What It Takes (21 page)

Nor were “sobered” or “reflective” words that leapt to Bar’s mind when she remembered George at that time. The image she recalled was from their honeymoon, when she and George strolled the promenades, amid the elderly retirees who wintered at that Sea Island resort. All at once, George would scream “AIR RAID! AIR RAID!” and dive into the shrubs, while Bar stood alone and blushing on the path, prey to the pitying glances of the geezers who clucked about “that poor shell-shocked young man.”

But there was, once, a time when he talked about the war, at night, at home, to one friend, between campaigns, when he didn’t have to cover any bases at all.

“You know,” he said, “it was the first time in my life I was ever scared.

“And then, when they came and pulled me out ...” (Him, Dottie Bush’s son, out of a million miles of empty ocean!)

“Well ...” Bush trailed off, pleasantly, just shaking his head.

B
OB DOLE DIDN’T WANT
to go to war. He was doing what he wanted, at KU, in the Kappa Sig house, doing what he never had time to do before: fooling around.

He was just ornery enough to be a good pledge. There was a pledge brother with a motorcycle, a big old Harley, weighed about a
ton
. Bob and some of the others hauled that bike up to a third-floor bedroom, then wouldn’t help the fellow bring it down. That sealed Bob’s fame. He even sailed through the hazing. Hell Week, the “actives” made freshmen wear burlap underwear to class. Bob laughed that off. The older guys got staves from a barrel factory, to whack the pledges into line. Bob said, “I’ve heard so much about those boards, I better find out how bad it’s gonna be.” So he made one of the actives haul off and whack him—hard as he could. Pretty near drove him through the wall. Bob said, “Well, that wasn’t so bad.” That was the last time anybody hit him.

He was going out for football, basketball, and track, so he kept up his training. He asked a friend coming from Russell to bring his concrete weights in her car. And he kept up his running, every day, before the others were awake. He was waiting tables in the house to pay his dues, and he had a milk route, dawn Saturdays, that earned him pocket money. A Big Man on Campus, like Bob Dole intended to be, had to have money to spend. ... Grace McCandless was the most beautiful girl on campus, and Bob Dole, freshman, invited her home for Christmas. (Bina was so excited, she baked twice as many cookies.) Before he left in December, Bob was elected vice president of Kappa Sigma. In his first term! But with all the new things he was trying that year, something had to slip: his grade point slid below the gentleman’s C, and he couldn’t make initiation. He was still a pledge in December, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and Bob Dole’s bright new world started to change.

He hung on at KU as long as he could. Heck, people said the war might be over before they got to him. He ran track that spring, finished the school year and started another. He played another season of football, then basketball, and more than a year after Pearl Harbor, Bob was still at school. But it got to be obvious that every man was going. Pretty soon his draft board would turn up his number—they were already coming for Kenny, back in Russell—so Bob looked to his chances, and signed up for the Army Enlisted Reserve Corps. That way, at least he’d get to finish the term.

What did he know about the war in Europe? KU, in Lawrence, was the farthest east he’d ever been. When the Army called him in ’43, and sent him off to basic training, they gave him his first plane ride. Heck, his first bus ride! Turned out, Bob and Kenny ended up in basic at the same time, the summer of ’43, at Camp Barkley, near Abilene, Texas. So Bina bought herself a train ticket, and showed up at the base, blew past the sentry: What was he going to do, shoot her? Bina marched down the dusty main street of camp, looking for her boys. The MPs tried to talk her into leaving, but she’d have none of it. “I’ve got two boys here and I’ve come to visit.” They had to call the camp commandant to deal with her. “Ma’am, you cannot go walking around here. If you’ll just wait, we’ll get your boys for you.”

But soon, they were far out of her reach. Kenny was shipped to the Pacific. Bob signed up for Army Engineering School, in the strange new world of Brooklyn, New York. After that, he was transferred to Camp Polk, Louisiana, then to Camp Breckenridge, in Kentucky, for antitank gunnery. By the spring of 1944, he’d made corporal and applied for officer training. The news from Europe was better and better: the U.S. was marching up the boot of Italy, Mussolini was out of power. As Bob Dole reported to Fort Benning, Georgia, for his three-month Officer Candidate School, the Allies were fighting their way off the beaches in Normandy. By the time he got his lieutenancy, Paris was free, the Germans were pulling back. ... Who could tell if he’d get there in time to fire a shot?

There was time. The invasions of Europe had taken a fearful toll among the junior officers who led platoons. By December 1944, just as George Bush was steaming home across the Pacific, Bob Dole was headed east, across the Atlantic. It was just before Christmas when he pitched up outside Rome, where the Army maintained a replacement camp, from which to deal out officers to plug the gaps in its ranks.

The first thing everyone noticed about Bob Dole was his strength. He was six-foot-two, a hundred ninety-four pounds. Then, too, he always wore a tank jacket that gave his upper body more bulk. The guy was big as a house. In fact, his body almost kept him out of the fighting. In Rome, he ran into Dean Nesmith, the trainer for Phog Allen’s KU teams. Nesmith was a taskmaster, an ex-football hero with a prognathous jaw, and no tolerance for whiners or weaklings. Now he was in the Army’s Special Services unit: sports and games for the guys behind the lines. He knew Dole, liked him: Bob was a kid who’d never quit. So he tried to get Dole into his outfit, as one of the trainers, a coach for the troops.

But too late: the Army had milled out orders for Dole to fill a slot with the Eighty-fifth Mountain Regiment, Third Battalion. The mountain troops were fighting their way up the spine of Italy, in a drive to the broad Po Valley, and beyond, to the Alps, to cut off the Germans before they could fall back to reinforce the Reich. At least, that was the plan: like most things in Italy, nothing went according to plan. The whole Italian invasion was a sop to Stalin, who demanded a second front in 1943. The U.S. went along, but insisted that no men or matériel be diverted from the next year’s grand D-Day plunge. Meanwhile, Hitler annexed Italy and ordered his generals there to fight to the last drop of blood. The result was the war’s most vicious sideshow: a meat grinder of a year and a half, where America lost tens of thousands of men, chewing north at less than a mile a day, in a campaign that history would little remark. Among the original 200 men of the company to which Dole was assigned, there were 183 casualties in four months after they debarked in Naples. When Dole got his orders, in February ’45, the battalion had just fought its first major engagement: a night assault on Mt. Belvedere; in less than twenty-four hours, a company commander and half the lieutenants were gone.

Of course, Dole didn’t know all that. In Uncle Sam’s infantry, you were lucky to know what was going on a hundred yards to your right or left. But he knew, somehow, it was bad business up there: he told Dean Nesmith he didn’t want to go. He sensed there was a bullet waiting for him in those hills. Nesmith told him to pack his kit. There was nothing more to be said.

That was the other thing they noticed about Dole, when he got to the mountains and took over Second Platoon: the way he held himself so quiet, like he’d stepped into someone else’s war, and didn’t want to intrude. He wasn’t like some of those ninety-day wonders, graduates of the Benning School for Boys, who thought they owned the world because they got a strip of brass on their collars. Dole knew what it meant to be a lieutenant of infantry: he was fodder, the guy out front, the guy with the binoculars and map case, whom the Jerries tried to shoot first because it would disrupt the chain of command. German snipers went for the officers and radio men: if they got them, the unit was cut off, disorganized, without eyes and ears. ... Of course, every man in the unit knew that: Dole could see the way they looked him over—coolly, like they didn’t want to invest too much, he might not be around for long. “I’m Lieutenant Dole,” he’d say, introducing himself. “I’m going to be leading the platoon. ...” If they didn’t say anything, he’d add: “Dole. Like the pineapple juice.”

A sergeant, Frank Carafa, was in charge of the platoon when Dole arrived. (Their lieutenant had moved up when the company commander was killed on Mt. Belvedere.) Carafa was small, quick, dark-eyed, a veteran; he’d been in the Army before the war, fought in the Pacific before he joined the mountain troops. Dole asked him how long he’d been running the platoon. Carafa looked him over: the wide boyish eyes under his helmet (guy was so green, he still wore his helmet!), the big tank jacket with pockets everywhere, the pants wrapped tight around his legs and tucked neatly into the top of his boots, the clean kit on the ground beside him ... straight off the boat.

“Since Belvedere,” he said.

“All right, soldier. There won’t be any changes,” Dole said. “We’ll run it like you’ve been running it, until we get the knack of it.”

Carafa nodded, and his eyes met Dole’s for a moment.

He was scared twenty-four hours a day. Hell, everybody was. The Germans were giving ground, hill by hill, and when the Americans fought their way onto the next peak, the Jerries knew every inch of that position. They knew where the cover was: they could zero in their artillery, the .88s—and they were good. Carafa used to say they could hit a fly in the tail, while it flew. “Mail’ll be in about five,” the men would remind each other grimly. That meant artillery rounds, day after day, dawn and dusk, sometimes all night in the dark. So they dug in—foxholes, twenty-four hours a day, two men on their stomachs in the cold stony ground, one staring off at the facing hillside, watching the Germans through a twenty-power scope (sometimes, they were so close, you could spot their snipers from a puff of rifle smoke), the other trying to get his two hours’ sleep, until it was his turn to wake and watch. Food came from cans in their kits: spaghetti and meatballs, or beef stew; you didn’t dare make a fire to heat it.

There were daily rumors of a breakout, the big push that would carry them over the ridges and into the Po Valley. It was coming, and soon. Everybody knew it. In fact, the brass had the plans drawn up, the race for the bridges over the Po, and then for the Alps, to cut off the Germans. The generals called it Operation Craftsman; but no one on the line knew the code name. Bellied to the stones in a shell hole, they worried about the guys in the next hole, six feet away. Were they still there? ... Were there Jerries out front? ... The goddam fog was the worst. You didn’t know who was around you.

It was scariest for the replacements, guys who never bargained for infantry. Most were “Triple-A,” antiaircraft artillerymen who’d been sitting in Rome. But the Luftwaffe was finished now, so they handed these poor bastards a rifle and a shovel, and stuck ’em in foxholes. One guy they stuck in Dole’s platoon was mental with the fear. Dev Jennings, one of the sergeants, went to the company command post to tell ’em they better have a look at the guy. “He’s just not gonna be with us.” But just as Jennings brought the exec to the guy’s foxhole, they heard a shot—M-I, an American—and they found the kid standing in a corner, where he’d braced against the sides of the hole to keep still, while he fired a bullet from his rifle through his left foot. He was still holding his M-I in position, with a blank stare on his face. They shipped him off to the aid station, wrote it up: gunshot, self-inflicted. What else could they do?

They were supposed to start the breakout April 12, with Dole’s company on the left flank, to take a rocky, brown, flattop hill, Number 913 on the maps, to clear the way for the drive to the Po. Dole got his orders as he always did, face-to-face, a visit from the company commander. There were no ready rooms for the grunts, no meetings called on that front. Why get a half-dozen officers together, where one mortar shell could take them out?

Dole’s platoon, about forty men, was supposed to stay on the left, moving down their slope and then across a thousand yards of shallow valley, over a short stone fence, and up the slope of Hill 913. Everybody knew the Jerries were dug in all over that hill: pillboxes with tunnels between them. The Jerries knew the ground like they’d farmed it for forty years. They knew where a squad leader in the field would eye a spot of welcome cover: that’s where they’d strew their mines and booby traps, or zero in their .81 mortars, ahead of time. It was Dole’s job to keep his guys out of those spots, to belly through that field, dodging everything the Krauts could throw, to bring his guys to the top of that hill, or as many guys as he had left: that was the awful calculus behind the brave word “breakout.” How much ground did he have to take? How many of his guys would get the mattress-cover on the way?

They were Dole’s guys now. A month is a long time in foxholes under fire. His tank jacket didn’t look so new. Now he kept extra clips of ammo taped together, like the vets, to give him forty-five quick rounds. He knew enough to keep a few grenades on his belt, no matter what the book said about leaving that to the men. The first grenade he threw bounced off a tree in the dark and blew up just a few yards away. He could still feel where a piece of hot metal flew into his leg. When was that—last month? Ancient history. Now, in the dark before the attack, Dole went down the line to his guys, a word for each, to see they were ready, a pat on the back ...

Funny thing about that. You go down a line of grunts before dawn of a big day, give ’em a pat, and just about every one—to a man—he’ll fart. They’ve got their rifles clean, they’ve counted their grenades, their bullets, checked all their lucky little things, and then there’s nothing to do, except get tight inside. Then you come and pat ’em on the ass. ... In the Army, they call it the pucker factor. It was high that day.