The Right Fight

by Chris Lynch

  “I said, fire, Logan!”

  He finally fires.

  It is beyond spectacular. I don’t ever expect to see a shot as perfect as the one right there, where the nose of one beautiful seventy-five millimeter shell connects perfectly with the nose of an ME-109 German Luftwaffe fighter plane and creates the fiery chaos of the ages, right above the column of tanks, raining fire and debris down on all of us, making clangs and dents and divots of joy all up and down the line.

  The Stuka banks off through the smoke, back toward the north, with the bulk of his comrades. But not before two more, farther back in our line, have been brought down. And not before, up ahead and not three tanks back, our guys take substantial bomb hits to go with the machine-gun rounds that are pockmarking everything in sight.

  Far up ahead there has been some command decision, as I see the light tanks accelerate and put distance between them and us, no longer hanging back for whatever it was we were hoping solidarity would achieve.

  It appears we are seriously fighting the Germans now for possession of Western Tunisia.

  We are taking casualties. They are taking casualties.

  There is a Luftwaffe pilot who took something from me. And then took it to the grave.

  The column has stopped. Cowens is involved in frantic radio talks. The other two guys up there are growling like bears while Pacifico sounds the siren.

  I stare straight ahead and find myself worrying the scapular between my fingers and thumb.

  We don’t move.

  It’s decided we will sit right here in the middle of the desert, dig in, and wait.

  Supplies are not far off, and right behind them are artillery units, with infantry to follow shortly.

  “That is how it should be,” Cowens says as we walk up and down the line, examining the damaged tanks just before night falls too dark to examine anything. “These units have to be blended. A bunch of tanks make a nice show of power, but they aren’t nearly flexible enough to be carrying out major operations by themselves for long. Tanks shouldn’t even be fighting tanks most of the time — we should be blowing up other stuff and supporting the foot soldiers. Finally we’re breaking this parade up into smaller units, mixed units, spreading out, fighting smart.”

  “I wish you were in charge,” Wyatt says to the commander.

  The commander responds with something that becomes a sort of low-key motto for our crew.

  “I wish General GSP was here.”

  That would be George S. Patton.

  “Only two guys on our side who really know what tanks are all about, me and him,” Cowens says as we finish our inspection and he does a crisp heel-turn to lead us back toward the evening’s bunk-down. “And I have no interest in being the boss, so it’s gotta be him.”

  It’s fortunate for us that Commander Not-the-Boss is kind of engrossed in his philosophies at the moment, as his minions exchange glances and grins that he might not approve of if he should suddenly turn around.

  I’m walking alongside Pacifico, just behind Logan and Wyatt. My assistant driver is still not quite with us, and I allow us to lag behind a little.

  “Hey,” I say low, just between us, “you all right?”

  He keeps walking, looking straight ahead with his expression giving up nothing and his voice giving up less.

  “Hey,” I say again, elbowing him in the side for punctuation.

  He turns to me quickly this time. “Hey,” he says with at least a portion of his goofy smile.

  We keep walking, but I know he’s not quite correct, so I keep staring at him. He looks away.

  I grab his right arm with my left hand, and he looks back, with sad worry.

  “I’m not hearing stuff. Not too good,” he whispers. I realize now, he’s whispering louder than someone who can hear whispers.

  “Aww,” I say, squeezing his arm harder. “Kid. Kid, you have to —”

  “No. Bucyk, no. I’ll be fine. It’s not completely … and it’ll get better. The ear that I listen to you guys with is better, anyway, so —”

  I can see now that he’s even favoring one ear, tilting his head a bit to the right. I squeeze the daylights out of that arm and there’s more where that came from if necessary. “Go home, pal. You didn’t want to be here, anyway. You did your bit, and then some. Go home.”

  The other guys don’t notice when we stop. Pacifico yanks his arm away, plants himself in my face, and squeezes my upper arms now. No contest, frankly, as my pal may be stout of heart, but he’s fairly limp of limb.

  “No, I didn’t want to be here,” he says. “But I don’t want to go home. I belong with you guys, and that’s where I want to be now. You say anything to mess that up, I’ll beat your brains in.”

  I can only hope he takes it in the nicest possible way when I cover my mouth with my hand to shield his sensitive eyes from the laugh he can only half hear.

  He gives me the full-watt, ear-to-dud-ear grin that could sell me a lot of stupid ideas.

  “Fine,” he says, “but I would shoot you.”

  “Fair enough,” I say. “But I’ll be watching you. If you can’t cut it …”

  He nods, and pulls me along to catch up with our team.

  His attitude being what it is right now, his whole head would have to fall on the floor in front of me before I’d want him off the crew.

  “Everything good?” Cowens says as we find him waiting outside the Sherman.

  “Good-good,” I say.

  “Good,” Pacifico says.

  They both start climbing up to hunker down for the night. I slip casually around to the other side first and get way up close to eyeball Pacifico’s side of the tank in the low light.

  There must be forty small dents, near-penetration pockmarks, in a semicircle beside where his head would be. Looks like the outline of a giant ear.

  It’s a funny notion, lying awake through the night when you’re not even lying down to begin with. Tossing and turning? Hardly. I’ve lost the ability to identify exactly what sleep is now, anyway. I am never fully asleep, never fully awake during the nights when the five of us are propped up in our cramped steel dormitory. The difference between what you are dreaming and what you are thinking becomes blurred. If there is even a difference.

  Tonight I’m pretty sure it’s mostly awakeness and mostly thoughts. You learn early on in battlefield life that the Army itself never fully goes to sleep. There is a constant low hum of something going on, an engine, a clanking, murmurings and motion sounds that never let you feel alone no matter how much you might want to.

  Not that I could feel that way, anyway. He’s been with me tonight. My Luftwaffe pal. The pilot who stared me down. Broke me down. And has now decided to move in with us right here in my tank. My Sherman. Did he die back there? Didn’t he? Does it matter, if he’s gotten in here?

  It’s close to daybreak when I hear a sound that sounds a little different. It’s a motor, but it’s not a motor I recognize.

  I quietly push the hatch open to go explore.

  “Where’s your sidearm, Bucyk? And your helmet?”

  I am startled, and it serves me right for thinking that the commander would not be vigilant.

  “Oh, sir, I’m just —”

  “Not without your weapon, you’re not. Never.”

  “Yes, sir,” I say. I grab my helmet and strap on my pistol before exiting.

  I knew it was a foreign sound, and foreign it is.

  “Morning,” I say as I approach the vehicle. I had only heard about these guys before now, never seen one. The Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) vehicle the Brits have been operating in Egypt since the early days of the war. It’s a handsome little brute, the nose looking like an old Chevy farm truck and the rest being all camouflage and heavy artillery. They operate like free agents, advance scouts buzzing all over the desert finding out what everybody’s doing, then disappearing again to make use of the intelligence.

  “G’day,” says the guy who’s in the navigator’s seat.


  “Morning,” says the driver, nodding.

  “What brings you guys to our neighborhood?” I ask.

  “Just having a li’l looky-round,” the navigator says, “see what we can see, know what I mean?”

  It is an accent I haven’t heard a lot of. “Australian?” I say.

  “Get it right, mate, or could be trouble. Kiwi. New Zealand.”

  “Right. Sorry.”

  “Yes, well, it’s time,” the driver says. Then he stares silently, sort of right over my shoulder. That accent, I recognize: British officer.

  “Where you going?” I ask the navigator.

  “Just beyond that bluff there. Gettin’ a quick dig-around among the wreckages you made. Never know what useful stuff you might find.”

  “Oh,” I say, sounding like an excited kid, knowing I sound like an excited kid, not caring that I sound like an excited kid. “Could I tag along?”

  The New Zealander looks at the Englishman, who looks in the direction of the bluff. There must be some kind of communication between them that I can’t read because the Kiwi comes back to me and says, “Where’s your commander?”

  “Ah,” I say, gesturing indirectly toward the Sherman, “he’s sleeping.”

  “Guess that means the answer’s yes, then,” the guy says cheerfully, and I jump into the back of the vehicle just as it’s pulling away.

  Sure enough, when we get to the other side of the bluff there are two downed German planes, a Stuka and an ME-109, both crumpled, singed, and embedded in the earth. We park the LRDG and approach the Stuka. We walk all around it, over the one intact wing, around to the cockpit. There is no sign of the pilot anywhere. Not inside, not in the area. He could have landed anywhere. Good.

  I leave them there as they pick apart the cockpit, pulling the control panel to pieces, looking for whatever secrets the Desert Group looks for. I approach the 109. The pilot’s cage has been torn right off. But as I climb up on the wing and look in, I see the deceased pilot himself has miraculously remained in there. He is in a very strange position, though, kind of reclined with a blanket under him, but with one arm up over his head as if in a half surrender. His face is bloody chopped tomato pulp, turned like he’s looking toward his own shoulder. His teeth are all knocked out, which is easy to see because he appears to be frozen in mid scream. Good.

  “Don’t touch,” the British officer snaps as the two of them march toward me.

  Was I touching? I wasn’t aware of touching. Maybe I was. I look at my hands.

  They are up on the plane now with me, on the opposite wing. I feel like a consultant surgeon watching them work. They examine the pilot for a few seconds before the Brit decides it’s okay to start on the instrument panel, and the Kiwi pulls the pilot up toward him.

  In a snap, I see two guns. They flash, either side of the pilot, as a second pair of German arms sprout up from underneath the first pair. Both Desert Groupers duck the bullets just as the second pilot’s face appears, gritting, snarling, all teeth and hate, and my pistol is already in my hand and I pump a bullet right into his temple and I see that face and I recognize that hateful face and I pump a second and a third shot into his head before he even can fall all the way back again and under the other man once more. Blood pumps out of the guy’s head like it’s going to make a bath right there in the cockpit.

  There is a whole lot of silence in the desert now. I can smell the work of my gun.

  I see the men of my crew going about their morning business as the LRDG vehicle pulls up to about fifty yards away. “This will be close enough,” I say. The British officer doesn’t need to hear it twice. He stops. I hop out and walk around to the navigator’s side of the vehicle. From the driver’s seat I get a silent salute, which I return. From the Kiwi I get a big grin and a pretty hard slap on my neck. He grabs my ear under the helmet and shakes my head all around.

  “Now that was some killing, mate.”

  I don’t say anything, but I do nod when he releases me to do so.

  “Let us know when you want to join up with the Desert Group. Anytime.”

  I hear the Chevrolet engine growl as they motor away behind me and I head toward my own desert group.

  I can’t wait to get there. To get into my tank, where I belong. I fight for my country, and now I’m pretty sure I could also fight for New Zealand, but I know my place, my war, is in that Sherman with my guys.

  I watch Commander Cowens all the way as he watches me walk home.

  “Did you find what you were looking for?” he says, fatherly, as I climb up the front of the tank to my hatch.

  “I did, sir,” I say. “Yes, I did.”

  We are traveling now with three companies — about sixty tanks in all. We’re supported by two artillery platoons, but as of yet no infantry.

  It feels like lighter going, in terms of speed and flexibility, but to be honest it’s still hard to get a read on what the big picture is. Everybody talks about reaching Tunis as the big prize. The British Eighth Army has been driving the German and Italian forces up from the south, and we are coming in from the west, with the idea that we are going to combine those pressures to shove the enemy up against the coast, into the sea, and off of Africa’s back once and for all. When we have done that, then the whole Mediterranean is ours, with staging areas for operations from east to west and uninterrupted supply lines that will really turn things around in Europe.

  That’s the theory, anyway, and Tunis is the brass ring.

  But from here? We’re never sure what’s around the next bend, over the next little hillock. And communication among units, battalions, divisions, armies, branches, allied nations, seem for all the world to be making our task more confused, rather than less. It’s all certainly frustrating the person immediately above me in the vast, vast, vast chain of command.

  “Look at that, now,” Cowens says as we slog through a surprisingly horrible rain, over nearly impassable mud tracks. All our vehicles are sashaying their way along, trying desperately to hold a steady path toward wherever we are headed. I now see firsthand what parched, arid land looks like once it’s pounded with bucketing rainfall, and it ain’t fun. What we know for certain is that Tunis is on the other side of a seriously imposing backbone of mountain range that practically divides this country, Tunisia, in two, right down the middle. We also know that the far side of that range is mostly Axis-held. As for what befalls us between here and there, that is anyone’s guess, but so far it has been a series of surprises, pleasant and otherwise.

  We have had a number of skirmishes. Mostly held our own. A little more than held our own, in fact. All things considered, the kids have been doing all right.

  “So, we’re taking this hill blindly, I guess,” says Cowens. He’s having one of his surlier days.

  “Unless you tell me otherwise, sir,” I say. “The way I see it, my command structure extends as far as you. Say the word and I stop, back up, do a backflip, you name it.”

  “Thank you Bucyk. You’re a good soldier. But good soldiers follow orders, as you know, and my orders are to follow this line and so those are your orders, too.”

  “Will do, commander.”

  I reach to my right, slap Pacifico on the leg, and steer to the top of the hill with the rest, and following their formation, I pull up and alongside the previous tank and survey the scene.

  “Oh, my goodness, me,” Logan says. “Is it my birthday? Wyatt, load, man, load.”

  “Sir?” Wyatt asks, appropriately.

  “Hold on, hold on, wait for instructions,” Cowens says, grabbing up the radio.

  We can try to hold on.

  There is a gentle slope before us, descending into a valley along a river. Just on the other side of that river is a small, secluded, packed German airfield. There are a few planes taking off and landing, but virtually no defensive presence that we can see beyond that.

  Cowens, still on the phone, speaks in the kind of abnormal calm you use when you don’t want to wake somebody or you’
re afraid of disturbing your own fantasy.

  “The artillery is setting up right where we are,” he says. “In a few seconds, when we get the word that they are set, the tanks roll and lay down a line of fire the whole way. Load up, gentlemen… .”

  I see scores of Messerschmitts, and Stukas, and ME-109s, mostly just sitting there. They don’t notice us at all yet, nested in with the trees here on the hill.

  “Ready …”

  The sound of the 81-mm mortar fire is like the starting gun on a race, and we are off, down the hill with a beautiful barrage arcing over from behind us and a glorious explosion of panicked terror before us.

  I lean into the levers just as hard as I can to get us across the field and to the riverbank as fast as possible. All the while my boys are just pounding everything they’ve got into laying waste to anything that moves on the other side of that river, and anything that doesn’t.

  It’s satisfying like nothing else. There has just been this percolating, burning hatred of these aircraft that’s been growing by the hour, especially since we crossed over into Tunisia. They seem to always have the advantage, to always bring down fire and havoc and then almost every time get away before you can get your hands on them. German air superiority has just been so complete that is seems like the situation is entirely devoid of fairness, and that’s how crazy it’s gotten, that I am looking for fairness in battlefield situations.

  Mortar shells are landing, one after another, blowing up aircraft where they sit. The thin line of troops they mobilize to defend are up and shot down as fast as they can get to the fence. Our shells are pounding the installation’s buildings right back into the sand they came from.

  The rain has stopped by the time we sit on the river’s edge, but it’s all still muck, and running water, and blood.

  “Switch,” I say to Pacifico’s good-ish side.