Invasion Page 7

  In basic we were always talking about the Germans as if they were stupid. We called them Krauts and Jerries, as if they weren’t really people like us. But up close we could see that they had planned as much as we had, had thought about the invasion as much as we had, and were ready for us to come. It was a scary feeling.

  I looked out through the thick shrubbery toward the next line. It was short, maybe seventy yards. If we ran fast enough, we could get across it in ten seconds. If the Germans were set up there, they could kill half the company in that ten seconds.

  “It’s like fighting with a blindfold on,” Petrocelli said. “You run across the field toward a row and hope that some Kraut son of a bitch doesn’t have you in his sights. Then, if you make it over, you got to kill him hand to hand, and he don’t give a damn because he’s fighting for Hitler, and they all love Der Führer.”

  I didn’t know why the Germans were fighting, but I knew they were killing and wounding a lot of Americans. And when we were training we had somehow, in our minds, made them into stupid, goose-stepping fools. Now we saw they weren’t.

  We relaxed where we were and called in mortar fire against the next hedgerow. Behind us we saw Charlie Company moving forward. They would have to take their chances sprinting across the field.

  “Woody, how much is 240 divided by 23?” Mink asked me.

  “How much is … ?” I tried to figure it out, but couldn’t. “A little less than ten. Something near ten. I don’t know, why?”

  “Because I figure we’re losing one man every ten yards across these fields,” Mink said. “That’s what it’s costing us.”

  “Fuck you!” I said.

  I liked Mink. He was quiet, thoughtful. If we had met in civilian life I would have hung out with him. But there were things I didn’t want to know, that I didn’t want to think about. One of them was anything that reminded me of how cheap my life had become.

  “Hey, Mink, I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he answered. “Me too.”

  Charlie Company came up, but their commanding officer didn’t have them go forward as a company. Instead he sent a patrol around the edge of the field.

  We watched as the seven guys on patrol edged their way down one side of the field, keeping as low as they could and running in single file. Halfway across the field, the first guy got hit by a sniper. His helmet flew off as he grabbed his head and fell forward.

  “Sniper in the trees!” Petrocelli yelled.

  We lit up the trees, the bullets chopping away at the branches, until someone yelled, “Cease fire!”

  The patrol got up and another man was hit. He fell to his knees, crossed his arms across his chest, and slumped forward.

  The rest of the patrol backed off and headed back to where we were as we let out a barrage into the hedgerow. Some more mortars hit just beyond the field.

  Dog Company moved up. I saw a group of officers getting together, and I thought they were deciding our next move. I looked at my watch, and it was 0910, ten minutes past nine. Back home in Bedford, it would still be the middle of the night. The mothers of the two men hit would be asleep, perhaps dreaming.

  We dug in just in time to find some shelter from the incoming artillery. The Germans were accurate with their fire, but they weren’t producing too many casualties because we were dug in deep enough to avoid getting hit with shrapnel unless it exploded almost on top of us. But whenever a shell hit, the ground shook and the smell of the rounds filled the air. There was return fire from our artillery, and after about twenty minutes everything quieted down.

  Some cooks showed up with cans of hot food.

  “What is this?” Mink asked one of them.

  The cook was dressed in fatigues that went loosely over his boots. He looked down at the food, then put his face really close to it before looking up again.

  “Chicken stew?” he said — more a question than an answer.

  It was some kind of brown sauce with green beans floating in it. It was delicious. I couldn’t believe it was so good.

  We each got a canteen of water and enough water in our mess kits to wipe them out. I didn’t ask for more food, but I wished I had. Then they served coffee with instant milk packs, and that wasn’t that bad.

  “When I get home, I’m going to kiss my mom a thousand times every time she makes supper,” Gomez said.

  I hoped I would see my mom again.

  Stagg and Burns went on a scouting trip to the rear and came back in a jeep with ammunition, sulfur, and bandages, which they had “borrowed.”

  I knew either Charlie or Dog Company was going to take the next hedgerow, so I relaxed a little. Mink came over and sat next to me.

  “I’m sorry about what I said earlier,” he said. “I was just nervous.”

  “No problem,” I answered. “We’re all nervous.”

  “Not like me,” Mink answered. “I’m scared out of my mind…. I’m sorry I said that.”

  I didn’t answer him. I knew he was struggling with what was going on in his head. I was struggling to keep it out of my head. I didn’t want to think about anything.

  Some guys from First Army came up with a group of civilians. They had good-fitting uniforms, and I wondered if they had had them cut down. A lot of guys did that back in the States. They said that the guys who were with them were prisoners — Germans who had switched into civilian clothing. They brought two of them over to where Milton and Cawthon were meeting, and Stagg sat in on their conference. Afterward, Stagg told us what he had heard.

  “These guys were captured this morning and they think they might be with German Intelligence,” he said. “Since they found them in civilian clothing, they can just shoot them.”

  “How did they know they were soldiers?” Mink asked.

  “The Frenchies pointed them out,” Stagg said. “They speak good French and English. They’re talking their heads off so we don’t hand them over to the French Resistance.”

  “They’ll kill them?” I asked.

  “Probably torture them first,” Stagg said. “Then kill them.”

  “Is that right?” Shumann asked. “To torture or kill a prisoner of war?”

  “You take your uniform off and you’re not a prisoner of war,” Stagg said. “You’re a spy. And out here, does anyone really give a damn about what’s right and what’s nice? Do you really give a damn, Shumann?”

  Shumann’s question surprised me, but it made sense. He had wanted to kill everybody until he got into the war himself. Now he was thinking about the rules. There were a lot of questions we were asking ourselves — or at least I was asking myself — that we didn’t want to answer. The next one came really fast.

  Charlie Company’s commanding officer got relieved of duty. He was told to take off his captain’s bars and report to battalion headquarters. A private was being sent back with him. The private, his leg in bandages, was blindfolded, and his hands were tied behind his back.

  “What happened?” Petrocelli asked.

  “He was supposed to take his company across the hedgerow and he didn’t,” Lieutenant Milton said of the commanding officer. “He decided that it was too costly and disobeyed a direct order. The private shot himself in the ankle.”

  “What’s going to happen to him?” I asked.

  “They may give him a summary court-martial and then shoot him,” Lieutenant Milton answered.

  I looked over at Mink, and he looked away. We both knew that we would all pay a price across these hedgerows. What we didn’t know was how personal it was going to get.

  I tried thinking about home, but it kept slipping away from me. What I was hoping for was something good to fill my head, maybe a picture of Mom on the porch peeling vegetables or Dad trying to fix the old generator that never worked for more than ten minutes at a time. But all I could get was the idea of the soldier blindfolded, his hands tied behind his back, and the captain going back. That and Mink’s numbers.

  “Hey, Mink, where did you get those numbers?�
� I asked.

  “Figured how many yards we’ve crossed and how many men have gone down so far,” he said.

  Gone down. That’s what it was about, the killing. We ran across the fields and they killed us, or we killed them, and then we got to the next field and did it again. Maybe we had more men to offer up than they did. But they knew the hedgerows, knew where the holes were to shoot through. We were just supplying the bodies.

  The truth was that I wasn’t seeing that many dead Germans, and even fewer wounded ones. I was getting the feeling that we were moving toward them, but they were winning. The guy who shot himself must have known the same thing. What the hell did it take to shoot yourself in the leg? How scared did you have to be? How long would it be before I got there?

  A company from the 175th moved through us and started across the fields. We gave them five minutes and then followed them. It looked like they had all made it, and that made me feel good. If you followed another company, the chances were good that the Germans had already left. It was just when you were the company taking the field that you had to worry.

  A couple of mortar rounds fell short, and Burns said that it probably meant that the Germans were already on the move. I didn’t know about that. Everyone was guessing all the time. The thing you didn’t have to guess at was that there were Germans out there waiting, and it was you they were waiting for.

  A horse came onto the field in front of us. It looked slow, ponderous. It was thick-necked, the kind of working horse we had in Virginia, but with shorter legs. It looked almost like a mule. We watched as it went, seemingly without a care for all the men it had to see crouched along the hedgerows, the two small medics looking after a guy lying in the field.

  “Hey, Mink, you think horses think?”

  “No, they don’t have language,” Mink answered. “You have to have language to think in any coherent manner. He just remembers that he comes to this field.”

  “If he did think, what would it be about?” I asked. “I mean, if he had language.”

  “He’d be thinking that it isn’t his freaking war and he doesn’t give a damn who gets killed and who doesn’t,” Mink said.

  Time for us to move up again. We formed a line close to the hedges, got ready, and went through. Nothing, then a few shots off to our left.

  “Keep going!”

  As I ran I scanned the rows for dark spots in the hedgerows that might be machine-gun nests waiting to kill us. I saw one and veered off to my right. Stagg was to my right and shot me a look. I straightened up and moved ahead.

  No return fire. I was breathing again. My M1 felt light in my hand, and I was sure we were going to get to the next hedgerow all right.

  “Grenades!”

  I was reaching for the grenade that was fastened to my cartridge belt when I saw that there were grenades coming toward us. I hit the ground and flattened out just as the first grenade landed less than ten feet from me.

  I didn’t want to close my eyes or curl into a ball, but I did.

  The grenade didn’t go off, but the rifle fire that followed it hit the ground next to me. I looked up and saw two silhouettes standing on the hedges ahead of us, firing down at us.

  Some of the other guys in the company were already returning fire when I got my rifle up. There was no aiming, just shooting in the direction of the hedges. The figures on top of the hedges were gone, and I shot at dark spots that could have been holes.

  “Move out!” Lieutenant Milton yelled.

  I didn’t want to move anywhere, but somehow got to my feet. I looked at the grenade, jumped over it, and ran forward.

  As I got to the hedgerow, I did see an opening for a rifle or machine gun. I shot through it and then climbed up the hedgerow. I found a thick tree branch and looked over. There were three bodies lying on the ground.

  Burns went over and examined the Germans to make sure they were dead. They were. Then he came back to our side of the hedge.

  “Thank God their grenades didn’t go off,” somebody said.

  “They’re dummy grenades,” Stagg said. “The kind they use in training. They’ve got to be as low on ammunition as we are. Probably lower. They just wanted to get us prone on the ground so we’d make good targets.”

  They had wounded five guys. Two looked like they might not make it. One man — he looked old from where I was crouched against the hedgerow — was banging the flat of his hand against the ground and tossing his head from side to side. The medic with him was trying to calm him down, and then just walked away from him.

  Milton posted me and Gomez as lookouts on the left and two other guys on the right.

  “You think those guys are smarter than us?” Gomez nodded to the three bodies being searched. “I mean, when they threw those grenades, I thought it was all over.”

  “I don’t know if they’re smarter,” I said. “I think we’re pretty smart, maybe smarter than them.”

  I didn’t know that or even think it much. What I did know was that, standing up as they did, they were ready to die.

  Some fighter planes came by and wagged their wings at us. I liked that. I was glad they recognized us and thought about what they were seeing. I wished we had had some planes back on the beach.

  The five guys who were hit were taken back. Three of them had their heads covered, and I guessed they were dead.

  “They threw the grenades at the guys in front to keep us down and then shot the guys coming up from the back,” Gomez said, shaking his head. “And let me tell you something else.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t care if they were dummy grenades or not,” Gomez said. “I’m scared of them.”

  All the time Gomez talked, sometimes between every two words, his tongue would come out of his mouth and he would wet his lips. I found myself doing that and knew that I was every bit as scared as he was.

  A tank broke through the hedges behind us. It looked like one of our Shermans, and I was glad to see it. Petrocelli said it was about time they brought in the tanks and then started cursing out the tank crews, calling them pussies and saying that they were probably too busy whacking off in the tanks all day to do any fighting. A jeep was with the tank, and I knew it had to be Gerhardt.

  “If he says anything about us not moving fast enough, I’m going to end his war myself with a bayonet up his ass!” Stagg said.

  The Sherman rumbled slowly across the field. The jeep pulled around it and came barrel-assing toward our hedge. It was almost to us when the Sherman hit the mine.

  Mink came over and sat near me. I knew he wanted to talk, to tell me how he felt, how afraid he was. These were things I already knew, but he was compelled to say them again. Who we were had changed in ways I never imagined. What I had always thought was that you grew from the inside, that the person you were had magically come into being as you grew and absorbed your surroundings. But what surrounded us in the weeks over there could not be absorbed. My eyes saw, my body felt, but I didn’t want to see or to feel, and so I turned away.

  The grass was a deep green, freshened by a light rain. In the far corner of the field behind us there was a dead cow. It lay on its side, legs stiff, stomach bloated, in a place where it had once peacefully fed. No one wanted to look at the dead animal, or squeeze it into our consciousness. It was a reminder of what our own fates could be.

  Mostly it was Negroes who collected the bodies of the dead. They were in a unit called Graves Registration, which sounds better than merely collecting the dead.

  A company of men started across the field. They might have been next in line to cross a field toward the next hedgerow.

  “I once taught summer school in Richmond,” Mink said. “I was really surprised to see how not serious the kids were.”

  “What grades were you teaching?” I asked.

  “Sixth and seventh,” he answered.

  Some of the men had finished their dinners and shuffled to the three garbage cans near the mess tents. They emptied whatever was left in their
mess kits into the first, then dipped the kits into the hot soapy water of the second, using the brushes on the side to clean them, and then dipped them into the clear water of the last can to get the soap off.

  “I don’t think they’re going to shoot those guys — the captain and that soldier they took back,” Mink said. “They just want to scare the crap out of us. In case we’re considering running away. They’re not going to shoot them, right?”

  “Those guys were thinking like regular people,” I said. “That’s what they don’t want us to do. We’re supposed to run across fields with the friggin’ Nazis shooting at us and not be afraid or something. I’m always wondering why I’m running at the people I don’t want to see.”

  Mink didn’t answer, just shook his head.

  I watched as our company sat down against the hedgerows we were hiding behind. The sky was growing dark, and there were rain clouds blowing in our direction. I hoped the Germans were cold.

  Gomez came by and gave us the thumbs-up sign. He had a small roll of toilet paper in his hand.

  In the hedgerows the only place to relieve yourself with any privacy was in the occasional ruts that ran between two of the rows of gnarled trees. And then you were always afraid that some German patrol would be out looking for someone being casual, someone with his pants down or his mind in a different place. I would have loved to have found a toilet. Some place to sit and be human for a few minutes.

  “Get some rest!” Milton said. “We’re moving at first light! Clean your weapons if they need it.”

  I was beginning not to like Milton, because he always brought bad news. But he was a good man, and I felt as if he cared for us. Somebody, I think it was Stagg, said that Milton was almost twenty-six.

  I put my rifle between my knees, muzzle up, and leaned against it. The smell of gunpowder and the grease from the slide mingled, but I could tell them apart as I drifted into a kind of twilight sleep.