He was a short slight man with a dark vandyke. He looked like, well, Lenin. Alone on the road, just alongside the German farm, with a big ham and a slab of bacon in a wooden barrow he trundled, he gesticulated and mixed pidgin German with Russian. “Stalin hat gezacht—” Stalin has said that any Russian Displaced Person could take whatever he wanted from any Germans anywhere. He held eye contact with me and stamped his foot a few times. When he made a fist, my point man, Driscoll said, lifting the butt of his M1, “Should I knock him down one time.”
“And take the groceries?” Finley said.
“For us, or the farmer,” MacEnroy asked.
“Take it easy,” I said, “all of you. Let me deal with him.”
Late May, 1945. Occupied Germany. Freed labor camps all around. Poles, Czechs, some French, Ruskies, Hungarians, springing loose over the countryside. After the swift murders of pre-selected camp superintendents and some guards in their houses outside the camps, the liberated flung themselves near and far to cadge and loot all over the place and return to camp with good plentiful food, plus extras. A few days before, our small airport garrison post was visited by a tiny band, hands full of fresh eggs, to barter for some kerosene we had in a barrel. We traded what amounted to a canteen of kerosene for the eggs. Two DPs almost died from the celebratory homebrew concocted of potato juice and our kerosene. Not our fault exactly, but I felt bad in a couple of ways. How come, as Squad Leader, I okayed and even supervised the little transaction, thinking they could use lamp-light fuel and not have an inkling I was supporting a local still? And the secret astonishment I had that people could be even more interested in alcoholic than nourishing consumption. Well, I was just twenty, with a lot to catch on to, feeling often like an imposter leading eleven other men, two of them old enough to be my father. Still, I hand done all right in combat and with my little command, and whatever doubts I had were my own.
Now here, on the road, I knew what to do. I raised my arm and hand significantly against my patrol, so that Little Lenin could see that I was saving him from something, and I wrested his wares, and he turned and left, dancing a sort of defiant jig off and away.
Going back to our bivouac, MacEnroy caught up with me. “You realize what’s going on here.”
Lately you couldn’t tell the difference between a question or statement.
“What.”
“You’re protecting our enemy from our ally.”
“That old farm lady’s no enemy. And I don’t know if that Red is an ally.”
“He was. Is.”
“Mac, I don’t want to get into it. Especially with you. You’re a Commie. OK, it’s a free country.” I looked around elaborately. “Well, not here. But lay off. . . . Anyway, what kind of thing was that for him to fling at us—‘Stalin has said’ this that or the other. Was I supposed to answer, Our President has declared so and so. Your guys are as bad as the others were.”
“We’ve been through most of this,” MacEnroy said, and we had, in some private bull sessions between battles. “Don’t try to throw me off. You guess what I’m driving at.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Why did we do what we just did,” he asked.
“Orders.”
“Do you hear yourself?” He stopped right there and smartly, mockingly, saluted me. Driscoll and Maltica and Finley stared. They all knew, with everything else, that I was half Jewish. Now here I was adopting the standard Nazi excuse.
And the last thing I wanted was any new confrontation with our C.O.
Already, here at our tiny base, Captain Russell thought I was up to my old tricks, protecting Maltica last Saturday. Five-foot-three Puerto Rican Maltica, still sleep-fuddled before breakfast, went out the front door and just unshouldered his Garand and fired across the road at that oblong object at the base of the closest aerodrome door. As the bomb blew up, fragments flew over and riddled our front door just an inch above Maltica’s head. When Captain Russell paid us his weekend visit, of course he noticed the pockmocked door. An unexploded bomb across the way must have spun off a rock over there and gone off, I speculated; Maltica was just standing outside at the time, lucky to be so short. It wasn’t the first time I had to cover for Maltica’s post-combat zaniness. “Let me see his rifle,” the Captain ordered, and I fetched Maltica’s piece that I had had him ream out, but not perfectly. Captain Russell inspected the bore, just plausibly normally dirty. “Give him extra KP for this,” the Captain said. He checked the cartridge case, filled with all eight cartridges now, after I’d replaced the fired one. Got you, the Captain might have said, but I had got there first. Then he left, once again not having caught me out.
He had almost caught me covering for Pfc. Bassanio in Cologne Plains combat, too. Bassanio had taken to throwing grenades into cellars of any village or town we were fighting or going through, maybe wounding or killing some huddled women and children. Instead of reporting him, I took him aside in one alley and bruised his ribs with my rifle butt. That stopped him. Captain Russell heard some rumor finally and would have had me up on dereliction after interviewing Bassanio, but Bassanio saved himself and me by getting killed on the other side of Remagen.
All right. The other thing between the C.O. and me was the tackling, my actually physically knocking him down from behind, flat and as hard as it was fast. There’d been a sniper who just missed me from some tree to our left, and I figured that our C.O., just up ahead of me, was the next target, and I ran low and clipped him. We never got the sniper, who slipped off without firing again, and Captain Russell had a profusely bloody nose, knee burns and other bruises. He never forgave me, more for loss of dignity than injury, at the same time that he was possibly grateful; thank God, 1st Sgt. Hopkins had heard the sniper’s bullet fired at me. Why it had to be me in particular who did that made the Captain rueful.
It was the same kind of feeling he must have had in the door-breaking episodes during village fighting on the Plains. After shoulder-ramming the front door of a main street house, our platoon Lieutenant was shot by a Jerry just waiting in the hall for him. Following that, I taught my squad to lie supine and kick open the closed door, gun-ready or already firing from below as the door whacked open. None of my men got shot after that. Captain Russell despised it, it was so awkward and low down a way to cope, and “You’ll just get shot in the kazoo,” he said, but he lost two more men the standard way and wound up adopting mine, feeling his contradictory feelings toward me. That’s what it was like for the two of us at best so that, incident after incident, his mood was always ambivalent, usually suspicious and hostile as well as begrudging.
Then there was the double Easter holiday leave in April ‘45.
“You want a second R&R weekend. You’ll take Friday and Saturday for the Jewish one. And you want Easter Sunday also?”
“Yes.”
“Do your dogtags claim you’re Jewish or not.”
“Yes.”
“Then?”
“I also wear a St. Christopher’s from my mother.” I unbuttoned my blouse and showed him, clicking both together.
“You know what,” he said at his shrewdest. “I don’t think you’re either. I think you’re a damn—”
“Sir, don’t charge me or any soldier on this matter in any way. With due respect, sir.”
"I”ll charge you one of these days, Sergeant. I’m pretty damn sure I will. You’re asking for it every time. Now—Hoppy, give him his twin pass—get out of here, you-I-don’t-know-what.”
That was the one more thing he had against me.
But.
The very night I came back from double Easter break, Hopkins told me that the company was out of communication with my squad, who were maintaining an observation and general post on our side of the Sieg River, about 50 yards from shore. Captain Russell came into the tent. Hopkins said that GI patrols were going over the river to count the German force on the other side that we were supposed to hit soon, and the Jerries were sending opposite numbers to see how ready we were. My squad was either to intercept and capture them or phone back for others to do so. But suddenly there was no communication. Had the wire been cut? Or what?
“They’re dead,” the Captain said. “Grenaded, my guess. They’re all just dead.”
It was midnight. I went down, holding to the phone line. No break. At the end, eleven men in a circle in the wide shell hole they’d found and were now soundly asleep in. I could just make out all the slack forms and the phonebox smothered under Finley. Well, they hadn’t had any R&R yet and were zonked out from fatigue. Discovered like this, they would have been executed in the old days. They hadn’t even set a rotating one-man guard. The thing was, deep-down, I could not believe my men, or any combat veteran squad, however dogtired, could all fudge like that; I was, with everything else to think or do, astounded inside me. I roused them all, went back 50 yards and cut the line, then fumblingly respliced it in the dark for the evidence the C.O. would need. Back at Hq, both Captain Russell and Hopkins were suspicious. They figured I had done something like I did, punishable in its turn. But I had gone down that line on my own right away to rescue my men, and that looked good.
“You,” Captain Russell said, “are probably the only one, before this war is over, to get a Bronze Star at your court martial.” (To go with the Purple Heart earned back in the Hurtgen Forest from a German tree-top blast that blew off my helmet and ran a surface wound in a continuous arc all along my skull, just where I started parting my hair afterwards. What was I then, frightened, by the blood in my eyes? Yes, sure, but also affronted, vexed, even insulted, and shocked, of course, literally and otherwise; but mostly, deeply confounded, wondrously— surprised. I say this, opportunely, for the record).
Now, in the situation, just a little later, Driscoll, the one who loved me most and who could tell me anything he wanted, said, “The C.O. is just waiting for you. It’s your nature that’ll do you in, eventually, unless you watch out more.”
“My nature?”
“You’re brave,” he acknowledged, and I knew an incident in particular that he meant, “but you’re what they call nave. In general, you’re actually, to tell the truth, unworldly.”
He could say a thing like that, aimed at my vital center, especially at 20, and not be struck back at because he was my friend and because he’d gone through this and that with me, unflagging, and because of what he’d just touched on, the time he had followed me out to a courtyard where another platoon man had been gut-shot by an incoming mortar and we brought him inside a hall where the medic went to work on him and it was myself who held the blue intestines in for the bandaging, Driscoll himself finally fainting. I had to pour canteen water over the squirming mass that I pressed and pressed in and, yes, it was the only truly brave thing I did in the war. And that allowed Driscoll to say this other thing about me.
And now, at the airport, he was saying it again, that MacEnroy, for his own purposes, was goading me about the Russians Dps.
“You’re not clued in. MacEnroy will never forgive you for saving his butt, on the Sieg River, and anyway he’s always been jealous of you. He’s nagging you to go to the C.O. to get your head chopped off finally. You’re a innocent. Don’t fall for it.” Shrewd, skeptic yet good-hearted, Driscoll was trying to run interference. “Another thing: you keep asking the Captain to find out what happened to the Pfc. that you mainly pulled in and held the guts of, did he live. Stop that. Don’t you know, he figures you’re prompting him for a citation and not for information, like I know is true. Just don’t have anything to do with the Captain now, especially after Maltica and the bomb. Cool it.”
Still, next day we had our worst confrontational patrol day, fending off Little Lenin and a band of eight other Russians at another farm, loaded as they were with hams, slabs and sidings. They wouldn’t budge or surrender anything even when we unslung our rifles. I told Finley to unsheath his bayonet and fix it and act ready to use it and then they surrendered their loot. They apparently didn’t mind being shot or else didn’t believe we’d do it, but being stabbed or cut maybe a slip accidentally on purpose was scary and serious. Anyhow, I didn’t like how things were heating up.
And then, that very night, a few of us were with some of the liberated young camp women, who regaled us with stories of how they sabotaged German munitions. In the factory lines as yet unmonitored by the foreman, the girls would stuff sawdust and the like in with the nitro to make dud mixtures and then, just before the foreman got to their aisle, the gals in the previous row would start singing in their dialect, “Here comes the lout, tra-la, all dressed as a krout, tra-la, he’s finished here now, the jerk, tra-la, get back to normal work.” I could hardly believe women could go on and on with such joyful, continuous dangerous sabotage. I thought of some .88 duds that hit near me, and I could have wept for gratitude and present guilt, all mixed up together. I would not simply be able to point rifles to fix bayonets at Little Lenins or Pulaskis or Masaryks on these roads anymore.
Just stop patrolling? Let all the Dps take whatever they wanted? That would be direct disobedience of orders. I decided on direct protest instead, no matter MacEnroy’s manipulation or Driscoll’s heads-up warning. I had to see the Captain.
Next morning I hitched a ride back to company headquarters on the KP jeep that made the rounds every two days. Sgt. Hopkins shook his head woefully at me before he even knew why I came. Then he said, “Go back to your posting. You never were here. Go back.” But I went in to Captain Russell.
“What,” he said.
“I protest protecting Germans from other nationals. I request another assignment.”
“Noted.”
“I respectfully want to apply for other duty, sir.”
“Denied.”
“I wish to be relieved of my current mission.”
“I’ll relieve you of rank, that’s what I’ll do.”
“Captain, you know what’s behind this, personally.”
“I know who—MacEnroy, the company Red. What’s the what.”
“That I’m Jewish.”
“Oh? Is that it. The man who stole Easter R&R is fully Jewish now? If there’s an intact synagogue in Berlin, where we’re going next, I’ll give you a Saturday pass.”
“I’m not devout, just Jewish. And Irish, considering your own self, with all due respect. Sir.”
“Stop all the respect talk you keep giving me. What do you mean by that remark.”
“If we were in Ireland, under certain circumstances, imagined by myself, and were aiding our allies, the Brits, taking every bushel of potatoes from the local population, maybe you would wind up yourself, sir, going to the Colonel for re-assignment?”
“Why am I listening to this.”
“Because.”
“Oh. Because of the non-existent sniper?”
“Your First Sergeant heard something.”
“Maybe he did. Maybe he didn’t.”
“The sniper just missed me. You were next—especially with your bars glinting. Sir?”
“Jesus Christ and Holy Moses. I ought—”
He almost sputtered, the only time. But why hadn’t he removed or smudged his insignia in combat? A not so secret crazy vanity, which held him back now.
Just then First Sgt. Hopkins bustled in. “Cap’n, these just came.” He handed Captain Russell two messages.
The C.O. read them. “This one,” he said, “says there are three deceased Dps in the hospital—”
“Not my kerosene,” I said.
“Oh no? Scrupulous you.”
“Pardon,” Hopkins said. “That’s diseased, sir. They’re not dead. It just has bearing on the other message.”
The Captain handed that one straight to me. Five GI trucks would be evacuating Camps A and B, for repatriation, tomorrow.
“You be at Camp A at 8 hours,” the Captain told me. “Supervise, with your squad. No bacon slabs, potato juice or pork chops smuggled on the trucks. Godalmighty, didn’t you understand that we’d have to feed the Germans if the Dps took everything and we’d still have to provide K and C rations to the Dps anyway?”
“Yes, sir. I didn’t want to be doing the job anymore than we would have liked rounding up the IRA members and taking spuds from Irish moms.”
“Stop the comparisons. Remember your geometry? Parallel lines never meet.”
I saluted and started turning.
“And.”
I turned back.
“And, you insubordinate, lucky sonofabitch, stop trusting your Irish luck. And tighten up on your men when we get to Berlin. Watch out for Maltica, hold Driscoll down, keep an eye on MacEnroy and Finley and, well, the rest of them.”
“No problem?” I said.
“Famous last words,” he said. “Now get out of here.”
And I did, back to our final days at the airport and then to garrison duty in the Zehlendorf area of Berlin, blithe as a twenty-year-old NCO could be.
Maltica came down with gonorhhea, right away and continually. Notwithstanding the army’s practice of rounding up Berlin women from cafes and bars that still offered warm beer and general comfort from that cold winter, testing them for venereal disease, and then hauling back those who were certified clean, so that there was a regular guarantee of safe girls, Maltica was going sexually wild. I could certainly understand his exuberant patronage of the safe women, but not his going out of bounds. It shook me up—until a certain incident. A number of us had booked one whole hotel floor, and some time soon I heard a knock on my door, parted from an embrace and opened the door to find dark 5-foot-three Maltica standing with a six-foot-two flaming blonde Brunhilde. “Look,” he said, “what I got!” He just wanted me to know. But that was no reason never to use propholactics. If he didn’t find a big flashy, fleshy German gal on safe premises, he went elsewhere until he did. And ten days later, again and again, I’d see him at the urinal, clutching the water pipes on the walls, moaning as he discharged; then, cured, he’d do it again. Well, he was in his once in a lifetime glory otherwise, and that negated the pain. I understood but was still thrown for a loop.
In other waywardness, Driscoll, Finley and two others bought about a dozen Mickey Mouse watches at the PX, presented one of them to the female Russian traffic cop at Alexanderplatz and traded the rest to the drunken crew of a Russian T-tank for their vehicle. Driscoll got a short lesson on the controls and drove it seven blocks into our zone before it quit. He just left it there. Captain Russell zeroed in on my squad.
“It was Driscoll, wasn’t it.”
I said, “I have no idea.”
“Don’t be a smart ass. We’ll check for fingerprints. He, or whoever it was, bartered for it.”
“Is that a new offense on the books, sir. Illegal bartering.” Fraternization was also against regulations but everybody was with every woman and you would have had to put the whole garrison army in the stockade. Same for this technical offense.
“It’s unequal bartering,” the C.O. said. “The size of the discrepancy! The biggest tank of the war against a few cheap wrist watches. The advantage taking, it’s like theft.”
“Sir, it’s just the reverse.”
“What.”
“Think about it. Whoever gets the tank gets a little joy ride. But the tank crew and maybe somebody else gets prolonged show-off use from the watches. Which the Russians knew from the start, drunk as they were. And we are bound to hand that tank back pretty soon, maybe even before the crew gets charged; if you want to know, they’re the ones who took advantage.”
“Oh, your poor boys!”
I did not say anything.
“Maybe,” he said, “I should lecture your squad about not being taken in next time? How come you always manage to turn things the other way around. You’re a pip, a continuous pip. Get out of here.”
Which I did, again.
But I was back next morning.
“MacEnroy is gone,” Captain Russell said.
“He’s over-slept with some gal,” I said.
“Not for four days now.”
“He’s down with what they call, nasopharangitis; he’s in one of our mini clinics, and their report hasn’t come through channels yet. Something like that.”
“I checked,” Sgt. Hopkins said. “It isn’t so.”
I shrugged my shoulders. I was going to be personally responsible for an AWOL? There must be something else I wasn’t getting.
“Go with your Top Sergeant and comb his quarters and see if you find—anything.”
We went and came back.
“Nothing,” we reported.
“You know what’s happened,” Captain Russell asked in that declarative way.
I hadn’t the slightest idea what he meant.
“He’s defected,” he said.
For a moment I thought Captain Russell said, “He’s defective.” He did use the words moron and idiot a lot, especially for my men—and me, although sonofabitch was his favorite for me. The next moment, I understood.
“He’s gone over,” he said. “He’s defected to the Russians. So, now: some of your men, Driscoll and cohorts, have been supplying time pieces to the Russians and dealing in heavy equipment and, next, more seriously, another has downright defected to them.”
“Excuse me, sir, he wouldn’t be carrying any secrets, though, except maybe that troop strength is down due to V.D. but that our PXs are full up and Red Cross doughnuts taste good.”
“You,” he said, “comedian: one of yours has gone over.”
“We have to wait some more.”
“Is all his gear gone?”
“Yes.”
“He’s a leftie and you never straightened him out—and he’s gone over.” Captain Russell paused. “I know it now. Sgt. Hopkins knows it. Now you know it.”
I just stood there.
“What can you tell me, aside from politics about him, anything special?”
“He was the long-legged one in my squad.”
“What kind of vital information is that.”
“I had him kick-breaking the doors on the Cologne Plains.”
“Oh. Anything else.”
“He—he—”
“What.”
“He had a sharpshooter badge.”
“Oh great! Jim Dandy.” The C.O. looked at Hopkins.
Hopkins squinted his eyes, reviewed the inside of his head, signed and said, “That’s right.”
I”ll write this up,” the Captain said. “That’s it. I’m not waiting another day. You two just confirmed his evident and, I say, permanent disappearance. I’m passing it right on to Regimental.” He glared at me. “Down with nasofahrenheit? Zonked out in whatever is German for a boudoir? Oh no. He’s defected and, smart enough as he is and with that certain proficiency, we’re in trouble."
“Wha-t? Who else is in what trouble, sir.”
“All of us.” The captain looked at me gravely. “I mean the country. There’s going to be some kind of war between us and—”
“Sir...”
“—don’t interrupt—them. And now they’ll have a young bright fanatic recruit who’s going to learn Russian and then be turned into something very dangerous to us.”
“Doing what, sir?”
“I don’t know exactly. How would I know, exactly.” He paused, thinking. A whole fraught minute. “Ike gets to be President. By then MacEnroy comes back to the States, un-fected or re-defected, however you look at it, but trained, and we take him back and, even under surveillance, eventually, somehow, he assassinates the President.”
I glanced at Sgt. Hopkins, who didn’t say anything, but his face looked stiff. My mouth must have dropped open. I wasn’t about to puff out an extravagant or nervous laugh, I controlled that, but I was agape a whole minute.
“Give you something to think about?” the C.O. declared, “long range. Well,” he almost relented, “we all have a share in it. But you especially. If we had court-martialed him for the big sleep at Sieg River and put him away in rear area, this couldn’t have happened.”
Sgt. Hopkins broke in. “Cap’n. That might be too much to lay on him, Sir.”
“I said we’re all in it, didn’t I?”
Hopkins looked skeptical but ventured no further. Then he leaned over to the captain and whispered something.
“Oh yes,” Captain Russell said to him, nodding, and to me he said, “That man you and Driscoll dragged in, the gut wound, we found out he’s alive. Just so you know finally.”
“I’m glad.”
“At the time, from what I heard, I thought he was a goner. But he made it.”
“Good.”
“Maybe, after all, I’ll write up a commendation for you.”
“Oh, no, sir! Please. Never wanted it, but not now. On the point system for military discharge, my time was coming soon for going home. A commendation in the works might ironically slow me up.
Captain Russell studied me, or the situation. One final ponder.
Then he said, “How come you’re At Ease. I never gave permission. That does it! ‘Tenstion, dismissed!”
I saluted and left, actually for the last time. Probably my mouth was shut by then, but there was double or treble astonishment reverberating inside me for a long while.
Now I know that I have lived in a steady state of quiet inner amazement all my life, a state of mind having nothing to do with the fact that I was only 20 then. It was what Driscoll and probably Hopkins and even Captain Russell had seen in me as permanent character: often quick-minded, present-minded, locally focused, but without comprehensive awareness, unable to think around or fully ahead. I’ve been 20 essentially all the time. I have lived over 80 years constantly, intimately surprised. Well, I’ve done all right on the whole. And probably Captain Russell did, too. So?
So: there are the people who see too much against the people who see too little. Temperament rules. That’s all. That’s it.
Isn’t it, period? question mark.
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