There were no bodies. Just a few parts. A shell had flown in and landed directly on Alex and Skip’s foxhole. Everything was gone.
A man can’t quite get that through his head. No. He can’t.
I thought about Skip Muck, the heart and soul of Easy Company. When we were back in Aldbourne, he had taken Joe Lesniewski under his wing and made him part of the group. I thought about Alex Penkala, how you’d often see him writing little letters to his sisters. He’d read me one of them once. It was a cheery note, you know, asking his sisters to send him cookies, promising he’d write again soon.
I helped out doing whatever I could do for a while. Then I brushed away the snow and sat on a stump. I thought about praying, but I didn’t know how to put anything into words. I wished I could go home. I wished we all could.
Then I went back to my foxhole in the woods in the snow in the ground. My feet were aching and frozen. My stomach hollow and tight.
11
FOY
Another cold front skulked in, and Captain Dick Winters nicked the skin of his neck. I shook my head in disbelief. It was twenty degrees below zero, and the man was shaving. From where I stood near the chow line, I watched him shiver under a tree, wiping lather and blood off his face, and I got to studying that. I reckoned an officer who kept his face clean shaven during Belgium’s coldest winter in thirty years must want his men to know he’s still the toughest son of a gun around, you know, that his resolve is still strong and you can still follow him anywhere he goes. He probably also wants his men to realize that they’re all going to be staying in that location for a while, as miserable as it is, so they should make the best of it. I scratched the stubble on my chin as the cook sloshed half a cup of bean soup into my steel cup.
Dawn was breaking and the wind bit us. We’d been outside in the snow for a month, maybe five weeks, I didn’t know. Time didn’t mean much to me. I finished my soup, hiked back to my foxhole, peered around a bit, then headed out to the edge of the forest and slid into an outpost hole.
I stuck an unlit cigarette in my mouth and came near to grinning at the thought of my morning routine. From where I sat, I looked out across this big open field and could see about a mile. Cold green trees and little scrubby brown and reddish trees poked their ways out of the snow. It was not a nice bright red, the color of those trees, but a dead, cold red.
Sure enough, there he was. Every morning like clockwork, far off in the distance, a German crawled out of his foxhole and hiked around a knoll with a bucket. Every morning he did the same thing. The snow made everything hazy and I squinted, dull even as the gray light was. I could barely see the man. But he was there again. Maybe he was going to get chow. Maybe he was going to do his business. I didn’t rightly know, but it didn’t matter. He’d disappear before long, I knew that much. But there was always about ten good seconds where he was wide open.
This morning, I figured he’d grown too comfortable. I wasn’t grinning at that, mind you, because I knew what I needed to do. As far away as he was, I brought my rifle to my shoulder anyway and got me a bead on his position. He walked toward the knoll. I fired. The bullet took forever. I stuck my head out from the side of my rifle and watched it fly. A soft pop hit the snow maybe twenty yards in front of him. I’d shot too low. I don’t know if the German even noticed the bullet hit.
Well, he was gone in a jiffy, so I watched for a while longer, then worked my way back to my hole. For the rest of the day I chewed on the angle of that bullet, the distance it needed to cover. We weren’t doing much that day besides: a patrol here, a patrol there, we fired a few rounds at them, they fired a few rounds at us. All day long the wind whistled around our ears. It seemed like everywhere you hiked these days, you’d see a dead body. Ours, theirs. A civilian once in a while. Horses. Cattle. Death was all over. Men just moved around the corpses and kept going. Everybody in the company seemed scabbed over by now, pretty shaky, you know. This one replacement had been crying in his foxhole ever since that last night of hard shelling. I didn’t blame a kid for feeling that way, but I feared all the noise he was making. I felt like bawling myself sometimes, but somehow I just kinda picked up and kept going. I don’t mean all that bloodshed hadn’t affected me. But I took each day as it came, you know, doing the one thing ahead of me that needed doing. That was all I knew to do.
The next morning I got up, hiked to the edge of the woods, and, sure enough, the same German crawled out of his foxhole. I took my rifle, aimed twenty feet above the top of his head this time, fired, and peered around the edge of my rifle again. Well, that German jumped, squiggled, and took off flying. I couldn’t rightly say for sure that I’d hit the man, but the next morning after that when I hiked to the edge of the woods, he wasn’t there.
It seems like a man will do anything when he’s tired and hungry enough. One afternoon McClung shot a jackrabbit and cooked it. It stunk like hell, but we were all starved so we passed it around. Lieutenant Shames had just come in from a patrol, and McClung gave him a real big piece because he was so cold. He was glad to have it.
Our exhaustion and hunger acted out in different ways, too. One night Popeye needed to shake me awake for fear of the noise I was making in my dreams. I lay there afterward, my teeth chattering, the dark closing in around me. I hated this place. These woods with their icy wind. So much killing. So much dying. I’d never felt so strongly aggravated about a piece of God’s green nature before, and I was sure it must be green sometimes, but I plumb despised this snowy hellhole we were in. All I’d ever take from this place was cold memories, a lot of miserable memories, the kind of memories that a man shoves out of his mind if he can.
Then there was this: one evening after it grew dark, word came round to get ready because we were taking the town of Foy the next morning. Popeye and I figured we’d catch some winks before the action, you know, so we covered our foxhole with pine boughs, same as always. It seemed only an instant, I don’t know, but I was gone far away from my foxhole, far in the darkness, walking in one of those dream countries where everything looks exactly as you know it. Same pine trees. Same frozen creeks. Same shiver down your spine.
Frank Mellett, that fella who’d bumped my shoulder in the chow line, lurked behind a tree. He popped out, real slow, brought his rifle up to eye level, and pointed at me. He shot first, but I ducked. I scrambled around, searching for my rifle in the blackness. I couldn’t find it. When Mellett slunk out from behind the tree again, I gripped my pistol with both hands, aimed between his eyes, and pulled the trigger. Blam! He fell over in the snow. Blam! I shot him again. He didn’t move.
Morning dawned, and I crawled out of my foxhole, looked around, but couldn’t see a soul. It shook me a minute. Maybe we’d been attacked during the blur of sleep, and I was the only man left standing. It had snowed again, and in front of me were huge mounds of white. It looked like I was standing in a cemetery. In a few minutes, Rogers popped out of one of those mounds like he was coming up out of a grave. At least I knew then I wasn’t all alone. He hiked over. “Who was doing that shooting last night, Shifty?” he said.
“I dunno. I didn’t hear any shooting.”
He shrugged and started hiking over to the jeep. I stood motionless, my heart in my throat. I’d brought with me up to Bastogne a little old 7.65 pistol, and when Rogers was out of sight, I pulled it out of its holster and looked at it. Rounds were hard to get for those, so I knew exactly how many I had. Two were missing. Sure enough, I’d fired my pistol twice during the night. It was for real.
My forehead got scrunchy and I started breathing hard through my nose. I shook my head, trying to get a clearer picture of what had happened. Maybe I’d been sleepwalking. I might have jerked that old pistol out and shot it unaware. Then a horror gripped me—I’d killed Frank Mellett in my sleep. It hadn’t been a dream after all. I’d killed one of our own men.
Some distance away, the pine boughs parted and a familiar figure slid out of his foxhole. He scowled my direction and slunk back thro
ugh the woods. Frank Mellett wasn’t bleeding anywhere. He was just as alive as I was, so I guessed I hadn’t shot him after all. I let out a big sigh of relief. I didn’t know what exactly had happened during the night, but I was sure tickled to death to see Frank Mellett up and walking.
Well, we grouped up and headed toward Foy the roundabout way, you know, so it wouldn’t be obvious to the enemy. It was still early in the day, and Third Platoon moved forward in a line through this wooded area. Another platoon was ahead of us and came across a big log-covered bunker. We caught up and looked around, reckoning it was a German sentry outpost, so we crouched low. A couple fellas from the other platoon musta reckoned somebody was sleeping in that bunker, so they threw a couple hand grenades in. I saw Sergeant Taylor slowly moving toward the bunker, his rifle raised. Something to my left moved. A German crawled out of a foxhole near the bunker. Bang! Sergeant Taylor’s rifle went off. Bang! It went off again. The Kraut was dead.
We scouted the bunker. The dead German was the only one around, so we grouped up and prepared to continue through the woods. Sergeant Taylor walked over to where I was, a curious look in his eye. “You know, that wasn’t such a smart move on my part,” he said in a hush. “A dead soldier isn’t going to tell you an awful lot. I should have kept him alive and sent him back for interrogation. Then we’d know what we were up against.”
I nodded. That Sergeant Taylor was a smart fella. He was doing his job, but he always wanted to do it better. We moved on through the woods. It remained very quiet as morning grew to afternoon.
Maybe an hour later, Sergeant Taylor and I hiked over to the side to our right flank to see what was going and met up with some troopers from another company. As we stood there talking, a couple shots rang out at random. Sergeant Taylor winced. His leg buckled. Then he sat down hard. The bullet had peeled the flesh back, looked right to the nerves. We hollered for a medic.
“I can’t feel my foot,” Sergeant Taylor said with a grimace as the medic dumped sulfa on his wounds.
“It’s a million dollars,” I said, “this one’s for sure.”
He nodded, knowing what I was saying even before I did. He’d been wounded before, at least twice that I remembered, but he’d always healed to come back and join us. This one was his third strike—and he knew he was out. That bullet had really torn into his leg.
It dawned on me what I was saying, and what this truly meant. My voice went low. “Well,” I said, but what I wanted to say wouldn’t come out. I swallowed hard. “Say hello to Elaine for me,” I choked out at last. That was his girlfriend back home. He’d told me about her plenty of times before. They loaded him on a stretcher to take him back to an aid station. I patted Sergeant Taylor on his shoulder. He gripped my hand a moment. He’d been there fighting alongside us since the beginning. At least Sergeant Taylor was going home alive.
The plan to take Foy seemed simple enough. The town was chock full of German tanks and artillery. All we had to do was charge across an open field, shove our way into the town, and throw grenades at every enemy we spotted. There was no great cunning involved.
Easy Company was picked to lead the attack. First Platoon got the order and started running across the field. We were close behind. We needed to get in there quick before the German mortars and artillery could come down on us. Halfway across the field I started to sweat. I hated open fields. We needed to keep moving. Whatever happened, we needed to get into the town. Bullets started winging in. You could hear the zing and the zang. There was nowhere to go but forward. The guns in First Platoon started getting mowed down. I heard men call for a medic. I saw Burr Smith go down. Frank Perconte lay in a pool of blood. Lieutenant Dike had stopped the platoon behind two haystacks for cover. Haystacks?! The lieutenant signaled for the Second and Third Platoons to hold up. It was the closest I’ve ever felt to receiving a suicide order. Why were we stopped?! We sat like fish in a barrel. Fire came at us from every window. The closest burned in from a building with a caved-in roof. It was too far away for me to find the sniper. We needed to get mortars on the roof of that building. We needed to keep moving forward.
Lieutenant Speirs was there. Real sudden-like. He was shouting orders. Getting things done. I didn’t hear about this until later, but I guess Captain Winters was watching the carnage from up on the hill. He’d grabbed his M1 in his hand and begun to run toward the mess, but higher brass stopped him. He was a battalion man now, not someone who led the charge from the front. So Winters thought fast and relieved Foxhole Norman of his command on the spot. He put Lieutenant Ron Speirs in charge. This was the same lieutenant who’d been rumored to have shot twenty prisoners back in Normandy as they calmly smoked cigarettes. Lieutenant Speirs ran over to the haystack, took charge, and got the mortars humping, the machine gunners laying down a base of protective fire. We went forward.
Artillery set up a smoke barrage in the field. We were scattered out now, different squads going in one direction, others going another. There were maybe six or eight of us in my group. We ran forward into the town under smoke.
A horse barn lay in front of us. We ran up, made sure it was clear, and ducked inside. We had a good view from its windows. We could see most the rest of the town. It was up a bit on a hill from where we were. Another brick building squatted some distance down the street. A tiny puff of white breath, visible only because of the cold, blew from around the corner. It blew again. A flash of German coat sleeve showed, then ducked back. The breath blew again.
Jim Alley crouched next to me. He was a fine soldier. We called him Moe.
“Moe,” I yelled. “We can get this guy. When he sticks his head out there again, you tell me.” Moe nodded and took out his binoculars. I aimed at the spot the white puff came from and held my breath.
“He’s there!” Moe shouted. “Now!”
A little flash of coat sleeve. A little flash of cheekbone. I pulled the trigger. The German crumpled in the snow.
We left the barn and sprinted up the side of the hill, through a vegetable garden and up toward town. We crouched from building to building. Small arms fire could be heard all through the town. We reached the side of bombed out building and glanced in the door. It must have been empty for a while. Ice stood where the floor used to be.
Most of us herded in and took cover while I stood near the doorway and two of our guys worked their way alongside the side of the building. They’d gone maybe thirty feet and had at least thirty more to go when it dawned on me how exposed they were. Come to think of it, I didn’t have great position either. Bang! One of our guys went down. The next bullet was aimed at me. My feet flipped out from under me on that ice, and I slid right up under a window. More shots rang out. I glanced up then down again. The other man along the side of the building froze. The sniper kept firing. Our other guy didn’t stand a chance unless we could get that sniper. I ducked up again to get a bead on where the sniper fired from. He was about sixty feet away, shooting from around the corner of a brick building. I ducked down again and propped my M1 up on the window ledge. Seven rounds were left in my clip. I didn’t have time to properly aim. I fired from instinct, seeing in my mind the corner of that building where I guessed the German’s head to be. Blam. Blam. Blam. Blam. The dust flew off the brick at the corner of the building. I fired all seven rounds.
No sound came from where the German sniper was. Our man found his feet again and checked the other man on the ground. The first man was dead. But the other was just fine. “Okay,” I said with a nod. I thought maybe I saved that man’s life. It felt good.
We left that building and came to a barn area. A big square yard sat to one side. McClung stormed through the door. Inside, the building was a shell, just roof and logs and a few partitions, but not finished. A lone German wheeled around, his hands up. He looked like a company clerk, and before anybody could get to him, he dived for the staircase and flung himself down. McClung followed. At the bottom was a door. McClung wrenched open the door, flung a concussion grenade inside, and
slammed the door shut.
When the smoke cleared, we took twenty Germans prisoner. Two were dead. The basement was their command post.
More fighting came, more shooting. We took the town. I felt okay about that, but later, after we regrouped, Frank Mellett was missing. Someone asked where he was. The answer came. He was one of the ones who’d been mowed down when Lieutenant Dike was hiding behind that haystack. Frank Mellett was dead.
You know, I never liked the man, but I was awful sorry he was gone. I got to thinking that maybe if I’d actually shot him for real in my dream, oddly enough, maybe just winged him in the leg or arm, maybe he’d still be alive. But I couldn’t think about that too much before another order came, and we needed to keep going.
Battles blurred after that. We were so tired by then, so hungry, so cold. More little towns, more fighting. Day after day. Noville. Rachamps. I saw some crazy sights. A German tank came up the road, and Lieutenant Shames and Moe Alley were out in the middle of that road looking like they were going to stop that tank by hand. They held their ground, under fire, for what seemed an impossible time. Finally, they moved back and let the tank go up. One of the bullets had gone through the stock of Alley’s rifle. Then a P-47 zoomed down and knocked that tank out. That was a good show.
In Rachamps we huddled for a night in a convent. It was the first time we’d slept indoors since leaving Mourmelon. The sisters had a choir there and sang for us. Hymns. Spiritual songs about better places, better times. Their voices echoed off the walls while candles flickered in the warm indoor air. Most of the men sprawled on the pews, quietly munching on K-rations, listening. Me, I stared straight ahead. The sound in my ears was the sound of angels, so different from the gunfire we’d been hearing for so long. So different. I wanted the night to never end.
I guess near mid-January, maybe it was toward the end, the battle for Bastogne and its surrounding towns was declared over. This time we’d won. We got into trucks and headed back through Bastogne, down the road toward a train station. It didn’t take many trucks to hold us. Numbers were thinner in every platoon. A platoon is usually forty men. Only eleven were left from the First.
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