Inside my head the noises got louder, and I felt myself crying inside. All of a sudden I was five again and lost and scared. Five again and lost and scared. Lost and scared.
“We’re the 29th, we’re damned good, and we’re going to keep on fighting!”
Lieutenant Milton didn’t look like a soldier to me. More like a car salesman, or somebody who sold feed. But we had been gathered and told that he was in charge of us.
“Anybody got any questions?”
“What company are we with?” Gomez asked. “It’s all mixed up.”
“Yeah, and so we’re now a fighting unit until we get it straightened up,” Milton said. “We’re going to start talking to one another, and living with one another, and looking out for one another. I want each of you to introduce yourselves so that we’re people. Not just serial numbers, but people. You can start, Gomez.”
“What you want me to say?”
“Tell everybody who you are,” Milton said. “That’ll be a start.”
“Why I got to start?”
“Because I said so,” Milton answered.
“Shit!” Gomez looked away. “So my family came to the States in 1924. In the States things weren’t that good for them but it was better than what they had in Mexico. So they came. I don’t remember much of that because I was too friggin’ young.
“We lived in Roanoke and it was okay. I didn’t join the National Guard because my dad wouldn’t let me. But when the war broke out, I joined up because I’m an American and I thought it was my duty. I didn’t know nothing about this stuff.”
“What stuff?” Milton asked.
“Guys being killed like what happened on the beach,” Gomez said. “I didn’t see it like that. I just seen it like I had a job to do, like we all had a job to do, and I joined up. There’s nothing fancy about me. I don’t have any deep thoughts about anything. I’m more like the kids who fought at Chapultepec. That was a war the Americans had against my people. In the history books it was kind of heroic. Maybe I should have thought more. I don’t know. But I’m an American, not a Mexican, and for me it was my country at war, so it was my fight.”
“Next.” Milton pointed toward Shumann.
“Arnold Shumann, Baltimore. First, I wanted to kill Japs. That was right after Pearl Harbor,” Shumann said. “Then, when they sent me to Iceland and then to England, I wanted to kill Germans. You mess with me and I mess with you. That’s how I go. We come over here and all these guys end up dying in the water and on the sand and I want to kill a whole bunch of people. I hate them. But even if I didn’t hate them I would want to kill them. I was made to be a soldier.
“My dad thought I should have been a factory worker, like he was. He made farm machinery. Once a year he took us all up to Richmond for a vacation. I hate Richmond. I never met anybody from Richmond I ever liked in my whole life.
“That’s pretty much me. After what I seen here, I want to kill Germans more than anything I ever wanted. If they kill me it don’t even matter, because God gave me a friggin’ chance to kill them.”
“Burns?”
“I was drafted. Didn’t care much about Germans or Japs. I don’t like any of them. I don’t like Negroes, either. Nothing personal. I just don’t like people who are different from me. Everybody in this group is like a brother to me. I’ll fight for them. If there was a German or a Jap or a Negro in this group, I would fight for them. I think I’m pretty good.
“I never thought much of dying. Maybe I should have. I don’t know. When I saw all those guys out there — lying out there — I felt like shit. I wanted to give them something. Maybe some payback. But dying never meant nothing to me until I saw those guys out there. I guess it should have meant something. Right now I’m appreciating stuff I never held too high before. Like pan bread.
“Back home my mother used to make pan bread when I was a kid and I didn’t like it. You know what pan bread is? You make it on top of the stove with flour and water and a half cake of yeast, and an egg if you got one. Then you cook it up. I hated pan bread because all my friends got bread from the grocery store or the bakery.
“Right now, I don’t give a damn about anything except moving my ass along the map across France and into Germany. I’m thinking more about dying now that I seen so many men die. I’m thinking more about how I’m going to deal with it. In a way I hope I go out good. Not smiling or nothing, but going out good, going out trying to get the job done. Wish I had done more thinking on all of this a long time ago. I didn’t, so that’s that.”
“Woody?” Milton looked at me. “What are you making of all this?”
I didn’t know what he meant at first. Why was I talking about who I was when half the world I knew had just died? How was I going to know about who I was?
I looked over at Gomez and I was glad to see him. I was glad to see his hair coming down into his face and his dark pretty eyes still open.
“Wedgewood!” Lieutenant Milton said.
“I’m from Bedford, Virginia. Bedford’s a good place to live. Small town, good people,” I said. “I was pretty much raised in the church and even thought I might like to go into a seminary. But I’m good at art, too. And I saw that not that many people can draw as well as I can, or even see the beauty in things the way I do. So I went up to New York to art school. It was a way of getting away from home, too. When the war broke out and my mom wrote to me that they were calling up the 29th, I went home and enlisted. I’m confused about this fighting and, like the others said, about people dying so fast. I just hope I get it figured out before … you know, something happens to me.”
“Why don’t you go, sir?” Gomez said to Lieutenant Milton.
“I’m from Glenarden, Maryland.” Lieutenant Milton spoke slowly. “I’m not into glory or being brave or even killing anybody. The country was attacked, and I took a look at my life and saw it wasn’t amounting to much, and it wasn’t going anywhere in particular because it didn’t have to go anywhere. My family has money. We own a small store in Washington and two up in New York. My dad knew how to make money, still does. He offered to buy my way out of the war, and he could have done it, too.
“I didn’t want any part of that, and not too much more of him, either. He did pull some strings and I got a gold bar instead of a PFC stripe. I hope to make a good soldier. Other than that I’m just like everybody else.”
“This don’t sound like much of an outfit,” Stagg said. “But it’ll do.”
Silence.
“So what’s your story, Stagg?” Lieutenant Milton asked.
“No story,” he answered. “I’m here, I’ll carry my load.”
“Minkowitz?”
“Amherst, philosophy major,” he said. “My parents are divorced. My mom lives in New York. She doesn’t think I’ll make it back. I’m not sure, either. I hope … I hope I carry my load.”
“You tell your dad you joined?”
“Yeah, he asked me if I had insurance,” Minkowitz said.
“Freihofer?”
“This is stupid.” Freihofer spoke through clenched teeth. “It has no meaning. What difference does it make where you are from or what your parents are doing? I don’t care if you make bread in a pan or in an oven. All this is bullshit. We are not here to love one another or take care of one another. We are here like ants who are supposed to crawl around on a big map and capture towns. If we don’t capture the towns, then they will send more ants. None of this talk will help us. It didn’t help any of those poor bastards lying in the sand. You know we are only ten minutes away from the water? You know that if we are attacked now most of us don’t even have rifles to shoot back? Don’t give me your bullshit, soldier.”
“Freihofer? Is that German?” Petrocelli said.
“It’s as German as Adolf Hitler,” Freihofer snarled.
“You speak German?” Lieutenant Milton asked.
“What difference does it make?”
“It might make a difference somewhere down the line, Freihofer,
and I want to know now,” Lieutenant Milton said. “And I don’t care if you think this is bullshit or not! If you give me any more lip, I’ll shoot you myself!”
“I speak German,” Freihofer said.
“Scott?”
“My friends call me Scotty,” Scott said. “I was working in a garage when we got called up. I don’t have a story, really. I’m just a working guy who gets along with everybody, more or less. I’m not the hero type, but I don’t run from a fight, either.”
Lyman couldn’t talk. He kept trying, kept opening his mouth, but nothing came out. I thought he was going to break down, but then Lieutenant Milton patted him on the knee and pointed to Petrocelli, who said he had to go take a crap. When he got up to go, Mac went with him. I hadn’t heard him speak, and guessed he wasn’t up to it now. I wished I hadn’t said anything.
Milton looked pissed. I knew he was trying to get us together again as a fighting unit, and some of the guys were buying it. What we had to do, what we were trying to figure out, was who the hell we were. Sometimes you come up with words and they don’t mean a lot. Like, it didn’t matter if I was raised in Bedford, or if I went to art school. I wasn’t even sure if it mattered if we crawled across the map of France like ants. I didn’t know what mattered anymore, because the world had changed. On Tuesday, the sixth day of June, 1944, the world had stopped being what I thought it was. There were guys I had laughed with and grumbled with and even joked with about what we would be doing in Paris or Berlin, and now they were dead. I didn’t know who had made it off the beach, or who had even got that far. I thought guys had drowned before they even got on shore.
And none of it was coming together for me. What I felt was desperation. Wild and nasty, and not like anything I had ever known before.
We moved into the town, into Vierville, men damned near shaking in their skins, trying to grasp what was happening. The men I was with moved around the edge of the town, behind the smoking buildings, the charred walls. This is what combat is about. This and the killing. As we moved, there was gunfire behind us and on the right, in the center of the town, and I imagined there were Germans hiding out, or that some had doubled back. What I knew was that there was a lot of confusion.
A bunch of us gathered with some officers and we were kind of sorted out. The ones with rifles and ammo were distributed to the few officers around, and I found myself with Lieutenant Milton again. I was glad to see him.
“They’re changing plans every thirty minutes!” Lieutenant Milton said. “Now they want us to move out as quickly as possible and head in the general direction of St. Lo. That’s our next big objective. What they’re worried about is a major German counterattack. We captured a lot of the Krauts, but they told us that a lot got away. If they team them up with an armored division, we’re in for a hell of a fight.”
“Especially since we don’t have any tanks,” Kroll said.
“They’ll bring them ashore as fast as they can,” Milton went on. “But we need to set up a perimeter big enough to establish a supply base and jumping-off point. According to the first plans, we were supposed to be in St. Lo this afternoon.”
“Yo, Lieutenant, did they expect any Germans to be here?” Stagg asked.
“I think they didn’t expect an experienced combat outfit to be here,” Milton answered. “But it doesn’t matter now. We’re here and we have to move before the Germans get reorganized.”
“It matters to me, sir,” Petrocelli said. “We were the first on the beach and we got our asses shot up. We were the first to move inland and we got our asses shot up. Now we got to get out further so when the Krauts bring up tanks they got some experienced shot-up asses to shoot at?”
“Petrocelli, I’ve heard just about enough of your mouth.” Lieutenant Milton spoke slowly, deliberately. “If I hear any more I’m going to close it for you myself.”
I watched Petrocelli’s jaw tighten, relax, and tighten again. If Milton hadn’t been an officer, there would have been a fight.
Milton told us to check our weapons, then stalked off. Petrocelli raised one finger and pointed at the officer as he left.
“Why don’t you give it a rest, Petrocelli?” This from Mac.
“Back in Bayonne, in my cousin Alberto’s restaurant, there’s this old guy who used to hang around,” Petrocelli said. “The guy had to be ancient. He could have been fifty, even sixty, and his neck was all wrinkled. But for an old guy, he was smart. He used to say that if something looked like a pizza, it wanted to be a pizza. He said that about some guys, too. If a guy looked like a bum, he wanted to be a bum. So, back in England, when I saw the pictures of Vierville-sur-Mer, it looked like a friggin’ beach. I thought this invasion was going to be a picnic.”
“A picnic?” Kroll asked. “You saying you weren’t scared?”
“No, I was a little scared. Maybe more nervous than scared, but the pictures they showed us had Vierville looking like a beach, with people sitting around on the sand. I don’t really trust nothing with a French name. Even when they call it a saint something. And I’ve been Catholic all my life, and I’ve never heard of a Saint Lo.
“Anyway, what this looks like to me is that the 29th is being put out there to find out where the Krauts are. We stick our necks out, the Krauts pick us off, and then the brass says, ‘Oh, that’s where they are!’”
We packed up for the move from Vierville toward Bayeux. Some of the guys were getting themselves together. I wasn’t sure if I would ever be the same guy who got on the boat on the fourth, but I was calming down some.
The thing that bothered me the most was that everybody looked different. Before I had seen men with eyes and noses and ears and they looked friendly or not friendly. Now I had seen some of those same men lying on Omaha Beach, had seen them curled up and lifeless by the side of the road, had seen them with their faces blown away or blackened by fire. They didn’t look like men anymore, they looked like some strange creatures you’d see in a nightmare. And their being dead didn’t make any sense, because being dead was supposed to be something you did when you got old, when you were home in your bed and coughing into a handkerchief. It was, in a way, at least in my mind, something that you made peace with before it happened, that you agreed to be part of. Instead it was something that happened to you with a violence you couldn’t understand, or at least I couldn’t understand. I told myself I wasn’t scared of dying. The words got into my head, but I couldn’t even say them out loud. It was true, in a weird kind of way, that I wasn’t scared of dying, but I was scared of the violence, of the suddenness that I saw get other men. They would be hit and you could see the surprise on their faces, and then the panic, and then, maybe, the knowing that they were going to die.
We got into some kind of line and started down the road to Bayeux. There were two Sherman tanks rolling in front of us. Lord, I didn’t want to be in a tank. I had seen them hit, and seen the guys burning as they tried to escape. I didn’t want to burn to death.
“Hey, Woody.” It was Minkowitz. “You think a French city is like New York?”
“No, how come you’re asking that?”
“You’ve been to New York,” Mink said. “I bet most of these guys haven’t been to New York.”
“I bet Petrocelli’s been to New York,” I said. “I had a girl in one of my art classes who lived in Hoboken. If she could come into the city three times a week, then Petrocelli must have been in New York a hundred times.”
“Yo, Gomez!” Mink called over to Gomez, who was walking near Petrocelli. “Ask Petrocelli if he’s ever been to New York.”
Petrocelli turned and gave Mink a look. “Yo, knucklehead, I friggin’ own New York. Nothing happens in that city without my saying it’s all right.”
“Stay alert! Stay alert! There could be snipers in the city.”
I knew that. I knew some German soldier could be hiding behind a tree, or in a building, drawing a bead on one of us. Maybe he had a machine gun and was just waiting for the right time to open u
p. Or maybe he was as scared as I was. I wondered if the others could see how I felt inside. If they knew the terror I felt.
We slow-marched four miles toward Bayeux and set up loose defenses around a small village that looked a lot like the outskirts of Bedford as it grew dark. I thought about soldiers surrounding our little city in Virginia and it made me sad. And just as in Vierville, the occasional pop! pop! of a rifle coming from the darkness kept us all on edge.
Lieutenant Milton kept checking the maps. There were signs around, giving the names of the places we were in, but it seemed to me that he wasn’t sure of just where we were.
You could tell the difference between the sound of an M1, the American rifle, and the German guns. We knew that one of us, sometimes two or more if they caught us together, was going down when we heard the Kraut guns. The thing was that the Germans had more automatic weapons than we did. It didn’t feel right trying to squeeze off a round against an enemy we couldn’t see when they were spraying us with machine guns.
Stagg came over and told us to keep our heads down. “They want us to know they’re still out there and still fighting,” he said.
“If they stick their heads up, I’ll kill them,” Gomez said softly.
“Yeah, Gomez, they know that, too.”
I dug a foxhole with Mink. We went down a full six feet with no problem. I wanted to be able to stand up and still have most of my body protected.
“You going to make a sump hole for grenades?” Mink asked.
“You want to hear something funny?” I asked. “I was with this guy in infantry training, and he said he would never dig out a sump hole for grenades. You know why?”
“Why?”
“You know you’re supposed to dig a hole so in case somebody throws a grenade into your foxhole you can kick it into the hole so when it goes off it won’t get you, right?”
“Something like that,” Mink said.
“Well, he said that if anybody ever threw a grenade into his foxhole, he wouldn’t spend his time trying to kick it around,” I said. “He said he’d jump out of the foxhole and take a chance fighting whoever threw it. You got to admit, it’s a funny picture, two guys trying to find a grenade in the dark and kicking it into a small hole.”
Invasion Page 5
