The Right Fight

by Chris Lynch

  “You’re welcome, and good riddance,” Logan says, slamming his hatch shut as we exit a town and hit open road. “Enjoy going back to being a great big no-place in the world there, Algeria.”

  “No place is ever no-place,” Cowens says sternly. “Algeria’s important to the world now, as it was before, as it will be again. Read your history, kid, and learn something.”

  “What do you know about Tunisia, commander?” Pacifico calls up when we have been following the column into ever more barren flatlands for ages.

  There is a pause.

  “Well, it’s over … there someplace. I think.”

  I catch a quick glimpse up over my shoulder to see him pointing. Very straight-arm, land-ho like. He gives me a wink and I turn my gaze back in the direction of actual Tunisia.

  We are somewhere in the middle of the pack of what looks to me like the kind of awe-inspiring tank column that would intimidate me out of my wits if I saw it thundering my way. Within only a few days of securing all of our objectives in Algeria and Morocco, Combat Command B has been sicced like a big bad dog on the Axis forces in Tunisia, with the balance of II Corps right behind us.

  I promise you, Hannah, I won’t say it anymore.

  But I feel it. I feel it right this minute, and there’s nothing I can do about that.

  There’s nothing that I want to do about that.

  “So let me see if I got this straight,” Wyatt says, and bless him, he sounds like he’s trying. “What we just accomplished back there, means that the French Army and Navy, they’ve surrendered to us.”

  Cowens sounds very pleased. “Not exactly,” he says with a laugh in his voice like one of those wise guy history teachers from high school.

  “Then what exactly?” says Wyatt.

  “Why Not, exactly,” calls Logan, in a pretty good Wyatt voice.

  “Shut up, exactly,” Wyatt shouts. “At least I’m making an effort to understand what’s going on.”

  “Man’s got a point,” Pacifico calls out.

  “He does, too,” Commander Cowens says. “The kid is giving it his all. Say, I know. Why don’t we let you explain it to him, Logan?”

  And that’s why he’s the boss man.

  We all wait. Then we stop waiting.

  “Bwaa-haaa-haaa … !”

  I’m betting we’re making enough noise that the vehicles in front and behind are straining to see what all the fun’s about.

  “Hey, I understand it,” Logan says, a little quieter and a lot less convincingly than he says most things. “I just don’t know how to explain it so that he’ll understand it.”

  The boss drops a dubious “Uh-huh,” like a very small bomb on Logan’s explanation, then moves on to something a little more helpful.

  “The forces of French North Africa have agreed to an armistice with the Allies.”

  Now, the configuration — of this tank, I mean, not the many nations involved in this conflict — is set up so that Wyatt is sort of in the spot above and behind me. So right now I am missing what is probably a pretty good visual. The audio helps me to get a decent mental picture of poor Wyatt’s expression of concentration.

  “C’mon, kid, I know you can do it,” Cowens says, almost sweet. For Cowens.

  “The French are back on our side, then!” Wyatt says happily.

  “Some of them are!” Cowens says just as happily.

  “Which ones?”

  “Well, the Resistance fighters, the Free French, were always with us.”

  “So who wasn’t?”

  “The Vichy French.”

  There is a silence that indicates a little more suspicion than usual from Wyatt. It seems he trusts the downstairs crew more not to pull his leg.

  “Pacifico?” he says. “Is this real?”

  “I think so, Wyatt. Bucyk?”

  It’s the most fun we’re likely to have for a while, so I don’t see any need to cut it unnecessarily short. “Is what real, Wyatt?”

  “Vichy French. I mean, of course I heard it before, but I just thought it was some kind of insult, like, oh that dirty rat, he’s a real Vichy French… .”

  There is a physical commotion upstairs that is unsettling enough that I think a fight might have broken out.

  “Cut it out, Logan,” Wyatt protests loudly. “I do not like to be kissed. Captain!”

  The scrambling is ended by Cowens apparently heaving Logan back into his seat.

  “No kissing in my tank,” Cowens says. “And anyway, he was right. Vichy French is an insult. Kid knows more about world events than the rest of you put together.”

  “Don’t ever change, Wyatt,” Logan says.

  “If you don’t want me to change then I’m pretty sure I better start changing as fast as I can.”

  “All right,” Cowens says, “playtime’s over. The situation is this. When the Germans whipped the French, they occupied the north of the country directly. They left the south — and the French colonies in North Africa — to supposedly govern themselves, from Vichy in the south of France. It was a puppet government, French in name but run by Germany, which became plenty obvious when we won in Algeria and Morocco and the troops there turned. As soon as that happened, Germany decided that was enough, and just swept all the way down. Now all of mainland France is German. That’s where that stands.”

  “So what does that mean?” Pacifico asks.

  I take the liberty.

  “It just means the Nazis are that much closer to where we can get our hands on ’em,” I say.

  I’ve impressed the boss.

  “I like your optimism, Bucyk,” he says. “Truth is, they’re a lot closer than that. The Brits have been rallying lately, driving them out of Egypt and Libya, sending them retreating right this way.”

  “We’ve got a date,” I say.

  “With the real German Army this time. With Rommel himself.”

  “Come to papa,” Logan growls.

  “So there are no more French troops in Tunisia?” Pacifico asks.

  “There are. But they just did a crisp about-face. They’re fighting against the Germans, who are going to be pretty surprised.”

  “For once I understand how the Germans feel,” says Wyatt.

  For a good week, it feels like we’re on a well-earned post-invasion holiday as we cruise along in our great steel line across vast uncontested stretches of road. As far as we can see, the farther inland one gets in North Africa, the drier and flatter it gets. There always seems to be something on the horizon, over there, and over there: cobalt blue sea, gentle hills, high plateaus. But you never get there. It’s always away, off someplace, while right here is always sand and rocks and boulders and rocks and sand, and the taste of dust is relentless. Dust in the mouth, the eyes, the gears of everything. But it’s quiet, anyway, which is okay.

  “This is going to be easy,” Logan proclaims, breaking a long period when the tank’s engine did all the talking.

  The statement seems to have gotten right up Commander Cowens’s nose.

  “You do realize, don’t you, Logan, that merely driving across however many miles of country is not the same as actually taking those miles of country, do you not?”

  It’s a tone of voice even Logan doesn’t dare to play with.

  “Yes, sir, I do.”

  “Good. Then, keep your wits. The easiest thing in the world is to let your senses go flat during a mundane stretch like this, and that is when you will make crucial errors of judgment or execution.”

  “Yes, sir, commander. I’ll keep an eye on my wits, sir.”

  Now, there he’s coming dangerously close to playing with him. Probably out of the very boredom the commander is addressing.

  Suddenly, there’s a something. It’s a small something at first but I notice it just as I notice Pacifico noticing it, the way dogs do that rigid-alert posture when there’s a bumblebee somewhere just outside of human hearing range and just inside of dog hearing range.

  Only then, and quick, it comes within eve
rybody’s range.

  The road we are taking runs southeast, into the heart of Tunisia, and the planes are coming at us from the north. Not flying straight into our faces, but obvious enough to be pretty bold. We can see them coming for miles, and hear them from even farther, and it’s strange, surreal, the way it feels like there is nothing else in this vast and spare landscape other than our tanks and their aircraft. It is a world devoid of anything other than warfare. At the same time, it doesn’t feel, for the first little while, like anything particularly hostile is happening.

  Then they get closer. Faster, closer, faster, louder, closer.

  The sound is wild, wicked, like nothing I’ve ever experienced. The formation, maybe a couple dozen planes, fans out shortly before they reach us so that the front of our column and us in the middle of the pack receive the same greeting at the same time.

  “Guns up, gentlemen!” Cowens yells, and we start firing at the same time the planes do.

  I keep driving, jamming both levers full forward to keep up with the accelerating convoy, as the machine-gun rounds and antiaircraft shells pop all over the sky, making a great racket and smoke.

  But our racket is nothing compared to theirs.

  Dive-bombers swoop insanely low, dropping a load and banking back up as the explosion below seems to boost them faster into the sky.

  We are strafed mercilessly by pilots who I swear look me straight in the face as they bear right down on us. You can feel the whoosh of their slipstream as they skim right over our heads.

  But the sound. There is a type of plane in the mix that screams, a haunting, intimidating screech that would probably do enough damage if they showed up and harassed us with no explosives at all.

  “Commander, what is that?” I scream, nowhere near above the din, but enough to reach the boss.

  “It’s a Stuka,” he shouts back. “The devil’s own bomber. They got sirens or some such attached. Been terrorizing everybody everywhere with those things, since even before the war started.”

  “Aw,” Logan says, taking aim at one, “and I thought we were special.”

  He lets fly, bu-hoom, misses, and I am certain I can hear the plane laughing as it departs.

  “I can’t stand it,” Wyatt screams.

  “It’s just a trick,” Cowens assures him, “a gimmick. Keep loading, kid.”

  “It’s a great trick,” he says, jamming a seventy-five up the cannon, “a great gimmick. Fire, Logan!”

  Logan fires, and it feels as if we are making noise as much for the noise as to shoot anything down.

  Next to me, firing away but saying nothing, my gunner Pacifico is making a strange noise of his own. It starts medium-loud, medium-high, but quickly builds both strength and pitch until it’s a pretty eerie thing all its own.

  Finally, he hits his note.

  It’s an exact copy of the Stuka sound.

  I glance over at him, and he is as grim as death’s sensitive little brother. There isn’t even a sign that he’s aware he’s doing it, but he is doing it, so relentlessly I don’t know how his lungs are managing to refuel.

  They are rolling in, bearing down on us again, this formation of four, two of the ugly gull-wing Stukas and two of the ME-109 fighters that we had seen before at Oran. Several of the other fighter-bomber groups have already peeled off back in the direction they came from, but I guess in the end we are special because these four are coming down like they intend to just dive straight into us without stopping.

  They don’t, of course. The first Stuka drops a bomb that lands close off to our left and makes our tank do a little hop, while both fighters pepper us with a diabolical barrage of machine-gun fire that has us all hollering wordless yelps into the air. The bullets make the Sherman sound like a tin can filled with rocks and shaken up wildly by some mad giant.

  The second Stuka pilot is bold or stupid or confused or something because he holds his load longer than the rest, trailing in after the others have already banked.

  The sound is demented, dementing all of us with it.

  Pacifico screams louder, its exact song right back at it, and stares straight into it as he murders the rounds right out of his .30, pushing them with his will up and out, and in … right into the side and the wing and then the retreating tail of that bomber before it can do its dirty business at all.

  We are all screaming as we stare at that aircraft limping away, off-level and trailing delicious German oil smoke across the sky in pursuit of its rotten friends.

  Its payload drops off like an accident, a turd off a bird, and pops harmlessly in the desert beyond where anybody cares about what happens.

  Then it’s over. It’s just us again, our line of tanks in the sand. Alone with our thoughts.

  And the screaming in our ears that remains as a gift from above.

  “Great shooting there, kid,” Cowens says, hanging down from the turret basket to reach in and slap Pacifico hard on the shoulder. Wyatt does likewise while a slightly frustrated-sounding Logan shouts out congratulations from his station. He could well be waiting for a straggler and another chance to gun somebody down.

  “Really,” I say to Pacifico, leaning sideways toward him while still driving forward toward the enemy. “Fine work, pal.”

  I shift back to where I belong when I hear the barely smiling machine-gunner still humming that eerie tune.

  “By the way,” Commander Cowens says, “I completely forgot my manners. Rookies, meet the German Air Force, the Luftwaffe. Luftwaffe, these are my rookies.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Logan says, speaking for the team.

  “Commander,” I say because this seems like the perfect time, “you seem to be pretty well acquainted with these guys.”

  “Oh yes, we’re old pals. We go way back.”

  “But since we’ve only been in the war less than a year, and we only just landed in-theater about …”

  “Young Bucyk, I was trading punches with these guys when you were still in short pants. Civil War in Spain. Franco’s Fascists, Hitler’s Nazis, and me. Everybody who was anybody was there. That was before I was even getting paid. That’s what a dumb kid I was.”

  He may have a long and colorful tale to tell about that, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he cut it off right there. Then his radio cuts it off for him.

  I’m starting to think it might be something more than a love of tanks that fuels the boss’s engine.

  There is a whole lot of phone chatter for the next couple of hours, between our commander and probably a number of different levels of commanders on the other end of the line. He’s pretty good at cloaking and scrambling his conversations to the point where we need one of those Navajo code breakers to know anything about what’s happening before he is good and ready to tell us. Being Dakota Sioux, I gather very little, so I concentrate on my driving.

  And on how quickly things can change here.

  We were so … big. I don’t mean in the sense that we were sizable and powerful as a military force, though there was that. More than that, we were substantial, this thumping column of machinery splitting through the center of this whole new place. We were like a part of the landscape, like we belonged here, in lieu of any visual cues telling us that we didn’t. There were none.

  Until those evil little birds.

  And that’s just how they seemed at first. We were thunder, they were whine. We were solid, they were wispy. We were right here, they were horizon speckle.

  Until they flew right up our noses, straight into our heads.

  I catch Commander Cowens’s engine hitting high revs, and I’m sensing that it is not a subordinate or even a peer he’s getting feisty with when he snaps into the phone, “That is exactly what I have been telling you helmet-heads all along. That approach is no longer gonna work anywhere, especially not here… .”

  The conversation stops itself just like that, before it can get really good.

  Because the action in front of us beats them to it.

  “Aw, for t
he love of Pete,” Wyatt calls as he sees the same thing we all see.

  Pacifico raises his volume like an air raid warden cranking a siren, and here we go again.

  Same thing, same formation, same blood-boiling scream, could even be the same planes, most of them, as they scorch toward us from that very same direction.

  One difference is the response. We start firing like crazy at the planes just as soon as we can get a bead on them. Nobody’s even waited for orders before going into full battle mode, probably too early.

  “Slow it down!” Cowens screams. “Don’t waste everything on out-of-range panic. You’re doing their jobs for them! We’ll be out of ammo before they even get here, and I can tell you that won’t be a pretty sight.”

  It is at that very second that I find myself thinking like a coordinator instead of just some guy with a very simple specific role to carry out.

  Supply. Holy cow. We have been met only once so far by supply trucks bringing us fuel, ammo, food, and all the stuff that goes into an assault vehicle before you can get anything out of one. And I am suddenly aware that we are overdue for the next rendezvous.

  “Pace yourselves!” I blurt out.

  “I’ll handle this if you don’t mind, Commander Bucyk,” says the actual commander.

  “Sorry, sir.”

  They are right over us again. The insane screeching, from above, from within. The tin-can-of-rocks sensation jars the tank senseless, again.

  I swear I see the pilot’s face looking right into my eyes, followed by the most humiliating instant of my life.

  I look away.

  As quick as humanly possible, I whip my face back to the spot but of course it’s too late. He’s gone, and he’s done it and I broke. Coward.

  I am furious, can feel my face flush, and secretly beg for that plane, that one, that 109 fighter right there, to come back. You. You. It doesn’t matter if we get him, if he shoots me dead in the eye, it doesn’t matter. He has to come back and give me … come back so I can take it back. And hold him still so he can die there, in the dirt, in front of my tracks where he will be crushed.

  “Come on, come on, come on!” Logan is howling like a lunatic as a pair of them, a Stuka and a fighter, come in together, closer and closer, weaving among bullet hails and poorly shot shells, and he holds his fire, holds it longer, holds it beyond even when Cowens orders him loud enough to pop the lid off his own hatch.