And then Kafak woke up.
“Where am I?” he asked.
He heard a steady thrumming drone, felt everything around him vibrating, and he thought he must be in some kind of hell, a kind of chamber of hell, set aside especially for men who killed their own. Then he recalled that was only a dream, that had only been a dream, and none of it had happened that way at all. There had been the little plaza, and the broken fountain, and the beautiful girl. Jankowicz had taken pictures of three or four of them with the girl and had given their pictures to each of them later. All of that much was true. And Nosh had been there as well, Kafak remembered, but Nosh hadn’t wanted a picture with the girl. “I only want to fuck her,” he had said.
And Kafak told him, “Don’t ruin it, Nosh.”
“What the fuck does that mean?” Nosh said.
“Forget it,” Kafak told him, but mostly because he wasn’t sure himself what he had meant.
And the girl had left then, before anything else could or did happen. She had skipped away, laughing and smiling. Kafak remembered that clearly. The skipping. He hadn’t seen anyone skip in years. Since he’d been a kid. So that stuck out in his mind particularly about that sunny, beautiful afternoon in Naples.
“You’re on an airplane,” a medic told Kafak. “You’re being flown to Marseilles for a hospital ship.”
“Huh,” said Kafak. He still felt half under from the morphine. “I’ve never been on an airplane before.”
“Well, here’s one more thing you can tell the folks back home you did in the war, soldier.”
“Sure,” Kafak said. “Why not?”
“So how you feeling, anyhow?”
“I feel,” Kafak said, “like I’m in hell.”
They gave him more morphine then, and he fell back asleep.
He had another dream.
Andover was there again. He was standing up, standing over Nosh who was curled in the fetal position on some cobblestoned street. Andover was beating hell out of Nosh with a piece of a leg. He was smashing Nosh with the booted foot of the leg while he, Andover, held on to the knee of the leg with both hands. He was just pounding on Nosh with that piece of leg. “Oh my shit,” Carter said. “What’s all this, then?” He started forward to stop Andover from delivering this beating but Kafak grabbed Carter’s arm and wouldn’t let him go. “Don’t,” he told Carter. “Just don’t.” “But, Dash,” Carter said, “he’s like to kill that ol’ boy.” “Good,” Kafak said. “That’s good.” “Oh my shit, buddy, how is that good?” “Because he deserves it. Nosh deserves to die.” “Nobody deserves it, Dash,” Carter said. And that made Kafak let go of Carter and he stared into Carter’s eyes and he said, “Why didn’t you kill me, Bama? You promised me you would kill me.” And then Kafak suddenly couldn’t see Carter at all. Couldn’t see anything at all. He’d gone blind. He felt himself screaming in his dream and he couldn’t make himself stop.
He woke later aboard the ship and all around him were other guys in bandages in beds and finally a guy who could walk came down the aisle between some of the beds and Kafak asked him, “Where am I?”
“You’re on a hospital transport ship. We’re just outside of Naples.”
“Say,” Kafak said. “Do me a favor, will you?”
“What’s that?”
“Don’t give me no more fucking morphine, will you?”
“You say so, soldier.”
He didn’t sleep much more after that and just gritted his teeth against the pain when it came. It came in waves, beginning kind of slow and then building and then peaking and he wanted to scream out loud at the pain then but he didn’t, he only ground his teeth together all the harder and clutched hard to the side-rail of his cot with his good hand. Then the pain would begin to lessen and then it would wash away until only a little was left until it started all over again the next time. They landed, and while he was being carried off on a stretcher from the ship, an NCO stood on the dock with a clipboard and he was assigning each wounded man to a hospital in Naples, so when it came Kafak’s turn, Kafak said, “Can I have the 118th?”
“Sure,” the NCO said. “Anything to keep our boys happy.”
So Kafak ended up in the 118th, and his first day there Nurse Sullivan helped get him situated and told him, “I can’t tell you how happy I am to see you, Private.”
“I knew you would miss me,” Kafak said.
She pulled a face.
“That’s got nothing to do with it,” she said.
“What, then?”
“Because seeing you here means you’re still alive.”
“Sure,” Kafak said. “But I’m in the hospital.”
“I did notice that,” she said. She laughed.
“How am I?”
“Let’s let the doctor decide that, shall we?”
“No. I mean, what do I look like?”
“As handsome as ever.”
Kafak reached up toward his eye. The bandage still covered it, wrapping across most of his head in a sharp slant.
“This ain’t so handsome,” he said.
She smiled at him.
“We’ve had it off already to put on a clean one. You look fine under there, soldier.”
“There aren’t any . . .”
“No scars. That’s what you want to know?”
“Sure,” Kafak said. “I mean, I guess a little one or something, that would be all right.”
“Oh right, the girls would just love that, wouldn’t they?”
“But nothing disgusting, you know?”
“You survived without being disgusting,” Nurse Sullivan told him, smiling.
“You mean to say, no more disgusting than what I started out, right?”
“I mean, not disgusting at all, soldier.”
“Good,” Kafak said. “Good.” Then he said, “Am I blind?”
“No, the doctor thinks you’ll see again. Not perfectly, of course, but your eye will work well enough for you along with the good one.”
Then Kafak remembered something else and he lifted his hand and he looked at the place where his finger had been, the middle finger of his left hand; about two-thirds of it was gone now. There were other wounds on his hand and arm as well, but they were all sewn up and healing already, not covered with bandages. He’d been days in traveling to this place, he realized. He moved his hand, clenching and unclenching it, gently, then more fervently. It felt fine. It worked fine. He smiled.
“What happened to my eye?”
“Well, there were some shards of wood in your eye. The doctor thought they looked like they might be from the stock of a gun.”
“My BAR. The front stock got blown all to hell by that German burp gun. I thought it was a bullet that hit me in the eye. Or shrapnel.”
“No. It was the wood. The doctor removed a lot of it, but there was a piece he just couldn’t get to without doing more harm than good to your eye. You’re going to have to learn to live with that piece. And be careful that it doesn’t slide up and cut into your eye.”
Kafak grunted.
“Anything else I should know?”
“You had a couple other wounds, bullet wounds, in your left arm. Those have all been removed, stitched up, and bandaged. They’re all going to be fine.”
Kafak nodded. He didn’t say anything more. Nurse Sullivan gave him an odd look when he fell so quiet, but she let him be, telling him, “You rest now. I’ll be back later.”
If she did return, Kafak didn’t know it because he either slept or feigned sleep the rest of that day and night. He didn’t want to see anyone; didn’t want to talk to anyone. Because something had occurred to him.
He figured he would be going back into combat.
It was October 1944. That much he knew, could figure out. Unless he’d been out a lot longer than he thought and maybe it was November, but he doubted that. He doubted that very much. The point was, the war was not over. They hadn’t even reached Germany yet. They’d go on. The war would go on. And he’d very l
ikely be back in it. A part of it again. He wasn’t quite sure how he felt about that. He didn’t want to let his buddies down. He knew that for sure. So if they sent him back, he’d go. For them. Because it’s what a guy did. Only he knew he didn’t really want to go back, either. If he never heard another gun fire or shell explode in his life, he’d be fine with that. If he never had to smell another burned body, he’d rejoice in that. If he never had to fear being turned into a ghastly, disgusting apparition again, he could live in peace.
But if he had to face all of those things again, then he’d do that because that’s what you did. And he wasn’t going to do anything less than anybody else would do.
The next day, Dr. Gibbs passed by on his rounds. He clearly remembered Kafak. He took one look at him, and he told Kafak, “That’s all for you, son.”
Nurse Sullivan stood nearby, and as the doctor walked off, she said, “How does it feel, soldier? To have it all over with?”
Kafak shrugged. Lieutenant Sullivan thought he wasn’t going to say anything and Kafak could see that in her eyes, on her face, but then he did say something. He didn’t want her to leave just then, so he said something to keep her there.
Kafak said, “I don’t know.”
“It’s a lot to take in,” she said. “I know.”
Kafak shook his head.
“You don’t know,” he said. His voice came quiet. He looked at Nurse Sullivan then, a sheepish expression turning his face. He smiled halfway, said, “I mean, who knows anything, right?”
“It must have been hell out there.”
Kafak said, “It’s just . . . it’s hard, you know, always being in the dark like we were. I mean, never knowing when the war’s going to end, never knowing where you were going or going to be from one day to the next, never knowing what you were going to have to face, to deal with, one day to the next. Never knowing if you were ever going to go home at all. And every second at the front, you just never knew what was going to happen. Were you going to be shot at? Bombed? Shelled? Were you going to be wounded or killed? You just never know and so you’re scared. All the time, you’re scared. I don’t care what anyone says, everyone, all of us, we were all scared. Until something happens and then your reflexes take over, you know? But the waiting. The waiting could be boring or tense, depending. But it always made you scared. And maybe the worst of it, the worst of it all, see—I wonder why I wasn’t killed. I wonder why so many of my buddies were killed and I wasn’t killed. I wonder did I do as much. I wonder why did I deserve to live and they didn’t? Because I don’t, see. I don’t deserve it any more than any of them did. So why did I get something I don’t deserve and they didn’t? I just don’t know, I mean.”
“Well, I don’t know the answer to that one, Bobby, but I can offer you this. You did survive. Whatever the reason might have been, you did. Now you’ve got to take that survival, take that life that’s been given to you, that gift, and make sure you don’t waste it. Make sure you use it well. Right?”
“Sure,” Kafak said. “Why not?”
“Are you happy?” Nurse Sullivan asked him then.
Kafak frowned, thinking over this. Then, not really answering her, he said all he could think to say.
“I don’t know if I’m happy,” Kafak said. “I only know I wouldn’t give up what happened, not any of it, not for a million dollars. I just wouldn’t ever want to do it again.”
And then Kafak smiled.
And then he wept.
EPILOGUE
My father would never go hunting. He had no ethical reserve about killing and eating animals; he never minded spending time with his boys. His reasons for refusing to take us out hunting ran deeper.
He never explained them to me, nor to anyone else, until one day we were sharing a drink. I was in my midtwenties by then, and somehow the subject came up, and I asked him once again, “Dad, why is it you never took us hunting when we were growing up?”
He smiled a crooked little smile and shook his head and spoke, not looking at me, or at anything else really. He said, “Because of the war.”
“Tell me about the war, Dad,” I asked him.
He laughed and told me, “I’ll tell you how losing a pair of glasses saved my life. That happened in the war.”
“Tell me.”
Only then he changed the subject. And not subtly, either.
When I tried to bring things back around to his time as a soldier, and told him, “You were telling me about the war,” all he said was, “It was the worst part and the best part of my life.”
It wasn’t until years later, when he was nearing his death from prostate cancer, that he finally decided to relate his experiences from the war. It was almost as if he needed to talk about them then, to let someone know what had happened to him, so that none of it would be lost when he passed away. He told me much about it, then, but he never told me all of it.
I don’t think anyone who lived through it was ever able to tell all of it.
Still, here is the story—as much of it as he told to me—relayed so that it will not be lost.
Because what my father went through, what all the men who fought in that war went through, all of that pain and suffering, all of that sacrifice and horror, all the duty and honor, none of that should ever be lost to the world.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The landings at Anzio-Nettuno (Operation Shingle), the action that begins Bob Kafak’s real war, were designed to be an end run around the German Gustav Line, which had halted the Allied advance up the boot of Italy. This area was about thirty miles southwest of Rome and had been marshland prior to the Second World War. Benito Mussolini drained it to create a fashionable resort spot. The drainage ditches that cut through the terrain would play an important role in the fighting as it progressed.
On the Anzio beachhead, the surrounding Alban Hills became a fact of life that wreaked tremendous damage on the Allied troops. This range looked down upon the Allied lines and gave the Germans a view of everything done by the troops there. Night and smoke were the only methods the Allies could use to move with any degree of safety whatsoever. While Major General John P. Lucas built up his forces so as not to be driven off the beach by a German counterattack, the German command took the opportunity to move reinforcements into those hills. By the time Lucas felt ready to break out from the beach, the Germans were prepared and outnumbered the Allied force by some several thousand men.
Kafak’s first action comes as a result of the attempt to relieve the US Rangers who had been sent to infiltrate and take the nearby town of Cisterna. Cisterna was a linchpin of the German defense, but Army Intelligence thought it undefended when the Rangers were sent in. The relief never got through, and the Ranger forces were decimated. Only seven men of the eight hundred plus who attacked returned to Allied lines—803 casualties killed, wounded, or captured.
The next major fighting in which Kafak is involved resulted from the Germans’ fierce counterattack over February 16–20, 1944. The Germans wanted to destroy the beachhead and drive the Allies back into the sea. To Hitler and his General Staff in Berlin, this desire was fired by their knowledge that the Allies intended a cross-channel invasion soon. The German High Command wanted to use this opportunity to show the Allies that such a beachhead could not be held and, even if it was, would prove disastrous to their troops. Field Marshal Kesselring, in charge of the Italian theater of operations for the Germans, threw everything he could against the Allies during this counterattack in hopes of destroying this abscess behind the Gustav Line. After the four or five days of fighting, the Germans, though having nearly rolled up the Allied lines at one point, could not execute a full breakthrough. They created a salient, which the Allies took some time and cost to flatten out, but the Allies held on to their beachhead. After the high losses of men killed, wounded, and captured during this counteroffensive, both sides realized they had no alternative but to enter into a period of consolidation and the reconstituting of their forces. Once more each side b
egan a buildup of troops and equipment and fortified their positions. This was the time of patrols and small-scale skirmishes. It would be months before truly heavy action took place at the Anzio-Nettuno beachhead again. And that would come with the Allies’ Breakout in May.
The episodes dealing with trench foot are true and a little-known aspect of this campaign. Trench foot is an insidious and debilitating affliction. It occurs when the feet become cold and wet and go unused; blood fails to circulate properly, and the tissue of the feet begins to rot and die. Gangrene can set in. The potential for a person to lose a foot or leg due to required amputation is very real; even death can result from cases gone untreated for too long.
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