SNAFU: Heroes: An Anthology of Military Horror Page 10

  Plenty of my friends and fellow soldiers died badly in that war and some of them did it only a few feet away from me. All of those movies I’d been weaned on hadn’t begun to prepare me for dealing with the madness. Surely they never said a thing about hostility on the home front when I came back. Just as often I saw the angry faces of strangers calling me hideous names when I stepped back on home soil. The names they called me too often reflected my own opinion of myself at the time.

  Now and then, mostly when I closed my eyes, I got a nice flash back of growing up in Summitville. I got glimpses of Antoinette Sanderson’s incredible green eyes when we shared out first kiss or even a sight of her perfect breast the one time I’d seen it. I got a look at the Halloween Festival in Town Square, and remembered the fun we all had building the scarecrows that stood like sentinels around the festivities. But those were rare, just enough to keep me sane. Mostly I saw the dead and the dying in rivers of blood. It was ‘kill or be killed’ over there, as my sergeant was fond of saying, and I did far too much killing to ever be happy about having survived.

  But I did discover a way to numb the pain for a while, a way to crush the overwhelming guilt of surviving when so many people who were braver or just plain more innocent than me died in screaming increments. I discovered booze. Beer was my preference and Budweiser the drink of choice. I didn’t sip and savor the beer I consumed. I drank it fast, hoping for numbness from the darkness I felt growing inside of me.

  I never quite made it to alcoholic, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.

  My grandfather put a stop to that nonsense before it could go too far. I was sitting out on the porch about two weeks after I got home when he decided it was time to set me straight. Two weeks, and already all of my dreams had been shattered. Toni Sanderson was off in college, and even though I didn’t speak to her, it was made very clear to me that she was seeing someone else and it was serious. I’d almost managed to figure that part out anyway; the letters, which were so frequent when I’d first left for the war, were less common and often seemed almost too friendly. I could read between the lines as well as anyone else. She sent the last few either out of a misplaced sense of guilt or out of a need to keep me from feeling lower than I already did. I couldn’t even see her to put what was left of our relationship to rest with a proper funeral. Not unless I felt like driving to Denver, and I was afraid to do that because one of the faces I’d seen calling names when I got off that damned plane and looked around had looked an awful lot like Toni’s. If I’d found out she had been one of the protesters, it would have been too much for me. I was wise enough to know that much at least.

  No girl waiting for me when I got back, not like in the pictures in Time and Life magazines. No victory parades, not even a hero’s welcome. I just stepped back into my life as best I could. I wasn’t very good at it, either; I started drinking and taking out my frustrations on the people closest to me. I roared at my mother when everything wasn’t just so, and it was seldom just so, you may rest assured. I glowered at my grandfather, feeling that he should have prepared me better for the madness of war, though the thought was never that well cemented in my head at the time. I ignored the rest of Summitville. They were not worth my time: they had not welcomed me back with open arms, but merely nodded and went on their way, embarrassed I suppose, to have a soldier come back intact.

  So beer became my one true friend and I left the rest of the world to fend for itself.

  My grandfather would have none of it. As I watched the sun do its slow descent toward Lake Overtree, he moved arthritically over to the chair next to mine and settled himself in. It took a while; though he walked very well on his fake leg, sitting and standing were still a challenge. I did my best to ignore him. He lit a Camel, blowing the smoke out with a satisfied gust of wind past his dentures, and then reached down next to me to take one of my beers. I wasn’t feeling too greedy just then, so I let him.

  He finished two cigarettes and two more beers while the sun tried to hide behind the lake and mountains. It was properly twilight before he started speaking. “Reckon you’re feeling a mite sorry for yourself.” I looked his way. He hadn’t called me Eddie since I was old enough to grow peach fuzz on my chin.

  “Maybe I am, Grampa. Maybe I’m just trying to get my balance back.” Oh, it was just the right sort of pop psychology my grandfather could understand. I’d picked up the term from him, after all. He most often used it to refer to someone who was in mourning for a close family relative. “Emma needs to get her balance back is all,” he’d say when someone made a comment about how poorly she was faring after her husband died in a bad car wreck. “She’s had a rough time, and it ain’t always an easy thing to start standing up again.”

  He lit another Camel from the butt of the third, and cupped his hand around the cherry. He’d picked up that habit during WWII and had never stopped hiding that small source of light from potential snipers. “Yeah, I can see how you might need to. Everything I’ve heard says it’s a nasty conflict over there. They can call it a ‘police action’ all they want to, but you and I know better, don’t we?”

  I nodded my agreement. Last I’d checked, police arrested people and locked them away for doing wrong; they didn’t drop bombs the size of VW Bugs on their houses and burn the forests away with Napalm. I took one of his cigarettes as he grabbed another of my beers. I was trying to quit, but it wasn’t easy. All of my willpower went to not blowing my top whenever my mother would look at me with a puzzled expression. She hadn’t been there. She couldn’t possibly understand what I’d been through. I had to remind myself of that fact everyday. She got that puzzled look a lot. It was her way of asking what was wrong without actually saying the words.

  “It’s been two weeks, Eddie, and you aren’t getting calmer. You’re just getting quieter. I figure you need to get it off your chest before it crushes you.”

  I knew what he was talking about, but I just didn’t know how to say it. I didn’t know how to look at another person, let alone my grandfather, and explain how much I’d done, or how much I’d seen. I think he knew that, too.

  He opened my beer with the church key he kept in his pocket and he took a long pull. “Maybe I should go first, just to break the ice?”

  I blinked at that. He had never told me a war tale and I fully expected he never would. I guess then was when I realized that I had become a part of a rather exclusive club. ‘The Survivors’ Club. Off in the distance, I could hear my mother starting to prepare dinner. The radio was playing and I suspect she couldn’t hear a word we said to each other. That was maybe for the best.

  He told me about Normandy Beach and the sheer volume of death and artillery that day. I shivered as I listened. The tale was very familiar to me, even if the location was different. I told him about the Ho Chi Minh Trail and he listened in silence. We drank and smoked some more, toasting the names and memories of people we’d known that never made it back from their fights on foreign soil. By the time I’d finished, we were both buzzing and the sun had set.

  My mother finished setting the table for dinner, but she never called. I suspect my grandfather had warned her about what he was going to do. I suspect she understood well enough to know that supper could wait for a while.

  We traded tales of combat and bloodshed, as I imagine many veterans have done over the years. Some were stories that were almost happy little slices of humor in the middle of Hell. Most were not.

  My mind was tired and my tear ducts were sore; I had done a lot of crying, though the tears were silent ones. Finally, when I was almost ready to call it a night, my grandfather told me his last war story. Even now, so long after it happened and after it was told, it still gives me shivers.

  We had moved on to the worst of the things we had seen and the worst we had done, pulling up the dregs of our experiences and showing them to each other with a morbid sort of fascination. I let him know what I and the rest of my squad had done in a little village where we suspected the locals wer
e on the side of the enemy. He didn’t look at me differently when I was done and I can never put into words how grateful I am for that simple fact.

  He reached for his cigarettes again, and discovered the pack was empty. He reached for another beer and learned that they too were all gone. He shrugged and settled himself more comfortably in the wicker chair. “I reckon I should tell you about the Château,” he said. And in his voice I heard a dread that made even Normandy seem like a pleasant story.

  I looked over at him, and saw him close those bright old eyes of his. His face looked as strained as it had when my grandmother died and when he heard about my father. I swallowed the fear I felt when I saw that look, and I nodded in the dark. “I guess maybe you should,” I said, in a voice I barely recognized as my own.

  “I wasn’t any older than you are now; might have been a year or two younger. I know I’d just barely gotten through basic training when I got over to France. It wasn’t like I’d expected at all. There were places where the war had made its mark, to be certain, but there were places where you’d have never known anyone was capable of even picking a fight. I’d seen a bit of both.”

  He looked at me and his mouth smiled tightly, though his eyes stayed just as dark and stormy. “Met me a few fine women when I was over there, too. Some of them were very grateful to see a bunch of Yankees with supplies. But that ain’t what this here story’s about, is it?

  “We weren’t all that far from Paris. We’d been in a few skirmishes and were lucky enough to come out of them with our hides intact. Mostly we managed to survive, but we weren’t winning very much. There were only a handful of us to begin with. Jenkins was the Sergeant, and he was the highest-ranking soldier we had left at the time. Lieutenant Price had gotten himself killed only two days before, and we were supposed to be heading back to the field command. Only problem was, we couldn’t figure out where we were trying to go. When Price died, he wasn’t alone. Billy Sinclair was on radio duty at the time and he and the radio both got themselves blown to pieces. We weren’t exactly enthusiastic about the way our week had been going, if you can catch my meaning.”

  He stopped for a minute and without a word went back into the house. He came back out with more smokes but left the beer behind. “There were only five of us left: Jenkins, myself, Toby Baker, you’d have liked him, Eddie, he was a little butterball from Ohio, but he had a great laugh and he shared it a lot. After him there was Emit Springer from New York and there was one last fella, a man named Jon Crowley. Where he was from, I couldn’t begin to tell you and I hope to never find out. In the middle of this entire snafu, Crowley was the only one of us who wasn’t sweating bullets. He was as calm as a man could be, and normally about three times happier than he had any reason to be. He wasn’t even part of our squad. He was just a straggler we’d sort of adopted along the way.

  “Came out of the west right after everything went sour, and started walking in the same direction as us. Crowley was just as happy as a clam to run across us, and it wasn’t long before we invited him to join in on our march. We were on the same side, and he had better food than the rest of us combined. He’d run across a nice supply of sausages and bread the day before.”

  Grandpa looked me straight in the face then, his eyes lit only by the glow of the ember he cupped in his hand. “Eddie, no man before or since has ever scared the hell out of me the way he did. There was something about him that just wasn’t right. He didn’t scare me all the time, only when he looked directly at me, or talked to me… or smiled that nasty, evil grin of his. And Eddie, he smiled a lot. The worse things looked, the more he seemed to enjoy himself.

  “He wasn’t right, is what I’m saying. There was something about Crowley that made me want to hide under the sheets or call for my mother.” He cleared his throat, maybe afraid I didn’t know what he meant, but I did. “Anyhow,” he continued gruffly. “There were five of us left and most of what we had on us had been almost useless. Maybe we had a hundred rounds left all told, and were as lost as we could be. Knowing that Paris was close by and getting there isn’t the same thing. We had one advantage going for us… we were the good guys in the eyes of most the locals. There were a few who maybe didn’t mind the Nazis so much, or maybe had a deal going to report anything unusual, like a small group of American soldiers, but we hadn’t run across any.

  “It was only a matter of time before we could work everything out and be on our way safely. At least, that’s what we kept telling ourselves and that’s what Jenkins kept telling us too. Lord, but we wanted to believe him.

  “Not long after the sun had set, we got to moving ourselves from the field where we’d spent the day. We had to move at night because the Nazis sure as hell weren’t going to ask us how we were before they started shooting. You know what I mean, I suspect.”

  I nodded my agreement. There were times when maybe the Viet Cong were too tired to look for us and times when we were too tired to look for them, and then there were times when we hunted each other like hounds with a fresh blood trail to follow. Maybe it was the phase of the moon or maybe it was just a vibe you picked up after a while, but sometimes you could tell when something was going to go poorly. You could tell when the enemy was in a killing mood.

  “We’d only gone a couple of miles, tops, when we heard the convoy coming. Crowley heard them first, and in the darkness, with the moon above, I could see his smile when he noticed the sounds of vehicles rumbling past. His teeth flashed like lightning and his voice was amused when he spoke. ‘I’m guessing that those aren’t the good guys, fellas. I think we might want to make ourselves scarce.’

  “He was right. The trail of German trucks that came past our little hiding place by the side of the road were huge. If it was less than thirty vehicles all told, you could have fooled me. Most of us kept our heads down, but Crowley laid in that trench next to the road and watched like a kid at a parade as every one of those loaded machines swept past us. How he managed to not get spotted is something I’ve never figured out.

  “When the last one was gone and the dust from their passage had settled, Crowley slid down with his back to the road and smiled from ear to ear. ‘That’s a lot of security going up the road. I wonder what they’re hiding.’ I reckoned we could do without finding out until we got reinforcements, and I know everyone else agreed with me, but Crowley lost his smile when I made that comment. I think I liked him better with the smile right then. ‘We’re lost, Finch. Don’t you figure maybe we should find out what those Jerrys are up to before it can come back to haunt us?’

  “I asked him what he meant and he shook his head, a look on his face that said he felt like maybe I was a bug, and one he wouldn’t mind squashing under his foot. ‘They weren’t just trucks, old boy.’ He looked at me as he spoke and I had to look away. I figured if I’d kept staring I was likely to wet my pants. ‘All of those trucks had SS soldiers on them. They were hiding something, maybe something big.

  “I hated him right then. I hated him because I knew he was serious, and I knew he was right. The Allies had just started making ground in France and, if the Nazis had something big planned, we had to let someone know as soon as possible. There were a few groans, but no real protests. We all knew what we were getting into when we volunteered for the war, but it seemed a little odd to me that Jenkins didn’t even try to take command. He just let Crowley lead the way.

  “I’ll say this for the French; they know how to make a road accessible. I’ll also say I wish we could have taken the roads that night, but that wasn’t an option. Instead of taking the easiest route, we took the safest route and that meant a lot of climbing and hauling our meager supplies over some damned ugly surfaces. Springer, the boy from New York, had the worst time of it. He kept trying to get where he needed to be and falling, sliding halfway down the hills. He never was very graceful as I recall, but he was damned strong.

  “There was one point when we were climbing up the side of a cliff that seemed to go on for miles. Oh, I reckon it
wasn’t much more than a few hundred feet, nothing we hadn’t at least learned how to do in basic training, but it was dark and the ground was wet with dew and it was maybe the most scared I’ve ever been when I wasn’t looking at someone who was trying to blow my head off my shoulders. The only ones who made it look easy were Toby and Crowley.

  “Well, we were doing our best to get up there, and had made it most of the way, when Springer slipped and started falling. He’d have surely fallen and split his skull wide if Crowley hadn’t showed a little initiative and snatched him. I know it sounds like a lie, and I still have days when I doubt that I saw it, but as Springer started to fall, Crowley grabbed hold of him with one hand and held him in the air. Springer wet himself right then and there, and I can’t say as I blamed him for it. He opened his mouth to scream and Crowley yanked him closer, until they were face to face. I was about ten feet below them, looking up and ready to do some screaming myself because the rock that man was planted on was starting to crumble. I figured if it went, I could pretty much call my life over unless it decided to float away. From where I was standing it was a sure thing that slab of stone would crush me like a bug.

  “Crowley smiled brightly as he looked Springer in the face. His mouth was wide in a grin big enough to just about reach ear to ear. ‘Make one God damned sound, boy, and I’ll let you fall. Do you understand me?’ Those were his exact words. I can still hear them and I can still hear the pleasure he got out of saying them. Springer nodded so hard I though his head was just gonna fall off. Crowley brought him even closer to his face, like he was looking deep into that New Yorker’s eyes and studying him. He had a look like that, Crowley did, and most times I figured he didn’t much like what he saw. ‘I ought to drop you right now. I ought to let you fall and break and bleed. But I won’t. You might make too much noise.’ I think Springer would have cried right then, but he was too afraid. Crowley kept a hand on his jacket the rest of the way up the cliff and I think more often than not he actually carried the Yankee rather than risk him slipping again.