He spoke to the German soldiers. “You speak English?”
“We surrender! We surrender!”
“What’s his story?” Reese had the muzzle of his M1 under the naked German’s nose.
“Too much for his head,” the German said. “Too much for his head.”
“Gott helfen Sie mir! Gott helfen Sie mir!”
“What is he saying?”
“I think he’s asking God to help him,” Mink said. “He’s looking for his lost saints. Maybe it’s too late for even God to help him now.”
It was shocking to know that there were still Germans so close to us. But the naked Kraut was even more of a surprise. We looked at him tearing at his hair and tossing his head back and forth. He was completely naked, his body white and filthy, his ribs prominent as if he maybe hadn’t eaten for a while. But his eyes were the worst. He was looking around him wildly, and then back over his shoulder, his mouth agape as if there were visions only he could see.
“Sag das nicht! Sag das nicht!”
“What’s he saying?”
“He is hearing voices.” The Kraut soldier with the crazed man shrugged and tapped his head.
Our guys started looking away.
“‘It crack’d and growl’d, and roar’d and howled, Like noises in a swound!’” This from Mink.
“You say anything else and I’ll shoot you myself,” I hissed at Mink. I didn’t want any more of his damned poems or his insights or his wisdom. It was wrong, but I didn’t want any more thinking.
Some of our guys helped carry the Kraut soldier off. He looked at them as if they, too, were some kind of weird beast that he hadn’t seen before. But somehow we knew what he was, and what he was going through.
We had to do a sweep of the buildings in the area, and two more Germans, one badly wounded and nearly dead, were found.
“Good thing these guys didn’t waste us when we were prancing around in formation,” Burns said. “We’re just fucking lucky! Fucking lucky!”
We began to assemble our gear to move out. The day was drawing to a close, and the sky behind St. Lo was an eerie silver, not gray or blue, but the color of an old urn. The buildings, or what was left of them, seemed like so many quick charcoal drawings that would be finished in a mythical time and place.
Pushing. I felt myself pushing the image of the Kraut soldier out of my mind. I didn’t want that to be me, to be me looking for my lost saints or my lost salvation.
Pushing. No, not pushing, but trying not to think.
“Hey, Mink, you ever try not to think?” I asked.
“If you fill your head with poems, you don’t have to think,” Mink said. “The rhymes and the rhythms and the music of it all can fill the soul.”
“You believe that?”
“No, man.” Mink’s smile broadened. “But ain’t it a grand thing to be saying?”
Guys were scrounging extra ammunition and extra food to carry out into the field. I found a case with four little jars of slide grease and put them into my pocket. I didn’t know why, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.
“Coloreds,” Captain Milton said. “It’s always good to see them because they’re bringing something we can use.”
Looking up, I saw some black soldiers securing their trucks. Then I saw someone I thought I recognized. I looked closer and a warm feeling came over me. I got to my feet and went over to the last truck from the end.
“Yo, Marcus!”
Marcus Perry turned toward me and then looked past me. I watched as he secured the back tarp of his deuce and a half.
“How are things going, man?” I asked.
“What you want?” he grunted more than spoke.
“To say hello,” I said. “How you doing?”
“Yeah, hello.” Another grunt.
I had read in Stars and Stripes how a lot of the black soldiers were getting pissed because of segregation. I hadn’t thought much about it, but I knew it was going on. The Army was the Army, I thought. Maybe life wasn’t perfect, but it was never perfect. I didn’t think Marcus would turn away from me.
What difference did it make? I went back to where Mink and Gomez were packing up their gear and started to try to think about where we were going next. I didn’t want to think about what was going through Mink’s head, and I didn’t want to think about what was going through Marcus’s. The hell with both of them, I thought.
Captain Milton had shown us a map that hadn’t made a lot of sense to me. The map laid out yards and miles. The drawings showed fields as if they were gardens. The distances between cities, cities close enough to see from town square to town square, were real on the maps but unreal in what I was calling life.
“Hey, excuse me!”
I turned and saw Marcus looking at me. “What?”
“Where you from?”
“Forget about it,” I said.
“No, no … you from Bedford?” Marcus asked. “In Virginia?”
“Yeah.”
“Josiah?” He looked closely at me. “You’re Josiah, right?”
He hadn’t recognized me! Marcus hadn’t fucking recognized me!
“Yeah, I’m Josiah,” I said. “Josiah Wedgewood!”
“Oh, man. Oh, man.” Marcus put his arms around me and pulled me to his chest.
“Okay! Okay! Let’s move it out! Four hundred seventy-seven miles we got to fucking go before we fucking sleep! Let’s go!”
“How are things going at home?” I asked Marcus.
“Not good, Mama says,” Marcus answered. “They’re grieving about what’s happened to us over here.”
“They know we’re winning?” I asked.
“They’re too simple to know that,” Marcus said. “To the folks back home, dying is losing.”
Marcus kissed me on the forehead. It was the first time I remember being kissed by a grown man. It felt good, and, as we held hands, there was meaning to it. There was Bedford, and family, and friendship, and all kinds of kin stuff. I was sorry about him being black, or maybe about the way we had treated blacks. Maybe after the war it would be different.
“Take care of yourself, man,” he said. “Take good care.”
“You do the same, Marcus,” I said.
The trucks started moving out, and I waved good-bye to Marcus. I thought I saw his hand go up, and I kept waving until I couldn’t see the cab of his deuce and a half any longer.
The Colored supply trucks moved out, and then some more trucks came in and a handful of Shermans.
“Mount up, 29th! We’ve moving out!”
The word was already out that we were moving toward Sainte-Marguerite-d’Elle. I was sitting on the back of a Sherman with Mink.
“Two days, Woody,” Mink said. “Major Johns’s orderly said we’d be there for two days for R & R, and then we’d be on reserve for the 30th. How can they take us out for only two damned days?”
“Mink, Marcus didn’t recognize me,” I said. “We grew up in the same town and went down the same streets. We know the same people. How could he not recognize me?”
“Maybe he was tired,” Mink said. “How long is it to Marguerite-d’Elle?”
“It took a week to fight our way here,” I said. “We must have killed half the Germans in the world to get to St. Lo.”
“At least.”
“How could he not recognize me?” I wanted to get a mirror and look at myself. I wanted to see what my face was like and my eyes. I ran my hands over my face to see what it felt like.
“Mink, how many Germans do you think there are?”
A whistle. Incoming artillery. The Shermans started off the road, and we were at an angle, being brushed off by the branches along the hedgerow.
I was on the ground when the first shells hit too far to the right. We found what shelter we could and held our breath.
“This is all supposed to be clear,” Captain Milton was shouting. “But be on alert in case there are some die-hard assholes who need killing!”
We waite
d for five minutes, and all the artillery was wide. Then the shelling stopped and we could see shells going in the opposite direction. Our guys were answering back.
“They’re still spotting from the ridges around St. Lo,” Gomez said. “There’s still a few of them left around there.”
We were less than two miles from Sainte-Marguerite-d’Elle, and the whole thing seemed stupid. Where was the safe area? Where were we going to go where there was no fighting?
We were sitting around waiting for orders again. Move up. Move back. Get bored and then run for your life. It was a crazy way to live.
I thought of Vernelle and wondered if she would ever be waiting for me in a man-woman kind of way. Maybe Marcus would get back first and he would tell her that I looked different.
“He’s a little meaner-looking,” Marcus would say. And Vernelle would understand. She’d nod a little nod that I’d given her in my mind, her dark hair setting off her eyes just right and a slightly worried look on her face. Maybe there would even be a tear in her eye, or at least the little lines between her eyes would furrow and maybe her hands would tense up.
A thought came that maybe none of this would happen, but I quickly pushed it out of my mind. I wanted it to happen. It would happen if I needed it to.
On the road again. This time we packed up and got in a tank convoy. The tanks were moving slower, and we were all on trucks or on half-tracks traveling between them. Riding was so much better than walking, and I was bouncing along next to Mink.
“Hey, Mink, you got any happy poems in your head?” I asked. “Something that’s going to make me feel good?”
“I think it’s the sadness of poems that touches the heart,” Mink said. “But I have one that makes me feel good.”
“Spit it out!”
“‘No Man Is an Island,’” Mink said, then cleared his throat before going on. “‘No man is an island, Entire of itself. Each is a piece of the continent, A part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less —’”
“Planes!”
“They got to be ours!”
“Krauts!”
The first shells hit the guys ahead of us, and we started dashing for cover. I turned back and looked over my shoulder. They were Krauts. Three pitiful Kraut planes silhouetted against the darkening sky, the flak exploding around them.
One of them suddenly burst into flames, and another veered off sharply to avoid the debris.
We were in a clearing fifty yards from the woods, and we ran toward them. There was a ditch in front of a hedgerow, and I could feel my legs strain as I made for it.
Suddenly I felt something go wrong in my back, and my right leg began to go crazy. I could still run, but stupidly, and I hit the ditch and fell heavily onto my chest. I thought I might have been hit. I saw Mink just in front of me.
“Mink! Mink! Check out my leg. I think I’m hit!”
The leg was jerking badly, and I knew I wasn’t jerking it. It felt like it was broken.
I was on my back and I saw another of the Kraut planes go up in smoke and another peel off and fly away into the night sky.
“Mink, take a look at my leg,” I said, reaching for him. “I don’t want to look.”
Mink’s head was down, and I pulled at his shoulder.
Mink’s head was down, and I pulled.
Mink’s head was down.
I turned him around, but I already knew. There was a huge hole in his chest.
“Oh, Mink. Oh, Mink …”
There are a few snow flurries mixed in with the rain, and the wide grounds outside of the medical center in Blandford Forum, England, are empty. The grass and trees are still a bright, bright green, and through the mist they seem almost to shimmer in the morning air. I had hoped to have been back in the States by now, but my leg, which had been healing, has an infection. A bullet nicked my femur and shattered it. At first they thought that I would be able to return to my unit, but when the healing took too long they said I’d probably be reassigned to a Headquarters Company. The doctor, a bright little man, said that the only real danger was that the healing would be uneven and my right leg would become shorter than my left.
“If that happens, your ballet days will be over,” he jokes.
It’s Thanksgiving Day, and we are told there will be services for the American soldiers. Catholics at seven and ten and Protestants in the afternoon. It’s not a holiday for the Brits, and some of them kid us about what they call the War of Rebellion.
They have brought American newspapers as well as the usual British papers and pass them out in the dining hall. I’ve a wheelchair and sit with some paratroopers to eat my eggs, toast, and fat English sausages, which I don’t like.
I look through the papers, reading the Mirror first, and then the Sun. I save the New York Times for my bed. What I want to see are the sports news and the local New York happenings. It’s funny how cheering those kinds of things can be. I glance at the paper in the dining room and am shocked to see a mention of the 29th on the front page.
I get myself back to my bed, easing my leg up onto the bed and into the sling they’ve rigged for me. The paper is the Late City Edition, and there is a picture of Eisenhower talking to a group of soldiers. The caption reads: GENERAL DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER TALKING TO MEMBERS OF THE 29TH INFANTRY DIVISION DURING HIS VISIT TO THE FRONT LINES.
They were in Germany!
I am so pleased for them. I feel like laughing and crying at the same time. These are my guys, the ones I had fought with and suffered with, and finally they were being given some real recognition. I want to save the paper forever.
Ten thirty and a group of soldiers, clean-cut and shaven, come in. They have cameras, and I know they’re from either Stars and Stripes or some other paper doing a story about how well we are being treated for the folks back home. There is a young civilian woman with them, a real looker and she knows it, and she comes to my bed and asks my name, outfit, and hometown.
“Josiah Wedgewood, from Bedford, Virginia,” I say, “29th Infantry.”
“Oh!” She looks surprised. “How are you doing?”
“I’m doing good,” I answer. “I see some of our guys made the front page of the New York Times.”
She takes the paper and looks at it approvingly.
“How would you sum up the accomplishments of the 29th Infantry?” she asks.
I search for an answer, and then I get all emotional and have to blink away the tears. A fool with a camera snaps my picture, but the girl motions for him to put the camera down.
“Can we come back a little later?” she asks. She has a sweet voice.
“Yeah, sure,” I say.
She pats my good leg and leads the others out of the ward.
“You need to get up a list of good things to say, mate,” says a Canadian soldier who lost part of his right arm. “Then whenever they ask, you can just pick one of them.”
“Yeah.”
The Canadian starts to shave, and I realize he’s still working on teaching himself to shave with the hand he has left. I start thinking about what I will say if the girl does come back.
Mink would have known what to say to her. He would have closed his eyes for a moment and then pulled something from his mind that was half poetry and right on the money. He would have looked at the picture of Ike on the front cover of the Times and seen more than me and captured it in a few words. Mink brought words to the war. Some of them I hadn’t wanted to hear because the truth wasn’t something I always wanted to deal with.
The words don’t come easy for me. When I wrote to my mom, I found myself worrying about things not to tell her. The thing is that I can’t say things about the dying and make it sound like anything except the horrible idea it is. When you see a soldier — someone who was alive a few hours or a few minutes or a few seconds ago — crushed in the track of a tank, or charred and smoldering on the side of the road, it’s a shock that you just don’t fit in easily. You need special words to say those thin
gs, and you know other people won’t understand them, because you don’t bring a lot of understanding to them yourself.
Vernelle would be easier, I thought. But there were three letters I started to write to her to tell her what had happened to my leg and what had happened to my friend Mink. The letters were awkward; the sentences didn’t fit what I was feeling at the time.
I want to say good things when I describe the men I fought alongside. When Stagg ran up the hill after the Kraut gun, when he took out the German crew and gave up his own life, he was bigger than I can ever be, and he needs to be talked about. Somebody needs to write down that he reached inside of himself in that moment and found something greater and larger than even the possibility of his own survival. And when Duncan and Arness and so many others had bought it on Omaha Beach, had died struggling just to get to the shore so that they could fight — somebody needs to put it into words. For most of us that day it was just a matter of trying to hold down the fear, of trying not to call out for our mothers, maybe even trying not to face the naming of what was going on.
There should be something special to say about having the guts to get up and run across a field toward another hedgerow. And there should be something to say about killing people you didn’t know.
When you were there, when you held your M1 in your hand with your heart beating a mile a damned minute and you were facing someone who wanted to kill you, it was one experience. But later, when you were away from them and thinking back without the panic in your throat and the sweat dripping down your face, the same experience was different. Different because it came with the realization that you could kill. There is no training in killing. They didn’t hold up anyone like Rudolf, the prisoner Helmut’s brother, for us to shoot in basic. There were just round targets to shoot at on sunny days in Virginia and Maryland and Georgia as we got ready.
June sixth changed us all. It made us into something else, something that could kill in the constant anxiety of battle. We were able to reach deep into ourselves and find the beasts within and bring them out so that we could survive. How could we put words to that feeling, or that beast? How could we tell anybody about how hard it was to put the beast back inside our hearts, and bodies, and souls, once we knew it lived there?
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