My Honor Flight (12 page)

Cap watched
the last runner go by, then he looked to the northeast.  He knew there was one
man missing.  He started to run back east when I saw Cunningham come jogging
along, still carrying his pack.  Cap was pissed!  I could see his head jerking
as he yelled at Cunningham.  Cunningham just kept running.  They made it to the
stream, and we all assembled there.

 “God damn
it, Cunningham!” bellowed Cap. “I said no packs!”

 “Cap, it
ain’t going to slow me down.  We might need something before we’re done.”

Cap pulled a
knife!  He walked up to Cunningham and stabbed the knife right at him!  We were
all shocked.  I looked around at the group, and everyone’s eyes were open wide.

Cap was
lightning-quick, and before we could react, we saw that he hadn’t stabbed
Cunningham, but sliced his pack strap.  With one strap gone, the weight of the
pack pivoted around Cunningham’s back and slid off his right shoulder to the
ground.

 “Noooo!”
yelled Cunningham.  He dropped to his knees and grabbed the pack and bear-hugged
it tight.

Cap was
breathing hard from running, but he was still calm.  He put away the knife, and
pulled his sidearm.  I couldn’t believe it!  He brought the barrel right up
under Cunningham’s helmet and pushed it into the side of Cunningham’s face.

 “I don’t
know what you’ve got in there, Cunningham,” Cap said, “and we’re never going to
find out.  You’re slowing this platoon down, and you’ll get all of us killed if
you don’t move your ass.  Get up!”

Cunningham
stood up, but he still clutched the pack!  He had tears in his eyes.  “Cap, I
can make it!  We might need something!”

Cap’s
expression softened a little.  But he still held the gun right at Cunningham’s
face.

 “Look son,
we will ALL DIE if you don’t move faster.  And that pack’s too heavy.  It
stays.”

Cunningham’s
lips started trembling.  He started bawling.  “But it’s my stuff!  I don’t want
to lose my stuff!  I might need it!”

 “We’ll get
you more stuff later,” said Cap.

 “But it
won’t be MY stuff!” said Cunningham.

Cap continued
to look right into Cunningham’s eyes, the gun still a few inches from his
face.  They were both still breathing hard from the running.  “Stackhouse, get
rid of this pack.”

 “Nooo!”
screamed Cunningham. 

Stackhouse
stepped up.  In one movement, he slapped his hand down on the pack and snatched
it from Cunningham’s grasp.  Cunningham grabbed at Stackhouse’s arm.  Big Swede
stepped in between them and pushed Cunningham toward Cap.  Stackhouse launched
the pack against a tree.  It exploded in a shower of items.  Pavelchek stepped
to the pack, bent over, and picked something up.

 “My pocket
knife!” he called.

 “Son of a
bitch!” yelled Morelli.  “Is my lighter there?”

About four
guys knelt down at the pack, grabbing at things on the ground. 

 “Boys, we
don’t have time for this!” called Cap.  “Chartelli, what’s it look like?”

Chartelli was
at the top of our little hill, looking to the east and north.  “Nothing yet,
Cap.  They probably ain’t running like us.”

Cap nodded. 
“OK, next checkpoint.  Mile and a half straight west.  There’s a road.  Find
some cover on the other side of the road.  Taylor, show us the way!”

Taylor nodded
and turned, splashing across the stream.  We all started moving, but we were
all looking back at Cunningham, who just stood there, looking at his pack. 

The next leg
of our run wasn’t as liberating.  Now the running was work, and the rifle in my
hands was getting heavier and heavier.  When I made it to the road, I was
surprised to see that Cunningham was only a few men behind me.  He didn’t talk
to anyone, just sat down and rested like the rest of us.

I was
bushed!  My legs burned and my elbows hurt from carrying the rifle.  Cap let us
stay for a good five  minutes, sprawled on the ground resting.  Pavelchek was
watching to the east and north.  Jones was watching to the south and east.

 “Cap?” asked
Petey.  “They wouldn’t still be chasing us, would they?”

Cap chewed
his lip.  “I don’t know.  But we’re not risking it until we’re in friendly
territory again.”  He looked at the map. “We’ve got about seven miles to cover
to get back to our last village.”

The group
groaned in unison.  The image of all those Germans had already faded from our
memory, so the idea of running seven more miles wasn’t very appealing. 

The run
turned from a panic-stricken escape to a long, painful slog.  We didn’t see
anyone—not a single person of any kind.  We’d trained back in England by
running a lot, and we had a fair amount of time on our legs during out time in
France, but we hadn’t covered ten miles running hard.  We were exhausted when
we got back to the camp.

When we got
back to a field HQ and reported on what we saw, Command sent in two full
companies to flush out the krauts.  We didn’t have to fight in that battle.  I
was thankful, because they lost about half of their men in that battle.  Those
were some especially tough krauts.

The next day,
we were all sitting around at breakfast. 

 “Hey Mack,”
called Morelli.

 “Yeah?”

 “You OK?”

 “Yeah?” I
asked, wondering what he meant.

 “You look
kind of naked.” 

A few in the
group guffawed.  I looked down at myself, not understanding what he meant.  I
heard a ping, and looked up just in time to see a flash of yellow land on the
ground in front of me.  It was my gold piece.  I picked it up, and looked
questioningly at Morelli.  He just nodded slowly.

 “Speaking of
naked,” said Peters, “there ain’t nothing worse than seeing a cowboy without
his favorite pipe.”  He held it up in a flourish.

 “I’ll be
hornswoggled!”  said Tinpan as he slapped his thigh.  “I thought that thing was
a goner for sure.  My daddy gave me that pipe!”

So the Curse
had been removed.  Some quick thinking by those guys recovered everything but a
straight razor that Taft carried.  We figured it was still somewhere in the
pack. 

I never
looked at Cunningham in the same way again.  In fact, I noticed that he acted
kind of twitchy.  He would put something in his pack, and then check it three
or four times.  And he would stick something in his pocket and then reach for
his pocket over and over, like he’d lost something.  And he collected oddball
things, like scraps of cloth or sticks.  I never worried in battle because he
seemed to act straight there.  But I didn’t hang out with him during any
downtime.  In fact, no one got real close to him.  And we’d come up with our
own rule that anyone could check his pack any time we wanted.  And we did,
probably every night.  We never found anything.  He knew we’d kick his teeth in
if he stole anything from us again. 

I remember in
August 1944, we were assigned to clear krauts out of a town west of Paris.  It
was the first combat where Buzz Company had civilians close to battle.  Normally
in our scraps with the Germans, civilians would hunker down during the fighting
and we wouldn’t even see them. 

The krauts
were holed up tight, and we skirmished for several days.  But the fighting
wasn’t constant, and we actually got to meet some of the Frenchies that lived
there.  They would bring us bread and meat, and some of them promised to bring
wine if we kicked the Germans out.  We didn’t tell them the rumors we’d heard
about Ouradour-sur-Glane.  Germans were supposedly destroying entire villages,
killing women and children.  I didn’t know if these were just ghost stories or
if Brass was spreading them to keep us fired up and willing to kill the enemy. 
But the stories haunted us—krauts shooting civilians in the legs so they would
die slowly, locking women and children in a church and burning them out, other
stuff.  All I know is the story cemented the image of an evil empire in our
heads.  It gave us purpose.

We had a
young French woman attach herself to our platoon.  She was a teacher, probably in
her mid-twenties.  Blonde, blue-eyed.  Really cute.  Some of the guys really
slobbered over her, trying to impress her.  Obviously we’d been away from women
for a long time, so a knockout like that was really distracting.  She spoke
pretty good English, which was rare in that town.  When we would get some rest
time, she was always there, asking questions about America, or answering our
questions about France.  She was committed to getting those Germans out of her
town, so she did anything she could to help us.  She would bring us water, or
make supply runs for us.  We’d nicknamed her Joanie, after Joan of Arc.  One
time Bill Taft gave her a chocolate bar.  When she opened it and saw what was
in it, she started crying. 

 “Hey, this
ain’t to make you cry!” said Bill.  “It’s to make you happy.  We just want to
thank you for all your help.”

She sniffled
and smiled through tears.  “We have not had chocolate here for a long time. 
The Germans take everything.  I want to get rid of them fokkers.”

 “Hey now!”
said Bill.  “A lady shouldn’t talk like that.”

 “This
language is bad?” she asked incredulously.

 “Just the
fuckers part,” said Bill, “but if you’re gonna say it, it’s not fokkers.”

That started
a discussion around American and French cuss words, and in a few minutes we
were all laughing.  She only ate one small sliver of the chocolate.  Then she
wrapped it up and tucked it in a pocket, explaining that one chocolate bar would
be a treat for at least half a dozen people.  We decided to all give her our
chocolate.  She left in tears with probably eight bars.

The next day,
we found a squad of krauts holed up in an ancient stone church.  The church was
a beauty!  I think it was built in the 1500s.  There were still some stained
glass windows intact, but several of the lower ones had been busted out by the
damn krauts so they could shoot from there.  Those stone walls provided perfect
cover from our rifles.

They were
hunkered down real good, and they seemed to have a lot of ammunition, because
every time one of us moved they took shots at us.  We had them surrounded, but
they had us pinned down.  It was a stalemate.

Cap came up
with a really good idea.  Some of the buildings around the church were a couple
of stories tall, so he asked for the eight best shots from the company.  The Ninth
platoon was probably about twenty-five strong at the time.  I was paired up
with Frank Pearson.  He was from Los Angeles.  He was a good guy—he had blond hair
and blue eyes, and we always teased him that he looked like the perfect kraut. 
If he ever got stopped by Germans, he would have a good chance of getting out
of it as long as he wasn’t in a U.S. uniform and he didn’t have to talk.  I
remember that he was real tall and lanky.  Decent shot too.  He and I were one
of the pairs.   

Cap pulled us
aside and told us to get on top of the buildings around the church.  Each pair
would be on a building on one side of the church.  Then the rest of Buzz
Company would draw fire down on the street level.  When the krauts shot, they
would be exposed in the window.  Since they wouldn’t be expecting us, we could
take them out.  Of course, Cap figured that would work only once or twice.  He had
the guys on the ground Bead Up so they would all shoot at the same time from
all four sides of the church.  That would look like an attack, and hopefully
they would all draw fire at once.

Pearson and
me were up on a three-floor hotel facing the back side of the church.  We were
farthest away from the church because of the way the streets were laid out.  There
were two windows on the back of the church, so one was Pearson’s target and the
other one was mine.

But the guys
who had the tough detail were the ones who had to draw fire.  They couldn’t
dilly dally around trying tricks like raising empty helmets, because they all
had to draw fire at the same time.  That meant live targets.  They were opening
themselves up for a straight shot.  They would have to time it just right too. 
Too long, and they were dead for sure.  Too short, and they wouldn’t draw
fire. 

We could see
Cap from our spot, and we waited for him to wave the ground guys on.  Right
down in front of us was Butler, crouched behind a broken-down German
commander’s car.  Someone had stripped off a bunch of parts from it.  Cap
raised his hand, and me and Pearson took aim on our windows.  We didn’t watch
Cap then, because as soon as he dropped his hand, the guys on the ground would
start shooting at the church.  We just waited for the sound of gunshots.

Gunfire
erupted.  No one popped up in my window.

 “Shit!”
yelled Pearson.  “Help! ”

I wheeled my
aim over to his window.  Pearson got one of the krauts, but there was apparently
a group of them, standing way back inside the room.  That made them hard to
see.  We pumped our clips into the darkness of the window, but they had ducked
out of the way.  Just then gunshots were hitting the building, inches below
us!  Krauts had moved to my window and were shooting at us.  We ducked down
under the ledge around the top of building, which had a one-foot high wall all
around the roof.  Bullets chipped away at the bricks on the ledge, and we could
hear some of them whizzing pass us.  Any time we moved, they saw our helmets
and shot.  The only thing that saved us was that we were on the third floor.  The
angle, combined with the one-foot wall, hid us most of the time. 

We
belly-crawled backward away from the edge of the building and hustled down to
the main floor.  When we reached the lobby, we spotted Butler on the ground
behind that car.  He was bleeding.  We ran up to the front of the building, but
the krauts were laying down a suppressing fire, so we had to duck under the
window.  Butler was pinned down, and if we tried to reach him, a bunch of
krauts would shoot at us.

 “How bad you
hit?”  I yelled at Butler.

 “It’s bad,”
he yelled back.  His voice was hoarse and higher-pitched than normal.

 “We’re goin’
for help!” yelled Pearson. “Sit tight!”

 “Not going
anywhere,” Butler gasped.  “But don’t take long.”

We stayed
there for a few minutes and then tried to look out again, only to have the
Germans shoot at us again.  We belly-crawled out the back of the building, and
worked our way around the neighborhood to Cap.  The attack had failed. 

 “Butler’s
down, and it looks bad,” said Pearson.  “He’s pinned down and we can’t get to
him.  He needs a medic.”

 “Herb
Johnson took one in the shoulder,” said Cap.  “But we got him out of there.”

We explained
to Cap that Butler was probably fifteen feet in front of our building, against
the old car.  We told him that anyone who moved around the church was getting
shot at.  I couldn’t believe that we had those damn krauts surrounded, but they
were in control of the situation. 

 “We’ve got
tank support,” said Cap.  “Tanks are west of us, heading east.  Get to a radio
and get a tank in here to take the church out.”

Pearson and I
were both wide-eyed.  We’d never had tank support before.  From day one, we’d
been infantry grunts, slogging our way through France.  The thought of having
tanks really excited us, because that meant combat would be in our favor.

 “What are
you waiting for?  Get to the radio station and call in the request!”

 “Yes sir!”
Pearson and I shouted in unison, and we took off for the radio.  Our platoon’s radio
had been destroyed a few days before, and we hadn’t gotten a replacement yet. 
But for this town, we had a company base with a radio station.  It was just a
field radio with a power source, in a bakery.  But it felt good being in
there.  The room was all closed in and felt secure.  Nice and quiet, except for
the radio squawking away.  We told them our platoon was pinned down, and we had
a man down and we couldn’t reach him because the krauts were barricaded in a
church.  The operator took the information and requested tank support at our
location. 

Pearson and I
were amazed at how easy it seemed.  You just get on a radio and ask for tanks,
and you get them?  But it was just blind luck, because the tanks were nearby.

We ran back
to the church.  We were supposed to retrieve Butler when the tank took out the
church.  We went back into our original building and hid under the window
facing the church, just waiting for the roar and clanking of tanks.

In the
mid-afternoon, we heard noise coming from behind us—someone was coming in our
building from the back.  We spun around and aimed our guns at the back of the
room.

Joanie held
out her hands, her fingers wide and her palms facing us, showing she held
nothing.

 “Please, no
shoot!” she whispered in her heavy French accent.  Her clothes were gray.  They
weren’t originally gray, because we could see little telltale streaks of white,
and yellow, and blue.  We scrambled out of the lobby and pulled her to the back
of the building, away from the church.  She’d heard about our call to the
tanks.

 “You must
not harm the church!” she pleaded.

I pointed in
the direction of the church.  “Germans are in there.  We’ve got a man down!”

 “But this
will destroy our church?” she asked. 

We paused,
then nodded.

 “This you
cannot do!  That church is our life.  It is our house of God for hundreds of
years!  You cannot destroy our church!”

Pearson and I
looked at each other with blank stares.  

 “I-I’m
sorry,” Pearson stammered.  “I wish we could help you more.”

Joanie stuck
her chin out and scowled at us.  She exhaled forcefully through her nose.

 “You
Americans are no better than the Germans!  You destroy everything!”

 “Hey, we’re
here to save you and beat the Germans,” I said.

Her eyes
locked on mine.  “No.  You are here to kill.  You are murderers, just like the
Germans.”

I swallowed and
actually bit my tongue hard.  We’d treated her real good, and we’d chased
goddamn krauts across half of France.  And now here she was, judging us and saying
we were the same as the krauts.  Some gratitude.  Pearson and I looked at each
other.  He nodded—we were done here.  We turned away from her and walked back
into the hotel.  We’d lost a friend.

 “The truth
hurts, no?” she spat, as we walked away.  I didn’t look at her.  I forced
myself to only think about Butler.

In the lobby,
we crawled back to our spot under the window.  We called to Butler, but he
didn’t respond.  We couldn’t tell if he was dead or not.  A medic joined us a
few minutes later.

 “First tank
blast, we grab him and bring him in here,” the medic said.  Pearson and I nodded. 
We sat there for a few more minutes.   Then we heard a tank.  They are easy to
hear.  Their engines roar, and their treads clink on the pavement.  We heard
this one coming from our left as we faced the church, and the engine noise wasn’t
as loud as it slowed.  We wanted to peek out at it, but the damn krauts were
still taking shots at us every time we showed ourselves in the window.

We heard a
blast from the tank, followed a split second later by an ear-shattering crash. 
We didn’t even look at the church.  We just crouched and charged out as we ran
straight to Butler.  We lay next to him and leaned against the old car.  He had
a pulse, but he was shot up bad—two shots to his right shoulder, one in the chest. 
His uniform was soaked in blood.  The tank fired another shot, and this time
slivers of roof tiles and stone pelted our building and rained down on us.  Again,
we didn’t even look, but grabbed Butler and dragged him back into our room.

There were a
couple more blasts, then it got quiet.  I raised my helmet up in the window,
and there were no shots fired.  We could hear yelling, and I peeked out and saw
Buzz Company firing far up to our right.  The entire back half of the church
was gone.  We spotted four or five Germans lying in the rubble, and there was
no movement in the church.  We took up defensive positions, and trained our
guns on the church.  But nothing moved.  Apparently when the tank hit, a lot of
the krauts went to the front of the church and made a run for it, and Buzz
Company was there, living up to its name.  I snuck a peek at the tanks.  But it
was just ONE tank.  I wished we could keep that tank for Buzz Company.   But its
engines revved, and it pulled away and left.  It was probably only in our area
for about ten minutes.