The Rising Tide: A Novel of World War II (42 page)

T
he paratroop regiments had been created in the spring and summer of 1942, and from the arrival of the first volunteers, the men who endured the training at Fort Benning, Georgia, absorbed the pride and displayed a swagger that said they were America’s elite soldiers. The pride was earned, since nothing in army boot camp could have prepared them for the kind of rigorous physical experience the paratroop commanders put them through. The training seemed to border on brutality, and a sizable percentage of the men who volunteered for the duty were incapable of completing the regimen. There was no condemnation for the ones who quit. They simply went away, transferred back to the units they had come from, or other places where they might be better equipped to serve. But those who completed the training, who made their required jumps, were instantly part of something unique. Not only were they among the most physically fit men in the army, but they did something no other soldier, sailor, or Marine had ever done before: they jumped out of airplanes.

Colonel Jim Gavin led his men by example, jumping with them still, suffering through the injuries that were a natural result of a man’s body colliding unnaturally with all forms of hard ground. The other officers did the same, Scofield of course, and the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Art Gorham. The officers’ willingness to endure the same punishment as their men had proven their worth and had given them the kind of respect no one earns by rank alone.

Jesse Adams had been with the 505th from the beginning, had slugged his way up the short ladder to the rank of sergeant. Adams was a short, trunklike man, wide shoulders and a strong back. He had a misleading smile, seemed at first glance to be overly friendly, charming, a man to offer a quick slap on the back. But the officers had seen something else, a streak of iron, Adams demonstrating a surprising lack of fear about leaping out of aircraft. It was something the sergeants had to have, an icy hardness that would put them above the men they trained beside, something that commanded instinctive respect and unthinking obedience. It didn’t hurt if his men believed that Sergeant Adams was a little crazy. He enjoyed the discipline, turning soft men into hard fighters, but had never particularly enjoyed the way the army expected him to enforce it on his men. Like so many sergeants in every army that had ever taken the field, yelling into scared faces was part of the job, education by repetitious browbeating. But in the planes, when a man stood in the open doorway and faced the wind and the terror of falling, Adams knew that shouts and curses served no purpose at all. You couldn’t shout a man into bravery, you could only shame him. He didn’t want men following him into combat only because they were too ashamed to be anywhere else.

Adams had come into the army just after Pearl Harbor, joining the great wave of recruits who answered the urgency of the country’s call. He came from a family of hunters and so was perfectly comfortable shooting a rifle, and like most, he expected to join the infantry. With so much attention being focused on the threats from the Japanese, he also expected, like most, to go to the Pacific. As he slogged his way through basic training, his strong body grew stronger, and rather than complain about the physical requirements, he attacked the courses and exercises, and grew stronger still. After long weeks of being shaped from recruits into soldiers, the men were brought together in an old hangar, sat down to hear the words of a captain, an officer no one had seen before. The captain spoke in somber tones, as though sharing a secret, that if a man considered himself the best, the army needed him in a new place. When the captain began to speak of airplanes, the soldiers perked up, but then, he spoke of parachutes, and the officer was met with mumbling curses and low laughter. But Adams didn’t laugh. From his first day in army boots, he had wanted to prove to someone, anyone, that he was the best. Best
what
didn’t matter, best man, best soldier, best fighter. He was already the strongest, most athletic man in his company, and if the army wanted him to prove it by jumping out of airplanes, Adams wouldn’t just ignore the opportunity. Several men from the company put their signature on the captain’s sign-up sheet. Adams had been the first in line.

H
is great-grandfather had moved the family out of the Carolinas after the Civil War, had settled the deep Southwest, and Adams spent his earliest years in southwestern New Mexico, the rugged desert country west of the Rio Grande. His father worked the copper mines, had been matter-of-fact about soldiers, considered them fodder for someone else’s machine, had talked in loud boasts about the noble life as a miner, hard men producing hard metal. Jesse heard it all through his childhood, that there was value in his father’s work that Jesse might never achieve himself. His father lectured him, dismissing the boy’s own dreams, dismissing talk of big cities and careers. Jesse gave up trying to convince his father of anything at all, could not fight the long-winded speeches, how the mines created the backbone that gave America its industrial power.

After so many years, his father’s words had numbed him, but the images did not, and as he grew older, he saw more of the reality of the miner’s life. Each evening they walked from the stark, rocky hills, toward the rows of small houses, exhausted, dirty men, struggling to find the will to make that same walk the next day. He watched his father as well, held on to the image of the man coming toward him across the dreary, open ground in front of the small house. Once in a while, the boy would see a smile, but more often his father would ignore him, passing by, his face frozen with glum despair, his thoughts far off in some distant place. Jesse would know there would be no conversation, nothing about Jesse’s arithmetic test, no chance his father would toss the baseball. The only pride he saw came from the man’s bragging, and Jesse began to understand that the exaggeration was some kind of tonic for the man. If there was any romance to his father’s life in the mine, there was none at home. At least once a week, when the supper plates were in the sink, the shouting would start, broiling fights that seemed to tear the house apart. The shouting always began with his father, but his mother would not shy away, would answer the challenge, their voices escalating into a screaming hell that would exhaust itself long after Jesse and his younger brother had tried to go to bed. The next day, the routine would begin again, his father gone early, the two boys eating a silent breakfast, prepared by a woman whose exhausted affection was preserved only for her children.

Jesse had a bond with his younger brother even now, Clayton surprising everyone by joining the Marines. Clayton was somewhere in the Pacific, and once Jesse had boarded the ship for Africa, he knew there would be no letters. As boys they’d shared the experience of parents who seemed only to despise each other, but as he grew older, Jesse began to hear about other families, dirty secrets spilling out from teenage boys who no longer feared what their fathers could do. The streets would often echo with furious fights, and Jesse always assumed it was just like the horrible endurance matches he and Clayton hid from in their room. But the other boys told stories that were far worse, drunken brutality, terrifying violence, visits from the sheriff. Jesse realized the blessing in all his parents’ shouting. His father never hit his mother, never hit any of them. The fights weren’t about brutality or violence. It was one man frustrated with his own life, grappling with a woman’s unwillingness to accept that she would never have
joy,
that neither of them had any reason to look in a mirror and smile.

Jesse was twenty when the war started, twenty-one when he went to his parents’ house for the last time. He stood outside the screen door with a bus ticket and a mangled suitcase, had planned it so he did not have to see his father at all, the man already making it clear that his boys had turned out far more useless than even he had predicted. But his mother surprised him, surprised both of her boys with tearful thankfulness that they would leave this place, would not end up in the mines.

Clayton was already gone, had barely waited for his eighteenth birthday. Jesse had stayed closer, protective, had worked for a small construction company owned by the big mine. The work was meaningless, but it gave him a place of his own, and the long hours gave him a strong back. When he finally left, to make the long walk to the bus depot, his mother was watching him from behind the rusty screen door. There were few words, no tears, just a final wish from her, surprising him. They were simple words, filled with her own kind of emotion, a strange and urgent desperation.

“Be a hero.”

T
he truck rolled slowly, lurched and swerved, the men cursing. Adams was close beside Scofield, had not been surprised that the captain would choose to ride in the big truck, instead of one of the available jeeps. The truck bounced again, more curses, and Scofield said, “You can all just shut the hell up. The driver’s dodging holes in the road. You rather he slam straight into them? We break an axle, we’ll all be walking home.”

“Sir…”

Adams looked toward shapes in the darkness, the voice, knew it was Fulton, the young New Englander. Scofield said, “What is it, soldier?”

“We gonna get back to camp soon, sir? I got the trots. Don’t think I can make it much farther, sir.”

“You’ll hold it until I tell you to drop your pants, soldier!”

After a silent pause, Fulton said, “I’ll try, sir.”

Adams could hear Scofield’s breathing, simmering anger, and Scofield said, “Son of a
bitch.
That’s all we need. One more for the doctor.”

Adams knew the captain’s anger wasn’t directed at Fulton. It was everyone’s shared agony, so many men suffering from intestinal problems that made any long journey a potential hell for the man himself and anyone near him. It was a common ailment, the camps in the desert infested with flies, flies in their food, flies dead in any uncovered water. The inevitable result was dysentery. Once the 505th had built their camps at Oujda, the usual training had been replaced by the necessity to stay healthy, but the army could not prevent a spreading wave of sickness. Keeping vermin out of their food was one problem, and it was essential that the men drink enormous amounts of water. But dead flies or not, the local well water was especially foul and had to be treated with lots of chlorine. It was just one more bit of misery for men who pitched their tents in a treeless frying pan of desert, who still had no idea why they were in Africa and no hint of what their mission would be.

OUJDA, MOROCCO—JUNE 15, 1943

They continued to train, mostly daylight jumps, Gavin and his officers doing as much as they could to keep the regiment fit and ready. But the camp at Oujda offered no comforts, no recreation, nothing but sunburn, flies, and choking dust. As more and more of the men fell ill, training missions became useless, too many men simply unable to participate.

Adams sat low in his slit trench, the only cool spot he could find, tried to think of the right words for the letter. The sun was baking his brain, and even the cool earth on either side of him was suffocating. He stared at the scrap of dirty paper, the only words a scribble from his pencil:

Dear Mom,

Not a damned thing to tell you about. Yep, that oughta be a good letter. Make her feel her boy is doing his bit. Brag to the neighbors. Hey, Jesse doesn’t have the trots! Damned near the only man in the company! The town’ll throw her a parade.

He crumpled the paper in his rough hand, then thought better of it, cursed to himself, too valuable. Keep it for later. He straightened it out again, slipped it into a pants pocket, the pencil as well, pulled himself to his feet. The camp was on a chalky plain, tents lined up in neat rows, wide dirt avenues between them. Beside each tent was a narrow trench, the only protection they had if the Germans decided to make them a bombing target. He looked up, bright blue sky, squinted, a thin crust of dry sand digging into his face. No Germans today. They got better things to do than risk coming out here. And with the kind of shape we’re in, we’re not worth the bombs.

“Sergeant!”

He turned, saw two officers moving toward him, Scofield, and another man, a major, Gavin’s aide. Heads popped up around him, men huddled in the dusty shade of their own trenches, curious, the officers passing quickly by them. Adams pulled himself up to flat ground, stood straight, saluted, Scofield returning it.

“Orders have come in, Sergeant. Dawn tomorrow we’re moving out. Pass the word, get the gear stowed, get your squad ready. We’ll board trucks, first…” He stopped, had given Adams all the information Adams needed to know. “That’s all for now.”

The men began to climb up, gathering slowly, the two officers moving on. Adams liked Scofield immensely, the Texan who seemed to fit perfectly into Colonel Gavin’s system, young and fit, a man in his late twenties who bore no resemblance to the wet-eared
ninety-day wonders.

“We leaving, Sarge?”

“What’s that about, Sarge?”

Adams ran a hand over his filthy shirt, looked past the men, scanned the tent city that had been their home.