Joe Amos rode in the silence of the engine, the Jimmy’s gears laboring over the sand. He looked again up the slope at the charred pillboxes. A flight of P-47 Thunderbolts streaked in low from over the Channel in tight formation, owning the sky. Out to sea the horizon shuttled with ships, the concrete harbor grew by the minute.
Oh, yeah, Joe Amos thought. America. It’s here, alright. It’s all here.
~ * ~
D+6
June 12
Ben Kahn kneeled beside another litter. He set his lantern in the sand. Both knees ached from six hours of bending, his kneecaps were chafed from salt and sand, and his trousers were stained with blood where he’d taken soldiers’ hands in his lap.
‘Son,’ he said in a firm voice. ‘I’m Chaplain Kahn. Can I get you anything?’
This soldier smiled under crinkling eyes. He blinked; the smile wavered.
‘Got a right foot you can spare, Chaplain?’
Ben opened his hands, empty.
‘You know anyone needs a right boot, I left a good one up in Vierville-sur-Mer.’
Ben patted the soldier’s chest.
‘We’ll get you out of here pretty quick, son. I’ve got some water.’
Ben poured from his canteen into a steel cup. The soldier worked his way up to his elbows to drink. He grunted. Ben slid a hand under his neck to hold him while he sipped from the cup.
‘Minefield,’ the soldier uttered between swallows. He needed to explain his weakness, the reason why this older man needed to help him drink.
‘I know,’ Ben answered, laying the soldier down, taking back the emptied cup. ‘There’s good boots laying all over this place.’
The soldier began to breathe harder through his nose. He fought nausea, tears, something he would not release. Ben looked down the length of the blanket covering the soldier, ending in the one boot. He laid his palm gently on the damaged leg.
‘You want to pray with me, son?’
‘Yeah.’
Ben had no kit with him, that was lost, he’d need to requisition another. In his pack he carried New and Old Testaments, one book of prayers, and another of hymns, issued by the Chaplain Corps. He had a canteen, a cigarette lighter, he’d stolen the lantern. His helmet bore a red cross on a white field to identify him as a non-combatant.
‘What’s your name, soldier?’
‘Lombardy, sir. Kevin. Pfc.’
‘I’m Ben Kahn. Where you from?’
‘Chicago.’
‘Pittsburgh.’
‘Go Pirates,’ the soldier said, in better control of himself.
‘Go Cubbies.’
Lombardy gestured to the pin on Ben’s collar, a double tablet bearing Roman numerals to ten, capped by the Star of David, the insignia for rabbi chaplains.
‘I’m Protestant, Chaplain. I never prayed with no Jew before.’
Ben grinned. He smoothed the soldier’s hair.
‘I think you’ve done tougher things today, Kevin.’
The soldier closed his eyes beneath Ben’s touch. Ben stayed quiet, watching the young face crease and still in the lantern light. Ben made his prayer in silence. He lowered his face and asked God again in this evacuation station for tsedoke, charity. For grace for this poor kid, for courage, luck, something to turn it around for Kevin Lombardy. God could do it. God could do it for any soldier, no matter how hurt, scared, or missing. But God had to choose to do a mitzvah. Mercy, please, God. Not for me. For this boy. For my boy and all of them. Hear O Israel. ..
‘Chap?’
Ben looked up from his prayer, jarred and not finished. He delved deep for God every time, never just cast his prayers on the surface like bread. Ben Kahn sank them to the bottom, probing.
‘Yes.’
‘I feel better.’ The soldier dabbed his sleeve across his eyes. ‘Rabbi, huh? That felt good. That was okay.’
‘I’m glad.’
‘You might think about taking a rest, Chap.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘You look worse than me.’
‘I’m a lot older than you. I’ve had more time to work on my look.’
‘What division you with?’
Ben slid the Red Cross helmet off his head to scratch his crew cut. This was the first soldier on a stretcher to ask about him. Ben poured himself a cup of water, his first in six hours of wounds and soldiers’ hometowns and trying to snag God’s attention from a world on fire.
‘Don’t know yet. I’m a replacement. I was supposed to be here six days ago. Got crossed up. I’ll find out where I’m supposed to be when I get to the repple depple.’
‘When’d you get here?’
‘This morning.’
‘What time is it? You slept any?’
‘Alright, Private.’ Ben screwed the cap on his canteen. ‘I take my orders from God and Ike. But you take one from me. You go home and you be the same man you always have been. Tell me about your family.’
‘Mom and Dad. Sister.’
‘Okay. You take care of them.’
Ben made a light fist and tapped it on the soldier’s chest, a gentle blow to offset the one that tore this boy off at the ankle. He set his helmet back on his head and pushed off the sand to rise. His knees and hips griped.
Outside the evac tent a clamor erupted. Men shouted, automatic weapons barked.
‘What’s that?’ Ben froze in a half-standing posture.
‘Bedcheck Charlie.’
‘What?’
The gunfire thickened on every side, from the beach and the cliffs. A powerful engine roared past, low and searing over the night sands.
‘Jabo,’ the soldier said, pulling up his blanket, shifting on his stretcher.
Ben ran the few steps to the open tent flap. Outside, orange tongues of small arms and mounted machine guns yelped after the screeching German fighter. The plane left them in its black wake and flew over another ten thousand Americans a mile farther down OMAHA, waking them and their guns. Ben heard the cannons of the fighter, strafing, harassing, then disappearing south over the German lines.
He walked inside the evac tent. Every soldier who could sit up from his stretcher was erect and alert. The medical staff, a dozen doctors and nurses, moved along the lines of tables and litters, through tubes, bags, and poles, pressing the men to lie down. Ben settled again beside Private Lombardy.
‘They come in threes,’ the soldier said.
His knuckles were white on the blanket. Ben sat close and waited.
In another’ minute when the engines appeared and the cannons and gunfire cranked, Ben lay across the private. The soldier shivered. His arms went around Ben’s back and clutched him there.
~ * ~
The orders seemed more than words typed on paper. They weighed that of a commandment, chiseled and sent down. The sheet sank Ben’s hand to his side. He thanked the personnel officer and turned away.
The town square of Isigny-sur-Mer brimmed with soldiers, most of them replacements. No civilians milled, moved out long ago by the Germans. Around the cobblestone center, every building was rubble. Desks and filing cabinets had been moved outside, there was not a floor or roof to be trusted in the village. Fresh soldiers waited in clots and lines, swapping cigarettes and glances. Convoys of trucks, always driven by the Negroes, rolled across the Aure River bridge and into the square, heedless of the men who jumped out of the way. The drivers were in a hurry, the replacements were not. Sergeants herded the clean GIs into the truck beds and they were hauled off in fifties and hundreds, chambered into the war an hour after splashing onto OMAHA or UTAH.
Ben read his orders again. He folded the sheet. He did not look into the blue morning sky for God. There was no reason to believe God was up there any more than He was everywhere. Ben had been told at the Chaplain School at Harvard this seemed a very Jewish instinct. He sometimes admired the Gentile way of believing God was in a high heaven, that secure sense that God resided in one place where He could be found. Right now Ben felt God in the orders, lik
e a stone tablet in his pocket.
‘The 90th,’ he said.
He stared at the empty bed of an arriving two-and-a-half-ton truck, one of the olive drab GMC Jimmies that were pouring into France almost as fast as soldiers and guns. The truck swerved around a broken fountain, squealing rubber on the cobbles, then stubbed to a stop. In the cab the Negro driver began tapping on the wheel.
To be heard, a sergeant funneled his hands over his mouth.
‘357th Infantry, 90th Division! Let’s go! Mount up!’
Soldiers filtered out of the crowd to the idling Jimmy. Ben closed his eyes to listen. The jangles of rifles, bandoliers, buckles, the scuffles of boots, and the mumbles of frightened boys—none of this had been different twenty-six years earlier. The mix of jitters with grease and wool was the same on the French breeze as it had been in the other war, the one they fought to prevent this one.
He opened his eyes. The backs of his hands were not smooth anymore, but spotty, his legs were not as sure. This hurrying truck would carry him back to his old division, the 90th, where he was once young and fierce. How far was he right now from the old trenches? And what of the quarter century wedged in between? What did those years mean, when all they did was return him here? They were just mishegas, craziness. All those years were just chisels, carving a circle that led back to the beginning.
Ben climbed into the bed of the truck with a squad. The driver hit the gas the moment the last man clambered up. The sergeant had to run behind to slam the tailgate.
There were no benches in the truck bed. Soldiers clung to the rails and each other for the careering ride out of the town. Ben stood wobbling in the center, pressed against rifle stocks, web belts, packs, and shoulders. A few of the men took hold of him, laying open hands against his chest and spine to buffer the ride.
‘Thank you,’ Ben said to the closest faces. ‘What’s your MOS, soldier?’
The boy answered, ‘745, Chaplain.’
Another piped up over the jostling. ‘Hell, we’re all 745s.’
This was military jargon for riflemen. These doughboys were headed straight to the lines.
No one else spoke. A few tried to light cigarettes but gave up under the wind. To the rear, another Jimmy filled with troops closed fast. Behind it, yet another truck left the town. Emptied transports roared past, going back to Isigny. How bad is it, Ben wondered, that replacements are needed in this kind of conveyor belt?
The convoy ran west, away from OMAHA. To the north, the beaches faded behind long marshy flats and scrubby hills dotted with burned-out vehicles and tanks from the fight for Isigny. On both sides of the road, deep craters had been blasted by the mammoth Allied flights of pre-invasion bombers. Ben marveled that so many of the bombs had fallen back here instead of on the Germans’ beach defenses. That mistake must have made D-Day even more miserable for the landing forces.
One soldier, a big boy, thick chested and needing a shave, reached across a shorter man to tap Ben on the helmet.
‘Chaplain?’
Ben leaned his way to be heard. ‘Yes?’
‘You’re a Jew, ain’t you?’
‘Yes. I’m a rabbi.’ He had to shout over the truck’s passage on the bomb-rutted road. The hands holding him stiffened.
‘Well, no offense or nothin’,’ the soldier drawled out over helmets, ‘but it’s just that I ain’t seen many of y’all over here. I mean, I figured with what they say the Krauts have done, you folks’d be crawling all over France to get at ‘em. Christ, from what I heard...’
The soldier paused.
Ben asked, ‘And what do they say the Krauts have been doing?’
‘You know... Taking them out of their homes, shutting down all their shops, stickin’ ‘em in work camps and such.’
Ben put nothing on his face. ‘And such.’
‘Yeah, you know.’
Ben did not know, and with every living Jew in the world, he lived in fear of learning.
‘I’m just sayin’, if it was me,’ the soldier said. ‘No disrespect.’
‘None taken, soldier. You go get them for me, alright?’
The doughboy grinned, anointed. Ben recalled the fear that made men speak like this, to hear tough words fly from their own lips. He recalled also that it was not his mission to correct ignorance. It was his job only to see that ignorance served the purposes of the United States Army.
‘Alright, Chap! We’ll make ‘em say Uncle for you.’
One soldier angled his head in; his helmet bumped Ben’s.
The young GI whispered, ‘Don’t worry, Rabbi. We’re here good enough.’
Ben smiled and lowered his head, the boy did the same. Ben whispered back words from Joshua:
‘It was not because of your own strength nor because you were great in number, for you were the fewest of all people. But it was because the Lord your God loved you, and because He would keep the oath which He had sworn unto your fathers.’
The truck jolted through another pit in the road. Ben was held in place, but the young Jewish soldier staggered sideways. The Southern boy, the ignorant one, stuck out an arm to steady him.
~ * ~
‘It ain’t your job. Sit still.’
Boogie John smoked and stared out the windshield to the rising sun. Joe Amos fidgeted on the bench seat.
‘Man, I can’t just sit like this. I got to move.’
The big driver turned to glance in his sideview mirror back at the Quartermaster crew loading the truck bed with jerricans of gasoline.
‘What you gon’ do, College?’ he asked into the reflection. ‘Get back there and help them load up? It ain’t your job. You’re the driver.’
Joe Amos tugged on the passenger mirror to let him watch the soldiers. The men labored across the sand in a sort of bucket brigade, one slung the jerricans to the next. The last in line hoisted the five-gallon containers up to two big fellows on the bed who stacked the cans.
‘Maybe I’ll get out and watch. Stretch my legs.’
‘Yeah.’ Boogie John coughed a smoky chortle. ‘Just what I need. Sit here and listen to a bunch of white boys loading my truck while a colored man stands by and watches. Yeah, I’ll enjoy that. You go ahead, College. And I’ll shoot you.’
Boogie John tapped the two stripes on his sleeve, making the point that Joe Amos had only one.
‘Now sit still. They load it. We move it. We ain’t back in England.’
Boogie tempered his command with an offered cigarette. Joe Amos took it and a light from Boogie’s Zippo. He inhaled and pushed the passenger mirror back.
‘England was nice,’ he said. ‘Those were nice girls.’
‘Yeah,’ Boogie agreed. ‘White girls.’
Joe Amos never stopped marveling how quickly Boogie could replace a grimace with a smile.
He said, ‘And those Red Cross dances. I’m gonna miss them.’
Boogie dropped his cigarette to the floorboard and crushed it. They’d all heard stories about a driver in Cornwall who’d tossed a lit cigarette out his window while loading gasoline. Boogie’s grin departed. ‘Don’t talk to me about the Red Cross.’
‘It kept us out of trouble, Boog. When you gonna understand that?’
‘When am I... ?’
Agitated again, the driver shifted on the bench to face Joe Amos. He was wide, dark, and against him Joe Amos felt thin and pale. He never liked the way Boogie did this, lectured him, made him feel the lesser for his light skin, for his three years of college, for his desire to get along.
‘Man, you don’t know what trouble is. Segregating dances is trouble. Segregating blood by race is trouble. Separate movie halls, separate rooms at pubs. What you gonna call trouble if that ain’t it? You need a bomb to fall on your head before you call somethin’ trouble?’
With a grunt, Boogie settled back behind the steering wheel.
‘Look at these crackers back there. Wouldn’t pee on you and me if we was burnin’. And the Red Cross wouldn’t give ‘em your blood neither if t
heir lives depended on it.’ Boogie fumbled for another cigarette. ‘They Jim Crowed us back home and they gonna Jim Crow us over here. You best learn that. Damn.’
Joe Amos looked away from the man who’d been his driving partner since training camp, almost two years past. Joe Amos wouldn’t change his mind; England hadn’t been so bad. The camps were segregated, sure, but that was the way the Army worked, and they all knew it. Maybe it was Jim Crow, but England was still a hell of a lot better than Fort Lee back in Petersburg, where a black man was a nigger half the time and scared the other half. In England, you got to do your job, run-ins with white soldiers only happened in town once in a while. No one in their 688th Truck Battalion had got into any serious dustups, none that got reported, anyway. But how had Boogie survived growing up in Cleveland with that kind of anger? He’s mad about something new every day in the Army. He’s a big man, Joe Amos figured, maybe no one back home ever took him on.
David Robbins - [World War II 04] Page 2