We tried to mortar them out, bazooka them out. But in the rain their muzzle flashes were lost to us, especially since the bullets flew so fast that we heard the report only after they’d struck home, killing another one of our men, by which time the sniper had already ducked back from view, lost again to the night. We knew only vaguely where the shots were coming from.
It meant someone had to go up there. Which was a job nobody wanted. There were for the most part no stairways—they’d long since been shattered by bombs—no easy ways up to the snipers’ nests, especially when you didn’t know where they were. But that was the key to our advance, removing that resistance.
I saw my chance. I don’t know why I said yes. Maybe I do: it was the look on my fellow company men’s faces. Those faces that’d sneered so derisively at me as if I was worth nothing, somehow less than a man because I’d not yet killed. The look on their faces that night was of fear. The High and Mighty were afraid. But I’d prove I was not. I’d go.
Arguello sent a half dozen of us into the night. The idea was for each of us to split up, somehow find our way up six different buildings in the vicinity of the shooters. And take them out. It was, of course, a suicide mission, but as you know, to a young man in his teens or twenties, suicide doesn’t really mean suicide; it may mean crazy, it may mean stupid, but it doesn’t really mean suicide. We’re too busy being invulnerable to know how vulnerable we really are.
My building in the rain that night: three stories high, gutted. Unstable, the middle two floors, along with the stairwells, blown out. There was no doubt some way up, some obvious way, but I wasn’t going to look for it, knowing that it was likely booby-trapped.
The only way up would be an impossible way, a way that needed to be so incomprehensible that the dug-in sniper up there—if he was even up there—wouldn’t even bother to consider defending it.
I’d scale the rear wall, I decided. It was sheer. No trellises or ledges or anything like our fire escapes back home. But the thing it did have was pockmarks. From all the small-arms fire. A few larger holes from tank or bazooka shot. And smashed out windows and windowsills, if I could get to them. I knew immediately that I’d never get up there with the carbine strapped to my back. It’d clunk against the wall, give me away. This meant I’d go up there with a knife and a sidearm only. I also realized pretty quickly that my boots were also an impediment. Too slick and unwieldy to fit in the subtle holes in the wall. So I went up, barefoot and scarcely armed.
What it was to climb that wall! The world shrunk away in that moment. The intermittent gunfire on the other blocks faded from my ears. It was just me and my colossal foolishness. Trying to find toeholds with my cold bare toes in the rain. Straining like a child to climb something he has no business climbing. Upward I went. I left my helmet by the second floor, as I found it scraping against the wall as I ascended, those subtle metallic-giving rasps potentially giving my position away. It was like a game. Could I make it to the top without being caught? I was giddy. I still don’t know why. Was it because my concentration was so great—on so menial but focused a task as finding another toehold—that I forgot myself and those horrible storm clouds within? Or was it that I somehow knew that the Moment was finally at hand, like an actor about to go onstage for the greatest performance of his life, or an athlete about to take the field for a championship? My stage was up there on that rooftop. With that sniper.
And when I crested that rooftop, that final moment when I looked up and over that ledge, holding my breath, and saw that indeed, the Sniper was here—his back to me—I felt this dark euphoria.
This was My Stage. This was My Time.
I crossed to him, this ridiculous barefoot thing in the rain that I was, and made a decision to use my knife rather than my sidearm so that in killing him, I would not alert any nearby snipers with a gunshot.
I put my knife in him. In his back.
It felt strange—his flesh didn’t take the blade like I thought it would—instead it felt like putting a dull blade in a yet-unripe piece of fruit. Incredibly, he took the receipt of the knife in silence. Utterly shocked and surprised as he no doubt was, he took it silently! Maybe in sitting in quietude so long up there, he had subconsciously trained himself to emit no sound. But he turned on me. And the fight, it turned out, had only just begun.
We struggled on that rain-slickened rooftop. One of us in jackboots, the other barefoot. We slid and tripped and fell again and again as we tried to kill each other by any means available to us—whether by knife or gun or by simply tearing the other man’s voice box with our hands. His breath was bad, I could smell it as we fought, pressed so tightly together as we were. No doubt the luxury of a toothbrush had long been lost to him because of battle conditions. We drooled and spat and snorted into each other—locked in the lethal intimacy of men trying to kill each other in close quarters. I twisted that knife in him, could feel it up against his shoulder blade beneath the skin. He tried to thumb my eyes, but I continually shook his probing hands away; he made due by burying his thumbs in my ears, trying to get to my brain that way. At about the same time, the rainy darkness around us erupted in ever more intense spectacle—high-arcing flares, tracers, the billowing infernal roar of explosions from inbound artillery. It was as if, in that moment, the whole world was fighting below, though we could see none of them, only their disembodied salvoes at each other.
The already large pool of water on the rooftop reddened with our blood (I later realized he’d split my brow good, all the way down to the skull, with one of his savage attempts to brain me on the tile). We slopped around in it, feral like pigs wallowing in their own bodily fluids.
If there is any humor to this story it’s that the modern soldier is ill-equipped to really kill another man, in terms of physical stamina. The rifles and grenades and artillery have made us soft. For we were spent within minutes, gasping like hell. They taught us to shoot, but they didn’t teach us how to go more than a round or two uninterrupted.
We pulled free of each other. In all candor, brother, I laughed. I half-gasped, half-laughed at how pathetic two able-bodied guys like he and I were. We were positively gassed! What would we do, have tea and call it a night? That’s the madness of war: here I was thinking these thoughts, half-laughing, all the while going for my pistol to kill him.
By the time I got to it, though, he was emitting a different sort of sound. He was crying.
I could barely hear it, with all the ordnance perforating the night around us.
But I could see it. A beaten man, tired in so many ways, his rib cage shuddering with sobs as he vainly tried to stand.
I got a better look at his face. This was no SS man. He was one of the Osttruppen, the conscripts we’d heard about from the Eastern Front. Conquered men forced into service for the Germans. I neared him. The fight, I knew, was over. I was the man with the gun, the one standing, and he was there on the ground in our mud puddle, crying. His features were vaguely Asiatic. I wondered if he was from one of those halfway regions in Russia, like Georgia, or even Mongolia.
He looked ridiculous in that high, tight collar of the Wehrmacht, if I can be candid. It spoke to how desperate the Nazis were now. Four years ago they would’ve shot this guy; now they handed him a gun.
He splayed himself out for me, supine. The gesture saying I’m Ready to Die. But it was bullshit and I knew it. It was a false bravado, or the actions of a man who’d been raised to think that was the noble thing to do, even if he didn’t want to. And his eyes told me he didn’t want to. He was not resigned; he was terrified.
This, though, was my Kill!
I’d climbed what seemed like Mt. Olympus to get here! Bested him with my own hands! This was not the bullshit luck of the throwing grenades or spraying machine-gun fire around us; this was soldiership in the truest, most primordial sense. Whether it was in Caesar’s Legion or the 90th, I was a soldier, a victor! I was the dominant monkey, goddammit!
But I couldn’t kill him. Not in that m
oment. I hadn’t decided not to kill him, but I was too confused to pull the trigger.
In short order the decision was forced upon me. The building shook with a collateral hit from incoming artillery. The hurricane of war out there became ever more intense. I could do nothing but fall back behind his sandbagged emplacement and make as small a profile as possible. With all the incoming fire being spread around our block, I had no doubt this rickety old building would fall. But it did not.
He lay a few scant feet from me. We remained that way for a long time, nearly as close as we’d been when we’d been hell-bent on killing each other. Dozens of flares arced above, rendering the falling raindrops into a surreal cascade of electric pink drops. And tracers roared overhead in both directions, from both lines, so thick I swear you could climb up them into the sky.
The man beside me finally managed a word, blood still running from the deep wound in his back as he looked skyward at the nonstop shellfire. “Führer-vuck,” he said. Initially I thought he was saying some version of Fuck Adolf Hitler—which we heard quite often from surrendering soldiers hoping to curry favor with their captors. But he said it again, and again, as he watched all the wild illumination above. “Feuerwerk,” he was saying. Fireworks.
And goddamn if he wasn’t right. In any other context it would’ve been beautiful. Each starburst and flare and volley of tracers trying to outdo the last, ready for those oohs and ahs of youth.
I could see those oohs and ahs in his eyes. The reflections there, registering in his tear-swollen eyeballs. He was a boy in that moment, unblinking, absorbing, trying to get all of those massive explosions into his eyes for fear they might be the last, that this year’s show would be no more.
Then quickly the shellfire was done. As it so often is. The deadly spasms, all their intent, switched off suddenly by command. Because a CO wants time to think, or have a cup of coffee. And that burning need to kill the enemy, just minutes ago so imperative, is suddenly put on a back burner. For hours, days. Do they do that in the Pacific? That hurry-up-and-wait illogic?
It was my chance, I knew, to get down. I’d accomplished what I’d set out to do. I’d bring the man’s rifle back—a beautiful Walther Gewehr 43—because that’s what so many of my platoon mates did. You brought back your enemy’s weapon, proof you’d vanquished him. More importantly to me, it’d show all the snarks in the platoon that I’d done the job that none of them was prepared to do. I was wild with confidence. I was certain I could slink back through the darkness, between the raindrops, utterly invisible to the German snipers. (I could do anything now, after having done this.)
That fact that I had not killed him did not weigh on me. I had gotten what I needed from the fight. I had won, by my own hand. I had dominated another. They had felt the hate in me. That great Rage in me had found its catharsis in all those punches and kicks I’d thrown with abandon. In the tearing of another’s flesh. In some strange way, I felt I had had my cake and eaten it too. My violence had been supreme. Cleansing. And yet I did not have another man’s death on my hands. No, I would not kill him now. Not with those eyes of an eight-year-old boy, stuck in a uniform he looked both ridiculous in and mortified by. Not with the wedding band on his finger.
If I put a bullet into him, I’d kill not only that man-boy but whoever it was that put that ring on his finger. For some reason, that’s what struck me. I’d kill her heart, and if they had children, their hearts as well. And if they didn’t have children, I’d be killing the chance their future children would ever be born. Is this how it is to kill a man, brother? Have you done it? Do you grow sentimental for him, then do it anyhow? Or is it better to never put a life to him, never to see him as an innocent in his parents’ arms, or a generation later returning the favor, doing the same to his own children, giving them solace during all those childhood bouts of fear?
The horizon threatened a hint of day. And in that rainy gloaming I could see his skin was sallow. He was just this side of death. He’d lost a lot of blood and was too weak to do anything about it. So I thought the least I could do before I left him was to stanch the flow. But when I turned him over, that ragged gash—the one I’d made in trying to carve his heart out from the backside—was still oozing, the wound too wide and deep for the blood to coagulate (I wondered vaguely if the rain also impeded its ability to clot). So I did my best, applied all the mostly forgotten techniques I’d half-heard—direct pressure and so on. Nothing worked. It wasn’t a limb, so I couldn’t work a tourniquet around it.
We’re quite good at taking each other apart, but hopeless at putting each other together again.
I couldn’t stop the bleeding. I didn’t know how.
And for that, he died. A number of minutes later. He fixed his eyes on me first, this final vain little bit of hope there, as if in the madness of this war, his killer could now be his savior. He died that way, with that sweet neediness in his eye.
I’d gotten my kill after all.
For a long time I didn’t move. The prospect of carrying that rifle down—that trophy—to show the other men burned in my stomach. It was a feeling somewhere between sickness and abject hunger. Where it is impossible to think of anything but that roiling tightness in your gut. The rest of your body is dead—your brain, all of it. There is only that all-consuming feeling and the panicked need to get rid of it.
Below, the war chirped to life again. Intermittent rifle shots started the day anew. It was a slow, familiar early morning roll-in of another day on the battlefield, which would gain in frequency and magnitude as the men got more caffeinated, focused, frustrated, angry.
And somehow I didn’t want to do that again. There was something in that brief silence between battle days, the fullness of that silence, so perfect and forever and without malice, that I wanted to live in. I didn’t want to hear that murderous language anymore—the rifle fire, the cannon fire. I didn’t want to hear men struggling to fend off my knife, didn’t want to feel the sickly stickiness of their blood on my skin again.
Mostly I didn’t want to again feel that perverse adrenaline rush—that was at once hateful and euphoric in my veins. I could see why men got addicted to battle. There is no drug in the world like it.
Day was coming. I had to move.
Before I did, some impulse in me made me take the man’s hundemarken, his dog tags. I don’t know what that impulse was. I knew that by taking them from his neck I would render him just another anonymous corpse on the battlefield, but I did it anyhow. Was it that I didn’t want this man named Ganzorig Möhnkbat—as the tags now told me—to die a Nazi, be buried in an official Wehrmacht grave? Was it that I imagined in his previous life, thousands of miles east of here, he would never have thought such a thing was possible? Or was it that I thought somehow I would be the one to notify his next of kin—in Mongolia, or wherever it turned out to be—that he had fallen (by my hand)? Could I and would I do that? Maybe it was nothing more than a penance I exacted upon myself, a reminder of the animal I was at my core.
I took the hundemarken. I opted to leave my sidearm beside him.
A souvenir, perhaps, for him. Proof that he had, in his death, vanquished me.
I descended the building, found my boots, and left.
I moved neither toward our lines—east—nor toward the enemy’s a scant block to the west. I instead walked north.
I don’t know what it was that befell me. In retrospect, I can only say that I wanted to escape. Not my platoon, not the war per se, but rather that barefooted man I’d been up on that roof, knife in hand, carving the flesh out of another. I wanted to escape all the things I carried up there, all the Reasons.
Can there be any greater curse the universe has bestowed on Man than Reasons? Those things that make us right and the other wrong? The hellish places they’d led us. The infernal things we’d see and do because of them and somehow afterward rationalize.
It is the worst sort of pain, to be Right like that. To win, to beat your chest victorious, to say I told
you so, all the while leaving scorched earth in our wake, which in turn pales in comparison to all the places within that we leave charred; they are the most precious territories of all, and once torched can never be rebuilt—you know them, brother—youth, hope, innocence—those things forever lost once we give over to righteousness.
I walked. I walked and didn’t stop. I half-expected a bullet to take me. Some deadly efficient sniper somewhere would split me wide open. But the bullet didn’t come.
I moved onward through the rubble, the sounds of the battle behind me growing more distant.
After a few blocks, I could hear a sound that I realized I had not heard in a long time. Rain. Funny, isn’t it? We’re in a near biblical deluge here in Europe and it turns out we’ve heard none of it. Blocked out by all the gunfire. By the equally cacophonous thoughts in our heads. And yet now I could hear the rain hitting the pavement, cascading through the gutters, bending in swirling gurgles down the drains. It was this trillionfold, ever-changing, ever-living thing, drumming the land in a subtle ever-rolling rhythm. An army in its own right. Without agenda. Only visiting itself upon the earth because the seasons so decree.
I felt a silly communion. It’s difficult to explain. It was as if the rain were offering me a way of no agenda, of no Reasons, and it had been all along. And I’d been too busy, along with the rest of the world, filling the air with shellfire to be able to hear it.
I didn’t know where I was going. Or what I intended. The only thing I felt was the fleetingness of life—the sniper’s bullet was surely coming at any minute. I’d never see the sniper’s face, I’d never have any warning. The bullet would hit me before the report reached my ears, and I’d be done. I guess the thought was, just for a moment, before that happens, I want to feel free.
The Far Shore Page 8
