My Honor Flight (18 page)

I don’t have much to say
about combat anymore.  I’m all storied out.  That’s the rise and fall of Buzz
Company on the battlefields of Europe.  We had some more assignments in the
coming three months, but they were nothing like what we faced before.  We were
paired up with the Fifth Platoon of Buzz Company.  They called us the
five-nine.  I think we numbered about twenty-five or thirty.

Come April, we were
assigned to provide humanitarian aid at the Buchenwald concentration camp. 
Anyone who tells you the Holocaust didn’t happen is a goddamn liar!  We arrived
on a rainy day.  The only noise we heard as we made our way through the open
iron gates was the mud sucking our shoes. 

As we entered the camp,
the CO met us. 

 “You boys need to brace
yourself.  This isn’t like anything you’ve ever seen.” 

We all nodded grimly, but
I remember thinking there wasn’t much I hadn’t seen in the last year.  I looked
forward to having a job without someone shooting at me.

I was wrong.

 “First thing to
understand,” said the CO, a balding Colonel, “is that you don’t give them
anything.  They’re going to look weak and helpless.  But there are crooks among
them just like normal men.  They’ll steal from each other, and they’ll hurt
each other doing it.”

I saw a figure in the
distance, past the CO.  It was a man who wore a black-and-gray striped
prisoner’s uniform.  He shuffled around a corner into my field of view, paused,
and collapsed.  I made eye contact with the Colonel and nodded toward the
figure, pointing.  He looked.

 “He’s probably dead,” he
said matter-of-factly.  “We’re losing about twenty men a day.  Fucking Nazis
starved them, and we didn’t get here in time.  You men are here to help get
these people food, help them get on the transport trucks as they arrive, and
maintain order.  But you won’t have too much problem with that.  These people
are damn glad to see you, and they’re damn glad to still be alive.”

We were split up to
support different barracks.  Tinpan and me were assigned a building with no
name, other than the number nine.  I thought it was ironic that we, original
members of the Ninth Platoon, had Building Nine.  Someone was supposed to bring
an interpreter to us, but we figured we would at least eyeball the prisoners
while we were waiting for the translator, see if anyone needed anything right
away.  We walked up two wooden stairs and entered the building.

The room was filled with
racks and racks of bunks, four high.  Just a big wooden frame with big wooden
shelves, where the prisoners slept.  There were two small windows on each wall,
but they didn’t provide enough light to really let us see anything other than
clusters of prisoners laying on the racks in those black and gray striped
uniforms.  The windows were open, but they didn’t help get rid of the stench. 
Human waste and rotting flesh combined to overpower my senses.  I gagged and
stepped back out for a minute.  Tinpan joined me.

 “Jesus H.,” said Tin.  “We
cain’t go in there.”

 “How long until this
building evacuates?” I asked.

 “Cap told me we were
first in line, then we are supposed to go help in the hospital.  He said we
should have trucks here in an hour or so.”

I sat on the step, and
Tinpan sat down next to me.  We looked around us at the barbed-wire perimeter
fencing, and the whitewashed buildings.  I thought I could smell the barracks
through the closed door.  Either that, or I’d caught some of it in my nose and
I couldn’t shake it.  I hoped that wasn’t the case.

Some guy from another
platoon walked up with a man in a German uniform.  No hat, no belt, insignia,
or weapons.  The GI had his gun trained on the German.

“What’s the story here?”
I asked, staring at the GI but nodding toward the German.

 “This piece of shit was
a guard here,” said the GI.

 “What’s your name?”

 “McGregor, been here
since yesterday.  After cleaning out one of these buildings, they put me on
babysitting detail with this little prick.”

I looked at the guard. 
He had blond hair, blue eyes.  He was short, maybe five feet four or so.  I
couldn’t help but smile a little bit.  Probably too short for the ultimate
race, so he was assigned to be a prison guard out here.  “So you speak
English?”

 “Ya,” he muttered.

 “Say something in
English,” I said.

 “I am to translate vat
the prisoners say so that you know vat they are saying.”

 “You were a guard here?”

 “Ya.” 

 “How many people did you
kill?” Tinpan asked.

He drew back.  “I
fulfilled my duty to my commander.”

I stared at him, didn’t
say anything for a while.  He fidgeted after a minute or two, uncomfortable
with my stare.

 “You’re going to help
haul these people out of here,” I said.

 “No, dat is not vat my
duty is.  I am supposed to translate ven you bring them out of the barracks.”

 “Ah don’t give a shit
what you think your duty is,” said Tin.  “If we’re goin’ in there, you’re goin’
in there with us.”

The guard flinched a
little, and grimaced.  He stood all straight and at attention.  McGregor poked
him real hard in the back with his rifle, knocking the kraut’s balance off and
making him take a recovery step.

 “Get your ass in there,”
said McGregor, motioning to the door.

The guard glared at
McGregor, and then at me and Tin.  But he complied.  As he climbed the stairs,
McGregor said to us, “I’ve been waiting to smack this fucker all day.  He’s a
smug little bastard.”

We walked into the
darkened barracks again.  I was ready for the stench this time, so I breathed
through my mouth, like when I used to skin rabbits back home.  It helped a
little, but it was so overpowering that I couldn’t avoid it completely.  But at
least I wasn’t gagging. 

Tinpan and I approached
the closest body.  I think it was a man.  White stubble covered his head.  We
fanned away a cloud of black flies, and we each grabbed an arm to help him up. 
I was startled by what I found.  This man’s upper arm was thinner than the
handle of a baseball bat.  Absolutely no muscles, just a bone with some loose skin
covering it.

 “Hold up,” I said to
Tin.  He nodded.

 “Goddamn.  We gonna
break this poor bastard’s arms if we help him up?” asked Tin. “Or pull his arms
out of their sockets?”

 “Hey, guard,” I said.
“How do we move these people without hurting them?”

 “How should I know?”
asked the guard.  “I am no doctor.”

Tin and I both
straightened.  Suddenly I wished I had Kozlowski with me.  I took a step toward
the guard, and got right up in his face.

 “You don’t seem real
motivated to help us here,” I said.

 “Vat is... motivated?”  Even
in the dim light, I caught just a hint of a smirk.  He knew what it meant.

I forced a grin.  But I
didn’t want it to look like a smile.  I wanted to make him
know
that I
was forcing a smile.

 “You see,” I said as I
pulled in real close.  Our noses were almost touching.  “You’re not the only
one that’s killed a lot of men.  Me and Tin here killed us a whole bunch of you
kraut bastards.  And it don’t really matter to either of us if we kill one more. 
So, if you don’t start getting a little more cooperative, you might find you
don’t make it through the day today.  THAT is what motivation means.  Do you
understand now?”

He didn’t say anything,
but he nodded.  Then he said something in German to the prisoner.  The prisoner
nodded.  He looked at me.  “I told him that you were going to help him to his
feet, and it hurts him too much to say something.”

 “That’s good,” I said.  “That’s
real good.  Now, you get down real close to this man’s face, and if you hear
even a little gasp, you tell us.  Because if we hurt this man, we’re going to
hurt you next.  Does that motivate you?” 

The guard just stared at
me, not acknowledging.  We were off to a bad start.  He stepped over and knelt
before the prisoner.  “Ven ever you are ready,” he said.

The prisoner was a living
skeleton.  I grasped his upper arm and fully encircled it with my fingers.  His
breath was absolutely horrible.  Even in the stench-laden barracks, a smell like
rotten meat came from his every breath.  He struggled to sit up, and I put my
other hand on the side of his torso.  I grasped his ribcage.  Again, there were
no muscles.  I could feel individual ribs.  Slowly, we helped him struggle to
his feet.  But he was too weak to stand.  So Tin and I each put an arm over our
shoulders and hugged his torso from either side.  We lifted him and carried him
into the daylight, his feet dragging along.  Outside, two more GIs were
waiting.  A medic and another man standing next to a big metal pot and a canvas
bag, with a rifle slung over his shoulder.

 “Set him down here, I’ll
evaluate him,” said the medic.

I sucked in fresh air,
thankful for the break.  “How long you been here?”

 “Yesterday,” said the
medic, not looking up from the prisoner.  “The day the camp was liberated.”  He
nodded to the GI, who pulled a metal cup from the bag, dipped it into the pot,
and brought out a cupful of warm soup.  He looked at the guard.

 “Tell him to drink this
slowly, and then signal when he’s finished so we can get him more.”  The guard
rattled off something in German.

 “We’re rotating between
this barracks and that one,” the medic said, pointing a thumb back over his
shoulder.  “When you bring the next one out, wait for me to check him out
before you bring out any more.”

So for the next two
hours, we labored to bring these prisoners out of the barracks.  They had all
soiled themselves and reeked of human filth.  All of them had horrible breath. 
They probably hadn’t brushed their teeth in months.  They had sunken eyes and
the skin on their faces was drawn tight from starvation.  We broke one
prisoner’s arm as we lifted him up.  Three of the prisoners were dead.  We left
them lying by the barracks but didn’t have anything for covering them.

Even though we sat down
in the dirt after finishing, the stench hung on me.  I couldn’t shake the
sensation of picking up these men, so light and frail that they were more like
skeletons than people.  We were supposed to get a mess break, but none of us
had any appetite, so we just decided to go to the hospital and start working
there.

The hospital was actually
the guards’ quarters, cleared out and retrofitted.  To get there, we had to
walk down a line of prisoner barracks.  A prisoner was sitting, propped up
against one of the barracks as we passed.  He rasped something at us in
German.  We turned to the translator.

 “He wants to know if you
want to buy a souvenir.”

 “What is it?” asked
McGregor.

The prisoner held
something up.  I held my hand out, and he put it in my palm.  It was a human
tooth.  I looked at the prisoner.

 “Is this his?” I asked.

 “Nein, but some of them
are his,” translated the guard.

 “What do you mean?” I
asked.

The prisoner brought up
his other hand, trembling in weakness.  He opened his hand, and displayed at
least a dozen human teeth.

 “He says he will sell
you these souvenirs for one American dime each,” said the guard.

I stared into the
prisoner’s eyes.  He looked up at me, and even with his starvation-tight-skinned
face, his lips pulled down at the corners.  His eyes glistened with tears. 

I knelt down on both
knees, keeping my eyes locked to his.  I nodded slightly, and put a hand on one
of his shoulders.  I tried to convey to him that he would be all right now.  I
reached into a coat pocket, and pulled out a chocolate bar.  Then I pulled out
a buck.  I offered them to him with my left hand, and held my right hand out to
take the teeth.  He nodded, and we traded.  I walked to the fence and threw the
teeth as far away as I could.

 “He will probably get
sick from the chocolate,” said the guard matter-of-factly.  “It was a bad
trade.”

I mentioned before that
all of us in Buzz Company had moments when we broke down, when we snapped.  I’d
had so many challenges throughout our tour, so many problems.  Right then,
anger surged through my entire body at the sound of that little midget kraut
talking all smug about the human being he helped torture.  I flashed back to
the first person I’d killed—that German on D-Day.  And Dieter, and the goddamn
cold of Belgium.  And the stench from the barracks was still on my clothes and
in my nose.  The stench of victims of the goddamn Nazis.  And I thought right
then that I would have that stench in my nose for the rest of my life—that I
wouldn’t ever get rid of it.  And every time I smelled it, I would see that
tooth seller’s tearful gray eyes weeping.  And it was all because of people
like this guard standing there by me.  He personified the whole German
leadership, and he represented all that was wrong with humanity.  I had come to
Europe to free us from evil.  And it stood before me right now.