Casualties of War: The Advocate Trilgy

by Bill Mesce

  “You already asked,” Harry said. “I’m afraid not.”

  The lieutenant shook his head. “Did I ask you if you wanted coffee? I thought I did. What time is it?” “Oh-one-forty,” Ricks told him.

  “Who are you?”

  Harry introduced the group.

  The lieutenant seemed mildly interested. “You must be here ‘bout the nutcase. The flyboy.”

  “Captain DeFrance had been informed we’d —”

  “They took DeFrance outta here a coupla days ago.”

  “We know.”

  The lieutenant shuffled to a canvas folding stool by the table and lowered himself into it with a grunt. There was a postal box on the table, the small, sturdy kind used for mailing breakables. The lieutenant flipped open the box and Harry saw a flattish cake, pieces gouged out of it, the rest crumbling much like the house above them. “Yup, we were settin’ here eatin’ powdered eggs. Said his wife made better eggs, he was gonna go home for breakfast, walked out inta the minefield ’n’ got his leg blown off.” The lieutenant broke off a piece of the cake and popped it into his mouth. “I hope that lady makes damn good eggs.”

  “Are you Lieutenant Brahm?” Harry asked.

  The lieutenant nodded mutely at the comer near them. Harry looked down and was startled to see a body almost at his feet, its rain slicker covering all but the muddy boots. “Sniper,” the lieutenant said through his mouthful of cake. “This mornin’. I guess Porter ha’n’t got ’round to readin’ his momin’ mail. You sure you don’t want coffee? Got cake, goes good with the coffee. Came for the cap’n yesterday. From his wife. All the way from — where was it?” He fumbled with the wrapping paper. “Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Not bad. She even wrote ‘Happy Birthday’ on it.” A fresh leak started through the planks above the lieutenant. Without rising, he slid his seat a few inches out of the way.

  “Who’s the senior officer here?” Harry asked.

  The lieutenant smiled grimly as he patted the pockets of his field jacket, looking for something.

  “He’s the only officer,” Ricks said, understanding. He offered the lieutenant a cigarette, lit it for him.

  “You say that like a lodge brother,” the lieutenant said, nodding a thanks for the cigarette.

  “Third Battalion,” Ricks told him.

  “Lieutenant Robbie,” the lieutenant said, introducing himself.

  “Sorry about Lieutenant Brahm,” Harry said.

  “Why? Did you know him?”

  “Major Porter said he was a good man.”

  “How the fuck would Porter know? He ain’t stuck his nose ’round that mountain since he set hisself up in that farmhouse.” To Sisto: “Hey, Dominick! How’s life back there at the Waldorf?”

  “Nice,” Sisto said. “Dry.”

  “Betcha miss it awready, huh?” Robbie took a deep pull on the cigarette, spurring a series of racking coughs.

  “You all right?” Kneece asked.

  “If you were my relief, I’d be fuckin’ fine.” Robbie laughed, triggering another series of coughs. “Did you boys say why you’re here? Somethin’ ’bout that flyboy? You come to pull ’im outta here?”

  “We’re just here to talk to him,” Harry said.

  “Too bad.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know what he’d been through ’fore he got here, but he’d pretty much had it when he showed up. Been a pain in the ass ever since. They put ’im up on the line with a field phone, Coster’s supposed to coordinate close air for us. Crazy bastard’s been droppin’ bombs all over fuckin’ Italy He’s so flak-happy he hears mice in the night he calls in bombers. I don’t even pass his mission calls on no more, less ’n I get it confirmed from my people on the line. You’re not gonna take ’im with you?”

  “We’re just here to talk to him.”

  “Shame. Why don’t you take me with you?”

  Harry smiled in sincere sympathy. “Could we talk to Coster now?”

  “I ain’t stoppin’ you.”

  “He’s in a nice deep hole about three hundred yards on,” Sisto told them, pointing toward the front line. “He don’t come out.”

  “Not for nothin’,” Robbie emphasized. “You wanna talk to ’im, you’re gonna have to go on up there. Personally, if it was me, I’d just mail ’im a questionnaire. Dominick, you think you can get these fellas up there with nobody gettin’ hurt?” Sisto shrugged. “We’ll see.”

  “You fellas be careful,” Robbie warned. “That squirrel hears noises in the dark, he’ll just as soon take a pop at you as anythin’ else. Iff’n this rain lets up, you wanna be back here ’fore sunup, otherwise there ain’t gonna be no gettin’ crosst that field’til nightfall. You’re lucky, maybe I’ll see y’all for breakfast.”

  *

  “Rain’s lettin’ up,” Sisto observed unhappily.

  They were kneeling in the shelter of the one standing wall of the farmhouse — or rather the few truncated feet of it that were left — along with the CP’s security squad.

  Harry shifted uncomfortably. His tired legs ached.

  Ricks pointed to the diffused glow behind the rain clouds. “Looks like the moon’s ready to break.”

  “Yeah,” Sisto said. “We want to be across before that happens.”

  “That’s it out there? That’s where the krauts are?” Kneece burbled.

  Harry couldn’t see the captain’s face, but his voice was tense, his breath coming in short pants. Not fear. Excitement.

  Ricks hushed him.

  “OK, listen up,” Sisto said. “You see out there, those little stakes with the white tape on ‘em? You stay just to the right of ‘em. That’s the way through. Don’t step nowhere you don’t see me step, otherwise you’re gonna be in the mines. When you get up to the line, remember the sign is ‘peach,’ countersign is ‘pit.’ You bump into anybody in the dark, you say ‘peach,’ and you don’ get ‘pit’ back, you start pullin’ the trigger. Awright, let’s go. And for Chrissake, move quiet.” Sisto fished his dog tags out of the collar of his slicker and held them in his mouth. Ricks followed suit and indicated Harry and Kneece should do the same. “So’ey won’ ma’e noise.”

  Sisto led off, holding himself in a crouch, moving quickly though not at a run. They followed at intervals: Ricks, Kneece, Harry.

  Harry stayed so close to the ground markers he almost tripped over them. His eyes kept racing from Kneece ahead of him, trying to make sure he followed the captain’s footsteps, to the muddy field round him, wondering which of those puddles and mounds might be a mine, wondering if his feet were pounding the spongy earth too hard and might set one off. As the rain lightened, Harry saw a copse of cypress trees just ahead, nestled together round a hump of ground. Sisto signaled them to halt, and they all dropped to one knee.

  “Hey, in the bunker!” he heard Sisto whisper. “Peach. Peach! Hey, asshole, peach!”

  There came an explosive pop, and it was only when Harry saw the other men in the file drop facedown into the mud that he realized it’d been a gunshot.

  Jesus… and he put his face to the wet earth. No place to go… this is worse than that damned boat…

  “You OK, Signor Roosk?” Dominick Sisto called back.

  Harry nodded he was fine.

  “Stunat!” he heard Sisto fume. “We’re Americans, you stupid fuck! Peach! Peach!”

  The beam of an electric torch lanced out from the earth mound and picked them out one by one.

  “This guys unbelievable,” Ricks said. “We should nail this guy for being a prize fuckin’ moron.”

  Sisto was charging toward the source of the beam. “Put out that light, dumbshit!” The corporal stumbled his way into a hole at the rear of the mound, grabbed the torch away, Harry heard a body hit the mud. “What the fuck is the matter with you?” Not waiting for an answer, Sisto wheeled and urgently signaled the rest of them to follow.

  In the dark, Harry tripped down the hole, which turned out to be the muddy entryway into some sort of dugout, low-cei
linged, he painfully learned when he tried to stand up. It was also cramped. Bodies kept rubbing against him. He heard the rubbery rustle of a rain slicker; an elbow thumped against his helmet — Ricks’s voice, “Sorry, whoever you are” — then the slicker was held up across the entryway and Harry heard someone tucking it tight round the edges of the portal.

  The flick of a match, the flare of Peter Ricks’s candle.

  It had been Ricks who had stripped off his rain gear. He took off the outside shell of his helmet, planted it in the earthen side of the dugout, dripped some soft wax onto the metal, then set the base of the candle in the wax. They were a sight, helmets, faces, and slickers glistening with mud. Sisto was holding the torch and a.45, both confiscated from the guilty party.

  “Where is this prick?” Ricks seethed.

  Sisto stepped out of the way and pointed to a figure curled in a corner behind him. Ricks reached down, grabbed the man by the front of his leather flight jacket, and flung him closer to the candle.

  “Je-Je-Jesus I’m sorry I-I-I’m sorry I’m so-so-so-so-sorry I didn’t know it was you these fuckin’ krauts, the fu-fu-fuckin’ krauts, they come around all night, they fuckin’ infiltrate all fuckin’ ni-night —”

  “What the hell kinda crazy bedbug is this?” Peter Ricks demanded. The cringing figure pushed away from them, looking like he sought to push himself into the dirt wall.

  Second Lieutenant Andrew Coster was a stunning testament to how even a short time under fire could age a twenty-four-year-old man. He hadn’t shaved since he’d been flown out of the naval air station at Narssarssuaq three weeks earlier, nor, by the rank smell in the dugout, bathed in as long. His face was gaunt, wan; his entire body trembled uncontrollably. His brown eyes, swallowed in shadowed, puffy flesh, were set in bloodshot fields.

  It was the eyes that registered with Harry. Not the flaming sleeplessness of them, but the wild, darting look that, even after seeing and knowing he was surrounded by fellow Americans, never faltered, never eased. Andy Coster wasn’t just afraid; he was consumed with terror.

  “C-c-can I have my gu-gun, huh, can I have my gun, oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus, do-do-don’t take my gun for Christ’s sake in the name of C-C-Christ c-can I have my gun?” The words tumbled out over each other, the trembling lips moving so fast Coster had no time to swallow. Spittle bubbled up at the corners of his mouth.

  Peter Ricks’s anger abruptly subsided. “Major — this is what you’ve been chasing since Greenland?”

  “Factually, he is a little anticlimactic,” Woody Kneece murmured.

  “How ’b-b-b-bout my gu-gun, f-f-fellas, huh, my gu-gun don’t leave me without a gun what the fuck is the ma-matter with you guys leavin’ me without a f-fucking gun?” In the space of a whimper, Coster seemed to go from crippling terror to angry desperation.

  Ricks knelt by the flyer, reached out a hand to his face.

  “N-n-no!” Coster reached up to fend off Ricks, as if fearing a blow. Ricks batted the hand away and held Coster’s eye open wide.

  “Son of a bitch,” Ricks muttered and stepped back from him. “You’re not going to get anything worth a damn out of this guy anytime soon. He’s all wound up on Benzedrine. Looks like he’s been eating them like gumdrops. Where are they, Coster?”

  “G-g-gimme my gun I’ll t-tell you you gimme my gun.”

  Ricks pulled Coster upright, patted him down until he found the envelope of pills in the flyer’s breast pocket. He pushed Coster away and headed for the door.

  “N-n-no no no!”

  Coster flung himself at Ricks, who easily pushed him off, then laid a sound punch on the flyer’s chin that left him sprawled and unconscious on the muddy floor.

  Dominick Sisto applauded.

  Ricks scattered the pills outside. “Let him sleep this off for a while. Then maybe we can get something out of him. That rain’s gonna stop. This bozo should have a set of field glasses here somewhere.”

  They bumped against each other in the small chamber. The observation post, which, from the amount of work done on it, obviously predated Coster’s arrival, had been scooped out of the earth to a depth of five feet. A web of heavy tree branches formed the base of a domed ceiling, over which had been thrown a tarpaulin and then a covering of earth and shrubs as camouflage. There were observation ports facing the MLR, but they had been blocked with sandbags.

  They searched through the litter on the floor: K ration boxes, C ration tins, a sleeping bag and a grid map trampled into the mud floor. They found the glasses near a field phone by the blocked ports.

  Ricks blew out the candle and had Sisto help him pull the sandbags clear of the ports.

  The rain stopped.

  The OP had been well sited on a slight rise that gave it a nearly 180-degree unobstructed view of the terrain in front of it. The American line ran along the low side of a shallow dale. A winding stream curled through the bottom of the valley, now rain-swollen past its banks, leaving the grassy expanse on either bank shining under the cloud-diffused moon. Even a military amateur like Harry could see how inhospitable the American position was: the far side of the valley was marked by a line of higher, steep-sided hills, looking down on the American positions.

  Ricks silently scanned the hills with the field glasses.

  “See anything?” Kneece asked, his voice tight.

  Ricks shook his head. “But they’re up there. Corp, how often do they probe around here?”

  “Whenever they can,” Sisto replied. “Anything to keep us gettin’ a nights sleep.”

  “How far apart are the other foxholes?”

  “Maybe every ten yards. There’s also an empty hole on either side of us inside these trees to support the OP Nobody’s in ’em; nobody wants to be around this nutcase.” He gestured at Coster, who hadn’t moved since Ricks struck him.

  “Corp, why don’t you set up shop in here? I’m going to take the hole on the right.”

  “What about us?” Kneece asked.

  “You two stay and guard your witness, and hope when he comes to he makes some sense. If he does, come get me. If anything pops, you two stay here. This is your position.”

  *

  Whatever ravages the war had inflicted on the hillsides and fields along the MLR were invisible in the night. The clouds broke up, a crescent of moon appeared, and the sodden landscape lit up in a thousand glittering points, every droplet, course of water, and puddle a twinkling sequin. The bombardment they’d heard off to the southwest had slowed to a few sporadic explosions, then nothing. Standing by the entryway they could look off to where the noise had been and see a scarlet glow pulsing in the dark.

  Harry pulled the steel shell off his helmet and set it down on the floor as a stool. “So what’s with this corporal business?” he asked Sisto. “You’re coming up in the world.” “Well, it’s not like being some fancy-schmancy JAG major.”

  “Trust me; that’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”

  “I was up to buck sergeant for a while. Was even runnin’ my platoon. ’Course, at the time, the platoon wasn’t much bigger than a squad.”

  “What happened?”

  “I coulda used you then, Signor Roosk. You coulda spoke for me like you did that time with ol’ Mayer.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “All I did was use my initiative. They were always givin’ us all that use-your-initiative guff back in basic, so that’s what I did.”

  “That’s what you did.”

  “We were bivouacked outside of Avellino. There was some kinda big house there, like an estate I guess you’d call it, some rich guy’s place. My initiative told me maybe that place hadn’t been properly reconnoitered, maybe something of military value had been overlooked.”

  “Like?”

  “Did you know all these big places in Italy got these wine cellars?”

  “Oh, brother.”

  “We took no prisoners, Signor Roosk. Not a bottle was left standing. Unless it was empty.”

  Kneece laughed with them.
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  “Pipe down in there!” Ricks hissed at them from outside. Woody Kneece stood by Sisto at the observation port. “This may sound crazy, but I almost want something to happen.” “Not crazy,” Sisto said. “You think like that ’til your first time. Then you don’t want anything to happen anymore.”

  “Jesus, I could use a cigarette.”

  “You do it like this.” Sisto crouched low in the dugout. He lit a match, covering its flare with his body against the wall. Once the cigarette was lit, he kept the glowing tip inside his cupped hands. He handed the cigarette to Kneece, who did likewise.

  “You said you were at Avellino?” Harry asked. “A lot of the people in our neighborhood come from around Avellino,” he explained to Kneece. “A lot of them still have relatives here. How was it?” he asked Sisto.

  “Pretty banged up. Mom told me to try and find our people. She said we had aunts, uncles, cousins, but all I found was this kid. Maybe twelve years old. I couldn’t understand him too well. The Italian we talk back home isn’t exactly like what they talk here. But if I got him right, he’s some kinda cousin to me. He spent six days living in a drainpipe until the shooting stopped. He was all I found. Didn’t know where his mom and pop were. Some of the people still in town told us a lot of people took off into the hills. Maybe they came back, I don’t know. I think that’s why I don’t write to Mom so much. She always asks, and I don’t know what to tell her. I mean, Signor Roosk, that used to be her village” Sisto went rigid. “Shhh.”

  Kneece extinguished his cigarette. They could hear someone running along the American line of foxholes in their direction.

  “Peach.” It was Ricks.

  “Pit.”

  More footsteps toward Ricks’s position, a quick, hissed conversation, then a pair of legs running by the observation ports to continue on down the line. Ricks stuck his head by the port.

  “What’s the poop?” Sisto asked.

  “Listening post thinks they heard something moving about two hundred yards to our right. Maybe they scooted over in the rain and now they can’t get back. If this pops, you hold fire unless it moves this way. You wait for me to call it, understand?”