Love is a Wounded Soldier (29 page)

“What happened?” I asked, without wanting
to know. I could tell there was a story that needed telling. Johnny just shook
his head, as though he didn’t even trust himself to start talking.

“Well, shit-for-brains doesn’t know what it
means when you tell him to fire only on your signal,” Dick started in hotly.

“Eddie?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he replied, as though I had just
asked the obvious.

“Anyway, he gets excited seeing Jerry
twitch a muscle four hundred yards away, and of course, has to take a couple
potshots at him. Well, some other Kraut hears the shots and tosses a potato
masher in the window. It lands over there, not close enough to anyone to throw
it back, so Charlie, nice guy that he is, throws himself on top of it. If he’d
been thinking he would have pushed Eddie down on it,” he opined hotly, fumbling
for a cigarette to calm himself down. I shook my head. Rage seethed in my
chest. I felt my nostrils flare.

“Looks like we’re a little late,” Doc
Clayton said wearily, looking at us from the doorway.

“Oh, dang,” Eddie said blandly, peering
over his shoulder at Charlie. Every man in the room looked at Eddie as though
eager to slit his throat.

“Oh, dang? Oh, dang?! Is that all you have
to say, Private Gunn?” I snarled at him, rising to my feet. Doc Clayton must
have remembered urgent business elsewhere, because he made himself scarce in a
hurry.

I shoved my nose in Eddie’s face and let
loose. “Let me tell you what, you stupid cunt! The next time you flagrantly
disregard one of my orders, there will be hell to pay, and you don’t even want
to know what I’ll do to you if another one of my men gets so much as a goddamn
scratch because of you! Do you understand?”

“Yes, Sergeant Mattox.” Eddie wiped my spit
off his face, but unfortunately, the infuriating smirk he wore didn’t come off
with it.

“Now get the fuck out of my sight before I
lose my temper!” I screamed, pointing to the door with a thrust of my chin.

Eddie turned and strolled off. I sat down
on a three-legged chair and put my head in my hands.

“What do you do with that?” I asked the
floor. The room was filled with an uneasy silence. I lifted my head, plucked
the lit cigarette from between Dick’s fingers, took a drag, and handed it back.

“It’s like talking to a fucking mannequin,”
I vented equal parts of smoke and rage. “All you get is a dumb smile and no
indication the thing understood a goddamn word.”

I looked at the faces of the men and could
see my tirade was just making them more angry and demoralized, so I stopped.
“Oh, well, life goes on,” I tried to smile.

“Yeah, for another day or two, anyway,”
Dick replied, with no attempt at jocularity.

“Don’t let this get you down,” I told him.
“If nothing else, be happy that today, at least, it was the other guy.”

“Yeah, well, sooner or later, we’ll all end
up being the other guy,” Johnny said darkly.

“Take no thought for tomorrow, for
sufficient to the day is the evil thereof,” I quoted.

“That’s easy preaching,” Johnny allowed a wry
smile.

I rose and we took care of our dead
comrade. In the days after that incident, I could sense the distrust grow
between the rest of the platoon and Eddie. It was an acid that I knew would
dissolve the glue that bonded man to man. I stewed about it for days. Then one
day, things just—sort of took care of themselves.

~~~

I put my finger to my lips and listened.
Eddie, Johnny, Dick, Leroy, and two new kids named Malone and Haney looked at
me questioningly. They nodded when they felt the floor shudder. A Tiger prowled
the streets of Aachen. The sixty-ton tank rumbled to and fro the narrow streets
like the devil himself, seeking whom it might devour.

We were using the shelter of a stone house
to launch an attack on a machinegun located in an upstairs window across the
street. A short way down the street, a sniper watched the street from a church
belfry, ready to put a plug of lead in anyone who dared try to assault the
house which housed the machinegun. We could handle the machinegun, and we could
handle the sniper, but we infantrymen had no answer for the squeaky-tracked
behemoth that fired 88 mm missiles through windows and doorways.

The tank passed our house, rattling the
windows. It stopped. We could see its menacing silhouette through the drawn
curtains in what had once been an elegant living room. We looked at each other
nervously. The silence was eerie. Finally, it rumbled on and out of earshot.

“Phew, that was close!” Malone exclaimed,
wiping the sweat off his forehead with a shaky hand.

Ker-boom!
The
Tiger roared from down the street. We all jumped. Someone else was getting the
business.

“We’re going to stay put until that tank
has been removed,” I said. “I want everyone to remain in here while I radio
Battalion Antitank Company to get over here and take it out. Stay away from the
windows. Avoid any movement. We need to keep our presence here unknown until
that Tiger has been taken care of. Understood?”

“Yes, Sergeant,” the men responded in
unison. I made an effort to make eye contact with Eddie. He acknowledged my
words with a nod.

“Good,” I said, leaving the room.

I snuck out the back door and crawled along
the back of the house, using every fence and shrub as protection. The backpack
radio had been forgotten two doors down, where we’d spent the night. I quickly
found it, delivered my message, and received confirmation that BAC was on its
way with a 105 mm howitzer. Then, I scuttled my way back, relieved when I
reached the house undetected.

As I opened the back door slowly, I could
hear the sound of the Tiger once again. I closed the door quietly, pushing
gently on it with my shoulder until it clicked. I locked it carefully behind
me, and began walking toward the living room on tiptoes, listening to the
approaching tank. Another sound made me stop. I heard light footfalls on the
stairway. I held my breath. They were becoming more faint. Someone was walking
up the stairs.

I drew my .45 and crept up the steps. The
throaty growl of the tank masked the sound of creaky steps. Reaching the top, I
walked stealthily to the first bedroom and poked my pistol and one eye around
the edge of the doorway. Empty. I snuck to the next room. Empty. Cautiously, I
tiptoed to the next room. This one was not empty. But instead of the German
intruder I feared I’d find, it was Eddie. My blood pressure shot up so quickly
it was a wonder I didn’t start bleeding from the eyes. I was incensed that once
again, Eddie had blatantly disobeyed a direct order.

He moved forward toward the open window
like a cat stalking its prey. The breeze toyed with the curtains. A loose screw
vibrated on the wooden floor as the tank shook the place with sound and weight.
I opened my mouth to call out to Eddie. He lifted his rifle slowly as he inched
forward. He was about to take on an elephant with a pea shooter! We were all
doomed if he roused the ire of the metal beast!

Bam!

Eddie slumped to the floor like a rag doll.
His helmet flew off. It bounced several feet and rocked crazily on its bowl
before it settled. Blood poured from a hole in the back of his head, just below
where his helmet had sat. A thin wisp of smoke floated like a spirit from the
barrel of my .45.

The Tiger moved on. I dropped my pistol
into its holster and again used the waning sound of the tank to cover my
footsteps as I carefully crept down the stairs.

“Where’s Eddie?” I asked quietly from the
doorway of the living room. The men started.

“He said he was going to check on you, Sergeant,”
Haney informed me.

“We tried telling him to stay, but you know
Eddie,” Dick shook his head. I nodded. The men looked at me as though expecting
me to erupt in anger, but I remained calm.

“I got through to Battalion Antitank
Command,” I said. “Hopefully within the hour we can move.” The men nodded, but
still studied me quizzically.

“And Eddie?” Malone inquired.

“I didn’t see him outside, so I’m guessing
he’s still in the house,” I shrugged.

“We think we may have heard him upstairs,”
Haney told me earnestly. “It sounded like he may have fired a shot.”

“He’s a grown man, Haney, I’m sure he can
look after himself,” I stalled. Seeing the confusion in the rookie’s eyes, I
said, “Go ahead and try to find him, just don’t leave the house and don’t do
anything stupid. And if you do find him, tell him he’d better have a fucking
good story as to why he fucked off.” I sank down in a plush green arm chair and
lit a cigarette.

“And take Malone with you,” I leaned my
head back and squinted at him through a cloud of smoke.

“Ah, this is living,” I groaned, as the
armchair attempted to swallow me. I tried not to think about Eddie or the job
ahead of us, and just relax for a few moments. I could hear low voices
jabbering excitedly upstairs.

“Wonder what’s going on up there?” Leroy
mused, cocking his head to look up at the ceiling, and then back at me as
though not entirely convinced that I didn’t know.

“Lord knows,” I said drowsily, closing my
eyes. I heard heavy footsteps clomping down the steps.

A minute later, Malone and Haney appeared
in the doorway with the body of Eddie Gunn.

“He’s dead!” an excited Haney informed us
breathlessly. Everyone looked calmly toward them for a moment.

“You think?” Dick questioned dryly. His
sarcasm was lost on Haney.

“Oh, yeah, look at his eye!” Haney nodded
animatedly, pointing at Eddie’s left eye, which hung out of its socket,
dangling out onto his cheek. Malone looked like he was about to be ill.

“The lad has a point, Sarge,” Johnny said
dryly.

“Yes, I do believe that Eddie was not in
the habit of wearing his left eye outside the body,” Leroy played along
morbidly. Dick knelt down and put his ear to Eddie’s chest.

“He appears to be deceased, sir,” Dick
agreed solemnly, lifting his head back up and getting to his feet. All eyes
waited for my reaction.

“Oh, dang,” I said blandly.

~~~

No one ever asked me if I’d shot Eddie
Gunn. Haney and Malone were too green to even suspect me, even though the
circumstances of Eddie’s death were extremely suspicious. As for the other men,
none of them ever mentioned it, except occasionally someone would make a veiled
comment about Eddie and the “sniper” that killed him.

Dick, who had a habit of saddling up a pet
saying and riding it until its legs fell off, spent several weeks replying,
“Oh, dang” to almost everything anyone said to him. It tickled him every time
he said it, and when I was around, he’d laugh at me with knowing eyes. A dark
sense of humor was all that kept some men’s minds on the rails.

I was scared for the first few days after.
Not scared my men would rat me out for killing Eddie; I trusted them, and they
knew I’d done what I did for their safety. Rather, I was afraid Eddie’s face
would haunt me for the rest of my life. But it didn’t, partly, I guess, because
I felt justified, like I’d done the right thing, but also because deciding who
to sacrifice and who to spare was part of my job. No, I didn’t always know who
was going to make it and who wasn’t, but there were many times I’d had to make
tough decisions about who to offer to the gods of war, and who to spare. There
were times I’d sent a terrified, wide-eyed greenhorn into a hornet’s nest
instead of risking losing one of my few precious veterans. Those are the faces
that haunt me in my sleep.

Table of Contents

TEN

NOT JOHNNY!

Click.

The lead weights that pulled down my
eyelids dropped, and my eyes flew open. I lay on a heap of straw in the
basement of a German row house, waiting for slumber to suffocate the
ghastliness of the day’s events. I held my breath and heard rapid, ragged
breathing.

“Johnny,” I said sternly, “put it down.”

For my friend, Johnny Snarr, there was no
optimism. Each day his eyes became duller, his despondency more perceptible,
his behavior more erratic. And now the click of a .45 in the darkness betrayed
his consideration of a final solution.

“We’ve come too far to be giving up now,
Johnny,” I addressed the blackness. “Now’s no time to be taking the easy way
out. We depend on you. I depend on you. Maggie and that little girl of yours
are depending on you to come back home safely. That little curly-head can’t
wait to see the daddy she’s heard about, but can’t remember. It wouldn’t be
fair to her.” I stopped, praying that my only reply wouldn’t be the sharp
report of a pistol.

“If you’re going to pull that trigger,
Johnny, you’d better first come over and put a bullet through my heart, because
that’s exactly what you’d be doing. You’re my brother, Johnny. The only brother
I’ve ever known.” My own candid words clogged my throat. War puts a hair
trigger on a man’s emotions.