One Man's War

by P. M. Kippert

  “You just got here, Sergeant,” Kafak said. “You can call it whatever the fuck you want.”

  Kafak walked away then.

  They trained for the next three weeks with the boat sled teams. Getting into the sleds. Traveling behind the tanks. Jumping out once they reached a point of action. They used smoke created by huge smoke-fog generators to hide their training from the Germans. Once in a while, an artillery shell or two came close, but no one got hurt. Anzio Annie paid a call one day. It left all their ears ringing but didn’t kill anyone. Kafak took a small piece of shrapnel in his wrist. It didn’t mean anything. He got it disinfected and wrapped and went right on. One day General Clark and General Truscott and some other general Kafak didn’t know came by to observe the training. See how things were coming along. They seemed impressed. To Kafak they did, anyway. But he figured you could never tell what a fucking general was thinking. They weren’t to be trusted half the time. The other half of the time, you didn’t want to listen to them at all, if you could help it.

  One day they had a ball game, just to relax. The beach made running hard, but it was a good time. Kafak played first base and hit a double. His side won 6–5. That night, a bunch of the guys sat around in a pretty large dugout, eating and talking. They heated up their cans of rations with Sterno disks. These were pinkish-colored wax disks of flammable material. About the size of a silver dollar and a quarter-inch thick. You ignited them and they burned hard and fast for about five or six minutes. Just long enough to heat up a guy’s field rations. Well, heat them up some, anyway. Kafak never used the disks at the front. He’d seen guys try to ignite them and next thing they knew they were shot by some German sniper. Or shot at, the very least. Kafak didn’t care to be shot at any more than he had to be, so he never even bothered taking the chance with the disks up front. Back here, nearer the beach, he figured it was safer. German observers might see something, but they’d have to try and shell them, and Kafak didn’t worry overmuch about that in the dugout.

  “So since we’re all gonna be dead soon,” one guy, Kafak thought his name was Bielchuck but everyone called him Upchuck, was saying, “you guys been laid yet?” There were grunts all around from the other guys, but that didn’t suit Upchuck. A guy could hide in a crowd of grunts like that. “How about you, Dash?” he asked Kafak directly. “You look like you’re about sixteen going on forty. How old are you, anyhow?”

  “I’m nineteen,” Kafak said. “Though it ain’t any of your fucking business.”

  “So you been laid? Or what?”

  “That ain’t none of your fucking business neither.”

  “Ha, ha! That means you ain’t.”

  “Fuck you, Upchuck,” Kafak said. He was smiling and shaking his head.

  He’d been laid. Twice. Once when he’d been stationed at Fort Wolters in Texas. Right after basic, a bunch of the guys had taken him to a local whorehouse and got him initiated. It had been fine. The whore had taken extra good care of him because his buddies had told her he was a first-timer. The second time had been while he’d been stationed at Camp Shenango in Pennsylvania. That time had been miserable. He’d felt like one of the cars passing through the assembly line at Ford. It was in and out and over with before he could barely take a breath. Besides which, the whore had been ugly as shit. Kafak figured the first whore he’d been with had probably been ugly, too, but he could hardly remember what she looked like, so in his mind she had become beautiful. A whore with a heart of gold. Like some fucking storybook. He knew better; it was just something he liked to hold onto.

  “Fuck you is right, Upchuck,” Marshak told Bielchuck then. Marshak had received word from Kafak that Kafak had volunteered for the boat sled teams, so Marshak had joined him. “Dash just got back from fucking Naples. You think he didn’t get laid in Naples? Everybody gets fucking laid in Naples.”

  “Not me,” Kafak said. “They got VD there that’ll kill you. Docs can’t figure out how to cure it.”

  “Fucking sulfa cures the clap,” Upchuck said.

  “Not the Naples clap,” Kafak said.

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “No, he’s right,” Marcowicz said. “I’ve heard that same shit. That Naples clap is hell on wheels, they say.”

  “Clap’s the clap,” Upchuck said, insisting on that fact.

  A corporal named Higgins shook his head.

  He said, “I was in the hospital there, and I was pretty well healed up so I helped out some for the docs, and I went into the VD tent over there. I saw this one guy had the clap so bad that the head of his cock was the size of a fucking lemon.”

  A couple guys whistled at that; a few others put down their food.

  “Fuck,” Marshak said.

  Kafak said, “Holy shit.”

  And Upchuck said, “Bull-fucking-shit, Higgie.”

  “I’m telling you what I saw,” Higgins said. “And you don’t even wanna know what they were gonna do to that motherfucker to fix him.”

  “No, we don’t,” Marshak said. And said it quickly.

  “How’d we get on this shit, anyhow?” Upchuck said. “We were talking about getting laid. Let me tell you guys a story since you’re all a bunch of fucking virgin motherfuckers anyway.”

  “Fuck you,” several of the guys said at once.

  Kafak just shook his head, and Marshak said, “Go on then, since you won’t leave us alone until you do.”

  “See, there was this guy I knew,” Upchuck said.

  “It’s always some guy somebody knew,” Higgins said.

  “Which means it was you,” Kafak said to Upchuck.

  “Fuck you guys,” Upchuck said. “You gonna listen or you wanna tell the story?”

  “Tell your fucking story,” Marshak said, grinning.

  Upchuck told them:

  “This guy I knew, this was back in the States, we’d just got done with maneuvers for basic so we’d been out in the hills for a week, ten days or so. When we got back to base, we all got a twenty-four-hour ticket, so me and this guy, let’s call him Stan, so me and Stan, we went into town for some R & R. Well, of course, we wanted to get laid, so we went to the local whorehouse. Only everyone from the goddamned camp was there before us and just back from a week in the wilderness and so they all wanted to get laid, too, so the place was too crowded for us to get in. We knocked on the door and that little window they always got slid open and the madam’s face showed and she told us they were all filled up. Her name was Beulah, I think.”

  That drew a chorus of howls.

  “Beulah, for Chrissakes,” somebody said.

  “What the fuck, Beulah?” Kafak said, and laughed.

  “Who’s telling the fucking story, goddamnit?” Upchuck said.

  “Go on, go on,” Marshak said.

  Kafak looked at Marshak. He seemed to be really interested in Upchuck’s story now. Kafak couldn’t fathom it.

  Upchuck went on:

  “Anyway, Beulah told us all the girls were busy, to come back later. So Stan and I went across the street, had a beer, and then went back. But Beulah told us she was still busy so go have another beer and try again. We did that. We did that like five times and still none of the girls were available on account of the whorehouse was so busy. Now by this time, with about seven beers under our belts, we were getting a little woozy. Stan was getting crazy to get laid. He was so fucking horny, I thought he might start humping a telephone pole or something, he needed it so bad. So he went and begged Beulah to let us in, but she said she still didn’t have any girls available. So, finally, seeing how bad off Stan was, she offered him something else. She told him she could see how hard up he was, and she could offer him something special she kept in the back room, just for emergencies such as this one. Stan asked what that was, and she told him if he really had to get laid, he could fuck Bubba in the back room.”

  Groans and hisses of disgust accompanied this. Upchuck waved them all down.

  “I know, I know,” he said, “and my pal Stan told Beulah
the same thing. He told her, ‘Now, Beulah, I don’t go for that kind of crap. You’re just gonna have to find me a gal.’ Well, Beulah told us again there weren’t any gals available so go have another beer and come back. Well, this happened a few more times, a few more beers, and by now Stan was pretty fucking drunk, see, and so that time when we went back and asked Beulah if she had any girls available and she told us no but she still could offer Bubba to Stan, Stan asked her, ‘Well, if I took you up on this offer, even though I don’t really go for that kind of crap, who would know about it?’ So Beulah told him, ‘Well, Stan, it would be just you, me, your pal there, Bubba, of course, and the six other guys.’ Stan was upset with that. ‘Six other guys?’ he said. ‘What the hell you mean, six other guys? What six other guys?’ ‘Well,’ Beulah told him, ‘the six other guys holding Bubba down. Cuz see, Bubba don’t go for that kind of crap neither!’”

  “Oh, fuck you,” somebody said.

  “You’re so full of shit,” somebody else said.

  “You son of a bitch,” Marshak told him.

  Kafak guessed Marshak was hoping for a better story. One with more sex stuff in it.

  Kafak said, “That’s a load of horsecrap. A friend of mine stationed in England wrote and told me the same exact story happened there, except for the names.”

  “Naw,” Upchuck said, “that ain’t possible. This happened to my friend Stan. Out on the West Coast, back in the States. I was there with him.”

  “Bullshit,” Higgins said. “I heard the same story in North Africa from a couple of guys.”

  “Well,” Upchuck said, shaking his head, “I guess old Stan gets around, is all I can think.”

  During the extended training, Kafak had gathered quite a few weapons, picking them up here and there. At one point, he carried an M1, a Thompson which he’d been given by the tank commander for his squad of boats since the guy had an extra one, a Springfield .03 rifle for launching rifle grenades, two Molotov cocktails for attacking tanks, and four rifle grenades. When Sergeant Staley saw Kafak in his sled, he said, “How the hell did you get in there with all that stuff?”

  “I just did,” Kafak said.

  “You really need all that shit, Kafak?”

  “I like to be ready, Sarge.”

  “Well, you look more than ready now, Kafak.”

  “I feel good about it, Sarge.”

  “Christ,” Staley said, and walked away.

  A few nights later, a bunch of guys were resting in a dugout, falling off to sleep. One of them had a radio receiver. He had it tuned in to Axis Sally. Sometimes she was about all they could pick up on Anzio. Once in a while they could get an Armed Forces radio broadcast, something like that, but mostly it was Axis Sally. She played music they liked, trying to make them homesick. She told them stories about what their girls were doing back home, fucking the 4-Fs behind their backs while they were over here in Italy getting their asses shot off. None of it bothered Kafak. He didn’t have a girl back home. This time, Axis Sally had a very personal message for the US troops.

  “I hear you boys are planning on attacking our brave men with a bunch of toy sleds. Like little children. Sliding into your deaths. You’re a great bunch of fools, if you try it. If you try something like that, you’ll all be killed. Annihilated. Listen, though, we know it’s not you, it’s not the troops who have to actually do the fighting. This is not your idea. This is some fool general’s idea. Someone who’s never been shot at in his entire life. No, but he’s willing to throw your lives away on a foolish plan like this. Battle sleds. That’s funny, when you think about it. I laughed so hard when I first heard about it. You’d laugh, too, if you didn’t have to be in those sleds. Instead, you won’t be laughing. You’ll be screaming in pain and terror as you all die.”

  It went something like that, anyway, best Kafak could make out. A hell of a thing.

  “I thought this unit was supposed to be secret,” Marshak said.

  “Can’t keep anything secret from the Krauts on this beach,” Higgins said.

  “Fucking Sally.”

  “She really knows how to hurt a guy.”

  “Well, it don’t make anything worse for me,” Marshak said. “I was already expecting it to go like shit, anyhow.” A few of the other guys laughed and agreed. “What d’you think, Dash?” Marshak asked then.

  “Fuck it,” Kafak said, rolling over on the ground. “Don’t mean nothing.”

  One night Staley came back from HQ and told all the men in his squad to report to the rear supply area for their PX ration.

  “Shit,” Marshak said, “that means we’re going soon.”

  “The next day or so, I’d guess,” Kafak said.

  “Stuff the chatter,” Staley said, walking past them.

  Marshak glared after the sergeant and waited for him to get out of earshot and then said to Kafak, “I hate these guys just out from the States. That fucker’s never been under live fire a minute of his life. And they put him in charge of us. We’re gonna get fucked, Dash.”

  “Naw,” Kafak said, looking after the departed Staley, “I figure he’ll be all right.”

  “You like that guy?” Marshak sounded like he couldn’t believe it, Kafak thought.

  Kafak shrugged.

  “Better than some second lieutenants I’ve known,” he said.

  “Well, hell,” Marshak said, “anyone’s better than a goddamned second lieutenant.”

  Down near the beach behind some headquarters buildings they received their PX rations. Beer, cigarettes, candy bars, and Barbasol shaving cream. Kafak took the stuff and walked off with the others.

  “Hell of a lot of Barbasol on that beach,” Marshak said.

  “Enough for all Naples to shave for a year,” Kafak said.

  “They might as well. We sure as hell don’t need to.”

  That night Kafak got himself ready. He cleaned and prepared his weapons. He was down to the tommy gun and the Springfield for the rifle grenades. He’d handed off the M1 to another guy who had busted the stock on his own. He drank the beer, smoked a couple of the cigarettes and stashed the rest away. He kept the candy. It was hard stuff, but it gave a guy a jolt of energy. All the troops knew when they were handed that candy that they were going into battle soon. Kafak figured it for the next day. Kafak left all his other gear behind. So did everybody else.

  “Hell,” he told a guy they all called Izzy, “you wanna supply an army, all you’d have to do is follow a unit going into battle.”

  “Sure,” Izzy said. “Everything gets left behind.”

  “Except for the important shit,” Kafak said, tapping his Thompson.

  They moved up to relieve the Forty-Fifth Division. It had rained earlier in the morning, but the sun was shining now. It poured down on them, bright and warm. The Third Division band was playing “Dog Face Soldier.”

  “There’s a hell of a thing,” Kafak said to Marshak.

  “What’s that?” Marshak asked him.

  “Such a beautiful day,” Kafak said, peering up at the sky.

  “Sure,” Marshak said. He grunted. “A beautiful day to die,” he said.

  Kafak grinned at him. He slapped him on the back. He figured that was probably what all the guys were thinking.

  “Move out,” Staley said.

  12

  The battle sled team hurried up to wait.

  It was May 23, 1944.

  The first day of the Anzio Breakout.

  They could hear the sounds of shells and scattered gunfire ahead of them. There’d been an intense artillery barrage earlier, prior to the attack. The sky was still dark at 0630 when the attack began, and the air was already suffused with the smoke and dust and smell of cordite from the thousands of shells that had been dropped. Kafak waited in a house near the front with the rest of the battle sled team. The tanks and sleds were camouflaged outside the house, nearby. Kafak glanced over at Staley. The sergeant looked calm enough for someone who’d never been in battle before. Kafak thought that a good sign
. Then he figured it only meant Staley didn’t yet know what he was in for. The lieutenant in charge of their team stood a few guys over. Kafak had never learned the lieutenant’s name. He didn’t figure he needed to know it. If the guy lasted any length of time, Kafak would learn his name then. In the meantime, why waste the effort.

  “I thought we were supposed to headline this motherfucker,” Marshak said.

  “Thought so, too,” Staley said.

  “So what the fuck happened, Sarge? Why we sitting back here holding our dicks while they’re fighting up there?”

  Staley looked at Marshak.

  “Never figured you for the blood-in-his-eyes type, Sleepy Ass,” he said.

  “I ain’t. No, don’t get me wrong, Sarge. I was only wondering, is all. I’m content to spend the entire war hanging around back here. You, Dash?”

  “Hell, I just follow orders, Sleepy Ass.”

  “Fucking soldier.”

  Staley walked back to the company commander, held a short conversation. When he came back he said, “Some genius at HQ figured out it would be better if the division attacked, and when they hit a strong point, then we’d come up to break it.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Marshak said. “Maybe they’ll cut through the Krauts like a hot knife through warm butter and we won’t have to see a single minute of action.”

  “Now you sound like the Marshak I’d expect.”

  “Hey, Sarge, we been here. We seen enough action to last a lifetime. Ain’t that right, Dash?”

  “We’ll see,” Kafak said.

  They were ordered up around noon. All of them felt thankful for the hours of carnage they had been spared. A lot of guys had already been killed or wounded. Their reprieve was over with now, though.

  Kafak hopped into his sled and waited. The tank finally started moving. He kept his head down. He was protected on the sides and front and rear. The top was wide open, though, leaving his back prey to any shell that might explode in a treetop. Or the shrapnel from a shell that hit the ground and that arced into his sled. As long as he kept his head down, though, Kafak felt pretty safe in the sled. Only he couldn’t see where they were going. The tank kept moving, first up the road, then turning this way and that. Then it stopped. They’d hit some fossas they couldn’t cross in the sleds.