“Why didn’t we hook up with those two guys, Dash? We coulda come back together. Safety in numbers, right?”
“Because,” Kafak said. He spoke quietly. Tired. He only wanted to sleep, not explain things to this new guy. He said, “I didn’t want them to see us and start shooting in the dark the way we were going to shoot at them.”
Kafak said “we” even though he hadn’t had any intention of shooting. It had just been Bentyne. Only Kafak wouldn’t say it that way. He didn’t figure it did any good to point out something like that. He didn’t figure that’s what a good leader did. Only an asshole would do something like that.
Kafak knew he had to act like a leader now. He didn’t want to. The captain had given him no choice, though. He would be a leader. At least until they got more noncoms up to the front.
Bentyne paused for a moment, and then he finally said, “Thanks, Dash.”
“For what?” Kafak said, curious. He thought Benytne was thanking him for bringing them safely back to the foxhole.
Only that wasn’t what Bentyne meant.
Bentyne said, “Thanks for not letting me shoot those guys.” Bentyne paused. Then he spoke again. “I don’t know how I woulda lived with myself if I had shot my own guys.” Another pause. “You know?” he finished.
Kafak didn’t reply right away. After a time, he did.
He said, “Fuck it.”
Bentyne grunted in the darkness of the bottom of that hole.
“That’s all?” he said. “Just fuck it?”
“It didn’t happen, Bentyne,” Kafak said.
“I know. Because of you.”
“Don’t waste time thinking about things that didn’t happen,” Kafak said.
“But that would’ve been really fucked up. You know?”
“If you want to survive this fucking shit,” Kafak said, “you don’t think about the past. You put it out of your head. You got to think about the future. About what happens next, you know? That’s what’ll keep you alive and keep you from going crazy.”
“So when do you think about the past?”
“I don’t know,” Kafak said. “Maybe when the present’s over. Or maybe never.” He paused, he sighed, then he added, “Or maybe just in another life.”
7
Kafak was a sergeant for a week. Then a bunch of new NCOs arrived at the front lines. Kafak didn’t think much of them. They were coming from the States. From home. What did they know? He didn’t even care to learn their names. Maybe they stuck around a while, he would. But not right now.
Still, he was glad he wasn’t a sergeant any longer. He didn’t like the responsibility. Cole offered to make the stripes permanent, but Kafak told him, “Fuck that. With all due respect, sir.”
Cole could have taken it another way, but he didn’t. He laughed and said, “You’re probably smarter at that, Kafak.”
Kafak figured he was. The way they were bleeding noncoms on this fucking beach, he didn’t like the odds.
Besides, despite what he had told Bentyne, he couldn’t stop thinking about things that had happened. Friends who had died. Been killed. He wondered why it was them and not him. He wondered was he not doing enough, not doing as much as they had done? Was that what had gotten them killed and kept him still here, alive?
He thought then about the men he had killed. Or might have killed. He couldn’t be sure, after all. In all the combat he’d seen, he’d always been firing when other guys were firing right next to him. So even if he pulled his trigger and saw a guy in his sights go down, a German soldier, that is, he still couldn’t say for certain that he had killed the guy, that it had been his bullet that knocked the guy down. It was the same sort of premise as a firing squad. The one rifle with a blank cartridge. The one rifle that could alleviate every conscience. Because all the members of the firing squad could believe it was they who had fired that one rifle. It was all the others who had killed the guy, and you had fired a blank. They all had that thought to hold onto. If they needed it. And even beyond that, even if it had been true, even if it had been his bullet and nobody else’s that had knocked the enemy soldier down, it still didn’t mean he, Kafak, had killed the guy. Not necessarily. Because the guy might only have been wounded. He might not have been killed.
Kafak remembered the time with the machine gun. Others had been firing then, too, to his left and right. More machine guns. Still, those Germans right in front of him. He figured they had gone down from his bullets, his machine gun. But it didn’t mean he had killed them. They could have been wounded, all right, or they could have just been ducking. He didn’t know they were dead; he didn’t know it for certain.
He believed he had killed some. He thought he had.
Only he didn’t know it.
And that made a difference. A big difference. That he could tell himself that. That he could believe in that, hold onto that. It made a huge difference.
To him, it did.
He had to stop thinking about that, though. He had to stop it and start thinking about what happens next. You can’t dwell on all the shit, he told himself. That will drive you crazy. That will break you. In your mind. You’ve got to only think about what happens next. Just get through what happens next. And then you just get through what happens next after that.
That’s how you make it through something like this.
That’s how he had to do it, anyway. That’s how he forced himself to do it.
They made another push toward Cisterna. It was to be a night attack. An assault in force but not anything like they had done at the end of January. Nothing that grand. They were hoping more for surprise to carry the day than force. Kafak thought it a damned fool’s idea. Only nobody asked him what he thought. They just ordered him to be ready one night because they were going to move up and take the town.
Like hell, they were, he thought.
One second lieutenant told Kafak and Marshak, “We don’t really figure we’ll take the entire town.”
“Then why we doing this shit, Lieutenant?” Marshak said.
“The brass is hoping we can move up far enough to settle into those burned-out buildings on the outskirts of the town. Be a better spot for our front line. Be a better jumping-off point for the next assault.”
“That sounds like shit to me,” Marshak said.
“We got orders, son,” the lieutenant said then.
Marshak looked at the second lieutenant. The guy was a pure shavetail, couldn’t be anything more than right out of college. So what? Maybe twenty-two or something, tops? That’s how Kafak had it figured. He could tell from Marshak’s face that Marshak thought so, too. And while Kafak was only a little over nineteen himself, Marshak had gone in older, was nearer thirty than twenty-five. So Marshak didn’t much care for being called “son” by some young rooster just out of ROTC or OCS. No, Marshak didn’t like that at all.
“Goddamned ninety-day wonder,” Marshak said after the second lieutenant had moved off to the next foxhole to keep the soldiers there informed about what was going on. “Can you believe that fucking idiot is gonna lead the platoon into a night battle, Dash? What the fuck is the fucking army coming to?”
“Don’t mean nothing, Sleepy Ass.”
“Like hell.”
“We’ll be back in this hole by morning.”
“Or we’ll be fucking dead.”
Marshak spat over his shoulder, the moisture lost in the mud. Kafak said nothing, but turned away and knocked lightly on the stock of his tommy gun. He wasn’t superstitious. Not really. He just couldn’t take the chance, was the thing.
That night, after full dark, they moved forward. They crawled out of their foxholes and moved up the road behind some armor. Two tanks and a couple of tank destroyers. The vehicles had to stay on the road. Kafak wondered if the Germans would send aircraft to try to knock them out. They were sort of sitting ducks, having to stay on the road like that. They had no choice, though. One tank had tried the ground next to the road and immediately sunk in. A ga
ng of GIs was now working feverishly to get the tank unstuck and moving. Otherwise it would be lost for sure come daylight. If not before.
Kafak ignored them as he passed them by. He continued on forward with the rest of his company. It was heavy slogging with all the rain and mud, even on the road. Marshak was next to him. Flares went up, a bunch of them. The entire battlefield was lit up. Kafak hit the dirt. Everyone around him hit the dirt. Shells started dropping. Mortars mostly. But Kafak heard the shrieking whistles from the fins of Nebelwerfers as well. The shavetail second looey came running forward, shouting.
“Let’s go! Let’s go!” he said.
Kafak leaped up and followed. He didn’t see if anyone else did, and then he took a chance and looked around. About half a dozen guys were running along with him and the platoon leader. The rest of the guys were much slower in getting up.
Kafak ran up behind a tank. He moved along in a crouch behind it. It fired a couple of times, but he didn’t see if it hit anything. Then there was a huge force slamming into him and an incredibly bright light. Kafak felt himself flying through the air. He landed off to the side of the road in mud. He sank in. A soft landing, at least, he thought. He shook his head and checked himself. Nothing. No wounds. His bones felt rattled and his lungs burned. Only the force of the explosion. He looked for its source. The tank he’d been walking behind was on fire. It had been hit by an antitank gun.
“Shit,” Kafak said.
“Ain’t nowhere safe in this fucking war,” Marshak said. He laughed, helping Kafak to his feet.
“Goddamned tanks.”
“You’re just asking to draw fire. Stick with me, Dash.”
They moved on in their crouches. More mortar shells were blowing but nothing close enough to make Kafak hit the deck. Then he thought he heard one, and he went flat in the mud, just the side of the road. He was looking up from under the lip of his helmet when the shell exploded. He saw the new lieutenant go up in pieces and come down in smoke. Wisps of the stuff curled off his uniform in the cold, wet night air.
“Jesus Christ,” Kafak said. “Fucking cocksuckers.”
“Well,” Marshak said, “that fucker didn’t last long.”
“They never fucking do.”
Kafak stood up and ran forward. Marshak followed him. They stopped and started duckwalking when they came to the back of a pack of men. They didn’t know if these guys were any part of L Company, their company, but they tagged along with them. It all ended up the same, in the end, Kafak figured. They were all moving toward their objective.
Another tank got hit, and then the infantry Kafak was with had outdistanced the armor. They were moving across the open field, the burned-out buildings within sight. This area had been thoroughly shelled already and kept under fairly constant cover, so Kafak didn’t worry overmuch about mines. He couldn’t see where the Germans would have had the time to re-mine the area. He kept moving steadily forward.
Small arms fire opened up on them then. They all dropped to the ground. MG42s ripped the air apart just above them.
“I hate those fucking Kraut machine guns,” the guy next to him said. “You can’t even hear a pause between the fucking shots.”
“They go quick, all right,” Kafak agreed.
“Fucking Germans,” the guy said.
Kafak crawled through the mud, moving forward. He hoped other guys were as well. It had gone dark again now, though, so he couldn’t be sure. The rain and the clouds splintered the moonlight so you couldn’t see more than a few yards in any direction. He heard shouts, though. Shells exploding. Guns firing. More shouting. He figured, from the yelling he could hear, that he was moving in the right direction. He’d lost all contact with Marshak. He kept crawling forward. The mud sucked at him, tried to hold him in place, but he elbowed and kneed his way through it. Some of it plopped onto his glasses. He didn’t bother trying to clean it just then. It made no difference to him right now, the little he could see anyway in the darkness.
Some more flares went up; he saw their comet tails. He waited for it, hiding his eyes, sinking as low into the ground as he was able. Then everything turned bright, and the German machine gunners let loose an even stronger barrage of fire. A guy right next to Kafak grunted and stopped moving. Kafak pushed on his shoulder. The guy fell back. He didn’t move. His eyes were open. Kafak knew the guy was dead. Kafak crawled forward.
In the fading light of the flare, Kafak could see one of the buildings, one of their targets, nearby. The building stood maybe forty yards away. Mortar shells were still dropping, but most of them were blowing behind where Kafak sprawled now. There were plenty of Germans in the building, though. Kafak could feel the intensity of the small arms fire coming from them. He kept low and hoped nothing hit him.
He wasn’t alone. About a dozen guys were scattered around him. They all hugged the earth as well. They were all screaming. Not in terror, maybe not even in anger. Just screaming. “Fuckshitcocksuckersonofabitchgoddamnedfuckingshiteatingfuckercocksuckerbastardfucks!”
Kafak’s voice blended right in.
Then some sergeant Kafak didn’t recognize dropped into the mud between Kafak and another guy. He yelled to the nearby troopers.
“On my three we rush that fucking building!” he told them.
“What the fuck? You crazy?”
Kafak heard someone say that. It sounded, he thought, like Marshak’s voice.
“On my three!” the sergeant said again, sounding more stern about it.
Then he counted it off. On three Kafak leaped up, figuring everyone else would as well. He could feel the other guys around him. They all ran.
“Fucking cocksuckers!” Kafak said.
He fired his Thompson as he ran forward, shouting.
He felt a guy beside him drop. Others nearby were falling as well. Kafak didn’t actually see them get hit or get knocked down. He more sensed it. He just could tell it was happening, was the thing.
He kept running. He ran hard. He knew now the only safety was to reach one of the still-standing walls of that building and press himself flat against it. Then the German guns couldn’t reach him. He ran harder. Shouted harder. Fired and emptied his clip. Without a break in his steps, he dropped the empty clip and inserted another. Started firing that one as well. He didn’t know if he hit anyone. Didn’t know if he hit anything at all, really. He just fired through the darkness.
Then he heard the whoosh and saw the comet tail, and he said “Oh fucking shit!” and threw himself forward and down upon the ground. He was maybe ten yards away from the building and realized once that flare went off he was dead meat. He tried to get back up, realizing he’d made a damned stupid mistake in dropping to the ground. He felt something sting him and spin him around, and then he fell again. This time, not his idea. He fired toward the building as he dropped. On the ground, breathing heavily and feeling like a bullet would smash into him at any second, he pulled out a grenade, popped the pin, threw it toward the house. He threw it high. Didn’t want it bouncing back at him off the wall. He tossed it over the top of the wall where the roof had been burned away. He heard the explosion even as he was throwing another one. The second landed within the building as well. He jumped up and started running again. Other guys were tossing their grenades, too. Firing. He was firing. There was a lot less fire coming from the building now.
He reached the wall. Fell against it. The sergeant stood just the other side of a window from him. He nodded at Kafak. Together they flipped a couple more grenades into the building, ducked back as they blew. Then the sergeant climbed through the window. Kafak jumped in right behind him.
Inside, all the Germans were dead. Some had been shot but most had been hit by shrapnel from grenades. Kafak saw two machine guns and their two-man crews. Another four Germans with burp guns. No rifles. That probably saved their asses, he thought. The machine guns all sprayed their loads, but a rifleman could have drawn a bead on a particular guy. Maybe Kafak.
Kafak didn’t want to cons
ider that.
That didn’t happen, he told himself.
What did happen was, they had taken the building. The objective. Kafak felt elated.
The sergeant started preparing their defensive positions within the building. One of the guys there somehow knew how to use the MG42. The second one had been destroyed by a grenade’s explosion. The sergeant had the working machine gun turned around to face for the inevitable counterattack.
“Think they’ll be coming?” somebody asked.
Foolish question. Had to be a new guy. First battle.
“They’ll be coming,” the sergeant said. “Just a matter of when.”
“Maybe our artillery can keep them off us,” Marshak said.
“That’s wishful thinking,” someone else said.
“Sure,” Marshak said, “like a fucking Christmas present.”
“Christmas is long over,” Kafak said.
“Fuck you, boys,” Marshak said. “Get a little optimism, why don’t you?”
They all had set up in positions facing Cisterna and the German lines. They couldn’t see a goddamned thing in the darkness.
“Fuck,” Kafak said.
“I wish we had a light,” Marshak said.
A few minutes ago, they had dreaded the German flares; now, they prayed for one.
They knew the Allies wouldn’t send anything up just now because their attack was predicated on the darkness. On surprise. They wouldn’t give away their own positions.
The sergeant was moving back and forth behind the men as they knelt or stood in firing positions. He kept telling them to be ready, stay alert. Like they might do anything else. Kafak understood, though. He was bucking up their spirits. Good leadership. Kafak felt the sergeant stop next to him.
“Soldier,” the sergeant said.
“Yeah, Sarge?” The sergeant nodded toward Kafak’s biceps. His jacket there was drenched in blood. “Shit,” Kafak said, a surprised mutter. “What the fuck?”
One Man's War Page 8