I walked down the main street, me and another guy, don’t remember who. We kept our rifles up, always looking, always watching. From the distance I heard a tack-tack-tack on a power pole. Was a woodpecker hammering for his supper, and I knew the fighting was over then. We walked on for some time, and Carentan grew completely quiet. We reached the other side of the city and stopped, just looking across the fields. We turned around and started walking back the way we had come, looking for the rest of our outfit. We walked for maybe half an hour, maybe an hour. It was hard to gauge time. Maybe we walked in circles.
Off to our side was a store with a sign over the windows that read “Vin.” The soldier I was with gave me a nudge, see, and we eyeballed the store closer. “Might well be some Krauts in there,” my friend said, one eyebrow raised, and I understood what he was getting at. We opened the door gentle-like and looked around. Bottle after dusty bottle lined the shelves. I didn’t know much about wine, but it seemed a shame to leave an opportunity like that untested.
We each found a bottle that looked to our liking, then hiked behind the store and pulled the corks. That first gulp went down sharp and sweet, but no later than by second gulp, a bullet zinged in and hit high over my head. I put a hand over my eyes to shade the dust and looked up. Where the bullet landed seemed harmless enough, so I just kept gulping. Another bullet slicked in all snakelike and found a target maybe five feet from the first bullet hole. Was that the best that sniper could do? My buddy and I chatted away in the afternoon sun and finished about half a bottle each and that was enough for my head. That Kraut sniper kept shaving bullets in on us every few minutes or so, but he was a mile wide of a barn door and bound to leave soon enough, headed the other way, trying to find his friends. So that was that.
We got up, walked back through the city, and found our outfit. Guys were milling about, the wounded were being carried away, and an order came to eat something while we had a chance. We squeezed canned cheese into our mouths from our K-rations, maybe ate a few crackers and chewed a stick of gum, then another order came through and we stood up and started hiking again.
Before long we were out behind the city. The sky clouded over and started a light drizzle. We left the road and hiked through the fields, always heading away from the town. I didn’t know where we were going or exactly why, but we were together again in the company, all of us. Men had dirt on their faces; their uniforms were speckled with blood. Dirt turned to mud in the rain, and water wormed down my neck, and a machine gun burst out on us, a short birrp-birrrp-birrp, and we hit the mud and scanned the hill. I reckoned those Krauts had run out of the city, regrouped, and now they wanted to get back in.
We lay a moment, catching our breaths, then the sky opened up and mortar fire fell in earnest. Huge splashy explosions kaboomed all around. We crawled on our bellies through wet grass to get our bearings, then got up and sprinted at a crouch into the trees. A man to my right went down and I didn’t see who it was, and another on my left went down and we hit the trees at a full run and broke through branches and found cover. A little ridge was there, with a field in front of the ridge, and on the far end of the field another ridge. We started firing at the Krauts from our ridge, with the Krauts firing back at us from their ridge. I glanced up and fired, then ducked down, then glanced up and fired again. It went on like that for some time, just us shooting and them shooting, and the rain continued to pelt us and the day grew dark and it was night before long, and for a while everyone stopped firing and the rain poured.
We dug foxholes in the dark and crawled into the mud like we’d crawl into bed. We closed our eyes, trading off sleep in shifts, but nobody actually slept. The man I was with had a flask and he pulled it out and we each took a long hit to get warm. I wished I could light a smoke, but everything was wet, and the mud seeped up, and my clothes clung to me like I’d fallen in a river. Another order came to fix bayonets on our weapons. Come first light, we were to run across the field and attack. It rained and rained throughout the night, and I might have dozed but I swear I heard a man scream, just like he had been bayoneted. Someone hollered for a medic. There was moaning, whimpering, but it died down soon enough, and the rain ran down my ears. Maybe I hadn’t heard anything after all.
We were studying a map at dawn when the first round of enemy mortars came in. They seemed bigger, whistling in with huge thuds, landing like boxcars being thrown through the air. Earth sprayed up in chunks, and I heard one of our men hollering our position into a radio. Another man yelled “Go! Go! ”And another man ran up a small hill. His shoulder smoked and he crumpled backward and rolled down what he had just run up. Our mortars opened up, and I crawled up a rise, glanced over the top, and emptied the clip of my M1. Had to find the target. Had to see the shape of the enemy. It wasn’t no use just firing like this. Had to see. Had to hear. I glanced up again, took a second to look through the weeds, and spotted the black shape of a shadow high on the opposite ridge. I fired. The shadow fell. I ducked down, glanced up again, and paused. Another shadow moved to the right of the hill’s crest. I fired. That shadow fell. A long burst of machine-gun fire shot out from near my head, one of our guys shooting across the field. A long burst returned from the enemy. Branches dropped all around me. Leaves shattered like confetti.
A new, low rumble shook the earth. Where had I heard that sound before? I glanced up over my cover. Far on the enemy’s ridgeline, I glimpsed the snout of a long gray pipe. A man’s helmet came into view, then the rumble grew louder. Tanks! German tanks! Where had they come from? We were no match for tanks! “Keep firing!” someone ordered. So we did. We held the line and pulled our triggers. Find the flash of light. Find the shadow that moves. Firing. Firing. Always firing. The spent shells flipped hot from the top of my gun, spinning away from my eyes, spinning, spinning. Lieutenant Harry Welsh ran out into the field with a bazooka and fired at an oncoming tank. Another enemy tank answered him with an explosion that blew a nearby tree in half. “Medic! Medic!” someone yelled. We fired and fired.
I wasn’t sure how much longer any of us could last when another rumble sounded, but this one came from the hill behind us. Big booms. Beautiful booms. Our tanks were coming up from the beach to meet the Germans. Our boys thundered into view and blasted away. We kept firing, firing. I saw a man step over the crest of the hill, his leg shot out from underneath him. He flipped and turned and fell on the ground. All was smoke over the far hillside. Their tanks started rumbling the other direction. This time I heard cheers. Our cheers.
I stopped firing and sat on a nearby log, then stood again and walked a bit. I pulled out a pack of Chelseas. A few were dry enough by now and I lit one. The smoke blew in ragged trails out of my mouth. The woods grew quieter. I lit another cigarette and smoked that. Then I smoked a third. I guessed the battle for Carentan might be over. I guessed we’d won. An order came through and we packed up and headed out.
Over the next few days, more orders came in. Don’t remember exactly what they were. More patrols. More shooting. More holding other lines. More firing. I was often ordered to go out as lead scout. Look around. Listen. See what I could see. Report back. I felt okay about that.
It might have been a week later, we were out on patrol when Lieutenant Welsh asked for volunteers to check out a farmhouse. Albert Blithe was back with us and could see again. He was a good man, more of a fighter than you’d think, and our medic had called what he had developed during the battle of Carentan “hysterical blindness”—how he’d sat and stared into space, unseeing, for a while. The blindness was gone now, and Blithe volunteered to go. Martin and Dukeman went with him. They disappeared into the leaves, and a moment later a shot ran out from the windows near the roof’s peak. Blithe had been hit between his shoulder and his neck. Joe Lesniewski ran up, pulled a clean T-shirt out of his musette bag, and packed it in Blithe’s wound. We opened up on the farmhouse, firing and firing. After that, all was quiet.
Sometime in that period we hiked back to Carentan and stayed a few d
ays. The Krauts didn’t hold the city anymore and it was safe. From there, we went to a field camp near Utah Beach. Got a lukewarm shower there, I remember, and some hot chow. Then we were ordered to leave Normandy. Seemed the best order I’d heard in quite a spell. Those three days of hard fighting we’d originally been promised had stretched to more than a month of fighting in Normandy. We boarded a ship and headed back to England. They gave us steak and oranges and ice cream on the ship and it tasted real good. I guess I had done what I’d been ordered to do, because I got a promotion around then to sergeant and I wasn’t a private anymore. Still didn’t feel like I knew much about much.
Some of the fellas got to talking about the time we had in Normandy. The conclusion was that we weren’t going to survive the rest of the war. I shared the view, I guess. Yeah, I did. Easy Company had jumped into Normandy with a hundred and forty men. Coming back from Normandy, only sixty-five were still with us. You think, shoot, here it’s just the start of the war and half our men are already gone. Ain’t no way a man’s going to get to the other side alive.
Well, we got back to England, and a few things happened there that might not be fit to mention in mixed company, you know. When you’re twenty-one and don’t expect to live long, you’re more likely to do things you might not ordinarily do. I wasn’t courting a steady girlfriend or nothing. Sure, I wrote girls back home, and they wrote me, and I guess I knew better than this. But it happened. I’ll say it plainly so. We went to London on a pass, McClung and me, and a trainload full of guys. “You’re a goddam girl chaser,” McClung said as we climbed off at the station, but I don’t know if I was all that or not. Within an hour we were brimming with beer and someone said, “Hey, there’s a whorehouse down the street,” so we were off. McClung carried his M1, and I wondered why the hell he needed that, since we weren’t in a combat zone anymore. The whorehouse was this old wooden building with a bright sign blinking out front. A line of soldiers stretched out the door and clear around the side of the building. They were all greenhorns, new recruits coming straight to England, and we took to the back of the line in a bunch.
“Ah hell,” McClung said, after waiting a minute or two. “We’ll never get in tonight with all these jokers around.” Three lights shined red over the porch. McClung elbowed his way to the front of the line, directly past the heys, yos, and watchits. He shouldered his rifle and shot out the lights. Blam! Blam! Blam! Well, those new recruits scattered like fleas off a dog in a washtub. Suddenly there was no line anymore at the whorehouse.
We went in and the ladies circled us. One took me by the arm and led me upstairs. She was old as a fossil, with bright red lipstick, and her hair bunched to the side near the top of her head. She hollered for my cigarettes, smoked the one I handed her straight down to ash, then kissed me hard on the mouth. Her teeth smelled like the inside of a rabbit’s hutch and her voice rasped low when she asked me what I felt like doing tonight.
I was just about to answer when, from downstairs, I heard another Blam! Blam! Blam! I thought the battle for Carentan was on again and sprinted down the rickety steps. There was McClung with his M1, shooting up the insides of the whorehouse. “What the hell are you doing?” I yelled.
He stopped firing and looked at me. “I ain’t got no money,” he said with a shrug. “Let’s go.”
“Shit,” I said.
McClung hooked his M1 in one arm, pulled out a cigarette, and lit it real calm.
“Shit,” I said again.
McClung kablammed his rifle again for good measure and laughed. “C’mon, Shifty, let’s get out of here.”
I laughed, too, and clattered the rest of the way down the landing. We banged through the front doors and got the hell out of there. I don’t remember what the ladies said after McClung started shooting. I guess they were all hiding up in their rooms. So that was that.
I went to the hospitals to check on some of the guys who’d been wounded. Popeye was lying on his stomach when I found him. He’d got a purple heart and felt bad for messing up, as he called it, and couldn’t wait to join up with the company again. I felt real happy he was going to be okay.
Back at base, this sergeant asked me if I might like a motorcycle ride up to Worcester, where we were going for a spell. He’d found this military bike back when we were over in Normandy, see, and nobody had ordered him to give it back yet. So I said sure and climbed aboard. He gave it a kick start or two and the motor revved up and we varoomed down the road.
It was a fine day with the sun peeking out from behind those English clouds, and as we zoomed by this American convoy we slowed enough for me to hear somebody holler out “Shifty! ” I never saw who it was or who knew my name. But the man wasn’t from our outfit. It must have been somebody from back home in Dickenson County, Virginia, who recognized me from a high school basketball game or something. The sergeant yanked on the throttle and our bike leaped forward. The countryside flew by from the back of that motorbike. For the rest of that afternoon, I held to that thought, home, and grinned like nobody’s business.
8
A BLUR OF BATTLES
The rest of the summer of 1944 passed as if in a shroud. Mornings dawned warm, afternoons grew hot, you know, like summer should be, but it was hard for a man to shake his memory of Normandy. A man couldn’t wrap his mind around the horrors of what we’d been through, no matter how hard he tried. Trees still grew, squirrels still chattered as they raced between hedgerows, we still did push-ups and jumping jacks and ran five-milers through the English countryside. But nothing seemed normal anymore.
I knew Normandy was just the start of our fighting. We all did. More battles would come, but we had no idea what sort of action might come next. New replacements, wild-eyed killers who couldn’t even shave yet, climbed off trucks at our camp and brought Easy Company back up to full strength. Orders were barked. Rumors flew alongside the orders. We were going here. We were going there. Word came down more than once that we were going to jump on another operation. France. Then Belgium. Both missions were scrubbed at the last minute because the battle situations changed. Fine by me, you know. Fine by me.
Then we got word to get ready for Holland. No scrubbing the mission this time. The battle would be bigger even than Normandy in terms of airborne divisions involved. They called it Operation Market-Garden, and the plan seemed simple enough. A long road snaked up the middle of the country, see, straight into Germany. Different allied paratrooper outfits would drop at various places alongside the road and wrestle it back from the Krauts. Then, British ground troops would zip up the road with their tanks and heavy machinery and head right into Germany. The war would be over real quick, and we’d all be home before Christmas. It wasn’t going to be an American operation. It was run by the British, see, which meant we’d be catering to them to some extent. Wasn’t sure how I felt about that. I liked fighting for Uncle Sam, you know.
One afternoon just before we jumped I ambled out of the lunch line and shaded my brow to look across the horizon. A familiar figure came limping toward me across the grounds, the smile on his face as big as a pumpkin’s. Popeye was back from the hospital. We shook hands, and he started jabbering away as feisty and fierce as ever. Seemed the Army had told him that if he stayed out of action more than ninety days, well, they was going to send him to another unit when he got well enough. “But goddam it, Shifty,” Popeye said, “if I was gonna let the Army do that to me.” So he busted out of the hospital, even though he was still too sore to sit. That’s how much he wanted to be back fighting with his buddies in Easy Company. You had to admire Popeye.
My buddy Bill Kiehn wouldn’t be making this jump though. He’d been wounded back in Carentan and they’d sent him to the hospital in England. He was out of the fighting for a spell.
Sergeant Buck Taylor had just come back. He’d been wounded back in Carentan, too. A grenade had flown over a hedgerow, blown up, and caught him in the leg. Wasn’t that bad of a wound. He probably should have been evacuated while we were stil
l fighting in Normandy, but he toughed it out until we got back to England, then went to the hospital on his own steam. They fixed him up and sent him right back. I was happy to have him around again.
Sergeant Carwood Lipton was still healing from the face and leg wounds he got in Carentan. He rejoined the outfit in England as quick as he could. They made him the company’s new first sergeant. He was probably the best NCO in the whole army, and I was glad he was back.
Well, all the upper brass was really gearing up for this new jump, but somehow to me it didn’t feel as big of a deal, you know. Not like the first one. I still felt some butterflies in my gut when the day came and I was heaved into the plane with all my gear. But I was chewing gum this time, feeling loose in my shoulders. Another fella in the stick opposite me read a paperback novel. We were old pros now, heading out with our rifles for another day on the job site.
Our planes took off for Operation Market-Garden on September 17, 1944. I gazed out our plane’s window at blue, cloudless skies. Down below, trees already had those red-raw hints of color, and fall was in the air. This time it was going to be a daylight jump, not like Normandy, and when we neared the drop zone, stood up, hooked up, and bailed out the door, I almost grinned. Wars should always be fought with this kind of fine weather.
It was a big jump, you know, the whole regiment came floating down together. Real easy, too. No wind. No swinging around in the sky. Not much anti-aircraft fire coming up at us. Just nice, soft, plowed fields to land in. Almost felt cushy. I bent my knees as the ground approached, landed, slipped out of my harness, and looked around. In the distance was a windmill, a grove of pine forest, and the spire of a huge church. I spotted orange smoke, our company’s signal to all find each other, and I set off in that direction. Most of the guys were already milling about in the meeting area. Medics were looking after a couple fellas who’d hurt their backs on the jump. Bill Wingett broke his leg when he landed, so he was out, and he was a fine soldier. But those were the only injuries I noticed.
Shifty's War Page 10