Love is a Wounded Soldier (25 page)

“How about Harold?” I asked, looking at
Francis. He and Harold Meeker had been almost inseparable.

“He . . .” Francis began, but something
caught in his throat, and so he looked down at his boots and swallowed hard. I
looked at Honky-tonk, and he made a slashing gesture on his throat.

“Aw, shit!” I shook my head, genuinely
sorry. Harold was likable, and had the makings of a first-class infantryman.
“I’m sorry Francis. He was a hell of a soldier. Hell of a good man.” He nodded
grimly and turned his head to hide his glistening eyes.

My men crawled out of the hedgerow one by
one and began making their way toward Frankie’s limp body.

“Yeah, well, we got another one to carry
off,” I sighed, starting that way too.

“What the hell was Frankie thinking,
running out there like that?” Honky-tonk asked.

“He wasn’t. He just went plum loco. That
boy should have never been allowed into conflict,” I opined. We all flinched as
a shell went off in the distance.

“Poor Twitch never had the constitution for
this business,” Francis agreed. “I’ve seen him get a paper cut and just about
pass out. Just too damn excitable.”

The men forming a ring around Frankie each
took a step back as we approached, their faces plainly revealing the anger and
revulsion they felt.

“Why didn’t they shoot him a few more
times,” Johnny snapped sarcastically. “I mean, it oughta take more than 10 or
20 rounds to kill a 125-pound kid.” Their emotions were contagious. I felt the
same anger and disgust as I looked at the little private from New Jersey. I
didn’t even bother trying to count the bullet holes. He had been raked pretty
much from head to toe, but they had almost cut him in two just above the waist.
I could see his mutilated intestines floating in the bloody pool that had been
his abdomen. His punctured stomach and bowels made gurgling sounds as they
filled the air with the rank odor of their partially-digested contents. It was
vile.

I lit a cigarette to settle my queasy
stomach, or at least mask the putrid smell that saturated the air. Other men
followed suit. We stood around in silence, each man lost in his own thoughts
and reflections.

“Hankins, Borkowski, see if you can find a
stretcher,” I ordered finally. They nodded and headed over toward the ancient
stone house that served as our temporary aid station several hedgerows away. I
looked down at the bullet-riddled corpse in front of me and stifled a
despondent sigh.

“I’ll make sure we’re secure,” I said, making
a move toward the part of the hedgerow that enemy fire had erupted from a short
half hour before. Johnny and Charlie began tagging along.

“I won’t be long,” I said, wanting some
time to myself. They got the hint and fell back.

It took little time to locate the remains
of the enemy gunners. There was little doubt the first two men were dead. They
were in worse shape than Frankie. A third lay on his belly in the underbrush,
and didn’t appear to have suffered visible damage. I cautiously poked him in
the back with the end of my rifle barrel. He lay still. I flipped his body
over, and couldn’t have gotten more scared if he’d jumped up and yelled “Boo!”
His jaw and lower teeth were intact, but his brain oozed out of where the rest
of his face should have been situated.

“Serves you right,” I muttered. Then I
shuddered. I stood and stared at him for a moment, waiting to receive some
feeling of vindication. But it didn’t come. The only thing I felt was a growing
sense of sadness. I turned away and lit another cigarette with shaky hands.

Something made a sound in the brush. I
stopped stock-still, my cigarette clamped between my lips. I held my breath,
straining to hear over the blood now pounding in my ears. Surely I had heard
something. Again, I heard a sound. It sounded like a faint moaning. I tilted my
head and could hear a slight rustle in the brush to my left.

Lifting my rifle slowly in front of me, I
crept carefully in the direction of the sound, stopping intermittently to scan
my surroundings and listen for more audible clues. There was blood on the grass
here.
And there
. . .
And there
. . .
And there!
There he
lay! A wounded German soldier had crawled off behind some dead brush and
covered himself with some leafy sprigs in an effort to camouflage himself. He
would have pulled it off, too, had he been able to stifle his moaning.
Instinctively, I raised my rifle and trained my sights on his head.

“Nein! Schiess nicht!” He curled himself up
in the fetal position behind the inadequate protection of the shrubbery. I
hesitated. He looked a little older than me, the type of guy that might have a
wife and a few young children at home.

“Bitte, Kamerad, schiess nicht! Bitte?
Bitte?” he pleaded. It didn’t take a linguist to figure out he was begging for
his life. The brush partially obscured him, so I moved in an arc to my left, so
I was standing almost in front of his head. He raised his head to follow the
muzzle of my rifle, his eyes brimming with dread. It was obvious he suffered
from a degree of penitence felt only by those about to face retribution for
their sins. In his eyes, I stood before him as terrible as Almighty God. I felt
pity for him. I didn’t want to feel pity for him.

“You killed my buddy!” I yelled at him
suddenly, trying to make myself angry. He flinched, as though he thought he’d
been shot, and then looked up slowly, as if surprised when he realized he
hadn’t been. Nothing in my training had prepared me for this moment. I had
assumed it would be easy to kill the enemy. The enemy was evil. Captain Ross had
briefed us on the depravity of the Nazi soldier.

“The Hun is a force of evil,” he’d told us.
“He will use all and any means to carry out the wishes of his diabolical
leader, Adolf Hitler. He will fight you with no mercy, and no conscience. You
should combat him with the same ruthlessness with which he will attack you.
Killing him should give you a deep sense of satisfaction, because in doing so,
you have rid the world of a dangerous and depraved menace. He will bayonet a
baby for smiling at him, and think nothing more of it than you do swatting a
fly. Because the Kraut is not human. He is a savage and dangerous animal. A
goddamn animal!”

As I stared into his eyes, it seemed like
I’d seen them before. He had the look of the damned, and there was a familiarity
about the way he entreated me with his pathetic eyes. Suddenly, I knew. Captain
Ross had been right. He was an animal.

~~~

When I was 10 years old, there was a
half-grown, half-wild, chalk-colored mongrel that had made a habit of being a
nuisance around the farm at night. On more than one occasion, Ma and I had been
woken up by a ruckus in the hen house or the bellowing of cattle, and sure
enough, the same good-for-nothing mutt was always the culprit. He wasn’t big or
mean enough to do much damage, but he did manage to run the cows ragged and
kill the odd hen.

One morning, after his visits were becoming
more frequent, Ma came back from gathering the eggs.

“That confounded mongrel must have gotten
in the henhouse again!” she vented. “Seven eggs! Seven eggs when there should
be twice that! That dog has got the hens so spooked they can hardly crap, let
alone lay eggs!”
Such coarse language from Ma!
I wondered if she noticed
the horrified look on my face, but she was too preoccupied with ranting.

“I’d pay you a dollar if you got rid of
that blasted nuisance!” she told me.
A dollar? A dollar! Why if I had a
dollar, I’d more or less be set for life!

“I’ll get that scoundrel for you, Ma,” I
vowed, before she could see the rashness of her offer.

After that, I lay awake at night, plotting
his death and spending my dollar. I could already picture myself coolly
dispatching the furry menace with one expert shot from my .22 Winchester rifle.
My blood raced as I thought of the excitement of approaching my fallen nemesis.
Perhaps I’d cut off his tail or ear to prove to Ma that I indeed had slain the
evil one as I demanded my bounty money. Oh, it would be glorious!

He did return several nights shortly after
that, but the moonless summer night provided me with little opportunity to take
him down. After that, he left us alone for three nights, and I was beginning to
despair that he’d fallen prey to some other fortunate predator.

On the fourth night, I woke to the frenzied
low of cattle, and leapt out of bed and into a pair of overalls. I snatched my
loaded .22 from where it stood at attention against the wall beside my bedpost
and bounded out the door without a thought for footwear or need for additional
clothing.

Some pretty she-dog must have sidetracked
the mongrel, because he was late. The sun heralded its imminent arrival by
tossing bursts of magenta above the horizon.

I crept across the yard and squatted behind
the woodpile. The grass was cool and wet on the bare soles of my feet. The air
hung heavy with the promise of a hot, sticky day. I peered over the woodpile,
through a spider web sagging beneath droplets of dew.

It was him alright, a small dot in the
distance dancing around several larger ones in the clearing on the west side of
our pasture.

I climbed through the fence and began
bounding my way through the thin, grazed woods that bordered the clearing. If I
could only outflank him using the trees as cover, he would be mine. I stopped
and listened, my heart racing and lungs pumping like bellows.
A little
further.
I dashed another hundred yards, slaloming around tree trunks the
cattle had stripped of foliage. I hit the ground and crept toward the edge of
the opening, stopping behind a tree near the meadow’s perimeter.

There he was, within range, but it would
take a careful shot to kill him. I couldn’t risk hitting one of the cows. He
was teasing one of our milk cows, Ginny. He’d leap at her and bark, she’d wheel
at him with her horns, and he’d twirl her around in a circle, yipping with
glee. I needed to get him separated from the cows.

I rested my rifle against the mossy tree
trunk, chambered a round, and followed him with my sights.
No shot. No shot.
Finally, I lifted my head and yelled, “Hey!” My shout got lost in the brouhaha.

“Hey!” I shouted louder. He stopped and
looked toward me. My sights came to rest right between his eyes. He looked
quizzically, as though trying to determine exactly who or what had made the
sound. My finger tightened on the trigger, but I couldn’t shoot. Ginny’s
yearling calf was standing almost behind him, and I couldn’t risk a ricochet.
He looked back at the cows, then back toward me, and then, as if suddenly
realizing how late it was, began trotting away from the cows, up a small hill.
My sights followed him from left to right. Unsure of where to aim on a moving
target, I aimed in the general vicinity of his head and let fly. There was no
doubt I had connected. He fell to the ground with a yelp, and commenced
flopping around, all the while piercing the air with blood-curdling howls.
Their mournful pitch resonated the strings of anguish inside of me. The waves
of sound carried a current of pain to my soul. Now the mongrel didn't seem to
be that much different from my own hound, Charlie. It was more than I could
bear. I just wanted it to stop.

Blindly, I shot again. And again. And
again.

Just die! I thought to myself, and fired
another panicked shot in the general direction of the screaming lump of white
and pink fur. He managed to roll, thrash, and claw his way over the rise and
out of my sight. His cries subsided.

I sat there, trembling. Despite the
coolness of the morning, I was clammy with sweat. My 10-year-old heart was
about to explode. The sun peered sleepily over the eastern horizon, as though
inquiring what the hell the ruckus was about.

Finally, when I’d stopped shaking enough to
stand, I slowly began walking toward the place I’d last seen him. Dread encased
my bare feet in lead. I could barely keep my feet moving as I shuffled up the
hill. I didn’t want to see what was on the other side.

He wasn’t dead. None of the three or four
holes I’d punched in him proved to be lethal. I knew it could be hours before
he died. As I approached him, he tried to run, but didn’t even have the
strength to raise himself. He whimpered as I got near. His eyes had a look of
resignation, as though he were tied to a train track and could faintly hear the
whistle of the train. Each step that drew me nearer to him heightened the
terrified look in his eyes. I wondered if he could see the fear in mine.

He begged me. He implored me with his eyes.
And then, when I thought my soul couldn’t feel any more turmoil than it already
was, he tried to wag his tail. I cried. And it seemed he cried too. We both
cried, because we both knew what must be done.

I fished a shell out of my overall pocket,
slipped it into the breech of my .22, and slid the bolt into place. I pointed
it unsteadily between his defeated eyes, my own eyes salty artesian wells.
There was no way I could pull the trigger while he looked at me. I lowered my
rifle and wiped the sweat and tears and snot from my face. I positioned myself
directly behind him, in hopes he wouldn’t look at me then, but he turned his
head weakly to follow my every move. Finally, I picked up a small rock from the
ground and tossed it lightly over his head. It clattered to a rest several feet
in front of his nose. He turned his head forward to look, and before he could
look back at me, I had done what I had to do. I never did ask for my dollar.