Even sitting here now, I’m amazed we made it back to our lines. Approaching, we managed to bark out enough expletives in English to avoid being mistaken for Germans and being shot, then dropped down into cover on the other side of the small rise that marked our position. All I remember is slipping on an icy road as soon as we were safe, Phoenix falling into my lap as I lost my footing, and the two of us sliding down the frozen hillside, me cradling him the whole way.
Even better, our tanks from the Armored Division had made it. They were laboring up the road as we slid past, bound for the forest, bound for all those approaching German infantrymen. Whether they’d have success up there, I didn’t know. But I knew enough to know they’d at least stop this latest German advance. Which meant, for at least a few precious minutes, we could breathe.
I held Phoenix. His eyes were lucid. Maybe it was that his brain was not so choked for oxygen as it had been before. Could it be that a safety pin and a one-cent strip of rubber could save a man? I guess that’s war. After all, if a two-cent bullet could dispatch a man to oblivion, why can’t something as mundane as a safety pin pull him back from it?
If only that were the end of the story.
Those tanks, those 35,000-pound Shermans, were struggling like hell past us, trying to crest that hill and get at the Germans. But their treads barely held purchase; those mighty beasts slid left and right, trying to claw their way to the top. And the last one finally couldn’t. It lost traction one final time, and gravity did the rest. It quickly slid backward toward us; we were splayed out on the ice right in its path. I scarcely had time to react—my thought, foolishly, was to try to stop it, or at least fend it away, as if somehow I had the strength. It was a split-second thought, because that tank was so heavy it came at us instantaneously. But it was the wrong thought. I should have moved Phoenix.
Instead, while I jumped to my feet, my hands on the tank, vainly trying to stop it, the tank slid atop Phoenix, crushing him.
I can’t really explain what went through me. There is that intimacy that I spoke of earlier. A shot-up man on the battlefield is a lot like a baby. One needs battle dressing, the other a diaper. Both surrender themselves to you with supreme vulnerability and trust (if still crying the whole time). You are in that moment their parent. The thing that will make all the horror go away. You are the only thing in their world, their only hope.
Afterward, I sent for Graves Registration. They’d take him and assign him for burial along with the hundreds of others we lost that day.
Then I went back to Arguello and told him I was done. I didn’t want to be a battlefield parent, an ass-wiper, a last beacon of hope. I didn’t want it. Because what sense was it for me to offer such promise to those men, when it was beyond my control anyhow? I’d be the final liar they’d see, in a string of dozens of liars along the way, all promising hope, even when hope and war are mutually exclusive things.
You’ve not been in enough war then, Arguello said.
Are the Catholics you meet over there as crazy as this shit-house loon? (Yes, I called you that, Arguello, if you’re reading!) Do they all think that the only way to heaven is through ungodly amounts of self-mortification and pain?
Ultimately, he would not be moved. Maintained the same position—I could be tried for desertion and go to Leavenworth for a decade, or I could “stick with it.”
I’m tired. I’m sure you’re tired. I’m sure every soldier on every side of this war is tired. But they keep pushing us, don’t they? Till all the cities are knocked down. Till every mine in the world is emptied of iron ore and turned into bombs and bullets. Even then, they’d make us fight with stones and dirt clods, wouldn’t they?
So it is I’m staying on. If only because that moment of intimacy with Phoenix was different than the one with the sniper on the rooftop in Aachen. I wore both men’s blood on my tunic, could smell their trench-foul breath. I was the last man either saw. But to one, I was a murderous usher unto Death. To the other, I was hope, that there is a way out of this mess, this carnage.
In that most frightened moment, I was there to assuage him.
The world can use that, a beacon of hope, however small it may be. Even if in the end it is a lie.
-G.
IX
(Never ask a hoarder for any of his stuff.
Come on, Lily, you know that.
Quickest way to make things get tweaky.)
But she’s done it.
In the spirit of getting out of here, on time, she’s asked Bill if it’d be possible for her to take the letters with her.
Oh, he says, his fingers dancing with subtle unease.
I’ll mail them back; I promise—
Oh, he says again.
He’s trying to smile, but she can see dread threatening to overrun the man.
(Never ask a hoarder for his stuff, Lily!
Besides, the man doesn’t have a zip code.
He’s dark ages to the USPS.
[Who are themselves dark ages.])
She tries a different tack: How about a Kinkos?
Is there a town nearby with a Kinkos?
I could copy them, bring them back.
Greensville, I suppose.
Great, how far’s Greensville?
One hundred miles.
Each way?
If it’s one hundred miles one way, it’s the same back, he says without a lick of condescension.
Like it’s one of the great truths he’s learned over the many long years of his life.
If you’re in a hurry on account of me, he says, no need to be.
I could put a tent out on the lawn for you.
Coleman; got it on sale at Scheel’s.
Never been used.
Oh, it’s not that, she says.
I’ve got to be back to work.
He nods knowingly, as if to say, Yeah, there’s that work thing, isn’t there?
Could move to Centralia, he says finally.
Then you wouldn’t have to work.
One more hour, she decides.
She’ll bomb through the rest of this stuff, then warp-ten that rental car back down the freeway to the airport.
It’ll end up being another one of those drive-through-the-night propositions.
The one she failed last time.
But that’s because there was wiggle room then.
This time, the deadline’s the deadline.
There’s no time to lard with indecision, with lollygagging.
Up against the backstop of a deadline, things come clear.
Black and white.
They either will be or they will not, depending upon her choice, right then and there.
She chooses it to be.
All of it.
This in Centralia, and that back down on the coast.
She can have it all.
It will just require an IV drip of 5-Hour Energy.
X
1 March 1945
B—
Pedals. Do you remember me writing to you about him, the first guy I patched up? (Though I didn’t do anything but dope him up on morphine.) He was the guy with the million-dollar wound.
He and I have become something of a team. He’s now an aid man. Carries the guys I’m able to patch up back to the aid station in the rear. I thought it was an interesting turn of events for a guy with a wound that was his ticket out of here.
At first I thought he had some sort of revelation—you know, God had touched him in his moment of need, etc., etc. It’d have to be that type of thing to make a man not only re-up, but put down his gun and join the mop-up crew.
I guess in helping him, I’d earned a place in his heart. He was the first man in the company to publicly embrace me. He’d share with me at night whatever liquor had been procured during the most recent actions—calvados, wine, schnapps—and we’d get to talking before drifting off to a few hours of restless sleep wherever we happened to be bivouacked. Because the Germans are in full retreat now, we have much bett
er choice of accommodations. It’s usually farmhouses or inns or churches. They still don’t have any roofs.
He’s an intellectual, capable of seeing interstices between things I’m unable to. Or maybe it’s because he’s a paranoid.
His soliloquies (rants?) go something like this: You think it’s a bullet that kills a man? You’re not looking far back enough in the process. Then it’s the soldier that fired that bullet, right? No. The CO, surely, then—the one that gave the order to engage the enemy. No. You’re still not looking far enough back.
The general, I’ll say, just to bite.
Still not far back enough.
The president?
No, we’re talking Prime Movers here. And the president is not the Prime Mover, I assure you.
God, I say, because that’s about as prime a Prime Mover as you’re going to get.
No, because there’s no scientific proof that he exists.
Let’s see, I say, playing along: what lies on the hierarchy somewhere north of the president but south of God? Ah! Ideology! You’re saying democracy killed those Panzer guys today. And fascism killed Ballard and Michaels.
No, he says, those are transient things, ideologies.
But there’s a constant, an undercurrent through all of human history, something that every man has wanted, irrespective of whether he’s a Nazi, Canaanite, or what have you.
Women!
He smiles at that thought. Man is just about stupid enough to blow up a whole continent in pursuit of the other side’s tail, but no. Good thought, though.
We’re drunk at this stage. Most nights in ’45, now that we’ve gotten clear of the snow, we’ve been drunk. Everyone’s getting a little lax. It’s not often you can just wheel through the landscape and take what you want with impunity.
Money, he says finally.
I was a bit dispirited to hear this. I was hoping he’d speak to a deeper motivation, an esoteric yearning that might illuminate things for me.
I tell him money’s too base a motivation. Yes, of course, people like money. But in my opinion, there are higher callings—religious dogma, political beliefs—and it’s when they’re taken to too righteous an end that wars start. I felt pretty smart saying that.
All that’s just a most magnificent misdirection, he says. Politicians, religious leaders, they get to where they get because they’re good at it. They know how to wave their hands and make you think it’s about one thing when it’s really another. Look at it this way: Think about the buildings they’re issuing their orders from. You see any government anywhere calling shots from a hut? I don’t see the pope in a teepee. They’ve got all the shit, Gray! Wake up. Ten years ago Nazi Germany didn’t have the shit, so they said, let’s build a bunch of tanks and Stukas and go take the shit. And they did. That’s what empire is! British empire, Caesar, ancient Egypt—nobody with power—real power—stays pat; they grow! They take other people’s shit! They want to have the shiniest shit, and that means they’ve got to take other people’s shit! Don’t get me started about America.
That’s not why I’m here, I tell him.
He rolls his eyes.
That’s not why you’re here, I continue.
Now he really rolls his eyes.
I’m serious, I say. You could’ve gone home, but you chose to stay, you chose to help.
He laughs like hell. I mean, really filled our small room with a cackle.
I’m not here to help, Gray! he finally says.
I’m here for the morphine.
It turns out Pedals was hooked within a week while he was laid up at the aid station. He says his family’s got a thing with chemicals—nicotine, alcohol—you put anything in front of them, and the wheels just come off.
He volunteered to stay on as an aid man, if only because he knew it was a ticket to an unlimited supply of morphine. The moment it hits you, he says, all the crooked places are made straight; the ceaseless streak of bullshit that is life loses all its unholy momentum and you can breathe. It’s like there is this world running parallel to ours, sweet and without pain, separated from us by the most gossamer of sheets, which can be pricked opened and accessed with a single morphine needle.
He is in this state most days as we are shoveling our compatriots’ bodies from the landscape. Hands bloody, eyes filled with perpetual atrocity, and yet within his head, a sweet, vacuous remove.
I let him nip morphine, as long as it doesn’t compromise our overall supply. It doesn’t. Uncle Sam, by how much dope he’s sending our way, anticipates a few million more casualties.
I also let Pedals steal the morphine because in some skewed reasoning, I’m not ready to let him go yet. He is like me—someone trapped by hells within and without—trying desperately to get out. But how can one escape hell if it is everywhere?
(I confess, on one of our schnapps benders, that I considered trying the morphine. But I was just sober enough to recognize that Pedals’ morphine escapes were always temporary—and he came crashing wickedly back into the world once the morphine wore off. He uses ever more morphine to achieve the blissful escape he yearns for. Morphine will kill him.)
Good or bad, I seek a more permanent escape. In this life. I am too haunted by the faces of the dead to believe that there is solace to be found in an afterworld. A god that would bestow a war like this upon humanity would hardly be good company.
As the days wear on, there is glee in Pedals’ eyes when he sees what he perceives as proof of his assertion—that this is all a money grab. We’ve indeed seen that the Germans have looted the best museums in Belgium. Just the other day, we stopped a German commander trying to run our lines in his officers’ sedan as he beat a hasty retreat for Berlin. His trunk was found stuffed with Belgian chocolate and French lingerie.
And while I wish I could say it was only the Germans, I’ve seen otherwise.
Germany’s become something of a feeding frenzy for anyone with a lick of power.
With the Roer River as a buffer, rear-echelon types are suddenly emboldened, showing up at the front. Men that wouldn’t be caught within fifty miles of the lines are now there, shaking hands with the men, getting their pictures taken.
It was in this atmosphere that a brigadier general appeared. I’ll have to use a pseudonym for him (Arguello may suffer my written slings and arrows with detachment, but I will not risk thinking that higher-up censors, should they read this, are possessed of his same beneficence). Smith will do.
Smith was everybody’s best friend. And he was good at it, I have to admit. Called us heroes. Acknowledged that we’d been run ragged, that our divisions had suffered 200 percent and 300 percent casualties. (Do they have that same enumeration over there? If not, it means that, numbers-wise, all of the original division members had been replaced due to casualty, and those in turn were replaced in their entirety. The men die or are maimed, but the division lives on.)
Smith was from Tennessee, eschewed all the formal I’m-better-than-you stuff you usually get from brass. He was a foul-mouth, a ham, a boozer. The men loved him. And they especially loved him when he staged a Tennessee-style backyard barbecue for us; there was freshly killed German boar, dripping with real American barbecue sauce, and bottles of genuine Tennessee Sour Mash for all of us. It was the first time we’d been afforded anything remotely approaching a delicacy by the Army (at least formally; we had done our own “foraging” along the way). We were grateful. It felt like the Christmas we didn’t have in our frozen holes back in the Ardennes. We were so grateful—and probably a little drunk—that we didn’t mind that the whole thing was staged amidst old bomb craters in an exposed field. The Germans were still launching an occasional V-2—a couple a day, their targeting completely random, as if a child were at the switch—but you had to make a calculated gamble. You could be out there on the field drinking whiskey and eating real food, subjecting yourself to the 1-in-1,000 chance you might take a shell, or you could be “safe and sound,” back in the tree line, where your odds were still p
robably 1,000-to-1.
Not a single man was back in the tree line.
Smith kept making speeches. He was one of those guys that booze gave the right kind of momentum to. He’d tell us dirty stories, even dirtier jokes, and all of it lifted our spirits. Leadership’s not so bad when it’s funny.
And bearing sour mash.
The only time he’d get serious is when he’d toast us and say something like, “In all seriousness, gentlemen, you’re doing Good.”
There was something about the way he said Good. The way he’d punctuate the word by tightening his lips, as if holding something back. As if the idea of it—of Good—brought tears to his eyes.
He said that more and more as the night went on and he got drunker.
You’re Doing Good.
I wondered vaguely if he knew something we didn’t. As if he were priming us for something. Something that lay ahead that was more terrible than what we’d been through up ’til now (if that were possible). Was it that we were going to go into Berlin? (The prevailing rumor was that the Russians were going into that fight, not us.) Had the Army done projections as to what sort of casualties an assault on Berlin would incur upon us—going into the capital, where the bitter-enders would fight the hardest? Is that what he knew? That we were going into a meat grinder? Or was it something worse?
We found out the next day. There was some relief when we learned we were going on what was billed a humanitarian mission. German resistance was light now, other than the ever-shrinking core immediately surrounding Berlin, and since we weren’t headed that direction, we’d likely be able to take most objectives without much of a firefight.
Smith stood before us the next morning, most of us wickedly hungover. “We’ve got the luxury of choice now, gentlemen. Most strategic objectives have been taken. Now it’s about choosing where to allocate our resources, how to do the most Good, how to stop the Nazis before they shit anymore beds.”
(Of the rumors that were going around the division, the one with the most traction was that the Nazis were, in a final petulant spasm, executing all POWs in the various camps around the country. We later learned that Patton was in fact leading some liberation efforts for the camps. Ours, it would turn out, was a more local and manageable mission.)
The Far Shore Page 10