It dawned on me that if I’d kept going, followed my orders, and made it to Colonel Ryan, Charlie O’Shea wouldn’t be heading up to the bluff and facing the gunfire. Instead he’d be on an assault boat, motoring back to safety.
I could tell by the way he stared that he’d seen what I was doing. It was obvious. My story of my injury being too serious, of passing out—well, it wouldn’t stand now. He saw me for what I was: a coward, hiding under two brave men who’d given their lives.
His face changed as he looked at me, as the realization dawned. His eyebrows furrowed, his lips tightened, the muscles in his neck stiffened and stood rigidly. He began to shake his head.
I knew what he was thinking.
Suddenly I saw me through his eyes, and the scalding shame burned through me and colored my cheeks. He started to mouth something, but the whip of the wind and the explosions carried away his words.
A thick ball of emotion filled my chest. In my mind, I began a reply to his accusations. He would report me, and I would be court-martialed or worse. Until then, I’d had an exemplary record. Until then, I was a hero to my family.
I thought to get up, face him, and explain that it was the fear, the death, the horrors. That I’d never expected them. I’d even begun to push myself up, moving through the bodies that, as the sun rose higher, had already begun to stink of rot—when he was suddenly gone.
One moment he was there, mouthing, staring, accusing me with his eyes, and in the next his head was gone. Exploded. Thick, wet drops landed upon the exposed parts of my body, my arms, my face. A piece of flesh hit me just above the eye, along with splatters of blood. For a moment, it blinded me, and I felt a wild panic erupt. My heart raced off again. Thu-ump. Thu-ump.
It was instinct that caused me to dive back under the bodies again. I couldn’t help him; I could only help me. Hell, I could have been him, if I’d followed my orders. That was my alternate fate, played out before me in all its Technicolor horror.
With the gore thick in my hair and upper body, I lay there praying, looking as much like a corpse as did the bodies on top of me.
I lay there crying, not worrying if the sobs caused my chest to rise, with the sand cradling me, the fallen men protecting me, and the weight of what I had done forever frozen at the moment when Charlie O’Shea shook his head and mouthed those words. His words that I would never hear and never know would forever haunt me.
Five thousand would die on the beach that day. Every day after that I would wish I were one of them.
Chapter 5
When I looked out the window again, they were still there: the soldiers, the gunfire, and the hellish battle. This couldn’t be real.
I shook my head, which made the world spin like a slot machine. Cursed vertigo had set in ever since that day. Always striking me at its convenience, never mine.
Even as the vertigo slowed, I saw nothing had changed. They were still out there. Now advancing toward me. And they never did that. It was always as if I had a side-window view of the battle. Tonight’s vision seemed even realer than last night’s. I slumped back down under the window, my breath coming in short, sharp pants. I twisted around so my legs lay out straight before me, my back pressed into the wall.
The room was a wreck, torn to shreds by the bullets. The sofa stuffing floated in the air like clumps of snow. Mavis would have been devastated. She loved that sofa. The desk lamp across the room lay shattered on the floor. And all around me was the glass from the room’s windows. It sparkled orange and red from the flares outside, and it was almost beautiful.
At some point while my mind traveled back to that beach, the lights had gone out. Of course, they’d taken them out. That would be protocol. Blind the enemy.
I needed to get away. If I could get through the kitchen to the back door, there was a gate out the back to the neighboring property. Surely, they wouldn’t dare follow us.
A moan came from beside me. Small like a child’s.
Caught up in my memories, I had forgotten Claire. I’d turned a blind eye to the human being right beside me. The poor girl must be terrified.
I turned to her and leaned over, anxious to reassure her that it would all soon end. The sight of her was as shocking to me as the specter of Charlie O’Shea next to my mailbox had been.
Claire sat only two feet away, and like me, her back was against the wall. She looked, at first glance, as if she were resting, as if the two of us were playing hide-and-seek together.
Except for the blood.
Down the front of her lemon-yellow blouse, near her collarbone, a patch of red expanded as I watched. Her face was pale as a sheet, and her hand dabbed disjointedly at the material. After a few jabs, she held it out before her, her eyes saucer-wide at the sight of the blood. A bullet had ripped into her. I thought it was my touch that had broken the window earlier, but I saw now that it had been a bullet.
Her breath came in hiccups. As she pulled air into her lungs, her stomach, beneath her skirt, sharply expanded and contracted as if manipulated by a machine.
She rolled her head to look at me. My immediate thought was to reassure her. “Don’t worry. It will go. It’s just some serious guilt haunting me. You’ll be okay. It’s me it wants.”
But, this wasn’t a mere vision or manifestation of post-traumatic stress. This was us, somehow, in a war that had already been fought. And Claire—with the two children and the husband and the opinionated views—the health worker who loved to talk, whose only mistake was to come back to check on me, had become a casualty of that war.
I pushed myself to my knees and crawled the few feet to the sofa. A ghastly multi-colored wool headrest, crocheted by Mavis while watching Mod Squad in the seventies, hung over the arm. Yanking it away, I clutched it in my hand, carrying it back to Claire.
Bunching an end of it into a ball, I pushed it into the wound. Claire cried out. It hurt me to hurt her, but I had to stop the blood flow.
“Claire… here.” I held the cloth to her chest. “Can you hold this? Push it in. It will help to stem the bleeding. Pressure. You need pressure on it.”
She attempted to take the bunched cloth in her hand. Due to either the shock or the loss of blood, she lacked the strength to hold it. A pool of red formed on the floor. Tears streamed down her face and slipped into her open mouth. She kept repeating only one word. “How? How? How?”
“I don’t know how,” I said. “It’s in my mind.”
I patted her hair as my own tears traveled down my cheeks. What could I do? How could I prevent this thing from happening to her? This had nothing to do with her.
She looked down again at her chest, then back at me, and said, “What have you done? Not in your—mind.” Her eyes looked lost and worn.
Her words tugged at me. She was right.
I had done something, and it had come to claim me. All the guilt I couldn’t shake, the guilt that had piled up—day after day, year after year—filling my heart, filling my subconscious, until I couldn’t hold it anymore, and it spilled out into this world.
One mistake under terrible circumstances. How could I know that my one act of cowardice would never be forgiven? How could I know that even though no one would ever know—except for Charlie O’Shea—I would still be condemned? That my own conscience would mete out a justice far greater than my superiors of the day? I had become both judge and defendant; prisoner and jailer.
I leaned toward Claire, my hand outstretched. She met my eyes, and I could see the same look I had seen on so many dying men in that war. That look never left you. I couldn’t take another person looking at me that way, dying in front of me, dying because of me.
The cloth had fallen into her lap. I grabbed at it and pushed it again into the wound. She winced, but she was so weak now, she barely made a sound.
“Claire. Claire! Look at me. Hold this.” I grabbed her wrist and forced her to take hold of the cloth. “You must hold this to stop the bleeding. It will be over in a minute. I promise. Do you hear me?”<
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She barely nodded, but her eyes, which had been frantically moving between half-open lids, slowed. A whispered “yes” escaped her lips.
I leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead. “Claire, thank you for always caring about me. I didn’t deserve you. I haven’t deserved anyone.”
Crawling backward a few feet, away from the window and the line of fire, I stood up, far more quickly than I could remember having done in the past decade. It was as if the years had bled from my body. My muscles, no longer withered, had now grown stronger.
It took only five strides to reach the front door. I paused for a moment, gathering my thoughts, thinking back over the years I’d enjoyed. Years I hadn’t deserved.
There was Mavis’s sweet face when she’d said “I do,” quickly replaced by the guilt of knowing that all those men would never hear these words from their sweethearts.
There were the children and the grandchildren. How tall and proud they stood whenever I marched in the remembrance parades, my purple heart and all the other awards proudly displayed on my jacket. Awards I was sure I had never earned.
These images filled my mind, the emotions traveling through my body, fueling my resolve. My hand reached for the doorknob, and with the flick of my wrist, it turned. In that instant, it was as if I’d turned the off switch on a radio. Suddenly the air was empty of sound; my mind was clear.
I flung open the door, expecting the vision to be gone. I’d finally had the courage to face it, and, in return, it would dissolve to nothing, and Claire would be fine.
But the scene that lay before me was exactly as I remembered it from 1944. I quickly glanced back at Claire: she hadn’t moved, still sat in a pool of her own blood, her tiny body heaving with the exhaustion of each breath.
I turned back to the door, and stepped outside.
As I walked down the steps, the odor of gunpowder and death assaulted me. The gray cloying mist swirled below my knees, and I heard the crunch and squelch of sand beneath my feet.
Across the way, I noted the sniper’s sight trained on me, as he awaited his order from God-knows-who. By Mavis’s favorite elm—whose dropping autumn leaves I cursed every year—the machine gun battlements spat out their stinging rounds. Dirt and grass flew up around my feet, spraying my pants and dressing gown. But still I walked. No zigzagging this time.
Just as before, I heard the bullet before I felt it, in the millisecond before the bullet pulped my calf muscle and shattered the bone. But still I kept walking, limping as I went, and ignoring the pain, even glad for the pain.
Under my breath, I began to chant, “I understand, sir. They’re counting on me.” The men. Poor Claire.
I dragged my injured leg behind, each step now causing sharp, shooting pains to travel to my brain. This time I missed nothing. My penance, no doubt.
And there he was, at the end of my path, just where he had been the night before.
Charlie O’Shea was waiting for me.
He’d always been waiting. As had all the men who’d lost their lives pointlessly. Because of me.
His lips moved, as they had done that terrible morning. He mouthed words. Seventy-year-old words I had never heard. Words that had haunted me and destroyed any true happiness I might have enjoyed in my life. My life always and forever colored by those unheard words.
Now I was only feet from him. This time I was standing. This time I faced him. Whatever he would say, I was ready to hear it. So very ready, and so very, very tired of waiting.
He lowered his gun and held out his hand. I didn’t expect that. In another time, I would have made a joke. So, you want a dance, Charlie? But he was saying the words again, and now I was close enough to hear.
The pain in my forehead was sudden.
At first, I thought it was a rock kicked up by the gunfire. But then blood dripped into my eyes. And in that split second between life and death, I understood it all. This bullet was the one that should have been mine. On that beach. On that day.
As I lay on the ground, the sounds and lights fading to a pale pink, then a gray, then a deep, beautiful black, I felt Charlie lean over me, and whisper in my ear. His voice so clear, so close, it was as if it was inside my head.
“Baker, we’re clearing the beach. Stay where you are. Stay down. Stay alive.”
A Word From Susan May
I was four when I decided I would be a writer, packed a bag, and marched down the road looking for a school. But for forty-six years, I suffered from life-gets-in-the-way-osis. Setting a goal to write just one page a day cured me in 2010. This discipline grew into an addictive habit that has since borne several novels, and dozens of short stories and novellas—many of which are published award-winners in Australia, the US and the UK.
My childhood reading diet consisted of Edgar Allen Poe, O’Henry, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, plus horror comics like Tales From the Crypt. Anything out of this world like The Twilight Zone and Outer Limits had me glued to the television.
Inspired by these classics, I attempt to pen tales that are simply about the story and the characters and not about fancy words or beautiful descriptions. At the end of my stories I hope, wonderful reader, that you will feel you’ve enjoyed a journey into the fantastic with a neat twist at the end.
I love the way a short story cuts to the chase. You are plunged smack bang into the middle of the action ready for a great ride before reaching a satisfying conclusion that leaves you pondering its ramifications.
Most days I’m just an average mother and wife living in Perth, Western Australia, but this darn imagination of mine keeps constantly venturing into the crevices of dark worlds, whether I want to go there or not.
The idea for “The War Veteran” came from Salinger, a fascinating documentary on the late, great author of Catcher in the Rye. One of the interviewees (who had served in WW2 with Salinger) talked of the horror flashbacks he still experienced. He shared that, to this day, the mortars and gunfire still erupted in his home, and were just as terrifying as they had been when he’d experienced them in real life.
He didn’t preface the statement with the words “imagined” or “visions”; he spoke as if the armaments were actually real. The idea of that haunted me. How horrific must it be to live with that for all those decades? There was no choice then. I had to write the story of “Jack Baker,” to put myself in the shoes of a man in this position.
In researching the story, I read and listened to firsthand accounts of surviving WW2 veterans. Nothing I could write can ever totally capture the experience, so my apologies to anyone who has witnessed war firsthand. I know my description pales.
If you enjoyed The War Veteran, you can find links to my other books and stories at An Adventure in Words (http://susanmaywordadventures.blogspot.com) I’d love you to spend some time with me. I promise you a fun ride.
Chapter One
Lanie tasted metal; sterile air flooded her nostrils. Screens illuminated the dim room and there was a dull beeping coming from somewhere. She could faintly see her mom in the fluorescent light spilling from the hallway: stooped over in her chair, a comforting weight half-leaning over her sheets, both hands wrapped tight around her daughter’s.
How the hell did I get here?
Lanie’s first thought had been a simple one, swiftly and sharply rewarded with a band of pain that sliced through her head, her eyes flickering shut at the intensity. She’d put her other hand up to her head, and feeling the soft bandages under her fingers had started screaming. A hospital bed?
“Thomas, where are you, Thomas? Why am I here? WHAT HAPPENED?”
It wasn’t her husband that skittered into the room but a nurse, hotly pursued by a doctor—one she vaguely recognized from some team function or equivalent. Maybe last year’s Christmas party? Thomas would know. Where was Thomas?
“Pleased to see you’re back with us,” the doctor said as he walked toward the bank of monitors by the side of her bed.
“How did I get here?” Lanie licked her
dry lips as the words croaked out of her mouth.
The doctor picked up her chart from the foot of the bed, briefly glancing down at her notes, brows beetled like a pair of fat, hairy caterpillars mincing across his face.
“The police will be in later. From what I have here though, it seems you hit another car head-on and came out second-best.” He paused. “Thomas will be along shortly. He’s been with your son.”
“SAM? JAKE? What’s wrong with my boys?” Lanie scrambled to sit up, grabbing at the sheets on her bed.
“Calm down, Lanie. It’s just Sam, he was with you in the car. Thomas is with him.”
“No! I need to know if he’s okay! Let me see him.” Lanie’s mother and doctor struggled to hold her in bed.
“You need to calm down. You’ve got a pretty nasty head injury, and I’ll have to give you something if you don’t stop it.”
Been a parent for long, have you, Doc?
“According to my notes, you hit a much bigger car out on the old loop road and—”
“No. I was at the shops… I never got into the car. This is ridiculous.” Lanie’s voice lifted an octave, her eyes darting around the room looking for something, anything.
“Right.” The doctor frowned, watching her cautiously. “The specialist is coming to check in with you later and run some tests. Amnesia is pretty common with head injuries of this nature, but it’s probably only temporary.”
Lanie looked over at her mother then, the tears that had been filling her eyes starting to spill unchecked down her face.
“Mom, I don’t understand what’s happened or how I got here. What happened with Sammy?”
“Honey, it’s going to be fine,” her mother soothed, gently stroking Lanie’s arm.
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