Casualties of War: The Advocate Trilgy
Page 79
Pete was right about the family being pretty well off. Their house could hold everybody who lives in my building. Still, they kept the service small and buried Woody in a family plot outside of town. Since Woody wasn’t killed in action against the enemy; there was no Purple Heart or color guard, but the State Constabulary supplied an honor guard.
I met the famous Uncle Ray He’s not what I thought he’d be. Remember when we were at Sir John’s and Woody mentioned his father’s library? It is a big one, but as you talk with Woody’s people you realize his father uses it for show — Uncle Ray is the one who actually reads the books.
He guessed it was me Woody had saved, but he also seemed to understand that I didn’t want Woody’s parents to know that. I told him about what Woody had said about being the last to carry the family name.
He told me not to feel guilty about that. It’s just a name, he said. The dinosaurs died out, the dodo died out, the Kneeces would die out, he said. The only people who care about that are the Kneeces, he said.
I didn’t get home until a week after Christmas. In the beginning Cyn asked me about what happened but I couldn’t tell her much and she stopped asking. It’s bad enough one of us knows.
Philip Mayer knows. You’d like him. He’s your kind of people, which I hope doesn’t require much more of an explanation. Without my even saying anything, he seemed to know what happened. I was out on the front stoop one night having a cigarette and he was just closing up his store, which is right next to our building. He called me in and we sat around drinking this horrible sweet wine of his.
It’s funny how you can say things to some people you won’t say to your wife. I didn’t want to tell him anything, but once I started talking I couldn’t stop. I talked about Woody and Armando and what happened last summer and about killing that man from the boat. I started to cry. I was crying so hard I didn’t think I’d ever stop.
He called me heldish, which is Yiddish for hero. I said I didn’t do anything to get called a hero. He said it was because I cried. He said he’d be more worried about me if I didn’t cry.
The twenty dollars is for you to go out and buy the best bottle of booze you can. Bring it over to Joe Ryan and tell him it’s from me.
It’s possible you and me may never see each other again. Cynthia asks me how you and me could be such good friends. We knew each other for a week back in August, and another week in December. I don’t know how to explain it to her. I’m not sure I understand it myself. But you’ll always be a friend, Eddie.
Be well and take care of yourself. Try not to cover anything more dangerous than cricket matches. You’re a good guy; Eddie Owen, even though I get the feeling you don’t always think so.
Your friend,
Harry
I still have that letter, yellow and brittle now. Every so often I take it out and pour myself a few sips of something warm into one of those chipped teacups. “Harry,” I say, and hold up the teacup, “meet the Boss. Boss, meet Harry.”
I’m ashamed to be in such good company.
The drink gone, I fold the letter and tuck it safely away, then turn in and sleep the satisfied sleep of a man who knows that while he’s never been the man he’d hoped to be, two honorable men called him friend. There’s few in this world can say as much.
Acknowledgments
As in The Advocate, I am again impressed at how much of a collaborative effort producing a novel turns out to be, and it would be an omission of the highest order not to give praise where praise is due.
First and foremost, I have to thank dear Kate Miciak. An editor in the Maxwell Perkins tradition, she is a hand-holder, rooting section, aesthetic backstop, guiding hand, tutor, and, in the truest sense of the word, a creative collaborator. She was one of only two people — myself not included — who believed I had this book in me, and helped midwife it onto the page.
The other was Richard Derus, my one-time agent and, I hope, long-time friend. In fact, there would be no story for Officer of the Court if Richard had not provided me with one.
And there’s Connie Munro, my copyeditor, who once again took on the thankless, gloryless task of giving this work a consistency of style, a literacy, and sometimes even a coherence that, I’m sorry to say, does not fall naturally to me.
Thanks to all of you and the rest of the Bantam team for making Officer of the Court happen.
And also as in The Advocate, it would be unfair not to give tribute to the research and labors of other writers and helpmates whose contributions helped provide the historical basis for Officer of the Court —
BOOKS:
Allen, William L. Anzio: Edge of Disaster. NY: Dutton, 1978.
Ambrose, Stephen E. Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany, June 7,1944-May 7,1945. NY: Simon & Schuster, 1997.
Collier, Peter, and David Horowitz. The Kennedys: An American Drama. NY: Warner, 1984.
Collier, Richard. Eagle Day. NY: Dutton, 1980 ed.
Eisenhower, David E. Eisenhower: At War 1943-1945. NY: Random House, 1986.
Farago, Ladislas. Patton: Ordeal and Triumph. NY: Ivan Obolensky, 1963.
Forty, George. U.S. Army Handbook 1939-1945. UK: Alan Sutton, 1997 ed.
Gann, Ernest K. Fate Is the Hunter. NY: Ballantine, 1972.
Immerso, Michael. Newark’s Little Italy: The Vanished First Ward. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997.
Jablonski, Edward. Airwar. Vols. I-IV NY: Doubleday, 1971.
Katz, Robert. Death in Rome. NY: Pyramid, 1968.
Kemp, Peter. Decision at Sea: The Convoy Escorts. NY: Dutton, 1978.
McCutcheon, Marc. The Writer’s Guide to Everyday Life from Prohibition Through World War II. Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest, 1995.
Murphy, Charles J. V, andj. Bryan III. The Windsor Story. NY: Dell, 1979.
Nalty, Bernard, and Carl Berger. The Men Who Bombed the Reich. NY: Dutton, 1978.
Pyle, Ernie. Brave Men. NY: Holt, 1944.
Robinson, Derek. Piece of Cake. NY: Knopf, 1984.
Robinson, Wayne. Barbara. NY: Doubleday, 1962.
Talese, Gay Unto the Sons. NY: Ballantine, 1992.
Terkel, Studs. The Good War. NY: Pantheon, 1984.
Veterans of Foreign Wars Edition of Pictorial History of the Second World War. Vols. I, II, III. New York: Wm. H. Wise Co., 1946.
OTHER PUBLICATIONS:
“Environment.” Firth, http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/firth/ environment/hI’m
Frank, Al. “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Terminal Is Taxiing.” The Star-Ledger (New Jersey). Feb. 13, 2000. p. 271.
Goldman, George. “Mariners Were the First to Go, the Last to Return.” The Star-Ledger (New Jersey). Dec. 7,1999. p. 20.
Gordon, William. “Victory at Sea.” The Star-Ledger (New Jersey). May 27,1993. p. 85+.
.”Bygone First Ward.” The Star-Ledger (New Jersey).
Feb. 1,1995. p. 41+.
Hampson, Stephen. “The Plight of the Neutrals.” History of the Second World War, 1973 ed. Part 7. p. 194+.
Hays, Constance L. “This Bud’s for Them.” The New York Times. June 23,1999. C1+.
Kemp, Peter, Lt. Cmdr. “Struggle for the Sealanes.” History of the Second World War, 1973 ed. Part II. p. 281+.
Kershaw, Andrew, ed. 1939-1945 War Planes. History of the World Wars — Special Edition. Hicksville, NY: Marshall Cavendish, 1973.
Mappen, Marc. “Jerseyana.” The New York Times. January 9, 1994. p. 19.
Marks, John. “Now, American Firms Face Holocaust Claims.” U.S. News & World Report. December 14, 1998. p. 40.
Nichols, Mike. “Return to Base.” The Star-Ledger (New Jersey). May 23, 1999. Section 8, p. 1+.
Orkney info. Firth, http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/orkney/hI’m
Rendall, Anne. “Orkney.” Scotland Gen Web Project, http://rootsweb. rendall. net/orkney, 1998.
Richards, Denis. “The Battle of Britain.” History of the Second World War, 1973 ed. Part 9. p. 225+.
Schofield, B.B., Vice-Admiral. “The First Arctic Convoys.” History of the Second World War, 1973 ed. Part 33. p. 907+.
Simkins, PJ. “Battle of the Coral Sea.” History of the Second World War, 1973 ed. Part 32. p. 887+.
Swinson, Arthur. “Japanese Victory: The Conquest of Malaya.” History of the Second World War, 1973 ed. Part 26. p.710+.
“Today’s Almanac.” The Star-Ledger (New Jersey). June 1, 1999. p. 2.
INTERVIEWS AND RESEARCH ASSISTANCE:
Colonel Arnold Briggs, U.S.A., retired
Josephine Esposito
Vincent Esposito
Michael Gepner
Gene Gulich
Rita Gonzalez, U.S.N.
Richard Herman Tony Lorenzo Lucy Mesce Thomas Mesce, U.S.N.
Maribel Padilla-Mesce Faye Palazzo Tina Young Marie Zanetti
A Cold And Distant Place
Bill Mesce Jr.
© Bill Mesce Jr., 2015.
Bill Mesce Jr. has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 2016 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
“There was a lot of pious talk during the war about ‘There are no atheists in foxholes’…but nobody believed the prayers were going to help. Foxholes don’t convert atheists; they breed them.”
Lt. Mike Cohen, 12th Combat Engineer Battalion. Quoted in The Bloody Forest – Battle for the Huertgen: September 1944 – January 1945, Gerald Astor.
GENESIS
YOU COULD BE AN “OLD MAN” at nineteen. Even eighteen. The years didn’t matter. You only had to be blooded. In the pre–dawn hours of November 7th, 1944, sitting on the cold, hard ground in front of the wireless console that was his responsibility, Private First Class Raymond C. Peck had come to feel that while the sporadic shelling he’d suffered for some fifty–odd hours might not constitute a full blooding in the eyes of battalion veterans, it was certainly aging him by the hour. His head drew within the coils of his scarf like a turtle as another German artillery round shrieked out of the lightless sky to crash into the headquarters area, jarring dust loose from the rubblework walls of the windowless hut which served as a battalion command post.
Even before Peck heard the easing voice say, “Not even close,” the wireless operator knew the comforting pat on his shoulder had come from Lieutenant Schup, the battalion’s S–3. That was just like Lieutenant Schup; firm and quiet, always an air of being unrushed, unruffled, like the sound of the rain gently washing the hut’s plank roof.
Raymond tried to smile as if agreeing with the lieutenant that the detonation was a trifle, but he was already gritting his teeth over the sound of the next incoming shell. The noise didn’t seem to bother the others: his mate, Timmy Rice, on the battalion’s switchboard; Lieutenant Schup, and the battatlion’s executive officer, Major Joyce. But then they’d all been through this more times than a body could count in Italy. They could read an artillery round splitting the dark, or the flutter of an incoming mortar shell in a way Raymond Peck had yet to learn (and with each crash he wondered if he’d live long enough to do so).
When the battalion had first emplaced two nights earlier, Raymond had heard Lieutenant Colonel Porter, the battalion’s commanding officer, make his initial report to divisional HQ and unflappably describe the shelling as, “non–concentrated, non–directed medium artillery harassing fire.” Lieutenant Schup, watching the young lad flinch with each exploding shell, had explained in plainer English: “They’re just tossing them here and there to keep us nervous.”
“You don’t mind me sayin’, Sir,” Raymond Peck said in his trembling, crackling adolescent voice, “they’re doin’ a damn good job.”
To which the lieutenant, seemingly oblivious to the next shell screaming by overhead, had said to him, in that fatherly, soothing way of his, “Don’t worry until you see me worry, son.” Lieutenant Schup was 24.
But Raymond Peck did worry. All the time. Every incoming round sounded like the finger of God tearing through the firmament to get him.
Raymond Peck was 19. The “old men” in the battalion called him “green.” Or kid, junior, sonny, tadpole, peach fuzz, and new meat. Sometimes they said these things jokingly, sometimes caustically, sometimes with a certain condescension, occasionally with a dismissive sneer, even though some of his judges were not much older than he, and more often his own age. Or younger. Though he tried to take the jibes good–naturedly, Raymond couldn’t help but rankle at the unfairness of it; he had not chosen to come to the war after they. It was a matter of birth dates and the Selective Service.
Still, in conversation with some of his headquarters company mates who were equally green, he admitted it could be worse as there were, in fact, few in the battalion qualified to toss such barbs about. The battalion had left most of its old men in Italy before being transferred to England for a re–fit the summer previous. Some of them had been wounded and left behind recovering in hospitals or shipped home. Still others remained behind beneath white crosses and Stars of David in ad hoc burial grounds stretching from Salerno up the length of the Italian boot to the Gothic Line, a hundred miles north of Rome; so many that barely one in four men in the battalion’s rifle companies were combat veterans.
The next shell went off so close that the dirt floor of the hut seemed to heave. Peck wondered that the stone walls didn’t fly apart at their cemented chinks, bowed his head against the sound of mud and the gravel showered down heavily on the roof. Shadows swung as the Coleman lantern suspended from the rafters pitched this way and that from the impact.
Colonel Porter had said the cramped little building of rough stone and planking was a “woodsman’s hut.” Being from a sleepy southern California town called La Jolla, which had the Pacific Ocean on one side and desert on the other, Raymond Peck had never even seen a healthy stand of trees until the Army had inducted him and sent him east eight months ago. Timmy Rice, from the more urban but equally deforested terrain of Chicago’s North Side, had asked Peck if he knew what a “woodsman” was while they wrestled their communications gear into the hut that rainy first night. Peck dipped into his shallow stock of literary references and replied, “All I know is that was the fella chopped up the wolf in ‘Li’l Red Ridin’ Hood.’”
Colonel Porter, whom Raymond Peck always thought could never find a short way to make a point, had called the hut, “The National Home for Wayward Belgian Dwarves,” and been the only one of the HQ staff to laugh at the joke. Lieutenant Schup had looked at the communications gear wedged into the small space and declared it a, “Belgian phone booth.” Raymond liked Timmy Rice’s appellation best: “A Belgian shit–house.”
Raymond had established his SCR509 wireless set on a tarpaulin on the earthen floor as there was no room for a table. Alongside, Timmy Rice similarly sited a company–sized switchboard with its five “drops,” having left the battalion’s larger board behind when the jeep and trailer carrying the heavy HQ gear had sank past its axles in the mire that was the Kall Trail. On the wall behind them, a map had been fixed with the chart side facing the stone wall.
On the blank rear of the map, drawn in grease pencil, was a blunt chevron shape, thicker in its left wing than its right. Along the center of the chevron had been scrawled: BUNKERS. A third of the way between that and the outer edge of the chevron had been drawn a jagged line and the appellation: TRENCHES. Then a few inches and another line: WIRE/MINES. Below that: TREES. The rough diagram was cluttered with arrows and markings indicating phase lines and directions of attack along with marginalia of scheduling and observer’s notations; reminders of the two previous days operations. At the top of the sheet was written in the small letters of afterthought: HILL 399. The hut was so small that whenever the battalion officers fussed over the map, their calves and muddy boots butted against Raymond and Timmy Rice sitting on the floor in front of their consoles. As a consequence, most of the battalion’s officers brought in on an officer’s call had ta
ken to hovering about outside the entrance of the hut until called upon.
Another round of incoming. This one did not clear the statuesque fir trees surrounding the picnic area which was home to the CP, but exploded in the uppermost branches, the explosion underlined with the lightning–like crack of splintering timber. Raymond Peck flinched as sheared–off branches thudded onto the hut roof. The shadows in the hut again did their drunken dance.
“Well, that one was close,” Lieutenant Schup said sounding slightly impressed yet not overly concerned. “They’re either getting luckier or they sniffed us out.”
Raymond Peck heard the hut door creak open and one of the mess sergeants peeped round the interior blackout curtain. “Got some blackstrap ‘n’ breakfast, sirs, if any a you has a mind.”
“Just coffee,” Major Joyce said.
That comforting soft pat of a gloved hand on the shoulder again: “How about you, son?”
The battalion old men always advised never to refuse a hot meal because one never knew when the next one would be coming, so even though Raymond Peck’s nerve–tightened stomach was not particularly amenable, he took a mess kit plate of powdered eggs with diced Spam, and a canteen cup of strong coffee, and forced himself to eat. Despite the coffee, the warm food had a lulling effect, and before he’d finished eating Raymond Peck’s eyes were fluttering and his head began to sink forward on a slow–motion collision course with the wireless set.
“Another inch, son, and you might’ve damaged the radio,” Lieutenant Schup said wryly as he woke Peck by gently pushing the lad’s head back up.
The longest unbroken sleep the boy had had since the battalion had encamped had been the short breaks in the bombardment – the longest no more than a half–hour – while the German guns restocked their ammunition supplies. Raymond Peck had seen, with amazement, the battalion’s old men sleep through the shelling (though veterans would confess such nonchalance had less to do with becoming inured than with the effects of complete exhaustion). Still, no one slept enough, and – whether it showed or not – the endless parade of German shells took a toll on every psyche, as did the intermittent rain, the bitter nightly cold, and spending most of each day sheltering in a muddy foxhole. There was not a man in the battalion – at least none that Raymond Peck had seen, including the genial Lieutenant Schup – who did not have the same hot coal eyes blearily staring out of an unshaven face; the same tired, raspy voice; the same lead–footed trudge.