Scott Turow - Ordinary Heroes

"First jump, then?" He had to repeat himself several times because the throbbing buzz of the engines filled the entire belly of the plane.

I nodded and asked for last-minute pointers. He smiled. "Keep a tight arsehole."

Almost on cue then, Biddy vomited in front of himself and sat there shaking his head, manifestly ashamed. "It's the heat," I yelled. The interior of the Hampden was like a blast furnace, and fouled with the sickening fumes of the plane's exhaust. I felt woozy myself. The bombardier acted as if he'd seen it all before.

"You'll feel better now," he told Biddy.

When the phone beside the hatch flashed, the bombardier grabbed it, then motioned to fix our chinstraps.

"All right, then," he yelled, "who's first?"

We hadn't discussed this, but Biddy raised a hand weakly, saying he had to get out. He hooked on, then crawled to the edge of the joe hole. The doors fell open slowly, emitting a frozen gale. Some part of my brain was still working, because I realized the plane had been overheated in anticipation of the cold. The bomb bay was not even fully extended when Gideon lowered his head and suddenly disappeared without a backward glance.

After hooking overhead, I tried to stand, but my legs were like water, and it would have been difficult anyway given all the equipment I was wearing and the shimmying of the plane. Like Biddy, I went on all fours, remembering too late to avoid the puddle he had left behind. The instant he was gone, I was at the edge, leaning into the great rush of icy air. My face went numb at once, as I looked down to the vague form of the land moving below in the darkness. In the white leather jump gloves, my hands were clamped to the edge of the bomb bay. The bombardier placed his face right next to mine.

"Captain, I'm afraid you must be going. Otherwise, sir, I'm going to have to put my boot in your bum."

Ma, what am I doing? I thought. What am I doing? And then I thought, I must do this, I must do this, because it is my duty, and if I do not do my duty, my life will be worth nothing.

But still, my body would not surrender to my will. I shouted to the bombardier, "I'll take that kick in the ass.), It was like diving into a pool, the shock of cold, the sudden distance from sound. I did a complete somersault in the air and came upright with my heart pumping nothing but terror, while one thought leaped at me with startling clarity. As my chute snapped open and I was slammed against the sky, a white pain ignited in my arms. I had forgotten to grip the harness, falling with my hands spread before me like a child taking a spill, and I feared for one second that I had dislocated my shoulders. But even that was not enough to distract me. Because in the instant of free fall, I had realized I hadn't really come to find Martin. The form I'd seen as I tore through space was Gita Lodz.

For half the descent there was no sound or sensation except the racing cold. I saw only the earth, black on black, a swimming form without perspective. And then it was as if the night, like the shell of a hatching egg, was suddenly pecked by light. Volleys of antiaircraft fire came from at least three sides and the rockets tore by like massive lethal bugs. Then, without warning, a squeal of red flares brought day to the sky. I caught sight of Biddy's chute, mushroomed below me, and took heart for just a second, knowing I was not alone here, but that was replaced at once by another spasm of terror when I realized that the Germans were firing at us. The AA was still blasting, but smaller rounds also ripped by like shooting stars. In the instantaneous glow, I actually saw one make a hole in the canopy of Biddy's chute, whose descent accelerated. It would be a good thing for him, though, assuming he survived, to get out of the barrage.

Paying my nickel on a Saturday afternoon, I'd heard the shots whanging past Tom Mix in the movie-theater speakers. But the real sound of a round that misses is just a sinister little sizzle and a wake of roiled air, a bee farting as it passes, followed instantaneously by the sharp report of the rifle the bullet came from. The German infantry, thank God, hadn't practiced shooting falling objects. A dozen shots missed by only a few feet. But as the ground came near, my ear was bored by an intense pain.

My next memory is of lying in the snow. Under my nose, Biddy was waving an ammonia ampoule he'd extracted from the first-aid kit on the front of his helmet. I flinched from the driving odor.

"C'mon, Captain. Those 88s will be on us any minute." I continued to lie there while I put things together. Somewhere along, I realized he'd already cut me free of my chute. "You passed out, Cap. Maybe a concussion." He wrestled me to my feet. I reached to grab my pack, which he'd also collected, then stopped dead, astonished by what I felt against the back of a thigh. I retrieved the sensation at once from the remote memories of childhood. I had shit in my pants.

Behind Bidwell I ran in a half crouch through a farm field where the snow was up to our knees until we reached a wooded border. All that worry about parachute training and it turned out we were landing on a pillow. After the flares, we knew American forces would be looking for us, assuming we'd come down in an area they controlled. While Biddy struggled in the dark to read the compass strapped to his arm, I shed my parachute harness and pushed farther into the brush, where I dropped both pairs of trousers. It could not have been more than ten degrees but I still preferred to stand there naked, rather than go on with crap trailing down my legs. I cut my briefs off with the jackknife from my belt, cleaned up as best I could, and hurled away my underwear, which ended up snagged on one of the bushes. Biddy was watching by now, but asked for no explanation.

A recon group arrived five minutes later. We raced with them to gather up the medical bundles before the German artillery turned on us, then clambered into the backs of a pair of two-ton trucks from an ordnance unit that had pulled up. As the vehicles rolled out, Biddy, beside me, reached up to touch my helmet. Removing it, I saw a dent in the steel above my right ear, and a fracture running down two inches to the edge. That was from the round that had knocked me out. I shook my head, as if I could take some meaning from the nearness of the miss, but nothing came to me. There was alive and there was dead. I wasn't dead. Why or how close really meant nothing compared with the elemental fact.

We had ridden half a mile before I picked up on the radio traffic blaring from the cab. Someone had not been found.

"The Brits," Biddy said. "The Hampden went down right after you landed." The Kraut AA had caught it in a direct hit, a giant ball of fire and smoke, he said, but they were east of us by then, over the Germans. I thought about the four men we'd flown with, but I could make no more of their demise than I had of my own survival. Instead I turned to Biddy to complain for a second about the cold.

The soldiers who had collected us were elements of the 110th Infantry Regiment of the 28th Infantry Division who had been cut off in their retreat and ended up here, formed up with the mist Airborne, which was the principal force defending Bastogne. They drove us back to their command post set up in the hamlet of Savy. The town consisted of a few low buildings constructed of the native gray stone. In the largest of them, a cattle barn, the acting combat team commander, Lieutenant Colonel Hamza Algar, had established his headquarters.

Algar was working at a small desk set in the center of the dirt floor, when we came in to report. The orderlies had done their best to sweep the place clean, but it was still a barn, with stalls on both sides and open beams above, and the residual reek of its former inhabitants. Four staff officers were standing around Algar, as he went over lists and maps beside a lantern. They were in field jackets and gloves, shoulders hunched against the cold. It was better in here, because there was no wind, but there was still no heat.