Kafak nodded.
“Sure thing, Cap,” he said.
Kafak patted the captain on his chest, softly, and then moved away as the stretcher was fastened into the bed of the truck. He stepped off and found a corpsman.
The medic asked him, “You one of the guys who brought Captain Cole back?”
“What about it?”
“Lieutenant Kravits wants to get all you guys a medal for doing it.”
“That fucker is medal-happy. Jesus Christ. You’d think he’d never been in a motherfucking war before.”
“Some officers are like that. Show their appreciation, you know?”
Right, Kafak thought. Order you to stay behind enemy lines and take on a fucking tank and then, if you live through it, show you how much they appreciate it. What kind of shit was that, he wondered.
He said, “He gonna be all right?”
“Who? Captain Cole?”
“Yeah.”
“Sure, he’ll be fine. Had some broken ribs, a busted leg. He ought to be up and about in no time. They’ll likely send him back here, if we’re still fighting in six weeks.”
If we’re still fighting in six weeks.
For some reason, those words struck Kafak. He’d never thought about things like that before, not until the medical corpsman had put it into words in that way. Could all of this really be over in six weeks’ time? Was that even possible? Kafak didn’t think so. On the other hand, the officers kept telling them the Allies were making tremendous progress on the northern European front. They would likely hook up, the two armies, one coming south, their own heading north, any time now. Soon. Everyone was certain it would be soon. Kafak didn’t feel so certain about that. He knew the Germans were retreating, but then they’d turn on the Americans and fight like hell, and there’d be more casualties, more guys killed. They’d fight a quick rearguard action during the daylight and then, when darkness covered them, they retreated to the next place from which they wanted to ambush the Americans. Kafak didn’t think the fight had gone out of the German army just yet.
Six weeks?
No, Kafak didn’t figure on that. He figured it would go a lot longer than six more weeks. He’d be surprised if it ended in six more months.
He put the thoughts out of his head along with the corpsman’s words. He understood what had so suddenly struck him about those words, what had gnawed at him so abruptly and oddly. The words had given him hope. Kafak hadn’t felt hope in a while and that was why it felt so strange to him. He didn’t like that it felt strange to him, but he understood why it did. He didn’t want to feel that hope. Hope, he figured, was the sort of thing that could get a guy killed. Just live through the day you were in. Just focus on that and get through that. Reach tomorrow. And once you did that, focus on that day until you reached the next one. Every day, you did that, and every day you survived was one day closer to the end. But to hope for the end at any given point, that wasn’t going to help him. That wasn’t about to help anyone.
Kafak stopped hoping.
He returned to his squad and they soon moved out once again. The cold grew colder and the rain started up. September weather came and got worse. Still not as bad as Anzio, where it seemed the rain never stopped and the mud never ended. You could never get out of the rain and the cold on Anzio. Not until the spring had come. And that got ruined by the Breakout. Here, it was different. At night, you often got to bed down in a building, under a roof. Out of the rain. Sometimes, even out of the cold. That was good. Better than Anzio, that was for sure.
Kafak was pretty filthy after the fight in the drainage ditch, so the rain felt all right on him as he marched. He threw his face up to the sky, let the raindrops fall on his face, cleansing him. He didn’t think about what had happened in that ditch. He concentrated on bringing Cole back safely. He focused on marching and keeping an eye and ear out for the enemy. No time to think about yesterday if you wanted to live through today. He focused on today. There’d be time to remember yesterday, all the yesterdays, later, afterward, when it was all over. And if he didn’t live through it, that was all right too, he figured, because then he would never have to remember it. Not any of it.
Kafak stopped thinking.
He marched.
18
More firefights. More rearguard actions by the Germans. They lost Anzini. Then Billings and Postlethwaite and Hodecki. Waszinsky bought it from a sniper in some town the name of which Kafak couldn’t even remember. He and Carter kept going. Lieutenant Kravits was killed by a mine one day.
“Well,” Kafak said, “there goes our medals.”
“That’s a shame,” Carter said. “Cuz the girls, they like them medals.”
“Fuck it,” Kafak said.
They came to a farmhouse. A new captain was in charge of the company now, and he’d only been with them about a week, since Cole had been evacuated. He’d been in the war a little longer than that, though. At least, that’s what he had told them. The company hunkered down on the crest of a hill, looking down on the farmhouse, and the captain decided they should rush the building before the Germans could form up their defense. He ordered the men to charge. The entire company ran forward screaming and firing and attacking that farmhouse. Only the farmhouse was empty. Not a German in sight. And, thank God, Kafak thought, not the French owners of the house either. They’d have been dead by now with all the firepower the men of L Company had poured onto that building. Some of the men searched the house with the captain while the rest surrounded the outside and kept watch. Kafak saw movement by a woodpile that stood a good thirty yards from the front of the house. A woodpile that was located behind them now, surrounded by high brush. He elbowed Carter.
“Lookit that,” he said.
Carter looked.
“Well, oh my shit, will you lookee there?”
They saw two German officers slipping out of the woodpile, through the brush, trying to sneak away into the nearby woods. Both of them held pistols and looked harried. Kafak laughed.
“Should we capture them ol’ boys?” Carter asked.
“Fuck it,” Kafak said. “What good are they to us?”
“Make us look good to the new captain.”
“Fuck that. Fuck him. Those bastards are alone behind enemy lines. They can’t hurt nobody. Let the motherfuckers go.”
But some of the other guys had seen them, too, and they weren’t in as forgiving a mood as Kafak. They started firing at the Germans. Instead of surrendering, the Germans only ran faster. A couple of the riflemen picked them off then. The two Germans went down.
“Two less, I guess,” Carter said.
“Sure,” Kafak said. “What’s the difference?”
Some men went to see if the German officers were dead or alive. Turned out they were both dead. The captain came back out of the house and reamed them all for killing the German officers. “They would have made good prisoners,” he told them all. “They probably could’ve provided some really good intel.” Nobody said anything back. You didn’t argue with an officer. Not like that, anyway. The captain shook his head, looking sour, said, “Well, nothing more to do here, anyhow, let’s go, men.” They marched on, up the hill that rose gradually behind the house. They reached the top of the hill and looked down onto a long valley stretching out before them. A road ran through it, from left to right as they viewed it.
“Hey, watch over there,” Carter said, pointing.
A bunch of the guys were pointing, indicating a lone German soldier coming down that road. The guy was on a bicycle and pedaling for all he was worth. A couple of guys took potshots at him, but he was out of range. The Kraut was hunkered down and pumping hard on that bike, moving fast. Trying to escape the approaching Allied forces. Some of the guys made jokes about it and then the regimental commander arrived and he had a tank with him, a kind of bodyguard, Kafak figured. The captain greeted him and pointed out the German. The colonel told his tanker to see if he could hit the soldier. The gunner took a few shots, but
he couldn’t hit the guy. That German was just too small a target that far off and moving way too damned fast. The guys were whooping it up at the near misses, though, and the colonel told his tank gunner, “I’m going to have to send you back for some target practice, son.” The gunner’s face was red, and everybody was giving it to him, including Kafak. He and Carter were laughing with most of the others. Only the newer guys weren’t laughing. They looked embarrassed, exchanging glances.
“This ain’t right,” a guy named Clarkson said to Kafak.
He’d only just joined them a few days earlier. The farmhouse had been the only combat he’d seen so far, and Kafak didn’t figure that counted since no one was shooting back at them. That made it nothing more than an exercise in assaulting an empty farmhouse.
Kafak shrugged.
“I guess I oughtta feel bad about it, too,” he said.
“You don’t, though, do you?” the newbie said.
Kafak paused, frowned, then said, “I felt a little bad, at first. Then I think about Sleepy Ass and Anzini and Andover and Coo and I don’t feel so fucking bad about that motherfucking Kraut anymore. No.”
“Still,” the new guy said. “You ought to.”
Kafak looked at him.
“See what you think in another few months,” Kafak told him.
“If you last that long,” Carter said.
“Don’t fucking jinx me,” the new guy said and moved off.
Kafak and Carter looked back to the pedaling German, but they weren’t laughing any longer. Kafak fell silent until the guy was nearly out of sight, and then he spit and he said, “You know something, Bama?”
“What’s that, Dash?”
“That right there,” and he pointed down toward the road with his chin, “that’s why we’re gonna win this war.”
Carter frowned at him.
“Why?” he asked. “Because some tank gunner can’t hit a single solitary Kraut on a goddamned bike?”
“No,” Kafak said. “Because some tank gunner can waste half a dozen shells firing at a single solitary Kraut on a goddamned bike.”
“I don’t get it, Dash.”
“It’s how come everybody should know, should always have known, that we were going to win this fucking war. Because we can waste all that time and all that ammo on one guy who’s no harm to anyone, just wearing the wrong uniform. What other country in this thing can compete with resources like that? You know?”
“I suppose you’re right, sure,” Carter said. “But resources or not, we still gotta fight to win this thing.”
“Sure,” Kafak said. “Sure, we do.”
Things began changing then because they were nearing the Vosges Mountains. The mountains offered natural defensive positions and were as far as the German army wanted to go. No more hit-and-run, no more rearguard actions, no more fight until dark and slip away. Now it was going to be all-out battles for every scrap of ground. Artillery fire picked up. They hadn’t seen a tank in over a week, and now they found fucking Panzers every time they turned around. The mountains were tough going, covered with trees and brush, and the rain didn’t help anything either. The rain came down steady and created a mist throughout the entire woods. Visibility couldn’t have been more than fifty feet. They had a new lieutenant as well as their new captain, a guy named Holbrooke, and Holbrooke came to them one day and told them, “We’re loading up on some trucks, boys. They’re moving us up to relieve the Thirty-Sixth. They’re already in the foothills of the Vosges, and we’re gonna give them a rest while we kick some Nazi butt. Let’s go.” They piled into trucks, with only the new guys fired up by the new lieutenant’s speech. Then, when the trucks started off, carting the regiment toward the front line and the heavy sounds of fighting, the new guys’ faces began reflecting not excitement or energy but fear. Kafak didn’t figure there was anything wrong with that. They ought to be afraid, was what he thought. Hell, he was afraid. He’d been through a few battles and plenty of firefights and countless number of patrols and scouts, and every time, every single time, he still felt afraid. And he didn’t believe anyone who said they weren’t. If you weren’t afraid, you must be crazy. And he would always take the former alternative to the latter. Kafak didn’t want to be anywhere near a guy who wasn’t afraid. That guy would get you killed. Kafak would take a frightened soldier any time. So long as they guy could fight through that fear and do the job he was supposed to do. That’s all Kafak asked of anybody in the company. In the entire division.
Kafak was already sitting at the back on one of the trucks, waiting while the others loaded, Carter across from him, when the captain came up. He was carrying a BAR, and he held it up, showing everyone in the truck. “Any volunteers?” he asked.
They knew what he meant. Volunteers to take the BAR. No one spoke up. One of the new guys started to but then took an elbow from the guy next to him and shut up. Quick. Nobody wanted to volunteer for BAR duty in a squad. The going rate for a BAR gunner in combat was all of about thirty seconds. And that was no exaggeration and all the veterans in that truck knew it. Since it was the heaviest firepower a squad carried, the Germans had learned pretty quickly to target the guy carrying the light machine gun. That was why they supposedly always gave the BAR to the smallest guy in the outfit, the hardest target. Kafak had seen no evidence of that kind of selective assignment for the gun. Guys just somehow ended up with it. Anyway, Kafak thought, it didn’t really matter how small you were, a bullet could always find you. Or a shell. Or a mine. Something.
The captain waited it out for a couple of seconds, and when no one spoke up, he handed the gun up to Kafak.
“Here,” he said. “You take it, Kafak. You were a BAR gunner before, right?”
Kafak had been. Once when a new guy, Judson, had transferred into the company from the States, he came trained out on and carrying a BAR. One of the new ones that didn’t foul so easily when you cleaned it and didn’t jam and break down so much as the ones they’d had earlier in the war. Judson lasted a day with the squad, and then he got killed. Riddled by machine pistol fire in a small firefight outside a tiny French village. Kafak had been assigned the BAR then and had used it for about four days before a new guy shipped in and Kafak passed it over. The new guy seemed happy to have the BAR. Now, he was dead, too, only just yesterday, in a shelling. So now Kafak had it again.
Carter said, “That ain’t right, Captain. Dash done his time on the BAR.”
“You want it?” the captain said, snapping at Carter.
“Oh my shit, no,” Carter said.
“Then shut up. Here, Kafak.”
Kafak slung his Thompson. By rights he should have handed it over, but he wasn’t about to do that. The more firepower he carried, the better he felt. Kafak was a big believer in firepower.
He took the BAR from the captain without looking at the officer. The captain walked away.
Carter said, “I’m sorry, Dash.” He shook his head. “I just couldn’t take it.”
“Ain’t nothin’,” Kafak said.
“Fuck me,” Carter said.
“Forget about it,” Kafak said. “Here.” He offered Carter a smoke. Carter took it and smiled. He lit them both up. They smoked while they waited for the rest of the trucks to load. It wasn’t long after that the engines growled and the bed lurched and they were moving toward the front.
When they disembarked the trucks later, Kafak and Carter waited at the assembly point to march to the line and relieve the Thirty-Sixth. They sat sharing a smoke. Kafak was thinking, not talking. He was thinking about all the talk he’d heard, the stuff from the officers, the rumors, conversations overheard and directly participated in. All of them indicated that the Germans had stopped running and were making a stand here, in the Vosges. Saint-Amé, Remiremont, Cleurie. The Allies were closing in on the German border and the Krauts didn’t want them any closer. The talk, the strategy, the perfect defensive positions offered by the rough terrain and weather, all of it meant one thing. A battle. A tough one.
Maybe tougher than anything Kafak had faced since the Breakout on Anzio. The fortress at Besançon had been tough, but nothing like Cisterna. And nothing like this, Kafak suspected. He felt an odd sensation run through his mind, then ripple through his guts. A premonition. That’s what it was, Kafak thought. A premonition. He knew such things were never good; he’d seen other guys get them. They never boded well. You ended up turning it into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Kafak didn’t want to do that. He worked to put it all out of his mind, just take what came.
That’s what a guy did, he thought. You just took what came next when it came and you got through it and you didn’t look back and you didn’t think ahead.
And that was how you survived hell.
Carter said, “You awfully quiet today, pal. You OK?”
“Sure,” Kafak said. “Why not?”
Carter glanced at him, looked away, puffed on his cigarette.
“We headin’ into the shit now, ain’t we?”
“Ain’t nothin’,” Kafak said. He worked his own cigarette. Slowly. Painstakingly. Enjoying every bit of it.
Carter said, “You scared, Dash?”
“Shitless,” Kafak said.
“Oh my shit,” Carter said. “Me, too.”
He chuckled and Kafak laughed and then Kafak stopped and he waited for Carter to stop and then he said, “Say, Bama.”
“What’s that, Dash?”
“You remember Andover? What happened to Andover?”
“Oh my shit, yes,” Carter said. “That was only a week or two ago.”
“Seems like years.”
“Yeah. It does that, all right.”
“Listen,” Kafak said then, “I want you to do me a favor, Bama.”
“How’s that, Dash?”
“Don’t let what happened to Andover happen to me. All right?”
Carter looked at him. He frowned. Smoke curled around his squint.
“What you talkin’ about, Dash? How you mean?”
“I don’t wanna be no cripple, Bama,” Kafak said then. He took a deep breath. “I can’t be no fucking cripple, you know?”
One Man's War Page 21