Before Their Time: A Memoir Page 3

  Another day passed like this, filled with lighter rain and considerably thicker fog, through which we wandered ectoplasmically and tried to stay warm. On the fourth day, we awoke to a sun finally streaming down from the east, over the hills we were eventually supposed to occupy. A sudden golden warmth descended from a cloudless sky—spring at last. We greeted it by taking off our shirts and basking in the morning air for a few minutes, Doug Kelleher scratching his ribs and making gorilla noises, which were his specialty. It was a couple of moments of unexpected joy, but almost immediately the order came through to strike tents and pack up—on the double, Rocky added. Within an hour, after a sloppy breakfast eaten on the run, we began to move out, full-field packs bouncing on our shoulders. Even for us, who were specialists in speed, this was quick-time.

  Arch’s thin voice piped out full-strength from up front of the company column. Hup-tup, hup-tup, his usual barking sound. Michael Antonovich and Francis Gallagher and a couple of other officers stood at the side of the road, watching us dogstep off. As we marched along, Antonovich thrust out his chin and jabbed his right fist into the palm of his left hand, which was always a sign of excitement in him. I think he was trying to give us the eager eye for the battle that lay ahead, as he had been taught to do by his OCS instructors, hoping, by his look and stance, to generate a kind of fierce energy in his troops at the idea of meeting the enemy. (A lost cause in the first squad, as he should have known.) Gallagher, on the other hand, was nattering out of the side of his mouth to one of his fellow officers from the second platoon, paying little attention to his troops.

  Hup! cried Arch, placing himself between Antonovich and Gallagher. As we passed them, Rocky, leading our stunted column, offered a good-humored mock salute that Gallagher instantly returned in kind. They were clearly in high spirits. Meanwhile our scouts marched ahead and we brought up the tail of the squad. Doug Kelleher was carrying the BAR for the first couple of miles and the rifle, slung from his shoulder, barrel down, seemed almost as tall as he was. Bern and I shared the ammo with him, heavy clips of fat rounds looped around our skinny waists like metal corsets, bandoleers draped dramatically across our thin shoulders and over our chests, with a few grenades hanging from our belts. Armed to the teeth, thanks to the machinations of Master Sergeant Rene Archambault. We looked ludicrous.

  Before we were a mile out, I heard the leader of the second squad, a couple of yards behind us, call out, “Close it up, Fedderman. Close it up, goddammit.” I knew that refrain. I had been hearing it ever since we had trained together at Fort Benning. Fat, clever Ira Fedderman, who never moved fast enough, wherever he was—Benning, Maine, or Tennessee—and was always shat on for it. But I had to watch my sympathies. Fedderman, an expert at many unexpected things, knew how to play on them. Earlier, just after we arrived in Tennessee, he had chosen Bern and me as his spiritual escape from the goons of the second squad, of which he was a more than shaky member. I had to be careful.

  Nevertheless, our foul mood had begun to lift. Cheerfulness spread through the ranks as we moved along. Bern and I no longer hated each other. I forgave him; I’m sure he forgave me. I even heard Bern, who kept treading on my heels, begin to sing under his breath. “This will be … my shi-ning … hour …”

  “For Chrissakes, Bern.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “You’re stepping all over me.”

  “So pick it up.”

  It was 9:30 in the morning, the sun was on the rise, and we were on our way to the fake wars. Good riddance to the heavy litter we had left behind in our muddy camp. We had turned it into a dump.

  WE COVERED about nine miles during daylight—not a little, certainly not a lot. At some point after dark on that first day, we should have stopped to bivouac for the night. There seemed to be no real hurry, and no real destination to reach. Also, the company line had become stretched out. This was not unusual. It almost always resulted from the varying rates of speed at which each platoon and each squad and sometimes each man marched. Therefore the chronic cry “Close it up, Fedderman!” could always be heard—or Keaton, Kelleher, or Kotlowitz, for Fedderman was certainly not the only one at fault here. We were all erratic stumblers at times.

  Toward midnight, then, still marching at an increasingly slack pace, we were attacked on our right flank by invisible units of the enemy division, which were hiding in the dark. We should not have been surprised, but we were. Fake ammo suddenly began to pop in front of us like cap pistols; toy explosives detonated to the right, throwing up clods of wet soil; a dozen red flares, looking gorgeous as they fanned out in the night sky, lighted the Tennessee hills to the north. I could see the shocked look on Doug Kelleher’s face when all the racket began. A rush of strange noises rolled down the hills on our right, a rattling of weapons and ammo, the heavy sound of men running and trying to shout at the same time. I even thought I heard a dog barking wildly in the middle of it all.

  I froze. Everybody in the first squad froze. Johnson, Willis, and Rocky Hubbell were positioned somewhere up front, yards ahead of us, gathered in a tight cluster. At that moment, a lump of hard dirt hit me on the shoulder and pebbles rolled off my pack. “Holy shit!” Bern Keaton called out, and fell to the ground behind me. Up ahead, Doug Kelleher did the same. When the BAR hit the ground, it sounded as though it had broken in two.

  “Return fire, first squad. Close in!” That was Rocky, shouting stilted orders. Close in where? Fire at whom?

  The detonations came closer, grew louder. I could smell the unmistakable odor of real danger. A stone hit my helmet. Way up front, Michael Antonovich was screaming something. Above his voice I could hear Gallagher’s Irish tenor rattling away. Then Arch’s own blustery voice cut through it. What were they shouting? In what language? Standing there in the dark, immobilized and disoriented, we were discovering the true chaos that defines almost every military action.

  Perhaps a minute passed, filled with the noise of weapons firing fake ammo at us. There were another couple of flares to the north. Then there was a silence, a great black vacuum, empty of sound, so sudden that it felt as though it had been agreed upon in advance. (Perhaps it had.)

  “Hit the ground,” an unknown voice called out from our right. “All of you.” The voice sounded very calm, very authoritative—amplified, too, as though its owner were speaking through a bullhorn. “Put your weapons aside,” it continued, enunciating each word carefully. “You are prisoners of war, captives of the 78th infantry division. Pay strict attention to what I say. I will not say it twice. I don’t want anybody to get hurt.”

  I believed in that voice and trusted it. Even more, I secretly wanted it to take complete charge of me, to make me a prisoner of war, a captive of the 78th infantry division. (A loathsome notion, to want to be a POW, as I came to believe only later.) I placed my M-1 on the ground, unpeeled all the BAR ammo and laid it neatly alongside my rifle, glad to be rid of it. Then I did the same with the M-1 ammo and the grenades. (In the middle distance, meanwhile, perhaps twenty yards away, I could make out the dim silhouettes of the enemy, rifles pointing at us; they were barely visible but fully sensed, rustling presences in the night.) I did all this deliberately, slipping off my pack, too, relieved of that at last, moving to a slow beat to quell my inner excitement, for I was terrifically excited at the unexpected action. Everyone was, I’m sure. And then suddenly, without thought or preparation, I took off to the left into the brush, my normally cautious heart charged by a new energy, my body moving powerfully on its own, as though it had a life that was separate from the rest of me.

  “What the hell,” I heard Bern say behind me, his voice heightened by surprise, but it was too late. I was gone.

  I SLEPT the night away about a mile or so to the west, well up in the hills that rose sharply on that side of the valley. During the climb, a sapling’s branch had snapped back against my left eye, causing swelling, which I kept poking at until it hurt.

  I soon settled down and decided to try to make myself comfortabl
e. There weren’t a lot of options. I had been trained to use my helmet liner as a pillow. I turned a pile of leaves and twigs into a primitive mattress. And that was all I had. Then I lay down to try to sleep. The major problem was the chill, which was constant and biting, but there was little I could do about it. I was cold all night, waking fitfully to hug myself and get the blood going; stamping my feet also helped. Exhaustion took care of the rest, quickly putting me back to sleep, although I don’t think I was ever fully under, in the conventional sense. In my sleep, I thought I could still hear the sounds of a battle down below. There were intermittent noises all night. I found myself worrying about what had happened to the Yankee Division.

  When a leg cramp finally woke me in the morning, I could see the sun hovering behind a mass of gray-black clouds that were barely moving across the bleak sky. Our brief romance with warmth and light was over. It was sure to rain again within the hour. Nevertheless, I was pleased with myself. I was alone amid a vast, wooded space that opened out onto grand vistas on the other side of the valley. There were no orders here to be obeyed, no squad to bother with. And no threats from an unknown “enemy.” Still, I began to prepare to return to the third platoon. I stood up, tested my leg, stretched, and rinsed out my mouth with water from my canteen, which was the only piece of equipment left to me. The wind had started up by then, and I hugged myself again for warmth. My sore eye felt tender. I had been out long enough. I had had my little adventure and it felt good.

  “Cold, baby?”

  I knew that voice. “Keaton,” I said, turning around. “You bum.”

  He laughed. He was sitting on the ground behind me, about twenty feet away. “You don’t look too happy to see me,” he said.

  “How’d you find me, anyway?”

  “I tailed you. Like the deerslayer. I could hear you from fifty yards away. Some Indian you’d make.” He laughed again. Then he stood up and, turning his back, began to pee. Walking over to him, I did the same. Together, back-to-back, we made serious morning noises.

  Then the two of us stared into the distance, into the grand hillside vistas, where carpets of Tennessee clover seemed to go on forever. Down below, behind a stand of trees, a few columns of smoke rose in the air on the road we had marched on until midnight.

  We watched the smoke rise. Bern seemed sad. So did I. I felt a tug, a sudden gloomy sense that maybe we were in the wrong place.

  “You think we should go in?” Bern asked.

  I made a face.

  “Yes or no?” he said.

  “I’m hungry,” I said. “And I’m cold. I have a swollen eye. Do I need all this?”

  We moved off just as it began to rain again. I was limping a little from my cramp. The whole sky was now gray-black. Even the delicious Tennessee clover, rippling in sweet waves in the heavy wind, was beginning to look gray. There was not a house or a shed, no habitation of any kind in sight. We were totally alone. The rain persisted, however, very fine in the early morning, misty and still soft, not yet ready to offer the wild drenching that would soon descend on the area of our so-called maneuvers where Bern Keaton and I were wandering so aimlessly and amateurishly. But we kept going, trying to catch a glimpse of the hidden road below, dreaming of food and warmth, while almost straight ahead, although we didn’t know it yet, lay the broad, brooding sweep of the Cumberland River, already in full spring flood.

  BY MID-MORNING we were drifting down toward the road, hating each other again. There was nothing we could do about it. We were like two Pavlovian animals, enslaved by our oppressed reflexes, and, as I’ve suggested, between Bern and me misery usually brought resentment. Besides, the sight of fresh smoke rising in the morning air from the road below reminded us of how hungry we really were. We had not eaten in sixteen hours. I had reached the point of blaming Bern; I’m sure he blamed me.

  We slipped onto the road amid strangers. Company C? we asked. Wrong company, wrong battalion. We were then pointed in the right direction, toward the rear, by a couple of ASTPs who recognized us, and we started on our way back to the platoon. As far as I could tell, there was no sign of the 78th Division today. It was just a long, disorderly line of YD troops from the 104th regiment, most of them half-dressed and unshaven, chewing away on C or K rations, sipping hot coffee, and smoking cigarettes from little cardboard boxes that came with the rations. As we moved along, my wool sweater hugged me like a wet sheet. Bern suffered the same clinging mess. “Jesus,” he kept complaining, pulling at himself. At least the rain had stopped, momentarily.

  In another few moments, I recognized a couple of faces from A Company, then B. When we reached C, a little throb of joy, mixed with a touch of fear, rose in my throat. Really home! Would we be welcomed or punished?

  From the side of the road, Ira Fedderman called out a greeting. He was sitting in his underwear on a blanket, hugging his chubby knees, with another blanket wrapped around him while his clothes dried on the ground alongside him. On his face, which was as round as a dinner plate, was a smart little half-smile. Typical. (Fedderman was from Greenwich Village, via Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, a route into the great world that he liked to describe as “a heady descent onto the primrose paths of lower Manhattan”; that was how Fedderman talked.) As we passed him, he began to sing to us, in a voice that was deliberately off-pitch.

  “Lights are low since you went away …” And so on, right to the end of the absurdly lugubrious lyric: “My buddies … my buddies … my buddies,” Fedderman’s voice rising with each repetition, like a choirboy’s falsetto.

  Fedderman was full of such tricks. They got him into a lot of trouble. Other guys didn’t quite appreciate them. They were insulted by them, or ticked off. Nobody was immune. It was as though Fedderman couldn’t help himself. Occasionally, he would even call Bern and me “Allegro and Penseroso,” interchangeably. Fedderman thought the literary allusion would flatter us. But we weren’t flattered. We thought it was ridiculous and affected, being called Allegro and Penseroso like that, and it was, even though Fedderman was offering it, in part, as a kind of tribute. Anyway, we pretended Fedderman wasn’t there, sitting on the side of the road in his underwear, singing off-key. We looked the other way as we passed him by until he was behind us. We were in no mood for sarcastic ironies.

  WITHIN five minutes, soggy on beer, Rocky forgave us. “Such things happen,” he said vaguely. (He knew better than I about such matters.) But I wanted more from him. I wanted to be acknowledged a winner. Hadn’t I lived to fight another day? Rocky ignored that. “Better take care of that eye,” he said, peering at it microscopically.

  “You guys were derelict,” Rocky went on after a moment, as though we didn’t know that. “You ran. And you ran before our counterattack. You guys know there’s always a counterattack.” I could smell the beer on him, but I thought he sounded reasonable enough. “Now pick up your equipment and no bullshit about it. Over there, the pile behind Willis. And don’t forget, this little incident is just one nail in your coffin.” Then, after a pause, “And you only get four.”

  And what happens after four, I wondered, but Rocky’s words sounded much tougher than his voice, so I kept quiet. As I said, he forgave us; it was his nature.

  There was a mixed welcome from the rest of the squad. Doug Kelleher giggled at us as we gorged our rations, his prep-school ninny giggle, which he never quite learned to master. Johnson was inimitably quiet; not for the first time I wondered if we actually existed for him. Willis was smug and dim. Listening to Kelleher and Willis describe the night’s events, we soon learned that Michael Antonovich had rallied the company in the dark after our escape—I guess the screams I had heard from him were some sort of hysterical early signal—and then driven the enemy off, into the hills in the east. To me it sounded crazy, the idea of C Company carrying the day after all seemed lost, but apparently it was true. In fact, for the moment Antonovich was something of a hero in the company, an unusual role for him.

  A couple of hours passed before we began to pack up again.
This time I took the BAR from Doug, feeling a little apologetic, and he carried my M-1. By then, Bern had cheered up a bit, and I was feeling better, too; all it took was some warm food and a couple of smokes. Just before we moved out, Arch stopped by. He seemed happy to see us back—almost gleeful, in fact. He looked us up and down in a long, slow sweep.

  “What the hell do you two think you are, anyway?” he asked, cocking his head to one side, “a couple of smart-ass queers?” Then he laughed. I’m sorry to say that we laughed with him, even as we turned red. Arch certainly had a way with words. He would have had more to say, too—I could see he wasn’t quite finished with us—if Lieutenant Gallagher hadn’t shown up at that moment. Gallagher was another story. All he said as he ambled up to us, nodding amiably, was “Good run, fellas. I don’t know whether to mark you missing in action or AWOL. Any ideas?” That sounded friendly to me and entirely rhetorical. Still amiable and without waiting for an answer, Gallagher then proceeded to other matters. That was how I knew that our little adventure was not going to be held against us.

  So once again we were on our way—the infantryman’s obsessive habit—C Company’s platoons snaking their path along the mud-filthy road, moving downhill now with a steady kinetic rush toward the great river. Dusk came early and by evening we were huddled around a small fire, opening rations once more, our fatigues steaming in the heat, as we waited our turn to cross the Cumberland. Around the same time, the rains began again.