Behind them, their brothers are a strong force that follows. I Company. Many are cut down, but many also are pushing through. Throwing caution to the winds, charging up through the ridge that will later be called Suicide Hill.
Something has taken hold among the men. Something savage. Some are felled by the barrage of German bullets, but no matter; the others race up the ridge, like wave after wave crashing upon the shore. Until they are at the next nest, screaming with wild maniacal eyes and leaping in to engage in hand-to-hand combat. It is so elemental and raw, this face-off. A schoolyard scrap, a tussle. A tangle of arms, sudden grunts, leveraging for position, gasps for air. Only here it ends in death, when they find themselves pushing bayonets into soft German stomachs, necks, temples, eyeballs. Or find themselves impaled, killed with air hissing out of punctured lungs, or with blood filling the chambers of their pounding hearts.
Then there is only one last nest. Mutt, Alex, and two other soldiers they’ve never seen before but who are now brothers for life. Screaming with blood-streaked faces, flinging their last grenades into the pit, they leap in just as the smoke clears. Helmets get knocked off, German and American, revealing photos taped on the inside of girlfriends and wives and children and babies and mothers, German and American both.
They thrust their blades over and over into the enemy’s chest, stomach, face, neck, as curses are thrown out in German and English and pidgin in a bloody tangle of arms and hands. One German spits out what must be a curse over and over as Mutt sinks his blade slowly into his throat, Ich habe zwei Töchter, Ich habe zwei Töchter, Ich habe zwei …
And then there are no more nests. No more snipers. No more Germans.
K Company and I Company have taken the ridge.
Alex and Mutt collapse to the ground. Not sure if the blood on them is German or American. Or even their own. Not sure if they are alive or dead or dying.
55
OCTOBER 30, 1944
FORÊT DOMANIALE DE CHAMP, FRANCE
They find the Lost Battalion the next day.
Alex, Mutt, and a couple of others are out on patrol. They walk slowly, partly because of Alex’s trench foot, partly because they’re on the lookout for lurking Germans. It’s Mutt who discovers the cable wire. He’s scanning the ground for possible mines when he sees a tar-covered cable line. Thin, the width of a spaghetti strand. They bend, pick it up cautiously. It’s an American communication wire. Probably laid down by the Lost Battalion a week ago.
Excited now, they move faster, following the wire. At the bottom of the hill, just as the mist begins to clear before them, Alex stops. He’s seen something.
“What is it?” Mutt whispers.
Alex points to a tree. “Over there. I saw someone.”
“Where?”
“Swear I did. Peeked out from behind that tr—”
A solider steps out. Blond, blue-eyed, Aryan.
Immediately, Alex and Mutt raise their rifles.
“Hey!” the soldier yells. Even in that short syllable, a Southern drawl. “Hey, there!”
Still cautious but lowering their rifles, Alex and Mutt walk over to the man. The soldier is staring at them with confusion, eyes going from their faces to their uniforms.
“You guys American?” he asks.
Alex nods. Just past the tree behind the soldier, movement. A foxhole, well hidden, the logs covering it packed with mud and brush. Eyes peering out.
“You guys the Four Forty-Second?” the soldier asks, more animated now. “Good God.” He spins around. “Y’all, they’re here! The Four Forty-Second are here!”
And with that, soldiers pour out of the foxhole. Filthy, emaciated, stinking of piss and worse, eyes blinking at Alex and Mutt. They are gaunt, staggering with dizziness and fatigue, phantoms recalled from hell. But smiles are breaking out across their mud-smeared faces.
“You guys want a cigarette?” Mutt says, holding out his pack of Camels.
“Sure do. Oh, man, I can’t believe you guys are really here. We thought we were goners for sure.”
Mutt cups the match with his hands, leans over to light the cigarette dangling from the soldier’s lips.
“So happy to see you, man,” says another soldier, patting Alex on the back. “How the hell did you break through? We tried. Never could.” More soldiers come out of the foxhole. They surround him, patting him on the shoulder with relief and happiness beaming from their tired faces.
Alex thinks of Frank. How his teammates would huddle around him and look to him to lead them. How they would thump him on the back or shoulder pads after he called out a winning play. It’s what Frank lived for, Alex thinks. He understands why now. The feeling is intoxicating. To be a hero to them. Or better yet: to simply be one of them, accepted completely.
The soldiers move aside to let their leader through. The tall man steps up to Alex and Mutt. Despite a scruffy beard he has a youthful face. “I’m Second Lieutenant Marty Higgins.” He pauses. His eyes tear up. “Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you for breaking through. For saving us. You look like giants to us.”
Alex looks down to the ground, not sure how to respond. It’s Mutt who speaks up.
“I thought I stink.” He grins. “But holy cow, you guys stink like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Oh, I believe it, trust me,” Higgins says with a smile. “I’ve been cooped up with these knuckleheads for a week.”
They all laugh, tears in their eyes.
56
OCTOBER 30, 1944, AFTERNOON
FORÊT DOMANIALE DE CHAMP, FRANCE
Transmission at 16:00. From Lost Battalion to CO Dahlquist at Headquarters:
Patrol from 442nd is here. Tell them we love them.
57
OCTOBER 30, 1944, EVENING
FORÊT DOMANIALE DE CHAMP, FRANCE
The 211 men of the Lost Battalion are evacuated back down the mountain, many of them carried by litter bearers on stretchers. But the 442nd is ordered to press on. To continue up the mountain. Cross the next ravine. No rest for the weary. Chase the Krauts back into Germany.
Not Alex, though. He can’t. His left trench foot. No longer can he ignore the acidic pain flaming out from it. When he pries off his boot—it takes him ten gruesome minutes—the medic takes one look at the swollen monstrosity otherwise known as his left foot and orders him to the aid station.
“How you’ve been able to walk on that is beyond me,” the medic mutters, shaking his head. “We’re out of stretchers so you’ll need to crawl. Or get someone to carry you down.”
“I’ll do it,” Mutt volunteers.
He piggybacks Alex the way they came. Slow going, the slippery mud slopes treacherous. They walk through the bloody carnage on Suicide Hill. German soldiers lie atop one another in machine-gun nests, jaws slack, eyes glassy, arms and legs sprawled like a stack of dropped mannequins. American soldiers lie unmoving behind tree stumps, or in slit trenches, eyeballs as hard as ice, hair festooned in icicles. One soldier is facedown in the mud, his exposed hands partially devoured. Paw prints of some animal—a wolf?—dot the mud and snow around him.
“How can we just leave our men lying out here?” Mutt says. He hoists Alex higher up his back. “I’m coming back for them, Alex, I swear. After I drop you off.”
“You need to rest. They’ll have recovery teams out soon enough.”
But Mutt shakes his head adamantly. “This is wrong. This is wrong.”
The bivouacked aid station is packed. Men waiting outside on fallen tree logs, their heads wrapped in dirty bandages, or nursing arms snapped in two, jutting bones exposed. Gamely gritting down on cigarette stubs, waiting their turn. Everyone shivering. Alex and Mutt fall asleep against a charred tree trunk. In the late afternoon, they’re brought inside the open tent.
“Another day longer, and the infection would have spread,” the medic tells Alex. “And you’d be dead.”
“Patch it up and I’ll be on my way.”
The medic shakes his head, starts scribbling on a me
dical transfer form. “You’re done. At least for a few days. Sending you to a clearing station in the rear. You leave tomorrow morning. For tonight, you sleep here. Can’t have you in a trench, your foot getting all wet again.”
They get up to leave, Mutt walking past the medic. The medic crinkles his nose, turns to Mutt. “Hold on.”
“What is it?”
The medic bends toward Mutt’s feet. “I can smell it from here.”
“Smell what?”
“The infection. Show me your feet.”
“It’s nothing.”
“Show me your feet,” the medic says forcefully.
They are barely recognizable, Mutt’s feet. The size of watermelons, the texture of leprous skin. Blisters and open lesions, the color of rotting eggplants, the skin completely sloughed off. A horrendous stink rises from them.
Alex’s mouth falls agape. “Mutt. You never said a thing. What the hell, man.”
“You leave tomorrow, too,” the medic says, signing off on another transfer form. “A clearing station. Then probably an evac hospital.”
“Hospital? No, I—”
“Infection has spread. Amputation of both feet possible. At least you get to go home now.”
Mutt falls silent.
“This whole time, Mutt?” Alex says incredulously. “You had trench feet this whole time and you didn’t say a thing?”
“Didn’t bother me.”
“Like hell it didn’t. You gave me your socks. You shouldn’t have. You had it worse than me.”
The medic leads them out back. Shelter halves are spread out on the ground, weighed down by a dozen soldiers lying on top. Each soldier has at least one foot wrapped in fresh bandages. The smell of infection is ripe in the air. “You two stay here tonight,” the medic says, already heading back. “There should be a bottle of talcum powder somewhere. Or packets of sulfa powder. And absolutely no walking.”
The tarp stinks; the ground beneath is cold. Tree roots jut into their backs. A brisk wind whistles through the trees, flaps the corners and edges of the tarp. But after four nights sleeping in soggy slit trenches while being bombarded by mortar and artillery strikes, it is the softest mattress in the quietest, safest bedroom they’ve ever slept on. Despite the early hour and pain in their feet, Alex and Mutt fall asleep almost immediately.
58
OCTOBER 31, 1944, AFTER MIDNIGHT
FORÊT DOMANIALE DE CHAMP, FRANCE
Alex wakes up in a bewilderment of confusion. The quiet, the sense of safety—none of it is familiar to him. He sits up. Around him, in the open air, a dozen bodies snooze away. Three men sit at the corner of the tarp, playing cards by moonlight.
Alex gazes up. The clouds are finally breaking apart, and stars glimmer through, the first time he has seen them in what seems like a year. The miracle of them, light from a million burning suns a billion light-years away in a vacuum of eternity.
Mutt is gone. Probably went to piss in the woods.
Words float over to Alex. The men, shuffling the cards, talking softly. About their fallen friends, the awful ways they died. The random, arbitrary way death chose them.
“… can’t touch the bodies,” one of the murmurs. He shuffles the deck one more time. “Gotta leave them out in the field. The Germans rigged some of them with mines.”
The men suck on cigarettes at the same time. Three dots of orange glow in the dark.
“Sarge said engineering teams coming tomorrow to make sure the bodies ain’t booby-trapped. Then we can move them.”
“Damn Krauts. They did the same thing at Anzio beach.” They slap cards down in the space between them.
Alex closes his eyes. Lies back down. The men’s voices murmur low and strangely soothing, the names of friends they’ve lost—Robert Hajiro, Kaz Fukunaga, Gerry Akamine—in the towns they died: Livorno, Lanuvio, Monte Cassino. Alex drifts back to sleep.
… wakes up suddenly. Snaps into a sitting position. His heart hammering away for some reason. How much time has passed? The three men have stopped playing—two have fallen asleep. The third man sits staring into the dark woods, smoking.
Mutt is still gone.
“Hey,” Alex croaks.
The soldier turns to him. “Yeah?”
“The guy who was sleeping next to me. Did you see him walk off?”
The solider shrugs.
“Did he say where he was going?”
The soldier snorts, turns his back to Alex.
Alex stares into the woods. Then at the tarp. Five cigarette butts lie discarded where Mutt slept. He’d been up a while, then, before heading off. Thinking something over. Stewing.
Where would he go?
The answer comes at Alex like a cold wind. He stands up immediately, hopping as he squeezes his left foot into the boot. Tears of pain fill his eyes. He hobbles off the tarp, past the aid station. Past a few jeeps. Heads up the slope toward Suicide Hill.
How can they just leave our men lying out here? I’m coming back for them, Alex.
Alex’s feet move faster, despite the pain shooting up from his left foot. His breath expels faster, hotter, the cold air sawing through his lungs. The landscape before him, caught in a silvery X-ray film of moonlight, stark and cruel.
“Mutt!” he shouts. “Mutt!”
The trees, those still standing, stare blankly back at him like uninterested, tired sentries.
… can’t touch the bodies. Gotta leave them out in the field. The Germans rigged some of them.
He walks faster, his breath gusting white out of him. Past a nest of dead Germans. Wind blows, sending a thin sheet of snow sliding down the slope. He shivers. Keeps moving, the hill so steep, he’s almost on all fours.
There.
A small dot moving against the white, moon-bleached landscape. Farther up the hill, about a hundred yards away.
“Mutt!” But the wind muffles and carries his voice away. “Mutt!” he shouts louder. He sees Mutt limping toward a black form on the ground. A dead soldier. “Mutt! Stop! Don’t touch the body!”
But Mutt still doesn’t hear. He keeps moving toward the figure, his arms extending toward the body. Slowly, so slowly.
Alex is sprinting now, pain shooting up his left leg with every step, his feet fumbling over roots and rocks and branches. Dangles of saliva fluttering out of his mouth. “Mutt! MUTT!”
At last Mutt hears. He stops, turns toward Alex. Alex sprints faster, shouting, flapping his arms, trying to warn Mutt. But the wind picks up, carving up his words, their tone, their urgency.
Mutt lifts an arm, waves back. Alex can almost imagine the smile on his face. What’s up braddah, you come to give me a hand?
He sees Mutt reach down toward the body.
“MUTT!”
The explosion is no more than a little pop. Not loud at all. A misfire, it must have been a misfire. He almost expects to see Mutt picking himself up, dusting off the ice and dirt, laughing.
59
NOVEMBER 3, 1944
CLEARING STATION, VOSGES FOREST
Alex clutches the blanket. For a moment he thinks he’s back at Manzanar. Everything is weirdly familiar: the same cot, the same army-issued blanket, the room itself airy and cold and full of the sounds of others snoring, wheezing, murmuring in feverish nightmares.
But he’s only in the clearing station. His third day here. Tomorrow he’ll be released to make room for the more seriously wounded. His foot hasn’t quite healed, but he’s deemed well enough. His whole time here, he’s barely eaten, barely spoken. His immediate neighbors have tried conversing with him. He hasn’t said a word back. He doesn’t know their names, doesn’t want to hear their stories, or how many Fritzes they’ve killed. In the daytime, he curls up and sleeps, pretends to, anyway.
His cot lies before a large window in the coldest section of the room. A draft whistles through the imperfect seal all night and day. He doesn’t mind, doesn’t care. He feels nothing these days, not even the cold. Not even the needles when they inject him i
n his foot, his arm. They could inject him in the eyeball, and he’d feel nothing.
The only time he felt anything was yesterday morning. He’d gotten his hands on a newspaper. The rescue of the Lost Battalion had made the news. A photo splashed on the front page, of Marty Higgins, leader of the Lost Battalion, shaking hands with a Lieutenant C.O. Barry of “the relief unit.” Lots of smiling teeth and faces in this photo, but not a single Japanese American face in sight. He read the article. Doughboys Break German Ring to Free 270 Trapped Eight Days. In it, no mention that the doughboys were in fact Japanese Americans, or that they suffered more than 450 casualties in the rescue.
60
NOVEMBER 12, 1944
A FARM IN BRUYÈRES, FRANCE
They stand shoulder to shoulder in the bracing wind, drifts of snow lightly powdering their new boots and helmets. The sky is overcast this afternoon, swirls of black clouds darkening the French farmland beneath. The men of the 442nd, finally able to shuck their lightweight uniforms for heavy field jackets and shoepacs, stand in formation, stoic and expressionless.
Before them stands Major General Dahlquist. Two white stars on the front of his helmet stare unblinkingly like his own eyes as they scrutinize the assembled regiment before him. This is the man who ordered the 442nd to rescue the Lost Battalion “at all costs.” The man who, many say, used the 442nd as cannon fodder. Who ordered troops to charge up Suicide Hill even against his lieutenants’ objections. Who threatened those same lieutenants with court-martial unless they obeyed.
He has now ordered the 442nd to assemble here on this farmland in Bruyères. Pulled them out of Fays and Lépanges-sur-Vologne where they were resting, after finally being taken off the line after weeks of brutal fighting. Even after two days of rest, though, the men are still exhausted. None of them wants to be here. Not here before the small retinue of army photographers with Dahlquist, chest puffed out, preening for the cameras.
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