One Man's War

by P. M. Kippert

  “Maybe he was outta ammo,” Wolocheck said. “That coulda been it, too, you know.”

  “All I know,” Carter said, “wasn’t your time, Dash. Cuz if it had been, that gun woulda worked.”

  “Hell of a thing,” was all Kafak said.

  “It was,” Carter said. “It was a hell of a thing. Unbelievable, when you think about it.”

  Only Kafak didn’t think about it. Didn’t want to. Because there was no reason to. Because all the thinking in the world wouldn’t have helped figure out a thing like that. There was just no figuring something like that.

  You just turned your back on it and you moved on.

  “Fuck,” Kafak said, later, quietly, and only to himself. “Fuck.”

  20

  “We’re taking Cleurie Quarry,” Holbrooke told them.

  The men looked at one another. Already they’d heard horror stories about the quarry. They had been able to see it from their various positions during the preceding days, if not in detail, at least in its broad outlines. And it looked like a piece of hell waiting for them to arrive. Kafak thought to himself that it reminded him of what he’d read about Devil’s Den during the Battle of Gettysburg in the Civil War.

  “What’s so fucking important about Cleurie Quarry that we gotta take it, Loot?” Wolocheck asked.

  The lieutenant started to explain, but the captain arrived then and cut him off.

  “Never mind that,” he told the lieutenant. He looked at the men. “The reason that Quarry is important is this,” he said. “The Germans got it. The brass want it. Case closed. Got it, soldier?”

  “Yes, sir,” Wolocheck said.

  He snapped off a salute.

  “Good. Now get your gear together. We’re moving out.”

  They all saluted because the captain waited for it. After he was gone, they looked at Holbrooke and he scowled.

  “You heard the captain,” he said. “Let’s move it, guys.”

  “Fuckin’ jerk,” Carter said to Kafak.

  “Least the loot’s OK,” Kafak said.

  It had been more than a week of near constant fighting or, at least, the constant threat of fighting. The Germans had attacked and counterattacked in force. They had infiltrated through the night and fog and trees, getting in between the American companies, behind the Allied lines, wreaking havoc. You never knew when an enemy soldier was going to pop up out of the mist practically right on top of you. A constant tension ground at Kafak and, too, the taxing and debilitating need to be always alert, ready. It took a toll. Sleep came only with exhaustion and was never settled. Kafak existed on shots of pure adrenaline and then crashed down into an almost fatal stupor from being overtired and overtaxed. He kept going, though, because he knew every other guy in the entire division felt the same way, was going through the same things. If they could do it, Kafak reasoned, then he could, too. And he did.

  The fight for the quarry had been going on for a couple of days when Carter told Kafak, “You realize this is our third day trying to clean out this fucker?”

  “You keep track of shit like that?” Kafak said.

  “Sure, a course, I do. We started fighting this battle more’n a week ago. We been at these rocks for three days now. The captain is calling this the mop-up operation. Mop-up, hell. Them Krauts ain’t any more outta there than the day we begun.”

  “Fuckin’ captain.”

  “Got that right,” Carter said. “Oh my shit, Dash, I wonder are we never gonna pry these fuckers lose from them rocks?”

  “We will,” Kafak said.

  “You got a lotta faith, pal.”

  “Remember the tank and the bicycle Kraut?” Kafak said.

  “Sure,” Carter said, “I remember that.”

  “That’s how I know we’re gonna get the Germans outta there.”

  “Yeah,” Carter said. He nodded. “Sooner or later, I suppose. Sooner or later.”

  “That’s the spirit,” Kafak said.

  “Just so long as we still around to see it.”

  “Don’t fucking jinx us, Bama. Shit.”

  “Sorry, Dash.”

  “Let’s go!” Holbrooke said, marching through the collapsed troops. “Everybody up. We’ve got orders. Let’s go.”

  “Where we going this time, Loot?” Wolocheck asked.

  “We’re going to move around the top of the quarry, flank these bastards. Hopefully we can give the guys down in the rocks some relief.”

  Kafak stood up with the rest of the men from the company. There were only about half of them left, half of the men they started with that week or so earlier that Carter had talked about. It was 0530, and they moved out, threading their way through the trees on the ridge that overlooked the quarry. Every so often, Kafak could look down and see the men in the rocks, fighting nearly face-to-face with the Krauts holding the quarry. L Company ran across a machine gun nest. Holbrooke used his usual flanking maneuver, and it worked. The nest was wiped out within fifteen minutes. A little while later, they came upon a second nest, but the Germans there saw how outnumbered they were, and they packed up and beat the wet ground in a fast retreat. The next nestfull of Krauts did the same. They fired for a couple of minutes, got the Americans’ heads down, then took off. Kafak kept moving, with Carter and Wolocheck nearby. A couple other guys, too. Manning and Cooper had joined their little group. Kafak slipped around a high mound of wet grass and dirt in the midst of some thickly grouped trees and found Holbrooke holed up there with about four other guys. Kafak hit the ground, then Carter and the rest followed suit. Holbrooke pointed ahead. Another German strongpoint, an MG42 with about six guys. They had a mortar there as well, but none of them were manning it as it came fairly useless in combat this close. The Krauts didn’t know where their own guys had slipped within the ranks of the Allied troops. Sending off mortar rounds might have killed their own as easily as it would the enemy. So they kept the mortar there in reserve and prepared themselves to use their small arms and grenades in support of the machine gun crew. Holbrooke looked at all of the men with him and then pointed to Kafak. “You’re with me, Kafak. Keep that BAR in plain sight, give them something to think about.”

  “Sure,” was all Kafak said.

  “I want to take these men alive,” Holbrooke said.

  “Oh my shit, Loot, we could wipe ’em out from here,” Carter said. “Just pointin’ it out, is all.”

  “I want them alive. Prisoners. For the intelligence.”

  “That ain’t too intelligent,” somebody said from the back.

  A couple of the other guys laughed, quietly. Holbrooke even smiled.

  “Maybe not,” he said, agreeing and defusing any objections to his command. “But it’s worth a shot. Be good to know just how much more the Jerries got that we’re going to have to fight. Don’t you think?”

  “Let’s just get it over with,” Kafak said.

  “Right. Let’s go. On my move.”

  All the guys got into crouches as quietly as they could so they could charge on Holbrooke’s word. Then he gave it and everyone was up and running and screaming like banshees, but nobody was firing. One of the Germans fired a quick burst of his machine pistol but then dropped it. All the rest dropped their weapons as well and shot their hands up high in the air. The short burst though had done some work. Wolocheck lay on the ground. Kafak bent next to him, and Carter stood over Kafak’s shoulder.

  “He dead?” Carter said.

  “Yeah, the fucker,” Kafak said.

  “Oh my shit, Dash,” Carter said. “That fuckin’ Kraut couldn’ta shot more than three fuckin’ rounds.”

  “Only takes the one.”

  “Oh my shit, yes,” Carter said.

  They moved on, Holbrooke shouting at them. He’d already sent the six prisoners to the rear under two guards.

  “Wish he would send me back,” Cooper said.

  “Hell, me, too,” Manning said.

  “We all wish that,” Carter said.

  “They can’t send Das
h back,” Manning said. “He’s got the BAR.”

  “Fuckin’ BAR,” Carter said.

  “Ain’t nothin’,” Kafak said.

  “I’d rather be taking prisoners back to HQ than moving forward into God knows what,” Cooper said.

  “Ain’t no back,” Kafak said. “Not in these woods.”

  “Oh my shit, if that ain’t right, I don’t know what is,” Carter said.

  That quieted them all and they followed Holbrooke through the fog. Kafak figured the lieutenant would be happy. They’d already taken out one machine gun nest, forced two more to retreat, and captured six men of a fourth. And it wasn’t quite 0730 yet. Kafak thought, At this rate, this battle has to end today.

  Then they came upon a platoon of Germans. Suddenly. One moment, the Americans were simply walking along, alert and ready, but just moving forward, and the next, just that fast, there were twenty or so Germans in front of them. A bonecutter opened up. Several Krauts fired their machine pistols. The Americans hit the ground or scurried for cover. Kafak was far off on the left flank of the platoon, covering with the BAR. He found a spot, quick, behind a tree. He stood and fired the BAR at the machine gunners. Everyone was firing, on both sides. The sound was intense, rapid, nonstop. A German popped out from behind a dead, fallen log and fired his burp gun at Kafak. The BAR seemed to explode in his hands and he felt a sharp, incredible pain and something smacked him in the face and he went down, onto his back, on the ground. “Fuck,” he said. “Fuckfuckfuck!” The burp gun continued firing, but now the Kraut was shooting where Kafak had been, not where he was, so all the slugs flew harmlessly over him. Kafak shouted to Holbrooke.

  “Loot! Give me some cover fire so I can get the fuck outta here!”

  “You got it, Kafak,” Holbrooke said. He shouted to the men. Then to Kafak: “Get ready to move.” A moment’s pause and then the lieutenant shouted again to the men. “Now!”

  The platoon nearest Kafak’s exposed position let loose a withering fire. It suppressed the Germans attack long enough for Kafak to run, stumbling, with his hand covering his one eye, from where he’d been on the flank back to the main body of troops. He ran, he fell to a knee, he crawled, he pushed himself back up, and stumbled some more. He fell back against the trunk of a thick tree and slid down it onto the ground. Carter rushed over to him. Out of his one still-seeing eye, Kafak saw the look of horror on Carter’s face.

  “What?” Kafak said. “What the fuck, Bama?”

  “Your face, Dash,” Carter said. “It’s covered with blood.”

  “It’s my eye,” Kafak said. “I can’t see out of my fucking eye.”

  “Medic!” Carter said.

  Holbrooke was kneeling by Kafak’s side now as well. The other guys were still blasting. Tossing grenades. The fire from the Germans was starting to fall off. Then it stopped altogether and they shouted their surrender. The corpsman arrived and tried to pull Kafak’s hand away from his eye. Kafak fought against it.

  “You gotta let me see your face, soldier,” the medic said. “Let loose now.”

  Kafak took a deep breath and said, “Fuck, oh fuck,” and moved his hand away from his face.

  “Your fuckin’ arm and hand’s all shot up, too, Dash,” Carter said.

  “No more fucking updates, Bama, you don’t mind,” Kafak said. “Ah,” he said, then turned the near shout into a groan as the medic probed his eye. He wiped away blood, but more kept pouring out from inside Kafak’s face.

  “I can’t stop this bleeding,” the medic said. “I’m going to wrap it up.” He looked to Holbrooke. “We gotta get this guy back to a first aid station, sir.”

  “Right,” Holbrooke said. “Carter, you and Cooper help Kafak back.”

  “Yes, sir,” Carter and Cooper said simultaneously.

  “You need morphine, soldier?” the medic asked.

  “I maybe don’t need it,” Kafak said, “but I won’t fight over it.”

  “We’ll wait until we get back to the station, then. If you can make it, that would be better for all of us.”

  Carter ducked under one of Kafak’s arms and helped him move. Kafak couldn’t see straight, so walking was more of a stumble. More than half of his head was bandaged over by now. He wondered how bad it was. The corpsman had also wrapped up his hand, very tightly. Kafak wondered would he lose it. He placed a couple more bandages around Kafak’s arm.

  They started walking back, toward the aid station, the four of them.

  Carter spoke quietly to Kafak.

  “Looks like you might lose that eye, Dash,” he said.

  “Fuck,” Kafak said. “What the fuck.”

  “You know that promise you made me make?”

  “What?”

  “The promise you made me make. ’Bout you becomin’ a cripple and whatnot. You remember.”

  “Yeah,” Kafak said. He grunted. Groaned. “Sure,” he said.

  “Well,” Carter said. “You want I should kill you now?”

  “What the fuck?” Kafak said. He sounded outraged. “I can see with one fucking eye, Bama. What the fuck?”

  Carter laughed.

  “Just makin’ sure, Dash, is all,” he said.

  “Fuck you, you fuckin’ maniac,” Kafak told him.

  Carter laughed all the way back to the first aid station, and, against his better judgment, from somewhere deep within his pain, Kafak sometimes joined him.

  21

  At the station, Carter, Cooper, and the medic left Kafak with the doctors. Kafak grabbed the first guy that came at him, a corpsman, who was unwrapping the field bandage. “I can’t see,” Kafak told the guy. “I can’t see.”

  “You got about a foot of bandage covering your eye, soldier. Of course, you can’t see.”

  “Before,” Kafak said. “Before they put it on, I couldn’t see.”

  “Let me get it off so the doc can take a look at things, OK? Just calm down.”

  “I am fucking calm,” Kafak said.

  The doctor arrived and told the orderly, “Give him some morphine so we can work on him.”

  Kafak felt the prick of the needle, and then he felt nothing more.

  He came to in a field hospital. A corpsman was shaking him awake, and he opened his eyes and looked up with one of them, groggy, at a doctor. The doctor said, “We’ve cleaned a lot of bullet fragments out of your hand, son, but I’m afraid we can’t save that finger. We’re going to have to take it off.”

  “My . . . finger?” Kafak said.

  “Yes, soldier. Just wanted you to know.”

  Kafak fell back into a hazy, morphine sleep.

  He had a dream.

  He was in Naples. Near the fountain where he had met the girl. She was there again, seated on the edge of the fountain, and the fountain was filled with flowing water, spraying water, and that didn’t seem right to Kafak, even in his dream, because he remembered there had been only a little water in the bottom of the fountain because the fountain had been cracked by a shell and the water had mostly drained out of it and the mechanism of the fountain, the one that made the water fly and spray, that had been broken, so the water just lay in the bottom of the broken fountain all green and slimy. But in his dream it wasn’t like that. In his dream, the fountain looked the way it had looked, the way it must have looked, in its greatest glory. And the girl sat there, smiling at the water flying all round her. Kafak walked into the little plaza and saw her there. He pointed her out to the guys.

  “There she is,” he said. “That’s her.”

  “That the girl?” Carter asked.

  “That’s her,” Kafak said.

  He frowned, though. Because that wasn’t right either. Carter hadn’t been there, in Naples. He hadn’t met Carter until later, on Anzio. Carter might have been in Naples, but not with Kafak.

  Kafak looked at the other guys with him. Marshak was there and Sergeant Collins was there and Captain Cole and Andover, too. No, Kafak thought, none of that could be right. None of them had been there with him, not i
n Naples. And Marshak and Collins and Andover couldn’t be there at all, could they? No, it wasn’t right. But Kafak turned away from this, turned away from them, and he looked again at the girl and he saw how pure and beautiful she was and she was smiling at him and he smiled back feeling suffused with wonder and joy and a warmth that sort of itched within his breast, but he couldn’t scratch it, it just filled him up and made him want to go and sit beside her. He started to do that and then Jankowicz pulled him back, yanking on his arm. That was right, after all. Jankowicz had been there, in Naples, when Kafak had met the girl. Jankowicz was a big, goofy guy, one of those guys who could break you in two with his bare hands only he was so gentle he wouldn’t hurt a fly. He’d been in the artillery so he never had to see what damage his work did. He could live with that, Kafak figured. Because he was just a big, gentle softy, truth be told. Jankowicz had taken the picture. He’d had a camera, and he’d been taking pictures of everything and everyone they came across as they walked through Naples that day, and now he took a picture of Kafak and the girl. A couple of them had pictures taken of themselves with the girl. Kafak hadn’t been the only one. Hadn’t even been the first one. But he had been one of the ones. And, later, Jankowicz had made certain that all of the guys who’d had their pictures taken with the girl got their picture. That was how Kafak had the picture in the first place. They’d all taken pictures with her and she had laughed and teased them in beautiful Italian none of them understood but that she was teasing them and laughing, that they all could tell, they all understood that much, and it had been a beautiful afternoon with the sun shining down, and now here it was, all over again, only now with the fountain flowering and the girl laughing and speaking broken English with her pretty Italian accent so now Kafak could understand her teasing and it was sweet and beautiful and then he took a picture with her but before he could ask her her name, another guy with them, a guy named Nosh from Brooklyn, he’d elbowed his way in, saying, “My turn,” and he’d moved up alongside the girl and grabbed her around the waist and pulled her to himself and she didn’t like it, Kafak could see that, she had stopped laughing, then she stopped smiling, and then she had tried to push away from Nosh only Nosh wouldn’t let her and he tried to pull her closer, stuck his face toward hers, tried to kiss her and Jankowicz had said, “Aw, Bobby, don’t do that,” and Nosh had told him, “Shut the fuck up, me and this dolly are gonna have some fun,” and then Kafak had said, “Let her go,” and Nosh looked at Kafak and said, “What the fuck did you say?” “I told you to let her go, you fucking son of a bitch,” Kafak said. Nosh thought about letting her go and coming to fight with Kafak, Kafak could see that on Nosh’s face, but Nosh didn’t, he only grinned at Kafak and then he turned back to the girl, tried to force a kiss on her again and now Kafak grabbed Nosh by the helmet and yanked back on the front rim of the helmet and that drew Nosh’s head back because the helmet was strapped under Nosh’s chin and then Kafak stuck a knife into Nosh’s throat and the blood spurted out, landed all over the girl’s dress and hands, ruining her clothes, and the girl screamed, looking down at herself, more upset by the lost dress than by Nosh being stabbed and then Nosh fell to the cobblestones of the plaza, blood shooting out of him like he had ten men’s worth, and he was writhing on the stones and bleeding and yelling at Kafak, “Look what you did! Just look what you did!” and then Carter pulled Kafak aside and told him, “Oh my shit, Dash, you can’t be doing stuff like that no more.” But Kafak wouldn’t listen. He looked down at Nosh and kicked him and Nosh howled in pain from the kick in his ribs and then Kafak said, “You fucking Nazi. Die, you cocksucker.”