by Howard Fast
“Fuck it! We dig in, right here.”
The men who had run after Adam flung themselves onto the sand around him and began to dig, using their hands, their rifle butts.
“God damn it, use your trenching tools!”
“Schwartz got it,” someone said.
Crawling, wriggling, running in spurts, the men of the company reached Adam’s point and began to dig in. A fold of dirt protected them. The sandspouts were kicking up behind them. Six bodies lay between the surf and their position. Whistles were blowing, piercing the noise of the bombardment. A shrill voice yelled for medics. It was a bleak, overcast day. Adam could see the big LSTs lurching in the water. Where was the next wave? Where were their reinforcements? Where were the tanks? The orders said they would be supported by tanks.
Lieutenant Sisily from the headquarters company came wriggling through the sand. He was a prissy, spit-and-polish young man. Califino and Adam grinned at each other, and Adam said to himself, I’m crazy, lying here in a hole, soaked and grinning at that jerk.
“I think it’s raining,” Califino said.
“Oh, shit on him. Come on, Sisily, you crawl like a fuckin’ earthworm.” Sisily was shouting to them. They could see the motion of his lips but couldn’t hear a word.
He stopped. “The hell with it,” Adam said. “Let’s get over there.” They crawled to Sisily.
“If you stay down,” Adam said into his ear, a wave of compassion overtaking him, “that fold of earth protects us.”
“I dirtied my pants,” Sisily said, tears in his eyes.
“It’s only shit. Forget it.”
“Where’s the command post?” Adam asked him.
“Two hundred yards back. The major wants to know how many casualties you have?”
“I haven’t checked. We’re just trying to group. I don’t think more than ten or twelve.”
Sisily closed his eyes and shook his head. Califino touched Adam’s shoulder and pointed down the beach. Two more LSTs were discharging men, who flattened out just above the waterline.
“That’s a lot of help,” Adam said. “Come on, Lieutenant. So you shit in your pants. Life goes on. What does the major want us to do?”
Now, suddenly, mortar fire began. A shell exploded about twenty feet away, showering them with dirt. “He says,” Sisily managed, “that there’s a bluff, ten, twelve feet high, up ahead.”
“How far?”
“He thinks maybe three hundred yards. That’s where the fire is coming from. He says we got to get up there and silence it. You’re the closest point.”
“Ah, shit, come on, Sisily! The major’s got more sense than that!” Califino yelled.
“I’ll go talk to the major,” Adam said. “Get them dug in, Califino, and see if you can find some medics. Come on, Sisily. Show me the way.”
The major, a thoughtful man in his mid-forties, was almost as confused as Sisily. “We sort of knew about that bluff,” he told Adam, spreading out a sopping wet map in the big hole that had been dug as a command post, “but we didn’t expect any resistance there.”
“Major, what about tanks? What about air cover?”
The major pointed hopelessly to the leaden gray sky.
“Well, where the hell are the tanks?”
The major shook his head.
“What about those men down there?” he asked, pointing to the water’s edge. “Are they staying there?”
“That’s our weapons company.”
“Oh, shit! Those dumb motherfuckers!”
“Levy, look. We can’t use machine guns, and even the tanks can’t get up that bluff. You have to go up with men and grenades.”
“Why us? My men have no combat experience.”
“Because you’re there.”
“What about those lousy bastards on the battleships? Why don’t they lay some shellfire on it? They’ve been laying their stinking shells everywhere else.”
“We have no communication, no fire control. We’re trying. But even when we get it, we can’t see results until we get up on that bluff.”
Adam crawled back and summed it up for Califino.
“Meyers is dead,” Califino said. “I told Rondavich to take over. Larry Smith is all right. He’s got his platoon dug in over there on the left.”
“I’m scared shitless,” Adam said. “We been on this lousy beach over an hour, and nothing. No tanks, no air cover, no Germans. All we got is kids being killed. How do you feel?”
“Like Sisily. I’m going to shit in my pants.”
“Motherfuckin’ stupid bastards!”
“We give it a try?” Califino asked.
“I guess so. We’ll be heroes. Thank God my kid brother’s on a ship! That’s, where we should be, on a ship, sitting on our asses behind ten inches of steel. Fuck them. Get Smith and Rondavich and Prinsky and Judson and that new sergeant they gave us, the one who said he was a grenade instructor.”
“Finelli.”
“That’s him. Hey Bennie,” he said to one of the soldiers, then shouted. “Bennie!”
“I hear you, Captain.”
“Crawl up there and try to get a look at that bluff we been talking about.”
Bennie crawled up to the ridge of earth and very carefully poked his head up. “It’s there!”
“How far?”
“Maybe a quarter-mile.”
“See anything—Germans, anything?”
“No, sir.”
“O.K. Come back.”
When Califino returned with the others, Adam repeated the major’s instructions.
“It stinks,” Lieutenant Smith said.
“I know. The whole thing stinks. I think there’s only one way. We spread out and race for the bluff. But let’s look. Bennie says you can see it.”
They crawled carefully after Adam, who had just a glance; then a machine gun opened up and they came tumbling back.
“It’s flat,” Adam said. “We just run like hell and hope it’s not mined.”
“It’s wrong by the book,” Califino said. “Every way.”
“If we crawl, we’re sitting ducks. This way, once we’re under the bluff, we got cover.”
“How do we get up there?”
“What about it?” he asked Finelli. “It’s not too high. Can we clear it with grenades?”
“Maybe.”
“What do you mean, maybe?”
“Maybe.”
“Why don’t we wait until dark?” Smith asked.
“Tell it to the lousy battleships,” Califino said.
“Let’s move,” Adam said. “Pass the word. We’ll take off in precisely ten minutes. And spread them out. We’ll regroup under the bluff.”
At eleven o’clock, they had taken the bluff. There were only two German machine guns, but it had cost Adam twenty-two more men out of his company. Exhausted, he lay there on the top of the bluff, staring at the green Normandy countryside, the neat rows of trees, the farmhouses in the distance. Fifty, sixty yards away, a mortar shell exploded.
“Let’s dig in,” he said to Califino. “What time is it?”
Califino looked at his watch. “Eleven.”
“God, all I want to do is lay down and sleep.”
***
Barbara’s plane stopped at Benghazi to take on passengers; it developed engine trouble during the takeoff, turned around, landed again, and was laid over for repairs. She had a two-day wait before an empty seat turned up on one of the Air Transport planes out of Cairo. She couldn’t sit still—she wanted so desperately to be up and on her way—and she talked herself into the loan of a jeep from the motor pool and drove out to the Graveyard. For months, she had heard of the thing they called the Graveyard. When the fighting in North Africa was over, especially after the great battles that had swirled around Benghazi, the arm
y had gathered all the wrecked vehicles, and the place where they were gathered together was called the Graveyard. It was a few miles outside of Benghazi, and the road that led to it ended on a hillock a few hundred feet above the surface of the desert.
Barbara drove out there, came to the end of the rocky road, and halted her jeep. In every direction, almost as far as she could see, the desert was covered with an unbroken carpet of ruined vehicles, tanks and trucks and gun carriers and self-propelled artillery and jeeps and command cars and halftracks, thousands and thousands of the products of man’s civilization and ingenuity and insanity. All she had heard of this place paled into insignificance against the fact. It beggared description. There, in that lonely, barren desert, it was a silent, voiceless commentary on a society, a world gone mad.
For at least a half-hour Barbara sat in her jeep, listening to the silence, watching the vultures swoop and wheel over the sea of metal, still searching for scraps of dried flesh; then she drove back to Benghazi.
The following day, she flew to Casablanca; then from Casablanca, in a big, four-motor transport, to the Azores; and then from the Azores to Newfoundland, where the plane dipped down and landed, in midsummer, between banks of unmelted snow eight feet high. Shivering with pleasure, Barbara took handfuls of snow and rubbed it over her cheeks. The tall, dark pines were like a benediction, the air sweet and cold and clean and biting. When the plane took off again, her eyes were wet, and she said to herself, What a foolish, emotional creature you are! Five and a half hours later, the big C-54 dipped down and landed at La Guardia Airport in New York City.
Somehow or other, by calling her paper in San Francisco, Bill Halliday, her publisher, had gotten word of her landing time, and he was at La Guardia with Hildy Lang, the head of promotion, to ease her through Customs and to bring her into New York in an enormous, hired black limousine.
“This time, this time, my dear Barbara,” he pleaded, “don’t run out on me. Just give us a few days.”
They had crossed the Triborough Bridge and were rolling down the East River Drive. In the park beside the drive, women in summer dresses played with their children, who laughed and raced thoughtlessly, and no one looked up at the sky. It was unbelievable and impossible, and it seemed to Barbara that only hours before she had been looking at the sleeping street in Calcutta or watching the trucks roll by with the bodies of the soldiers killed in Burma piled like cordwood or walking across the blazing white sand of Saudi Arabia or staring over the Graveyard in Benghazi—and it was impossible, a compounding of the insanity.
“Barbara?”
“Yes,” she said slowly, “I’ll stay here for a while.”
It turned into two weeks, and thus Barbara missed the occasion in San Francisco when her father received his presidential award. As a matter of fact, when she spoke to Dan on the telephone he failed to mention it, and she only knew about it when she read the details in the New York Times.
Bill Halliday had saved all her dispatches from overseas, and for most of the two weeks, Barbara worked at revising them, rewriting and connecting them. In the course of those two weeks, she spoke to Dan and to her mother, learning that her brother, Joe, was well and stationed on Guam, and that Joshua Levy had died in action in the Pacific.
***
On July 20, 1944, the Democratic Convention was convened in Chicago, and under pressure from the party politicians, President Roosevelt abandoned Henry A. Wallace, the incumbent vice president, and selected Senator Harry S. Truman of Missouri as his running mate. Deciding that Truman should have every opportunity for national exposure, Roosevelt chose him to go to San Francisco and award the presidential citations to the West Coast shipbuilders. While the invited guests were gathering in the main ballroom of the Fairmont Hotel, Truman and his aides met with the shipbuilders in a private suite where, Admiral Land made certain, the whiskey was good and the cigars pure Havana.
Truman shook hands with Dan enthusiastically, and Dan in turn regarded the small, bespectacled man somewhat dubiously. “So this is Dan Lavette,” Truman said. “You’re a legend, Dan. You don’t mind if I call you Dan? Not on the podium, of course. My notes tell me that you’re the quarterback of one of the best damn teams out here. You don’t mind the designation? Colorful, but appropriate, I think.”
“I’m not a quarterback,” Dan said coldly. “I’m not a football player. I build ships. That’s about it.”
Admiral Land pulled him away. “What the hell was going on there?” he whispered.
“Who is that little squirt, Truman?”
“Lavette, I swear to God I don’t believe you. That’s Harry Truman, candidate for the vice presidency, and he’s a damn good senator.”
“I haven’t looked at a newspaper in months,” Dan said. “The Chronicle sends me my daughter’s dispatches from overseas, and that’s all I read. When did they have their damn convention? Why does Roosevelt bother?”
“You are the most painful sonofabitch I ever dealt with. Can you stop hating the world for the next hour or two? Anyway, I’m glad to see you own a tuxedo. It’s an improvement over those jeans you wear.”
“I don’t own it. I rented it. Why in hell don’t you get me some engineers who know their asses from their elbows instead of bothering me with these idiotic awards? I shaved this morning for the first time in three days and left the island in the worst mess we’ve had in months with those lousy Victory ships of yours. I have to get back there tonight.”
“And suppose you don’t? What’s going to happen? You have the smartest bunch of engineers of any shipyard out here. Give them their head. The world won’t come to an end. What’s it to you, anyway? You hate the war, you hate Roosevelt, and I’m not sure you don’t hate me.”
Dan allowed himself a thin smile. “Whether I hate you or not, Admiral, you have more balls than anyone else in this outfit, and I wish to God you were out there in the Pacific running this thing.”
Dan didn’t return to Terminal Island that night. The ceremonies were over, and he was standing at one end of the speakers’ table, trying with some embarrassment to unfasten the decoration that had been pinned onto his dinner jacket, when a voice said, “If you’ll hold still, I’ll do that for you, Danny.”
He looked up and saw Jean—the first time he had seen her in the three years since May Ling had died. She had not changed a great deal, nor was she denying her fifty-four years. Her hair was streaked with gray, but worn without dye in a tight bun at the back of her neck, and she made no attempt to conceal the wrinkles. The eyes were still very blue, and her figure was still very much as it had been when he first met her. He noted her simple gray suit with approval, but then, he had never disapproved of Jean’s taste in clothes.
“Hello, Jean,” he said quietly.
She had unfastened the decoration, and she held it out to him. He noticed that she wore no rings, no jewels of any kind. He stuffed the decoration into his pocket and asked her how she had gotten there.
“Roger Lapham invited me. You remember him, don’t you? He’s the mayor now. Or didn’t you know that?”
“Damned if I did! So he’s the mayor?”
“He does it very quietly. Our table was at the back of the hall.”
“Where is he now?”
“I told him to leave me on my own. I wanted very much to see you. When I wrote to you after May Ling’s death and got no answer—”
“I couldn’t answer any of the letters.”
“I think I understood that, so I waited. But it’s been three years.”
“Almost—yes. Look, Jean, I couldn’t eat any of the slop they served here tonight. I’m hungry. Let me talk to the people who are waiting to tell me that they always knew Dan Lavette would make it back, and then, if you want to, we’ll go somewhere and eat?”
“I’d like that, Danny.”
It took half an hour for Dan to disentangle himself from the crowd o
f old friends and acquaintances who came up to the speakers’ table to say that they had missed him, that San Francisco had not been the same without Dan Lavette, and to congratulate him on his presidential citation. Jean sat at a table a little distance away, watching the tall, heavyset, gray-haired man who had once been her husband. If she had not changed too much in appearance, Dan had changed a great deal indeed. He had lost weight; his body had become even more lean than before, his heavily muscled shoulders sloping and uneasy in the dinner jacket, his face deeply lined, his dark eyes sunken under his shaggy brows. He was still an imposing and handsome man, but so different from the big, tough, swaggering, cocky waterfront fisherman she had met thirty-five years before that it was almost impossible to connect the two and make of them a single person. And yet, as she watched him, her thoughts kept going back to the boy, the boy who had sat at the dinner table in the Seldon mansion on Nob Hill, waiting for cues, eyeing the array of knives and forks and spoons so warily, following her lead, looking sideways at her as no one had ever looked at her before. Well, it was all long, long ago, and the Seldon mansion had long since gone the way of the other mansions on Nob Hill, and the boy was this somber, unsmiling man who in four years had become one of the biggest shipbuilders the world had ever seen.
He finished with the well-wishers and walked over to her. She rose, and he took her arm. The very movement was gentle, like the gait of a wild horse subtly broken. They walked out into the cool, bracing night air.
“Are you hungry?” he asked her.
“I couldn’t eat, Danny. I hardly touched the food,” she replied, not adding that the evening had been a very emotional and difficult one for her.
“There’s a place on Jones Street, down near the wharf, an Italian place called Gino’s.”
The name touched her memory. Long ago, when she had once hired Pinkerton detectives to follow Dan, they reported that Gino’s was the place he often met May Ling.
“That would be fine, Danny.”
“Cab?”
“I’d rather walk, if you don’t mind. It’s not too far.”
“And downhill, thank heavens. Each year, these hills become steeper and more impossible. God Almighty, do you remember when I used to run up them?”
