Ordinary Heroes

by Scott Turow

  From the woods, the corpsmen radioed for a convoy and ambulances, which met us on the other side of the creek where the cow path joined the woods. In the lights of the vehicles, I caught sight of a C ration cracker in cellophane lying unharmed in the snow. I broke it in pieces and passed it out to the three other men who were waiting with me. We ate this morsel in total silence.

  "Damn," one of them, Hank Garns, finally said. We were back at Algar's headquarters in minutes and ushered into the cold barn. There were thirteen of us. Counting the wounded, twenty-two men in G Company had made it, out of the ninety-two we'd had at the start of the day. Meadows and Masi were dead.

  "Jesus, that was rough," said a dark man named Jesse Tornillo. "We came in on our chinstraps."

  "Yeah," said Garns. "Guess you're right. Hadn't noticed till you mentioned it." Garns was smiling and seemed to take no notice that his entire body was rattling as if he had a mortal chill.

  "Captain," said Tornillo, "it might be that mutt of yours saved our lives." I had not registered that the animal had followed me inside but he was looking around the circle as if he could follow the conversation, a black mongrel with a brown star on his chest and one brown paw. "When he started in with that whimpering, maybe he made those snipers think we were all of us dead." Tornillo bent to scratch the dog's ears. "Saved our lives," he said. "How you like that? I was laying there, listenin to him scratch around. Soon as I figured out it was a dog, hombre, I was praying for just one thing. 'Oh, Lord,' I kept sayin, 'if these Krauts gotta shoot me, please don't let this damn pooch piss on my head before that.

  We laughed, all of us, huge gusts of laughter, full of the sweet breath of life. As for the dead, there was no mention of them now They were, in a word, gone. I didn't doubt that these men, some of whom had been together for months, mourned. But there was no place in our conversation for that. They were dead. We were alive. It wasn't luck or the order of the universe. It was simply what had happened.

  Algar came in then and I gave him my report.

  "Good thinking, good thinking," Algar kept saying when I admitted how we'd survived by playing dead.

  "It was an ambush, Colonel."

  By now we both knew that G Company had been given a suicidal assignment. We did not have enough men or firepower to hold that road, no matter what our position. I didn't say that, but I didn't have to.

  "Dubin," Algar said, "I'm sorry. I am the sorriest son of a bitch in the Army."

  I went to the battalion aid station to check on the wounded from G, but they were already on the way back to the field hospital by ambulance. There were doctors in Bastogne now, four surgeons who'd landed this morning by glider.

  When I returned, Algar had found the cooks and ordered them to reopen the mess to serve us Christmas dinner. We had fried Spam and dehydrated potatoes, with dehydrated apples for dessert. As a treat, there were a few fresh beets. We'd eaten one meal in the last two days, and I felt the full measure of my hunger as the heat and aroma of the food rose up to my face. I count that Christmas meal in that cold mess eaten off a tin plate as one of my life's culinary highlights.

  Biddy sat down beside me. We didn't say much while we ate, but he turned to me once he was done.

  "No disrespect to the dog, Captain, but it was you that saved our lives."

  A couple of the other men murmured agreement. But I wanted no part of being treated as a hero. There were isolated instants when I had actually led my men, scrambling from hole to hole amid the initial artillery barrage, even when I waved them so disastrously into the clearing. In those moments, a tiny voice trapped somewhere in my heart had spoken up in utter amazement. Look at me, it said, I'm commanding. Or more often: Look at me, I didn't get hit. But I held no illusion that was fundamentally me. We can all play a part for a few minutes. But I was not like Martin--and it was he I thought of--able to do it again and again.

  The real David Dubin had fallen to the earth and played dead, where he had eventually surrendered to terror. I had given my men saving advice mostly because it was what I had wanted to do, to lie down like a child and hope that the assault--the war--would be over soon. True, it was the wiser course. But I had taken it because at the center of my soul, I was a coward. And for this I was now being saluted. I was grateful only that I did not feel shocked at myself or overwhelmed with shame. I knew who I was.

  The men began to talk a little about what had happened, especially the eight or nine hours we had lain in the snow.

  "Praise God, man, these are the shortest days of the year."

  "Lord, poor fucking Collison, huh? I ain't gonna sleep for three nights hearing that."

  But as I sat there, finishing off my dinner, my will, indeed all that remained of my being, was summoned in a single desire: I was going to make sure I never set foot on a battlefield again.

  Chapter 22.

  THE REMAINS

  My wish to avoid combat, like so many other wishes I made, did not come true. There were more battles, but never another day like Christmas. Patton's forces continued pushing on Bastogne from the south, and more and more supplies made it through. Like an eager audience, we cheered the sight of every truck carrying cases of C rations bound in baling wire, the brown-green ammo boxes, or the gray cardboard tubes containing mortar and bazooka rounds.

  On December 27, the 110th was re-formed with elements of the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment. Algar became battalion commander. G Company was now E Company, but I remained in charge. With six days in combat, I was one of the more experienced field officers Algar had. A second lieutenant named Luke Chester, literally a month out of OCS, became my second-in-command. He was a fine young soldier, a serious man, who spent most of his free time reading the Bible. But he was not Bill Meadows.

  We pushed farther down the road through Champs, where so many of my men had died, then swung north and east into Longchamps. Although it did not seem possible, the weather was worse, less snow, but the kind of brittle, devastating cold that had seemed liable to snap the ears off my head in high school. However, our assignments allowed us to be quartered indoors for a portion of most nights. Algar protected my company. We were not the forward element on many operations. Instead, we generally followed armored infantry, covering the flanks. We fought brief battles, two or three times a day, knocking back smaller German units, repelling commandos, securing positions other forces had already overrun, and often taking prisoners, whom we'd hold until the MPs arrived.

  But it was war. We still entered scenes that, as Biddy had characterized them, seemed to have come from the Inferno: the dead with their faces knotted in anguish, weeping soldiers immobilized by fear, vehicles ablaze with the occupants sometimes still screaming inside, soldiers without limbs lying within 'vast mud-streaked halos of their own blood, and others careening about, blinded by wounds or pain.

  Every morning, I awoke to the same sick instant when I realized I was here fighting. I thought the same things so often that they were no longer thoughts at all. The questions simply circulated through my brain with the blood.

  Why was I born?

  Why do men fight?

  Why must I die now, before living my life?

  These questions had no answers and that fact often brought pain. It was like running full tilt again and again at a wall. The only comfort--and it was a small one--was that I saw these thoughts passing behind the eyes of every man I knew. They danced, like skinny ballerinas, across the thin membrane that separated everything from a molten surface, which was my constant fear.

  I nearly did not make it to 1945. We were throwing the Germans back, inch by inch, but the control of terrain remained extremely confused. The Nazi lines, once drawn so tight around Bastogne, had been shredded, but not always with sufficient force to fully subdue the Krauts. On the maps, the intermingled American and German positions looked like the webbed fingers of joined hands.

  On December 31, Algar sent us out to secure a hill on the other side of Longchamps. Our artillery had rained down alre
ady, and the enemy figured to have retreated, but as the first platoon started up, shots snapped in from above. Two men died and two were wounded. I was in the rear, but I scrambled forward to order everyone to dig in. A shot rang off a stone near my feet. I saw the German who had been shooting. He was up the hill, perhaps two hundred yards from me, peeking out from behind an outhouse in his large green coat with its high collar and the helmet that I still thought made every Kraut look half comic, as if he was wearing a coal scuttle. As he watched me through his rifle sight, I could see that killing me was a crisis for him. I had the nerve somehow to nod in his direction, and then scurried off on all fours, leaving the German infantryman little time to think. When I looked back, he was gone. I promised myself that I would spare one of them when the shoe was on the other foot. I tried to work out how fast the phenomenon of troops giving grace to one another would have to spread before the men in combat had made an armistice of their own.

  I killed, of course. I remember a machine-gun nest we had surrounded, pouring in fire. A German soldier literally bounced along on the ground every time my bullets struck him, almost as if I was shooting a can. Each of these deaths seemed to enhance the power of the Thompson .45 submachine gun with which I'd parachuted, and which Robert Martin had borrowed, so that I sometimes felt as if I'd lifted a magic wand when I raised the weapon.

  By now, I also thought I was developing animal senses. I knew the Germans were nearby even when they could not yet be seen or heard. In that instant before combat began, I passed down a bizarre passageway. Life, which had seemed so settled, so fully within my grasp, had to be renounced. I would now shoot my way across a bridge between existence and nonexistence. That, I realized mournfully, was what war was. Not life-essential, as I'd somehow believed, but a zone of chaos between living and dying. And then the bullets would fly and I would fire back.

  On New Year's Day, after we'd turned east toward Recogne, we came upon a few advance scouts, Waffen troops. There were only four of them. They'd been hiding behind a crisscross of felled pines in the forest, and should have let us pass whatever their intentions, whether to ambush us or simply to report our whereabouts. Instead one of them spooked and fired at first sight of our uniforms. The four were no match for a company. Three were dead after less than a minute of fighting, while several of my men saw the fourth scout stumbling off into the brush. Reaching the three corpses, we could see the blood trail the fleeing German had left, and I dispatched Biddy's platoon to find him before the man got back to his unit.

  When Bidwell returned half an hour later, he was morose.

  "Bled to death, Cap. He was just laid out in the snow, with his blue eyes wide open, lookin at this here in his hand." Biddy showed me a tiny snap the size of the ones he was always taking, but this was of the German soldier's family, his thin wife and his two little boys, whom he'd been staring at as he died.

  On January 2, 1945, E. Company received reinforcements, nearly thirty men, all newly arrived replacements. I hated them, with the same intensity my men had hated me only a few days ago. I could barely stand to command these troops. I hated being responsible for them and knowing how much danger they were destined to expose us to. One of them, Teddy Wallace from Chicago, told anybody who'd listen that he had a family at home. Fathers had been the last drafted and he worried aloud about what would become of his sons if something happened to him, as if the rest of us didn't have people who loved us and needed us, too. His first action required his platoon to clean out a German mortar team. Two squads had surrounded the position and then tossed in a grenade. When I arrived, I found Wallace on the ground. After falling on a rock, he had pulled his pants leg up to study the bruise, rubbing it repeatedly, while two men with bullet wounds groaned within feet of him.

  He died the next day. We were trapped in the woods, while inching our way north and east toward Noville. The artillery again had devastated the German position, but two snipers had climbed into the trees, trying to shoot down on us as if they were hunting deer. In the process, they made themselves insanely vulnerable, but rather than trying to lob bazooka rounds at them, I radioed for tank support, and ordered my men to dig in on the other side of one of those thick-walled Belgian farmhouses. Suddenly, Wallace stood up, as if it was a new day and he was getting out of bed. I don't know what he figured, that the snipers were disposed of, or perhaps the battlefield had simply gotten to him. In the instant I saw him, he looked as if he had a question in mind, but a shot ripped all the features off his face. A buddy pulled him down. I thought Wallace was now going back to his family, albeit without a nose or mouth, but when I crawled up later, he was gone. I wrote to his wife and sons that night, describing his bravery.

  In the wake of battle, one of the principal preoccupations of my company, like every fighting band, was collecting souvenirs. German firearms, Lagers and Mausers, were most prized, and everyone, including me, eventually acquired one. One of the men found a good Zeiss photographic lens and gave it to Biddy. My troops also removed wristwatches, flags, pennants, armbands--and cut off ears, until I put a stop to that. I understood this trophy hunting, the desire to have some tangible gain for what they had been through.

  The day that Wallace went down, after two Sherman tanks had arrived and blown up the trees where the German snipers had perched, I watched another replacement soldier, Alvin Liebowitz, approach Wallace's body. I hated Liebowitz most among my new men. He was a lean boy, red-haired, with that New York air of knowing every angle. During several of the brief firefights we'd had, he'd seemed to disappear. Wallace and he had come over together, and I thought Liebowitz was reaching down to pass some kind of blessing. I was shocked when the sun gleamed before his hand disappeared into his pocket.

  I came charging up.

  "What?" Liebowitz said, with ridiculous feigned innocence.

  "I want to see your right pocket, Liebowitz."

  "What?" he said again, but pulled out Wallace's watch. He could have told me he was going to send it to Wallace's family, but then he might have had to hand it over. Alvin Liebowitz wasn't the kind to give up that easily.

  "What the hell are you doing, Liebowitz?" "Captain, I don't think Wallace here's going to be telling much time."

  "Put it back, Liebowitz."

  "Shit, Captain, there're guys over in the woods picking over the Krauts' bodies right now. Germans, Americans, what's the difference?"

  "They're your dead, Liebowitz. That's all the difference in the world. That watch may be the only thing Wallace's sons ever have of their father's."

  "Hell, this is a good watch, Captain. It'll disappear a long time before that body finds its way home.

  That was Liebowitz. Smart-ass answers for everything. The Army was full of Liebowitzes, but he got under my skin to a degree unrivaled by any other man I'd commanded, and I felt a sudden fury that did not visit me even in battle. I lunged at him with my bayonet knife, and he barely jumped out of the way as he yelped.

  "What the fuck's wrong with you?" he asked, but put the watch down. He went off, looking over his shoulder as if he was the aggrieved party.

  Biddy had witnessed the incident. When we were settling in the empty train car where we billeted that night, he said, "That was dang good, Cap. Lot of the men liked seeing you put Liebowitz in his place, but it looked for all the world like you was actually gonna cut him."

  "I meant to, Biddy. I just missed."

  He gave me a long look. "I guess we all harder on our own, Captain."

  By January 8, the battle had turned. Every day we were securing large chunks of the ground the Germans had taken back with their offensive. I woke that morning with a dream I'd had once or twice before, that I was dead. The wound, the weapon, the moment--I felt the bullet invade my chest and then my spirit hovering over my body. I watched the Graves Detail approach and take me. Fully awake, I could only say as everybody else did: Then that is what will happen.

  It was Bidwell who had roused me inadvertently. He had my toothbrush sticking ou
t of the corner of his mouth. We were quartered in a church school and Biddy, without apology, had taken a little water from a sacramental font.

  "I dreamed I was dead, Biddy. Have you done that?"

  "Captain, it ain't any other way to be out there but that." Then he pointed to the doorway, where a young private stood. He'd come to tell me that Lieutenant Colonel Algar wanted to see me on the other side of Noville.

  Algar, as ever, was at his desk, looking at maps. He'd acquired a supply of narrow black cheroots and had one in his mouth whenever I saw him these days. He answered my salute, then pointed me to a canvas-back chair.

  "David, I got a teletype this morning from a Major Camello. He's General Teedle's adjutant, or assistant adjutant. They were trying to determine your whereabouts. When I answered you were here, he wrote back wanting to know when you could resume your assignment. They're concerned for your welfare."

  They were concerned about Martin, at least Teedle was. I asked if he'd told them Martin was dead.

  "I thought I'd leave that to you. Besides, you said you needed to see a body. I asked General Teedle for your services for one more week. We're going to be a long way toward kicking Dietrich out of the Ardennes by then. If things go well, I hope to be able to relieve your entire unit."