Ordinary Heroes (45 page)

But I sensed that even the drama of the law might fail to preoccupy me. If I remained in this abyss
,
there could be only one choice. I knew instantly and found not the remotest irony in my decision. I would apply for transfer to the infantry and return to combat. The desperation to remain alive, to kill rather than die, was the only reliable distraction from what was rocketing around my mind.

Only as I closed the door on the hotel room, with my duffel slung across my back, did the full import of my plans strike home, and somehow it was Gita who addressed me. I listened to her voice in the same state of fury and surrender that had tormented me for days, wanting not to hear it and hearing it nonetheless.

"You are Martin," she said.

February 11, 1945

Dear Grace
,
I have spent the last week in London, attempting to recover from what ha
s t
ranspired. After months of sharing so many impressions with you, I know how sparse I've been with details of the fighting. But there is no point to saying more. Imagine the worst. It is more awful than that. I came across the ocean, regretting that I was to be but a pretend soldier. I have been a soldier in earnest in the last months, and I regret tha
t f
ar more.

I now know, Grace, that I will not be abl
e t
o come home to you. I feel myself damaged in some essential way I will never fully repair. I thought when I arrived here that love would survive anything. But that was one of many fabrications I carried along. For me, our sweet world has ended.

I know what a shock this letter must be. And I am crippled with guilt and shame when I imagine you reading it. But I am in a mood that seems to require me to cast off all illusions, and that includes the notion that I could return to be a loving husband to you.

I will carry you with me eternally. My regard and admiration are forever.

Please forgive me
,
David

Chapter
28.

VISITING

For several years when Sarah and I were little, my mother would dress us up once each summer and put us in our Chevy with m
y f
ather. There was a touch of foreboding about these trips, probably because Dad didn't take us many places without Mom, except for baseball games, which she regarded as permanently incomprehensible. It was summer, and Sarah and I were not in school, and this little automobile trip was the last thing either my sister or I wanted to do. Before getting very far, Sarah or I would claim to be carsick. But Dad continued, driving about twenty minutes into the heart of the black belt, proceeding through the most blighted streets until reaching a tidy block of three-flats. There he extracted my siste
r a
nd me from the auto, notwithstanding our complaints.

Inside, we visited briefly with a soft-spoken light-toned black lady named Mrs. Bidwell. These meetings were palpably painful to everyone. After we'd come all that way, neither my dad nor Mrs. Bidwell seemed to have a clue what to say. In fact, even as a child, I realized that my sister and I had been hauled along principally as conversation pieces, so that the old woman could exclaim over how we had grown and Dad could agree. Race was not the issue. My parents lived in University Park, one of the earliest and most successfully integrated neighborhoods in the U
. S
., and they were comfortable socializing with black neighbors.

In Mrs. Bidwell's living room, we drank one glass of excellent lemonade, then went on our way. When I asked each time why we had to stop, my father said that Mrs. Bidwell was the mother of a boy he used to know. Period. I didn't even think of her when I started reading Dad's account because she was black, unlike Gideon Bidwell--yet another boat I missed.

Years ago, I broke a story about one of the supervising lawyers in the Kindle County Prosecuting Attorney's Office, whose gambling habit left him indebted to local loan sharks. My source was an FBI agent who was understandably concerned about the perils of having an Assistant P
. A
. in the pocket of hoodlums, and the Bureau guy even showed me th
e f
ederal grand jury transcripts so I could reassure my editors before we went to press.

It was a great coup for me. The only problem was that the prosecutor involved, Rudy Patel, was a pretty good friend of mine. Both serious baseball fans, Rudy and I were part of a group that shared season tickets to the Trappers' games. We'd often sit side by side, cursing the Trappers' perpetual misfortunes, high-fiving homers as if we'd hit the balls, and berating the players for strikeouts and errors. Bleeding for the Trappers is a Kindle County ritual and it became a bond between Rudy and me. I gave him good coverage on his trials. And then cost him his job.

Fortunately for Rudy, he got into an impaired lawyers program, enrolled in Gamblers Anonymous, and avoided getting disbarred or prosecuted. Naturally, though, he had to be fired, and was required to live with the ignominy of being outed by me. He ended up as a professor at a pretty good local law school and has gone on with his life, albeit with none of the promise that radiated around him earlier. I took care of that.

Rudy and I still live on the same bus line to Nearing and every now and then in the station we'll see each other. Every time I do, I can feel myself light up instinctively with the affection of our old friendship, and even see him begin to brighten, until his memory returns and he retreats into loathing. Over the years, his look of pure hatred has abated
a l
ittle. He must know I was doing my job. But the fact is that there's nowhere to go. Even if he forgave me wholeheartedly, our friendship would be part of a past that he's both set aside and overcome.

I mention this because it reminds me a little of my father's visits with Mrs. Bidwell. These brief meetings clearly upset Dad. Driving home, he had a look of quick-eyed distraction, gripping and regripping the steering wheel. I don't know what illusion had brought him to the North End. That he was obliged to keep faith and memory? That by showing us off he could restore just a shred of the stake in the future Mrs. Bidwell had lost with the death of her son? But after the last of these trips, when I was about ten, Dad looked at my mother as soon as we returned home and said, "I can't do that again." My mother's expression was soft and commiserating.

I'm sure Dad kept his vow and didn't go back. As I have said, there was never a living place for the war in my father's life. It was not life. It was war. Loyalty could not overcome that.

Nor, frankly, do I imagine that Mrs. Bidwell ever tried to contact him again. Looking back, I'm struck that neither Mr. Bidwell nor Biddy's brothers were ever there. For them, there was probably never any accommodating themselves to the intolerable irony of losing a son and a brother whose only equal opportunity involved dying.

In the end, Mrs. Bidwell and Dad were a lot like
Rudy and me. There was a shared history, but it was a history they were impotent to change. Fate, inexplicably, had favored one and not the other. There was no erasing that inequity, or any other. And because they were powerless in these ways, they could only regard what the past had dished up with great sadness and then move on to the very separate lives that remained.

Chapter
29.

WINNING

Fr
om
Don't Be a Sucker in Germany!, a pamphlet published by the 12th Army Group, found among my father's things:

The facts in this booklet were compiled by the Provost Marshal of the Ninth U
. S
. Army as a guide for troops in Germany. Nothing here was "dreamed up" by someone behind a desk. This booklet is a summary of the experiences of the French, Dutch, and Belgian underground workers now serving with the American armies. They know the tricks and the answers. That's why they are alive to pass this information on to you.

DON'T BELIEVE IT

Don't believe there are any "good" Germans in Germany. Of course you know good Germans back home. They had guts enough and sense enough to break from Germany long ago.

Don't believe it was only the Nazi government that brought on this war. Any people have the kind of government they want and deserve. Only a few people bucked the Nazis. You won't meet them; the Nazis purged them long ago.

One Belgian major, wounded twice in two wars with Germany, was stationed in Germany from 1918 to 1929. He says:

"A German is by nature a liar. Individually he is peaceful enough, but collectively, Germans become cruel."

If a German underground movement breaks out, it will be merciless. It will be conducted by SS and Gestapo agents who don't flinch at murder. They will have operatives everywhere. Every German, man, woman, and child, must be suspected. Punishment must be quick and severe. This is not the same thing as brutality. Allied forces must show their strength but must use it only when necessary.

***

We won the war. In February and March, the Allies ground forward. The Germans finally seemed to realize they were overwhelmed--depleted by the Battle of the Bulge (as people were now calling what had happened in the Ardennes), outmanned in the skies, and facing massive Russian forces attacking on their eastern front. "Bald schiessen wir nicht mehr."

For the Third Army, the principal problems were weather and terrain. The worst winter in fifty years abated with an early thaw, swelling the rivers and streams in the mountainous landscape on which the Siegfried line had been erected. Waterways that our forces once could have forded on foot now required bridging by the engineers while the troops waited. But Patton, as always, advanced. Nineteenth Tactical Air Command provided comprehensive support for the forward columns. On March 22, Patton defied Supreme Headquarters and secretly mounted a massive assault across the Rhine, thereby depriving Montgomery of the intended honor of being the first general into the German heartland. The fur was flying around HQ for weeks afterward, and I have no doubt that Patton's little mutiny provided much of the impetus that led to him being relieved of command as general of the Third Army by May.

Even with the end in sight, our progress brought none of the jubilation that had accompanied the liberation of France. Our men had been at war too long to celebrate combat, and, far more important, there was the daily evidence of what our victory meant to the local populations. A relentless parade of Germans driven from their homes by the fighting flowed back into our path, marching along with their most valued possessions on their backs. They lived in the open in unhappy packs that were soon breeding grounds for typhus. Some waved the Stars and Stripes as we passed, but we had killed their sons and fathers, and exploded or plundered their houses. For the most part, there was a miserable sulking suspicion between them and us, especially since we knew that many German soldiers had ditched their uniforms to hide among the throngs of the displaced.

Despite mass German desertions, the Third Army alone took 300,000 German POWs in those weeks. They were trucked to the rear, dirty, hungry, defeated men, herded into barbed-wire cages, many of whom, when addressed, prayed for the end of the fighting, which, under the Geneva Conventions, would allow them to go home.

As for me, I remained desolate and occasionally temperamental. I never carried through on my threat to myself to volunteer for combat. Instead, I went through the routines of a military lawyer with proficiency and disinterest. Reports describing thefts, rapes, and murders of Germans arrived on our desk
s i
n a tide and were generally ignored. We proceeded only with investigations of serious crimes against our own troops. It was not simply that the Germans were our enemies. Many military commanders, including General Maples--he was promoted April 1--expressed the view that a nasty occupation in Germany was justified, not so much in the name of revenge, but so that the Germans saw firsthand what they had unleashed on the rest of the world. I never contested that point of view.

But I contested little. For me, the war was over. Like the cities and towns of western Europe, my steeples lay in ruins. I wanted only to go home and find time to pick through the rubble. It was the downcast civilians, as much as our own troops, with whom I often felt a bond.

From home, I continued to receive heartsore entreaties from Grace Morton, who refused to accept my judgment that our marriage would never occur. My darling, she wrote, I know how awful this time has been for you and the tragedies you have witnessed. Soon, we will again be together, this madness will be forgotten, and we will be one.

I wrote back with as much kindness as I could muster, telling her she would save us both continued anguish by abiding by my decision. In response, her letters grew more openly pleading. When they went unanswered, her magnificent dignity wor
e a
way. One day I would receive a diatribe about my disloyalty, the next a rueful and lascivious contemplation of how wrong we had been not to sleep together before my departure. I forced myself to read each note, always with pain. I was stunned by the extraordinary contagion bred by war, which had somehow conveyed my madness across the ocean to infect her.

The Third Army moved its forward HQ twice within a week, ending up in early April in Frankfurt am Main, which had been bombed unceasingly before our arrival. Blocks of the city were nothing but hillocks of stone and brick above which a little aura of dust lingered whenever the wind stirred. In the area close to the main train station, a number of the older buildings remained standing and the Staff Judge Advocate set up in a former commercial building on Poststrasse. I was given a spacious office that had belonged to an important executive, and was still unpacking there on April 6 when a chubby young officer came in, twirling his cap in his hands. He was Herbert Diller, an aide to the Assistant Chief of Staff of the Third Army, who wished to see me. I was rushing down the block with him toward the General staff headquarters before he mentioned the name Teedle.