James Benn: Blood alone

I slumped against the rise, drank half the water in my canteen, and wished I had enough to wash my face. I couldn't have moved if my life depended on it, and it damn well might. My legs felt weak and I thought the water I'd swallowed was going to come right back up. I lay at the bottom of the rise, Hutton dead behind me, the enemy in front. I tried to get up, but the ground was spinning and I couldn't. I closed my eyes and felt the sun beating on my eyelids. Through a haze I heard medics moving the wounded out and felt someone start to grab my legs until one of the bazooka guys said to let me be, I was alive, I just didn't look it.

I woke to the sound of tank treads. I grabbed my rifle and looked around to get my bearings. The Tiger was smoldering, and Hutton was gone. One of the bazooka team raised his hand, palm up, as if to calm me.

"Don't worry, buddy. Those are ours. We got six Shermans coming up."

"Finally," his loader said, and tried to spit. It looked like his mouth was too dry and dusty to work anything up. I crawled over and gave him my canteen. He nodded his thanks and took a careful mouthful, then handed it back.

"How long was I out?" I asked.

"Couple hours," the loader answered. "You looked pretty banged up to start with, so we left you alone. Nothing much happened here since Joe popped that Tiger."

"What outfit you with?" Joe asked, eyeing me.

"Headquarters Company," I said, a plausible lie that might even be true.

"Jesus," the loader said. "They got everybody up here. Truck drivers, cooks, clerks, even some navy guys from the shore party."

"You shoot pretty good for a straight leg," Joe said. "Calm, not all shaky like some of these other guys."

"Straight leg?"

"He means everyone but paratroopers," the loader said. "After we qualify we stuff our pant legs into our jump boots."

"Straight leg. I get it," I said. "And straight legs can't shoot straight?"

"Some do," Joe agreed. "Some hunker down and don't do anyone no good. Some fire at anything. You took your time with aimed shots. Makes a difference."

I could hear someone else telling me about aimed fire. The helmet guy. He thought the same way. Like a professional. Who was he?

"Thanks," I said. The blurred image of a face swam through my mind. I could almost hear him. Aimed fire.

"Name's Clancy," the loader said, his hand extended. "This here's Joe."

I shook their hands. Joe lit a cigarette and they both looked at me, waiting.

"Aloysius Hutton," I said, my mind blank, as if that were the only name in the world.

"Pleasure," Clancy said after a moment. Joe drew on his cigarette and gave it to his buddy. We watched and listened. The Shermans clanked into position about fifty yards away on our left. Firing broke out intermittently along the line. Nothing as ferocious as before, only a rattle of rifles and short machine-gun bursts. We waited as the sun dipped down behind us and more GIs and paratroopers came up from the direction of Gela.

At six o'clock the Shermans roared forward and we got the signal to advance. I followed Clancy and Joe down the slope, jumping over dead Germans and wilting yellow flowers. Gunfire was heavy to our left, but in front of us all we could see were flashes of khaki running low, darting from cover and then going to ground again. We made it down to the road, to an abandoned pillbox situated to cover the road in the opposite direction. Inside was a lone German, dead, bandages swathing his abdomen. He looked a lot like the kid who had died next to me in the field hospital.

For about an hour we hunkered down by the pillbox and listened to the Shermans firing over the next hill. The shooting slackened, then died away. We walked out into the open, standing upright, which felt strange. The Germans were gone, except for a couple dozen prisoners being marched up the slope. No explosions, no machine guns. The quiet was so sweet no one dared speak. Clancy, Joe, and I wordlessly climbed back to the top and looked out over the plain below us. A trail of dust marked the retreat of the remaining German vehicles, and plumes of smoke marked those that didn't make it.

The top of the ridgeline was the collection point for the dead. We watched bodies being laid out in neat rows as POWs were put to work scraping graves out of the shale. No different than the holes we'd tried to dig. It looked easier to do standing up. A paratroop chaplain knelt, saying a prayer over each body. There were thirty-four of them. Someone started knocking K-ration cartons apart, forming makeshift crosses and a couple of Stars of David. Everyone was silent, and the noise of shovels biting the hard ground seemed even louder than all the fighting. Chink, chink, metal against rock, flesh against the earth. I turned to walk away and saw Slim Jim himself standing at attention, tears washing the dirt from his cheeks. Thirty-four good names were going to be written on those wooden planks, many of them belonging to boys he knew. All of them he'd put on this ridge to fight and die. I was glad I didn't have to make decisions like that, and then wondered if I ever had.

Joe put his hand on my shoulder and moved me away from the group, walking me down the slope toward the olive grove and the aid station. The light was fading, but I could still see his eyes moving back and forth, looking to see who was around. He stopped and grabbed the front of my shirt, ripping it open.

"I know you aren't Hutton," he said. "I helped bring his body over here and gave the lieutenant his dog tags. I doubt there's two Aloysius Huttons on this fuckin' island. And you don't have no dog tags."

"Listen, Joe-"

"Never mind. I got enough troubles with the Krauts, I don't give a crap about yours. If I hadn't seen you drop so many of them I would've shot you myself when you gave that phony name. But you stood your ground, helped us out, and we owe you. So scram. Grab a jeep before things get organized here. Go back to Gela or wherever you came from. And keep your head down, straight leg."

He nodded toward the road. Clancy stood a few yards away, keeping a lookout. "If you run into trouble with any guys from the 82nd, ask for Joe and Clancy of the 505th. Everyone knows us, we're a team."

He gave a little wave. I waved back and watched them trudge back to the ridge and their buddies, alive and dead. I headed down through the olive grove, past the aid station, to a jumble of vehicles pulled off the road, and wondered exactly where the hell it was I had come from.

"Hold still, darlin', let me get these bandages off. They're filthy," a woman said.

"OK," I said. I had been swiveling my head around, on the watch for officers or anybody else in the business of collecting stray GIs. Back at Biazza Ridge I had collected four wounded from the aid station and brought them down to the field hospital. I had wanted to get out of there as fast as possible, but it didn't seem right to steal a jeep just for myself. It was good cover, I'd figured. No one would stop and question me with four bleeding men crowded in the jeep.

"Not infected, thank goodness," she said, pulling off the once-white bandages, stained with blood, dirt, and sweat. She was dressed in army fatigues about five sizes too big for her, sleeves and pants rolled up to fit. Wisps of brown hair stuck out from beneath her helmet.

"I didn't know there were nurses here already," I said as she put a new dressing on my head. I was still sitting in the jeep. I had been ready to take off as soon as they got the casualties out, but she refused to let me go until she had checked my head wound.

"We landed this morning. They sent us up from the Evac Hospital to help out. We would've gotten here sooner but we ran into German tanks. We hid and watched them go by. That's as close as I ever want to get to those things," she said, shuddering, her shoulders bunching up.