Sergeant Salinger

by Jerome Charyn

  Still, Regiment relied on Major Oliver and his company of “squirrel shooters.” Regiment always had Oliver jump off first in any attack on German bunkers in Hürtgen. But most of the major’s squirrel shooters were long gone, victims of some random sniper or shrapnel from a tree burst. And he had to jump off with retreads and raw recruits. Yet he attacked and attacked and attacked. And Sonny had to run across the twisted roots and fallen pinecones and needles, with a canteen flapping at his side and the green four-leaf ivy patch of the Fourth Division on his shoulder.

  The major did have one advantage. He was a maestro with a flamethrower that he carried with a bucket strapped to his back. If he could create some kind of diversion, he would crawl behind a Kraut bunker, point his hose with great precision at an orifice in the bunker’s log and concrete wall, and let the flames fly from twenty feet or so. The Krauts didn’t even have a chance to surrender; that’s how fast the flames swept through the bunker.

  Soon he was called “Fireboy.” He went nowhere without that bucket on his back.

  Sonny knew he wouldn’t survive the Hürtgen if he stayed with Fireboy too long. The major took too many chances, too many risks. He crept right up close to a bunker or pillbox, and was too easy a target with the tank on his back—he looked like a hunchback made of metal. But somehow Sonny did survive, and so did the major, who was very solicitous of all his retreads. He wouldn’t banish them to their former rear-echelon posts. And none of them had the least desire to go back. Their own heads were on fire with the madness and bravado of the major’s jump-off points. They taught themselves to use their M1s. It was nearly a miracle.

  Sonny and the corporal were startled. They didn’t have that same facility to inspire. They charged up a hill with these converts to Major Oliver’s religion. They captured pillboxes, had their share of prisoners. But Regiment considered them too precious to revert to their former role of rear-echelon interrogators, at least not while they were in the Hürtgen, and belonged to E Company.

  The major grieved over every lost retread and had his own burial service, reading passages from the Bible he knew by heart.

  Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord giveth and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord. Amen.

  Fireboy dug the grave himself with his trench shovel after conferring with Graves Registration. He would mark each grave with a soldier’s dog tags and helmet crowning the fallen boy’s rifle thrust into the thistles and half-frozen soil. Sonny had to observe each religious ceremony with his head bowed and his hands crossed. He couldn’t dishonor the dead of E Company. But Lieutenant Colonel Blunt was furious when he saw the grave markers. He removed the dog tags from each grave and thrust them into the pocket of his field jacket.

  “Fireboy,” he said, “do you want the Krauts to steal the dog tags and pounce on us, posing as GIs?”

  “Colonel, this is sacrilege,” Oliver said. “Put ’em back, every fucking dog tag you stole.”

  The lieutenant colonel stared at him with all the smug superiority of his rank. “And do you think Regiment will back you up?”

  “I don’t care what Regiment says, or Battalion. I’ll go to Division Headquarters if I have to.”

  Blunt saw how delusional the major was. Or perhaps he understood that Division would back up this marathon flamethrower and the retreads of E Company. He put back every dog tag in its proper place and vanished into a cove of pine trees.

  3.

  THEY NOW BIVOUACKED IN GERMAN TRENCHES covered over with roofs made of logs to shelter them from tree bursts while they slept. They didn’t have enough blankets and long coats and insulated boots. When the snow fell and the ground froze, they had to huddle together and dig their canteens under their belts, or their drinking water would have turned to ice. They never had enough ammunition. Often the gun bearers would arrive with blankets and bandoliers in the middle of the night. Whatever roofs the boys of E Company had, they were still exposed. The Screaming Meemies never stopped. The mortars flew at them day and night. The retreads often whimpered in their sleep. The relentless pounding was meant to drive them mad. But Fireboy had his own religious fervor. He would prepare his platoons and jump off at the first whisper of light that meandered through the treetops. And he took one more pillbox, one more Kraut machine gun nestled in a mound of earth, squinting at his flamethrower with the eye of a squirrel shooter. The Krauts tried to kill him more than once. They weren’t ignorant of this Fireboy and his insane platoons. But he danced around their sniper bullets and whistling shells. The major was his own radioman. “Fireboy to Girlie One.” He called in the coordinates while he peered through his binoculars and watched the P-47s arrive in swerving lines and strafe some hillside where the Krauts were entrenched.

  “Girlie One to Fireboy. How do you like the music?”

  But they were still freezing, and the Krauts intensified their artillery. The major didn’t need any medics. He noticed every twitch, every whimper. And when he had to, he’d send a retread back to the rear.

  “I want to stay with you, Mr. Oliver. It’s the only home I got.”

  “Aw, come on, Private, you’ll clerk a little, have some R & R with those playboys at Regiment, and as soon as you’re sick of them, you’ll run home to the company. But bring us some blankets.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Sonny was startled when Fireboy woke him in the middle of a light barrage.

  “Salinger, do you have any of your mother’s famous socks? I can’t feel my toes.”

  “Sure thing, Major.”

  Sonny could have traded in socks and collected a fortune. But he didn’t believe in bartering. He’d never bartered before.

  “Sir, I could massage your toes. It really helps.”

  The major removed his own ragged and wet GI-issue socks and put on the socks that Sonny gave him.

  “Thank your mother, Sergeant. I’ll pray for her…. You don’t like my Bible readings, do you?”

  “I’m sorry, sir. It’s hard for me to imagine the kind of Lord who put us in this Green Hell.”

  “He didn’t put us here, Salinger. The Devil did.”

  And Major Oliver must have had the Lord on his side. The next morning, two days before Thanksgiving, a whole bunch of bearers arrived through the pines carrying the company’s holiday dinner, since no damn jeep could get through the lines. The cooks had prepared gravy and genuine mashed potatoes and turkey sandwiches on some kind of pumpernickel bread from a bakery in Luxembourg.

  “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh,” Fireboy said. And Sonny didn’t argue. He hadn’t giveth much, not in this Green Hell. They were alive only because of Fireboy’s religious zeal and his surefire accuracy with a flamethrower. The white pines seemed to have a preternatural glow during a dusk that disappeared into the trees.

  PART SIX

  Luxembourg, High and Low

  December 1944

  1.

  ONE DAY EARLY IN DECEMBER, on a rainy afternoon, the Krauts vanished like a horde of gremlins from that Green Hell, with their mines and trip wires. There wasn’t a German helmet to be found, with its little apronlike neck guard in the rear. All the bunkers had been pillaged or buried under mounds of clay. The pillboxes looked like dunghills. Every corpse had been removed, every rocket launcher, every cannon, every useless, broken bicycle of the German Bicycle Brigade. It was as if the Krauts had never returned to the forest to hit GI Joe with a merciless surprise attack, or perhaps had never been there at all, and the Twelfth had been ravaged and almost ruined by some invisible force of nature—a walking whirlwind.

  It didn’t feel right. Major Oliver stomped around with his flamethrower, but Sonny and Corporal Benson had their own bit of luck. They could abandon the major and E Company and move into a little stone house in Luxembourg, beside the walled town of Echternach, where Charlemagne himself had once bivouacked with his army of Franks, a long time ago. It seems that this sector had always been a slaughterhouse, the ho
me of ancient battlefields. But Sonny didn’t care. He had a bed to sleep in with a hot-water bottle and an indoor shower where he could rinse off the black soil and grime of a month in the Hürtgen. He’d come to a borderland. Germany was on the other side of the river Sûre, at the very edge of Echternach. Sonny could have marched right across a stone bridge, along the narrow lanes of the rue de la Sûre.

  He woke to the bells of the basilica inside the medieval walls of Charlemagne’s little fortress town and to the chants of priests at their morning prayers. The songs revived Sonny and removed that constant cannonade he heard day and night in his one good ear. Hürtgen would remain with him. He knew that—the perpetual darkness and perpetual blood. The Bicycle Brigade with their little lanterns and long-range rifles as they attacked in the middle of the night like pranksters on some infernal Halloween. He wouldn’t forget how their rain capes flapped in the wind, and what deadly shots they were; how they could ride and steer across the gnarled ground, plant their mines and aim their guns. You couldn’t shoot at them; they didn’t leave much of a target. They were too damn quick. You had to run them down, like some tracker or deer slayer. Sonny had bagged only a single bicycle rider during his month in the Hürtgen, had chased him for half a mile. The bicycle rider didn’t wear a helmet, but a hunter’s cap. He’d killed two members of Sonny’s squad while they were asleep—had executed them, really, spilled their brains. And that’s why Sonny was so persistent, why he chased and chased. The bicycle rider chortled to himself. It was the rain cape that ruined him. Its rubber gave off a sheen in the bit of moonlight that hovered over the tops of the white pines. And Sonny nicked him in the ear with his Colt .45. The bicycle rider tumbled and fell into a ravine. Sonny left him there….

  But now he had these morning songs from the basilica that drifted across the medieval walls to his house on the rue des Ramparts. There was a watchtower in front of Sonny’s bedroom window with its murder holes, but he couldn’t imagine any Krauts lingering inside. Sonny could peer over the walls. The entire town seemed deserted. He couldn’t find a soul near the town hall with its double staircase and dormer windows. The citizens of Echternach must have been frightened of these new invaders with their jeeps and Dirty Gerties. The couple who prepared Sonny’s breakfast looked at him with a kind of cautious bewilderment. They were used to a German presence in Echternach. They chatted with him in French and English, though they had a Frankish tongue of their own that was handed down from Charlemagne himself, Sonny imagined. They ran a hotel in the heart of Echternach that must have been a haven for the new Nazi elite.

  This other house with its arched roof was where they lived, and Sonny discovered photos of the Führer tucked under a blanket in the bedroom closet. The husband and wife were very short, around five feet or so. And Sonny must have seemed like a giant to them, a half Jewish giant. They both wore identical blue pullovers that smelled of mothballs. He had ham and butter and dark country bread and coffee served in a pewter cup that reminded him of a chalice. It was the best coffee he’d had since the last time he sat down with his mother at Schrafft’s over a butterscotch sundae and a shared slice of apple pie.

  “Can I be of any further assistance, Herr Sergeant Salinger?” asked the woman, who had much more pluck than the man. She must have been used to invaders half her life. “You will come and visit us again, after the war, yes? It is nonsense, this war, no?”

  The man nudged his wife to be silent about the war.

  And Sonny wasn’t in the mood to debate with her. “Yes,” he insisted. “Total nonsense.”

  The woman smiled. She bowed and left with her husband. They must have served coffee to the Wehrmacht these past four years, drank to Hitler’s health out of their own pewter chalices. He wouldn’t permit them to tarnish his first morning in Echternach, with Corporal Benson in the room below. They’d been out of Hürtgen these past two weeks, and the morning songs from the basilica began to confuse him. Suddenly, oddly, he felt the presence of God, as if he were some freakish disciple of Major Oliver’s. He couldn’t have prayed, nothing like that, or recited from the Book of Job and the Song of Songs. He had no sense at all of an afterlife. Yet that constant cannonade had softened a little, had stopped exploding inside his skull. He drank his coffee and followed all the undulations in the ramparts, and the magical movement of the stones mingled with the morning songs like musical notes. He had Miriam’s socks and a spick-and-span room, even if its last occupant was probably a Kraut.

  The rain beat hard on his window. A storm was brewing. The sky had turned black.

  He would show a movie this evening; he’d become E Company’s projectionist. He would requisition a room in the basement of the town hall. Sonny had his own collection that went with him from war zone to war zone, with a little help from Special Services. He’d show The Lady Vanishes or The 39 Steps. He was a spy hunter addicted to spy films. Sonny Salinger of the CIC. And just when he was in the mood for a little R & R, he felt that first tremor, like a rubber band that went up and down his spine. Then he heard the crump of artillery, as if it came from some faraway basilica. It drowned the church songs. He still didn’t believe what was happening. The jitters, he told himself. He blamed it all on the Green Hell—and the lashing wind of a thunderstorm. But thunder couldn’t have made the floorboards rise and fall. Plaster chips rained on his head. The chiffonier tottered. And Sonny found himself under the bed, in the company of a terrified white mouse that climbed on his knee and nestled there.

  He heard the creak of boots on the boards, then the sound of voices in the windswept street below—German voices. He’d left his holster on the night table with his magazine pouch. A face appeared below the coverlets.

  “Sarge, the Krauts are coming.”

  “That’s impossible. They fled from the Hürtgen. They crossed the Rhine.”

  The corporal stared at the mouse. “Some companion.”

  The mouse scuttled into a hole, while Sonny crept out from under the bed.

  The whole house began to sway like a rocking horse. “Sarge, we’re fucking under attack.”

  Sonny stared out the window. Members of a Kraut Bicycle Brigade stood in front of the house’s tiny couple. They must have crossed the Sûre downriver, rather than risk an American patrol on Echternach’s stone bridge. There were at least fifty riders, all of them with their lanterns and long rifles, and gas masks on the handlebars. Their commander, a young lieutenant in goggles, asked Frau Schmit, the tiny man’s wife, if they were harboring any of the American swine from the Fourth Division. She could have easily betrayed Sonny and the corporal. But she didn’t. And he had to wonder why.

  “Herr Leutnant,” she said with her usual pluck, “you aren’t blind. You could look for yourself.”

  The young lieutenant doffed his hunter’s cap. “You have always welcomed us, meine liebe Frau. But I will leave a few of my fellows here, in case the Schweinehunde happen to arrive. They feed on human flesh.”

  The lieutenant left a squad of six bicycle riders near the house and pedaled with the rest of his patrol right into the wind and rain and through the ramparts of Echternach. Sonny could hear the faint report of pistols from inside the walls. He had a bad case of vertigo in this swaying house.

  “Sarge,” the corporal said, “what should we do?”

  “Join the fight.”

  “But there are six of those sharpshooters outside your windowsill.”

  “So?” Sonny said. “We’ll surprise them.”

  Then he could hear a curdling scream as members of the Bicycle Brigade rode off with their tunics on fire. Sonny and the corporal ran down the narrow, winding stairs with their Colt .45s. Frau Schmit was on the bottom stair. She clutched Sonny’s arm, with absolute terror in her eyes.

  “You will take us to America, Herr Sergeant Salinger, yes? I saved your life.”

  Major Oliver stood outside with that metal hump on his back and the tube of his flamethrower, like a serpent’s tongue. He was alone.

  “Fire
boy,” Sonny said, “how’d you get here?”

  “By instinct,” the major said. “Pack your stuff. The place is crawling with Krauts.”

  Sonny had to rush upstairs for his manuscripts and his canteen. He met Frau Schmit again.

  “I’ll be back for you. I promise.”

  And he ran into the woods with the corporal and Major Oliver, who had to keep adjusting the straps of the fire tank on his back.

  2.

  IT NEVER SHOULD HAVE HAPPENED. The Allies were nearly a stone’s throw from the Rhine. But the high command must have been half-asleep. With its regiments roughed up in the Hürtgen, the Fourth had to patrol thirty-five miles of hard terrain along the Luxembourg-German border, a section of the Ardennes Forest. The Allies were dancing along a depleted string. And rather than crawl deep into Germany and create a defensive line, the Krauts had their own breakthrough in the Ardennes—it was the Führer’s last deadly serenade to GI Joe.

  For two weeks in December, there was utter chaos. So much of it was caused by one man, Otto Skorzeny, a lieutenant colonel in the SS, a six-foot-five giant with curly black hair who had a wicked scar along his left cheek and mythical status among the Krauts. A whoremonger, barroom brawler, and bon vivant, Skorzeny would have been tossed out of the SS, delivered to an internment camp, and beaten half to death if he hadn’t been Hitler’s favorite Kommando.

  “My mischievous Otto,” the Führer supposedly said, “my beloved Scarface.” He seemed to like the idea of this giant who wrecked one SS canteen after the other and always had some madcap scheme in his skull.