AWOL in North Africa

by Steve Watkins

  I didn’t have to tell them what I thought — which was a good thing, since I didn’t know what I thought — because John Wollman showed up just then. We were in our basement practice room, supposedly having band practice, though we hadn’t quite gotten to that yet. And it would be a while longer before we picked up our instruments.

  “Hey, kids,” John said. He looked around the dusty room, his gaze pausing on the footlocker in the corner, where we’d found his medic pouch. “Much better meeting you guys in here than where I ran into Anderson earlier.”

  “He means the bathroom at school,” I explained.

  “Oh, definitely,” Greg said, laughing.

  “Anything new in the investigation?” John asked. “I had a feeling maybe there was something.”

  Julie told him about the letters that were on the way in the mail. She left it for me to tell him that his brother, Aaron, had passed away a long time ago, and as far as we knew, there was just the one living relative — John Wollman III.

  “Who is a big jerk,” Greg blurted out.

  John looked at him expectantly. “Oh?”

  “Sorry,” Greg said. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “It’s okay,” John replied. He was standing close to Greg and lifted his hand as if he was going to pat Greg on the back, or give him a hug.

  Julie read him the email from John Wollman III, including the part about people thinking pacifists were cowards.

  “We don’t think that,” Julie quickly assured him. “Not at all.”

  “We think you were really brave,” I added. “Out there on that beach in the middle of the landing, and doing what you did to save that guy. And all the other guys you saved.”

  “Tried to save,” John corrected me. “I couldn’t say if I did or didn’t. And, anyway, not much bravery in that. I don’t remember ever thinking I was brave. Just really, really scared. Scared once we climbed off the ship onto the landing craft. Scared when we landed. Scared tending to those boys that got wounded. Scared so bad I didn’t ever stop being scared.”

  “But you still did your job,” Greg says. “That’s what it sounds like. And I bet my dad would say that’s the same thing as being brave.”

  “Your dad a veteran?” John asked, still looking like he thought Greg needed a hug. I thought it was John Wollman who needed the hug. But there’s no way you can hug a ghost, of course.

  “Yeah,” Greg replied.

  John got a funny, faraway look for a couple of very quiet minutes.

  “When I was in training, I heard it a lot,” he said finally. “About what a coward I was that I wouldn’t fight. One drill instructor, he made a sport out of trying to get me to fight, to defend myself. Calling me names. Saying things about my family. About my mom especially. That was hard. Hard not to retaliate. I’m still not sure how I managed to keep from doing, well, something. And it was other guys, too. I kept reminding myself what Jesus said about turning the other cheek. What I had always been taught my whole life growing up. One time I did make a fist. That drill instructor spit on my uniform. I don’t know if he meant to or he was just so worked up about what a gutless coward he said I was, and the spit just accidentally sprayed out. Either way, I almost couldn’t help myself. I even drew my arm back to hit him.”

  Greg was beside himself with anticipation and anger on John’s behalf, or that’s how it looked to me, anyway. “And did you?” he asked. “Did you finally hit him? Because it sure sounds like he deserved it.”

  John smiled and shook his head. “No. My mom wouldn’t have liked that, and she had a way of finding out everything that happened. I’d probably have had to confess it to her in a letter. Not to mention they’d probably throw me in the stockade for something like that. So no, I let that one go, too.”

  “Did it continue?” Julie asked. “After you were in North Africa and saving lives. Did it continue?”

  “Not with most guys,” John said. “Once things got going, everybody was too busy trying to stay alive to worry too much about anybody else’s business. Or almost everybody.”

  He seemed to be remembering something, or someone, but he started flickering out before he could say anything more, and once again, we were left leaning forward, waiting to find out what else there was.

  While we waited for the letters, we got back to work learning more about the war in North Africa. And there was plenty to learn. We went to the library and checked out a bunch of world atlases and World War II photo books and histories and timelines. One thing we kept getting confused about was the geography — at least Greg and I did. Julie, of course, had a photographic memory, so knowing which country went where on the map wasn’t so much a problem for her. We finally figured out a way to remember, though: My Aunt Takes Licorice Everywhere. MATLE. I’m not exactly sure how we came up with that, other than the fact that Greg had sneaked in some Twizzlers and kept sticking his face in his backpack to munch on them so the librarians wouldn’t see him since you’re not supposed to have food in the library.

  Anyway, MATLE are the initials for the countries of North Africa, starting on the Atlantic Ocean side and going east to the Red Sea.

  Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt.

  My Aunt Takes Licorice Everywhere.

  Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia were under the French, though there were tons of German and Italian troops in Tunisia.

  Libya was under the Italians.

  Egypt was with the British.

  We already learned all that, but learning it and remembering it are two very different things.

  We also learned (again) that from 1940 to 1942 the Italians and then the Germans attacked the British in Egypt. The Italians attacked first, but they had a lousy army so the British — and Australians — totally defeated them, and even captured one hundred and thirty thousand Italian soldiers in the process. Then the Germans had to go in and bail out the Italians, which Hitler wasn’t too happy about.

  A guy named General Bernard Montgomery led the British and Australian troops. A famous German general named Erwin Rommel led the Germans. They called Rommel the Desert Fox because he was such a great commander, usually able to outmaneuver the British, though not always. And this was the first time ever that war was waged using tanks to lead the way. So that made Rommel a pretty historic general. Montgomery had tanks, too — thousands of them supplied by America — but ours weren’t as good as the Germans’, which had stronger armor and were better engineered to go faster and shoot farther with greater power. They called Rommel’s army the Afrika Korps.

  Rommel’s troops and Montgomery’s troops fought these massive tank battles back and forth across Libya and Egypt through the desert — one side gaining ground and driving forward, then the other side counterattacking and pushing them back.

  “And that’s where we came in,” Julie said. “November 1942.”

  I had to admit I was getting confused with so many countries and so many armies, so Julie offered to draw me a map of North Africa, with arrows showing me (and Greg, who was confused, too, but just didn’t want to admit it) where the various armies started out and where they fought one another and where they ended up. Which was right in the middle of the continent.

  “Tunisia,” Julie said. “That was the place.”

  “So why did our troops land in Morocco and Algeria instead of there?” I asked, squinting at the lines that Julie had drawn.

  “Because,” she said, “when the Americans entered the war in 1941, there weren’t any German or Italian troops in those two countries. Since it was just the French, we figured those would be the easiest places to occupy. And once we were there and the French switched to our side, we could take the war to the Germans and the Italians in Tunisia. Montgomery’s tanks and troops had finally gained the upper hand and were pushing Rommel back to the west across Libya by that time, driving the Afrika Korps all the way into Tunisia.”

  I finally got it. “So if we trapped the Germans and Italians in Tunisia, we could attack from
both sides, and from the south,” I said, or asked.

  “Right,” said Julie. “And we could block German and Italian reinforcements and supplies from Europe in the north with our ships and planes in the Mediterranean.”

  Greg had been reading madly the whole time we talked. “They called it Operation TORCH,” he announced.

  “Cool name,” I said.

  “It looked like a great plan,” Greg added. “At least on paper.”

  I agreed.

  “All plans look good on paper,” Julie said, sounding like she’d had a lot of experience with this sort of thing.

  “So what are you saying?” I asked.

  “Just keep reading and you’ll see,” she said.

  In addition to General Montgomery and Rommel, the Desert Fox, we learned some other important names. First there was General Dwight Eisenhower, who was the commander in chief of the Allied armies. He was in charge of planning and then carrying out the invasion — and the rest of the war.

  “And you know what else he was?” Julie quizzed us.

  “Really tall?” Greg joked.

  “Bald!” I added, laughing.

  Julie shook her head. “The president, you morons. He was elected the president of the United States after the war. He served two terms. Hello?”

  “I knew that,” I said, because I actually did.

  “Whatever,” said Julie, probably not believing me at this point.

  “And he really was bald,” I added lamely.

  “Yeah, and I’m pretty sure he was tall, too,” Greg added.

  “Back to work,” Julie ordered.

  Another name we found that was important — and of course we’d heard of him, too — was Franklin Roosevelt, who was president through most of the war. And then there was Winston Churchill, the British prime minister, who, during the Nazi bombing of London — which went on for months and months — said that famous line to encourage all the British citizens to be brave and to be strong: “We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

  “I think that meant he believed there was no way the Nazis were going to win, no matter how many bombs they dropped and no matter how many people were killed,” Greg said when we read it.

  “That sounds about right,” I said.

  “Plus, he wanted to remind everybody that they couldn’t just hide,” Julie said. “They had to not worry about the bombing and stay busy on the war effort.”

  Finally — well, not finally, because there were a lot of really important people involved in the war in North Africa and the rest of World War II, of course — but I guess the most important besides Eisenhower and Montgomery and Rommel and Roosevelt and Churchill was this guy Patton. Major General George Patton. He was probably the most famous American general of the war, and toward the end of the North Africa campaign, he was in charge of the American forces there. He was also what they called a glory hound — a guy who wanted all the credit for himself. Apparently there was a lot of that going around because we read that about the British general, Montgomery, too.

  Besides being famous and a glory hound, Patton was supposed to be a great general, outmaneuvering and outsmarting and outgeneraling the enemy throughout the war. But, boy, was he also really weird.

  “Hey, you guys,” Greg said at one point, interrupting us from our reading. “I just read this thing about how one time Patton was mad at a soldier for not digging a foxhole deep enough, so he unzipped his pants and peed in the foxhole right in front of the soldier and everybody else around.”

  I burst out laughing.

  “And there’s more,” Greg said. “Talk about a guy who liked to give orders. Even in the middle of the war, when men were fighting in mud and dust and the desert, he ordered that soldiers pay a fine of ten dollars if they weren’t wearing their neckties as part of their uniforms.”

  “How hot do you think it got there?” I asked.

  “Desert hot,” Greg said.

  Julie rolled her eyes.

  All the accounts we read also said Patton was really brave. Or maybe foolish. Or both.

  Once in Morocco enemy planes flew over Patton’s headquarters and opened up with machine guns, strafing buildings and tents and trucks, and sending soldiers scrambling for cover. Patton stormed outside with his service revolver and started cursing and shooting up at the planes until they left.

  Greg and I thought that story was really cool, though neither one of us could imagine being that brave or that crazy to do what Patton did. “But I bet it totally inspired his men,” Greg said. “Like that speech by Churchill did for the people in England.”

  “Probably so,” I agreed. “Though it sure wouldn’t have if he’d gotten killed.”

  Julie frowned. “First, that story about Patton shooting at the plane isn’t true,” she said. “It was in a movie about him, but they made it up. And second, after North Africa, when they were fighting in Italy, General Patton visited a hospital and one of the soldiers in the hospital didn’t have any physical wounds. He had what they called shell shock, or combat fatigue. Today they call it post-traumatic stress. Soldiers who suffered from it just couldn’t function anymore after they’d been in battles and seen their friends get killed, and had to kill people themselves. So sometimes they went into a kind of shock where they just cried and couldn’t stop. Or they went numb and wouldn’t speak to anybody and wouldn’t move and couldn’t follow orders. Didn’t even seem to hear it when somebody gave them an order.

  “So when General Patton met this one soldier in a military hospital who was that way, instead of understanding what the guy had been through and how it affected him, General Patton slapped the soldier and called him a coward for not being out fighting.”

  Greg and I both stared at Julie, horrified.

  She continued, “Patton actually did that on two occasions, to two different soldiers with PTSD. He got in a lot of trouble for that. He had to apologize to all the troops, but they said you could tell from the way he gave his apology speech that he didn’t mean it.”

  I felt deflated. Here I’d been thinking Patton was such a great leader, really cool and kind of over the top with the pistols and the peeing, but still great. And the books all said what a brilliant general he was, too, and how successful he’d been in North Africa, and later in the Italian campaign, and still later when the Allies liberated Europe and attacked Germany. But now, after what Julie had just told us, I almost didn’t know what to think.

  When the letters didn’t come after a few days from John Wollman III, Julie emailed him again. It took another day to get a response, and it wasn’t much. Just, Oh yeah. I forgot to put them in the mail. I’ll do that today.

  “Not even an ‘I’m sorry’ or anything,” Julie said. We were at band practice and trying to focus on the set we would be playing at the next open mic competition, which would be our third one.

  “I think we need a new song,” Greg said. We had our standards — this antibullying song that Julie wrote, plus a song about hamsters that Julie also wrote. We’d gone back and forth on the third song.

  “What about something a little different,” Julie said, grinning. Clearly she had something in mind already.

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “Like rap,” she said. “And I could do it. That way it wouldn’t all have to be about you being the lead singer, with all the pressure and everything.”

  “Good call,” Greg said. “And we all know what pressure can do to you, Anderson.” He pretended to barf. I didn’t think it was funny, but Julie did. I hated it when those two ganged up on me like that.

  “So let’s hear it,” I said. “Your big rap number.”

  Julie shook her head. “I haven’t exactly written it yet. But I will.”

  “Hey, I have an idea,” Greg said. “Why don’t you write it about Belman. You know, making fu
n of him or something. That can be how we get back at him for the rubber chicken and the potatoes.”

  “I have a better idea,” I said. “Why don’t we send an anonymous note to his parents and tell them about the potato cannon and get him in trouble.”

  Julie rolled her eyes. “And we can hold the rubber chicken for ransom while we’re at it. I’m sure it’s a family heirloom and they’ll pay plenty to get it back.”

  Greg and I both knew she was making fun of us. Or I thought Greg and I both knew that. Then he said, “You know, that just might work. And that way we could get the money back that you spent paying John Wollman III for the letters!”

  Julie turned back to her keyboard, not even bothering to respond, except to say, “Can we please just get back to practicing?”

  I was the last to leave that day. Something had been bothering me since reading about General Patton, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was. And then, sitting alone in the basement, messing around on my guitar, it hit me. I wanted war heroes to be just that — war heroes — and not anything else. I didn’t want them to do mean things, too. Peeing in a foxhole, well, okay, I could live with that. It’s a way to make a point, I guess, and it’s funny.

  But slapping a soldier who was suffering from a mental breakdown from being in battle — that wasn’t something you did if you were a hero. That’s something you did if you were a jerk. The problem was that apparently you could be both — a hero and a jerk. I’d thought we were the good guys in World War II, and we definitely were. Somebody had to stand up to Hitler and all the horrible, horrible things he did, and we were that somebody. But people like Patton still did such lousy things sometimes. It just didn’t add up the way it was supposed to — or the way I wanted it to.

  And then there was the other side. The way the books we read talked about the German general Rommel made him sound like a hero, too, which was strange. I mean, what a cool name they gave him — the Desert Fox. He was supposed to be this guy who had high principles and didn’t think you should hate the people you were fighting, and he believed that it wasn’t right to treat prisoners bad, or to follow Hitler’s orders about killing Jewish people. In fact, he supposedly hated Hitler. He might have even been involved in a plot that attempted to assassinate Hitler later in the war, and then when the plot was discovered, he was forced to take his own life. So there was all that.