Shifty's War

by Marcus Brotherton

  Well, I got to studying what had just happened, and I guess it was all a big joke. The fella had taken a hand grenade, screwed off the top, then poured out the powder. He’d put the grenade back together, then loosened the pin. I didn’t say nothing. No harm done, I figured. Of course, nobody stole the money when we scattered—if a man did, the guys would catch him and he’d get whupped.

  A couple nights later I was nearing a full house at a different poker game when somebody tried the same thing. “Live grenade!” someone hollered. We all hit the floor, and sure enough, that grenade was a dud, too. I guessed that was how it was going to be, because a couple days later, it happened again. It didn’t matter how many times different guys tried the joke, the results were always the same. If someone hollered “Live grenade!” we took cover. That’s the way we were wired.

  Lot of craziness happened at Mourmelon. Come halfway through December I was sitting in the sergeants’ barracks late one evening when Johnny Martin and Bill Guarnere swaggered in with two cases of champagne. All the other sergeants crowded around, and Martin popped the corks. We held out our canteen cups, and he filled them to the brims.

  It was the first time I’d tasted champagne, and, well, it felt to me like sweet fizzy apple juice. Why, that stuff slid down as easy as soda pop, and I guess a lot of fellas were thinking the same thing because we guzzled the first case and started in on the second. There we all were, drinking champagne and laughing away, and I don’t know who said something aggravating at first, but another guy mouthed back, and another fella said something similar, and pretty soon the first guy walloped the second guy over the head with his canteen cup. Then it all broke loose and we all got into it, tossing guys into the walls, beating each other over the head, smashing our fists against each other’s chin. Wasn’t too long before First Sergeant Carwood Lipton hurried into the barracks and yelled at us to knock it off. All the bunks were broken off the walls by then and he was real mad. “You guys are supposed to be leaders,” he hollered. “A bunch of sergeants doing all this! Clean up this mess, then you can sleep it off.”

  It sounded like a wise plan, so we did. Next morning we fell out for chow call, our heads still woozy, and Lieutenant Dike, our company commander, wore a grave look on his face. I figured he’d chew us out, too, at very least make us run a few miles, but all he said was “After breakfast, stand fast.”

  Stand fast. What did that mean?

  We cleaned the barracks again, then all stood fast. Afternoon stretched into evening. Some guys went to see movies. Some played cards. Some went to sleep. Other fellas acted like it was business as usual, but I felt a strange uneasiness in the air.

  Seemed like it was the middle of the night, December 17, maybe early morning the 18th, when someone hollered for us to “Look sharp! Get up! Get going!” We bolted out of bed. Word had come in that the goddam Krauts were throwing everything they had at us over near a town called Bastogne. “Where the hell’s Bastogne?” somebody mumbled. “Just move!” came the reply. “Grab your gear! ” “What gear?” the man said. “I ain’t got nothing.”

  He was right. Few of us had anything except the clothes we’d worn into camp. Some of the fellas didn’t even have weapons anymore—they’d turned their rifles over for repairs. We were supposed to turn in our ammo when we got to camp, but I never did, so fortunately I still had that. But it wasn’t much, and I knew there wasn’t much ammo around camp at all. Mourmelon didn’t even have an ammo dump—I’d checked into that one off afternoon.

  “Bastogne’s in Belgium,” Sergeant Taylor said. He walked into the barracks and started packing his gear. He always did have a clear head. He’d healed from his motorbike wound and joined us back in camp, and he continued, “It’s near the Ardennes Forest, and it’s gonna be cold up there, so grab all the warm clothes you can find.” He put on a hooded sweatshirt that his parents had sent him back in Holland. He was one of the lucky ones. Warm clothes? What were they? Our boots weren’t felt-lined. We didn’t have any long underwear or thick wool socks. We had our combat jackets, but they weren’t meant for winter. Some of the replacements didn’t even have helmets yet. Joe Lesniewski had turned his boots in for repair and was running around in his stocking feet. I packed a change of underwear into my sleeping bag along with a change of socks and my pistols. I still had my M1. But that’s all I had.

  We bust out of our barracks and loaded onto a bunch of trucks, their engines already idling. “Shove on over,” somebody yelled, and more guys crowded on. There was no room to sit, so everyone stood. The trucks ground their gears, and as quick as that, we headed off into the night.

  We rode for some time, the trucks lights blazing. Every once in a while the trucks stopped and we jumped off the tailgates and pissed on the sides of the road. We climbed back on and kept going. The wind blew all around us, and we shivered and snapped our lighters, trying to smoke. It started raining, then stopped, then started again. A few men had K-rations and we passed around crackers and gum. The roads were potholed and we jostled against each other. A few times the roads got so steep and slick that the trucks got stuck in the mud. We all got out and helped push them over the hills. Must have been a mile or two outside of Bastogne, our truck stopped for good. We jumped out, pissed again, stretched, formed up into columns, and started hiking toward the town. I heard distant rifle shots in the hills.

  As we marched down both sides of the road, we started seeing figures coming toward us, American soldiers, all with their heads down. When they came closer, we said hello and they looked up, their eyes wild. “Don’tchall go up there,” one man said. “They’ll murder the lot of you.” I didn’t know what he was talking about. “Ya gotta run,” said another. “Krauts are armed to the teeth—tanks, bombs, artillery. You’ll never make it out alive.”

  This puzzled us, this behavior. These men were retreating from the very place we were marching toward. We scuffed along in silence for a minute or two before one of our men had a good idea, “Hey, how about giving us some of your ammo,” he called out.

  “Yeah,” said another. “We’ll take everything you got.” The other troops started handing it over—their hand grenades, their bullets. It wasn’t much, but I figured it would see us through for a while.

  As I hiked toward Bastogne, I shivered. I was wet and cold and hadn’t eaten much for a day and a night already. But the gnawing in my gut wasn’t chief in my mind just then. I was wondering at what kind of craziness we were heading into. Nobody had any idea, I guessed, except the soldiers hiking the other way.

  10

  ONLY SAFE UNDER THE EARTH

  From out of my foxhole I peered down the twiggy corridor into the murk. The pine trees were planted in rows, gridlike, you know, and they cast eerie shadows in the twilight. I peered closer. I’d never been afraid of trees at night, not really, but these ones glared like they had eyes. The Bois Jacques woods, they called these trees, and I remembered nights back in Clinchco when we hiked to Dave’s Ridge and slept next to that abandoned schoolhouse that folks said was haunted. The feeling I got up at Dave’s Ridge was as close to the feeling I had now as I’d ever had. But even that wasn’t close. A fella couldn’t sleep thinking a ghost was nearby. You’d stare all night into the blackness, wondering when the devil was gonna reach his bony fingers around your throat and drag you away.

  I tightened my arms around my rifle, and pulled my sleeping bag closer around me. Twisting my shoulders against the frozen side of the foxhole, I tried to find a mite of comfortableness. My feet ached. I wished I could rub some life into them, but I dared not take off my boots for long. My teeth chattered. My whole body was tensed against the cold. A smoke would taste good, but I wouldn’t risk a flame. I wished for a drink of water, but the inch or so I had left in my canteen was a block of ice. From somewhere out in the dark forest, a branch snapped. My finger went to the trigger and my eyes darted to the sound. I listened, my neck taut. Nothing more moved except the snow that sifted down in small silent flakes.

&n
bsp; I couldn’t grumble much. I knew other soldiers were feeling the same misery as me. We were all huddled in our foxholes, a few here, a few there, stretched out thin in a defensive line against the enemy. In my mind I retraced the picture I’d drawn of the landscape in front of us. We were far back in the trees, but nearer to the edge of the woods the landscape formed a little inlet, almost like a river when it gets wide and turns on a corner. On our right and left were long lines of trees that formed two broad sides of a cove, and in the middle of that cove was a field. We couldn’t see the field from our holes, but we had set up outposts on the edge of the forest. Whenever our turn on outpost came, we’d head to those further foxholes and look out on the field then. It sloped down to a little town called Foy, maybe a mile away.

  The fellas had been talking, see, and nobody at my rank knew exactly how many of the enemy we were facing. We just knew there were lots, and that they were plumb aggravated to see us. We were pretty sure the Krauts were camped in the trees to our right. We guessed they also stretched ribbonlike in front of us toward the north, holding the line between us and Foy. Well, shoot, somebody said the line of Krauts stretched clear around the town of Bastogne, and I didn’t doubt it. The word was that we’d come up to fight eight divisions of German troops. That was a heap of men. This was a mighty important battle, it was. If the Krauts could take Bastogne, well, then they could take the seven roads that led in and out of it. We all knew those roads were mighty important. Getting them was probably key to the Krauts’ last hope of victory. We were all that stood between them and the roads of that Bastogne.

  My feet felt dead and I flexed my toes in my boots, trying to push blood around my body. I shivered, peered out of my foxhole again, then settled back and looked over at Popeye, who dozed with one eye open. Maybe I should try to catch a few winks, too. My head nodded. Was I dreaming? Hold the line at all costs. That was the only real order I remembered hearing. I guessed I was doing that. Doing my job. Sitting in my foxhole in the snow at night. My stomach growled. I pushed on it, trying to hold back the sound. My last meal had been yesterday morning. I patted down my pockets, hoping I’d missed half an old Hershey bar somewhere. Nothing. I wondered what the weather would hold for the morrow. During daylight, the skies so far had proved too overcast for planes to fly in and drop supplies. If we were ever going to make it, we needed to see some blue sky soon.

  Another twig snapped. I rolled over in a flash and peered out into the dark. The wind was beginning to pick up. Maybe it was only that. Far off to my right, a branch moved. Didn’t look like wind. I brought my rifle up, put my finger on my trigger, and aimed into the falling snow. I wondered if I should call out. Couldn’t remember the passwords. Maybe it was Bill Kiehn again. A gust of wind blew. Blackness grabbed out at me. I wheeled around. Popeye had me by the ankle.

  “Get some sleep, Shifty,” he said. “I’ll stay up for a while.”

  I felt the tension all through my shoulders. “Yeah. Yeah, maybe you’re right.” I cradled my rifle near my chin and shoved my hands up into my sleeves.

  It felt good knowing a man like Popeye had your back. There were plenty of good men just like him joined in this fight. Easy Company wasn’t alone in the woods. Far from it. Lieutenant Winters had set up battalion headquarters behind us some distance, at the south edge of the woods. That thought was comforting—having a good officer and his overall command so close. Then, I knew the fellas in Dog Company were some distance south of us. They were real hard fighters, too. All the men in Third Battalion were dug in north of us, and I think the men from First Battalion were over near a town called Noville. We were all of us surrounding the town of Bastogne, maybe ten thousand Allied troops total. That was the picture—surrounded. We were around the town, and a larger ring of Germans surrounded us. Someone guessed it was four to one odds in favor of the Germans. But that didn’t bother us none. As paratroopers, we were used to being dropped smack-dab in the middle of the enemy.

  I could just make out some of the features of Popeye’s and my foxhole. We’d made it real good. It had a little shelf and we’d put some logs over it for artillery cover. We’d strung up boughs over the logs to keep out the falling snow. Every time we breathed, our breath came out white. Icicles pointed down from the roof of our foxhole. Digging a hole in the Ardennes the first day we had arrived proved rough. That ground was so cold, you know, it was hard to get your shovel through. But it’s funny how quick a man will get his shovel moving if he thinks he’s about to be shelled. Nothing came at us right away that first day, but we could hear the rumble of artillery in the distance, the crisp rat-a-tat-tat of a machine gun from time to time. Earl McClung was some distance away letting a guy named Don King dig the foxhole for the both of them. Bill Kiehn and Sergeant Taylor sweated nearby on their holes. Skip Muck, Alex Penkala, and George Luz had built a giant foxhole beyond us a ways and it was a fine sight to see. It seemed like forever ago we’d started in on those foxholes, but it was only a day or so back.

  A twig snapped again. No mistaking it this time. Popeye tensed and brought his rifle up. I slithered out of my sleeping bag and brought my rifle up beside his. Our eyes darted through the forest. The wind shoved the branches around. It was getting close to daylight. Another twig snapped. “Who’s there?” I said.

  “Shifty, Popeye, it’s me,” came a hushed whisper. Sergeant Taylor crawled over and slid into our foxhole, bringing a shower of snow with him. “Breakfast is here. Cooks brought up some soup from Bastogne. It’s over in a jeep near headquarters.” He looked around our foxhole with an admiring eye. “By the way, Lieutenant Shames reminded us to tell you guys to save your ammo. No firing at anything, except to repel a major attack. Got it?”

  I nodded. The sky was just growing gray. Popeye had slumped down against my sleeping bag. He was breathing into his neck and looked like he might doze off again. I slapped his shoulder, and we slid out of the foxhole and hiked silently back through the woods to where the jeep was parked. A few other guys milled around, rifles in hand. We fished out our mess kits, and the cook ladled out a scoop of soup into each cup. “Sorry,” he said. “All you get.” The beeflike broth had a few beans in it and went down cold as I drank it. Joe Lesniewski finished his soup just after me. I glanced down at his feet, remembering he’d left Mourmelon without any boots. His feet were wrapped in burlap bags.

  A guy named Frank Mellett bumped my shoulder on his way up to the chow line. I was about to say something when he turned at me and scowled. “Waddayou staring at?” he snarled.

  I don’t know why that boy aggravated me so. He was a fine soldier and one of the original Toccoa men, but our personalities didn’t mesh. Mellett was from up North, Brooklyn, I think, and we talked different. Others liked him okay—he was a good friend of Hank Zimmerman, and Hank was a real swell kid. It was just that Mellett went his way, and I went mine. That’s the way we liked it.

  I decided to keep quiet and head back to my foxhole. Popeye followed, blowing into the openings near the wrists of his thin GI gloves. The wind picked up even more as daylight dawned. A great icy blast flew through the corridors of the trees. Nearly cut a man in two, that wind. Snow had stopped at the chow line but started falling again, and the wind erased our tracks as we hiked. We crawled back into our foxhole and peered into the woods. Branches swayed against the wind. I reached up to scratch behind my ear and brushed off an icicle from a pine bow over our hole. The icicle slid down my neck.

  “My hands are damn near ready to fall off,” Popeye said at a whisper. “I don’t know if they’ll ever get warm again.” I looked over at my friend. Popeye’s arms were crossed and his hands were under his armpits. He uncrossed his arms and slapped his knees twice. “Shifty, did you hear a British pilot was shot down over Bastogne last week and captured by the Krauts?”

  I shook my head, shivering.

  “Yeah,” Popeye continued. “So the poor fella survives but really gets messed up on the jump down. The Kraut doctor who treats him in the prison camp has
got to hack off one of his legs.”

  I rearranged my back against the foxhole and eyed him closer.

  “Well, the Limey must be really studying the situation,” said Popeye, “because he says to the Kraut doctor, ‘After you take my leg off, can you have one of your bombers drop it over London on your next raid?’ The Krauts think he’s a real loony but say okay. A few days later, gangrene sets in and they got to cut off his other leg. The Limey pilot asks the same thing, and the Krauts agree. Poor fella’s really had it, and next they got to hack off an arm, and he asks the same thing. Again, the Krauts agree and drop his arm over England. . .. Hold on, Shifty, I got an idea, I’ll be back in a minute.” Popeye crawled out of the foxhole. I glanced up. He had his fly open and was urinating on his hands. He crawled back in a few minutes later and shot me a dirty look. “Goddam, Shifty, but that cooked my hands up real nice. You gotta give it a try.”

  I shuddered but almost grinned. “You were telling me about that pilot fella?”

  “Ah yeah,” Popeye said. “Finally, they have to amputate his last arm, and the Limey asks the same thing. But this time the Kraut commander comes to tell him off—” Popeye screwed up his face and puffed out his chest, doing his best imitation of an angry German officer. “‘Nein!’ says the Kraut commander. ‘Ve cannot do zis! Ve suspekt you are trying to escape!’”

  We both sniggered.

  A twig snapped again. We grabbed our rifles in a flash and peered into the gray light. “Glad you got some chow,” Sergeant Taylor said, as he crawled into our foxhole. His face was grim. “It’s been too damn quiet out there this morning. Let’s go cross over the road and see what we can see.” Popeye and I nodded. I didn’t know how much sense it made to go looking for a fight, but Sergeant Taylor was always levelheaded in these matters. The three of us crawled out of the hole and started working from tree to tree over to the area where we guessed the Germans were.