If I was right, that would mean air support, supplies, maybe even reinforcements. I hung, yet again, in that uncertain zone, not knowing if I wanted to be replaced before the German attack. At least a demotion to platoon leader would let me pull duty I'd prepared for. If Meadows went down, I'd literally have to call Algar every hour for instructions.

As 5
:00
a
. M
. approached, somebody else who'd gotten up for night guard entered the pump house, clearly another squad member, who received a full account of the evening, including the ungodly amount Bronko Lukovic had won, and Collison's encounter with me.

"Oh, Collison, you sure know your oats. Way to impress the new CO."

"I just like orders better comin from a Christian, is all," said Collison. "We're already fightin this fuckin war to save the Jews.,
,
"Jesus, button your flap, Collison. You sound like Father Coughlin."

"Says you. Wasn't them Nazis that attacked us at Pearl Harbor. What the hell we care what ole Hitler's Join? I'm tellin you, it was all them Jews around Roosevelt. That's why we're here fightin."

"Collison, we're all fighting for the same damn reason. Because we have to. Because nobody gave us a choice."

"This platoon," answered Collison, "we got to be the worse-off bunch of doggies on the front. W
e b
een gettin nothin but screwed. I'm not kiddin. Two-thirds of our men dead and now they send us this Jew officer when we're surrounded."

"Shit, Collison. Don't snap your cap about Dubin. We've lost every officer we've had. And they knew what the heck they were doing. How long you think it's gonna take before this one stops a bullet? He's still looking around the woods for the men's room.

They all laughed. A minute later, I heard a familiar voice. Biddy had gotten up to spell me on night guard.

"Pipe down in here, y'all. Sound come outta that hole up top like cheers at a football game. Hear y'all fifty yards away." There was silence then. I'd wager some were wondering for the first time how far off I was. "And let me tell you something else. The Captain's a good man, y'all gone see that."

I could hear O'Brien ask, "Is he hep? I just can't take these officers who don't know nothing but what they read in the rule book."

"He's hep," Biddy said. He arrived at my position a minute later. He said nothing, but offered a cut-down salute when I left him to go back to sleep.

Chapter
18.

COLD TRUTH

Bill Meadows shook me awake a little after Too a
. M
., as the faintest light was leaking into the sky. He wanted to go over orders fo
r t
he day. To conceal our position, we couldn't risk contact with the men on point or relieve them once the sun was up. Meadows wanted to replace the crews who'd been out there freezing all night and I told him to proceed.