The Medic

by Leo Litwak

  We spread out and thrashed through the woods calling Billy in tense whispers. It was possible they’d found him and he was in their hands. Or he could have taken off after dark and been settling down for chow while we were still hunting for him. We returned to the company but he wasn’t there.

  The lieutenant entered him in the morning report as missing in action. He told us the pillbox was our dawn objective. This time the full company would be with us on the assault, our platoon in the lead.

  Lucca was bitter that we’d left Billy. He said that we shouldn’t have left him. He shouldn’t have been with us in the first place. How could anyone have allowed the dimwit up front? The poor jerk should have been reassigned to a rear echelon.

  I told Lucca, “I tried. He wouldn’t go.”

  “Why give him a vote when he doesn’t operate with a full deck? Just tell him he’s going to spend the war in Paris or the States or back on the farm—anywhere but here. You don’t give a dummy like that a choice.”

  Lucca had been riding me all day. I told him if he didn’t like the way I did things he could ask battalion aid for a new medic.

  Lucca took a deep breath. “For better or worse you’re our medic.” He grinned when he said it but he wasn’t friendly.

  “You think maybe it’s for worse?”

  He paused, then said grudgingly, “If I didn’t think you did a good job, you wouldn’t be here.”

  He took off to check on the platoon and get briefed for the morning action and I dug alone, full of resentment. I dug a few inches, ate K rations, lay down in the shallow trench, but couldn’t sleep. I feared what was coming in the morning.

  I didn’t see Lucca until we assembled before dawn.

  WE LEARNED IN the morning that Captain Roth had checked into the battalion aid station to have his wound tended and hadn’t returned. He saved his almost unblemished skin and let Captain Dillon from battalion headquarters take over.

  Dillon was a taciturn man, in combat since Normandy. He’d been elevated from the ranks through battlefield promotions. He listened to Lieutenant Klamm’s account of the valley fortifications and decided the coming action was more than our company could handle without support. He called for artillery and armor.

  The shelling started at dawn.

  En route to the pillbox we were joined by a tank destroyer, the long barrel of a ninety-millimeter gun jutting from its front.

  THIS TIME I found Powell. He was still at the wire, on his back, big and serene, getting the rest we all needed, his wound now clearly visible. A deep depression in his temple had turned purple, evidence I hadn’t left him there alive.

  LIEUTENANT KLAMM STEPPED across the wire into the field and again called for surrender.

  “Geben sie auf!”

  His accent was wrong, but this time he was backed by a big gun. When the pillbox didn’t answer he signaled to the tank destroyer and the ninety-millimeter cut loose. We braced against the blast and recoil. Pits of raw concrete opened in the skin of the pillbox. A few rounds were enough. A white cloth flapped from the door. A soldier cautiously emerged, waving the white cloth. We broke into cheers until we saw that it was a GI, not a German, coming out. And not any GI, but our own Billy Baker.

  HE’D WATCHED THE Germans leave during the night. They streamed from a railroad tunnel at the base of the hill and he entered after they were gone. The apparently insignificant pillbox was linked to other bunkers and underground barracks and arms depots. We’d been vainly attacking a major fortification of the Siegfried line.

  Billy spent the night following tunnels and elevators through the abandoned complex. He returned to the small bunker to sleep and was awakened by the ninety-millimeter rounds hitting the walls.

  He had occupied the immense fortress by himself.

  The lieutenant put him in for a Silver Star. For all I know it was granted, though he didn’t live to get it.

  Lucca came up to me afterward and squeezed my arm. “Tough day, kid. We did good.” My resentment disappeared in an instant. For his good word I might have considered doing that first day in Germany over again.

  I SAW CAPTAIN ROTH weeks later at battalion headquarters, dapper, relaxed, impressively weathered, joking with other brass. I nodded and he nodded back, no need to salute. He had been reassigned to regimental intelligence and was waiting to receive a major’s gold leaf.

  Dear Folks,

  Have met the Siegfried line. Glad to make its acquaintance but once is enough. Germany is beautiful from a distance. Don’t know that I care to see it close-up. You can tell from my jokey tone that I am fine but will be much more improved when that salami arrives. How’s Mom’s Victory Garden?

  Love, Leo

  CHAPTER 5

  < LUCCA SAID >

  Lucca said do your job and don’t expect rewards. So what if Billy Baker got a Silver Star for capturing a pillbox? The medal only certified as real an event that never happened. Medals were bullshit. The only thing worth hoping for was to get the job done and go home. Forget the medals. Forget the loot. The rules of war allowed the taking of enemy weapons and gear and battle flags and that sort of thing. Everything else was stealing. If you survived, be grateful. If you came home with eyesight and arms and legs intact that was enough.

  Lucca didn’t talk much about home. We knew he had a fiancée and that his father was a tailor and the Luccas were a large family but he cut off other discussion of what he was before the war. He kept peacetime apart from wartime. We weren’t the people he was going to be with the rest of his life even though we had his full attention right now. Right now he expected everyone to concentrate on finishing the war. He once said to me, bitter over the loot Maurice Sully was accumulating, “I don’t want medals or cameras or knives or guns or someone else’s silverware. Let the krauts have it all back once we finish the job.”

  WE ENTERED GERMANY a village at a time. We assembled before dawn. The assault began when there was enough light. If we were lucky there was no resistance and the villagers lined the cobblestone main street and cheered as if we were their liberators. We shouted, “Nach Kirche,” and herded them toward the church, where they waited for a team from Military Government to brief them on occupation behavior. We were free to roam the village and search for weapons, taking whatever we wanted.

  Maurice found a complete antique sterling service, hidden under potatoes in the root cellar of a farmhouse. He had an arrangement with the company clerk who had access to our barracks bags, where the loot could be stored.

  I heard the clerk complain about the silver Maurice had found. “It’s too much,” he said. He had to drive the company jeep as far as regimental headquarters to get to our barracks bags. He warned Maurice, “We can get in trouble over this. Enough’s enough.”

  The clerk was a collector of cameras and Maurice offered him a damaged Rolleiflex he’d picked up. The clerk was happy with it. He’d been looking for a Roly. He could get it repaired.

  Maurice said, “Enough’s never enough,” and hunted for loot in every village we entered.

  We gave up life in slit trenches when we entered German villages. Two, three, even four of us, in muddy boots and filthy clothes, shared feather beds in sequestered homes.

  THIS IS HOW Maurice acquired his trophy Luger.

  A sergeant with Headquarters Company let it be known he would accept a quality Swiss watch in exchange for a mint-condition Luger. Maurice inspected the weapon and craved it. He urged me to heft it and feel its elegance. It wasn’t a brutal sidearm like the GI Browning .45, which bore the hand down then hurled it up, the heavy bullet flattening a target even when the hit was far off center. The Luger yearned for the target. It was alive in the hand with a spirit of its own. The grip met the barrel at a rakish tilt with a slight recoil, the thrust straight ahead.

  Maurice told the headquarters sergeant, “Hold it for me. I’ll get you a watch pronto.”

  He found the watch in the next Mosel valley town we occupied. A well-dressed elderly citizen with a
n eighteen-carat Tissot on his wrist was among those being hustled to church. Maurice said, “Guten Tag.” Good day. The German answered with a relieved smile, “Guten Tag. Wie gehts, mein Herr?” How’s it going, sir? Maurice had picked up a little German from me. “Ganz gut, danke.” Very good, thanks, whereupon he stripped the watch and had the wherewithal for the Luger.

  I say “found” his Tissot and “found” his Luger and “found” sterling silver and “found” food and drink. It’s not as if they were lost or never owned, but to him the wrist that once possessed the watch, the holster that once carried the Luger, were irrelevant in the provenance of these goods. He saw the watch as though it had never been possessed until revealed to his eyes. It all belonged to him, not only the watch, but the wrist to which it was strapped, and the man whose wrist it was.

  In another village, he found a gold Tissot for himself.

  Quality weapons and ceremonial blades were at first the collectibles of choice. Later, as Maurice learned value, he looked for jewelry and gems and even art.

  THE CAPTAIN TOLD US, “When you hear the order to attack, stand up and start marching and firing and keep marching and firing and don’t run, don’t hit the ground, don’t take cover, don’t lose your intervals, always stay in line with the advance. It doesn’t matter that you can’t see what you’re shooting at.”

  Captain Dillon called this maneuver “marching fire.”

  When we used marching fire, I had to force myself to rise and start marching. I walked into enemy fire and didn’t hit the ground, didn’t start digging, didn’t wiggle on my belly toward the nearest tree, didn’t hug the ground and hide my face. I walked at a steady, modest pace, buddies strung out to the left and right, utterly exposed. It was against all my inclinations. I was as terrified and resentful as if I had been offered as a sacrifice to a god in whom I had no faith.

  PFC VAN PELT got out of the war during marching fire.

  We lay on our bellies in a field outside the town, spread out in a company front. We waited for the artillery to begin, then rose up at command and began marching behind a billowing wave of smoke. We fired without aim, relying on the intensity of the fire to keep the enemy pinned down.

  I followed to the rear and center where I could see both wings of the platoon. The terrain dipped, the squad on the left sank from view, I shifted to keep them in sight. The squad rose up and I moved toward the center. That’s when I saw Van Pelt crawling toward me. I yelled, “On your feet! No hitting the ground!” It was none of my business, but his cowardice was tempting and I hated him for showing me how easy it would be to grovel and hide. He crawled to me, rolled over on his back, and said, “Fix me.” He’d been hit three times by a burst from a machine gun, in the side below the ribs, then through the fleshy part of the shoulder, then the right cheek, that bullet exiting beneath his left eye, ripping the left cheek. I asked him to move a little to get out of the line of fire. He wiggled over, entirely calm. His eye was closed and I couldn’t see how bad the damage was. I gave him morphine, used a triangular bandage to wrap his head and face.

  He asked if he was going to die. I said not if he willed to live. He said, “I’m going home then. I will it.”

  I left him for the litter bearers and ran to catch up with the platoon. We marched and fired all the way to the edge of town. The barrage of smoke lifted and we saw the enemy cowering in trenches below us. They never raised their heads and it was slaughter. Afterward we poured through the town. I found Lucca and Lieutenant Klamm at the town center, waiting for the platoon. The squads arrived garlanded with captured sidearms and gear. Lucca asked about Van Pelt. I said he’d live, but his Dutch prettyboy looks were done for.

  We heard an explosion from a small bank off the square while waiting for the last of the platoon. It sounded like a grenade.

  Maurice and Nagy came from the bank, cramming deutsche marks into a rucksack.

  The old deutsche mark was worthless to us. Our exchange currency was the occupation mark.

  Lucca wanted to report what he’d seen to the lieutenant.

  “It’s him or me,” Lucca said. “I don’t want him in my outfit.”

  I argued against reporting Maurice. The marks weren’t worth the paper they were printed on and with the whole country blowing up who cared if a small-town bank got hit?

  In our billet that night I saw Maurice and Nagy sorting the banknotes.

  Nagy asked, “What you looking at?”

  “Let him look,” Maurice said. “He’s our buddy. He won’t talk.” Buried among the worthless German marks I saw gems and gold. I didn’t want to see what I felt obliged not to report and turned away.

  IT WAS ALMOST SPRING, a breezy, sunny day. We crouched in a pale green meadow, watching chemical mortars set fire to a village. It was still burning when we entered. The only casualties were two elderly farmers, one gored by a bull he was trying to lead from fire, his right buttock ripped open. I pulled the flesh together with overlapping strips of butterflied adhesive but couldn’t close the gap and covered it with large gauze compresses. The other farmer was almost entirely burned, clothes seared to his skin, a burly old man, hair crisped, skin hanging from his jowls, hands and arms blistered and blackened. He suffered in a language I didn’t understand while three of us worked on him—me, and Cooper, and Grace. We cut away as much of his clothing as we could, put him on a clean sheet on a kitchen table, slathered him with burn ointment. I worked on his legs, Grace on his torso, Cooper on his head and face. Litter bearers hauled him away in a jeep.

  Maurice made up a song in waltz time about the burned farmer. One verse went,

  We took this town to gather loot

  and smoked a Kraut like a cheroot.

  His farmyard smelled of spring and hell,

  Manure, new grass, and burning gel.

  On the way to our billet we passed a tankman, stained with grime, goggles raised over his helmet, standing at the open door of a burning house, rolling drunk, a bottle of wine in one hand, guiding his piss with the other. A GI, foraging for dinner, chased a squawking hen in front of our billet.

  That evening Cooper, the Second Platoon medic, negotiated with a compliant fräulein. He offered cigarettes and D-ration chocolate for what she had to trade. He would have added soap and toilet paper, but cigarettes and chocolate were enough. Cooper, a handsome, easy-talking Southerner, didn’t speak German and his English was sometimes so drawled I had to concentrate to unravel its sense. Yet in the brief hour after we entered the village he located the woman, jollied her into accepting his terms, set her up in a barn loft to wait on him and his buddies. He rattled on with “y’alls” and “honeys” as though he were speaking to an Alabama woman. He laughed constantly while he chatted her up. He invited me to join him and Grace and I met her lying in fragrant hay, her skirt hiked, a sturdy farm girl in heavy dark dress and a man’s boxer shorts and grass-encrusted boots.

  Cooper saw my reluctance and said, “You go first.” He and Grace withdrew down the ladder to await their turn.

  I lay beside her without desire and didn’t touch her. I wanted the respect of my buddies, relief from dread, not much else.

  “You’ll like her,” I told Cooper when he asked how she was.

  The fräuleins lacked cigarettes, soap, sweets. There was little fresh meat. Everything was in short supply. Alles kaput. They were ready to trade sex for cigarettes or D-ration chocolate bars or sticks of Kaue Gummie or K rations or bar soap or combinations of these commodities, depending on the strength of GI desire and fräulein resistance. It was convenient to believe that these were farm girls, familiar with animal nature, and that their own animal nature was no problem to them. The truth is few of us examined our beliefs. We took what war offered us.

  Lucca said to me glumly, “Just make sure you’re not trading for clap.”

  CAPTAIN DILLON HAD announced a theaterwide nonfraternization policy, regulating all dealings between German civilians and GIs. Minimum contact. Guten tag, danke, bitte, nach Ki
rche, etcetera, no hanky-panky with fräuleins.

  VD was epidemic among the troops. Whole companies were decimated by clap. A fifty-dollar fine for anyone caught fraternizing. Captain Dillon told the men he was talking about serious business—sterility, blindness, madness. If we were willing to do business with the fräuleins and risk the fine then we’d better take precautions.

  Maurice said sex was less risky than war. He’d rather be crazy than dead.

  We approached a village on the way to the Rhine. The battle ahead was stalled and we crouched on both sides of a gully that led into town, waiting for the action up ahead to be finished. We heard small-arms and mortar fire. The word came back that the village had been decked out in white flags, apparently surrendered, when a German sniper killed a popular Second Platoon noncom.

  That was the excuse for what followed.

  A private from the Second Platoon, a skinny Louisiana kid with a freckled, burned face named Roy Jones, brought back two German prisoners who may have been snipers. He marched them down the gully, between our columns. The prisoners were about thirty or forty feet from me, arms stretched overhead. One was very tall, the other very short. The tall one was bareheaded, with grayish-blond hair. The short one wore an overseas cap. They both wore gray uniforms, trouser legs tucked into boots. Jones took aim. I said, “Oh, no,” not loud enough. The first shot somehow missed and the Germans continued marching, arms raised. The next shot bowled over the short one. The tall soldier took three more steps before he, too, was shot down.

  I put myself in the shoes of the tall German soldier, marching down the gully, his hands in the air, a few steps in advance of Jones. I couldn’t forget how he kept marching after Roy Jones killed the little man alongside him. He took three steps at the same pace as when two of them had marched in front of Jones, no wavering—one, two, three, then crack. When he collapsed, his head fell a little faster than the rest of him, his arms—still elevated—floated down. He hit the ground like a carcass dropped to a block for butchering.