The Far Shore

by Paul T. Scheuring

  In some ways, though, I am the perfect soldier Uncle Sam needs right now: godless and furious. You, of course, know why: everything that I mentioned to you in the last letter. The Thing that Happened to Me (of which I will speak no more; never again). It has broken me and changed me and set ablaze those fires within for which all the rain in the world could not extinguish.

  As you can no doubt tell from this letter.

  I am still your brother, but something else too.

  I am a storm, greater and more merciless than anything that has yet hit Normandy.

  May the world have pity because of my presence.

  Yours in both life and death,

  Gray.

  V

  After she finishes the letter, Lily sits on the porch for a long time.

  Looks out at the flattened nothingness of Centralia.

  And wonders whether Bill, upon receiving this letter, felt the same thing she now feels in her gut.

  The emptiness.

  Like there’s a feeling there ready to form, a sickly one.

  But if by being still and not thinking, she might convince it to go away.

  After a few moments, she sorts back through the letters by the date stamped on the envelope.

  She’s looking for the preceding letter Gray referenced.

  But it’s not here.

  Whatever happened before, it seems, will not be known.

  VI

  29 October 1944

  B—

  So much has transpired. I write you from the stockade, believe it or not.

  We’ve come through France and Belgium to the German border. I suppose I should take a step back and explain to you the wild sequence of events that got me to this place. It started when we were tasked with taking the first major city on German soil—Aachen.

  Like so many other villages and towns we’ve had to battle through, this one would no doubt be more of the same—house-to-house fighting, moving up the streets an address at a time, fighting tooth and nail for the rights for people’s abandoned living rooms, bathrooms.

  The elation we’d feel when we’d finally cleared out a nest of Germans and taken the apartment they’d been positioned in! That goddamn second-story bathroom window from which they were sniping our men for days on end. It was ours now. All of its twenty square feet and bathtub and sink and shitter. But none of that compared to the ultimate spoil in that tiny room: the sheer bliss of real, white fluffy toilet paper. After three months, toilet paper!

  It is not war if it’s not ironic, right?

  You know what’s incredible? I must have been the most unbelievable statistical fluke in the war, at this stage, if not the history of war. When we subsequently mobilized for Aachen, I’d been in theater nearly four months. And we’d been in firefights almost all that time. I swear we spend more time shooting guns than sleeping. And all that time, impossible as it sounds, I have not killed a man.

  Of course, in the haze of battle I have fired off shots in wild blind defensiveness—hundreds, thousands of rounds sprayed into hedgerows; I’ve thrown grenades—over embankments, into buildings, into bunkers. Daily I have done my job to kill the enemy.

  But I have not seen a man fall by my hand.

  Perhaps in those times of blind melee—more than once—my bullet or grenade has struck true, a bad-luck volley for whatever German happened to be standing there…but I have not seen it, I have not seen corroboration.

  The other guys in the company have turned me into something of a joke over this. They say I’m secretly Germany’s best soldier—because I use up Allied ordnance to no effect at all. They say I’m the only soldier capable of firing a bullet into a continent full of Germans and missing every time.

  But I assure them to wait.

  I’ve got more hate in me than the Germans will ever know what to do with.

  Perhaps that’s why Captain Arguello started getting into me.

  Despite myself, I have to say Arguello is a good man—a Latino from Los Angeles, a God-fearing Catholic. But even if a man is good and well-intentioned, sometimes you still don’t want him poking around in your life, you know? Some things can’t be fixed.

  He took me aside when we were provisioning at a supply dump. Said he could see the pain in me.

  I told him that didn’t make me different from any other soldier. The secret was to dole out more pain than you took in. Both in life and war. Stay on the offense.

  “But you’ve got a darkness in you,” he said. Which pissed me off. “That’s something you’re holding and they’re not. They hate the enemy, but you hate you.”

  Last thing I need is someone invading the last sovereign place I’ve got in this world: my head. But he’s a CO, right? And you’ve got to sit there and listen.

  I tell him he’ll have no problems from me, if that’s what he’s worried about. I tell him I am the perfect soldier. Without conscience. Just a machine—legally entitled and very ready—to kill.

  (I talked a big game, didn’t I? For a man seemingly incapable of registering even a single kill after all this time! We all bluster over the things we are most insecure about, it seems.)

  He looked at me a long time. It was a look that makes a man jealous: it was a look of concern, but more importantly, that this concern came from a stable and good soul within—a soul that was at ease with itself, that had found some sort of bedrock that took away all doubts.

  Finally he shrugged, as if something had been made up in his mind. “You want to kill? We can do that. I’m going to get you up to your ass in blood. But be ready. New worlds will open to you.”

  That was all he said. He punctuated it with a look that suggested I would not like these new worlds. Then he walked away, leaving me to my devices.

  He, of course, thought that he would be schooling me in the horrors of war. But I saw it in an entirely different light. I was ready for my baptism. I would finally have catharsis.

  He put me on A-team when we jumped off for Aachen. Made sure I was the first to engage the enemy.

  Aachen, as I said, was like countless other towns we’d hit. Skeletal. Without power. Deserted save for the Germans playing their studied game of hide-and-seek. The difference this time was that we were on German soil now. We were attacking their homeland. A land they’d grown up in, of which they knew every nook and cranny. Their morale had changed. Where they were willing to cede soil that was not theirs before—the soil of France and Belgium, cultures they felt were inferior anyhow—they were not now. It was as if the idea of Hitler’s Super Soldier—that invincible being that had washed across Europe in 1939 and 1940, but had been slowly demythologized once we’d breached the Atlantic Wall and driven them running back across the continent, proving they were indeed mere mortals—had suddenly returned.

  The weapons were there. The strategy. The mercilessness.

  We were in for the fight of our lives, and I was on the front lines.

  The Germans had fallen back to the center of the city. They waited, daring us to come in and get them. The skies had not been clear in weeks, and thus our air power was unable to soften them up any further. And the rear-echelon guys were getting anxious, from what I understand. They kept driving us. They wanted to end this thing. Get us all home before Christmas, they said. (That they were invested in me seeing the contents of my stocking was heartwarming.)

  So we had to go in, air support or no.

  We pushed in, going house to house, getting our tanks to punch holes in the walls; inside we’d punch holes between the houses—creating safe thoroughfares away from the eyes of the snipers. Took us a couple of days in Europe to realize that the worst place you can ever be is the street. You never go in the street.

  Instead, we created these paths through the buildings, moving ever forward toward the center of the city. Clearing out resistance where we needed to.

  And liberating toilet paper.

  From what we understood, we’d be facing SS divisions in the middle of town, bitter-enders, guys t
hat wouldn’t cut and run like the everyday Wehrmacht. They were holed up in a few square blocks around the central plaza; the administrative and official buildings there were of a sturdier construction, with greater complexity and communications potential. They were fortress-like.

  We pounded them with mortars, with tanks, but the buildings held.

  In particular, they’d nested in the old theater—this massive bomb shelter of a place, with all sorts of windows, columns, and dug-in balconies to shoot from.

  Arguello called back for the 155s to hit it. Even a barrage of those heavy shells did nothing.

  We were to take it. Sometimes, as you know, in this age of the grandest killing technologies the world has ever known, the most dependable way of getting the job done is the good old-fashioned way: let the monkeys all get together and fight it out with clubs and knives and small arms. Put them in a small space and see who wants to survive the most.

  One thing you no doubt know over there in the Pacific is about dug-in enemies. A man in a foxhole is a man in a foxhole. Japanese, German, American, doesn’t matter. Shittiest part of war. You’re dug in. Waiting. Thinking. You try to think about other things, but all you think about is If they’re going to come, When they’re going to come, How they’re going to come.

  And you make plans to counter that.

  Which gave me an unsettling feeling as we cased that place. Yes, we were coming, and we had an overkill of men and machines and materiel all the way back to France, so much so that no one really doubted we’d win the War, but on this day, in this eviscerated town, the men inside that theater had been playing chess in their heads, had been for days, calculating our moves in advance—in their town, the town they knew like the back of their hand. They asked themselves exactly how they’d try to dislodge someone positioned in the Theater. How would I try to get in here? What road would I take? From which way would I come?

  And like any good fighter you’d have figured it out. You’d have figured it out days ago.

  And the horrible thing is that I was thinking this very thing the whole time as we made our approach. They know. They’ve got some ugly, early Christmas present waiting for us. But I said nothing. Maybe now, upon reflection, it was because I didn’t want any more bullshit, any more anticipation. I wanted a fight. I wanted to show my company brothers what killing really was.

  We did our searches for booby traps, but with the rain and the increased exposure toward the center of town—the weaker buildings rimming the downtown areas had been flattened by the air assaults of the last six months—we had to make that calculated choice between moving slowly, checking for traps, and in the process exposing ourselves—or blitzing them, hoping that whatever tactical surprise we might achieve was worth the chance of triggering traps we took in such a rush.

  We should have waited. We tripped a web of near-invisible fishing line that ran not just in the streets, but into and through the buildings. It was a literal web, stretching in a hundred different directions—between cars, through windows, across hallways, transecting the insides of the buildings. That gossamer web was impossible to see in the rain-darkened interiors—and when it went, when it was finally tripped, it pulled dozens of S-mines from their hidden locations, triggering them. They came from cupboards, from wheel wells, from cribs, from chandeliers. And we were right in the middle of them.

  Do the Japanese use things like the S-mine, or “Bouncing Betty” as it’s called here?

  It doesn’t explode immediately, but rather projects itself up three feet—right at waist level—just as it explodes. The idea is take the manhood from a soldier first. If it kills him, it’s a bonus. I guess they think that a man is more scared of losing his balls than of dying, and as such it’s a more effective way of terrorizing the enemy.

  Needless to say, our company was shattered. I have never seen the inside of a slaughterhouse, but I now have a good sense of what it must look like.

  The ones that survived fell back; we found ourselves yelling at each other at the top of our lungs once we’d found cover. We realized in short order this was because half of us had had our eardrums blown out; the other half, mercifully which included me, only suffered from a temporary, though maddening, near-deafness in our ears.

  It took a moment in that horrid ringing silence to realize that the Germans had followed upon the explosions with a withering counterattack. Where before there was not a single sign of the enemy, now Mauser fire came in at us from all directions, from above and below. “From below?” you probably ask as you read this.

  Yes, brother, they were in the sewers. A perfect network of bunkers, if you think about it, underlying the whole town, impervious to shelling. If one was willing to crawl in the shit and piss, they were impervious.

  They were on the rooftops too. Above and below. They were everywhere.

  We did the only thing we could: dig in and radio back for reinforcements.

  Soon we had tank crews and numerous fresh squads by our side. Without the element of surprise, without that network of Bouncing Betties, the Germans no longer had the advantage. My platoon had been the tip of the spear—just as Arguello said it would be—and we’d suffered mightily for it. But in a way we’d played the Germans’ hand. Now it was time to close the deal. And we went about doing that. A lot of those Germans paid a quick price.

  As the day wore on, it became apparent that the real holdouts were the guys in the sewers. It was holy hell to get them out of there; we’d move for one manhole, only to see them rise from another, pick off a few more of our men, then disappear again.

  We suffered this way for hours, until a flamethrower unit appeared from the rear. We were going to roast them alive in their holes.

  If you could have heard those sounds once the crews unleashed those long geysers of flame into those tight quarters beneath the streets! Everywhere it echoed down there—the sound of men vainly trying to scream away the flame, trying to scream themselves free of their claustrophobic shit-bunkers down there. The impervious were impervious no more.

  In a matter of hours, the sewers were silent. No more screams. No more gunfire. But Arguello wanted to make sure the job was done. He sent a handful of men down there to verify and “secure” the sewers. I’m no historian, but I’d wager it was the first time in the world one nation had secured a dozen miles of shit and piss from another. Arguello gave me that look—that knowing Catholic look—both condescending and caring—that said: “You wanted the fight. I’m giving it to you in spades. Get in there.”

  So I was amongst those that went in. It was a strange relief to smell only the burnt petrol odor that the flamethrowers left behind. It had blasted away the excreta, or had at least sterilized or overpowered its stench in the short term.

  When we came across the Germans’ bodies, they were in perfect still life. An artist could not have teased greater expression from a model’s pose in trying to express an emotion in unmoving silence. They all died at the zenith of their panic, mouths wide, hands and arms before their faces, bodies arced in a most supreme angst. That terrible angst writ on their faces suggested to me that even death—finally apprehended in this life when we at last touch it—is no welcome destination. No place where we lay down our struggle and live in perpetual respite.

  We are caught, aren’t we, brother? Between Germans on the rooftops and Germans in the sewers. Between life—as it is in this war and in this world—and death. The boundaries to this existence: excruciating on all sides.

  It would turn out there was life down there.

  We heard the sounds. Deeper in the sewers, in places so cramped and sordid, I suspect even the lowest vermin would not go. The remaining Enemy, no doubt. Desperate. Hiding.

  Once we threatened them with a quick blast from the flamethrower, they came out, dribbling pathetic pleas in English. They did not want to die, they did not want to fight, they just wanted to live.

  It took us a moment, in that dim light, especially given how much excreta covered their bodie
s, to realize that they did not have the build of soldiers. They were small or stooped or feminine. They were citizens of the town, ones that apparently could not get out before the advance.

  Don’t shoot, they said. It came from the old man’s mouth, from the child’s, from the tear-strewn face of the woman.

  And I wanted to. I wanted to shoot them down right there, relieve them of the sewage-drenched things they’d become. Free them from a world that would reduce them to this. A couple of quick twitches of my finger and they’d be relieved of the horrible indignity that they so embodied in that moment; of all that invariably came next—the suffering, the continuing hurricane of war around them, the scramble for food, for a roof, for shelter with the onset of winter coming. (Roofs always go first, don’t they? Walls hold, some will, but roofs always go. We’ve knocked down probably 80 percent of the roofs in Western Europe.) I could do some good in the world with just a couple of shots. End these shit-strewn troglodytes’ suffering once and for all.

  But this could not be my first kill.

  The other guys in the company would have a field day with that—can’t kill the enemy soldier for the life of him, but unarmed civilians at point-blank…Gray’s a master at that. Besides, killing for me was about catharsis, about getting the Rage out, not some misaligned sense of mercy.

  Arguello ultimately got them back to the rear. Bathed them. Gave them dry clothes and a meal. I was not there to see it.

  The advance had to continue. We’d already been there for the better part of a day, and we’d gotten no further than that block of horror, just before the Theater, the one that had stopped us cold with its S-mines and perfectly timed ambush.

  It was night now. The winds had picked up; rain slashed in. It was so thick I swear the tracers the Germans fired at us from the Theater sizzled through the raindrops. Gave off steam as they lit up the night. The engineers were busy welding the sewers shut. But we still were unable to advance because of the snipers up on the rooftops. They were killing machines, with incredible economy. Virtually every bullet they used struck home.