One Man's War

by P. M. Kippert

  Kafak understood that thinking. The longer they remained here, making this kind of racket, behind enemy lines, the greater grew the chance of German reinforcements arriving. And once reinforcements arrived, the entire patrol would be either dead or prisoners.

  Cole started to give orders for Henderson and the sergeant to flank around to the barn foundation when the two Germans on the ground leaped up and darted to the chicken coop. They disappeared behind it. Cole yelled to the others.

  “Keep fire on them!” he said. “Sergeant, take Henderson and Kafak and—”

  His voice was cut off by the rip of a machine gun. Coming from the chicken coop.

  “So that’s why those fuckers wanted to get over there so bad,” the sergeant said. “Fuck.”

  Cole frowned, thinking. After a few more seconds of that bonecutter battering toward them, he cursed.

  “Fucking shit,” he said.

  “What say, Captain?” the sergeant asked.

  “No way we can get to them now before they get help out here. Best thing for it, we skedaddle the fuck out of here. Shit. Come on, boys! Fall back!”

  Kafak slipped out of the crater and ran hard in a darting crouch for a row of rocks. He jumped behind them. Marshak dropped in right beside him.

  “Goddamn! It sure got hot, Bobby!” he said.

  “Got that right. Fuckin-A.”

  “You sure did move your ass,” Marshak said, and laughed, teasing Kafak.

  “Yeah,” the sergeant said. “Some dash, all right.”

  Marshak laughed some more, and Kafak said, “Your gun jammed with a bunch of Krauts on top of you, I hope you end up moving that fast.”

  “Got that right,” Marshak said, grinning.

  “Well get off your asses and start moving fast right now. We gotta get the fuck outta here. Now!”

  The sergeant was up and running then. Marshak leaped up and followed, calling out over his shoulder.

  “Let’s go, Dash!”

  Kafak figured he had a new nickname.

  And he didn’t mind it a bit.

  6

  They leapfrogged as they had done earlier, removing themselves from the firefight. They were halfway back to their lines, once more in the cover of the drainage ditch, water creeping up their legs, when Kafak knew the German reinforcements had arrived. He knew because a parachute flare had gone up, turning the darkness bright off in the distance where the farmhouse had been.

  They were well and gone from there now.

  They crossed back into their lines and didn’t get shot. Kafak figured that for a plus.

  Cole told him, “Good job triggering that ambush before they were ready for us, Kafak.”

  “Sure thing, Cap,” Kafak said, only he wasn’t sure that was exactly what he had done, but he felt grateful the captain thought it was.

  He noticed, too, he had gone from “Bob” back to “Kafak.”

  He didn’t mind that, though. It meant they were safe again, within their own lines.

  Well. As safe as that could make them. It was all a relative thing when you were on Anzio.

  More patrols followed that first one over the next weeks. Kafak still felt the adrenaline rush for the next couple times, but after half a dozen runs, patrols became a matter of course for him. Once they even captured a German. He’d been hiding in a hole, out of ammunition, his clothes barely rags, only the mud caked on them holding them together. He’d been happy enough to surrender. They took him in. He begged for food. Kafak always wondered if the guy had told the brass anything interesting. The only thing Kafak thought about him at the time was how hungry he seemed.

  “He must’ve been lost out there for some while,” Kafak said to Marshak.

  “Yeah,” Marshak said, “it don’t seem like the rest of ’em are all that hungry. Except for our asses.”

  “They’d spit yours out anyway, raggedy as it is.”

  “Fuck you, Dash.”

  A couple of the patrols turned into firefights like that first one had. They were the bad ones. In one of them, Collins got hit. He didn’t die, though. He had to be evacuated to the hospital at Naples. Kafak wondered whether he survived or not, in the end. Then Kafak forgot about him. They had a new sergeant then. A guy named Jerrigan. He only lasted eight days, and then he got hit, too. He died, though. They were running out of noncoms. One day Cole came to their foxhole. Kafak was sharing it with Marshak, Bentyne, and Stoddard.

  “How’s it hanging, boys?” Cole said.

  They were all eating lunch out of the can. Kafak had stew today.

  “Gotta have a cast-iron stomach for this shit,” he said.

  “I don’ know,” Stoddard said. “This shit’s bettuh’n what I ate ’fo I’s in the army.”

  Stoddard was from the Deep South; he had that accent.

  “What, you were in fucking prison?” Kafak said.

  “Nah, we was jus’ po’.”

  “Hell, I was poor, but my ma could make something good outta nothing.”

  “Yeah, this ain’t home cooking, that’s for sure,” Marshak said. Then he said to Cole, “When we gonna get a chance to get some real food, Cap?”

  “Where you expect to get that, Sleepy Ass?” Cole asked.

  “You know, back in Naples. Or Casablanca. Or New York City. As far away from here as you wanna send me.”

  “Nobody gets off this beach, Marshak. You know that.”

  “No R & R at all, Cap? That just ain’t right.”

  “I know,” Cole said. “I know it’s not. Believe me. The top brass know it’s a problem, too. It’s just nothing much can be done about it. It’s how things are.” Then he changed the subject abruptly, making it clear this was not a thing he much wanted to discuss, and said, “Kafak, you’re acting sergeant until we get some new NCOs up here from Naples.”

  “Me, Cap? What the fuck?”

  “You, Kafak. Until further notice.”

  “Hey, let me be the sarge, Captain.”

  “What the fuck you think this is, Marshak? There’s no fucking contest here. This is the goddamned army or hadn’t you noticed the people shooting at you?”

  “Aww, he gets that at home, too,” Kafak said.

  “Yeah, evuh Sat’day night,” Stoddard said.

  They laughed, and Marshak told them, “Yeah, that’s what happens every time I’m with your wife.”

  That only made them laugh harder, and Bentyne said, “He ain’t even married, you dumb fuck.”

  “Oh, maybe that was your sister, then.”

  They were still laughing and going back and forth when Cole motioned to Kafak to follow him. Kafak looked around. It was daylight. He didn’t want to leave the hole during daylight. Cole tossed a couple smoke grenades, and they moved off. They found a small depression not far off from Kafak’s hole and lay down next to one another.

  “What’s up, Cap?” Kafak asked.

  “Those boys keeping up with their shoepac discipline?” Cole said.

  “Sure thing, sir. We know better than to miss it. We seen too many black feet.”

  “Good, good. We just don’t have the NCOs up here right now to keep things together. Too many getting killed or wounded.”

  And now you made me one, Kafak thought, but didn’t say. Thanks a fucking lot.

  Cole was quiet then for a while, and Kafak could sense he was thinking about something. So finally Kafak, not wanting to stay out here any longer than he had to since the smoke was already starting to be rained away, said, “Something else, Cap?”

  “Yeah,” Cole said. “Yeah, there is.” He sighed and looked back at the hole they’d just come from. “I know things are tough for you boys, Kafak. The fucking weather, the patrols, being shelled every fucking goddamned day. And never knowing when some smart-ass fucking sniper’s going to take a potshot at you. I get it. We all get it. General Truscott is very concerned about the fact that this shit, this tension of being near constant death and this depression over seeing your friends get shot up, and this fucking rain and
this fucking cold and all the rest of it can destroy morale. Thing is, just not a lot we can do about it right now. We just don’t have the men to let anybody off the beach unless they’re dead or dying. You know?”

  “Sure, Cap. I get it.”

  “So tell it to me straight, then. How’s the morale with your folks, there, in your hole?”

  Kafak shrugged.

  “What you’d expect, sir. They ain’t happy.”

  “How’re they acting?”

  “They’re soldiers, sir. We’re all soldiers.”

  “Which means?”

  “We want to go home but know we can’t. So we spend our days bitching and ducking.”

  Cole grunted. He seemed to like the answer, Kafak thought.

  Then he said, “And patrolling. I want you to take one or two of the guys out tonight, Kafak. Make sure we got no infiltrators close by.” Cole paused, looked at Kafak, said, “You do that for me?”

  “You got it, Captain,” Kafak said.

  He’d taken it as an order, anyway. Cole might want to make it sound like a request, but Kafak knew better. Some general or colonel or someone who’d never seen the front, never stepped foot in the goddamned mud, wanted to send some men out and told Cole so. Cole passed it on to Kafak. Kafak knew he wouldn’t be the only one. There’d be other guys on other parts of the line doing the same thing. He didn’t hold it against Cole. He held it against the son of a bitch general or colonel who never set foot on the fucking front line. That son of a bitch he had no use for. That son of a bitch he hated more than the Germans.

  That night Kafak took Bentyne. He wouldn’t take Marshak because he didn’t trust Marshak to respect his temporary promotion. Marshak and he had been together too long. Marshak only thought of him as Kafak, the guy he shared his foxhole with for what seemed like forever. Marshak wouldn’t take any orders from Kafak, and Kafak knew it. So he took Bentyne. He could have taken Stoddard, too, but he remembered Cole had said one or two, and Kafak figured best not to chance two more guys besides himself. Only the one. Especially since he was in charge of the thing. He didn’t want to be responsible for that, for seeing two guys killed or wounded. Or even one, for that matter, but he had no choice in that.

  Bentyne told Kafak he’d been on patrol before. Kafak didn’t know for sure. He’d only met Bentyne a week earlier. He took him at his word. They left all their noisemakers in their packs in the foxhole with Marshak and Stoddard. They were already at the front line, so Kafak passed the word along to the foxholes to either side of them not to shoot at them when they came back through the lines. They all went over the password. Before he left, Kafak smiled and told Marshak, “Now don’t go shooting at me just cuz you’re jealous I got made sergeant instead of you, you bastard.”

  “Hell, that don’t worry me none, Dash. No way you could keep any stripes, even if they were given to you for real. Which they ain’t, you’ll notice, cuz the captain don’t trust you any more than I do, pal.”

  “Green ain’t a good color on you, Sleepy Ass.”

  “Tell it to the fucking army, buddy.”

  Kafak and Bentyne started off. They lowered themselves into one of the numerous fossas, those drainage ditches that sliced everywhere through the beach. The entire area had been just one huge swamp before the war. Mussolini drained it all to create this area as a demonstration of the good Fascism could do for the country. Kafak had heard the story. It was one reason the area was so tough on armored vehicles. Most of the ground, when not mud, still ran wet just below the surface. Get off the roads and you’d likely crunch through the surface ground and get yourself stuck. That’s what the tankers said anyway, when Kafak had a chance to talk to them at the rear, once or twice. The ditches came in handy now for the Allies to move about. The Germans, too, come to that. Kafak and Bentyne walked along first one, then another, then another. About six inches of water filled the bottom of the ditches this night. Not so bad as some other times. They still had to be careful not to rattle it, not to make too much noise slopping through the stuff. They’d gone miles and miles in the ditches. It felt that way to Kafak. They hadn’t seen or heard anything German the entire time. They would stop every so often and listen for what they could hear above them on the ground surrounding the ditch they happened to be in at the time. They heard only the sounds of the night. Quiet. An occasional shell exploding, lobbed by one side or the other just for the hell of it. No other reason than that. Once in a while they might hear a single bullet, a sniper’s call, but those were always far off in the distance. Twice the Germans sent up flares. Kafak and Bentyne ducked low in the ditch. They waited out the light. Nobody shot at them, and that was a good thing.

  After a couple of hours of this sneaking around in the ditches, Bentyne said, “You figure we oughtta go topside, see if we can see anything more that way?”

  “Why?” Kafak said. “You think we should?”

  “I don’t know. You’re the sergeant.”

  “Fuck that.”

  “Well, sure, then. I think it might be a good idea. Really get an idea of the lay of the land, you know?”

  “How fucking long you been on Anzio, Bentyne?” Kafak said.

  “Not so long as you, Dash, that’s for sure.”

  “All right,” he said at last. Feeling resigned. “Let’s crawl out of this muck. See what we can see.”

  Bentyne nodded and smiled. He seemed really to want to leave their cover, Kafak thought. The guy had to be crazy. He’d take Stoddard next time, he thought to himself. If there were a next time.

  They scrambled out of the ditch, slipping in the mud a little but keeping as quiet as they were able. Up on the lip of the ditch, they lay flat. Kafak looked around. He noted the shadows, the formations of rocks and trees around. He looked for anything unusual in the outlines. He didn’t see anything. He waited to see if they had been noticed. He waited to be shot at.

  When he wasn’t, he said, “Come on,” to Bentyne.

  Bentyne started to get up, and Kafak slammed a hand onto his back, forcing him back down into the mud.

  “What the fuck?” Bentyne said.

  “That’s what the fuck, Sarge, to you,” Kafak said.

  “Well, what the fuck, Sarge?”

  They spoke in low, hissing whispers. Kafak still worried they carried too far in the night. Better not to talk at all, but sometimes a guy had to.

  “Let’s just crawl for a while,” Kafak said.

  “What? In this fucking slop?”

  “You wanna be dirty or you wanna be dead?”

  “. . . Right then,” Bentyne said.

  They crawled farther away from the drainage ditch. They reached a low row of rocks. Kafak looked around. Not a German in sight. Not a messed-up shadow around, either. He figured it safe to move in the usual manner, and he patted Bentyne on the arm and motioned him up. They moved in that crouching walk then, covering ground more quickly than in the watery ditch, but still moving carefully, slowly. Eyes open.

  After nearly forty minutes of this and finding no infiltrators, no Germans even moving toward the Allied lines, Kafak suddenly stopped. He put up his hand. Bentyne stopped. Bentyne looked at Kafak. Kafak frowned and pointed to what he was looking at, what had halted him. Kafak saw two figures. They were a good distance away. In the darkness, they were just two shadowy figures in a ditch. But Kafak could see that they were moving carefully, sneaking about. He thought they might be infiltrators. Germans.

  Bentyne raised his M1, started to draw a bead on the men.

  Kafak put a hand on his arm.

  “Wait,” Kafak said.

  “What?” Bentyne said.

  “Give it a second.”

  “They’ll be on top of us, Dash. I don’t need them shooting back at me. We need to shoot now.”

  There wasn’t enough light from the crescent moon to see the men clearly. They were only outlines of men. Men carrying guns, that could be seen. But the uniforms couldn’t be made out.

  Kafak said, “They could be
our guys.”

  “I don’t want to find out they ain’t once they’re already on top of us.”

  “Just let’s see.”

  “Fuck that, Dash. It’s like deer hunting, you know? You fucking shoot the deer when you fucking see the deer. Cuz you might not get another chance to shoot the fucking deer.”

  “Just fucking wait,” Kafak said.

  “But—”

  ”That’s a fucking order, Bentyne.”

  They waited. They lay down in the mud, and Bentyne drew a nervous bead on the two approaching soldiers. Kafak could tell Bentyne was nervous. He could feel the jumpiness in Bentyne’s body lying next to his own. Kafak wondered if Bentyne really had been on a patrol before. He had seemed all right until now. He’d done everything else right. And what the hell? Kafak asked himself. Maybe Bentyne was the one doing things right now as well, wanting to shoot those soldiers before they alerted, before they reached a position where they could shoot back effectively at Kafak and Bentyne. Kafak sure as hell didn’t want to get into any firefight all the way out here. Alone. Maybe Bentyne was right and Kafak was wrong.

  “Shit,” Bentyne said then.

  He stopped being nervous. Kafak could feel the tension drain out of Bentyne. Kafak saw why. The uniforms could be made out now. The helmets were telling. They were US. Their own guys.

  Bentyne started to rise up, and Kafak grabbed him and pulled him flat.

  “Don’t move,” he said, a low whisper.

  Bentyne looked at him, curious.

  “What’s up, Dash? Those guys are ours.”

  “Yeah, they are,” Kafak said. He even recognized one of them now. A guy called Riggsby. Still, Kafak didn’t move.

  “What’s going on?” Bentyne said.

  “Just wait.”

  They did. They waited until Riggsby and his partner had passed by their position. Kafak still made Bentyne wait until Riggsby and the other guy were out of sight. Even after that, Kafak waited another ten minutes or so.

  Then he rose up and started off. Bentyne didn’t say another word. Kafak headed back to their lines.

  Once they had reached their foxhole, they lay down to sleep. Since they had taken patrol, Marshak and Stoddard took the first watch. Sprawled there in the mud, nothing but a misting rain to wash off the filth, Bentyne turned to Kafak and whispered.