Purple Hearts

by Michael Grant

  Rio now leads them up the bank, crawling on their bellies. Rio’s seen nothing, but her predator’s senses have warned her with a prickling on the back of her neck that Germans are nearby.

  Crawl. Crawl. Pause. Crawl. And a brief snatch of spoken German, coming from way too close. In those bushes? Molina crawls beside her and points to their right. Sure enough: movement in the form of a gray uniform. A German patrol.

  Rio motions everyone to lie flat. They lie still for twenty minutes as the German patrol passes within a hundred feet. And then . . .

  BOOM!

  The first round elicits a yelp from Molina, but that sound is obliterated by a catastrophic artillery barrage that lacerates the area where Rio believes the American tanks are dug in. It is presumably German artillery, but given how frequently artillery hits the wrong target, it could be American. Either way the sound of destruction is an opportunity.

  “Let’s move out!”

  At a crouching trot they move more quickly now, artillery exploding well to their left, the ongoing battle of the ridge blazing away behind, to the right, and many hundreds of feet up from where Rio’s squad is.

  Suddenly through the trees ahead, Rio spots a German truck. And then, ahead of the truck, a tank.

  “Mazur! What do you make of it?”

  The Polish American bazooka man peers into the forest and whistles softly. “That is a Jagdpanzer, a tank-killer.”

  “Looks strange.”

  “No turret. It’s got a big old cannon, but it has limited movement unless you move the whole vehicle.”

  “How would you go at it?”

  Mazur considers. He’d seemed at first like a bit of a fire-breather, but now that it’s time for the show he is cool and professional and Rio finds herself warming to him.

  “Well, Sarge, they’ll have most of their people over on this side of the road. If there was a way to get to the other side . . .”

  Getting to the other side is flatly insane. The only way is by crawling under the bridge, and there are Germans thick on both ends of the bridge. Can she get Jenou, Jack, Molina, Jeffords, Chester, Mazur, and herself under the bridge? She briefly considers a diversion, but an experienced German commander will smell that in a second.

  Seven people beneath a guarded bridge? Easier with fewer.

  “Here’s the plan,” Rio says. “Mazur, Stafford, and I try for the bridge. The rest of you go along the left bank and see if you can find a place to enfilade that bridge. Castain? You got Molina, Jeffords, and Chester.”

  Jenou looks appalled, and it occurs to Rio that this will be Jenou’s first time really in charge of anything but herself. But Jenou nods worried acceptance.

  Rio takes a bag of bazooka rounds from Chester and leads the way into icy water that deepens with each step so that soon it spills over the top of her boots. The artillery barrage creates crashing, ground-pounding noise, and the falling snow obscures sight: it’s the best chance they have.

  But as they come to within twenty yards of the bridge, Rio spots a German sentry squatting beneath the bridge to relieve himself. He has his back to them and appears to be reading a letter as he defecates.

  A veteran, Rio notes sourly. Only an experienced soldier has the sangfroid and cool calculation of risks required to calmly take a dump with artillery landing just beyond shrapnel range.

  Rio hands her Thompson to Jack. He looks very unhappy, like he might object to Rio’s plan, but he subsides and accepts her submachine gun.

  Rio moves quickly now, too close to avoid being seen if the German turns around, but knowing that he can’t possibly hear her and, given the situation, isn’t likely to smell her.

  He never turns around as her koummya goes around his throat. She draws it back hard, needing it to slice straight through his voice box to silence any cry. He does not cry out. He twists and falls on his back. His throat is a grisly red smile.

  They reach the far side of the road unobserved, then creep in a water-filled ditch alongside the road. From here they see more vehicles, all with engines running, with tank commanders sitting tall in their hatches.

  They are just waiting for the artillery barrage to stop before giving the command to attack. Just above them, so close they can smell its exhaust, is the first Jagdpanzer. Behind it a standard Panzer Mark IV. If they take out one or both they will block the bridge and at least delay the attack. With enough delay the artillery-plastered American defenders may have time to stiffen their lines.

  “All right, Mazur,” Rio says.

  “I’m going to put some WP on that Jagdpanzer first. Then a HEAT round on that second panzer. Might get in a third round, depending. Then we skedaddle.”

  “Is that American for run like hell?” Jack asks.

  Rio has her Thompson again. Jack acts as loader for the bazooka. Mazur shoulders the long steel tube, and Jack slides a rocket into the tube.

  “Watch the backfire, Tommy,” Mazur says to Jack.

  Careful aim. They are side-on to the Jagdpanzer.

  Whoosh!

  BAM!

  The round hits squarely on the side armor of the tank. It makes a small explosion, just enough to expose the white phosphorus to oxygen. The tank’s commander immediately yells orders as dense white smoke billows around him. The order is apparently to button up because the commander drops down into his vehicle and pulls the hatch after him.

  Jack has already reloaded, and Mazur now aims at the Panzer Mark IV. It’s at an angle to them. The rocket flies, hits, and bounces away to explode in the trees beyond.

  They hear shouted orders in German, and Rio knows what they will be: infantry is being ordered forward to protect the precious tanks.

  “Try again!” Rio says.

  Jack and Mazur reload. Aim. The sound of hobnail boots running, underbrush crashing and . . .

  Whoosh!

  BOOM!

  The rocket hits the bogie wheels on the tank’s right side, and the tread spools off.

  “Skedaddle!” Rio yells.

  Jack grabs the ammo, Mazur grabs the bazooka, and they run back toward the bridge. No longer worried about stealth, they run, leap the German whose throat Rio cut, splash through the water, and stop suddenly, almost face-to-face with two German soldiers.

  Brrrt! Brrrt! Brrrt!

  Rio’s Thompson blazes, and the Germans fall. But now every German infantry soldier within hearing knows where they are. They dive into the woods as a file of German Panzergrenadiers splashes across the stream, racing to cut them off.

  From the woods comes the chatter of small arms, and for a moment Rio thinks they’ve been flanked. But no, it’s Jenou and the others firing to discourage the Germans.

  The Germans are discouraged just long enough for Rio to gather her lost sheep and go hell-for-leather back up the hill. They are walking back toward American lines and the possibility that they’ll be shot as Germans, so Rio yells the password again and again and they pass through the lines and collapse on the ground.

  Rio is laughing aloud.

  Jenou looks to Jack. “What the hell?”

  Jack laughs. “I think our sergeant just discovered a new hobby: killing tanks.”

  27

  FRANGIE MARR AND RAINY SCHULTERMAN—BASTOGNE, BELGIUM

  TRANSCRIPT

  Debriefing of MARR, FRANCINE

  Interrogator: SCHULTERMAN, E. (LT. G2)

  SCHULTERMAN: Frangie, I’m happy to see you well.

  MARR: I don’t know how well I am, but I’m happy to see you! And a first lieutenant besides! Watch out or they’ll make you a general.

  SCHULTERMAN: Fat chance. Okay, for the record this conversation is being recorded. I am Lieutenant Elisheva Schulterman, speaking with Sergeant Frangie—what’s your legal name?

  MARR: Francine.

  SCHULTERMAN: Francine. Francine Marr, sergeant, medical corps. So, Frangie, for the record, tell me what happened at Malmédy.

  MARR: They massacred us. That’s what happened. We were ambushed and surrounded
and we were taken prisoner. The SS—

  SCHULTERMAN: Do you happen to know what unit?

  MARR: No. But I heard someone talking about an SS officer named Peiper. I think the Peiper person was in charge.

  SCHULTERMAN: Yes. General Joachim Peiper. He’s notorious for what he—and others like him—did in Poland and Russia. Please continue.

  MARR: There’s not much to say. They marched us into a field. They drove a truck in, opened the flap, and started machine gunning.

  SCHULTERMAN: No warning or explanation?

  MARR: What explanation could they have for murdering POWs in cold blood?

  The interview lasts half an hour, during which Frangie goes from rage to sorrow to depression. Rainy switches off the recorder. They are across from each other in a small room that smells of plaster dust and mildew. There is a wooden table between them, a nice table, not military issue.

  Rainy excuses herself for a moment. She goes directly to Herkemeier who is waiting for her.

  “She confirms the other accounts,” Rainy says.

  Herkemeier nods. “This is bad. It’ll scare the hell out of some GIs, stiffen the spines of others, but mostly it will mean revenge. After word gets around about Malmédy, no German prisoner—certainly no SS—will be safe.”

  “I can’t spare too much pity,” Rainy says.

  “It’s not a question of pity, Rainy. Soldiers fight soldiers. Eventually the two sides really come to hate each other—but as soldiers. This? This is different. There aren’t many rules in war, but one of them is that you care for your prisoners.”

  Rainy sighs. “We need to minimize the damage, then. Make sure this ends up being seen as a purely SS thing. If our people are going to be looking for revenge, we can at least focus the worst of it on the worst of them.”

  Herkemeier makes a face like he’s just bitten into a bad peach. “We’ll need some friendly Germans when this is all over. So in the end we’re going to lie about how deeply the Wehrmacht is involved in atrocities, and pin it all on the SS. We’ll most likely whitewash the Wehrmacht and the German people too. Political necessity.”

  “I have to get back,” Rainy says, squirming at talk of politics. “I’m borrowing this.” She goes behind Herkemeier’s desk, slides open a drawer, and takes out a bottle of German schnapps. She leaves quickly, not angry at Herkemeier, angry at the fact that he’s right. She forces herself to calm down before opening the door to the interrogation room.

  Frangie has a coffee mug before her. Rainy takes it, pours the last inch of coffee into a trash can, then pours an inch of schnapps for Frangie. Frangie sniffs at it. Says, “Smells like chewing gum,” and then downs the shot in one gulp.

  “Listen, Frangie,” Rainy says. “GIs who deal with this kind of thing often experience severe guilt. You know? They ask themselves, ‘Why me? Why did I live?’”

  “Oh, I’ve already done plenty of that,” Frangie says. She hates to admit it, but the alcohol burning a hole in her stomach has settled her nerves. “I’m not a combat soldier who lost some buddies, Rainy, I’m a medic. All I see of this war is wounds and death. Folks crying. Folks screaming. Folks begging for Jesus to save them. You can’t—”

  Suddenly she cannot speak. Her throat is choked, her eyes swim with tears.

  Rainy waits, watching Frangie try to master herself, try to push a million pounds of pain down, down, down inside herself. Where it will fester and eat at her. Where it may become a poison that will destroy her.

  She reaches across and lays a hand on Frangie’s hand.

  They sit that way in silence for many minutes. Outwardly silent, as Frangie tries to get control of emotions that roll through her like a series of waves, cresting, waning, crashing in again.

  “I forgot what I was going to say,” Frangie says at last. “Anyway, I should be getting back.”

  “Back to where?”

  “Back to my battalion.”

  “Frangie.”

  “What?” A slow, terrible dawning, and a second, more anxious “What?”

  “The battalion suffered seventy percent casualties. They’re off the line, and basically, sparing you the army jargon, the remains will be folded into some other group.”

  Frangie hears nothing after “seventy percent.”

  Rainy pours her another shot of schnapps.

  “Listen, Frangie, there are two ways this goes now. Either you get sent to the rear to see if another colored unit can take you, and of course they will, but it may be a while. You could probably get some time off, some Paris time even. Or you could get shipped back to Blighty and be assigned to a hospital.”

  Frangie nods dully. “Or?”

  Rainy sighs. “You should go—”

  “Or?” Frangie demands angrily.

  “Or you could sit tight here, because Bastogne is in big trouble now and is going to be in worse trouble soon. We’ll need medics, whatever color they are.” She leans across the table a little and squeezes Frangie’s hand. “You’ve done enough. You’ve done more than enough. You’ve had your war. Let me get you out of Bastogne while I can. Go back to England, finish your time there. And when it’s all over, go home with your head held high.”

  Frangie snorts dismissively. “My head held high? Until I run into my first white person and have to step off into the gutter.”

  Rainy, confused, asks, “Is that a metaphor?”

  “A metaphor?” Frangie looks at Rainy with disbelief. “You really don’t know, do you? In the south—maybe other places, too, I don’t know, but in the south if a colored person is on a sidewalk and a white person’s coming toward them, the colored person steps aside. Into the street if necessary.”

  “You mean . . . that’s expected?”

  “Expected? Yes, you could say it’s expected. Just like it’s expected that I will sit in the colored section at a movie theater, or never drink from a ‘whites only’ drinking fountain, or—”

  “But how do people know which is a white drinking fountain?”

  “There’s a sign.”

  “A sign.”

  “Yes, a sign that says ‘Colored Only,’ or ‘Whites Only,’ or ‘No Dogs or Negroes.’ And it’s not like a suggestion; if you don’t go along you wake up to find a cross burning on your lawn. And sometimes, if the white folks get drunk enough, there’s a lynching.”

  “But that’s crazy.”

  Frangie smiles at her friend. “You want to know the funny thing, Rainy?”

  “Funny would be good.”

  “The funny thing,” Frangie says, leaning forward and lowering her voice in volume if not intensity, “is that all my life I thought it was normal. I thought it’s just the way things are. I thought, well . . . yes, it’s a white person’s world and . . . and I never even thought about it being wrong. I read a story in . . . I don’t know, one of the colored papers . . . anyway, about this colored vet, wounded, heading home to see his folks. And he was made to move out of the white seats to make room for German prisoners being sent to a POW camp in Kansas. See, Germans are white. Doesn’t matter that they’re the enemy, they’re white.”

  Rainy takes this in. How had she not known this? How had she never asked herself what life was like for Negroes? She feels obscurely guilty, despite the fact that Jews are themselves treated as second-class citizens. Yet she is white, and while she can’t join a country club or attend some universities because of her ethnic background, she is still undeniably white and has never confronted such a thing as a “Jews Only” section.

  She comes close to telling Frangie some of what she has learned and come to suspect about what Germans are doing to Jews. But her innate reserve stops her. Anyway, how would it help? She sees more than enough rage in Frangie’s eyes, she doesn’t need more.

  “I don’t think I ever understood that,” Rainy admits.

  Frangie slumps in her seat. Already small, she becomes smaller still. “In 1921 white folks burned down Greenwood. That’s a neighborhood in Tulsa. Used to be called the Colored Wall
Street. White folks burned it down. They actually got hold of planes and threw gas bombs down on colored homes.”

  “That really happened?” Rainy asks skeptically.

  “My mother . . .” Frangie stops, but only long enough to master her voice, which still comes out as a low, grating sound unlike anything Rainy has ever heard from Frangie. “Some white men took her. And they used her.”

  Silence stretches again. Rainy feels something inside her resist. Deny. But that’s madness, obviously Frangie is telling the truth. Yet at the same time, Rainy can’t believe it, doesn’t want to believe it. She wants her moral lines neat and clean and clear. She doesn’t want to know that in her own country there are men and women every inch the moral equivalent of the Nazis.

  If there is one true thing that can be said about Rainy Schulterman, it is that she keeps her own counsel and shares only the minimum. If there is a second true thing about Rainy Schulterman, it is that she goes where the facts lead her.

  “I didn’t know,” Rainy says. She drums her fingers on the desk and says again, “I didn’t know. I never knew. I never really . . .” Her head shakes, slightly at first, but more vigorously, more angrily. “I didn’t know. How? How do I not know that? How do I not know?”

  Rainy gets to her feet and paces, followed by Frangie’s eyes. Despite herself Frangie is almost amused by Rainy’s reaction. When the four of them—Rio, Jenou, Frangie, and Rainy—had been together in Britain it had immediately become clear that Rainy was the clever, informed one, the one who understood the war and the history and the politics and so on. Rainy was undeniably very smart, but there were some very big holes in what she knew of the world, especially the world closer to home.

  “How do you people fight for us? For our country?” Rainy demands suddenly.

  “We don’t,” Frangie says. “We fight for our country. And mostly we just do the same as all the white GIs, we fight to stay alive and keep our brothers and sisters alive.”