Ordinary Heroes (34 page)

Chapter
21.

COMBAT

12/24/44--At the front

Dear Grace--

I am writing to wish you and your family a wonderful Christmas holiday. I imagine all of you together, cozy around a fire, but perhaps that's just to comfort myself, because right now I'm colder than I have ever been in my life. At the moment, I'm convinced we should honeymoon in Florida and I am trying to warm myself up by imagining that.

I assume news of the German offensive has reached you, but the commanders here are encouraging. This is magnificent, scenic country, tremendous hills of trees, deep with snow, and beautiful little towns nestle
d b
etween, but combat has blown many of them to smithereens. I arrived as part of the investigation I have mentioned now and then, and given the circumstances have actually been pressed into combat as the leader of a rifle company. Finally, a chance to put that training to good use! At last I'll have a little story or two to tell you and our children.

Please give my warm regards to your family. I assume you will be praying tonight. I'm not much of a prayer-sayer myself, so please put in a few extra for me, fortissimo. I want all the help we can get.

Well, that's enough blabbing for tonight. Remember I love you, darling.

David

At 2:00 a
. M
., we moved out on the route the scout team had traced along the edge of the forest, following their tracks in the snow.

Orders went down the line in a whisper. "Scouts out first in each squad. Patrol discipline. Silence. Move fast and low. Don't lose sight of the man in front of you.

In all, we advanced about four hundred yards to another incline on the eastern side of the road, settling in a small notch in the forest. It was not as good a position as the one we had deserted. We wer
e a
bout thirty yards from the roadside here, and even when we fanned out, we could not really see well to the north. A small creek was east of us, however, a good defensive perimeter. It must have been fed by an underground spring, because it was still running, even in the intense cold.

There had been no prior encampment here, which meant the men had to dig in through the snow and the frozen ground. It was hard work and we agreed we'd assign four soldiers to each hole, and let them sleep in shifts. Bidwell and I were still shoveling with our entrenching tools when Masi came up. He turned his angle-necked flashlight on to show me a German ration can. There was no rust on it, and the streaks of the meat that had clung to the side hadn't frozen yet.

"There was a pile of shit no more than ten yards away from it, Cap. Hot enough to have melted a little hole in the snow, and still soft when I put a stic
k t
o lt.

I took the can to Meadows.

"Where are they?" I asked Bill.

"Back there somewhere," he said, pointing to the woods half a mile off "Probably just following up on the scout plane, Captain. Good thing we changed position."

I wasn't as confident. The Krauts were paying a lot of attention to us, if they didn't intend to come down this road. We agreed we'd send out scouts a
t f
irst light to follow the tracks and get a fix on the German forces. We also doubled tonight's guard. That was better anyway, given our shortage of deluxe accommodations.

Despite my concerns, I was calm. I seemed to have simply worn out my nervous system, subsiding to the resignation true soldiers acquire. If it happens, it happens. I slept for an hour or so, until heavy booms woke me, and I saw the light dancing up from Bastogne. The Germans were bombing there, giving General McAuliffe a Christmas present after the warm greetings he had sent them. The air assault went on about twenty minutes.

I fell off again before Biddy shook me awake for guard duty an hour later. I had been dreaming of home. There, it was the usual chaos. I was knocking at the front door and could not get in. But through the window I had a clear view of my parents and my sister and brother around the kitchen table. My mother, stout, voluble, enveloping, was ladling soup, and through the glass I could somehow enjoy the warmth and fragrance from the bowls she placed on the table. When the image returned to me now, I emitted the minutest moan.

"What?" asked Biddy. He was climbing into his bedroll. There was already some light in the sky, but we'd all been up most of the night. In the distance, the German artillery was pounding already. The Krauts were at work early.

I told him I had been dreaming of home.

"Don't do that," he said. "Best I can, sir, I try to never let my mind go runnin off in that direction. Just makes a body feel badly." That had been Martin's reasoning with Gita.

"You figure you'll go back home, Biddy? I mean afterward. You know. To stay?" I'd been deciding whether to ask this question for the last couple of days.

You mean, am I gonna go back home and be myself? Who I was? Or go any other place and be who I am to you?"

That was what I meant. His big body swelled up and deflated with a long sigh.

"Captain, I been thinking on that so long, I'm just plain sick of it. Truth, Cap, I don't mind this here at all, not being every white man's nigger. It's okay--most of the time. Over there in England, lot of those English girls preferred the colored soldiers, said they was more polite, and I was trying to make time with one and she slapped my cheek when I said I was a Negro. Aside from that, it's been all right.

"But I can't go home and not claim my own. I can't go walking down the street pretending like I don't know the fellas I do, men I played ball with and chased around with, I can't do that. That boy I was having words with last week--that's what it was about, and I wanted to crawl into a hole after you lit into me. I can't hardly do that. And I can't turn tai
l o
n the folks who love me neither. I'll go back. That's what I reckon. But no matter what, Captain, it ain't gonna feel right."

"It won't make any difference, Biddy. You go back, get some more schooling for your photography. It won't make any difference."

"Captain, you don't really believe that."

"I do indeed, Biddy. I know what it's been like. But we can't take up the same stupidity now. Here we've had Southerners and Northerners, rich and poor, immigrants from every nation, fighting and dying for this country. People can't go back home and tell themselves we're all different when we're not. You be your own man, Biddy, nobody's ever going to judge you, white or colored."

"Captain," he said. He stopped to think, then started again. "Captain, I want you to know something. You're a good man, all right, you truly are. You're as straight and honest an officer as I've met. And you ain't hincty--you don't get up on yourself too much. But Captain, you don't know what the hell you're talking about now. That's the last we-all gonna say on this."

I had no chance to argue further because the first artillery shell came wailing in then. It landed about two hundred feet away, rocking the earth and igniting a plume of flame that irradiated the near darkness. I rose, still without my boots, and hollered for everyone to get down, just in time to witness another detonation that hurled a private at the perimeter into a thick tree, shoulder first. It was Hovler, the Texan who'd worried about his girl stepping out on him. The sheer force threw his arms and legs behind his back so hard that they wrapped around the trunk, before he slithered down in dead collapse.

What followed was twice the intensity of the TOT barrages. This was not random shelling at thirty-yard intervals from converted light AA or mortars. This was fire from bigger German guns, the 88s and even the heavy loads of Nebelwerfers, all precisely targeted and seeming to cover every inch of the forest incline we occupied. On impact, the ordnance spit up flames and snow and soil in the dark like giant Roman candles. Slumping back, tying my boots, listening to the outcry all around me, I realized that the Germans knew exactly where we were, despite our move. The earth rocked and things went flying the way they did in the newsreels of tornadoes--rifles, soldiers, and tree trunks zooming through the air in the orange light of the explosions and the resulting fires. Chunks of steel sizzled as they sank into the trees, from which smoke, like blood, leaked forth. But the noise, as ever, was the worst of it, the whistling metal raining down, the titanic boom of the shells, and the seconds in between when the panicked voices of my men reached me, shrieking in anguish, yelling for medics, begging for help. Peeking out, I saw direct hits on two holes a
t t
he far perimeter and the soldiers, already dead, flying toward me. In the uneven light, one of them, Bronko Lukovic, the poker champion, seemed to break apart in descent. He landed twenty yards from me on his back. His arms and legs were spread as if he was floating in a pool in the sun, but his head was gone, a bloody mess sprouting from his neck like the teased ribbon on a gift box.

"Move 'em out," I started screaming. I clambered from the hole, waving my arms, giving orders to Biddy and Masi, and Forrester. Bill Meadows, unaccountably, was nowhere to be found. I located him, blundering around in his hole on his hands and knees.

"Lost my specs, Captain, I'm blind without those specs." I jumped in, groping with him for an instant, then climbed back out, running from hole to hole to get the men in his platoon moving. By now I knew that if we didn't go, most of us would be blown to bits, and the remainder killed in the ground assault that was sure to follow. Even so, a couple of soldiers had lost control of themselves in the relentless bombardment. In one hole, a private named Parnek was on his knees, sobbing hysterically, as he tried to claw a hole in the frozen ground with his fingers. Another man in his squad, Frank Schultz, wouldn't leave because he couldn't find his helmet.

"Where's my hat," he yelled, "where's my hat?" I grabbed him by the shoulders to tell him it was on his head. He touched it and fled.

With the creek behind us, we could only go toward the road, and as we tumbled off the incline, I could hear the roar of tanks approaching. My men dashed forward, including the wounded who were mobile. O'Brien, the wiseacre from Baltimore, was hobbling behind me. His whole lower leg was gone, even the trousers, and he was using his MI as a crutch. As we broke into the clearing, I was following Biddy and his platoon, and his troops were suddenly falling to their bellies in front of me. My instinct was to order them back to their feet until I found myself facing the black mouth of a 75mm tank gun aimed at us from no more than one hundred yards. As I crushed myself against the snow, a rocket went right over our heads, exploding in the midst of the holes we'd just left. Most of Meadows' platoon was still back there and I could hear the shrieking. On our left, a machine gun began barking, joined almost immediately by rifle fire from the foxholes we'd abandoned last night across the way. There were two tanks in the road now, both Mark IVs that had been painted white, their big guns flashing and recoiling as they spit shells into the woods. About fifteen infantrymen were riding on each tank and firing their rifles at us.

It was havoc. Fortunato was on his feet, looking on like a spectator, with the SCR-3oo on his back. Who had given the radio to the man who couldn't speak English? Several of our soldiers were on the ground, doing nothing. "Shoot," I yelled, and raised my Thompson. I was sure no one could hear me, but on one of the tanks, a grenadier was struck and pitched forward into the snow. Ten feet to my left, Rudzicke, who'd wanted to sing Christmas carols, was hit in the back. The bullet left a clean hole that looked like it had been sunk by a drill bit. From the way he jerked forward, I was afraid he'd been shot by one of my troops, but the Germans had fallen upon us from all directions and the men had no idea even where to aim. Behind us, in the woods, grenades exploded, and in the fires burning back there, I recognized Volksgrenadiers, regular infantry who'd been able to sneak close in white snow-combat suits. They were cleaning out those of Meadows' men who'd remained in their foxholes. Amid the machine-gun and small-arms fire, there was a great jumble of voices, buddies crying out directions, but also men screaming in pain and terror. Stocker Collison teetered by, blood-soaked hands over his abdomen. I had the impression that he was holding a cauliflower against his uniform until I realized that the blue-white mass was his intestines.

Biddy had his bazooka team taking aim at the tanks, but they got off no more than one round before a grenade landed in their midst. I wanted Masi to return with his platoon to attack the grenadiers in the trees to our rear, but he went down as soon as I reached him. It was a leg wound, but a bad one. Blue-black blood surged forth with every heartbeat. He cast me a desperate look, but by the time I thought of applying a tourniquet he had fallen backward. There were two final feeble squirts and then it stopped completely.

When the crossfire had started, probably two-thirds of the company had emerged from the woods, strung out over forty yards. At least half had gone down in no more than a minute. Amid the great tumult, I turned full circle. The sun was coming up and in the first hard light the world was etched with a novel clarity, as if everything visible was outlined in black. It was like that moment of impact I'd felt once or twice in a museum, but more intense, for I was beholding the gorgeousness of living.

Somehow, in that instant, I understood our sole option. Algar had told me not to surrender, a point proven by the slaughter behind me in the woods. Instead I dashed and rolled among the men, yelling one command again and again, "Play dead, play dead, play dead." Each of them fell almost at once, and I too tumbled down with my face in the snow. After a few minutes the firing stopped. I could hear the explosive engine roar of Panzers thundering by and orders being shouted in German. Not surprisingly, Algar seemed to have been good to his word. The rocking blast of mortars was nearby. I gathered that Algar had brought his armor up fast and had apparently engaged the Panzers a mile farther down, where machine-gun fire and the boom of the tank rockets was audible. Near us, I could make out different engines, probably armored troop carriers, into which the unit that had killed most of my men seemed to climb to join the battle up the road. Even as the shouts sailed off, two grenades exploded in the broad clearing where we lay, rattling the earth and leaving more men screaming.