The Redhunter (8 page)

That night, after the game, Joe lay in bed. He pondered the day ahead. His first combat mission. The casualties in the bombing
campaign hadn’t been nearly as heavy as on the European front—they got their
Stars & Stripes
once a week and knew about the terrible attrition there. Still, last week they had lost four planes. Possibly this time tomorrow
he’d be …

No, no. That wouldn’t happen to Joe McCarthy, he thought. Well. He would see. He would, however, make certain to say his prayers.
He found himself resisting an answer to the question,
Joe, assuming you come back, and the colonel likes your pictures and says to you, McCarthy, I’m going to alter things, make
you a regular combat photographer instead of a photo analyst, would you be glad, or sorry?
He didn’t want to answer that question, so he tried hard to think of other things. It was very late when, finally, he dropped
off to sleep.

One year after Joe McCarthy flew his first combat duty, Private First Class Harry Bontecou faced combat for the first time,
in Belgium. One year later, First Lieutenant Harry Bontecou, AUS, 103rd Division, was serving as duty officer at Camp Plattling
in West Germany. It was after midnight, and he’d be on duty until six in the morning. Every half hour he would open the heavy
wooden door of the onetime farmhouse, converted now for army use, and expose his face to the bitter cold.

He thought back to the night one year ago. He was doing very different duty on his current assignment, to keep guard over
refugees from the Soviet military. Then, two weeks after graduating from basic infantry training at Camp Wheeler, Georgia,
Harry Bontecou had been in hard combat. Hitler was making his last major play. In mid-December the Germans chose the hilly
and wooded country of the Ardennes to launch their great counteroffensive. It came to be called, after the profile of the
German offensive across the Belgian border, the Battle of the Bulge. The lights that caught the eye that night weren’t the
moon’s glare and the stars, so vivid tonight. They were the traceries of machine-gun fire. Harry heard now in his memory the
confused and confusing orders of his platoon commander, Lieutenant Rothschild. Harry wasn’t absolutely certain whether the
order had commanded his squad to go forward from their improvised position
along the front, or to retreat to yesterday’s position. He checked quickly with Pete on his right, but he wasn’t sure; neither
was Reid, on his left.

Neither of the two commands, however contradictory, would have surprised Private Bontecou. In the last five days they had
reversed direction three times as the Nazis bore down … then gave way … then bore down again. The anxious and harassed Allies
fought with counter determination under the dogged leadership of General Anthony McAuliffe. The line went back and forward.
It was distorted, it zigzagged, and more than once the men being fired at dead ahead were fellow Americans; or fellow Germans.
One morning Harry had heard the captain on the radio barking out the message to headquarters that there was no way to hold
on, let alone repel the enemy, without massive air support quickly; instantly. Harry’s platoon did retreat, but two days later
they were back. Most of them. Not Jesse, nor Coady, Phillips, nor Stimson. Lieutenant Rothschild was gone.

This night Harry Bontecou stayed out in the cold long enough to revive the memory of that other cold a year ago. Intentionally,
he overdid it—waited in the cold until the features on his face cried out for relief, the fingers of his hands tingling with
pain. Only then would he duck back into the office and luxuriate in the same warmth he’d felt in the hospital, where he woke
after the operation on his shoulder.

A sound interrupted his reverie. The telephone rang. The memory clouds quickly disappeared. He picked up the receiver. The
duty sergeant’s voice came through. “Okay on Gate C, Lieutenant.”

“Lieutenant.” Lieutenant Bontecou. He mused. The only other Bontecou he knew of was lieutenant governor of New York State
and no relation. Harry allowed himself to recall the private pleasure and pride he had taken in the hospital when Major Autrey,
a thin smile on his face, brought him the special order. He had been awarded a battlefield promotion to second lieutenant.

He was well in six weeks, and by then they all knew that the Germans had lost the war. Late in a cold March afternoon he heard
the short-wave report—the Luftwaffe had run out of fighter planes to deploy against the advancing Allied armies. Why, oh why
doesn’t Hitler just—call it a day!
Jetzt ist Feierabend.
Now is quitting time. Harry was spending time with a German language book during the
long hours in the truck and at night in his pup tent with his flashlight. What
was
this loyalty to Hitler from the soldiers the Allies were killing and maiming every day? He pondered that question with searing
incredulity on April 8, when his division opened the gates of the Nazi extermination camp at Gotha, and he learned—and saw—what,
in addition to fighting wars on two fronts, was Hitler’s other major killing enterprise.

Now, decorated-in-combat First Lieutenant Bontecou was a camp guard. He looked up from his book. He was reading Boswell’s
Johnson,
received in the mail from his mother two days earlier and inscribed, “Darling Harry: This will shorten the long hours. Hint:
You can always find plenty to read that stands the test of time. This book has never been out of print since 1791, when first
published. This edition was published in 1926, the year you were born.”

His last day in New York before shipping out to combat duty had begun as usual, as expected. Dorothy Bontecou had given him
breakfast and was at the door just after eight, to leave for the subway and her job at the New York Public Library. That night
they would dine alone with the bottle of champagne his mother had spoken of; the next day he would go off to war.

On the matter of the information Harry needed, she told him to look in his father’s trunk in the office where he had worked
in their brownstone on the West Side. “Whatever the insurance company needs has to be there,” she called up from the door
before shutting it behind her. Harry walked over to his father’s dusty office, still crammed with books and papers, the big
Royal typewriter jutting out from one hollow of the desk. Harry sat down in his father’s chair to gather his thoughts. He
had odds and ends to attend to before leaving the country for the first—and last time? he permitted himself to wonder. He
had read attentively the morning paper giving the news of the bloody campaign in Belgium. With all that secrecy surrounding
his battalion’s movements, it was obvious that was where they were headed. But now he needed information on his father for
the army insurance form, his serial number in the national reserve. Well, that
was for later. Now, to the Metropolitan Museum to see the exhibit of modern Mexican art Miss Yglesias, his Spanish teacher
at high school, had warmly recommended in her telephone call yesterday. And he would pick up the course catalog at Columbia
and scan it voluptuously.

He lunched at the Automat near the museum and walked back to the house to search out the serial number, dating back to his
father’s college days. Harry climbed up to the room where his father had sequestered himself most of every day. He opened
the creaky trunk and saw what he had expected, great deposits of papers and envelopes. He flipped by what seemed thousands
of packets of poetry and lecture notes and lecture clippings and letters from poets and professors. And there, finally, was
a scrapbook of his dad’s years at Columbia, 1919 to 1923—he must have fingered this book before, because he remembered seeing
as a boy the photograph of his father posing earnestly as manager of the tennis team at Columbia. He spotted a folded sheet
of paper with a yellow sheet attached, a preprinted form with check marks here and there. Curious, he began reading the letter.
It was addressed to his father from a Dr. Homer Babbidge at Lenox Hill Hospital. The text was a single paragraph:

Dear Mr. Bontecou:

This last, enclosed, is the end of the line as far as medical science has taken us. There are no further laboratory tests
to take. Your sterility is, as originally diagnosed, a case of azoospermia, a congenital disorder.

Harry went cold. His eyes froze on the doctor’s signature. And then traveled, what seemed inch by inch, up to the top of the
page. The date was October 7, 1925.

A year before he was born.

He had begun to sweat as, mechanically, he continued his search for the national reserve number. He stayed seated on the floor,
his legs crossed, staring at the trunk. He couldn’t think what to do.

He looked over at the photograph of—No. It wasn’t his father. All that … stuff in the trunk. It belonged not to his father.
It was the … collection of … his mother’s husband. He would have to get used to that formulation. He didn’t know what to do.
He knew only
this: He needed right away to leave Eighty-seventh Street. Before his mother got back.

He packed quickly—not difficult for a soldier who, the following day, would embark on a troopship to the western front. The
note to his mother he scratched out on the kitchen table read:

Dear Mom,

Awful. Call from AA company commander’s office. Departure schedule moved up. Bad news on the fighting front, I guess. I have
to report to the Brooklyn Army Depot by 10
P.M.,
which means I have no time to lose. Will write the first day I get over.

Love, Harry

Would he have signed off with profuser signs of affection if he hadn’t opened the trunk? He supposed so. But she would surely
attribute the economy of his closing to the abruptness of his sudden recall, and to apprehension about the future.

Camp Plattling in postwar West Germany was hardly an extermination camp. But there were three thousand human beings in that
camp behind barbed wire, forbidden to leave. It was the responsibility of the 103rd Division, of which Harry was an officer,
to keep them there until the conquering lions settled the question, Where would they go?

Marshal Georgi K. Zhukov, speaking for no less than Joseph Stalin, had publicly insisted on June 29, 1945, that the Russians
among them were to be “repatriated.” Zhukov spoke of men (the women and children had been released) who had “treacherously
fled their duty.” Harry had seen no notice of the Zhukov demand. He was told of it by Major Chadinoff, the fiery regimental
doctor obsessed by the evil—“Yes, I mean
evil!
—”character of the fateful deliberations of the U.S./British command.

Plattling, along with a half dozen other U.S. Army camps, detained Soviet citizens who had run, walked, crawled, bribed, lied,
or persuaded friends/relations/bureaucrats to give them refuge from the Soviet army. Some had been captives of Hitler who
escaped. Most were refugees from the Soviet army. Hitler had run deep into
Soviet territory until he was stopped at Stalingrad. Behind him, over the six-hundred-mile stretch of territory he had overrun,
he left scores of thousands of prisoners. In the turmoil and cold and hungry desperation, many escaped the German camps and
made their way not to the east, to penetrate the fluctuating Nazi-Soviet war line, but instead went west, seeking relief both
from the native despot in Moscow and the German despot in Berlin. They were Ukrainians, Poles, East Germans: men fleeing by
whatever means the westbound Communist juggernaut, scurrying past the Polish-Soviet border into central Germany. Captain Pelikan
from G2 explained to the officers of Harry’s regiment at one of the weekly information sessions that Washington and London
were bound by promises made at the wartime Yalta and Potsdam conferences. The Geneva agreement of 1929 acknowledged a right
of prisoners of war to refuse repatriation, but these refugees were not protected formally because they were not in uniform.
It was widely predicted that Stalin would deal cruelly with the soldiers. Stalin didn’t need reasons to send millions to Gulag
and death. He had, this time around, reasons that satisfied him and everyone who surrounded him, who labored mightily to satisfy
Stalin. It was only left to General Eisenhower and General Montgomery, the principal military representatives of the United
States and Great Britain, to maneuver as they could. The sole instrument left to Allies reluctant to send the Russians back
home to possible torture and death was what Churchill had dubbed the “apparatus of delay.”

“They’re trying to find a way out,” Captain Pelikan explained. “Meanwhile, we have to keep them here.”

Harry wrote to his mother,

When they’re sent back, according to Doc Chadinoff, they’re declared either traitors for having a) pulled out of the Soviet
military, or b) dodged the Soviet draft. Or c) they are people who gave aid to the occupying enemy. Or d) they were Russian
prisoners of war who, under Nazi control, were exposed to dangerous ideas.

Whatever. They are enemies of the state and will be treated as such. Out of curiosity, Mom, is anybody over there talking
about these people? “ … What did you do in the war, Harry?” “Well, I helped win it and later made goddamn sure that every
Russian I was
in charge of would be returned to the Soviet Union. You see, the Russians had unfilled concentration camps and idle executioners.”
I sound bitter, Mom? Actually, we haven’t given up hope. Write your Congressman. Though I guess that won’t do much if Vito
Marcantonio is still Manhattan’s man in Congress. I can’t even remember whether in the last election our fellow voters reelected
Mr. Communist Party-liner. We’ll see.