Scott Turow - Ordinary Heroes

But I don't want a bunch of soldiers with rifles trying to stop tanks. Fight like hell, as long as you can, but protect your men. Those are your orders."

I saluted.

I passed through our strongpoints, giving the password. Walking up, I encountered another member of Masi's platoon, Massimo Fortunato, a huge handsome lump, on guard duty. An immigrant, Massimo claimed to have lived in Boston "long time," but he spoke barely a word of English. Even Masi, who said he knew Italian, generally communicated with Massimo by hand signals like everybody else. Fortunato had come in as a replacement, but one with combat experience, which meant that he was not subject to the usual ridicule. He had fought through North Africa and Italy, until a sympathetic commander transferred him to Europe, following an incident in which Fortunato believed he was firing at a boy he'd grown up with.

I asked Fortunato if all was quiet.

"Quite," he answered. "Good quite."

I went back to the pump house to find Meadows. O'Brien was helping Collison with a letter home, writing down what Stocker told him, sometimes framing the words for him. Bill and I agreed that he'd send a scout team across the road to assess our new position. After that, we'd give the men orders to pack up. Bill went out to make the assignment, as Biddy's platoon was filtering in.

"Think we'll ever have a worse Christmas, Captain?" Biddy's second-in-command, a PFC named Forrester, asked me.

"Hope not."

"Nah. Next Christmas, we'll be dead or the war'll be over. Right?"

"It'll be over. You'll be home. That'll be your best Christmas, then."

He nodded. "That'd be nice. I'm not sure I ever had a best Christmas." I didn't say anything, but I'm sure my face reflected my curiosity. "I was adopted, Captain. Old man got it at Verdun. My mother, she ran out of gas somehow. Some friends of my aunt's took me in. They had six other kids in that house. I don't know what made them do it. Good sods, I guess. Irish, you know. Only Christmas, somehow, that was always strange. They were Catholic, went to midnight Mass. My family was Scotch-German, Presbyterians. Not such a big deal, but Christmas would get me thinking. These here ain't my real brothers. Ma and Pa ain't my real ma and pa. Adopted like that, Captain, at that age, it didn't seem there was anything real in my life. Not like for other people." He looked at me again. I couldn't think of anything to do but clap him on the arm, yet the gesture drew a smile.

When I returned to our forward position, I wrote letters to my parents and to Grace, as I had in the hours before we'd attacked La Saline Royale, just on the chance the messages might somehow reach them if worse came to worst. Writing to Grace was getting harder. I knew what to say, but I seemed to mean less of it each day. It was not my stupidity with Gita Lodz, either. Instead, there was something about my feelings for Grace that seemed to suit me less and less. After standing there with Howler, thinking about whether Grace could do me wrong, I now experienced a pinch of regret that stepping out was beyond her, since it might even have been for the best.

While I was writing, I gradually became aware of music. The German troops were in the woods singing Christmas carols, the voices traveling down to us on the wind. Many of the tunes were familiar, despite the foreign tongue, whose words I could make out here and there because of my limited Yiddish. "Stine Nacht," they sang, "Heilige Nacht." Rudzicke scrambled up to my hole.

"Captain, I was going to sing, too," he said. "A lot of us wanted to. Seeing as how we're moving out anyway.

I debated, undertaking the unfamiliar arithmetic of pluses and minuses that an experienced combat officer probably had reduced to instinct. Would I mislead the Germans about our position in the morning, or give something away? With an assault in the offing, could I deny the men one meager pleasure of Christmas? And how to cope with the ugly worm of hope that this demonstration of fellowship might make the Krauts less savage at daybreak?

"Sing," I told him. And so as we packed up, G Company sang, even me. Christmas was nothing in my house, a nonevent, and I felt as a result that I was not a participant in the festival of fellowship and good feeling that Christmas was everywhere else. But now I sang. We sang with our enemies. It went on nearly an hour, and then there was silence again, awaiting the attack which all the soldiers on both sides knew was coming.

Long after I first read what my father had written for Barrington Leach, one question preoccupied me: Why had Dad said he desperately hoped his kids would never hear this story? Granted the tale ended with what I viewed as an episode of heartbreaking gullibility, not to mention dead-bang criminality. But there were oceans of valor before that. What did Dad want to protect us from? I would have thought he'd learned too much to believe that anybody could be harbored from the everlasting universe of human hurt at human hands. Instead, Dad's decision to suppress everything could be taken only as the product of his shuttered character, and one more occasion for regret. God knows, it would have meant the world to me at a hundred points as I grew up to know even a little of what he had written.

Like every boy my age, soaked during the 1950s in World War II epics on TV and in the movie houses, I had longed to know that my daddy had done his part-best if he were another Audie Murphy, but at least someone who'd brought his rightful share of glory to our household. Instead my questions about the war were perpetually rebuffed by both parents.

The silence was so complete that I didn't even know whether Dad had seen action. I believed he had, because of the profound stillness that gripped him when battle scenes from WWII appeared on The Way It Was, my father's favorite show. It was TV's first video history, hosted by the sage and solemn Eric Sevareid. I would watch the black-andwhite images leap across my father's unmoving eyes. There were always artillery pieces firing with great flashes, their barrels rifling back and mud splattering as the massive armaments recoiled into the ground, while aircraft circled in the distance overhead. The grimy soldiers, caught in the camera's light, managed fleeting smiles. It became an article of faith to me that Dad had been one of them, a claim I often repeated when my male friends matched tales of their fathers' wartime exploits.

Yet all I knew for sure was that both my parents regarded war as a calamity which they often prayed would never be visited on Sarah and me. No one was more determined than my father and mother that I not go to Vietnam when my number came up in 1970. They were ready to hire lawyers, even leave the country, rather than allow me to be drafted. The sight of Richard Nixon on TV inspired Dad to a rare sputtering fury. He seemed to feel a basic deal America had made with him was being broken. Simply put, he had gone to war so that his children would not have to, not so they could take their turn.

But that period might have been less unsettling for me if I'd known a little more about my father's wartime experiences. At the U., among the antiwar types, there were occasional debates about the ethics of avoiding the draft. Logic said that some kid, working class or poor, was going to take my place. Four decades later, I still accept my rationale for wiggling out with a medical exemption due to a deviated septum, a breach between my nasal passages, which, in theory, might have led to breathing problems on the battlefront. My first responsibility was for my own actions. Understanding how misguided Vietnam was, I faced a clear moral imperative against killing-or even dying-there.

But for those of us who didn't go, there was always a lurking question. Granted, we were privileged, moralistic, and often ridiculously rude. But were we also cowards? Certainly we had planted our flag in new ground. Before 'Nam, the idea had been handed down since the Revolution, like some Chippendale heirloom, that braving death in defense of the nation was the ultimate measure of a true-blue American guy. Knowing a few details of how my father had passed this fierce test of patriotism and personal strength might have given me some comfort that I could do it, too, if need be, and made me more certain I was standing up, rather than hiding.