Purple Hearts

by Michael Grant

  There is a low barbed wire fence, and they are made to climb over it, ripping uniform trousers and tripping the clumsy or the exhausted. The field is surrounded on three sides by forest, stark, leafless trees with branches silvered by snow. Some SS men head across the snow to the borders of the field.

  Frangie does a quick count, something like seventy-five or eighty-odd GIs stand shivering and breathing steam.

  “Yeah, I reckon we’re going to Germany,” Pepper says. “And probably not a phonograph or a radio anywhere. At least it’s got to be warmer than this.”

  But Frangie is not sure. Her stomach is twisting in knots. There’s something in the air, on the faces of the SS, in this place.

  They’re going to kill us.

  The thought comes fully formed and undeniable. It is a truth Frangie feels deep down, down beyond the reach of Pepper’s optimistic chatter.

  She wants to tell him, wants to say the words, but saying them will make them real, and she wants desperately to believe that her instincts are wrong.

  A German staff car and a covered truck push through the barbed wire and stop at the edge of the road.

  “Our Father . . . ,” Frangie whispers.

  “What?” Pepper looks at her, baffled then slowly alarmed.

  “. . . who art in heaven . . .”

  “Are you . . .”

  “. . . hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come . . .”

  Pepper says, “They aren’t gonna . . .”

  “. . . Thy will be done . . .” The words catch in Frangie’s throat. No, no, not Thy will, I want to live. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. “. . . on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread . . .”

  The canvas at the back of the German truck rises suddenly. Frangie sees SS soldiers hunched over a machine gun. Her breathing is sharp gasps. Her heart hammers. No, no, no!

  “. . . and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive . . .”

  B-r-r-r-r-r-t!

  Soldiers scream and twist and fall.

  B-r-r-r-r-r-t!

  Americans try to run and are cut down.

  B-r-r-r-r-r-t!

  The cries go up. Mom! Jesus! No! God save me!

  B-r-r-r-r-r-t!

  Men and women stagger. Blood explodes as mist from punctured bodies.

  Pepper turns terrified eyes to Frangie, and a bullet hits him in the hip. He falls. Frangie, even now on automatic, a medic first and last, drops to her knees to help him as all around people fall.

  B-r-r-r-r-r-t! B-r-r-r-r-r-t! B-r-r-r-r-r-t!

  An officer in the squad car has his pistol out and shoots crawling, wounded soldiers with no more concern than if he’d been shooting rabbits.

  B-r-r-r-r-r-t! B-r-r-r-r-r-t! B-r-r-r-r-r-t!

  Frangie feels a sharp blow against her knee and falls.

  It stops. The machine gun falls silent.

  The pitiful, fearful, pain-wracked cries of the wounded do not. Men and women are crawling across the snow, leaving blood trails behind.

  Frangie hears shouted orders in German. SS soldiers advance across the field, their tall boots crunching snow, chatting among themselves. Laughing.

  Laughing as they stand in front of a crawling man, kick him onto his back, and shoot him in the face.

  Laughing as a wounded woman breaks for the woods and they shoot her in the back.

  Laughing as they step on a writhing man’s stomach and bounce on him, forcing fountains of blood from his mouth before shooting him.

  Frangie is half beneath Pepper who still breathes. Frangie can feel the rise and fall of his breath.

  “Play dead!” she says in a terse whisper.

  But Pepper isn’t listening. Is he even conscious?

  A dead woman is curled beside Frangie’s head. Frangie can hear the trickle of her blood dripping on snow.

  Boots in the snow.

  Frangie does not move her eyes. She does not breathe.

  Bang!

  Pepper’s body jerks.

  Bang!

  The dead woman’s face explodes outward, showering Frangie with gore.

  Not a breath!

  Not a blink!

  The boots move away.

  Frangie lies amid the now-silent dead for an eternity as snow falls and Pepper’s blood freezes into a red icicle that hangs from his mouth. His brown eyes are open, staring.

  Numb in body and mind, Frangie pushes her way out from under Pepper. She rolls the dead woman aside. She vomits onto the ground and begins to sob. She cries like a child, without thought, without self-consciousness. She bawls like a baby.

  She crawls on hands and knees toward the trees. The roads belong to the Germans now.

  There’s a slight hill, and she tops it then rolls down the other side. Only then does she get to her feet and start to run.

  26

  RIO RICHLIN—CLERVAUX, LUXEMBOURG

  “Lieutenant Dubrowski?”

  The lieutenant is crouched behind a well-dug-in machine gun team. He’s as young as second lieutenants usually are, maybe twenty-four, maybe not. “See that big rock?” Dubrowski points. “Go left of that about two bumps.” The machine gunner adjusts and opens fire, the machine gun slurping the ammo belt like spaghetti. Dubrowski turns to Rio. “Yeah?”

  Rio does not salute—officers on the front lines don’t appreciate being conveniently identified for the Germans. “Sergeant Richlin, sir. Sergeant Mackie . . . sorry, I mean Captain Mackie sent us up here.”

  “What do you got?”

  “Half a platoon of beat-down GIs needing a shower and a shave and about a week of sleep.”

  Dubrowski looks past her at the platoon gathered below his ridge-topping position. “They look like a scary bunch. Can any of ’em shoot?”

  Rio shrugs. “Maybe half are complete greenhorns, but I have a dozen good people.” Then, feeling she was being unfair, she adds, “And most of the rest will come along in time.”

  “Uh-huh,” Dubrowski says. He grins, and Rio likes him immediately, on instinct. This is not Lieutenant Horne. This officer hasn’t shaved in a long time or changed his uniform, nor, from the look of his sunken black eyes, has he slept. He’s in, and obviously has for some time been in, the line of fire, right alongside his people.

  Dubrowski squat-walks away from the MG, then rises to a full six feet and strides into the middle of Fifth Platoon. The first thing he says is, “You are all out of uniform: Where the hell are your neckties?”

  There follows five long seconds of baffled stares, then Dubrowski slaps a soldier on the shoulder and says, “Sorry, I couldn’t resist. You are about as sorry-looking a bunch of GIs as I have ever seen. Hell, you look as bad as my own people. Damned if we couldn’t kill the Krauts with our stink alone!”

  That last bit he says loudly enough to be overheard by some of those own people, one of whom says over his shoulder, “Still waiting on a bottle of perfume from Paris, Dub!”

  “Perfume hell, Castro, you need a sandblaster,” Dubrowski yells back, and winks at Rio. “Welcome to Clervaux, ladies and gentlemen. Sergeant Richlin tells me you’ve been in it, and now you’re in it again. Let me tell you how it lays out.”

  He quickly sketches the position. Clervaux—and, more important, the road running through it—is at the bottom of a bowl. A mishmash of American units is on the lip of the bowl. The Krauts are outside the bowl trying to get to the lip so they can, in his words, “drop 88s and mortars like a goddamn New Orleans rainstorm on the town and push us the fug out and take the goddamn road, which they need for their fugging tanks.”

  “Where do you want us, sir?” Rio asks. Most soldiers curse more or less constantly, but Rio had somehow expected something different from a West Pointer.

  Dubrowski considers. Then he pulls Rio aside to speak privately. “Tell you what I need, Sergeant, you tell me if you can do it. What I’d like is to form a sort of flying squad I can deploy to harass the damn panzers they got trying to come up along a forest track.”

  “A bazo
oka team?”

  Dubrowski nods. “If the panzers break through, they can drive straight toward the main road, pivot into town, and all of us up here will be cut off and spend the rest of the war in a POW camp.”

  “We haven’t done much tank-killing, Lieutenant.”

  “I have a PFC you can have, good with a bazooka.” Raising his voice, “Castro! Send word to Mazur to get his ass over here!” Then again to Rio, “He’s a Polack like me, but a fresh-off-the-boat Polack, barely speaks English. But goddamn, he hates Krauts. Take Mazur, pick your best squad, see what you can do.”

  Rio has several conflicting reactions. She can barely keep her eyes open, she aches everywhere, her stomach is rumbling, and she knows her people are at least as bad off.

  On the other hand, as she sees the situation is desperate, she does not want to be a POW, and her chain of command now runs through Dubrowski to Mackie. And Rio would chop off her own arm rather than disappoint Mackie.

  “Yes, sir,” Rio says.

  Mazur comes at a run, carrying a bazooka. He’s a small man, barely over the legal minimum for enlistment, but wide and built like an upside-down triangle, with almost comically bulky shoulders.

  “Mazur. Welcome aboard,” Rio says. “Okay, here’s how this goes. I am forming a flying squad to go see if we can’t annoy some panzers. Stafford, you’ll be my ASL. Sorry, Geer, Beebee can be your number two, I need Stafford.”

  So much easier not to think about Jack when I call him Stafford.

  Geer shakes his head and sighs, not thrilled to trade Jack for Beebee.

  “Castain, Molina, Jeffords, and . . .” Rio hesitates. She needs a beast of burden, someone big and strong enough to carry bazooka rounds. She sighs. “. . . and you, Private Sweetheart. You’re all with me. Everyone else with Geer. Geer? Go report to the lieutenant.”

  Geer says, “You should take me with you.”

  Rio nods. “Yeah, I probably should, Geer, but I need someone back here who knows what’s going on.”

  The words in case I don’t come back are unspoken but understood.

  Rio squats with Dubrowski again, going carefully over the maps. “There’s a trail right here.” Dubrowski stabs the map with a finger. “Don’t know how far it goes, but it might get you as far as this.” Another finger stab. “Our guys are holding over here, so you need to watch out for friendly fire.”

  “Mines?”

  “The area was swept for mines when it was ours, but Fritz is a busy little fellow, so . . .”

  “Swell.”

  They have seven rounds of standard antitank, armor-piercing bazooka rockets and three smoke rounds. As they set off, Rio asks Mazur, “Is it worth carrying the smoke rounds?”

  Mazur grins, revealing several missing teeth. “Oh, I love Willy Pete, Sarge. You light a panzer up with Willy and it blinds them. It gets mighty warm inside a tank that’s burning, and the Krauts bail out.”

  “You’ve killed tanks?”

  Mazur holds up two fingers and a stub of a middle finger. He laughs. “Two and a half, see? Hah! Killed two, crippled one.”

  His English is almost perfect, obviously Dubrowski had been teasing. “What happened to the finger?”

  “Damn dago sniper in Italy.”

  Jack walks point with Corporal Jeffords, a lanky Arkansan chewing and spitting tobacco behind him scanning for mines. Molina is just behind Rio, and Rudy J. Chester brings up the rear, gasping beneath the weight of his gear plus two musette bags stuffed with bazooka rounds.

  Jenou drops back a bit to match stride with Rio. “Do we know something about killing tanks?”

  “Not yet.”

  “At least we’re heading downhill,” Jenou says.

  “Sorry to drag you into this, Jen.” Rio is about to add something about being desperate for veterans, but she checks herself and says, “I need you.”

  “Well, isn’t that nice?” Jenou says, intending to sound sarcastic, but the truth is she’s oddly touched and sounds like it. Jenou has barely spoken to Rio since Stick’s death. “You doing okay?”

  “Like Christmas morning finding a stocking full of gifts,” Rio says.

  “Speaking of which, it’ll be Christmas soon. I guess that’s good what with everyone saying the war will be over by Christmas.” Jenou fumbles in her bag and pulls out something that looks like a big, metal Tootsie Pop. “Beebee scrounged this. It’s a British thing called a ‘sticky bomb.’ You take it out of its shell and it’s basically a grenade with glue on it. You’re supposed to throw it at tanks. I have two. I’ll hold on to them for you.”

  “Why are they for me and not for you?”

  “You’re the hero, Rio, not me.”

  “No?”

  Jenou shakes her head. “You know, when we started out I was just looking for a guy and a way out of Gedwell Falls. I have a feeling that Jenou is dead. Dead and buried.”

  “We’ve all changed,” Rio says.

  Jenou nods. “That’s true. You used to just be my flat-chested best friend who broke out in hives at the thought of kissing a boy.”

  Rio glances back to see who might be overhearing this exchange. Milkmaid Molina is nearest. Her face is blank, but it’s the careful sort of blank that indicates that yes, she heard all right.

  “At first I was not real happy with how you were changing, and that took my mind off thinking about myself and whether I was turning into someone different.” Jenou trips on a root, takes two wild balancing steps, and catches herself.

  “So?” Rio prods.

  “So, like I said, that Jenou, the empty-headed little flirt, died somewhere back along the way. Italy, I guess. Yeah, that’s when I started to feel like . . . I don’t know. Not like me.”

  Rio grabs Jenou’s arm and pulls her off the trail. “Keep going, Molina, we’ll catch up.”

  “Is this a rest stop?” Chester asks hopefully.

  Something in Rio’s snarl convinces him to keep moving.

  “Are you okay, Jen? We never got much of a chance to talk about what’s going on with your folks.”

  “I blame the Krauts—they keep interrupting. Anyway, to be honest, Rio, it’s a relief. It was getting me down thinking of going back there, back to . . . them . . . when this is all over.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Well . . . there’s this GI Bill thing, you know, where the government will pay for college?” Jenou winces as if expecting ridicule.

  “Jenou Castain, college coed?” Rio smiles crookedly.

  “You think I’m not clever enough.”

  “Oh bullshit, Jen, you’re smart enough to do whatever you want.” She frowns. “Which is what, exactly?”

  They start walking again, a few dozen paces behind Chester.

  “Well,” Jenou says, “I’ve been sort of noodling around with this journal . . . anyway, I thought maybe I’d study English and think about writing.”

  Rio is silent for a while until Jenou says, “Yeah, but it’s probably a silly pipe dream.”

  “I think it would be wonderful. You’ve always had a way with words. I’d be proud of you,” Rio says. “All right, Molina? Take point. Stafford to the rear.”

  “How about you, Rio? Afterward, I mean? You still think there’s any potential in the handsome Mr. Braxton?”

  Rio accelerates her pace and says, “I have to get back up front.” She ignores Jenou’s drawled “Uh-huh,” and catches up to Molina.

  “All right, Molina, we may be getting close, so use all your senses, right? Listen. And smell too.”

  “All I smell is me,” Molina mutters.

  The trail is one person wide, sometimes just a single step wide so they have to walk heel-toe, which is awkward when you’re carrying weight. Snow comes drifting down through the trees, fat flakes of it. They’ve been traveling steadily downhill, and Rio worries about the return climb if snow starts to fall in earnest.

  All conversation has stopped. They move slowly, with all the stealth they can manage while following a goat t
rail through trees with branches that reach out to snag them as they pass. It is getting on to afternoon, and Rio considers ordering a meal break. But Germans have noses, too, and the smell of C rations could give them away.

  Molina stops suddenly and takes a knee.

  “What?” Rio asks voicelessly.

  Molina points through the tree trunks, through the bushes, to a sliver of unpaved dirt road. Rio unfolds her map and tries to connect wavy lines on paper to the forest around her. Down there, a road. Off to the right, a stream. “Yep,” she says. She waves her squad forward and motions them to gather around.

  “Okay, listen up. We have to leave the trail here and go down this slope then follow the stream. Our guys are here.” She points at the map, and as if on cue they hear the chatter of a .50 caliber. “Krauts here. They’ll have patrols out. Do not start shooting unless I tell you or you have no choice. Right? Panzers are bunched up along this track trying to break through. I doubt they’ll be expecting us, but keep your eyes open.”

  Now Rio takes point, with Jack just behind her. They no longer look for mines—the shadows in the forest are lengthening and the snow, falling faster now, will conceal wires or fresh-turned dirt.

  She takes careful, silent but swift steps, moving with feline grace, her Thompson leveled at her waist. From time to time she stops to listen and to sniff the breeze. She looks for movement, any movement, listens for the snap of a branch underfoot, inhales any scent suggestive of German tobacco or food.

  Step, step, step. Pause. Step, step, step, step. Pause.

  It is an excruciatingly slow way to advance, but advance they do. They reach a small trickling stream, barely enough to submerge their canteens in. But the tiny stream has cut a deep ravine, almost head-high, and Rio leads them along the stream, stepping into, out of, and back into freezing water.

  The temperature is dropping fast. Snow accumulates, just a dusting, but the start of worse to come. The squad breathes steam. Feet already cold are growing numb.

  “Bridge,” Rio says, stopping and chopping her hand forward to indicate the direction. “It looks like something Kraut engineers threw up over this stream.”

  In the most basic sense this stream, this ravine, delineates the line between the American Shermans dug in on the western side and the panzers on the other side. The sound of machine gun fire is sporadic, along with the higher-pitched sound of rifles. From time to time they’ve heard a tank firing followed by an explosion.