by Dean Hughes
Alex smiled. “I would like a little hot water,” he said. “Just to get something warm inside me.”
“Are you really that strict in your religion, Sergeant?” Johnston asked.
“He was a missionary,” Curtis answered for Alex.
Johnston asked, “Are you like a Jew who won’t eat anything that’s not kosher?”
Alex tried to think how to answer that. He had gotten out his mess kit and removed the cup. Curtis poured him some hot water. “We don’t have a lot of health rules, if that’s what you mean. I don’t smoke or drink, and I don’t use coffee or tea. Otherwise, I eat pretty much like anyone else.”
“Yeah, but I’m just wondering how a guy can be a million miles from home–without his preacher nowhere around–and worry about a cup of tea.”
“I don’t think about it that way,” Alex said. “I just don’t drink it. It’s not like I have to make a new decision every time someone offers me a cup.”
“Alex isn’t like anyone I know,” Curtis said. “Religion isn’t a list of rights and wrongs to him. It’s who he is.”
Alex looked away. “You make me out to be a whole lot better than I am, Curtis,” he said. “I wish that were true, but it’s not.”
Curtis laughed. “He’s humble, too,” he said.
But Johnston asked, “Why do you say that, Sergeant?”
Alex didn’t want to get into this. He merely said, “I don’t use a lot of hard language, and I don’t go out and get drunk–so the men get certain ideas about me. But religion runs a lot deeper than that.”
“It’s the deeper stuff I’m talking about,” Curtis said. “When the shooting starts, I’d rather have Thomas next to me than anyone I know.”
Alex glanced at Johnston, and he knew they had picked up on the same irony. Johnston shrugged. “I guess I never put good soldiering and religion together,” he said. “In fact, I’ve always put ’em pretty far apart.”
Curtis did try to explain. He praised Alex for his concern for the men, his willingness to put his own life on the line, for his righteous indignation toward the Nazis. Alex hardly listened. He told himself that he needed to pray, needed to think about his spiritual life, but he knew he couldn’t do it–knew he feared to do it. He was hiding from the Spirit, not seeking it, but he knew no other way to keep doing what he had to do.
“War makes me religious,” a voice said. It was Duncan, who had come up behind Alex and had apparently heard what Curtis was saying. “Combat leads me to prayer and loose bowels every time.” The men all laughed.
“I get sick,” Curtis said. “I want to heave my guts up, just before it all starts.”
Duncan walked around the men and crouched in front of the fire, almost on top of it. “I can tell you about Deacon,” he said. “He’s mild-mannered Clark Kent. And then he grabs his weapon and turns into Superman.”
“If I’m Superman, how come we haven’t won a battle since we jumped into this country?”
“I don’t know the answer to that,” Duncan said. “But we’ve sure gotten our pants kicked. And there was a time when I didn’t think that was possible.”
“The Germans had the tanks, the better positions,” Johnston said. “This whole plan was stupid. It never had a chance of working.” He swore and spat into the flames.
“I’ll tell you something else,” Duncan said. “Everyone underestimated the Germans. They ain’t giving up near so easy as Montgomery and some of them generals thought. We’ll have to slug our way through the Siegfried Line and then take one town at a time. This war ain’t anywhere close to being over.”
Alex had been thinking the same thing lately in spite of all the optimism he had felt when he’d first made the parachute drop.
“Even if we do get things cleaned up here next year,” Johnston said, “the war in Japan is going to be a whole lot worse. We’re looking at a long ol’ haul over there, and that’s where they’ll send us. Every one of us airborne boys will get dropped into that place, and the casualty rate is going to be higher than anything we’ve seen so far.”
Duncan nodded. “That might be right,” he said. “But we’ve taken a pretty good beating already. I was talking to the XO the other day. He told me E Company dropped in here with 154 officers and men. We’re down to right around a hundred now–and we’ve got some replacements. We’ve taken something like 120 casualties since we landed in Normandy. And that’s not counting guys like me. I’ve been hit a couple of times but never left the line.”
“You’re talking an eighty percent casualty rate,” Johnston said.
“If you ask me, the odds don’t look good,” Duncan said. “You feel like sooner or later . . . your time has to come. I don’t even get scared of dying anymore–and I’d love to get one of them million-dollar wounds–but I don’t want to get all tore up and be limping around the rest of my life–or eating through a straw. You know what I mean?”
“We all know what you mean,” Alex said. He moved a little closer to the fire and sipped at his hot water. But he didn’t want to think this way. He had promised Anna he would make it back, and he could never forget that commitment to her.
When Alex walked back to Howie, he found him sitting on the edge of the foxhole. It struck Alex how much weight the kid had lost, how haggard he looked. He seemed less fearful lately, but he had become increasingly quiet.
“Are you doing all right?” Alex asked.
“Sure.”
“You haven’t been eating much, have you?”
Howie looked up. He seemed, for a moment, not to understand the question, but then he said, “Enough, I guess.”
Alex sat down next to him. “Howie, I think they’ll pull us out of here before too much longer.”
“I’ll believe that when I see it.”
“Well . . . me, too. But it doesn’t make a lot of sense to leave paratroopers sitting in holes.”
“Like Irv always says, don’t look for anything the army does to make too much sense.”
“I gotta hand it to you, Howie, you’ve stayed with this thing. You’re getting to be a vet.”
“I told you before, I’m going to do what I have to do from now on.”
“And then go back home when it’s over and impress all those girls in Boise. Right?”
Howie turned and looked at Alex. He seemed curious, or maybe surprised. “No, Sergeant. It ain’t nothing like that. I just want to be able to live with myself.”
“Yeah,” Alex said. “I know what you mean.”
“In one of those letters I got yesterday, my mom said that girl I used to like got married. So there ain’t nothing to that anymore.”
“So are you feeling bad about that?”
“I don’t know. How would I know? I don’t ever feel good. Do you?”
“No. Not really.”
“War ain’t nothing like it is in all those picture shows I saw back home.”
“Did you think it would be?”
“I guess I did. A little.”
“Look, Howie, you’re getting tough. You’ll get through this, and you’ll go home and get a good job, marry some girl, and have a nice family, and someday you’ll look back on all this and say, ‘That was the making of me. I did a hard job, did it like a man.’”
Howie looked into the bottom of the foxhole, seemingly lost in thought for a long time. When he looked up, he said, “Sergeant Thomas, I’ve never had much of anything in my life. Me and mom and my sisters learned how to get by, and that’s what I’m trying to do here. But I don’t want to look back on this when it’s over. Not at all. I want to forget everything about it.”
Alex saw something simple, childlike, in Howie’s eyes, and he thought again, as he often did, of Gene. It struck Alex how wrong it was to pull boys out of high school, out of childhood really, and send them into all this. “Howie,” Alex said, “the worst thing about war is that it turns everything upside down. It’s the very best people who just aren’t suited to be here.”
“Well . . .
I’m gettin’ suited. I ain’t going to be no sissy anymore. I was a little too young when I got here, maybe, but I’m going to be a man from now on. All the same, that still don’t mean I’m going to look back on this and say how swell it was.”
Alex nodded. He knew the feeling. He decided to dig some paper out of his pack and write to Anna. In his letter he told her that little had changed, but that he was relatively safe for now. He told her it was cold and wet, but he didn’t try to give her much idea about the boredom and the misery of it all. He closed his letter by saying:
Anna, it’s hard sometimes to stay human out here. I don’t know how to explain that to you, but maybe you can imagine what I’m feeling. Every day I tell myself this won’t last forever, but in a way, it already has. Still, you keep me in touch, through your letters, with all the things that really matter. You are an angel to me, and you’re too good even to imagine the hell I live in. Someday I’ll bring you down from the heavens and let you be a person, but for now, let me just worship you. I have to believe that heaven really exists, that it’s waiting at the end of this nightmare, and for me, you are its loveliest resident. I would defile you now, should I approach you in my muddy boots, but I cling to the belief that I can be worthy to be with you again someday.
And then, on November 24, some portion of heaven came to Alex and his men. They were pulled off the line. Canadian replacement troops moved in, and E Company, with all the other paratroopers, was trucked back along Hell’s Highway, the road so many men of the 101st and 82nd Divisions had given up their lives to take. Some of the men made cynical comments about the waste, but most were too happy to get out of Holland to think much about the past.
The cold penetrated through the canvas cover of the troop truck, and the men complained, but even the grousing had a rather good-humored tone to it. They were getting out of the mud; that was the important thing. Rumor had it that they would spend the winter in France, in a camp away from the action, and that they wouldn’t make another drop until spring.
The men were relieved, and when they arrived at Camp Mourmelon, where they took hot showers and received clean uniforms–then slept on a cot in a warm barracks–they all talked as though they couldn’t have had it better. But they were changed men, and everyone seemed to sense it. What they knew now was that they could be beaten. There was no other way to look at it: Market Garden had been a disaster. Thousands of men had lost their lives, and thousands more had been wounded–and the goal had never been achieved. General Montgomery claimed that ninety percent of their goals had been reached. The men read that in the Stars and Stripes, and they laughed and shook their heads. That was like throwing a dart at a target and watching it drop to the floor–ninety percent of the way there. The only goal that had been important was a surprise drive into the heart of Germany, the breaching of the Rhine–the early end of the war. That had not happened, and the soldiers who had been there no longer trusted the army decision-making process the way they had after D-Day.
But most of the men were not philosophers. They had done what was asked of them, and they had survived. Now they were clean and warm, and the months of winter stretched before them as a long season of bliss. They were the lucky stiffs now who didn’t have to sit out the winter in Holland. Besides that, passes were available to Reims, where the men could drink and fight with the men of 82nd Airborne, and better yet, to Paris, where everything most soldiers dreamed about was available.
Alex certainly enjoyed the increased comfort and the prospect of being out of harm’s way, but the training now seemed tedious, and none of the other activities in camp enticed him. The men played a lot of poker, and they played some baseball and football when the weather was good. Some men tried to recruit him to play in a football game that was being organized. The “Champagne Bowl,” they called it, a big New Year’s Day game. But Alex didn’t want to play. He used his wounded leg as an excuse, but the truth was, he had no desire to bang around on a football field. What he wanted was to negotiate a pass for a week or two at Christmastime so he could cross the Channel and have a little time with Anna.
Somewhere along the line, the mail for the regiment had lost its way. Alex knew that his letters had probably been sent to Holland and now had to find their way to France, but as each new day passed without word from Anna, he felt as though his lifeline had been cut.
Alex didn’t worry about passes for Reims or Paris, but he kept trying to get something worked out for a trip to England. Finally, however, Captain Summers told him that it wasn’t likely to happen. He might as well take a couple of days in Paris and settle for that. There was no time for Anna to join him there, and after his disappointment, Alex hardly cared about going. But it was better than staying in camp every day, and so he and Curtis, Howie, and Duncan got their passes on the same weekend, and they took the train to Paris together.
It was a strange combination of men, but Duncan actually spent all day Saturday wandering through tourist sights with the others: the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, and Napoleon’s Tomb. When evening came he had had enough. He wandered off to Place Pigalle–“Pig Alley,” the men called it–with some other men from the 101st. And yet, he returned to the hotel surprisingly early, and he hadn’t even been in a fight. “There’s something wrong with me,” he told Alex. “These stupid kids, drinking and getting wild–they make me nervous. Every time I start to let go a little, I think some German is sneaking up behind me. I don’t even like to be drunk anymore. It scares me.”
On Sunday Alex located a Mormon branch that met in some rented rooms. He took his friends with him, and they went to sacrament meeting that afternoon. There were more American and British soldiers in the congregation than French families, but the language of the meeting was French. Still, the branch president gave a short talk in English, and he spoke about living by faith in a world that was struggling to keep hope alive. Alex liked having his friends there to hear the simple testimony, the carefully prepared words. “God certainly hates this war,” the branch president said, “but he can be with you, giving you strength, even at the worst moments of your life. Even in war.”
Afterward, in the train car on the way back to Mourmelon, Curtis told Alex, “I like your church. I liked the music, and I liked those people gathering together to keep each other going–no matter what’s going on in the world.”
Duncan smiled. “My mama won’t believe it if I write her and say, ‘I went to Paris and went to church.’ He roared with enjoyment. “Of course, I won’t mention what kind of church it was. She thinks Mormons are devil’s children.”
“Hey, we baptize people underwater, just like you do,” Alex said. “Just tell her it was a Baptist church.”
“Well . . . maybe. But it might not be a good idea to tell her at all. I wouldn’t want her to have a heart attack–from the shock.”
Alex laughed and said, “I don’t know, Duncan. You might want to get her used to the new you. By the time you get home, you’re going to be a serious man.”
“Maybe so,” Duncan said. He seemed to know that was actually true. He sat for a time, jiggling to the motion of the train, looking out the window into the dark. “What do Mormons believe?” he finally asked. “It sounded a lot like what I used to hear in my church–back when I was a kid.”
Alex confirmed that, that Mormons believed a lot of the same things Baptists did, but then he told about the plan of salvation, as Latter-day Saints preached it, and about eternal progress. “We think life is all about getting better, becoming more like God. And the way we see it, that goes on forever. Heaven isn’t a place to sit and rest; it’s a place to keep growing and learning.”
Curtis was the one who found that most interesting, and he kept asking questions. He and Alex had talked about Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon before, but they talked about all that in more detail now.
What Alex longed to do was to bear testimony, to speak with the power he remembered from his mission. But he only explained; he didn’t test
ify. And then, when the conversation quieted, he looked out the window, trying to see outside. In the dark he saw only his reflection in the glass. There was a shallowness in the image, a seeming two-dimensionality, and that seemed all too fitting. But he didn’t know what he could do about it.
Chapter 24
LaRue was surprised when she came home from school one day in November and smelled baking bread. She found her mother in the kitchen. “What are you doing at home?” she asked as she stepped through the kitchen door.
“I just thought everyone would like a decent dinner for a change,” Bea Thomas said. “So I told your dad I was going to leave a little early.”
“It doesn’t seem like it’s as busy at the plant anymore.”
“It’s not. We have plenty of work for the moment, but we’re not up against those constant rush orders we used to get.”
“What’s going to happen when the war ends?”
Mom was peeking into the oven, checking her bread. She turned around, lifted her apron, and used it to clean her hands. “We’ll be fine. In some ways it’ll be nice. I probably should be home more.”
“Won’t you miss all the excitement?”
“Well, yes. I do like being in the middle of things down there. It’s the first time in my life that anyone has asked my opinion about much of anything. Now I’m supposed to know everything.”
LaRue walked over to the kitchen table and sat down. “Is that just bread, or did you make hot rolls, too?”
Sister Thomas smiled. “Rolls, too. If you’ll wait a few minutes, you can have one while they’re still hot.”
LaRue felt some nostalgia come over her, and it saddened her. She had loved to be in the kitchen when she was a kid, chatting with her mother, supposedly helping her, eating “shoe-fly pie” or the oatmeal-and-raisin cookies Mom would make. It seemed such a long time since she had felt that close to her mother.
“I don’t want to stay home all my life,” LaRue said. “I’m thinking I’d like to run my own business.”