If I Die in a Combat Zone (2 page)

“Tell them St. Vith.”

“What?”

“St. Vith,” I said. “That’s the name of this ville. It’s right here on the map. Want to look?”

He grinned. “What’s the difference? You say St. Vith, I guess that’s it. I’ll never remember. How long’s it gonna take me to forget
your
fuckin’ name?”

The captain walked over and sat down with us, and together we smoked and waited for the platoons to fan out around the village. Now and then a radio would buzz. I handled the routine calls, Captain Johansen took everything important. All this was familiar: cordon, wait, sweep, search. The mechanics were simple and sterile.

“This gonna take long?” Barney asked.

Captain Johansen said he hoped not. Hard to tell.

“What I mean is, you don’t expect to find anything—right, sir?” Barney looked a little embarrassed. “That’s what O’Brien was saying. Says it’s hopeless. But like I told him, there’s always the chance we can surprise old Charlie. Right? Always a
chance.
”

The captain didn’t answer.

I closed my eyes. Optimism always made me sleepy.

We waited.

When the cordon was tied up tight, Barney and the captain and I joined the first platoon. Johansen gave the order to move in. And slowly, carefully, we tiptoed into the little hamlet, nudging over jugs of rice, watching where we walked, alert to booby traps, brains foggy, numb, hoping to find nothing.

But we found tunnels. Three of them. It was late afternoon now, and the men were tired, and issue was whether to search the tunnels or blow them.

“So,” a lieutenant said. “Do we go down?”

The men murmured. One by one we moved away, leaving the lieutenant standing alone by the cluster of tunnels. He peered at them, kicked a little dirt into the mouths, then turned away.

He walked over to Captain Johansen and they had a short conference together. The sun was setting. Already it was impossible to make out the color in their faces and uniforms. The two officers stood together, heads down, deciding.

“Blow the fuckers up,” someone said. “Right now, before they make up their minds.
Now.
”

“Fire-in-the-hole!
” Three explosions, dulled by dirt and sand, and the tunnels were blocked.
“Fire-in-the-hole!
” Three more explosions, even duller. Two grenades to each tunnel.

“Nobody’s gonna be searching them buggers now.”

The men laughed.

“Wouldn’t find nothing anyway. A bag of rice, maybe some ammo. That’s all.”

“And may be a goddamn mine, right?”

“Not worth it. Not worth my ass, damn sure.”

“Well, no worry now. No way anybody’s going down into
those
mothers.”

“Ex-tunnels.”

Another explosion, fifty yards away.

Then a succession of explosions, tearing apart huts; then yellow flashes, then white spears. Automatic rifle fire, short and incredibly close.

“See?” Barney said. He was lying beside me. “We did find ’em.
We did.
”

“Surprised them,” I said. “Faked ’em right out of their shoes.”

“Incoming!”

Men were scrambling. Slow motion, then fast motion, and the whole village seemed to shake.

“Incoming!” It was Barney. He was peering at me, grinning. “Incoming!”

“Nice hollering.”

On the perimeter of the village, the company began returning fire, blindly, spraying the hedges with M-16 and M-70 and M-60 fire. No targets, nothing to aim at and kill. Aimlessly, just shooting to shoot. It had been going like this for weeks—snipers, quick little attacks, blind counter-fire. Days, days. Those were the days.

“Cease fire,” the lieutenants hollered.

“Cease fire,” the platoon sergeants hollered.

“Cease the fuckin’ fire,” shouted the squad leaders.

“That,” I told Barney, “is the chain of command.”

And Barney smiled. His face had the smooth complexion of a baby brother. Tickle him and he’d coo.

When it ended, he and I walked over to where the mortar rounds had come in. Soldiers from the third platoon were standing there in the wreckage of huts and torn-down trees. It was over. Things happened, things came to an end. There was no sense of developing drama. All that remained was debris, four smouldering holes in the dirt, a few fires that would burn themselves out. “Nobody hurt,” one of the men said. “Lucky thing. We was all sitting down—a little rest break, you know? Smokin’ and snoozin’. Lucky, lucky thing.
Lucky
. Anybody standing up when that shit hits is dead. I mean gone.” The soldier sat on his pack and opened a can of peaches. It was over. There was no fear left in him, or in any of us.

When the captain ran over to check on casualties, the same soldier repeated his story, making sure the captain understood the value of a good long rest break. Johansen smiled. What else was there to do? Smile, make a joke of it all. Blunder on. Captain Johansen told me to call battalion headquarters. “Just inform them that we’re heading off for our night position. Don’t mention this little firefight, okay? I don’t want to waste time messing with gunships or artillery—what’s the use?”

I made the call. Then we hefted our packs and guns, formed up into a loose column, and straggled out of the village.

It was only a two-hundred-meter march to the little wooded hill where we made our night position, but by the time the foxholes were dug and we’d eaten cold C rations, it had been dark for nearly an hour.

The day ended.

Now night came. Old rituals, old fears. Spooks and goblins. Sometimes at night there was the awful certainty that men would die at their foxholes or in their sleep, silently, not a peep, but this night everyone talked softly and bravely. No one doubted that we’d be hit, yet there was no real terror. We hadn’t lost a man that day, even after eight hours of sniping and harassment, and the enemy’s failure during the day made the dark hours easier. We simply waited. Taking turns at guard, careful not to light cigarettes, we waited until nearly daybreak. And then only a half-dozen mortar rounds came down. No casualties. We were charmed.

When it was light, a new day, Bates and Barney and I cooked C rations together. Same food, same smells. The heat was what woke us up. Then flies. Slowly, the camp came alive. The men stirred, lay on their backs, dreamed, talked in small groups. At that early hour no one kept guard: a glance out into the brush now and then, that was all. A cursory feign. It was like waking up in a cancer ward, no one ambitious to get on with the day, no one with obligations, no plans, nothing to hope for, no dreams for the daylight.

“Not a bad night, really,” Barney said. “I mean, I was looking for the whole fuckin’ Red Army to come thunking down on us. But zilch. A few measly mortar rounds.”

Bates shrugged. “Maybe they’re out of ammo.”

“You think so?”

“Could be,” Bates said. “A real possibility.”

Barney stared at him, thinking, then he smiled. The idea excited him.

“You really think so?” he said. “Out
completely
?”

“No question about it.” Bates put on a solemn face. He was a teaser and he loved going after Barney. “Way I figure it, pal, Uncle Charles shot his whole wad yesterday. Follow me? Boom, it’s all gone. So today’s
got
to be quiet. Simple logic.”

“Yeah,” Barney murmured. He kept wagging his head, stirring his ham and eggs.
“Yeah.
”

“We wore ’em out. A war of fucking attrition.”

Things were peaceful. There was only the sky and the heat and the coming day. Mornings were good.

We ate slowly. No reason to hurry, no reason to move. The day would be yesterday. Village would lead to village, and our feet would hurt, and we would do the things we did, and the day would end.

“Sleep okay?” Bates said.

“Until two hours ago. Something woke me up. Weird—sounded like somebody trying to kill me.”

“Yeah,” Barney said. “Sometimes I have bad dreams too.”

And we gathered up our gear, doused the fires, saddled up, and found our places in the single file line of march. We left the hill and moved down into the first village of the day.

Two
Pro Patria

      I
grew out of one war and into another. My father came from leaden ships of sea, from the Pacific theater; my mother was a WAVE. I was the offspring of the great campaign against the tyrants of the 1940s, one explosion in the Baby Boom, one of millions come to replace those who had just died. My bawling came with the first throaty note of a new army in spawning. I was bred with the haste and dispatch and careless muscle-flexing of a nation giving bridle to its own good fortune and success. I was fed by the spoils of 1945 victory.

I learned to read and write on the prairies of southern Minnesota.

Along the route used to settle South Dakota and the flatlands of Nebraska and northern Iowa, in the cold winters, I learned to use ice skates.

My teachers were brittle old ladies, classroom football coaches, flushed veterans of the war, pretty girls in sixth grade.

In patches of weed and clouds of imagination, I learned to play army games. Friends introduced me to the Army Surplus Store off main street. We bought dented relics of our fathers’ history, rusted canteens and olive-scented, scarred helmet liners. Then we were our fathers, taking on the Japs and Krauts along the shores of Lake Okabena, on the flat fairways of the golf course. I rubbed my fingers across my father’s war decorations, stole a tiny battle star off one of them, and carried it in my pocket.

Baseball was for the summertime, when school ended. My father loved baseball. I was holding a Louisville Slugger when I was six. I played a desperate shortstop for the Rural Electric Association Little League team; my father coached us, and he is still coaching, still able to tick off the starting line-up of the great Brooklyn Dodgers teams of the 1950s.

Sparklers and the forbidden cherry bomb were for the Fourth of July: a baseball game, a picnic, a day in the city park, listening to the high school band playing “Anchors Aweigh,” a speech, watching a parade of American Legionnaires. At night, fireworks erupted over the lake, reflections.

It had been Indian land. Ninety miles from Sioux City, sixty miles from Sioux Falls, eighty miles from Cherokee, forty miles from Spirit Lake and the site of a celebrated massacre. To the north was Pipestone and the annual Hiawatha Pageant. To the west was Luverne and Indian burial mounds.

Norwegians and Swedes and Germans had taken the plains from the Sioux. The settlers must have seen endless plains and eased their bones and said, “Here as well as anywhere, it’s all the same.”

The town became a place for wage earners. It is a place for wage earners today—not very spirited people, not very thoughtful people.

Among these people I learned about the Second World War, hearing it from men in front of the courthouse, from those who had fought it. The talk was tough. Nothing to do with causes or reason; the war was right, they muttered, and it had to be fought. The talk was about bellies filled with German lead, about the long hike from Normandy to Berlin, about close calls and about the origins of scars just visible on hairy arms. Growing up, I learned about another war, a peninsular war in Korea, a gray war fought by the town’s Lutherans and Baptists. I learned about that war when the town hero came home, riding in a convertible, sitting straight-backed and quiet, an ex-POW.

The town called itself Turkey Capital of the World. In September the governor and some congressmen came to town. People shut down their businesses and came in from their farms. Together we watched trombones and crepe-paper floats move down mainstreet. The bands and floats represented Sheldon, Tyler, Sibley, Jackson, and a dozen other neighboring towns.

Turkey Day climaxed when the farmers herded a billion strutting, stinking, beady-eyed birds down the center of town, past the old Gobbler Cafe, past Woolworth’s and the Ben Franklin store and the Standard Oil service station. Feathers and droppings and popcorn mixed together in tribute to the town and the prairie. We were young. We stood on the curb and blasted the animals with ammunition from our peashooters.

We listened to Nelson Rockefeller and Karl Rölvaag and the commander of the Minnesota VFW, trying to make sense out of their words, then we went for twenty-five-cent rides on the Octopus and Tilt-A-Whirl.

I couldn’t hit a baseball. Too small for football, but I stuck it out through junior high, hoping something would change. When nothing happened, I began to read. I read Plato and Erich Fromm, the Hardy boys and enough Aristotle to make me prefer Plato. The town’s library was quiet and not a very lively place—nothing like the football field on an October evening and not a very good substitute. I watched the athletes from the stands and cheered them at pep rallies, wishing I were with them. I went to homecoming dances, learned to drive an automobile, joined the debate team, took girls to drive-in theaters and afterward to the A & W root beer stand.

I took up an interest in politics. One evening I put on a suit and drove down to the League of Women Voters meeting, embarrassing myself and some candidates and most of the women voters by asking questions that had no answers.

I tried going to Democratic party meetings. I’d read it was the liberal party. But it was futile. I could not make out the difference between the people there and the people down the street boosting Nixon and Cabot Lodge. The essential thing about the prairie, I learned, was that one part of it is like any other part.

At night I sometimes walked about the town. “God is both transcendent and imminent. That’s Tillich’s position.” When I walked, I chose the darkest streets, away from the street lights. “But is there a God? I mean, is there a God like there’s a tree or an apple? Is God a being?” I usually ended up walking toward the lake. “God is Being-Itself.” The lake, Lake Okabena, reflected the town-itself, bouncing off a black-and-white pattern identical to the whole desolate prairie: flat, tepid, small, strangled by algae, shut in by middle-class houses, lassoed by a ring of doctors, lawyers, CPA’s, dentists, drugstore owners, and proprietors of department stores. “Being-Itself? Then is this town God? It exists, doesn’t it?” I walked past where the pretty girls lived, stopping long enough to look at their houses, all the lights off and the curtains drawn. “Jesus,” I muttered, “I hope not. Maybe I’m an atheist.”