Casualties of War: The Advocate Trilgy

by Bill Mesce

  “Telephone?”

  “Don’t they have telephones where you come from, Owen? Ya know, it’s something how that worked out you have a last name sounds like a first name.”

  “A good Scotsman’s prudence.”

  “I think what’s happening is this. A battalion gets ordered into the attack. They hit the first phase line ok. The battalion S–2 gets on the horn to regiment and says we’re off to a good start. Regiment tells division the attack’s going great so far. Division tells corps we’ve never had an attack go better. By the time the message gets to Versailles, it sounds like the war’ll be over in time for us all to sit back and enjoy Charlie McCarthy. Then the next message they get is that same battalion screaming for a lifeguard. This leaves the higher–ups understandably baffled. ‘What happened?’ they ask. ‘Everything seemed to be going so well!’ SHAEF wants somebody from outside to evaluate the problem, see where and how big it is.” Van Damm parked his chin on a fingertip. “Voila.”

  As we didn’t really know each other, there then followed an uncomfortable silence where we found ourselves with nothing else to say.

  “Yeah, well,” Van Damm finally said and sighed to his feet. He turned to regard the epicene embrace of the velveteen chair. “That chair’s contagious. I’ve got this urge to buy drapes.” He shook my hand. “Good to finally meet you, Owen. I’m going to dig up Ricks and say hullo. When you see ol’ Voss, you give him my regards.”

  I escorted him to the door, but as he reached for the knob, I laid a restraining hand on his.

  “You make a pass at me and I’ll scream rape,” he said.

  “You know why Harry’s here, don’t you?”

  “I know he’s on a case. I know the charges. How’d they get Voss to swing from the other side of the base?” He responded to my puzzled look with, “I hear he’s playing defense this time.”

  “He has a personal connection to the lad on trial.”

  He removed his cigar, licked his lips thoughtfully as that wonderful machine inside his head quickly and properly divined the subtext. He nodded. “Ah.”

  “I’m thinking you might be of help to him, eh?”

  “Me?”

  “I can’t say for sure now, can I? Only Harry could. But it involves an action in the Huertgen, and I’m thinking, well, I can’t help but think you might have something to contribute. That is, if you’d be willing to testify.”

  He smiled at the dare. “I’m just wondering how much good I’d do him, Owen. He gets a jury panel of brass–arses, I don’t know how they’re going to feel hearing what I have to say and seeing it go down on the record.”

  “I suppose, then, it’s a question of who to protect, isn’t it? The ‘brass–arses,’ or a young officer who tried to save what was left of his men?”

  He nodded in appreciation of my maneuvering. Then, that look of study, again. “Do you believe him? This kid ol’ Voss is defending?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know him. Harry Voss does. He believes him.”

  “What’s the trial date?”

  “December 8th. But I should think Harry would need to talk to you beforehand.”

  Van Damm rolled his eyes. “We just started with Cota’s people. I don’t know how long we’re going to be buried here.” But then a resigned nod. “I don’t know how soon I can get up there…but if he wants me…”

  I opened the door for him and told him where to find Peter Ricks.

  “Ol’ Voss does get us to do it for him, doesn’t he?” Van Damm called over his shoulder as he headed off down the corridor.

  “Aye. That’s his gift.”

  “Why couldn’t he just be pretty like the rest of us goils?” he said in a Betty Boop–ish voice with a slap on his own posterior. Then there was a high–flying wave ta–ta – “Tell ‘im I said hullo” – and a trail of cigar smoke puffs heading off down the corridor.

  *

  “Surprised me no end he knew I had a law degree. Hell,” Andy Thom shook his head with a dumbfounded smile, “I thought the lootenant hated me.”

  We were sitting in a salon now being used as the hospital canteen. Makeshift counters provided coffee, sandwiches, and even hot food for the hospital staff and the ambulatory patients. We were sitting on a pair of lounges picking at plates of something called “processed turkey loaf” laid under a near plasticine substance passing for gravy.

  “What made you think the lieutenant hated you?” I asked.

  “Well, I guess I mean I didn’t think he cared all that much for any of us. I didn’t think he even knew any of our names.”

  “You’re talking about the time you were in England.”

  Thom nodded. “Lootenant Sisto was a real ball–buster. Out on the trainin’ field you’d thought his boot wasn’t happy lessen it was planted in yer ass! Then ya’d drag on back to camp ‘n’ if you tried to find ‘im then? Like a ghost. Invisible. Only time he talked to you was when he was workin’ you ‘n’ that was just to scream at ya. But then…”

  “Eh?”

  “He was all different when we came over.”

  “How so?”

  “Then he was always there. You were on the march, Lootenant Sisto was up ‘n’ down the column, talkin’ to you calm–like, askin’ what you needed. Sometimes, well, it was like he knew you just needed to hear somebody say you were doin’ fine, ‘n’ nice–like ‘mindin’ you what you needed to be ‘minded on. On the line, that’s when you found he did know yer name. Anyway, after they pulled us back from the hill, we were camped for a coupla days at the division assembly area outside Rott. That was when they had the inquiry ‘n’ then he came to my tent. ‘Andy, wouldja mind helpin’ me out with this?’ Coulda knocked me over with a feather, Mr. Owen.”

  Peter Ricks joined us then, and we spent the rest of the evening comparing notes from the interviews each of us had conducted that day. As we pored over our notes, commented on our material, I caught Peter Ricks’ eyes and nodded at young Thom. The hardship of the rehashing was easily apparent in the tightness in the lad’s voice, the pained look in his eyes, the beginning of a tremble in his hands. These were his comrades. These were men he knew. And he’d been through it with them.

  “I’m beat,” Ricks said at last. “I don’t know about you guys, but I need some sack time.”

  I agreed, saying something gratuitous about needing to be fresh for the morrow’s interviews.

  I don’t know if Thom saw through our wee sham. In any case, he said he still had some notations to make and we started off to bed, leaving him in the canteen. In the archway leading to the corridor, I stopped and looked back. Andy Thom was not sitting with his interrogation notes and pad and pencil. He stood on the other side of the blackout curtains draped across the high salon windows, losing himself in the night.

  *

  “Jesus, this looks like Dr. Frankenstein’s spare parts room.” Peter Ricks droll comment was directed at our respective prosthetics set neatly together on a dressing table in our quarters. “No wonder that kid doesn’t want to bed down with us. It even gives me the willies!”

  Whatever the room had been, it was now a storeroom for furniture removed from other parts of the chateau to make room for the field hospital’s cots. Ricks looked ruefully about the jumble of chaise lounges, side tables, wing–backed chairs, overstuffed sofas. He shifted uncomfortably on his cot. “You would think there’d be an honest–to–God bed in all that stuff.”

  I related to him what Andy Thom had told me about Sisto down in the canteen. Ricks seemed unsurprised. “You don’t want to know them,” he explained.

  “But what about later? How do you explain the change?”

  Ricks clambered out of his cot and went to the light switch on the wall. “Because then you’re in it and they’re your boys. You ready for lights out?”

  I nodded, the room went dark, and I heard the rustle of his blankets as he climbed back into his cot. I could hear the creak of the cot’s wooden frame as he fidgeted this way and that. After a few
moments, I heard the sound of his hand fumbling among the personal items on the floor by his bed, the crackle of cellophane. His Ronson flared in the dark, disappeared, replaced by the iridescent flower of a cigarette tip.

  “Can I ask you something, Mr. Owen?”

  “Of course.”

  “About your leg.”

  “Aye.”

  “You ever get used to it?”

  “A man can get used to anything. So they say.”

  “So they say. How long does it take?”

  “When I get there, laddie, I’ll let you know.”

  *

  “Ok, here’s the hill, tu sabe?” T/Sgt. Juan Bonilla didn’t wait for a response. He grabbed my pad of foolscap in those massive hands of his, flipped it over, yanked my pencil away and began to sketch on the cardboard backing a shape not quite sharp enough to be described as a chevron, not blunt enough to be called a crescent.

  I had been looking forward to interviewing Juan Bonilla for by the time we sat together on the afternoon of our second day in Wiltz, he had gained near–mythic dimensions in my mind’s eye. Those who had known him since joining the unit in England admired him; his fellow Italian campaign veterans adored him; those who had some awareness of his experiences in North Africa before he joined the 37th Division were in outright awe.

  He was the son of migrant workers, Mexicans who followed the harvests throughout southern California. It was assumed he was in his late twenties, but there was no factual record of his birth. One of the old tales had his mother pausing during picking just long enough to deliver him between the furrows and almost immediately return to picking artichokes (or lettuce or oranges, depending on who was telling the story). In fact, there was even some doubt as to whether or not he was properly an American citizen.

  More certain was this: though barely able to speak English and only half–literate, he was bright enough, even as a young lad, to believe there was more to life than spending it stooped over harvesting someone else’s artichokes (or lettuce, etc.). He ran off, enlisted in the Army, and by the end of his first hitch, self–taught, he could read, write and speak English capably, and had demonstrated enough of a gift for the military arts to earn his corporal’s chevrons. He had been weighing the choice of “re–upping” or trying to ply his newly–cultivated abilities as a civilian when the Japanese made the decision for him by bombing Pearl Harbor. From that point on, those already in military service – whether they had a year or a day left on their enlistment – were now in for the duration.

  He had been among the first troops to cross the Atlantic, was blooded in North Africa, wounded at Kasserine, then, again, in Sicily, seriously enough this time to still be laid up when the Americans landed at Salerno. By then he had his third chevron and came into the 37th Division as a replacement squad leader, one of his charges being a much younger PFC named Dominick Sisto.

  It had been Bonilla who had put the lad up for promotion to corporal, pushed his name for command of a squad of his own. When the student passed his mentor and came to command a platoon, it was Bonilla he selected to be his platoon sergeant, and it was by Sisto’s side he’d remained up to and through the tragedies at Hill 399.

  It has been my experience that mythic figures rarely, in person, cut much of a figure at all, but Juan Bonilla seemed every bit the legendary warrior he’d been promoted to be. Though a bit short, when seated this mild deficiency disappeared and he seemed massive with an enormous barrel chest and inflated biceps that threatened to burst his olive drab blouse along the buttons and seams. His features – flagged by a thick, unbroken brow – seemed lost on the broad face of his large, squarish head. His hands, when closed, looked like ten pound sledges, and some of my previous interviewees had warned me that a poke from those thick fingers was like being prodded with a stone post.

  As he quickly sketched the outline of Hill 399, a set of chains fell from his open collar (it was impossible to button it round that bullish neck). One chain, naturally, held his identification plates – his “dog tags.” From the other was suspended a two–inch long wooden cross. It had the rough–hewn look of something hand–carved.

  “So now the way it was that las’ time, you got King Company ‘n’ Love Company together onna lef’, Item onna righ’, tu sabe? ‘Bout halfway up, you got these trenches alla way ‘crosst a front a the hill. Now, see, the hill is got like two tops – ”

  “Two tops?”

  “Like is high over here, ‘n’ high over here, ‘n’ in here inna middle is low.” In translation: There were two crests to the hill, one on either “wing” of the chevron, with a low saddle between them. “Here where is low, this is all rock–like, almos’ alla way down to the trench, so the kraut, he can’ put no bunker or nothin’ in there. So up this way, that’s the only way up.”

  “So the special assault detail – ”

  Bonilla humph–ed. “Fancy name, same ol’ shit. Jus’ mean a firs’ guy to get his cojones shot off at the top a the hill ‘stead the bottom.”

  “They were to jump off from the trenches and go up into this saddle, this low part.”

  “Si. Yeah.”

  “There were twenty of you in that detail?”

  “Li’l more. The l’tenan’, he don’ wan’ no green troops, no rookies, tu sabe? Wan’ too many a the ol’ crowd lef’, but we scrounge up twenty, ‘n’ then me, the l’tenan’, ‘n’ his RTO, ‘n’ we had the colonel wi’ us, Porter. So, wha’s that? Two dozen, righ’? You gotta unnerstan’, it wan’ no two dozen made the run up the hill. Tha’s wha’ we started wit’ at H–hour, but we los’ one goin’ up the hill, three more wounded jus’ from us hole up inna trench waitin’ ‘n’ waitin’ ‘n’ waitin’ to go.”

  “What was the hold up?”

  Bonilla sighed in frustration, not knowing which grievance to air first. “Ok, look, we jump off ‘fore sun–up, s’pose’ to be a surprise attack, tu sabe? But we got all hung up ‘cause that whole part a the hill was so tore up. Then we hadda wait for this guy from King, he was s’pose’ to take out a machine gun closin’ the door on this way up. So now he’s late, the fockin’ sun’s up, ‘n’ now when we gotta move, you go up ‘n’ you are real fockin’ naked! Ain’ no place to dig in ‘n’ cover up once you move ‘cause a all rock.”

  An irrelevant thought intruded. I could see him wondering whether to express it or not. Resigned to an unpleasant obligation, he sighed and continued: “This Colonel Porter, ya know I wouldn’ crosst the road to piss on ‘im he’s on fire. I don’ ‘member no time he wan’ always hangin’ back at HQ. We’re up in the shit, we’re takin’ fire, we’re livin’ up to our ass in mud, Porter’s always someplace where is dry ‘n’ he got hot coffee. But this time, I gotta say it, he was righ’ there. Time to go ‘n’ Porter ge’s righ’ out in fron’, goes chargin’ righ’ up the hill. Course, once you’re outta the trench, you got no place to go but back inna trench or run for the top or they gonna chop you up. Still…

  “The l’tenan’ was righ’ there wi’ ‘im, up at the fron’. He tell me to pick up the back end, keep ‘em movin’. We ain’ that far outta the trench when the kraut mortar is comin’ down. Like I said, you out there fockin’ naked. So you jus’ run.”

  “How many of you made it to the top of the hill?”

  “I was too busy tryin’ not to get my cojones shot off to count noses, tu sabe? I t’ough’ we were in better shape ‘n’ we really was ‘cause I see these other heads only I didn’ know they come up from the Item side of the hill. Ya know – ” he held up one of his stout, granite–like fingers “ – Item was only s’pose’ to fix the krauts on their side a the hill. But these guys, they saw a hole ‘n’ pushed to the top. They didn’ have to do that. All they gotta do is stay in that trench ‘n’ keep their heads down but they made the move. They oughta get wrote up nice or somethin’ for that.”

  “I’ll pass it along.”

  He grinned. “Or give ‘em three days in Paris. A medal’s nice, but I betcha they’d rather have P
aris.”

  I smiled in agreement. “How were you disposed at the top?”

  “Dis–what?”

  “Where was everybody? How were you positioned?”

  “We were kinda all spread out. Like this.” He flipped the pad open, roughly tore a sheet free and began to sketch again. He outlined the saddle: the two overlooking crests, the drop–offs to the forward and rear slopes of the hill. “Ok, now all in here – ” his pencil hovered above the area of the saddle “ – is all holes. Mortars, artillery, is been droppin’ two days, is nothin’ up there but holes, like the hill got chicken pox. I’m las’ up, me ‘n’ some other guys we jump inna hole, firs’ one we see, ‘bout here.” He drew a small circle immediately inside the line demarcating the fall–off to the face of the hill, and to the left of the median of the saddle. “There’s some Item guys way over here.” Another circle, far to the right of the median, but further up into the saddle. “Now in here, inna middle, is a bunch a holes all together, one after another inna line almos’ make a trench.” He sketched a series of overlapping circles from the center of the front of the saddle in a small arc almost to the middle of it. “The l’tenan ‘n’ Porter, they was firs’ up so they jump inna firs’ hole ‘n’ they crawl up as far as they can go. The res’ of ‘em just drop inna firs’ hole. Lessee, that was Sketch Makris, he was the l’tenan’s RTO. Ronnie Byrd, Don Lauffer, they was in with me. ‘N’ Li’l Petie Wardell, ‘n’ Goofball Beaudrie, they was over here.”

  “These other two men, Wardell and Beaudrie… They were in the same position with the radio operator? With Makris? How come they didn’t testify at the inquiry?”

  “‘Cause they never come off the hill,” Bonilla said prosaically. “A guy wi’ me, Ronnie Byrd, he never come down, ‘n’ some a those Item guys. I don’ know who most ‘em were; it was a whole other company, tu sabe? Somebody else’s family. I thin’ mebbe one was an officer.”