But just then the firing coming from the Americans increases, and from the woods comes Geer with his BAR firing from his hip and Jack is just behind him.
Rio and Cat join in, and for a blessed moment the German machine gun is silent.
“Run!” Rio yells, and they all race pell-mell for the woods, with renewed fire zinging at their heels.
23
RIO RICHLIN—HÜRTGEN FOREST, NAZI GERMANY
“You what?” Lieutenant Horne is livid.
“I pulled out,” Rio says.
“Were you not aware, Sergeant, that I had ordered Sticklin to stay put?”
“It was a bit confusing,” Rio says, sidestepping the question.
“Did you or did you not know that I had ordered Sticklin to stand fast?”
If she lies and she’s caught there will be no help for her. But she can only be caught in the lie if survivors of the ambush come forward to challenge her. She is not one hundred percent sure, but she believes they will not.
“No, sir. Last thing I heard was Stick saying withdraw.”
“You’re a damned liar, Sergeant, and if you weren’t a woman I’d have you up before a general court-martial! Cowardice! Cowardice in the face of the enemy.”
“Sir, you were not there.” She says it levelly, uninflected, implying nothing.
“I was in command via radio, and I thought I had competent NCOs, not a pair of . . . of . . . women!”
Rio says nothing. But she looks plenty. She stares directly into his angry eyes, unflinching. After an uncomfortably long time she says, “Sir, we started out with twenty-nine GIs. We came home with sixteen. If we’d stayed, no one would have come home. And you’d be explaining to the captain and the colonel how you happened to not be there when your entire platoon was wiped out.”
Silence returns. She watches the calculations being done behind his eyes. He’s furious, and he’s a coward, but he’s not entirely stupid. He knows she’s right. She’s helped save his career by getting out with anyone.
“I’d bust you down to private right now if I had a single NCO to replace you with.”
“I would very much appreciate being a private, sir. Stafford is ready to step up, he’s a damned good soldier. And if not him, then I’m sure the Repple Depple can send us a three-striper.”
He snarls so ferociously she nearly recoils. “No time, sadly, Sergeant. We’re moving out.”
“Moving out?” She laughs in disbelief. “We just got our asses kicked. And we’ve been on the line since—”
“I don’t give a shit. We got orders for all hands on deck. They’re rounding up cooks and typists and giving them M1s. The Krauts are attacking in force, northwest of us.”
“We are not the whole army. My people are beat! We lost Stick, who was the glue that held us all together. My people are exhausted and feeling about as low as you can get.”
Horne looks down at the desk, smiling nastily at her upset. “Yes, shame about Sticklin. Good man. And now, guess what, Richlin? You are Sticklin. You’re the new platoon sergeant, God help us.” He spits on the dirt. “Like I said, I’m a bit short of NCOs. Now get your exhausted people saddled up and ready to go in fifteen minutes. Trucks are coming. Dismissed.”
Rio storms from the tent, fists clenched, lips so tight they disappear. She’s supposed to take over for Stick? Run the platoon for that weak, lying, coward Horne? With who? Cat is on her way to the field hospital, supposedly fine, but out of the war. Mercer was last seen sobbing helplessly into his helmet. And Geer . . .
She slows as she approaches Geer. He sits in a camp chair, bending over Pang. He carried Pang all through the awful miles. His uniform is saturated with Pang’s blood. Pang’s rifle lies across his chest like a holy object. His chest does not rise or fall.
“Listen, Richlin,” Geer says without looking up. “Can you, um, can you uh, you know, get me Pang’s address stateside? I need to write to his folks.” The last few words come out strangled.
“That’s not your duty, Geer, that’s the chaplain and—”
“No.” He struggles to control his facial muscles. “No. I’m going to write them.”
“Okay, Geer,” Rio says. “I’ll get the address.”
“Thanks, Rio.”
Has Geer ever used her first name before?
“Listen, Geer, I hate to do this. But the yellow bastard made me platoon sergeant. So the squad is yours.”
Geer nods, still looking down at Pang, who looks peaceful. He might almost be asleep but for the waxy stillness of his flesh. “You’ll do fine, Richlin.”
Coming from Geer, it is a profound compliment. “I suppose we’re never going to like each other much, Geer, but I’m damned glad I have you to take over the squad.”
Geer stands up. Slaps his hands against his sides as if marking the end of something. “Who do you think I should make my ASL?”
“That’s on you, Geer. Whoever it is will be your assistant squad leader, not mine.”
“Think people will follow a limey?”
“Jack? If I were you, that’s who I’d pick.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll try to keep your backup boyfriend alive.”
“Fug you, Geer.” Rio laughs and hopes the dirt on her face will hide any blush.
Geer gives her a sidelong look. Then, having seen something in her face, he groans. “Are you kidding me? Are we moving up again?”
“Heading north. Some kind of Kraut attack. You round up anyone and everyone, regardless of MOS, regardless of whatever they have to say. Cooks, clerks, pharmacists, I don’t care: get them.”
“What in hell is a dead Jap doing here?”
Rio and Geer both turn. A soldier with a clipboard. He’s a good-looking young man with spectacles and a very clean uniform.
“What are you?” Geer demands.
“I’m attached to graves registration, we’re—”
“Well, you just got unattached. Four Eyes, you just joined Fifth Platoon. I am Luther Geer, your new lord and master.”
“You can’t—”
Geer cuffs him on the side of his head, knocking the man’s glasses askew. He bends down and whispers, “Sorry, Pang. Gotta borrow this.” He lifts Pang’s M1 and shoves it into the clerk’s chest. “Welcome to hell, little buddy.”
The trucks do not show up on time, of course, and Rio uses the time to pick a replacement for Cat. She calls together the ragtag remnants of Cat’s squad and says, “Any of you people want to be squad leader?”
When almost every eye turns in one direction, she has her pick. “There you go . . . How do you say that?” She points at her name patch, which reads Dubois. She’s new to the platoon, but she’s a corporal and had been at Anzio before being wounded.
“Doo-boyce, Sarge,” she says.
“Where you from, Dubois?”
“I was born in Montana, but I was living in Oregon, working as a copy editor at the local paper.”
“Well, your people seem to trust you, so I’m going to trust you. We are taking a ride, a long one. Get your people squared away, and grab anyone you see who is not attached, find ’em a rifle, and hog-tie them if you need to.”
“Will do.” Then, in a lower voice she says, “We know you were with Stick from the beginning, Sarge. We’re all sorry as hell. He was good people.”
Rio nods, unable suddenly to trust herself to speak.
He was good people. Past tense.
Sergeant Mercer has pulled himself together, but his squad looks spooked. Rio catches the eye of the squad’s ASL, a woman named Pettyfer.
“I have no time for bullshit, so give it to me straight: Is Mercer okay?”
Pettyfer glances in Mercer’s direction. He has his back turned and is loading a clip. The rest of his squad looks past him at Rio and their corporal. “I don’t know, Richlin, to be honest.”
Rio pulls her a short distance away. “You got the word, obviously. I don’t know where we’re going except someone, somewhere up the line screwed up. So maybe it’
s all a big hurry-up-and-wait, and maybe it’s right into some new shitstorm. If Mercer goes batty, you take charge.”
“Aw, jeez, no!”
“Hey. You think I want this job? Do what has to be done.”
It is three hours before the trucks come rattling into camp, and when they arrive they do not look good. Bullet holes pucker door panels. The canvas covers are ripped by shrapnel. One of the canvas covers has been burned, so now it’s just blackened tatters. And the drivers are so far gone that as soon as they come to a complete stop they fall asleep on their steering wheels.
The dispirited, mud-caked, stinking, hungry, and in too many cases battle-stunned troops climb wearily into the trucks. Rio finds herself for the first time in charge of people she does not know. Her squad is almost a family, but a platoon—even a much-diminished platoon—is an organization.
Things, Rio thinks, are not going according to plan.
Someone with stars on his shoulders, Bradley or Ike himself maybe, somebody, had taken his eye off the ball. And now the much-battered 119th Division is on its way to die for their mistake.
Platoon Sergeant Richlin sits on the hard wood bench, scratches at her lice, wedges herself in so as not to be bounced off, takes a drink from her canteen, tilts her helmet forward, and goes instantly to sleep.
After an unknown number of hours she wakes to find that they are still in forest, though whether it is the same forest or a different one, she cannot tell. A narrow river chuckles contentedly beside the road. The hills on either side are steep and growing steeper.
The road itself is busy in both directions. Long columns of wounded GIs pass going the other way. And once again, refugees are on the move, forced off the road into the woods, where they pass slowly, ghosts with backs bent beneath household belongings, or pushing wheelbarrows with old people propped in undignified positions, and children left to cling to their mothers’ hems.
The road takes a turn, still following the river, and ahead is a town dominated by three impressive buildings. First, perched in splendid isolation atop an absurdly steep ridge sits an abbey that, from Rio’s limited view, looks ancient and vaguely reddish. She is sure there’s a word for the style of architecture, and once upon a time she might have asked Stick, who seemed to know most things.
The town proper is dominated by a church with twin stone towers topped by diamond-shaped gray slate roofs. The church is up a moderate slope from a castle, an impressive whitewashed affair with a very Sleeping Beauty sort of round tower on one end. The abbey overlooks everything, the church overlooks the castle, the castle overlooks the town, the town is built alongside the river, and everything but the abbey is sandwiched into a heavily forested ravine of almost comical steepness.
Rio hears heavy firing up on the ridge, machine guns and small arms and the occasional thump of a mortar.
We’ll be climbing that slope unless I miss my guess.
The truck stops beside the river in an open, cobblestoned square. Now, for the first time, Rio notices that there are only four trucks.
“Everyone stay put,” Rio says, and climbs down. She walks the length of the truck to the driver, a man she guesses may be twenty-five but who is so whiskered, so slack of jaw and blank of expression, he looks like a much older man.
“When does the rest of the column get here?” Rio asks.
“This is the column,” the driver says. “Now fug off ’cause I’m going to sleep.”
To Rio’s amazement he does just that, and right then, collapsing onto his seat and snoring before he is fully prone.
“Get the people assembled, Richlin.” It is Lieutenant Horne.
“What are my orders, sir?” Rio asks.
Horne points with a cigarette up the slope. “Up there. The Krauts have tanks, we got tanks, and our tanks are getting their asses kicked. Fritz has this place surrounded.”
Rio takes that in. “We’re surrounded in a ravine with only one road out? When does the rest of the division get here?”
“They don’t. It’s just Fifth Platoon. The brass are running around like chickens with their heads cut off, throwing units into the line. Captain Passey and the rest of the company are elsewhere. Just you and me, Richlin.” He grins and winks as if it’s all some kind of joke. “So, like I said: climb that ridge. Report to whoever is in command up there.”
“And you, sir?”
Horne points at the castle. “That’s the HQ, I’ll be there getting the lay of the land. You can have my radio operator.”
“Food?” Rio asks, increasingly furious.
“You see a field kitchen?”
“My people are supposed to climb that?” Rio points at the ridge. “With no rest, no hot food, and go right into it?”
“Shouldn’t be a problem for you, Richlin. You’re the tough-as-nails soldier girl, aren’t you? The lady warrior with the Silver Star?”
He gloats at her, gloats as if this is a game and he’s just scored points. Her choice right then is to either follow orders or tell the supercilious fool what she thinks of him. What’s he going to do, court-martial her?
Well, she realizes, yes: that’s what he’s itching to do.
She turns her back on him without a salute or a word and stalks to the back of the truck. “All right, grab your gear.” She raises her voice to a shout and says, “Fifth Platoon, saddle up!”
“What are we doing?” Jenou asks as she climbs down, blinking sleep out of her bloodshot eyes.
Rio raises her eyes to the slope.
Jenou turns to look. “What, now? Right now?”
Sergeants Mercer and Geer join her in a huddle, smoking and shooting dirty looks at Horne, who is striding away toward the castle with his gloomy sergeant, Billy O’Banion, in tow.
“We’ve got two squads, barely,” Rio says. “No kitchen, no supply line we can count on, and the people already here, most of ’em, came straight from the Hürtgen, just like us. Basically, we’re at the bottom of a steep V. If the Krauts get the tops of the ridges, they can drop plunging fire all day long. If they take the road north, we’re cut off, may be already.”
“What’s the good news?” Geer asks sourly.
“The good news? We have a river. Plenty of drinking water,” Rio says.
“Fugging perfect,” Geer says. “Light pack?”
Rio shakes her head. “Everything the people can carry. Ammo and food. Mercer? You’ve got a bazooka team in your squad. They any good?”
Mercer shakes his head. “Not so far.”
“Everyone’s GI insurance paid up?” Geer says. It’s an old joke by now, and no one laughs.
They must cross a stone bridge, and on the other side Rio has everyone top off their canteens in the river and drink their fill. The face of the ridge is right there, right before them, five hundred near-vertical meters of dense fir forest. The trees here still have branches and graying pine needles, unlike the charred toothpick trees of the Hürtgen.
Counting the various random noncombat soldiers they’ve managed to dragoon, they are twenty-four GIs not counting Geer, Mercer, Rio, and Pettyfer, not even half a platoon.
“All right,” Rio says, grabbing a tree trunk. “Follow me.”
PART IV
THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE
Haven’t you heard? They’ve got us surrounded—the poor bastards.
—Unknown American soldier at the Battle of the Bulge
LETTERS SENT
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Pang,
My name is Luther Geer. I was with your son when he died.
I have to tell you something about him and me. I didn’t like Pang at first. But we were together in Italy, and now France and Germany, and what happened is that over a long time of being in this squad together I got so I liked him.
He was a good soldier. He was brave as, hell, any GI I have met. I hope you are very proud of him, because you should be.
Maybe after the war I could come and see you and tell you more. I’m not one for letter writing so much as talking.
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Anyway. I called him Jappo, and he called me Hillbilly. Maybe you wouldn’t guess it from that, but Pang was my friend. And I am sorry as I can be that he is gone.
Sincerely,
Cpl. Luther Geer
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Sticklin,
I hope you don’t mind me writing despite us not knowing each other, but I knew your son Dain well. We were together all the way from basic training.
Right from the start, Stick—that’s what everyone called him—stood out. Before any of us in that group were even close to being real soldiers, Stick already was. He worked hard at it, and he was very good at his job. I guess I can’t even begin to count how many long conversations I had with Stick in camps and foxholes and boats and trucks. I admired and envied how much he knew about history and different places and why the world is like it is.
Dain Sticklin was everything you could ever want in a friend or a sergeant. If I ever felt like I had a big brother, it was Stick. Losing him was like a knife in my heart. But I know your pain and sorrow must be deeper and more terrible still.
I’ve taken over Stick’s platoon now, but I feel in my heart that any time I don’t know how to handle something I can just ask myself what he would have done and get the right answer.
I guess you don’t need me to tell you, but you raised a very fine young man. We all miss him terribly.
Sgt. Rio Richlin
Dear Pastor M’Dale,
I am writing you because I guess I need to say something that I can’t say to anyone here.
There is so much pain here and so much death. None of it is like folks back home think, none of it is like what they see in movies. We are cold all the time. Filthy and wet all the time. Hungry too.
I look around me and I don’t even see human beings anymore. I see walking sacks of blood and organs waiting to be ripped open, to have all that is inside them shown to the world. They are so brave and so determined, and it doesn’t matter because they just die. Especially the replacements, who so often die within a few hours of getting to the front. The veterans don’t even learn their names because when a replacement dies, you don’t want to know that they have kids or a widowed mother or hopes or dreams or hobbies.