Ordinary Heroes (2005)

by Scott Turow

  They could not position their tanks to take on Patton without control of Bastogne. And they knew that with every hour, supplies were being distributed to peripheral forces, meaning the longer they waited, the stiffer the resistance.

  Given the scout plane, Algar figured there was now some chance that one of the Kraut attacks might come from the west, perhaps through Savy. Perhaps even through Champs. There was no telling. And in any event, whatever force was in the woods would move on us, at least for a while, to keep the company in place. So Algar and his staff still wanted us in position to hold that road. They were just going to move us a little, into the woods on the eastern side, in order to lessen the chances of the German guns fixing on us. If the first attack came at us, we were to move north and contact the enemy. With luck, we'd catch them by surprise and be able to flank the Panzer grenadiers. Either way, we were better off attacking than waiting for the Germans to mass and pin us down. If we did get the first attack, Algar would send tanks and reinforcements, even call in air support if the weather held. It was more likely that we'd get called to reinforce Savy. Those were the orders.

  Ralph, the Exec, came in to report on a conversation with McAuliffe's staff in Bastogne, who were suddenly disheartened about Patton's progress.

  "Ham, I don't know what to make of this, but this guy Murphy, he was sort of implying that maybe Bastogne is bait."

  "Bait?"

  "That Ike wants to draw as many of the German assets as possible tight around the town, and then bomb it to all hell. Make sure there's never another offensive like this. Better in the long run."

  Algar thought about that, then gave his head a solid shake.

  "Patton might bomb his own troops. Never Eisenhower. We want to keep that one to ourselves, Ralph."

  "Yes, sir."

  When Ralph left, Algar looked at me. "Here's another thing to keep to ourselves, David. A couple of things. I don't like to say either of them, but we're all better off being plain. Don't let your men surrender to the Panzer forces. Name, rank, and serial number won't get them very far. After the job we've done on the Luftwaffe, most of their intelligence comes from what they can beat out of our troops. Once they've got what they want, the buggers have no means to keep prisoners. And they don't. Word is they flat-out shot dozens of our troops at Malmedy. But understand what I mean. I was with Fuller at Clervaux, when Cota wouldn't let us retreat. I'm never going to issue that command. I don't want to lose that road.

  But I don't want a bunch of soldiers with rifles trying to stop tanks. Fight like hell, as long as you can, but protect your men. Those are your orders."

  I saluted.

  I passed through our strongpoints, giving the password. Walking up, I encountered another member of Masi's platoon, Massimo Fortunato, a huge handsome lump, on guard duty. An immigrant, Massimo claimed to have lived in Boston "long time," but he spoke barely a word of English. Even Masi, who said he knew Italian, generally communicated with Massimo by hand signals like everybody else. Fortunato had come in as a replacement, but one with combat experience, which meant that he was not subject to the usual ridicule. He had fought through North Africa and Italy, until a sympathetic commander transferred him to Europe, following an incident in which Fortunato believed he was firing at a boy he'd grown up with.

  I asked Fortunato if all was quiet.

  "Quite," he answered. "Good quite."

  I went back to the pump house to find Meadows. O'Brien was helping Collison with a letter home, writing down what Stocker told him, sometimes framing the words for him. Bill and I agreed that he'd send a scout team across the road to assess our new position. After that, we'd give the men orders to pack up. Bill went out to make the assignment, as Biddy's platoon was filtering in.

  "Think we'll ever have a worse Christmas, Captain?" Biddy's second-in-command, a PFC named Forrester, asked me.

  "Hope not."

  "Nah. Next Christmas, we'll be dead or the war'll be over. Right?"

  "It'll be over. You'll be home. That'll be your best Christmas, then."

  He nodded. "That'd be nice. I'm not sure I ever had a best Christmas." I didn't say anything, but I'm sure my face reflected my curiosity. "I was adopted, Captain. Old man got it at Verdun. My mother, she ran out of gas somehow. Some friends of my aunt's took me in. They had six other kids in that house. I don't know what made them do it. Good sods, I guess. Irish, you know. Only Christmas, somehow, that was always strange. They were Catholic, went to midnight Mass. My family was Scotch-German, Presbyterians. Not such a big deal, but Christmas would get me thinking. These here ain't my real brothers. Ma and Pa ain't my real ma and pa. Adopted like that, Captain, at that age, it didn't seem there was anything real in my life. Not like for other people." He looked at me again. I couldn't think of anything to do but clap him on the arm, yet the gesture drew a smile.

  When I returned to our forward position, I wrote letters to my parents and to Grace, as I had in the hours before we'd attacked La Saline Royale, just on the chance the messages might somehow reach them if worse came to worst. Writing to Grace was getting harder. I knew what to say, but I seemed to mean less of it each day. It was not my stupidity with Gita Lodz, either. Instead, there was something about my feelings for Grace that seemed to suit me less and less. After standing there with Howler, thinking about whether Grace could do me wrong, I now experienced a pinch of regret that stepping out was beyond her, since it might even have been for the best.

  While I was writing, I gradually became aware of music. The German troops were in the woods singing Christmas carols, the voices traveling down to us on the wind. Many of the tunes were familiar, despite the foreign tongue, whose words I could make out here and there because of my limited Yiddish. "Stine Nacht," they sang, "Heilige Nacht." Rudzicke scrambled up to my hole.

  "Captain, I was going to sing, too," he said. "A lot of us wanted to. Seeing as how we're moving out anyway.

  I debated, undertaking the unfamiliar arithmetic of pluses and minuses that an experienced combat officer probably had reduced to instinct. Would I mislead the Germans about our position in the morning, or give something away? With an assault in the offing, could I deny the men one meager pleasure of Christmas? And how to cope with the ugly worm of hope that this demonstration of fellowship might make the Krauts less savage at daybreak?

  "Sing," I told him. And so as we packed up, G Company sang, even me. Christmas was nothing in my house, a nonevent, and I felt as a result that I was not a participant in the festival of fellowship and good feeling that Christmas was everywhere else. But now I sang. We sang with our enemies. It went on nearly an hour, and then there was silence again, awaiting the attack which all the soldiers on both sides knew was coming.

  PART V

  Chapter 20.

  DON'T TELL THE CHILDREN

  Long after I first read what my father had written for Barrington Leach, one question preoccupied me: Why had Dad said he desperately hoped his kids would never hear this story? Granted the tale ended with what I viewed as an episode of heartbreaking gullibility, not to mention dead-bang criminality. But there were oceans of valor before that. What did Dad want to protect us from? I would have thought he'd learned too much to believe that anybody could be harbored from the everlasting universe of human hurt at human hands. Instead, Dad's decision to suppress everything could be taken only as the product of his shuttered character, and one more occasion for regret. God knows, it would have meant the world to me at a hundred points as I grew up to know even a little of what he had written.

  Like every boy my age, soaked during the 1950s in World War II epics on TV and in the movie houses, I had longed to know that my daddy had done his part--best if he were another Audie Murphy, but at least someone who'd brought his rightful share of glory to our household. Instead my questions about the war were perpetually rebuffed by both parents.

  The silence was so complete that I didn't even know whether Dad had seen action. I believed he had, because of the profound stil
lness that gripped him when battle scenes from WWII appeared on The Way It Was, my father's favorite show. It was TV's first video history, hosted by the sage and solemn Eric Sevareid. I would watch the black-andwhite images leap across my father's unmoving eyes. There were always artillery pieces firing with great flashes, their barrels rifling back and mud splattering as the massive armaments recoiled into the ground, while aircraft circled in the distance overhead. The grimy soldiers, caught in the camera's light, managed fleeting smiles. It became an article of faith to me that Dad had been one of them, a claim I often repeated when my male friends matched tales of their fathers' wartime exploits.

  Yet all I knew for sure was that both my parents regarded war as a calamity which they often prayed would never be visited on Sarah and me. No one was more determined than my father and mother that I not go to Vietnam when my number came up in 1970. They were ready to hire lawyers, even leave the country, rather than allow me to be drafted. The sight of Richard Nixon on TV inspired Dad to a rare sputtering fury. He seemed to feel a basic deal America had made with him was being broken. Simply put, he had gone to war so that his children would not have to, not so they could take their turn.

  But that period might have been less unsettling for me if I'd known a little more about my father's wartime experiences. At the U., among the antiwar types, there were occasional debates about the ethics of avoiding the draft. Logic said that some kid, working class or poor, was going to take my place. Four decades later, I still accept my rationale for wiggling out with a medical exemption due to a deviated septum, a breach between my nasal passages, which, in theory, might have led to breathing problems on the battlefront. My first responsibility was for my own actions. Understanding how misguided Vietnam was, I faced a clear moral imperative against killing--or even dying--there.

  But for those of us who didn't go, there was always a lurking question. Granted, we were privileged, moralistic, and often ridiculously rude. But were we also cowards? Certainly we had planted our flag in new ground. Before 'Nam, the idea had been handed down since the Revolution, like some Chippendale heirloom, that braving death in defense of the nation was the ultimate measure of a true-blue American guy. Knowing a few details of how my father had passed this fierce test of patriotism and personal strength might have given me some comfort that I could do it, too, if need be, and made me more certain I was standing up, rather than hiding.

  Instead, the only story about my father's war I ever heard came from his father, my grandfather the cobbler. Grandpa was a wonderful raconteur in the Yiddish tradition and, when Dad was not around, he told me more than once the colorful tale of how my father had entered the service. In 1942, after Dad had decided he could no longer wait to do his part, he had gone for his induction physical and been promptly rejected because of the deviated septum I ended up inheriting from him (and which, when I faced the draft, he wisely suggested I ask an ENT to check for).

  My father was so upset at being turned down that he finally persuaded my grandfather to go with him to visit Punchy Berg, the local Democratic committeeman, who was able to influence the course of most governmental affairs in Kindle County. Punchy received entreaties in the basement of a local county office, where boxes of records were stacked on steel shelving. There beneath a single lightbulb, Punchy sat among his henchmen at a teacher's desk while he pondered requests. He either said no, or nothing at all. In the face of silence, one of Punchy's sidekicks would step forward and whisper a price--$5 to allow a child to transfer to a better school, $15 to get a driver's license after failing the exam. Favorable verdicts in the Kindle County courts were also available, but at costs beyond the means of workingmen.

  My father stood before Punchy and poured his heart out about not being allowed to serve his country. Punchy had expected something else, a request, of which there were a number, that a draft notice be delayed or, better yet, forgotten. My grandfather said that Punchy, a former boxer whose nose was flattened on his face like the blade of a shovel, spent a minute shaking his head.

  "I'll tell you, kid. Maybe you want to think about this. I know your old man a long time. Schmuel, how long it's been you fixed my shoes?"

  My grandfather could not remember that far back.

  "A long time," Punchy said. "You're the firstborn son. That makes you an important guy to your folks.), This remark provided the only encouragement my grandfather needed to let fly with his own opinions about what my father wanted. It was pure craziness to Grandpa's way of thinking. He had come here to America, like his brothers, so that they did not get dragooned for the Tsar's army, as Jews so often were. And now his son wanted to go back across the same ocean and fight, beside the Russians no less?

  "Your old man's got a point," Punchy allowed.

  My father was adamant.

  "Well," said Punchy, "this is hard to figure. How I hear tell, it's costing families twelve hundred to keep their sons out. But gettin in?" Punchy rubbed his chin. "All right, kid," he said. "I gotta tell you. I'm pretty red, white, and blue myself. Half the time I'm cryin that I'm too old to go over there and take a bite out of Hitler's dick. In you want, in you get." And then Punchy proved what a true patriot he was. "Kid," he said, "it's on the house."

  Chapter 21.

  COMBAT

  12/24/44--At the front

  Dear Grace--

  I am writing to wish you and your family a wonderful Christmas holiday. I imagine all of you together, cozy around a fire, but perhaps that's just to comfort myself, because right now I'm colder than I have ever been in my life. At the moment, I'm convinced we should honeymoon in Florida and I am trying to warm myself up by imagining that.

  I assume news of the German offensive has reached you, but the commanders here are encouraging. This is magnificent, scenic country, tremendous hills of trees, deep with snow, and beautiful little towns nestled between, but combat has blown many of them to smithereens. I arrived as part of the investigation I have mentioned now and then, and given the circumstances have actually been pressed into combat as the leader of a rifle company. Finally, a chance to put that training to good use! At last I'll have a little story or two to tell you and our children.

  Please give my warm regards to your family. I assume you will be praying tonight. I'm not much of a prayer-sayer myself, so please put in a few extra for me, fortissimo. I want all the help we can get.

  Well, that's enough blabbing for tonight. Remember I love you, darling.

  David

  At 2:00 a. M., we moved out on the route the scout team had traced along the edge of the forest, following their tracks in the snow.

  Orders went down the line in a whisper. "Scouts out first in each squad. Patrol discipline. Silence. Move fast and low. Don't lose sight of the man in front of you.

  In all, we advanced about four hundred yards to another incline on the eastern side of the road, settling in a small notch in the forest. It was not as good a position as the one we had deserted. We were about thirty yards from the roadside here, and even when we fanned out, we could not really see well to the north. A small creek was east of us, however, a good defensive perimeter. It must have been fed by an underground spring, because it was still running, even in the intense cold.

  There had been no prior encampment here, which meant the men had to dig in through the snow and the frozen ground. It was hard work and we agreed we'd assign four soldiers to each hole, and let them sleep in shifts. Bidwell and I were still shoveling with our entrenching tools when Masi came up. He turned his angle-necked flashlight on to show me a German ration can. There was no rust on it, and the streaks of the meat that had clung to the side hadn't frozen yet.

  "There was a pile of shit no more than ten yards away from it, Cap. Hot enough to have melted a little hole in the snow, and still soft when I put a stick to lt.

  I took the can to Meadows.

  "Where are they?" I asked Bill.

  "Back there somewhere," he said, pointing to the woods half a mile off "Probably just
following up on the scout plane, Captain. Good thing we changed position."

  I wasn't as confident. The Krauts were paying a lot of attention to us, if they didn't intend to come down this road. We agreed we'd send out scouts at first light to follow the tracks and get a fix on the German forces. We also doubled tonight's guard. That was better anyway, given our shortage of deluxe accommodations.

  Despite my concerns, I was calm. I seemed to have simply worn out my nervous system, subsiding to the resignation true soldiers acquire. If it happens, it happens. I slept for an hour or so, until heavy booms woke me, and I saw the light dancing up from Bastogne. The Germans were bombing there, giving General McAuliffe a Christmas present after the warm greetings he had sent them. The air assault went on about twenty minutes.

  I fell off again before Biddy shook me awake for guard duty an hour later. I had been dreaming of home. There, it was the usual chaos. I was knocking at the front door and could not get in. But through the window I had a clear view of my parents and my sister and brother around the kitchen table. My mother, stout, voluble, enveloping, was ladling soup, and through the glass I could somehow enjoy the warmth and fragrance from the bowls she placed on the table. When the image returned to me now, I emitted the minutest moan.

  "What?" asked Biddy. He was climbing into his bedroll. There was already some light in the sky, but we'd all been up most of the night. In the distance, the German artillery was pounding already. The Krauts were at work early.