Love is a Wounded Soldier (24 page)

“Nice work!” I slapped him on the back. He
acknowledged me with a grim nod.

“Hold your fire,” I told the men. My M1
ready, I tip-toed toward the entrance of the pillbox, as though somehow I might
be heard. Two more unarmed Germans stumbled out. I was wound so tight, it was
all I could do to hold off the trigger.

“Get down, get down, get down!” I screamed
at them, jabbing in a downward motion with my bayonet. They fell to their
knees, fingers interlaced behind their heads.

“Menkel!” I called for one of the men who’d
followed me up.

“Yes, Staff Sergeant?”

“You speak German, don’t you?” I asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Ask these bastards where the mines are,” I
ordered. Menkel proceeded to interrogate the men. They both refused to
volunteer any information.

“Where are the goddamn mines, shit head?” I
knocked one of the soldier’s helmets off with the tip of my bayonet. He gave me
a disdainful look, and replied with a taunting smirk.

“He says you’ll know when you step on them,
sir,” Menkel interpreted. My blood boiled.

“Tell him if he doesn’t show me where the
mines are, I’ll run this through his fucking throat!” I raged, my bayonet
wavering in front of his face. Menkel’s delivery of my message was met without
any indication of fear by the German. There was a vapid look in his eyes. It
was the look of a man who had teetered at the brink of death a thousand times.
He would not fight it. He would meet death with a cold indifference. He spat
defiantly at my feet.

As angry as I still was, I wished I could
reach out and snatch back my words. I felt like a parent who, in a hot-headed
moment, has handed down the harshest possible sentence to an errant child. And
like that parent, upon a moment of reflection, I too, was consumed with regret
for my promise. I wished I’d told him he’d get sent to his room with no supper
if he didn’t tell me where the mines were. Oh, if I’d only said he’d be
grounded for a week! But there was no time for regrets. No time for hesitation.
My men looked to me for leadership. Any indication of weakness, indecision, or
lack of follow-through would erode their confidence in me. And so I followed
through.

I remember only parts of the rest of D-Day.
Fractured memories like shards of shrapnel forever embedded in my psyche. Most
of the things I remember, I wish I could exchange for the pieces of life I’ve
forgotten. I remember the tip of my bayonet planted at the base of his neck,
just above the top button of his uniform. I remember the feel of the blade
sliding smoothly. The first bright red jet of blood against the white of his
neck. I remember how my thrust slowed just slightly as my bayonet ground
through his spine and split his vertebrae, and then how easily it slid up to
the hilt. How I struggled to pull it back out. I remember seeing his last
exhalation bubble up through the ragged hole in his throat. His lungs gasping
frantically for oxygen. The way his eyes rolled back in his head when he
breathed in only his own blood. Fumbling for my .45, putting a bullet in his
forehead, and putting me out of my misery. I remember the mixture of awe and
revulsion in the eyes of my comrades. I remember feeling like I’d just been run
through myself.

We did make it to the top of the hill.
Waves of boats continued to drop off more men, each boat facing less resistance
than the one before it, until the German opposition was muted.

We expected a counterattack within the next
day, so I got the men to take turns going back down to the beach in pairs to
scrounge for supplies, ammunition, and weapons to bolster our dwindling
reserves. I took Johnny with me when I went.

As we carefully picked our way down the
bluff, I could smell the faint stench of death. The sky and water were gray, as
though mourning the day’s bloodshed with us. The tide carried in bodies and
boats—and bits of both—on foamy crests, tinged pink with blood. It seemed we’d made
the Channel ill with our bloody invasion. The sea spewed the bodies of my
comrades onto the shore with the fishes as though purging itself with violent
retching. Bodies bobbed in the surf. Fresh, limp bodies, bloated bodies turned
deep purple, and bodies that were nothing more than bones wrapped in stringy
heaps of mangled flesh. Flames from a burning wreck licked the somber sky as we
picked through the remains of men to find useful items.

“What a waste!” Johnny murmured, kneeling
beside the charred body of a man I wasn’t even sure if I knew. His uniform had
been burned right off of him. Johnny shook his head and looked down the crimson
beach as though calculating the years of life that had seeped into the sand. He
got up, and we continued walking.

“What a waste,” he repeated, looking down
at a young man, maybe 18 years old if given the benefit of the doubt. He looked
serene and unblemished, as though he could have been lying in a coffin at a
funeral parlor.

“Wonder what killed him?” I mused. Johnny
knelt again and pushed the thin body over on its side. Blood trickled out of a
small hole in the back of his head.

“One little piece of shrapnel!” he said
angrily. “One little piece the size of your goddamn fingernail, and it’s over!”
He stood up.

“How the hell are we supposed to make it
out of here alive, Mattox? What are the odds? How many hundreds more battles
are ahead? We don’t have a chance. Not a Popsicle’s chance in fuckin’ hell!”
Anger, fear, and despair colored his words. I fought those same monsters. But I
wasn’t allowed to show it.

“Johnny,” I said, almost sternly. “It’s not
your job to think about what’s ahead, behind the next bush, or around the next
bend. It’s your job to do what you’re told. You do what’s right here,” I told
him, placing my open palm in front of my nose. “You kill the German in front of
you. You follow the orders given you, and let God worry about whether you have
a chance or not.” I softened my voice. I knew some food and sleep would go a
long way in improving his outlook.

“And as for this boy,” I continued, “this
boy did what he was told to do, and he was successful.”

“Successful?” Johnny repeated doubtfully. I
bent over stiffly and pulled a bandolier of bullets and some hand grenades off
the young man’s body.

“He got these to the beach, didn’t he?” I
tossed Johnny the bandolier. “Now go avenge his blood.”

Table of Contents

EIGHT

A GODDAMN ANIMAL

We established a
perimeter of defense and dug foxholes in the shale before nightfall. Exhaustion
overcame us all, so we determined the shallow foxholes we’d dug to be adequate
for the night. I collapsed into a slit trench around midnight. The unceasing
throbbing in my leg was surpassed only by the ache I felt in the core of my
soul. I waited for sleep to visit, but the faces of the men I’d killed and seen
killed that day lingered about me and frightened it away. Frankie De Luca could
be heard crying over in a different foxhole. No one told him to shut up. Some
of us just wished we could cry, too.

When sleep finally came, it hit me over the
head with a lead pipe. I slept like a dead man.

When the morning roused us with a
half-hearted attempt at sunshine, it brought with it a renewed sense of life.
We had been visitors to hell, and, at least for the time being, were alive to
tell about it. And nothing made me more aware of my aliveness than the pain in
my leg as I attempted to stand up. My leg had stiffened into a hickory post
overnight. I felt like screaming, but instead, cursed through clenched teeth.

My tortured exclamation caused Jedidiah
Hankins and Dick Johnson, who were cautiously stretching as they stood in their
foxhole, to turn and stare at me.

“Would you help me up instead of standing
there like a couple of rubbernecking geese?” I snapped. They sheepishly hurried
over. I wrapped my arms around their necks, and they brought me to my feet.

“Son-of-a-fucking-bitch!” I screamed. The
pain shot up and down my leg like hot needles as I tried to put weight on it. I
clung to their necks.

“You’re chokin’ me, man!” Jedidiah’s words
barely squeezed through his strangulated throat.

“Sit me down!” I gasped, almost passing out
with pain. They carefully backed me up so I could sit on the brim of the
foxhole. I lay back, legs hanging in the foxhole, upper body resting on level
ground.

“Aaargh!” I writhed in pain.

“For Chrissakes, some of us are trying to
sleep over here!” A groggy Corporal Reid lobbed a verbal grenade over the edge
of his foxhole. I hurled it right back.

“Shut your fucking puke hole, Charlie!
Shouldn’t you already be up and hurling projectile vomit at Jerry for a
change?” I made light of his relentless vomiting the previous day. He grinned
and yawned as several of the fellows enjoyed a chuckle at his expense. I
managed to laugh too, despite my pain, and attempted to collect enough
willpower to try standing again.

“Would this be of any help, Staff Sergeant?”
It was Private Rudd, holding a crooked stick he’d found in a nearby copse of
trees.

“Private, you are a goddamn genius!” I
struggled to my feet and tested my new walking stick.

“Corporal,” I ordered Charlie, “see to it
that this man is rewarded. I want you to give him a three-day pass, a Medal of
Honor, and an all-inclusive date with Betty Grable,” I joked.

“Yes, sir!” Charlie saluted mockingly. The
perplexed look on Rudd’s face fell away as we shared a round of laughter. I
felt my pain ease slightly with each chuckle.

“Let’s get moving.” I slapped him on the
shoulder and followed my own order.

~~~

“Stay down!” I whispered as Frankie De Luca
raised his head slightly. We were pinned down by machinegun fire near
Vierville, in the one of the hedgerows that diced the Normandy countryside into
one acre plots.

“I need to see!” his lips quivered with
fear.

“Stay down, Frankie!” I spat through my
teeth. All around us bullets whined through leaves, smacked through tree
trunks, and burrowed into the ridge of rich topsoil that had accumulated in the
hedgerows over hundreds of years.

Frankie lay on the ground, tears streaming
down his face. “No! No! No!” he cried, as though someone were beating him. At
first I thought he’d been hit.

“Where are you?” he moaned loudly. “Where
are you, you goddamn Nazi sonsabitches?” He was hysterical. His porcelain mind
had cracked on D-Day, and now on D-Day +3, the incoming fire had shaken it to
shards. Johnny, who lay on his belly on the other side of Frankie, made a move
to quiet the frazzled private, but Frankie leapt up before Johnny could attempt
to pacify him. He exploded through the scant yards of brush that separated us
from the open field.

We watched, thunderstruck, as he charged
wordlessly toward the sound of gunfire across the field. He pulled the trigger
of his M1 as fast as he could as he heedlessly galloped toward certain death. I
couldn’t believe what was happening. Apparently the Germans couldn’t either,
because he made it about 75 yards before they even started shooting at him. A
bullet knocked his helmet off, but he kept running wildly, head back, gasping
for air. A hurricane of gunfire rained down on him, but he ran on, as though
against a gale force wind. Each step became progressively slower and more
labored, as if he were running up a steep incline. Finally, he reached a
standstill, dropped his rifle, and extended his arms as though offering himself
up for crucifixion. He leaned forward on the gust of lead, before it threw him
back several steps. He tottered, arms flailing, as though uncertain which way
to fall, and toppled over on his back.

The guns then turned their attention toward
us, now having a much better idea of exactly where we were hiding. We flattened
our bodies against the ground. The chatter of enemy fire was met with back-talk
from some friendlies that, unbeknownst to us, were hunkered down to the right
of us, to the south-west. They unleashed a mortar round. The German position
fell silent, but they fired another one for good measure.

“Give me some cover fire,” I told the men,
after we’d waited a few minutes without being shot at. Wanting to determine if
the German gunners were dead or just playing possum, I hobbled diagonally
toward the other friendly position as the men released spurts of gunfire toward
the knocked out nest. I didn’t draw any enemy fire, so they stopped, and I
signaled that all was clear.

A few familiar faces emerged from the
hedgerow in front of me, along with a couple I didn’t recognize. Capriotti,
Honky-tonk, and Crazy Eddie Gunn grinned at me as they approached.

“Sarge, is that you?” Crazy Eddie asked.
“Jesus Christ, I thought you were fuckin’ Jesse Owens running across the
field!”

“There’s some ugly faces I haven’t missed!”
I kidded back, before becoming serious.

“Everybody alright?” I asked them. “Where’s
Lt. Callahan?”

“He got taken out by a sniper this
morning,” Francis informed me.

“Dead?”

“He wasn’t dead when they took him off, but
next thing to it. Took a few rounds in the chest. If he makes it it’ll be a
hell of a long haul.”