Ordinary Heroes (35 page)

That was the principal sound now, men moaning and crying. Stocker Collison was calling out, "Mama, Mama," a lament that had been going on for some time. The wounded were going to die fast in this weather. Soaked in their own blood, they would freeze soon, a process that would accelerate due to their blood loss. When the last German voice disappeared, I hoped to find the radio.

I was about to get up, when a single shot rang out, a parched sound like a breaking stick. The pricks had left a sniper behind, at least one, who'd probably fired when somebody else moved. I thought of calling out a warning, even though it would have given me away, but that would reveal that many of the others lying here were alive. I could only hope the men would understand on their own.

Instead, to betray no sign of life, I worked o
n s
lowing my breathing. The smell, now that I was aware of it, was repulsive. No one ever told me there is a stench of battle, of cordite and blood, of human waste, and as time goes on, of death. I had chosen a terrible position--I was lying on the submachine gun and after only a few minutes the stock had begun to sink into my thigh, so that I was being bruised under my own weight. But I would have to bear it. In some ways I welcomed the pain as my just deserts as a failed commander. I wondered how the Germans had found us. Their scouts must have been out in the darkness and followed our tracks through the snow. They may even have seen us cross the road. I reviewed my decisions repeatedly. Should I have recognized there was such a large force out here? Would we have been better off, in the end, staying in the first foxholes and fighting from there? Could we have held the Krauts off longer, inflicted more losses? After days of suffering in the cold, we had not detained the Germans more than a few minutes as they came down the road.

I was freezing, of course. I had been freezing for days, but lying in the snow without moving was worse. My limbs burned as if my skin had been ignited from inside. Near me, someone moaned now and then for water and Collison was still asking for his mother. He went on for at least another hour and then a single sniper's bullet rang out and the calling stopped. I wondered if they'd shot him out of merc
y o
r contempt. But within a second, there were severa
l m
ore bullets and a haunting punctured soun
d e
merging from each man they struck. The snipers--I now thought there were two--seemed to be systematically picking off our wounded. I awaited my turn. I had gone through the entire battle, the few minutes it all had lasted, with no conscious fear, but now that I realized they were killing any man showing signs of life, I felt the full flush of terror. A thought struck through to the center of me like an ax: I was going to find out about God.

But I did not die. After five or six shots, the firing ceased. The wounded, at least those moaning or begging for water or help, had gone still, and there was now a harrowing silence in the clearing. I could hear the noises of the morning, the wind in the trees and crows calling. The submachine gun was still beneath me. From the last shots, I believed the snipers were across the road in the same woods we'd left. I had no idea how many men who lay here were still alive. Ten perhaps. But if we all stood and fired, we'd have a chance to kill the snipers before they killed us. Those would be my orders if the sharp-shooting started again.

With no voices here, the fighting down the road was more audible. The rumbling explosions echoed and reechoed between the hills. Late in the morning, the drone of aircraft joined it and bombs shook th
e a
ir. I hoped we were dropping on the Panzers, but couldn't be certain.

Several hours along, I opened my eyes briefly. Near me Forrester, who'd been abandoned by his widowed mother, was jackknifed. A ragged bullet hole was ripped in the back of his neck. His carotids had emptied through it, staining his jacket, and he'd messed his trousers as he was dying, an odor I'd smelled for quite some time. But I hadn't looked out to count the dead around me, or even the living. With the planes aloft, I knew the sky was clearing, and I longed for one last sight of that fresh blue, so full of promise. I looked while I dared, then closed my eyes. I missed the world already.

By now, my bladder was aching. Urine, however, would eat through the snow and potentially give me away to the snipers. More important, I was likely to soak myself and freeze to death. For a while, I decided to count, only to know time was passing. Finally, I thought about the people at home. Lying there, I was full of regret about Gita. For weeks, I had been too confused to feel the full measure of shame that visited me now It was the images of my morning dream that haunted me, a tender rebuke. I wanted home. I wanted a warm place that was mine, a woman within it, and children, too. I saw that spot, a neat bungalow, from outside, as clearly as if I were at the picture show. The light, so brigh
t t
hrough the broad front window, beckoned. I could feel the warmth of the house, of the fire that burned there, of the life that was lived there.

Someone broke through the trees. Had the Germans come to finish us? But the tread was lighter, and too quick. Eventually I concluded an animal was lingering among us, some carrion eater, I feared, meaning I would have to lie here while it gnawed the dead. At last the footfalls reached me. I recognized the heat and smell of the breath on my face instantly, and had to work to hold off a smile as the dog applied his cold snout to my cheek. But my amusement quickly sluiced away in fear. I wondered if the Krauts were using the animal for recon. Could the dog tell the quick from the dead or was he sent to test our reactions? I refused to move although I could feel the mutt circling me. He lowered his muzzle yet again for a breath or two, then suddenly whimpered in that heartbreaking way dogs do. I could hear him padding around, nosing among the men. He cried out one more time, then went off.

Late in the afternoon, the battle appeared to shift toward us. I reasoned it through. We were winning. We had to be winning. There was gunfire only a few hundred yards away, on the western side of the road where we'd been yesterday. That meant Americans were nearby. An hour later, I heard English on the wind and debated whether to cry out. As soon as it was dark, I decided, we'd move.

When I opened my eyes again, it was dusk. Forty minutes later, the light was gone and I began to drag myself on my elbows through the clearing. I wanted to crawl toward the Americans, but the snipers' shots had come from there, and so I crept back to the woods where so many members of G Company had been slaughtered this morning. I was slithering on my belly into a black maze, through the snow and blood and shit and God knows what else, thinking in my brain-stuck way about the serpent in Eden.

I touched each body I passed. It was easy to tell the living, even with a gloved hand that was like lead. In the dark, I could see eyes spring open, and I pointed to the woods. reached a form I recognized as Biddy's and hesitated. Please, I thought. He was alive.

I dragged myself around for nearly an hour, gathering the men who were able to move, and sending them scraping toward the woods, like a nighttime migration of turtles. Covered in sweat now, I'd worn the skin off my elbows and knees. I could make out the trees ahead of me, but stopped when I suddenly heard voices. Germans? After all of this we were crawling back into the arms of the Krauts? But I was too miserable to devise alternatives. Nearing the border of the woods, I realized someone was creeping toward me. I grabbed my gun while the other form continued forward on his belly. Then I saw the Red Cross on his helmet.

"Can you make it?" he whispered.

When I reached the trees, two more medics swept forward to grab me. As I stood up, the urge from my bladder overwhelmed me and I barely made it to a beech where I relieved myself, savoring the warm fog rising in the cold. I had a terrible cramp in one leg, and feared I would fall over and look like a fountain.

The medics explained the situation. The Germans who had passed by here had been routed. McAuliffe had brought up reinforcements and the firelight went on long enough for American bombers to get here and blow all of the Panzers off the road. More than one hundred grenadiers had surrendered, but one band had fallen back into the trees on the other side of the road. Algar was going to call in artillery, but he'd demanded that the medics first try to collect the survivors of G Company. The corpsmen had driven jeeps down the cow path from the west, then walked in nearly a quarter of a mile before they made out the dozen or so of us bellying our way through the snow.

Here, in what remained of the foxholes we'd been in this morning, the medics moved among the dead with gruesome efficiency, checking wrists and throats for the sign of a pulse, and when that was lacking, as it almost always was, pulling the dog tags through the shirtfronts to make work easier for those in the Quartermaster Corps Graves
Registration Detail. With the medics, I talked about how to bring in the wounded still out in the open. We had to figure there were Germans in the woods across the road, but the medics understood I couldn't leave without the eight men I'd found in the clearing, still breathing but unable to move. Biddy and I crawled back out with two corpsmen. We formed litters by retying each man's belt under his arms, then peeling his field jacket back over his head and folding his rifle within the fabric. One of the medics gave a signal and I stood up first and began dragging the man I had, O'Brien, toward the trees. I waited to die, yet again, but after even a few yards, it was clear there was no one on the other side now, at least no one willing to give himself away by shooting. As I dragged O'Brien along, the dog followed.

From the woods, the corpsmen radioed for a convoy and ambulances, which met us on the other side of the creek where the cow path joined the woods. In the lights of the vehicles, I caught sight of a C ration cracker in cellophane lying unharmed in the snow. I broke it in pieces and passed it out to the three other men who were waiting with me. We ate this morsel in total silence.

"Damn," one of them, Hank Garns, finally said. We were back at Algar's headquarters in minutes and ushered into the cold barn. There were thirtee
n o
f us. Counting the wounded, twenty-two men in G Company had made it, out of the ninety-two we'd had at the start of the day. Meadows and Masi were dead.

"Jesus, that was rough," said a dark man named Jesse Tornillo. "We came in on our chinstraps."

"Yeah," said Garns. "Guess you're right. Hadn't noticed till you mentioned it." Garns was smiling and seemed to take no notice that his entire body was rattling as if he had a mortal chill.

"Captain," said Tornillo, "it might be that mutt of yours saved our lives." I had not registered that the animal had followed me inside but he was looking around the circle as if he could follow the conversation, a black mongrel with a brown star on his chest and one brown paw. "When he started in with that whimpering, maybe he made those snipers think we were all of us dead." Tornillo bent to scratch the dog's ears. "Saved our lives," he said. "How you like that? I was laying there, listenin to him scratch around. Soon as I figured out it was a dog, hombre, I was praying for just one thing. 'Oh, Lord,' I kept sayin, 'if these Krauts gotta shoot me, please don't let this damn pooch piss on my head before that.

We laughed, all of us, huge gusts of laughter, full of the sweet breath of life. As for the dead, there was no mention of them now They were, in a word, gone. I didn't doubt that these men, some of who
m h
ad been together for months, mourned. But there was no place in our conversation for that. They were dead. We were alive. It wasn't luck or the order of the universe. It was simply what had happened.

Algar came in then and I gave him my report.

"Good thinking, good thinking," Algar kept saying when I admitted how we'd survived by playing dead.

"It was an ambush, Colonel."

By now we both knew that G Company had been given a suicidal assignment. We did not have enough men or firepower to hold that road, no matter what our position. I didn't say that, but I didn't have to.

"Dubin," Algar said, "I'm sorry. I am the sorriest son of a bitch in the Army."

I went to the battalion aid station to check on the wounded from G, but they were already on the way back to the field hospital by ambulance. There were doctors in Bastogne now, four surgeons who'd landed this morning by glider.

When I returned, Algar had found the cooks and ordered them to reopen the mess to serve us Christmas dinner. We had fried Spam and dehydrated potatoes, with dehydrated apples for dessert. As a treat, there were a few fresh beets. We'd eaten one meal in the last two days, and I felt the full measure of my hunger as the heat and aroma of the food rose up to my face. I count that Christmas meal i
n t
hat cold mess eaten off a tin plate as one of my life's culinary highlights.

Biddy sat down beside me. We didn't say much while we ate, but he turned to me once he was done.

"No disrespect to the dog, Captain, but it was you that saved our lives."

A couple of the other men murmured agreement. But I wanted no part of being treated as a hero. There were isolated instants when I had actually led my men, scrambling from hole to hole amid the initial artillery barrage, even when I waved them so disastrously into the clearing. In those moments, a tiny voice trapped somewhere in my heart had spoken up in utter amazement. Look at me, it said, I'm commanding. Or more often: Look at me, I didn't get hit. But I held no illusion that was fundamentally me. We can all play a part for a few minutes. But I was not like Martin--and it was he I thought of--able to do it again and again.