Scott Turow - Ordinary Heroes

"No, sir."

"Good. What time you stand guard, Collison?" "At oh three hundred, sir."

"Why don't you walk the perimeter now to be sure everything's okay.), He spent a long time looking at me before departing. The other men remained silent. I had been better at this than I'd imagined, but I knew whose manner I'd instinctively assumed. Teedle's. I would have to think about that.

I had drawn guard with the platoon of Sal Masi, a shrewd little guy from Boston who was my third sergeant. He'd been promoted from corporal on the battlefield and still had the doglegs on his uniform. Along with two of Masi's soldiers, I had watch on the rear hill, a position I'd assigned myself because it was at the highest point we occupied, and thus the most exposed to the wind.

My spot was about fifteen yards from the pump house, and the tin chimney that poked through the roof was designed to vent the pump's heat in the summer, but now it funneled the sound from within as if it were being broadcast. On their first night here, the men inside clearly didn't realize that. As a result, I spent much of my two hours on watch listening as the north wind carried along the squad's conversations, including their commentary about me, which began when Collison got back from his snowy trip around the perimeter.

"Jesus fucking Christ, Collison. Why didn't you just ask him to stick out his pecker so you could check?"

"Man oughta say what he is. He ain't got no call to hide it."

"Hell, man, you're white trash and I don't see you wearing a sign.

"Aw, go soak your head, O'Brien. The thing with the damn Jews is you don't never know when you got one.''

"That's bull, Collison," said somebody else. "You can tell by lookin. You just haven't seen any 'cause you're an ignorant Mississippi peckerwood."

"You got no call to talk to me like that, Marshall."

"Whatsa matter, Collison, did he hurt your feelings? I'm gonna cry, I'm not kidding. I'm crying already. I ain't cried like this since I read My Friend Flicker."

The line, from O'Brien, a thin sharp-faced kid from Baltimore, provoked a storm of laughter inside the pump house. Encouraged, O'Brien took off on Collison.

"Know the difference between a zoo in the North and a zoo in the South?"

Collison didn't answer.

"In the South, they don't just write the name of the animal on the cage. There's also a recipe." The uproar rocked out again. "Know what they call a Mississippi farmer with a sheep under each arm? Huh? A pimp."

Apparently O'Brien decided Collison had had enough. The men went back to playing poker, largely silent except for the grousing when somebody won. Without that distraction, and with nothing to see in the farm field that lay ahead of me, I worried. I worried mostly about whether fear would paralyze me in the midst of combat as it had when I jumped, and what would happen then to the men I was supposed to lead. The moment in the plane had drifted with me all day, like the lingering weakness from a fever. It had taken something away from me, from everything I saw and every breath I drew. I was a coward. I didn't expect myself to be unafraid. But I had been dashed to discover that I could not overcome it. The man who had volunteered to jump, the American who believed in the right things, had no control over the other part of me. It was as Gita had been trying to tell me when she lifted her skirt. Everything except instinct was a pretense.

Hoping for other thoughts, I began searching the sky. The clouds to the south did not look quite as thick. If I was right, that would mean air support, supplies, maybe even reinforcements. I hung, yet again, in that uncertain zone, not knowing if I wanted to be replaced before the German attack. At least a demotion to platoon leader would let me pull duty I'd prepared for. If Meadows went down, I'd literally have to call Algar every hour for instructions.

As 5:00 a. M. approached, somebody else who'd gotten up for night guard entered the pump house, clearly another squad member, who received a full account of the evening, including the ungodly amount Bronko Lukovic had won, and Collison's encounter with me.

"Oh, Collison, you sure know your oats. Way to impress the new CO."

"I just like orders better comin from a Christian, is all," said Collison. "We're already fightin this fuckin war to save the Jews.,, "Jesus, button your flap, Collison. You sound like Father Coughlin."

"Says you. Wasn't them Nazis that attacked us at Pearl Harbor. What the hell we care what ole Hitler's Join? I'm tellin you, it was all them Jews around Roosevelt. That's why we're here fightin."

"Collison, we're all fighting for the same damn reason. Because we have to. Because nobody gave us a choice."

"This platoon," answered Collison, "we got to be the worse-off bunch of doggies on the front. We been gettin nothin but screwed. I'm not kiddin. Two-thirds of our men dead and now they send us this Jew officer when we're surrounded."

"Shit, Collison. Don't snap your cap about Dubin. We've lost every officer we've had. And they knew what the heck they were doing. How long you think it's gonna take before this one stops a bullet? He's still looking around the woods for the men's room.

They all laughed. A minute later, I heard a familiar voice. Biddy had gotten up to spell me on night guard.

"Pipe down in here, y'all. Sound come outta that hole up top like cheers at a football game. Hear y'all fifty yards away." There was silence then. I'd wager some were wondering for the first time how far off I was. "And let me tell you something else. The Captain's a good man, y'all gone see that."

I could hear O'Brien ask, "Is he hep? I just can't take these officers who don't know nothing but what they read in the rule book."

"He's hep," Biddy said. He arrived at my position a minute later. He said nothing, but offered a cut-down salute when I left him to go back to sleep.

Bill Meadows shook me awake a little after Too a. M., as the faintest light was leaking into the sky. He wanted to go over orders for the day. To conceal our position, we couldn't risk contact with the men on point or relieve them once the sun was up. Meadows wanted to replace the crews who'd been out there freezing all night and I told him to proceed.

Before he left, we took a moment to inspect the terrain. The open, rolling hills-hayfields or grasslands grazed by beef cattle-were now deep in snow with no animals in sight. Most, I imagined, had been killed or eaten long ago. North of us, beyond the railroad tracks and the drifts mounded here and there on the road, several fields undulated, separated only by stone markers. With my field glasses, I saw that the land had already seen combat. The Germans who had once occupied our holes had been hit hard before retreating. The blackened form of a Panzer was out there, with snow heaped on the tracks and the turret, and I also could make out the axle and fenders of a truck. My guess was that there had been more wreckage, which our engineers had towed off to assemble the crude roadblock that stood a couple hundred yards from us. It was comprised of commandeered tractors and two burned-out tanks, one ours, one German.

To the west, in the distance, lay dense green woods of tall pines, where the German grenadiers were probably hiding. Even in daylight the forest appeared black and impenetrable. I thought of the Brothers Grimm, and their goblins and spooks stealing from the trees to snatch souls and visit curses.

The last thing Meadows pointed out was the stand we occupied, a mixture of the same skinny, thick-branched pines that were across the way and deciduous trees, most of them beeches still wearing some of their coppery leaves. The Germans were delivering daily artillery barrages across a broad sector, wherever they figured Americans might be positioned to protect the roads, often utilizing their 20MM antiaircraft guns, which had proven effective as offensive weapons, or the dual-purpose 88s. Fixed on quad mounts and half-tracks, the guns were tilted forward and fired into the treetops. The result was a little like a bomb exploding in midair, raining shrapnel down on everyone below. Algar had sent us north of E's holes in hopes that the Germans might not have been aiming here, but up high the trees were ragged, as if they had been eaten away by moths. Several of the beeches had most of their boughs blown away, the remaining trunks standing like solitary amputees, blackened by the shell bursts. In other words, we were going to get it. The Germans had been firing in the hour after dawn and just before sunset, periods when they could be certain that our planes, which could navigate only by daylight in this weather, would never be in the air.