The Right Fight

by Chris Lynch

  AND, YOU WERE RIGHT ON THE MONEY ABOUT COMMANDER COWENS AND GARY COOPER.

  Dear Roman,

  The more I hear, the more certain I am that you and your crew can topple tyrants wherever they show their rotten faces. I am believing in your Commander Cowens as much as you are, more and more all the time. His service in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade only confirms that you are lucky enough to be working with a true hero, of the country and of the world. And you can tell him I said so, even if it turns out he only looks like Mickey Rooney.

  Right behind the thought of seeing you again is meeting these great pals of yours. The country owes them much, but I owe them more.

  I know I should be writing more, but darling it just keeps getting harder. I hope you understand, and know that I just want to see you for real.

  Love, and prayers,

  and love,

  Hannah

  Boy, do I understand. Boy, oh boy, do I understand.

  One surprise treat we get out of all this is that we are retrained and reassigned to an M-3 Half-track Armored Personnel Carrier. It’s a beautiful atrocity of a thing. It has the front end of a truck, with two wheels, and the back end of an open-top tank, with tracks. Mounted on top between the two is a big ol’ .50-caliber machine gun. The crew is only three — driver, gunner, and a third man who rotates between both jobs as needed. The half-tracks carry a load of ten troops, who get delivered wherever the hot action and General George S. Patton demands them.

  When we return to Tunisia, I am driving that magnificent creature, and Pacifico is my gunman. Our third wheel is a guy named Martin, who happens to be a kind of mutation between Logan and Wyatt. He sits quietly with his hands in his lap in the assistant driver seat until it’s his turn on the firearms, at which point he turns into Patton with a little more courage and a lot more volume.

  The Sherman was an imperfect machine. That is probably as it should be, as a war should be fought by soldiers, with weapons in service to them, not in place of them.

  I will love my M-4 for the rest of my life.

  But this is where we belong now.

  And the machine-gun perch on top of the M-3 half-track personnel carrier suits Pacifico much better.

  Pacifico and I came back to a Tunisian campaign that seemed to have done all right in our absence. We left the field in February, returned in mid March, then delivered the right fighters to the right fights ten at a time until May 13, when all of North Africa, including 275,000 German and Italian prisoners of war, came into Allied hands.

  By July, General Omar Bradley, who is also not bad, is leading II Corps, but General Patton is in charge of the entire Seventh Army, including two guys named Bucyk and Pacifico, as it invades Sicily.

  We face an insanity of windy Mediterranean weather known as a mistral, causing a chaotic landing, followed by fierce fightback from the Italian forces, but we land 160,000 troops on the small island and no matter the blood and loss here, we feel it going our way, going north.

  General Montgomery’s British Eighth Army heads up the eastern flank of the island toward the ultimate destination of the port of Messina, which will once and for all secure all Mediterranean traffic for the Allies.

  We head northwest toward the Sicilian capital, Palermo. It is brutal fighting we encounter, the kind only a desperate force wants to wage. For the first time, we have more of our planes buzzing overhead than theirs.

  But there is no debate. This chapter of the war is closing, in our favor.

  It takes a grueling two weeks before we do it, but we finally roll into Palermo victorious. We pause, drive slowly through the city, and find that, whatever Italian political sympathies were all along, in Palermo, on the streets, we are absolute heroes.

  Martin is up top on the gun. He is pounding the roof as the troops we carry hoot like monkeys and shake hands with every last Sicilian they can reach.

  It is euphoria.

  I am giddy as I reach over to my copilot, and I slap his leg hard and several times.

  Then I look up, at his face glistening, his chin and neck laminated with tears. I follow his gaze, out to the complete rubble of the city around these joyous people, the utter devastation. The punched-out windows in the grand hotels and churches. The crumblings of carved stone from buildings hundreds of years old lying like bread crumbs over the pavement everywhere you could see.

  “Nonna,” he says, wiping furiously at both eyes with the heels of both thumbs to make it stop. Like he has anything to be ashamed of.

  I seize the hand closest to me, and won’t let it go. And he cannot stop the crying.

  As he should not.

  The Allies are in their third day of bombing Rome. Rome, I have seen, in pictures. If Algeria and Sicily took my breath away, what will Rome do?

  One day later, as we walk among the ruins and joy of Palermo, we get the news.

  The Fascist government in Rome has fallen, and Mussolini has been arrested.

  My best, and deafest, pal has not stopped weeping for twenty-four hours. I shout him the good news, which doesn’t exactly help the sobbing situation.

  “What now?” he shouts back, blubbering.

  “Now?” I say. “Now, I drive you to the field hospital and turn you in. Your mission is accomplished, and you are going home, my friend.”

  He shakes his head vigorously until I seize it in both my hands.

  “I say yes,” I say. “And Nonna says yes.”

  Oh, jeez, now I’ve done it.

  I lead the heaving mass of weep and honor and loyalty back to the half-track, I stuff him in, and I drive.

  “What about you?” he asks, as I lead his deafness into the field hospital to rat him out.

  “Me? I’m going to Berlin. I paid my ticket, and I’m not getting off ’til the ride’s over. Can’t let the general wipe out the Fascists all by himself, can I?”

  “GSP!” he bellows, throwing himself at me in an unprecedented, not unwelcome, hug.

  “GSP,” I say into his not-so-good good ear. “And for us. I’ll do it for all of us.”

  We hug, we nod, we don’t look at each other, we hug a little longer, and together we make that infernal evil Stuka bomber noise until we can’t take it anymore.

  The war rages on….

  Half a world away from Roman's war, Hank McCallum is the newest sailor on the USS Yorktown. He's determined to avenge the Americans who died at Pearl Harbor. But first, Hank must survive the conflict on his own aircraft carrier.

  Read on for a sneak peek.

  World War II

  Book Two

  Dead in the Water

  Every man should be prepared to lose one son in a fight to defend his own.”

  That is my Pop talking to me. To me and my brother, Theo. But that almost goes without saying. Naturally he is speaking to me and Theo, because the last time anybody said anything to me without Theo being close enough to hear every word was when I was one year old. Then he was born.

  We’re kinda close.

  Anyway, that is Pop talking to my brother and myself as we stand in the front hall with the door wide open, the two of us just heading off to sign up to fight in the war that everybody knows is coming.

  It is a shocking thing to hear, to say the least, on the way to do what we are on the way to do. It sounds like he is giving us up, throwing us to the sharks in the name of patriotism.

  But of course he’s doing no such thing. This, in fact, is Pop being as soft and emotional as I have ever seen him. He has more to say. The reason we have to keep standing there in the open doorway and wait for him to say the rest of it is because he is choking on that first part. So he starts again, but faster this time.

  “Every man should be prepared to lose one son in a fight to defend his own. But no one should have to lose two.”

  Now it makes sense. Though, perhaps not to my Mam. None of it makes sense to her. Which is why she is elsewhere today, bawlin’ her eyes out to her own mam.

  It is usually Theo’s job to ligh
ten stuff up when stuff gets all grim. And he is frequently kept busy with that task since my father, as fine and upright a man as there ever was, can also be the very definition of what is known as The Dour Scotsman.

  “Ah, nobody’s dyin’, Pop,” Theo says, laughing, waving our old man off and sauntering out the door. As if he thinks that will end it.

  “Everybody’s dying, Theodore,” Pop intones — because that’s what he does; he intones. He intones in such a tone, without even raising his volume, that the pavement shakes under my brother’s feet and freezes him there as surely as if he’d been seized by the ankles.

  “Sorry, Pop,” Theo says, turning slowly back toward us.

  “Don’t be sorry, and don’t be stupid. People are getting killed everywhere and every way in this bloody mess, and the surest way to join them is to go thinking that you somehow know something that the Brits and the Poles and the French and all those other sorry souls don’t know. Do you know such a thing, my son, that you would like to share with the rest of the world before it’s too late, if in fact it’s not too late already?”

  I believe there have been entire months during which my father has not spoken that many words.

  “No, sir,” Theo says, wisely. “I know no such thing.”

  Pop exhales then, releasing the lungfuls of air he had stored up in case more speech was required.

  “Good,” Pop says, softly. Then, he gets to his point-of-points. “Henry,” he says to me, never much liking the nickname Hank outside of birthdays and holidays and such. “You’re set on the Navy, correct?”

  “I am, Pop.”

  He nods. “It’s a fine and noble service.” Pop himself sailed, fine and nobly, in the Great War.

  “Me too, Pop,” Theo calls out. “It’s the Navy for me too.” It is a frantic attempt to head off what he knows must be coming.

  “No, Son,” Pop answers.

  “Pop!” Theo shouts.

  This would not be something my brother — or anyone else I know — would normally try on our father. I brace for the wrath.

  But it doesn’t come.

  Pop shakes his head very slowly instead. He opens his mouth to explain, then looks down at his feet. He continues to look down as he speaks, haltingly.

  “One torpedo …” he says. “One. Just the one, and that’s …” His head starts shaking again. Then his hands, until he balls them into death-white fists and knocks them against his thighs. “We could never bear that. Thinking about that … every day, every night… . I’ve seen torpedoes, up close, and their work, up close… .”

  “But the buddy system,” Theo pleads. “We’ll be able to look out for each other.”

  “He’s not your buddy, Theodore. He’s your blood.”

  Desperate, Theo tacks the other way entirely. “They’ll never put us on the same ship anyway, Pop.”

  “Yeah,” I say, but with a lot less emphasis, a lot less expectation.

  Then, a little curveball. Pop starts laughing. He looks up, shows us his rare red-rimmed eyes, shows his deep-creased face and mouth stretched in pride and stubborn admiration. “If there was any way, you two would make it happen. If you made it as far as the recruiting office together, you would make it happen somehow, of that I have no doubt.”

  It is, in the combination of the words and the manner, the warmth and the threat, titanic praise from the titan himself.

  And it is also, definitively, the last word on the matter. My brother and I will not be enlisting in the same service. The logic of the argument is almost certainly my mother’s, the steely resolve my father’s, the combination an irresistible force.

  He puts a big gentle hand on my back, eases me out to where Theo stands mute, and shuts the door firmly behind me.

  How did he know?” Theo rants as we head down the road toward the bus station that will take us to our respective recruiting offices in Baltimore. “We were so good. We never let on, ever, what we were thinking. Months, we kept it under wraps, then — just as we’re about to pull it off — bam! It’s like he decoded us or something.”

  I have to laugh, grabbing him by the back of the head and shoving him farther up the sidewalk. “You have to admit, Theo, it wouldn’t have taken the fanciest figurin’ to work me and you out. Half of Accokeek probably decoded us before we even decoded ourselves.”

  Accokeek, Maryland. Home. It’s small and it’s tight and one time in high school I clobbered a lazy fastball so hard it broke a window in George Washington’s house across the river in Mount Vernon. Before the ball even came to a stop every last person in Accokeek knew about it. Everybody knows everything here. Everybody knows us.

  It is a long and solemn bus trip, a whole different journey than the one we thought we were taking when we were both Navy-bound. Then, before Pop split us up, we were just heading up the road, arm-in-arm to the same place with the same outcome. Now, Baltimore could just as well have been Bombay with how far it feels, and how foreign.

  We both have to get used to it. But especially Theo, who has little more than an hour to decide which of the three remaining services will be his.

  The bus cranks down to a stop in the big town, and we slowly make our way off along with about ten other folks who seem to share our general grimness about the whole thing.

  But that’s it. Time is up on me and Theo feeling sorry about this situation.

  “Go on,” I say firmly to my brother as he follows me toward my destination. Destination is perhaps too strong a word, as I am following my nose and nothing else down toward the water. But the one thing we do know for sure is that our destinations are not going to be the same. We have to adjust to that starting right now, and as the older brother this is my duty.

  “Go on, what?” he says, wide-eyed as I set my hand flat on his chest. “Go on, what? Where?”

  “Don’t know,” I say. “But I’ll see you at home. Later.”

  I give him the littlest bitty shove backward as I nod toward the heart of old Baltimore. But I might as well have heaved him off the side of a cliff judging by the lost and hurt look he gives me before I force myself to turn away and not see it. I know he is still standing there as I march away from him. I know he is staring at the back of me and is bewildered.

  But my brother is tough, with or without me. I know that. We both have to know it.

  He is sitting on the front steps as I come walking up the path toward the house a few hours later. He has his baseball glove on and is smacking a ball into it over and over again, so hard you could close your eyes and think it was A’s batting practice going on back in Federalsburg.

  “Well, ’bout time,” he says. “I was starting to wonder if we were gonna have enough daylight left for a little throwin’. You Navy boys sure do take your time cruising back and forth to a situation.”

  It’s closing in on sundown. But all things considered, I thought I’d made pretty good time from Baltimore, up and back and what all in between.

  I shrug. “Sailors,” I say, reaching up just in time to catch my own glove that he’s slung at me. “We do have our own pace.”

  Theo nods, knowingly. There is either a brand new wisdom about his whole manner since I left him on that Baltimore street, or a brand new ability to approximate it. I don’t suppose there’s a significant difference, as far as I am concerned.

  We start playing catch, quiet at first. Slow and easy. This will not last long, that much is for sure, so we enjoy it while we can.

  This is it for us, our thing. Catch. I don’t think we have gone two days without playing, not since we got our first mitts. That was on a Christmas morning, back when we were so small it was an achievement simply to keep the gloves upright and hope the ball just dropped in there. It was snowing steady that day and we were slipping and stumbling all over the place, but we didn’t care. Just like all those days since then, when we didn’t care if it was snowing or raining or roasting or hurricaning, and we would play catch. And talk. And catch, and figure, and catch, and sort. Catch.

/>   “So,” I say, after enough time and forty-some throws have passed between us without him telling me about his enlistment. “What did you think, by the way, of Pop’s theory? About being prepared to lose one son?”

  Snap.

  That’s the stuff now. He is putting some mustard on his throws now, so this is the real talk coming.

  “Didn’t think much about it at all, really,” he says. “I just assumed he meant you.”

  “Ha!” I say, pointing at him with my glove hand before letting fly with a sizzler right at his face.

  He catches it easy and with a big grin on his mug. He did grow up a lot since I left him there in the big city, working it out on his own.

  “So?” I say, finally, giving in to him and asking for the answer. “Where you goin’, boy?”

  Still smiling, and with the ball gripped for the throw, he releases one finger and points at the sky.

  Army Air Corps.

  For some deep, unknown reason, this makes me very satisfied, thinking of Theo soaring up there above it all. His own helpless grinning is probably a big part of my satisfaction. I open my mouth for a follow-up interrogation, but he is already done with that. He whips the ball back at me, shutting my mouth and taking the conversation where he prefers it.

  “You’re not gonna tell the whole world that president’s-window nonsense when you’re over there, are ya?” Theo says as the ball pops hard into my glove.

  “Of course I am,” I say, sending one whistling back his way. The ball makes a crack-snap as he gloves it right beside his ear without hardly twitching. “You saw it with your own eyes, too. It was incredible, and should be talked about.”

  He sends the ball back in a blink, like he’s turning a double play. Then he lets his arms drop straight down by his sides, which is always his way of showing a lack of respect for the proceedings. “That pop-up wouldn’t have reached the shortest fence in the whole Eastern Shore League. And it was a foul ball.”