Shrapnel

by William Wharton

  He reaches up and carefully pulls off his fragile glasses. He wipes them on a flannel handkerchief he keeps in a little leather case. I’ve seen him do this before. He slides them back on, hooking them behind one ear after the other. He stares at me some more, tears in his eyes.

  ‘I’m one American soldier with something to fight about. But, I admit I’d like to kill at least five German men for every one of my family they’ve killed.’

  He pauses. He has me scared. I don’t need anything like this. Up until now, there’s been nothing personal for me in this war; just killing the enemy, the Krauts.

  ‘Don’t tell anybody I’ve told you this. If one of the Division staff officers finds out about how I feel, they’d probably pull me off this CIC detail. I’m counting on you.’

  Why the hell is everybody counting on me? This war doesn’t mean anything to me except it’ll probably kill me. I’m liable to be dead, all over nothing. I don’t say anything. I figure this Kurt for some kind of maniac. I’m not a maniac, I’m scared out of my wits, yes, but I don’t really want to actually kill anybody. I nod my head, the way you would with any crazy, and don’t say anything. This Kurt Franklin is a dangerous man. Hell, Franklin isn’t even a Jewish name, I don’t think.

  I wait. Then I can’t wait any more.

  ‘So, what are we doing out on this patrol? Are you going to find and kill the whole German high command or something? This all seems nuts to me.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Will. I just wanted to see how you’d react. There’s a lot of anti-Semitism all through the American army. Most of these guys I just can’t trust. If they were Germans they’d probably be killing Jews themselves. It’s all crazy.’

  ‘So, again, what are we doing out here sitting in a field waiting to be killed? Let’s go back.’

  ‘We’re safe here. I’ve checked. I needed to find a place where I could talk to you in private. Can I trust you?’

  ‘You’d better trust me. If what you’re saying is true, we’re probably breaking at least ten of the Articles of War. Who’s the enemy? Which direction are they? Do we start killing American non-coms? Are we going to arrange for another of those group surrenders the way we did in Metz? I don’t get it.’

  ‘It’s like this, Will, simple enough. There will be more and more Krauts coming in to surrender, some of them will be their officers, some staff or intelligence officers, many of them SS, or former Hitler Youth. It’s the Twelfth Panzer out in front of us now, an SS elite command. These officers will be funnelled on back to your S2. He works with the CIC, too, and speaks some German he learned at Yale. He’s supposed to interrogate these guys.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘We’re convinced they have information about troop emplacement, planned attacks, names and sizes of Kraut forces out there that would help us a lot, maybe avoid some unnecessary killing.’

  ‘So, what’s that got to do with me? I don’t speak German, I almost failed Latin in high school. What makes you think I can make them tell me anything? I thought you wanted to kill all these Krauts anyway.’

  ‘You are a smart ass, aren’t you? I’ve been told you don’t have much respect for non-coms or officers, but this is different.’

  ‘In the army, everything is always different, if it isn’t the army way. So what else is new?’

  ‘Don’t be difficult, Will. When we interrogate these guys it will always be in the field. They’ll already have had their chance to spill their guts back at S2 interrogation centres or here at your I&R headquarters. They’ll only send the “hard core cases” out to us.’

  ‘Sounds like Mafia business to me. I imagine the Red Cross or MPs could make quite a case out of this.’

  ‘Don’t worry about the MPs or the Red Cross. That’s all being taken care of. These guys won’t be speaking any more English than you speak German. I’ll be doing all the interrogation. You’ll just be backing me up.’

  ‘You mean, with an M1 or one of the new “grease guns”? That should be fun!’

  ‘You don’t shoot anybody, just act tough and push them around some. Remember, these guys have been killing people as if it’s going out of style. These are real gangsters, garbage, a menace to the human race.’

  ‘You don’t need to convince me. I went to all the propaganda movies, John Wayne, Van Johnson, Alan Ladd are the good guy heroes and Lew Ayres the yellow coward. My questions is still “Why me?” You tell me I’m going to make “tech” for doing nothing more than I’m doing now, right?’

  Franklin takes off his helmet, wipes his brow with the back of his hand. It’s the first time I realise how serious he is about all this. I’m listening, but the entire thing seems so bizarre, out of some other crappy movie.

  ‘It’s because you were so effective with that capture in Metz to start things off. I went through records of about fifty guys, photos and all, making decisions. I’m down to five guys in your division. I’ll choose three from these. You’ll never know who the others are unless we work together on a project, except they’re generally in I&R, they’ll never know about you.’

  ‘You still haven’t answered my question.’

  ‘Don’t laugh. It’s because of the way you look! The Germans all have this goofy conviction of how a good, meaning “bad” German should be taller than most, with blue eyes and blond hair, the true Nordic type. You’re perfect! You almost scare a little Jew like me.’

  ‘Cut it out!’ Sure, I used to be called ‘Whitey’ as a kid because my hair would bleach out in the sun, and some of the dumb girls in class would start on how blue my eyes were, but that’s all. I’ve never won any beauty contests. I’ll admit maybe I was a good looking baby. But that’s never meant anything to the army.

  ‘You’ve won the Infantry Baby Beauty Contest and the prize could be your life. Think about that!’

  He stands up and I stand up, too. We start back the way we came. When we reach the perimeter, he turns to me.

  ‘Well, what do you say, Will?’

  ‘When do they start the “tech” pay? And I already have some salary deductions I’ve lost the hard way. Do they wipe those off my service record?’

  ‘That’s already been done.’

  ‘Pretty sure of yourselves aren’t you?’

  ‘More sure of you, Will. We’ll be seeing each other. Remember, not a word to anybody. Not even Anderson knows about this. I’ll be transferred out of your squad tomorrow. If anybody asks, we didn’t find anything out there. There actually isn’t much according to the aerial surveys.’

  With this he continues to walk away from me and I turn to where my tent is. I’ll have it to myself for a while.

  During most of the months of March and April I’m called regularly to help with ‘Interrogation’. For a while, they actually put me up in one of the regimental tents. When I’m not being a terrorist, I’m living high.

  Kurt is right. The guys they throw to us are blond, blue-eyed giants all right, perfect Nazi movie types. And they are arrogant. Their uniforms are fairly clean with polished boots, but one can see from their faces, and the way they move, that they’ve had some recent rough treatment. Kurt scares me when he goes into his act. He scares them, too. He’s usually pushing his face into theirs or actually into their necks and jamming a pistol or ‘grease gun’ into their stomachs and hollering at them.

  The Germans are pretty impressive the way they resist. Mostly we have some Poles who’ve attached themselves to our outfit who punch them around. At the time, I didn’t realise they had good reason.

  They’d get them down on the ground and use their boots to grind their faces into the mud or snow. Then they kick them, not seeming to care where they kick. And these Germans are so damned nasty and tough, one can’t help rooting for the Poles.

  Finally, we have a pair of young SS officers. They look to be about the age of our Lieutenant. Kurt tells us that they’re both from an Intelligence Company something like Sicherheitsdienst and these guys we’ve got to ‘break’.

  The Pole
s don’t get anything out of them with the rough stuff. Then Kurt tosses out shovels to them and shouts. He wants the Germans to lie down on the ground. With a bayonet he marks off spaces on the ground for the two of them, just large enough to match their bodies. It makes me think of two things from childhood. The times we’d bury each other at the beach in the sand, and the times we’d do the same thing in winter to make angels in the snow.

  Kurt gets them digging. It’s a grey, cold day. They start working up a sweat and Kurt is hollering at them the whole way. I can’t understand what he’s saying, but I can understand when he starts shooting at their feet and between their legs. He actually nips one of them on the boot. He’s shooting from the hip all the time and can’t have that much control.

  Every once in a while he has them stretch out in the holes they’re digging. Their faces are turning whiter than the snow. I’m tempted to just walk away. This is more than I bargained for. I feel like a Nazi myself.

  When the holes are dug, Kurt has them strip off all their clothes, including underwear, then stretch out in the holes. Now they’ve started shouting back and crying. When one seems to have gone too far with his curses and anti-Semitic raging, Kurt pulls off a few shots near his head. I don’t know how he can miss. Either he’s a very good shot or a poor one. It doesn’t matter much in terms of the effect on these poor bastards.

  When he has the two of them stretched out on the cold, dark ground and white muddied snow, he has the Poles begin to bury them. He’s giving instructions all the time in an almost hysterical voice. He has them start at their feet and work their way up toward the heads until only their faces are showing out of the slush. He’s asking the same questions all the time. Obviously asking if they’ll talk to the interrogators. One of them breaks down as they start sprinkling the earth on his face. Kurt gives the word and two of the Poles drag his almost unconscious body out of his grave. He’s slobbering and vomiting as he’s dragged off to the regimental interrogation tent.

  It doesn’t take long until the second officer gives in too. A human mind can only take so much. When the Poles lift him up, he breaks away and starts running with his numb legs. Kurt lets him go about twenty yards, running and stumbling, then shoots him in one of his legs just at the knee. He falls screaming and rolling.

  That’s the last I see of it. We’re in a daze. I think Kurt suffers almost as much as the Germans. The Poles, on their own, are filling in the holes. Maybe in some way it helps them to forget what has just happened. But I know I can never forget. That’s the end of my career on the interrogation detail.

  I go back and sleep two days in my tent, chasing away the nightmares.

  SERGEANT ETHRIDGE

  During the course of the war, I change. It’s probably just inborn cowardice. Not through any great effort or skill on my part, I find I’m scared more than most people. And, I’m not adept at hiding how scared I am from the other guys. I’m definitely not known by our squad as the most courageous of soldiers, despite taking prisoners at Metz. I’m not so bad that they’re actually thinking of throwing me out of the I&R, that is sending me back to a line company, something we all dread, but it’s bad enough. I discover the difference between being scared and being a coward is having other people find out.

  I become quite a specialist at what we call ‘dogging it’, that is, faking a patrol the way Wilkins and I did. We all do it. If the situation looks really bad, we become quite imaginative mocking up our phoney, ersatz war. Also, we get good at ducking, hiding out, when a dangerous patrol is being formed.

  Once, when I know before anyone else that there is going to be the worst kind of patrol, ‘Tiger’, where we’re supposed to take a prisoner, I hunker down under a jeep. I’m not too proud of this.

  A Sergeant named Ezra Ethridge is in charge of the I&R platoon. I know he’s looking for me. I’m falling asleep under that jeep, trying not to breathe. Ethridge is another southern cracker, a real regular army non-com, and we all hate him with a passion.

  Ethridge doesn’t like anybody, but it seems he particularly loathes me. Maybe it’s the way I goof off all the time. Anyway, he’s always taking it out on me. And so I know tonight’s patrol is going to be really nasty.

  A good friend of mine named Vance Watson is now my tent buddy, when and if we ever have a tent. Mostly we’re in holes. The main reason we get along is because it’s a contest between us who’s the most scared. We just know we’re scheduled for this patrol. We’d heard news of it, it’s definitely the kind of thing we don’t want to do.

  We’ve found an old barn near the Headquarters CP in which someone must have stored hay. It’s our secret, last ditch, hideout. We go up there on a sort of shelf and pile hay over each other and become invisible whenever things look bad. When no one is looking, I make a surreptitious dash out from under the jeep and head for our hideout. Vance is already there.

  Ten minutes after our dash we’re settled in. It’s about twenty-two hundred, past ten o’clock. We’re pulling our wool knit caps over our ears, trying not to hear Ethridge yelling, resting our heads on our helmets turned upside down. We also know that even if we aren’t on this patrol and they find us, we’ll be assigned to some other ratshit duty, like helping the officers bunk in, carrying all their crap.

  Ethridge is hollering all over the place. Now, I have to say, this is the kind of thing you can really feel bad about, but not us. We’re just ducking down deeper and deeper, thinking he’ll never find us, he’ll never climb that rickety ladder, he’s too fat, he’ll break it.

  He never does find us for that patrol and he sends out two other guys from the Second Squad, one named Jim Freise and the other Al Toby. It’s a bad patrol, as bad as we thought, or even worse. But thank God neither of them is killed. Jim takes a bullet right through his thigh, but it doesn’t break his thigh bone. Al Toby carries Jim all the way back, three hundred yards. Luckily Toby is about six-two and strong as an ox, Jim Freise maybe five-eight and light. Jim Freise looks a bit like Mike Hennessy, the same kind of dark curly hair and blue eyes. After Toby brings Jim in and slides him off his back, he falls in a heap on the ground. Medics carry Jim off on a stretcher, unconscious, medics hovering over him.

  Of course, Vance and I feel like real rotters. I actually find myself wishing I’d gone, the war would be over for me. Jim got one of those million dollar wounds, one where he’ll never be in combat again.

  Ethridge gives us a bad time about how someone else took our patrol and was practically killed, all that kind of crap. Where the hell were we? Couldn’t we hear him calling? But Sergeant Ezra Ethridge never once went on a patrol himself. He knew it and we knew it.

  CROSSFIRE

  Despite all these kinds of dumb patrols and because three of our non-coms are killed by some eighty-eight millimetre direct hits, I do become squad leader to the first squad of the I&R platoon. I can’t believe it, attrition can do wonders.

  The war seems as if it’s never going to end. We’re deeper into Germany. We go several days when there’ll be practically no fighting, no serious resistance, and then we get stopped, mostly by artillery. Unfortunately, we’re involved with penetrating the Siegfried Line, now, the Germans’ major defensive line, their equivalent to the French Maginot Line, only much more intelligently designed. They’ve rearranged it so their bunkers are in groups of three, in triangles, each one covering the other two. After a lot of trial and error, i.e. casualties and deaths, we all sort of figure it out. You don’t go for either of the front bunkers; you go for the back one, the third one. Then, when you’ve cut that third one out you’ve broken down their system of mutual defence and you can come up behind the other two bunkers. Then, if they don’t surrender, we drop or throw grenades through the firing ports.

  Sometimes it takes twenty grenades to get one in. It’s like a carnival game. But after a while, a Kraut usually pushes out a white flag and surrenders. By this time, the Germans have passed the word around that if the back bunker is taken ‘alles ist kaput’, they
’d better surrender or shrapnel will be ricocheting around them in the bunker.

  None of this kind of thing is really I&R work but things are thoroughly screwed up; military term, SNAFU. We’re doing almost everything from attack patrols to guarding the regimental band.

  We’re in snow now, it has to be late January, somewhere in there. As usual, we don’t know what the situation is. One afternoon they call me in, as squad leader. There’s Sergeant Ezra Ethridge, along with the new S2, Major Woods, who had been in charge of the motor pool before. The rumour is that Love, our former S2, went bonkers with combat fatigue. That I can understand. There’s also Lieutenant Anderson, our platoon Lieutenant who never goes on patrol either, who knows next to nothing about combat.

  This S2, Major Woods, whose experience has been just keeping trucks and jeeps running, has come up with a really dumb patrol. Patrolling is none of his business, and this one is absolutely impossible. It’s as if I went down and rebuilt one of the jeep engines.

  We’re in the ruins of a town called Olsheim. There’s nothing but bare, deep, snow fields in front of us, there’s hardly a tree or a bush. The Major has spread out some old aerial photographs on a rickety table, which indicate there’s either a railway embankment or a bunker out there in front of us but it’s hidden in the snow. I look at it and even though I know I should keep my mouth shut, I can’t help blurting out, ‘This looks like big trouble to me, Sir. This is something for a real “Tiger” patrol, not I&R.’

  Anderson is agreeing with me. He thinks this is not an I&R patrol situation at all, it should be a ‘Tiger’ patrol with twenty or thirty ‘line’ soldiers and artillery backup.

  I speak up again: ‘You can’t just send a reconnaissance patrol out on this kind of mission, Sir; it’s suicide. Reconnaissance is only supposed to find out what things look like, and come back. If anybody comes close enough to see what’s actually going on out here, for sure they aren’t coming back.’