There Should Have Been Castles Page 20

  Again Mackie was tolerant, but barely. “Ah know yawl scared, boy. But the day is turnin’ dark an’ we got no tahm foe cowardice. Now, the sergeant says he checked the gun an’ that it is fahn, an’ so that is fahn with me, so—”

  “Sir,” I said, hanging in like Larry Leech, “if you will examine it yourself, I’m sure you’ll—”

  And Mackie blew. “Ah am not gonna examine nothin’, boy! Yawl can get in lahn with the othahs, or yawl can drop out and face a courts martial, and not the chief Rabba of Droozlim’s gonna save yo bacon!” He had to smile at his own wittiness.

  The case for my pressing the issue further was fading quickly, especially with Johnny a few feet away from me, clearly indicating by face and gesture that I should drop the issue and get on with the rest of my life.

  “Yes, sir,” I said to Captain Mackie. “But if it does slip, I will bring the matter to the attention of the post inspector general and—”

  “Back in line, kike!” said Holdoffer, shoving me so hard into Johnny that the both of us almost toppled. Tony caught us and kept us from belly-wopping in the mud.

  “Stupid bastards,” I muttered.

  Tony was straightening me out. “Come on, Ben. You ain’t gonna win that one.”

  “The fucking stupidity—it’s like a disease!” I was so angry I was shaking, my hands clenching and unclenching as if they wanted to hit someone. They were not totally under my control.

  Captain Mackie moved ahead in the day’s events. “Vurra well, men. Yawl have had the ’vantage of two drah runs. An’ now it is tahm yawl did it with lahv ammo. No big trick, jess do what yawl did the fust two tahms, rememberin’ t’keep flat onna groun’ at all tahms as that machine gun is gonna whip awf anythin’ flahin’ too hah in the skah. Ah should point out that they is a coupla charges gonna go awf at very-us innivals, but—if yawl jess pay attention to what yawl is doin’ it shoont cause yo’ enna hodship whotsoevah. Carra on, Sergeant.”

  And Mackie began to tippy-toe back to his jeep. But the evening was taking on a chill and the jeep was uncovered, and so he glanced over at the ambulance and, noting that the two medics and the bald captain were warmly ensconced inside that vehicle, he executed a tippy-toe turn and joined that privileged trio inside the ambulance, where it was warm and dry. In so doing, Captain Mackie disappeared from our view and his post.

  We all filed into the side trench, third time. And again Tony, Johnny, and I lay back at Johnny’s insistence, watching the others trudge to the head of the line.

  “Shouldn’t we go first and get it the hell over with?” asked Tony.

  Johnny nodded in the negative. “Fucking gun’s liable to sink with the first round that’s fired.”

  “But, if it doesn’t,” I said, “it just might do it on the last round.”

  “Could be,” said Johnny. “I don’t know. Could happen any time or not at all. Luck of the fucking draw.”

  “Shouldn’t we tell everyone to stay over to the left?” asked Tony.

  “God damn it, Tony! It’s every stupid slob for himself!” It was the first time I had ever known Johnny to get angry and it got me a bit nervous, like watching the Rock of Gibraltar twitch. “We can’t have everyone on one side!” Johnny went on. “We’d be crawlin’ all over each other!” He softened, faking a smile. “Listen, relax. It may never happen. Just stay to this side and let’s get through the fuckin’ thing as fast as we can. That way—”

  The whistle blew and the men in the first group went up and over, not as an integrated group of soldiers, but as rabble, as ten straggly bugs with the perception of a blur. And all hell broke out. The first thing we heard was the machine gun, blatching like a jackhammer into a microphone, splitting the air and shaking trees. Then we saw the promised tracer bullets, coming as phosphorescent fingers that pointed over the course at ten-yard intervals, purpling by so low that they almost seemed to be at ground level. The tracers sprayed over the course like a well-regulated garden sprinkler, fanning left to right and back again, the gunner obviously knowing his trade, the stanchion obviously holding. With the tracers swinging and flying over the far side of the course, we stuck our heads up like groundhogs to see what we could see.

  The men were so low in the mud, pressing themselves so passionately to China, that there was no way any of them was going to get hit. Also, I had the suspicion that our machine-gunner had somehow elevated his weapon because the tracers very soon seemed to be going over the course in a noticeably ascending line, disappearing over the far end at something like five feet above ground level. It pleased me to know that somebody back there had some sense and that our buddies, unaware that they had nothing to fear unless they jumped up and sang “Apple Blossom Time,” were all the same performing the maneuver admirably. The tracers came swinging around and back toward us, so we ducked.

  Some charges blew, not as loudly as they might have had they not been so buried in the ooze, but loud enough; and, when the tracers speared over the far side of the course, we again popped our heads up to see how our boys were dealing with it all.

  They were dealing with it well, going about their muddy business, crawling through the paste, spreading the wires for one another, aiding and abetting one another and, for one quick moment I could see why America did well in her wars. It was because the average buck private, the lowest man on the totem pole, be it by instinct or conditioning, even when commanded by twerps and nerds, was able to take care of himself in untidy situations. And I found myself cheering them on so loudly that between the machine gun and the cheering I was unable to hear the grating bellow of Holdoffer’s voice.

  The first group made it without incident, somehow knowing not to dive into the safety trench but to roll into it, instinct triumphing over panic, marvelous. The machine gun relented and we watched the gunner feed another ammo belt into its side. The charges ceased, too. I only remember four of them going off, five at the most.

  “Six,” said Johnny and I figured he knew.

  The whistle blew and the next ten men went over the top. Again the machine gun ratcheted. The tracers flew, three charges blew, everybody cheered—and everybody got through. It was a game and the good guys were winning.

  It continued on until there were but two groups left. Tony, Johnny, and I were among the last ten men who would go. We moved into the back trench, taking the places of the men who had gone up and over when the whistle had sounded. The tracers were still zipping over the course, still passing over our heads by that very comfortable five feet. It was so clear that no one was going to be hurt that we stood straight up and peered over the rim of the trench like box-seat customers. It was a mistake.

  Just as Johnny said, “Stay over to the left,” because Tony and I were too far to the right, the machine gun stanchion sank into the mud as though driven by a sledge hammer. I could see the tracers suddenly cutting at too low an angle, and Tony’s head flew away, his helmet clanging like a shooting gallery gong.

  I couldn’t believe it. He was still standing next to me, still holding his muddy rifle, but he had no head and blood was gushing out of the tubes in his neck. It bubbled and fountained down his field jacket, over the caked mud, down his trousers, mixing with the slime below—all that precious blood. I grabbed his neck with both hands, trying to cover it, to stop the blood from leaving, but it kept coming, gushing out from between my fingers, spurting, pulsating, shoved out by an angry heart. I was crazy, shouting at the headless body, “Cut it out, Tony! It’s not funny! Cut it out!”

  Johnny was pulling me away. I looked into his face and it was frozen. I screamed, pulling Tony’s body to mine, hugging it, trying to make it well, rocking it as if it were my baby.

  The firing had stopped. I looked around at the men standing in the trench with me, at their faces. They all looked hollow-eyed dead, spotted about like skulls in a cannibal’s hut. Some turned away and groaned, and slipped. Some vomited.

  I looked at Johnny—Johnny Munez—so chillingly calm. “Ben, let go.” His voice w
as so controlled that it quelled my hysteria. And I relaxed my hold on Tony and Johnny took him from me, gently, allowing Tony to settle into a sitting position—a headless soldier taking a break. At ease, soldier. Rest.

  Then the sounds began to filter in. Crying. Moans. And not all of it was coming from our trench. Some of it was coming from over the top. Johnny was steadying me. “You’re all right, Ben. You are. Ben?”

  “I’m all right.”

  “You know what happened?”

  “The stanchion gave.”

  “Right.” He peered over the top and I did likewise. The men to the left were crawling in every direction, some toward the finish line, some toward the side trench, some back at us. The men to the right, four of them, had been hit. Only one of them was moving. Lying on his back he was raising his hand in the air, his index finger pointing up as if hailing a cab. I couldn’t see who he was.

  Down at the far end, nightmarishly, Holdoffer was raging, yelling at the machine gunner. “Shoot shoot shoot! Who told you to stop! Shoot shoot shoot!”

  But the gunner had no intention of loosing another round. He just sat at his gun, attempting to secure it so that it could not do that again.

  Holdoffer was screaming into the gunner’s face, all that foul breath, “They gotta learn! It’s part of it! Commence firing, Corporal! Commence firing! Corporal!”

  There was movement back at the ambulance. The medics were in motion, readying equipment they never thought they’d have to use. They were fussing with a stretcher, dropping it twice into the mud, face down. The bald captain was sloshing clumsily toward the wounded, slipping, getting up, swinging his arms scythe-like to gain leverage over the mud. He had forgotten his helmet and his head looked like a white ass.

  Only Captain Mackie was motionless, evidently unwilling to dirty his uniform. He just stood there, surveying the scene from the ambulance, as if watching a dull polo match.

  Johnny was looking at me, his eyes searing into mine, his voice terrifyingly controlled. “That’s the enemy, Ben. You hear me, Ben?” There was blood in his eyes. Real blood. His eyes were bleeding. Something had popped in his head, some vein, some something had given way and the whites of his eyes were red. “And now, Ben—now we go after them.” And casually he climbed, up and over, and I went with him, walking toward Holdoffer, toward where that man was screaming at the gunner who simply wasn’t buying, who was, instead calmly taking down his equipment as though the whistle had blown for lunch.

  No one else walked with us, just Johnny and me, and it was unreal. It was also familiar—newsreel footage: “Doughboys advance at Château Thierry.” “GI’s Move up at Remagen Bridge.”

  The bald captain and his two flunkies were out on the course, their white bandages fluttering like surrealistic banners, turning muddy in moments. I didn’t look to see which of the men had been hit. It didn’t matter. NG, RA, US, Reservist—it just didn’t matter. Any face that I would be able to recognize would be the face of a friend. Johnny was right. The enemy was up ahead.

  We kept walking, not bothering to slip under the barbed wire, just stepping over it, our rifles in front of us in the prescribed position as if our bayonets were fixed, as if our mud-clogged rifles could be fired.

  Holdoffer saw us coming, and if he wasn’t crazy before, he was crazy then. With the ammo box he clobbered the corporal, lifting it high and bringing it down upon that man’s head so hard that he simply folded up and lay still. Holdoffer picked up the machine gun, which was already detached from its tripod, and, cradling it in his arms as lightly as if it were balsa wood, he stepped out toward Johnny and me, jumping across the trench in front of him as easily as if he were a panther. He advanced on us at the same pace that we were advancing on him.

  It was not happening. How could it be? How could we be replaying every battle movie I’d ever seen? What the hell were Johnny and I doing walking into the muzzle of a machine gun? It was all so far beyond my ability to think about that I just kept moving forward without thinking. Munez and Webber had rifles without bullets. Holdoffer had a thirty-calibre machine gun. Where the hell was Randolph Scott?

  We were no more than thirty yards apart when Holdoffer’s finger curled around the machine gun’s trigger. I could see it do it. I could see it squeeze. But I couldn’t hear the gun fire because there was no ammo belt hooked in.

  That didn’t bother Holdoffer. It didn’t bother him and it did not dissuade him. He just kept walking toward us, through the mud, past the medics who didn’t look up, past the bald captain who couldn’t do anything for the first man so he sloshed through the gook to the second. Holdoffer was grinning and squeezing the trigger and making like a machine gun—“Eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh!”—spraying the area with bullets that came only from his mind. He never broke stride, never slack-end his pace. Something had snapped in his head. And something had snapped in ours. We were going to kill him. We were going to bash his head in with our rifle butts. We hadn’t discussed it, Johnny and I, but that’s what we both knew we were going to do. We were going to end the existence of Sergeant Luther Holdoffer and we wouldn’t be hurting for witnesses because they were all around us, quiet as death and as watchful as vultures. I wanted someone to stop us. A word would have done it, a sound, a small tick of rationality. A laugh, a burst of profanity, a song—Bing Crosby, Kate Smith, somebody from home. But there was nothing. Nothing from anybody because everybody wanted us to do it. The drama would play to a conclusion, nobody to be seated during the last five minutes of the show.

  The two factions were no more than fifteen yards apart and closing when a figure came running up at Holdoffer from behind. Holdoffer never saw the man who bridged the separation swiftly, in defiance of all the awkward footing, but he felt the blade, plunged so hard into his kidney that he dropped immediately to his knees. It was Sergeant Kuyper, Deyo’s lover, and he had performed the vindictive deed with the longest blade he could find in his trusty Swiss Army knife.

  Holdoffer looked up at Kuyper and recognized him, which was what Kuyper wanted. Then he sagged into the mud, plopping over onto his side, lying there, alive but barely, the knife sticking in his kidney, its red handle and white cross the only clean metal on the course that day.

  Kuyper looked at us blankly, then turned and walked back to the others, as though he had suddenly remembered to go back and turn off his car lights. Johnny and I reached Holdoffer and looked down into that twisting face. We wanted him to see us, too. He did. And his lips moved in some inaudible curse, his teeth so brown that, played against the brown of the mud, it appeared as though he had no teeth at all. Then his head turned sideways so that the slime he was lying in began to trickle into his mouth, gravity and suction doing what man could not, shutting the mouth of the obscene animal, stifling its bestial noise.

  By then the medics had established that the first three men were dead and moved on to the fourth, the one with the index finger in the air. He was alive and so they worked on him, glad to be able to save somebody that day because their pride was at stake. The man would live but, in the time it took to save him, Holdoffer quietly died. Not of his wound but by drowning. And we stood there and watched, Johnny and I, as his head rolled over like a capsizing ship and the last bubbles pushed up through the mud.

  Five men had died on that worst Friday of my life: Private Dickie Stovall, US; Private First Class Junior Lightman, NG; Corporal Alan Kirkpatrick, NG; Private Anthony Wesso, US; and Master Sergeant Luther Holdoffer, NG. Private Paul Morgan, US, was wounded but survived. Corporal William Simmons, RA (the machine gunner) received a concussion but survived. Who was guilty? Where did the responsibility lie?

  Sergeant Frank Kuyper, RA, was charged with homicide. He was arrested and jailed. Captain Albert Mackie, Range Officer, was confined to quarters pending further investigation. But Colonel Herbert Cranston of the 42nd Group, and his next in command, Lieutenant Colonel Terence Beakins, and Lieutenant Wyatt Collings, Company Commander—none of whom had showed up that day—lay low. Very l
ow indeed.

  The dead were shipped every which way: Dickie Stovall to Brooklyn, New York; Junior Lightman, Alan Kirkpatrick, and Luther Holdoffer to small places in Pennsylvania, all near Lancaster; and Anthony Wesso to Norwalk, Connecticut, where they buried what was left of him, throwing his baseball glove into the coffin to see if he could pitch his way out of it.

  None were buried on the post. The situation was too hot and the Army wanted the bodies dispersed, scattered to the winds, divided and conquered and forgotten.

  The Inspector General of Fort Devens, Lieutenant General Kenneth McArdle, hero of Anzio, Salerno and Monte Casino, spent all that remained of Friday and all that there was of Saturday gathering his facts and formulating his conclusions. High on his list of men to be talked to were Private John Munez and PFC Benjamin Webber.

  Johnny went in first and came out ten minutes later with nothing for me but a blank look. I walked in as he walked out.

  General McArdle was a large man, well over six feet tall and 250 pounds wide. He was in his forties, a West Point graduate, a career soldier, and a very troubled human being. I saluted and he gestured for me to sit down. “We’ll drop the formalities as this goes considerably beyond military pomp and circumstance. If you want to smoke, smoke. If you want to take your shoes off, do it. If you want to pass wind, pass it. But, for Christ’s sake, Webber, help me with this situation.”

  “Yes, sir.” I sat down and faced the general. There was much I wanted to tell him and I’d be damned if I was going to edit myself.

  “Munez gave me nothing. I don’t know what he thinks he’s proving, keeping it all inside.”

  “He’s like that, sir.”

  “Corporal Simmons, the machine gunner, I spoke with him only briefly because of his condition. He said that the gun slipped and that he stopped firing as soon as it did. He said that Sergeant Holdoffer directed him to continue his fire but that he refused. He said that Sergeant Holdoffer was deranged. Everything that Simmons said is corroborated by the handful of men I’ve so far managed to speak with. Is that your interpretation, too?”