Once a Warrior

by Fran Baker

  Except for the two of them, the LCT was deserted. The water was knee deep. None of the self-propelled guns or jeeps from Mike’s battery had debarked.

  “Want a drink?” The sailor proffered a half-pint-sized bottle that was about three-quarters empty.

  Still too shocked to speak, Mike nodded and grabbed it gratefully. He took a pull, careful to leave some for the other man, and felt bourbon whiskey blazing a trail down his throat and into his stomach.

  As he lowered the bottle, salvos straddled the small craft, shaking it and dousing them with yet more water. On the beach, a mortar scored a direct hit on a tank. Within seconds, it was a roaring inferno.

  “Holy shit!” Mike’s throat was raw from the saltwater and bourbon he’d swallowed, tight with emotion he couldn’t afford to let loose as he watched two men, their clothes afire, leap out of the tank’s turret and fall like a couple of spent matches onto the sand.

  The explosion served its purpose, though. It snapped him back to concentrating on the job at hand. And that job was to survive this fiasco and find his battery so he could start fighting back.

  He thrust the bottle at the sailor, who waved it away. “I’ve had plenty,” he said. “You finish it.”

  Mike emptied the bottle in a head-back, walloping gulp. Then, full of Dutch courage, he jumped off the front of the landing craft and started wading to shore.

  And stepped into the jaws of hell.

  He’d never been exposed to small-arms fire before, much less mortar fire, so his heart, if not his feet, was doing double-time. Despite the fact that he’d just wet his whistle, his mouth felt as dry as cotton. Slogging through the waist-deep breakers and the blood-red water, he couldn’t help wondering whether the rest of his life could be counted in minutes or hours. Days and years didn’t even enter the equation.

  Without his rifle, he felt totally defenseless. He took refuge behind a beach obstacle shaped like a giant jack. Then, soaking wet and shivering with fear, he tried to figure out where he was in relation to his battery. With their guns still aboard the landing craft, they were obviously going to have to regroup.

  “I’m hit!”

  Mike looked to his right, into the white face and frightened eyes of a young soldier. A boy, really. Not much older than his own brother. Instinctively, he made a grab for the kid and yelled at the top of his lungs, “Medic!”

  “Maa-maa . . .”

  “Hang in there.” However frantic his thoughts, Mike’s voice was calm as he dragged the badly wounded boy behind the obstacle with him. “Help’s on the way.”

  But the medic got there too late. He took one look at the motionless soldier, his eyes glazed and his mouth frozen on that agonizing call for his mother, and shook his head. Then, ignoring the bullets kicking up spurts of sand at his heels, the corpsman moved on to do what he could for some other casualty.

  Mike felt rage burn like a hot iron inside his head. It was time to do some killing of his own. For that poor dead kid lying beside him. And for John Brown, shot down in the prime of life.

  He took his .45 service automatic out of the plastic he’d wrapped it in before the landing and found that it was sticky with salt and gritty with sand. When he pulled the slide back to load a round into the chamber, it stuck halfway. Cursing a blue streak, he tossed the useless pistol aside and reached for the dead soldier’s Browning automatic rifle, only to discover that it was similarly fouled.

  “A gun, goddammit.” He needed a gun.

  The beach was strewn with them, and with bangalore torpedoes, ammo belts and bandoliers of grenades—all discarded in either death or disgust. He thought about trying to grab the closest carbine, then thought again when a burst of machine-gun fire flung sand in his face. That was when the enormity of the situation hit him. Instead of a well-trained, well-equipped fighting man, he was half-drowned and helplessly disarmed before the enemy.

  On paper, the invasion plan had looked foolproof. At first light the Air Corps would bomb the beaches for a half-hour to soften them up for the troops. Then the Navy would weigh in with its own bombardment to knock out the Germans’ concrete pillboxes on the bluffs so that the combat engineers could go to work blowing mines and clearing lanes for the landing craft.

  But nothing was working according to plan. The beach was a shooting gallery, the Americans sitting ducks. And with their pillboxes virtually untouched by either the air or naval bombings, the Germans were having a field day.

  Mike hunkered down behind the beach obstacle, alone with the dead soldier and trying to buy some time for himself. But time was as much his enemy as those mortars and machine guns. The longer he stayed there, the greater his chances of getting hit.

  The question was, where should he go next?

  Behind him, even lightly wounded men were drowning in the tide. Around him, other men were falling and crawling and crying and dying. Straight ahead of him, along the seawall, hundreds of men—many of them wounded—were lying out in the open, exposed to the mortar fire pouring down from the bluffs.

  His best bet was an exit. The closer the better. And the closest one, a sunken dirt road bordered by a high earthen bank on one side and a few twisted trees that had somehow survived all the shelling on the other, was only a couple of hundred yards to his left.

  Mike’s legs were trembling like he was palsied, but he decided to make a run for it. If he was going to die, he’d rather die doing something than to bite the dust doing nothing. Just as he got to his feet, making sure to keep his head down, he heard a tremendous roar that damn near broke his eardrums.

  Glancing back, he saw two destroyers pulled broadside to the beach, blasting away at the bluffs.

  The heavy smoke from their guns provided the cover he needed. He made the sign of the cross, and then he made his break. He ran like hell, zigzagging through a withering hail of bullets and hoping to high heaven that he didn’t zig when he was supposed to zag.

  He dove behind a dirt embankment near the base of the exit and hugged the ground. How long he lay there, panting from exertion and praising the Lord that he’d made it in one piece, he couldn’t begin to guess. But when he finally raised his head, trying to get his bearings, he saw a GI bent down on one knee a few feet away from him.

  He wriggled up beside him, tapped him on the shoulder and yelled, “Hey, do you know where Headquarters Batt—”

  The soldier keeled over, dead from a bullet hole right in the middle of his forehead.

  Cursing viciously now, Mike picked up the other man’s M-1, blew the sand off its sights and threw back the bolt. Satisfied there was a live round in the chamber, he stood and, with his finger on the trigger, started working his way up the draw. His only goal, besides survival, was to find his outfit. But if it happened to be his turn to die, he wasn’t doing it alone. He was taking as many Germans with him as he could.

  He advanced like an outlaw, keeping his eyes to the front and his back against the bank. Partway up, he realized he’d acquired a following. He turned his head and found himself practically nose to nose with a soot-faced private who was mimicking his every move.

  “Where are you going?” he barked.

  “With you, sir!” the private shouted back.

  Apparently that sounded like as good an idea as any to the dozen or so other leaderless men staggering up the road. Not only did they nod their helmeted heads in agreement with the private but they also looked to the second lieutenant in front of him for direction.

  Just what he needed, Mike thought. A bunch of stragglers to bring the wrath of the Germans raining down on him. But being an officer, he couldn’t very well leave them milling about like a herd of lost cattle. And the guns they carried would come in handy at the top of the hill.

  “Spread out! Half of you on one side of the road and half on the other!” No sooner had he bellowed the order than a volley of machine-gun fire from a nest on the crest stitched a dividing line down the center of the road.

  The soldiers scrambled to obey.


  On the high ground, Mike crouched down behind a hedgerow in order to catch his breath and signaled the others to do the same. The steady b-r-r-rip of machine guns on the other side of the tall, thick shrub pulsated in his ears. He thought for a minute, trying to come up with a plan for disabling them. When he did, he turned to the private who’d become his shadow.

  “Got a hand grenade?”

  “Right here, sir.”

  A sergeant squatting beside a tree directly across the road from them produced one too.

  Mike doffed his helmet, broke a long, sturdy stick off the shrub and put his helmet on the end of it. “Pull the pin,” he whispered to the private, “count to five, and then throw your grenade over the hedgerow.”

  The private semaphored the order to the sergeant.

  The instant Mike eased his helmet up, machine gun bullets started spinning it like a top. Two grenades went sailing over the hedgerow. In the wake of their explosion, the guns went silent.

  “Let’s go!” Mike plopped his bullet-riddled helmet back on his head and waved the men to follow him. Still keeping to his defensive crouch, he cut around the hedgerow and found three dead Germans and one disabled machine gun in a concrete trench.

  A fourth German, wearing a field cap, a greatcoat and a stunned expression, sat crumpled in the corner beside a second gun that had somehow survived the grenades.

  “Kamerad,” he muttered hoarsely as he clasped his hands over his head in surrender.

  “What should we do with him, sir?” one of the men asked.

  “They told us not to waste time taking prisoners,” the sergeant said.

  Mike had come to France with vengeance in mind. Still mourning John Brown, he’d vowed to kill every German he could. But what kind of example would he be setting for the other soldiers if he shot an unarmed man, he wondered now. He was an officer, sworn to follow the rules of engagement, not to commit atrocities. And deep down inside, he knew it wouldn’t bring his friend back.

  “Frisk him and send him down to the beach,” he snapped.

  While the other men were doing that, he reached inside his coveralls and pulled out the waterproof pouch in which he’d carried his situation maps ashore.

  “Can you use this, sir?” A corporal held out a brown leather map case that he’d taken off the German.

  Nodding his thanks, Mike slung the straps around his own neck and stooped to spread the map on the ground so he could see where he was and where he had to go to catch up with his battery.

  A rifle slug split the air where his head had been just seconds before and ricocheted off the concrete wall.

  “Sniper!”

  “Hit the floor!”

  Mike rolled over until he was behind the German machine gun that the hand grenades hadn’t destroyed. Then he hosed the hedgerow across the road, sending leaves and limbs flying every which way. Shrieks of pain, followed by dead silence, told him he’d partially evened the score for John.

  Two thunderous explosions coming from the beach suddenly bracketed the trench.

  “Damn!” The same naval fire that Mike had blessed earlier he now cursed.

  The floor trembled and shook beneath an answering barrage of German artillery fire.

  “We’re getting’ it from both sides!” the sergeant shouted.

  The private, sporting a bubble of blood on his cheek from where a chip of concrete had nicked him, stammered, “W-where do we go now, s-sir?”

  “First, let’s see where we are.” Still flat on his stomach, Mike reached for his map and finished spreading it out in front of him.

  Where they were, he discovered, was in no-man’s land—between the Germans’ prepared positions on the bluffs and the Americans’ renewed shelling from the beach. The only “safe” place he could find was a field of some sort across the road.

  “We could probably dig in over there,” the private pointed out.

  “I’ve got an entrenching tool,” the sergeant said.

  “And I’ve got a shelter half,” another soldier added.

  “So do I,” someone else chimed in.

  Mike gave up on the idea of finding his battery. At least for now, anyway. Because if he abandoned these men and later found out they’d been killed, he couldn’t live with himself. Resigned to his fate, he folded the map and stuck it in the leather case.

  “Cover me,” he ordered.

  The makeshift squad fired a steady fusillade as he cut around the hedgerow and charged across the road. Then they took turns, one running and the rest shooting, until they all wound up in a flat field encircled by some more of those high damned hedgerows that made such good defensive cover for the Germans.

  “We’re safe, sir,” the private panted.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “See that cow over there?”

  Mike looked at the grazing brown-and-white bovine, with her big eyes and swollen udder. “So?”

  “So, cows are curious animals, sir. If there was anyone else in this field, ol’ Elsie wouldn’t be chewing her cud. She’d be facing ’em, waiting to be milked.”

  Mike looked at him askance. “How ‘d you know that?”

  “I grew up on a farm in Clay Center, Kansas, sir.”

  Cows spotting Germans made about as much sense as anything else Mike had seen or heard today. He started to shrug it off. Then it hit him that, as a forward observer, he might find this particular tip real handy in combat.

  “I’ll have to remember that, Private,” he said appreciatively.

  “Anybody know what time it is?” someone asked.

  Mike dug his watch out of his pocket. He’d wrapped it in a condom before the invasion to keep it dry and was glad to see the ploy had worked. What surprised him, though, was seeing how late it was.

  “Almost five o’clock,” he said in amazement.

  “No wonder I’m hungry!” The sergeant, a burly guy with a brush haircut, started digging around in his pack for something to eat. “I missed breakfast and lunch.”

  The other men followed suit, sharing everything from the apples they’d brought from England to the K-rations they’d been issued before the invasion with those who’d either lost their packs or, like Mike, had left them on the landing craft. With the fighting still raging around them, they didn’t dare light a fire to heat water for their packets of Nescafé coffee. So except for a sip of water each from the one canteen that had survived intact, they didn’t have anything else to wash down their food.

  Until the private came up with an idea of how to remedy that. “Ever tasted fresh milk, Lieutenant?”

  After wolfing down a cold ration of chopped ham and eggs, Mike found that his stomach was still sending out distress signals. Except for some seasick pills and those two slugs of bourbon, he hadn’t had anything by mouth in over twenty-four hours for fear of being gut-shot. Now he set the empty ration can aside and reached for an apple, trying to make up for lost time.

  “My dad used to bring it home sometimes,” he said with a wistful smile.

  The private grinned, a missing front tooth and that smeared face giving him an engagingly boyish appearance. “Well, you’re about to taste it again.”

  Everyone watched in amazement as he squatted beside the cow’s ballooning udder and held a borrowed canteen cup beneath the chosen teat. An expert milkman, he filled the cup to the brim and carried it back to Mike without spilling a drop.

  “Here you go, sir.”

  “Thanks.” Mike drained the cup, finding that the warm milk was as rich and creamy as he remembered.

  Artillery shells and mortar fire whistled and whizzed over the field, but the cow stood patiently as the private returned for another cupful.

  Milking a cow in the middle of a war suddenly struck Mike as ridiculous. He started laughing, letting it roll out of him in waves. Pretty soon the other men were howling along with him, releasing some of the tension built up over the longest, most miserable day of their lives.

  As darkness came on, so did the cold
. The sodden group decided to spend the night together and then try to find their own outfits in the morning. Besides, they all agreed, another cup of that fresh milk would taste mighty good for breakfast.

  I made it, Mike thought as he flopped down in a ditch beside the hedgerow. Dog-tired yet still too wound-up to sleep, he stacked his hands under his head and just laid there for a while, watching a path of tracer fire arcing in the distance and listening to that cow lowing contentedly in a corner of the field. But as his eyes finally drifted closed, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was living on borrowed time.

  * * * *

  Ste. Genviève, France

  “Hold his head still.”

  Anne-Marie willed her hands to stop shaking and smiled down at the four-year-old boy who was lying on her grandfather’s operating table. Unfortunately, little André Tardieu couldn’t see her smiling at him because of the bandage covering his eyes. A larger bandage started just below his shoulder and nearly reached his elbow, and his hands were wrapped in gauze.

  She noticed the smell of smoke lingering in his hair as she bent down and whispered in his ear, “We’re almost finished.”

  “Maman!” André cried as Henri Gérard began probing for scattered splinters in the boy’s cheeks and quivering chin.

  But his mother was dead. As were his older sisters and baby brother. The only other member of his family who was still alive was his father, who had dragged the boy out of their blazing farmhouse after a German shell had hit it. An anxious Monsieur Tardieu, his own hands badly blistered, was now waiting in the anteroom for news of his son’s condition.

  Just a little over a month old, the war had already extracted a terrible price from the people of France. The Germans, furious at being caught off-guard by the Allied invasion at Normandy, had begun striking back at acts of sabotage with mass executions. The most egregious to date was when an elite Das Reich division on its way to the front rounded up all the inhabitants of Oradour-sur-Glane in the village’s church and barns and set fire to them.

  “Don’t move!” Dr. Gérard sharply admonished the squirming André.