Ordinary Heroes

  "As you were, gentlemen."

  O'Brien told me to go slow approaching the fire. These men were familiar with the hazards of frostbite.

  "Captain," said O'Brien. "Can I ask you a question? You ever heard of a fella getting frostbite of the dick? Collison's worried that his dick will fall off."

  I'd never heard of that. I thought back to high-school biology and explained that what imperiled the extremities was their distance from the heart.

  "I told you, Collison," said O'Brien. "You're so dumb, you know what they call the space between your ears? A tunnel. You know what you got in common with a beer bottle, Collison? You're both empty from the neck up."

  Collison, on his haunches, looked toward the fire as O'Brien laid into him. I suspected that O'Brien was giving him the treatment for my benefit, after last night.

  "Take it easy, O'Brien. Save a few cracks for the rest of the war."

  Saved by an unexpected source, Collison looked my way briefly.

  "How's he even remember all these? I can't never remember no jokes."

  "That's because you're a marching punch line, Collison," said O'Brien.

  Meadows came in then to send the squad back to their holes. First Squad was on the way up. I crept closer to the fire and Meadows stayed with me a minute to warm his wire-framed glasses, which were frosting over. The little red dents stood out beside his nose.

  "So, Bill, what was your racket before this started?"

  "Me? I was on hard times, Captain, if you want to know the truth of it. I grew up in California, close to Petaluma. My folks were farmers but I got myself down to Frisco, worked as a longshoreman and made a good buck, too. But there was no work come '34 or '35. It didn't go right between me and my wife, then. I was drinking. Finally, she took herself and my two boys back to Denver where her people was from, put up with her folks. I just started hopping freight cars, looking for work. But there were lots of chappies like me sittin 'round fires in every freight yard in every city. Those were bad times, Captain. I was first in line at the Army recruiter when the mobilization started in '40. This damn war was a piece of luck for me. If I live through it. Wife remarried but it didn't work out and she's all lovey-dovey now when she writes me. I really want to see those boys. Oldest is sixteen. I sure as hell hope this war ends before he can join up. I don't know how I'd keep my senses if I had to worry about him being in this mess, too. You think it's gonna be over soon?"

  I'd thought so, just a week ago. At the moment it looked as if there was more fight in the Nazis than any of us had expected. Still, it seemed important to tell the men I believed victory was not far off. Meadows looked at me hard to see if I really believed it.

  I ate a cracker out of today's K ration and decided to save the rest for morning. I caught two hours' sleep, then warmed up again in the pump house before my watch. The men of Masi's platoon, too small to be divided into squads, began filing in. Meadows and I were on the same schedule and headed out together.

  "Gee whiz," said Meadows, putting his gloves on again, "how do you figure they took a fella from California and sent him to the European theater?"

  "Man, you ain't countin on the Army to make any sense, are you, First Sergeant?" asked one of the men coming in.

  We all laughed. I stood outside listening to my men for a minute as their talk rose into the night through the chimney.

  "You figurin it's some bad luck we're here rather than the Pacific?"

  "Lot warmer in the Pacific, I know that."

  "Every letter I get from my brother," said someone else, "is about how damn hot it is. But it's not how that's a blessing or nothing. They get every kind of rash. He says he got stuff growin on him, he didn't even know a man's skin could turn that color. And a boy's got to have some absolute luck to get himself a drink. Ain't like here in Europe with all this wine and cognac, nothing like that. Best that happens is somebody with an in with the quartermaster gets hold of some canned peaches and sets himself up a still, makes something tastes like varnish. Guys is drinkin so much Aqua Velva, quartermaster's never got any in stock. And they-all's fighting among themselves to get it."

  "But it ain't cold there."

  "Yeah, but I'd rather get killed by a white man, I really would."

  "Now what kind of fucking sense does that make?" another asked.

  "That's how I see it. I ain't askin you to feel that way, Rudzicke."

  "Don't be a sorehead."

  "Just how I feel is all. Think it would be a little easier to go out like that. Just don't want the last face I see to be brown."

  "I can understand that," said another man.

  "I tell you another thing," said the first man, called Garns, "them Japs is savages. They're like the wild Indians, eat a man's heart. They think we're some inferior species like monkeys. They really do."

  "They're the ones look like monkeys. Don't they? The Krauts at least, they'll treat you okay if they take you prisoner. Buddy of mine wrote me how he was fighting on this island, Japs caught one of their men. They sliced this guy's backbone open while he was still alive, then they poured gunpowder in there, and lit the poor son of a bitch. Can you imagine? And the rest of his platoon, they're hidin out and listening to this shit."

  There were plenty of hideous stories from the Pacific. I'd heard several times that the Japs cut the ears off living prisoners.

  "Yeah, but its warm," said someone. That drew a laugh.

  "I don't figure war's much good wherever you are," somebody else said.

  "You hear about these Polynesian dames. Buddy wrote me they landed in a couple of places, girls didn't even have no shirts on when they got there. And they fuck sort of like saying hello."

  "Ain't no women fuck like saying hello. Ain't no woman do that lest she's gettin somethin out of it. My daddy tole me that and I ain't never seed how he was wrong.

  "Yeah, but I still hear these dames in the Pacific, they're something else. This buddy said one of these dolls, she could pick up a silver dollar with her you know what. Finally, somebody got the idea of taking out his business and laying the dollar on there and this girl she took up both. That musta been a sight."

  "You think it's true what they say?"

  "How's that?"

  "That the Nazis travel with whores. They bring them along."

  "Sounds like Nazis."

  "Yeah, we're goddamn Americans. We believe in freedom. The freedom not to get laid."

  Meadows came crunching back through the snow. He gave me a wink, then opened the door to tell the men to keep it down.

  "Krauts are still there," he said.

  When I left, a soldier named Coop Bieschke was carving his name in a copper beech about halfway to my guard position. He'd been at it both nights, using up his sleeping time for this enterprise. I thought to ask him what was so important, but I wasn't sure Coop could explain it. Maybe he was planning to come back here after the war ended, or perhaps he wanted his people to know the spot where he'd died.

  Maybe he simply hoped to leave a mark on the earth that was definitively his. I watched him at work with his jackknife, oblivious to me and everything else, then continued up the hill.

  After guard, I returned to the pump house, then rushed back to our foxhole before my boots could freeze again, placing them under my legs, in the hopes that my body warmth would keep them from hardening overnight. It was a wasted effort. When I woke up, my pants legs had actually frozen together and it was a struggle even to get back on my feet.

  The morning of December 24 was cloudless and our Air Corps was in the sky not long after first light. As the formations of bombers, and the P-47s to protect them, roared overhead, my men waved from inside their foxholes. The German antiaircraft was intense, especially as our planes penetrated German territory. We could see the red trails of the AA rising, and several times aircraft suddenly becoming a star of flame. But the ranks of bombers and supply planes kept appearing for nearly five hours, vapor trails behind each motor, making the sky look a little like a
plowed field. The escorts weaved up and down, on the lookout for German fighters, while the chutes on the supply drops continued to unfurl in the skies near Savy. Occasionally, when the wind died down, we could hear the rumble of the trucks fetching the medicine and food and ammunition back into Bastogne.

  The men remained in their holes, but now with the camouflage, I was able to move out every hour or so to check our positions. I dashed through the woods, wrapped in a tablecloth, with a linen napkin knotted beneath my chin like my grandmother's babushka. When I ran up to their holes, several soldiers looked at me and said, "Trick or treat."

  For the most part, I was in the hole with Biddy, trying to tell myself that I had borne the cold yesterday, so I could make it today. Today would be easier, I told myself, because now I knew there would be a fire in the pump house later. But perhaps that made it worse, since I could recall now what it felt like to be warm.

  Every hour, I lit a cigarette. In the interval, I took to sniffing the odor of the tobacco on my gloves. I couldn't understand the odd comfort it seemed to bring me, until I thought of Gita Lodz and the strong scent of her hair and clothing. I wondered if I'd ever see her again. Or if I cared to. Then I asked myself the same thing about Grace. And my parents. If I had to choose only one of them to be with last, who would it be?

  "Lord, Biddy," I said suddenly, "doing nothing but standing in this hole and thinking is enough to make a man stark raving mad."

  He grunted as a form of agreement.

  "I wonder if we'd be better off if the Germans just came and we got it over with.,, "Captain, you don't want to say that. Take it from me.

  I asked him to tell me about Omaha Beach.

  "I don't know, Captain. It ain't nothing like whatever we-all gonna get ourselves into here. The thing of D-Day was the size of it. I was there D plus one. And it was war everywhere, sir. Them battleships was behind us firing at the Germans on the cliffs, and the Germans was shooting down. Our bombers was up above and the Kraut AA batteries were roaring. And you had thousands of soldiers running up that beach, shooting whatever there was to shoot at. It was fighting everywhere, men giving battle cries, and all that moaning and screaming of the wounded. When the troop carrier dropped us and we sloshed up through the water there, it was red as a stop sign from the blood, and I couldn't see how we'd ever get to the rendezvous point. There were bodies all over. You couldn't pick a straight line up that beach without tromping on the dead. And each step, I looked at them and thought: This here is my last step, the next one, it's going to be me. When I got my squad assembled, I turned back and I realized it was just like I'd imagined it. I'd imagined this my whole life."

  "War, Biddy?"

  "No, sir. Hell. It was the devil's hell, all right. Sitting in church, having the preacher tell me where the sinners was gonna find their ugly selves, and thinking so hard about it, that was what I'd seen. The banging, the screaming, the pain. Even the smells of the bombs and the artillery rounds. That's a saying, sir, you know, war is hell, but it's a truth. The souls screaming and sinking down. And the skies falling. When I get to thinking about it, sometimes I wonder if I'm not dead after all." He shook his head hard as if to empty it of thought. "I don't like going on about this, Captain."

  I told him I understood. He was silent for a second.

  "You know, Captain, about Martin?"

  "What about him?"

  "Men like that who've been at war for years now. I understand why they keep doin it. Because it's the truth, sir. It's hell. And it's the truth, too. Ain't nothin else so real. Can you figure what I'm saying?"

  I couldn't really. But the idea frightened me as much as the thought of the Germans waiting to attack.

  We were an hour from sunset when there was a little aimless putt-putting overhead. My first thought was that it was German buzz bombs, the V-is that I'd heard about, but when I got my binoculars, I followed the sound to a little single-engine plane. The field telephone growled at once. It was Meadows, telling me the aircraft was a Nazi scout and that we should yell to all the men to get their tablecloths on and hunker deep in their holes. But about five minutes later, the plane circled overhead again. When I heard the engine nearing for a third pass, I knew we'd been observed. I raised Meadows.

  Any question he's seen us?"

  "No, sir."

  "Well then, let's try to shoot him down."

  "We don't have bullets to waste, Captain."

  We agreed that the Browning crews had the only real chance of hitting a . Target at five hundred feet and we both dashed forward to the strongpoints to issue that instruction. It seemed to take the three-man crews forever to get the unwieldy machine guns elevated, but even at that, one round took a piece out of the plane's left wing, before the craft climbed out of range.

  I called Algar.

  "Shit," he said. "Any chance the plane didn't make it back?"

  There was a chance, but it was still in the sky when we'd last seen it. If it made it, we'd be sitting ducks for the Kraut artillery. We had to move out, but not until we had another defensive position as good as the one we were giving up. Algar also wanted to see if our recon had provided any clues about where the Germans were in the woods. Putting down the phone, I thought the same thing all my men would. Another position meant giving up the pump house.

  Algar was back to me in a few minutes. Both intelligence and operations thought that the Germans were repositioning much of their artillery in light of the morning overflights. If so, they were probably not ready yet to fire on us, and both G-2 and G-3 doubted that the Germans would risk a barrage at night, which would pinpoint their guns' new positions to air surveillance, inviting bombing at dawn.

  Its your choice," Algar said about staying put for the moment. "We'll reposition you by morning, either way."

  This was my first real decision as a commander. For the sake of the pump house and the fire, I decided to remain here, but in the next thirty minutes, every creak of the trees in the wind seemed to be the first sound of incoming shells. I stood up in the hole, examining the skies, hoping to smell out the artillery like a pointer. The field telephone rang as soon as darkness began to settle over us. It was Meadows.

  "Captain, a lot of these men, they'd like to get that fire going. It's Christmas Eve, sir. They want to have a little service. I guess they figure that if God's gonna protect them, it has to be tonight." I gave permission.

  Having gone last to the pump house the night before, I was entitled to an early trip and I took it, before the prayer service began. As Meadows had predicted, coming up with the table linens had broken the ice for me with some of the men, and I found one of Biddy's squads in there anyway, troops better disposed to me for his sake. A lanky Texan, Howler, had taken a place on a stone near the fire, and looked up at me as I warmed my hands beside him.

  "Captain, you married?"

  "Engaged," I said, although life in a foxhole made that seem more chimerical every minute. Home was so far away.

  "Pretty," Howler allowed, when I found my wallet. "This here is my Grace," he said.

  "Grace. Why, that's my girl's name, too." We marveled at the coincidence. His Grace was sunny and buxom. In the snapshot, her hair was flowing behind her in a wind that also formed her dress against her.

  "Fine-looking."

  "She shore is," he said. "Shore is. Only thing is, that works on my mind. You think your Grace is gonna wait for you?"

  Eisley and I had bunked at the Madame's with two different fellows in Nancy whose women had Dear Johned them. I wondered how it would feel, if Grace got some intimation of my fling with Gita and abandoned me. I'd excused myself because of the excesses of war, but what if she didn't? Grace had two suitors left at home, boys she had been going with before me, one a 4-F because of a glass eye, and the other running a factory critical to the war effort. Now and then, when I listened to men like Howler worry that their gals could two-time them, the idea that Grace might take up with one of these boys would pierce me like an arrow, and then,
like an arrow pass through. I did not believe she would do it. It was that simple. Boredom, longing, loneliness--even jealousy and anger--were not forces capable of conquering Grace's virtue. Until I met Gita, I might have called it principle. But even by Gita's view, even if she were correct that every man and woman was a story they had made up about themselves and tried to believe, that was Grace's--that she was a person of virtue so lightly borne that it did not really touch the earth. She could never do that to me. Because, in the process, she would destroy herself.

  "I hope so," I answered.

  "Sitting out here, it kinda gets in my mind that she can't possibly wait for me. She got any sense, she'd know I'm three-quarters of the way to dead anyhow, being out here surrounded. And likely to come back with some piece of me missin, if I make it. Why should she wait? There all those 4-Fs and smart guys and USO commandos at home, makin good money 'cause there ain't many men left. Why shouldn't a dame get herself a beau?"

  I still had the picture in my hand.

  "She doesn't look like the kind of girl to do that, Hovler."

  "I hope not. I'd hate to live through all this just to come home to a broken heart. I don't know what I'd do. I'd mess her up, I think." The thought made him so unhappy that he left the fire and went back to his hole.

  At 9:0o p. M., a jeep came creeping up the road. I'd been summoned into town to see Algar. He was at the same desk where I had met him, now trimmed out with pine boughs. His pipe was in hand, but I could tell from the aroma that he'd been reduced to filling it with tobacco from cigarettes.

  "Merry Christmas, David." He offered his hand. He and his staff had been contemplating my company's situation and the way it fit into the overall picture. Creeping ever closer, the Krauts had issued an edict today to McAuliffe to surrender and he'd reportedly said "Nuts" in reply. There was reason to think he'd made a good decision. Patton's forces were said to be advancing down the Assenois road on Bastogne now, and more than ',zoo loads of supplies had fallen by parachute today. As a result, General staff was convinced that the Germans had no choice but to mount an all-out attack tomorrow.