I got into a prone position and looked toward the cluster of small houses. Some of the roofs were thatched, and others were covered with a reddish material. I looked for movement, a sign of waiting Germans. Mink and the guy with him moved quickly. That was the way to go — no creeping while some guy got a bead on you. They moved quickly to the first house.
Mink flattened himself against the outside wall of the house near the front door, his rifle at the ready across his chest. He was talking! Then a young woman came to the door.
Mink lowered his rifle and talked to the girl as the other guy came up. He turned toward us and gave the thumbs-up sign.
“Could be a trick!” Mac said.
“Guess we’ll find out,” Lieutenant Milton said. He signaled for the rest of us to head toward the houses.
A feeling of panic gripped me. Gomez and Stagg had volunteered to go through the fields and had made it. Mink had crossed to the houses and had made it. Sooner or later it would be me on point, and I wondered if I would make it.
A few French men, mostly old, came out of the houses. There were some children and old women, too. The old women wore long dresses and aprons, and the men were in dark baggy pants.
“Check each house and put something — a canteen cup — outside the front door when the house has been cleared. Nobody relax for a minute until every house has been cleared and you’re set up in a defensive position.”
“We’re setting up communications,” the corporal from Headquarters Company said.
“You’re doing what I just told you to do first!” Milton barked. “Drop your gear right there and start checking the houses.”
I felt pretty relaxed as I went first into one house and then another. They both smelled of tobacco and urine. I had heard stories about Germans shooting at French people going to the outhouses.
After setting up a perimeter and guards in the fields, we took a break as Lieutenant Milton got briefed on our role in an assault on St. Lo. I remembered the last briefing: We have to take it and the Germans have to hold it.
“Hey, Woody, you want to trade your mashed potatoes for crackers and jam?” I looked up and saw Freihofer standing over me.
“Sure,” I said, “why not?”
Crackers and jam were always good, even if the crackers were stale. Freihofer handed over the can and I handed up my mess kit and watched as he scooped out the mashed potatoes.
“Mind if I sit?”
I gestured to the ground next to me and, crossing his ankles, he collapsed into a sitting position.
“What you thinking about this war?” he asked.
“I’d sure like to be home reading about it,” I said. “I don’t think the people back home could combine the images. You know, how pretty all of this countryside is and then all of the killing. What do you think?”
“Stupid stuff, mostly.” Freihofer stuck his fork in the mashed potatoes and pushed them to one side of his mess kit. “I’m tiptoeing along the edge of the field back there thinking about all the times I was too lazy to go to church on Sundays. You know, once I almost went all the way with a girl in the church basement. It didn’t happen, but it wasn’t my fault that it didn’t.”
“And you’re thinking God is looking for some payback?”
“That stupid or what?”
“I think if I ever got in a big poker game — I don’t mean even for a hundred dollars or anything like that, but a really big poker game where I was betting my life against a million dollars, that big — I’d be just like I am now. I’m scared all the time, I’m wondering what I did right in my life and what I did wrong, I’m wondering if any of it really means anything.
“The million dollars would be fine, but the only part of that bet that matters is losing your life. That’s what I’m thinking over here. I don’t want to be a hero, I don’t want to do anything wonderful, but, oh Jesus, do I want to see home again.”
“You married?”
“No.”
“Got a girl?”
“Does it matter if you never went out with her but you’re thinking you might have liked to if you had ever had the nerve to ask her?” I asked.
Freihofer smiled and looked away.
“How about you?” I asked. “You married? Hooked up?”
“I’m close to my dad,” Freihofer said. Then he shut up.
Freihofer had changed a lot. At first he seemed pissed because we noticed he was German. Then he was just distant and avoided everybody. Now he was getting to be like the rest of us, worried about what our lives had been like, worried how people would think about us if we didn’t make it back home, and maybe even how God was thinking about us.
I wrote a letter to Vernelle.
Dear Vernelle,
I guess I’m not supposed to tell you exactly where I am. Even if I do, the censors will probably black it out. Anyway, I’m thinking about you a lot and wondering if you ever think of me. There’s no reason for you to think about me, except, maybe, I need somebody to have me on their mind.
Most of the things I want to say to you don’t have a connection. At least there’s nothing that I can say that connects with anything I’ve ever done or said to you. That’s pretty pathetic. But I’m going to say some things anyway in this letter. Please don’t let them bother you too much. Just think they are the ramblings (I like that word) of a lonely soldier.
Vernelle, I spent last winter in New York City on the Lower East Side. The apartments there are so old you wouldn’t believe it. In the place I stayed, the bathtub was in the kitchen. It was covered with a slab of wood that I used as a table. I’d put my easel on the tub and draw what I saw out the window. Sometimes, on cold nights, it would be freezing in that apartment, and I would be lying there shivering and alone and wishing I had someone there with me. Now I wish that someone was you.
There’s noise coming from down the road, and so I’ll
“Panzers!”
The boom of the panzer guns was like the voice of doom in the night. Shells slammed against the walls of the houses and through them.
“Fall back! Fall back!” Lieutenant Milton’s voice called.
Where the hell was back?
“Krauts in the field!” Burns shouted. “Gotta go in after them!”
I was running toward the fields. I saw some of our men firing from the kneeling position and started thinking we would be fighting hand to hand.
Oh, please, Jesus!
I saw the barrel of a panzer gun sticking out from one of the fields. It jerked up and the yellow-and-red flame that came out covered twenty-some feet in a second.
I fell into a prone position and started looking for targets. I couldn’t see if the shadows in the fields were Germans or Americans, and I kept switching targets but I wasn’t firing my weapon.
Oh, please, Jesus!
“Go toward the fields! Go toward the fields!”
It made no sense. The fields could have been full of Germans waiting for us. Everybody was up and moving away from the houses. The booming of the panzers went on, and I heard a loud explosion just to my left.
I wanted to get down on the ground, to dig my way into the earth, but I didn’t want to be left alone.
Brrrrrrup! Brrrrrrup! The sound of a German machine gun. I had heard that sound on the beach. I had seen what those guns could do.
Grenades! One! Another one! The air was full of dense smoke.
I saw a ghost figure ahead of me.
“Halt!”
I lifted my rifle, squeezing off a shot as I did. The figure jerked backward; he was falling. I was over him, looking down into his face. The German reached up toward my rifle. I shot him in the face. Once. Again.
The sound of a plane. I looked up. American planes were buzzing our positions. Angry hornets against the darkening skies.
The panzers started moving into the hedgerows.
I didn’t want to turn back to find the man I had shot. But I did. I walked over to him and, bending over, looked into what was left of
his face. There was a bullet hole just below his left eye, and another above the right.
Running. We were running in terror through the hedgerows. Above us planes swooped and dived against the panzers. There were explosions, and the very air smelled of burning.
“Regroup! Regroup and take cover!” Sergeant Burns yelled. He was on one knee and holding up an arm. His M1 was across his body.
I didn’t want to stop. I wanted to keep running until the pounding in my chest stopped. But I stopped a few feet away from Sergeant Burns. My gasps were loud, and I opened my mouth wide hoping to make less noise, to make myself appear less scared, less scared than the horror I felt.
“The planes will take care of the panzers,” Burns said. “Look out for Krauts trying to make it back to their lines. Keep your cover and ID your targets before shooting them.”
“Burns, good work!” Lieutenant Milton was a few yards away. The left side of his face was smeared with blood. “Guys, keep your heads down and listen. Gomez, can you work your way through this hedgerow?”
Gomez made the thumbs-up sign and started squeezing through the thick branches of the hedgerow to our left.
“Woody, the same thing on the other side!”
Did he know how scared I was? Did anybody know? My legs were heavy as I moved toward the right hedgerow. It was only a few yards away, and I realized that the company was in a lane. The Germans would know about it and look to hit it with artillery soon. The embankment was steep, and in the shadows of the thick undergrowth I groped, nearly blindly, toward the top of the hedgerow.
It was only two feet wide, maybe three at the top, and I got across easily. On the other side there was a wheat field, easily two hundred yards across, and I saw there was no place to hide in it. As I huddled against the base of the hedgerow I had just climbed over, I felt relieved.
There were shots in the distance. Once in a while they grew more intense, but there were no sounds of the big panzer guns. Fighter planes circled overhead and then peeled off as they lost altitude and swooped over the fields and hedgerows.
“Woody, we’re moving out,” a voice said from the other side of the hedgerow.
I twisted my ankle making my way through the hedgerow again, but soon I was with my platoon. We walked four yards apart, and I could tell we were headed away from St. Lo.
“Stay alert!” Lieutenant Milton called out.
Images flashed in my mind. They were brief and jarring. The blur of wheat as we ran from the panzers. The backs of soldiers crouched and running, the roundness of their helmets forming dark silhouettes against the brown-gold wheat.
The face of the soldier I shot. I killed.
Someone was walking next to me. Stagg.
“How you doing?” he asked.
“It’s getting to be work to get one foot in front of the other,” I said. “That sound pretty stupid to you?”
“Were you scared back there?”
Scared? Everything inside of me wanted to scream out. I wanted to cry, to call for my mother, to close my eyes and bury my face in my hands.
“Yeah,” I said. “Real scared.”
“Me too,” Stagg said.
I looked at him. His face was the same grim mask it had always been, the same tough-as-nails expression, the same pale white complexion that didn’t seem to hold any emotions.
“I didn’t expect tanks,” I said.
“The fucking Germans are smart,” Stagg said. “They let us into that village knowing how tired we are. Then they send in some panzers to wipe us out. We got lucky today because there were some planes in the area.”
“Is that how we’re going to make it through this war?” I asked. “Being lucky?”
“You got anything better?” he asked.
I didn’t.
We moved slowly for another half hour, then hooked up with a small company from the 175th and a band of stragglers. The makeshift force was being led by a lieutenant colonel. He looked like the bad guy in a cowboy movie. He spoke to Milton while the rest of us sat or lay down the best we could. It wasn’t so much that we were physically tired; we were emotionally tired, too.
The officers met, and when Milton came back to us, Freihofer was the one who noticed he was wearing captain’s bars.
“I see you got a promotion, sir,” Freihofer said. “Congratulations.”
“All it means is that a lot of officers are getting killed and they need replacements,” Milton said. “At the rate we’re going, I’ll be a general at the end of the war. But listen up: We’re going to have air cover, but we’re going back to Saint André.
“The Krauts are hoping that we give them a day or two before we come back,” Milton went on. “That’ll give them that time to bring up more armor around St. Lo.”
“They think they’re really going to hold it?” Burns asked.
“If they get enough armor up and concentrated, they think that we can’t sustain the losses and will give it up,” Milton said. “And our brass thinks we can’t afford not to take the losses. Simple as that.”
“It’s not simple if you’re the loss,” Burns said.
Milton turned to Burns sharply. “Do you have a problem, soldier? Because if you do, now’s the time to spit it out!”
“Yeah, I got a problem,” Burns said. “God gave me a brain and a set of balls!”
I watched Burns turn slowly and spit on the ground as he walked away. Milton called him back twice, and then raised his M1. Then, slowly, he lowered it.
Burns had said what we had all been thinking, what we were saying to one another and to ourselves. The bodies were piling up faster than our minds could handle them. Gerhardt was bitching because we weren’t making much progress. We seemed to be going in circles, looking for a weakness in the German lines and not finding any. None of us were confident, nobody was still thinking we had an easy win. Don’t think. How could thinking help? In our heads we were playing and replaying our own death scenes. How could we turn off the flickering images when they came at us every day?
Don’t think.
I promised myself I would do what I was told. If I was told to run across a field, screaming and yelling to shut out the sounds of my own panic, I would do it. If I was told to look into the face of some German and shoot that face away, I would do it.
Don’t think.
“Mister Wedgewood!”
I turned and saw Marcus Perry grinning at me. At first I didn’t think the guy in front of me was real, but when he opened his arms I knew he was.
“How you doing, man?” Marcus asked.
“Not all that good,” I said. “You?”
“Better than you guys,” he said. “All the reports we’re hearing are about how you’re kicking ass up here, but you know you’re only sixteen miles from Omaha Beach. And we’re carrying the bodies back.”
“You hear anything from Bedford?” I asked. “You got the time to sit down?”
“Yeah,” he said, with a slight nod of the head.
Marcus’s face seemed leaner, less round. His build was still good, but not as heavy as it had been when he played ball back in Virginia.
“How are people taking it back home?” I asked.
“We brought mail and ammunition up,” Marcus said. “So your folks should be able to tell you something. But from what I know, they got a flood of telegrams early this month saying who had been killed on the beaches. My uncle was saying that grown men were crying. They didn’t expect nothing like what happened.”
Early this month? We had landed at Omaha Beach on June sixth, and it was already July. It took a whole month to get those telegrams out?
“I sure as hell didn’t, either,” I said. “You getting any word about how the invasion is going?”
“They say the Germans are trying to get their panzers to the front,” Marcus said. “They think their tanks are going to stop you guys, and they’re throwing in everything they got to give themselves time to get them up here.”
“What day is this?” I
asked. “I mean, what day of the month?”
“The eighteenth of June,” Marcus said. “You sure you okay?”
“We didn’t even get to July yet?”
“Something like that,” Marcus said. “You sure you okay?”
“It stopped making sense a while back,” I said. “The killing just floods over you like — I don’t know — like a storm you can’t get out of. I don’t know how I’m going to handle all of this killing when I get home. I just don’t know, man.”
“You think it makes more sense when one of us in these trucks gets killed? They got snipers trying to shoot the drivers and artillery trying to zero in on us. We’re driving forty and fifty miles an hour with a foot and a half between trucks. I don’t think I could pee straight if I was pissing down a slide rule!”
“Hey, Marcus?”
“Yeah?”
“If you get back home — what’s it going to be like?”
“Beautiful like Christmas morning, Josiah,” he said. “Beautiful like Christmas morning.”
There was a whistle, and a black officer, blacker than any man I had ever seen, started yelling for his soldiers to mount up.
“Drive carefully!” I said.
“Hey, Josiah, God bless you!” Marcus said. “God bless you.”
I knew he meant it, too.
God had never been on my mind that much, and I didn’t expect him to pop up and take care of me now that I was in Normandy. But I thought about God more than I ever had. I didn’t like it, but I did.
When Lieutenant Milton got promoted to captain he seemed a little friendlier, like maybe we were his boys and he had to take care of us. He got to passing out the mail personally — there weren’t that many of us from the original battalion — and when he gave me a letter from my mom I was really happy. I put it in my field jacket pocket, telling myself that I would read it later, but then I took it out a minute later and, sitting against the back tire of a jeep, I read it.
Dear Son,
I hope this letter finds you well. We have heard such terrible things about the fighting. Nobody knows if their loved one is well or not. That is except for the ones who have heard that their boys were dead. It is such a sad thing. We can’t sing in church or listen to the word of the Lord without thinking that we are not doing enough to keep you well. Oh how I wish this war had not happened at all.
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