Robert Adams - A Man Called Milo Morai

All of the patrol had gone to ground. Chamberlin wriggled over to first Pettus, then Milo. After the most cursory of examinations and a brief, futile attempt to wrestle the BAR from under Pettus’ dead weight, the big sergeant got the men off the exposed section of roadway without any more losses. Having fortunately spotted the flash of the shot that had struck Milo, Chamberlin and Corporal Gardner divided the riflemen between them, then Chamberlin set out in a wide swing with his section, going to the left fast, while Gardner’s section moved more slowly, almost directly at the objective, now and then having one of his men gingerly expose himself to keep the attention of the sniper on this nearer unit.

Milo, back at the ambush point, just lay still, hoping that by so doing he could hold the pain at bay until he had lost enough blood to pass into a coma and so die in peace and relative comfort. But he did not, he could not find and sink into that warm, soft, all-enveloping darkness, and the pain went on and on, unabated, movement or no movement. In instinctive response to his body’s demands, he of course continued to breathe, but he did so as shallowly as possible, lest he bring on another bout of coughing and choking on his own blood.

The pain grew worse as he lay there; so bad was it that he gritted his teeth, grinding them and groaning. But then, strangely, the pain began to slowly ebb away, to lessen imperceptibly. Although he felt weak and terribly thirsty, he felt no more drowsiness than he had before he had been shot. He opened his eyes then, to find that he could see, and see very clearly, which last surprised him. What he saw was the two sections of Chamberlin’s squad parting and wriggling, then proceeding at a crouching run in two directions clearly intended to converge upon what must be the sniper’s nest—the jumbled stones and still-standing chimney of a burned-out farmhouse.

Something deep within him told him to take a better look, a closer look at the distant objective against which his last full rifle squad was now advancing. He cautiously raised himself just enough to drag from beneath him his cased binoculars, gritting his teeth against the renewed waves of pain that never materialized. What he saw through the optics was three figures clad in Wehrmacht Feldgrau , busily setting up a light machine gun, an MG-42, by the look of it, and fitted out with one of the Doppeltrommel drum magazines. The thing was on one of the rare tripods, which would serve to make its fire more accurate and devastating than the usual unsteady bipodal mount.

With no base of fire to cover them and their advance, he knew that those men of his would be slaughtered. They would not know of that deadly machine gun— for, after all, they thought themselves to be stalking only a sniper and an assistant or two and could not see from their positions just what a hideous surprise the Krauts were setting up for them—until the high rate of fire of the MG-42 was engaged in ripping the very life from out of them.

He immediately dismissed his Thompson. The submachine gun was a superlative, if very heavy, weapon at normal combat ranges, but in this instance, he knew it just could not reach the needed distance. Forgetting his wounds and his pain in his worry for his men in such a state of deadly danger out there, he allowed his body to slide down the bank, then wormed his way back to where Pettus lay.

All of his strength was required to shift the big man s weight enough to get both the BAR and the six-pocket magazine belt off it without standing up and giving that sniper a new target. Then, laden with his own weapons and equipment, as well as the twenty-odd pounds of automatic rifle and its seven weighty twenty-round magazines, he crawled up the bank to its brushy top and took up a position that allowed him a splendid field of fire.

A pair of mossy boulders situated close together provided both a bracing for the bipod of the BAR and a measure of cover from return fire, almost like the embrasure of a fortification.

He took the time to once more scan his target area with the pair of binoculars and shrewdly estimated the range at about eight hundred yards, .give or take some dozen or so yards. With the bipod resting securely on the gray boulders at either side, he slid backward and calibrated the rear sights for the range he had guessed. Then he set the steel-shod butt firmly into the hollow of his shoulder, nestled his cheek against the stock, took the grip in his hand and crooked his forefinger around the trigger.

Expertly feathering the trigger so as to loose off only three rounds per firing until he knew himself to be dead on target, Milo cruelly shocked the understrength squad of Wehrmacht as they were preparing their deadly surprise for the two small units of attacking Americans.

As the bursts of .30 caliber bullets struck the fire-blackened stones and ricocheted around and about the area of the ruined house, the Gefreite reared up high enough from where he lay to use his missing Zugsfuhrer’s fine binoculars to sweep the area from which the fire seemed to be coming. It did not take the twenty-year-old veteran long to spot the flashes of the BAR, and as the present danger to his squad superseded in his experienced mind the planned ambush, he pointed out the location of the automatic weapon that now had them under its well-aimed fire to the Maschinengetoehrmann and ordered return fire.

When he had caught the glint of sun on glass, Milo had anticipated counterbattery fire and had scooted his body off to one side, behind the larger and longer of the two boulders, pressing himself tightly against it and the hard, pebbly ground, so he only had to wait until the German machine gun ceased firing, brush off stone shards and bits of moss, then get back into firing position. As he dropped the partially emptied magazine into a waiting hand, then slipped and hooked in a fresh one, he smiled coldly. Now he knew he had the range.

As Chamberlin later stated it, “Well, when I beard that damn fuckin’ tearing-linoleum sound, I knew fuckin’ well it was more up there ahead than just some friggin’ Jerry sniper in that place, so I just stayed down myself, and I hoped old Gardner would have the fuckin’ good sense to do the same thing, and of course he did.

“Then, when the BAR cut in on full—for some reason, I hadn’t heard the fucker before then—and I realized it must be shooting at the Jerries from the fuckin’ road, all I could figger then was that old Pettus, he hadn’t been killed after all and was giving us covering fire, keeping the fuckin’ Jerries down so’s we could get up to hand-grenade range of them. So I waved my boys on, slung my MI and got a pineapple out and ready.”

Milo was working on the seventh magazine when he saw the flash, then after a pause heard the cruummpp of the first grenade explosion within the perimeter of the German position. At that point, he ceased firing lest he find himself shooting at his own men. When he had collected the emptied magazines, he reslung the BAR and Thompson, slid down the bank and was there to greet the two sections as they straggled back to their starting point.

When Sergeant Chamberlin saw Milo standing there, his eyes widened, boggled out, and he almost dropped the cased pair of fine Zeiss binoculars he had stripped from off the now incomplete corpse of the Wehrmacht Gefreite , and he still was just standing and staring, trying to comprehend the incomprehensible, as the others came up behind him.

“Fuck a fuckin’ duck!” Corporal Gardner exclaimed, letting the bolstered broomstick Mauser that had been the machine gunner’s sidearm dangle in the dust beside his worn field shoes. “Sarge … I means, lootinunt, we thought you’s daid, fer shure. I know damn well that fuckin’ bullet hit you, Gawd dammit! I seen the dust fly up outen your fuckin’ shirt, I did. So why the fuck ain’t you a’layin’ dead, like old Pettus there, huh?”