Silver Stars

by Michael Grant

  “Unfortunately they can’t get the boats anywhere near the river by truck, so we have to carry them from a drop-off.”

  “How far?” Coelho asks.

  “About a half mile, I reckon.”

  “What the hell?”

  “That’s right,” Cole says, raising his voice just a little to quiet the din of outrage. “We’re carrying the boats across open country in full view of Kraut artillery, although it’s dark enough and we’ll have smoke. Then we put ’em in the water and cross the river.” He spreads his hands. “That’s my orders. No one’s happy about it.”

  “It’s fugging suicide,” Sergeant Alvarez says. “You know goddamn well this is FUBAR.”

  “This entire goddamn campaign is FUBAR,” Sergeant Coelho says. “General Mark goddamn Clark does not know what the fug he’s doing. He’s as big a glory hog as Patton, but only half as smart.”

  No one jumps in to defend the general, who is seen as more interested in reaching Rome and riding through the streets like some Roman emperor of old than in the lives of his soldiers. Cole lets the anger burn down to glowing coals before adding, “Yeah, and just so you know exactly how FUBAR this is, our flanks will be hanging in midair. Once we get across—”

  There’s a bitter snort.

  “Once we get across, we’ve got a series of objectives. A series of hills—”

  Rio almost smiles. Cole always pronounces it “OB-jectives.”

  “Better and better,” Alvarez says. “Cross this flooded field in the freezing rain, through minefields, paddle across to reach barbed wire and more minefields, and then la-di-da into the hills and every goddamned inch of it under Kraut shells.”

  “Well, Alvy, you’ve explained it perfectly,” Cole says dryly.

  This earns bitter, cynical laughter.

  Rio says, “What’s the terrain like?”

  “Open from here to there, farm fields, cross-country. There are some tree trunks still standing along the riverbank, but the fact is there’s not six inches of real cover between here and the far bank of the river. And none on the other side either.”

  Rio falls in beside Stick as they slog back to their squad.

  “Listen, Richlin, this is a bad deal. You know it, I know it. But we can’t let on to our people.”

  “You don’t think they’ll figure it out pretty quick?”

  “Sure they will. But we can’t have anyone hanging back. So you and me, we put on our war faces and keep discipline.”

  “Whatever you say, Stick.”

  Rio is weary, they all are. Too many fights in too many villages; too many holes dug only to fill with rainwater; too much time spent cringing in muddy fields as artillery dropped around them; too many snipers firing from too many well-concealed positions; too many night patrols sneaking along that river in the dark with Kraut machine gunners firing at any sound; too many hikes past the bodies laid by the side of the road for graves registration.

  Weary. Down to her bones.

  The lunacy of the plan is instantly clear to every member of the squad, but Rio keeps a stern look on her face and refuses to join in with the loud grousing. She hasn’t asked to be made corporal, she doesn’t want the job, but she’ll do anything for Stick, and he’s asked her to back him up.

  They are trucked to yet another muddy field—having to get out twice to push trucks whose wheels have sunk to the rims in the soup—where they find the boats. Boats . . . and craters.

  Rio has her hands full trying to locate two boats in the roadside dump that have not already been holed by shrapnel. Jenou is with her, shining a flashlight to inspect the boats. At least a third will never float. “This isn’t good, is it?”

  “No,” Rio says softly.

  “Jesus.”

  “Scared?” Rio says it in what she intends to be a joking tone, as if expecting Jenou to deny it. But it comes out sounding like a challenge.

  “Sure I’m scared,” Jenou says. “I’m not you, Rio, all right? Is that what you want me to say? You want me to kiss your butt and tell you how brave you are? Fine. You’re braver than I am, Rio. You’re a better soldier. Goodie for you.”

  Rio stares at her. It is not the response she expected. She’d just made a little joke. They all joked about their fears, didn’t they? Did Jenou actually believe Rio wasn’t worried?

  “We have a job to do, Private Castain.”

  “Well, aren’t you a good little corporal?” Jenou sneers. “What the hell do you think you’re proving? Is this about being as good as the men? Or is this about being better than me?”

  “I’m just doing my job,” Rio insists.

  “Your job? I’m your friend, Rio. Remember? You and me? Jen and Rio?”

  Rio kicks the side of the boat in frustration. “What do you want from me, Jenou?”

  Jenou stares for a moment, meeting Rio’s angry gaze before dropping her own, so she ends up looking at Rio’s koummya. “I don’t think I’m going to make it, Rio. I feel it. You know? I feel it here.” She taps her chest. “If I’m going to buy it, I want to know I’ve got a friend who will mourn for me.”

  “Christ, Jen, you’re not going to die,” Rio says dismissively.

  Jenou’s belligerence is all gone, the flash of anger burned out. In a soft voice she says, “What if I do, Rio? What if you do?”

  “What the hell is the point of worrying about it? I don’t see Geer or Pang or Stick moping.”

  “No,” Jenou admits. “They’re all busy being men.” She says that last word with a strange mix of condescension and affection. “We’re not men, Rio. We don’t have to be men.”

  Rio shakes out a cigarette and arches her body over it, shielding it so her Zippo will light. The flame lights her face, an eerie light, like something out of a Dracula movie. “Don’t we?” Rio asks, exhaling smoke. “You ever think maybe it’s the other way around? Maybe men are that way because they grow up expecting they might someday find themselves in some shithole getting shot at?”

  Jenou draws back, confused, and Rio plows ahead, angry in her own turn now. “You think if we grew up imagining the day we’d be ass-deep in mud with our buddies getting picked off, we’d be sharing our deepest emotions? You and me, we grew up imagining our first kiss and planning our weddings. They grew up playing cowboys and Indians, playing war. So yeah, they keep their distance from each other, they don’t expose themselves to . . .”

  “To what?”

  “Pain.” The word comes through gritted teeth. She grabs Jenou’s collar and yanks her close, close enough that no one else can hear. “It tears my guts out, Jen. Cassel. Suarez. It’s like a . . . it’s pain, that’s all. And you want me to be little Rio from Gedwell Falls and share my every thought with you? You think I don’t know you could get hit? You think every goddamn patrol we go out on, every fugging little village, you think I forget it could be you next?”

  Rio releases Jenou and steps back. She takes a deep drag on her cigarette, but a drop of rain has extinguished it. “We’re in this now, Jen. We can’t go home. We’re here, and we’re in this, and any moment some Kraut could . . . Grab a fugging bottle of wine . . . make the wrong step . . . and what do you want to do, have a nice chat about it? You want me to spill my guts to you and tell you I’m scared too? Want to ask me again what it was like, shooting those Eye-ties?”

  Jenou says nothing, and Rio yells, “Stick! These two look okay!” Then, her energy gone for now, she says, “Jen, you don’t get it. It could be you. Or it could be me. You really think the smart move is for us to get closer?”

  Jenou shakes her head slowly. “Okay, Rio, have it your way. I just have one question, and I want the truth.”

  “Yeah?”

  “What was it like. For you. The first time you killed a man?”

  Rio is quiet for a moment, ignoring Stick who is coming over with the rest of the squad. In a barely audible voice she says, “It was . . .” She shakes her head, smiles ruefully, and says, “I liked it. That’s the truth of it. I felt powerful.
And I liked it.” She forms a bitter half smile. “That’s what you wanted me to say, isn’t it?”

  The two friends look into each other’s eyes. Jenou nods very slightly and says, “See, that’s the thing, Rio. You were made for this. You talk about the men growing up expecting something like this, well, you didn’t expect it, but you took to it fast enough.”

  “I’m just trying to get by.”

  “We’re all just trying to get by, but we aren’t all Killer Rick.”

  “You want to feel bad every time you kill one of those bastards who are trying to kill us?”

  Jenou shakes her head. “No, Rio. We’d all go nuts. I’d go nuts. I’m just . . . I’m scared, and I want to make sense of it all. It’s got to mean something, doesn’t it? If I get it, I want to die thinking it made some kind of sense.”

  “Yeah, well, after it’s all over you can write a book about it. Call it Jenou Castain: My Wartime Adventures in Africa, Sicily, and Italy.”

  They are silent for a while as Stick breaks the squad in two to carry the boats, and they wait for the signal. Then, with forced humor, Jenou says, “Of course they might make a movie of the book. I’d have to be played by Veronica Lake.”

  “Yeah? And who plays me?”

  “John Wayne in a dress,” Jenou says instantly.

  This is somehow both preposterous and funny, and despite the rain and the cold and the exhaustion and the fear of what is coming, Rio’s slow smile appears.

  “Fug you, Jenou.”

  “Yeah, fug you too, Rio.”

  “Just keep your head down,” Rio says, and reaches for Jenou’s cold hand. “You’ll be okay.”

  “Whatever you say, Corporal.” The hand squeeze is quick and furtive.

  With rain falling and night dropping the temperature to near freezing, they carry the boats: five or six soldiers to each boat, soldiers already weighed down by their gear, soldiers with fingers numb with cold holding the slick wet gunwales, feet slipping in mud. They set out like some bizarre parody of an amphibious landing, a long line of men and women staggering abreast as they haul their awkward loads forward.

  It’s almost funny at the start. And then the first artillery rounds start to drop from the sky, flying in from the town of Monte Cassino at the base of the massif and from hillside positions behind the far bank of the river.

  Rio’s squad has one of the boats, all hands gripping, slipping, reattaching, slipping again. Shells scream in, and they drop the boat and lie facedown, hugging the mud.

  Then it’s up and grab and stagger until mortars start to fall, and then it’s facedown again.

  Up and down.

  Up and down.

  Then Lieutenant Stone calls a halt, and they sit in the mud as the American artillery opens up. For thirty minutes the distant 105s and 155s plaster the riverbanks and the positions beyond as they sit watching, hoping against hope that the artillery will do their work for them. A green kid yells, “That’ll teach ’em! Leave some for us!” But the veterans know better. The Germans are dug in, and while the rain of shells will kill some, it won’t kill enough.

  And the American artillery does nothing to discourage the German gunners. A boat from Fourth Platoon is hit, making splinters of it and hurling men and women aside.

  “All right, move out!” comes the order.

  Rio sees Jillion crying freely, eyes red in the light of an explosion. She sees Jack, grimly determined, one foot in front of the other. Geer, strong as usual, cursing constantly. Jenou, having a hard time of it, hands coming out in blisters. Beebee has turned into a decent soldier with a talent for locating things, but he’s small and the weight is hard for him. Pang is at the back, holding on with both hands, probably bearing more than his share of the weight. Cat has the bow, probably also carrying more than her fair share.

  Rio sees more hands slipping and calls, “Down boat.”

  They drop the boat and fall to their knees or bend over, gasping. Canteens are drained, crumbs of biscuit retrieved from pockets and shoved into greedy mouths. A flask makes the rounds, a swallow of raw brandy that provides the only hint of warmth.

  “Up boat!”

  Another group is hit, their boat sent tumbling to crash into Sergeant Alvarez, wounding him. The calls for Medic, medic! sound across the field.

  Trudge, trudge, trudge.

  “Down boat!” The boats and their human transportation look like some strange sort of spiders: too many legs hauling a swollen, ungainly body.

  A shell lands fifty feet away, and no one bothers to cower as clods of wet earth patter on their helmets and shoulders. A second round is closer, and they hug the ground again.

  “Up boat!”

  They are helpless. They are ants waiting for the shoe that will crush them. Rio spares a glance at Jenou. Her mouth is set, her eyes narrowed, determination on her face.

  The next round and Jenou could be . . . Rio shakes off the image, but it is too vivid, too awful to dismiss entirely.

  Ahead, a few stumps of trees mark the bank of the river, and now they are coming within range of small arms fire, so sniper rounds, outrunning the noise of their firing, come flit . . . flit . . . striking dirt, rocks, and at least one round punches a hole in the boat itself.

  They are in the crosshairs of long-distance as well as close-range fire now. The position is impossible.

  Impossible.

  But then there is a screaming artillery round with a different pitch, as shells arc overhead from the Allied artillery behind them. The banks of the river erupt in smoke, almost useless smoke with the German gunners all zeroed in, but it will baffle the snipers, for a while at least.

  Rio sees Jenou trying to light a cigarette, but her hands are shaking so badly that Jack does it for her. A distant part of Rio’s mind notices that her friend has acquired the habit too. How long has Jenou been smoking? Why hasn’t Rio noticed? Is there anyone left who hasn’t acquired the habit?

  She looks at her brothers and sisters, peering at them each in turn, anything to distract from the fear rising inside her. This is not like staying strong in the heat of battle, this is helplessness. It is not the first time she’s been under artillery fire, but never has she had to simply walk through it, unable to shoot back, unable to take cover, unable even to run away.

  “Up boat!” Rio says, trying to make the words sound like the previous twenty iterations, but to her own ear her voice sounds strained.

  They run forward now, short, fast steps, feet slipping, boots so caked up with mud that each foot weighs ten pounds. No stopping this time, all the way, all the way!

  BOOM! BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM!

  The 88s screech in, falling like meteors, sending up yards of dirt and leaving craters and mangled bodies behind. There is an eerie scream of pain off to the left, but the source is invisible because now they have at last reached the smoke. Rio glances up just as a falling shell punches a hole through the smoke and shatters a denuded tree that sends splinters flying, one striking Jillion in the stomach. It sticks out, an elongated triangle of wood. It’s as if someone has thrown a dart at her. Jillion releases her hold on the boat, and Rio does as well, rushing to her.

  Jillion stands plucking at the splinter and says, “It doesn’t hurt.”

  Rio tugs experimentally at the big chunk of wood, then unzips Jillion’s coat and the two of them see that the splinter has pierced her coat and blouse but somehow caused nothing more than a slight scratch.

  For the first time that Rio can remember, Jillion smiles.

  “Missed me!” she says.

  They grab back onto their boat and shuffle forward into gloom, following Stick’s boat, which has pulled ahead, hearing the river before they see it, and stepping into it when their momentum carries them too fast down the near bank.

  It’s no Mississippi, the Rapido or Volturno or whatever the hell it is, in fact it’s less than thirty feet across. But the banks are steep and the water is swift, swollen with rain. It nearly yanks the boat away from them,
and indeed Rio sees some other squad’s boat go bouncing past, empty of men.

  Orders are being shouted down the line: they are to board and push off immediately. Small arms fire—rifles and machine guns—now blaze away through the smoke from the far bank. They are too near the Germans on the other side for the 88s to be used, but now the mortars get serious about their work, dropping behind the platoon and walking slowly, cautiously forward to pound troops trapped between artillery-scoured fields and the river.

  Stick yells, “All set, Richlin?”

  Rio says she is, and they begin to pile into the boat. A bullet hits Jillion in the eye and blows out a chunk of her skull. She falls backward in something like slow motion, landing on her back in the boat.

  “Medic!” Jenou yells, but there can be no possibility of helping Jillion. She is dead, unquestionably dead, with the pink matter of her brain floating in the swamped bottom of the boat like chum.

  The boat moves into the water, driven by the few oars they’ve managed to get into the water, and is instantly seized by the current, which drags its head around so all their paddling together barely straightens it out. They can do nothing to stop the boat’s momentum in the direction of the distant Mediterranean.

  They row like mad but the far bank, glimpsed only in brief tears in the smoke and fog, is running swiftly past.

  A machine gun finds them and half a dozen large-caliber holes are poked just below the waterline, so water begins to pour in.

  “Row, row!” Rio yells. “Left side row! Right side—”

  A mortar shell douses them in buckets of freezing water. More shells land behind, beside, blasting the river, knocking the oar out of Geer’s hand, twirling the boat again so now it faces upstream and the machine gun bullets pluck at the water.

  Cat pushes the stunned Geer aside and paddles madly with the splintered remains of Geer’s oar, but now Rio can sense that whatever hopes they might have had are diminishing quickly. No sooner do they have the boat turned in the right direction than Rio realizes there is eight inches of water in the bottom. The boat lies lower in the water and is infinitely heavier.