Robert Adams - A Man Called Milo Morai

As he stood looking down at the body of his old friend, Milo said to no one who could hear him, “What a waste, old buddy. You got through almost all of it without a fucking scratch, only to be shot down by a fanatic little kid who wasn’t even old enough to shave, right at the tail-fucking-end of the fucking war.

“I was wrong, you Were right about knowing you were going to die soon. But, hell, if you hadn’t come up here to give me those fucking stupid envelopes, that little Kraut-ling would never have had a fucking chance to get you in the sights of that fucking rifle, either. But who’s to say, Jethro, who really knows? You could have run over a stray antitank mine on your way to or from wherever you were going after you decided not to come here today, too, or Sergeant Webber could’ve plowed that car into a half-track loaded with explosives and you’d both be just as dead. Goodbye, Jethro, goodbye, buddy. Yes, I’ll do my best for Martine and your kids … but, then, you knew I would, didn’t you?”

Old Colonel John Saxon looked his near-fifty years, every bit of that and far more, but for all his aged appearance, he still was the same tough, profane old soldier that Milo first had met back in ‘42. By May 5, 1945, with Hitler dead and the Russians fully involved in their savage, barbaric rape of the stricken, shattered capital and its surrounding areas, a staff NCO rang up Charlie Company and Milo dutifully reported to the onetime town hall, now the battalion CP.

“Milo,” said Saxon, after they two had each partaken of the powerful schnapps that the American troops called liquid barbed wire, “you ever heard tell of a Colonel Eustace Barstow, a fuckin’ counterintelligence type?”

Milo nodded. “Yes, John, he was a major back then, but he was my section chief at Fort Holabird, before I transferred down to the battalion at Jackson. Why?”

Saxon snorted. “Well, the fucker’s the full bird now. He’s runnin’ some operation down Munich way and he wants you some kinda fuckin’ bad. Was you his angelina or suthin, huh?” He grinned evilly, mock-insultingly.

The Colonel Barstow who warmly welcomed Milo was not very much different from the Major Barstow who had grudgingly approved his requested transfer to a combat-bound unit. He was become a little chubbier, perhaps, but still was very active and fit-looking in his well-tailored uniform, which latter was the old-fashioned one of long blouse, pinks and low-quarter shoes.

“Had God intended me to wear an Ike jacket and combat boots, He’d have had me born in them,” he chuckled merrily. “But sweet Jesus Christ, old man, did you try to win the fucking war single-handedly or something? The only thing you’re lacking from that collection on your chest is a Purple Heart and the Croix de Guerre. Don’t worry about the Purple Heart—you want one, I can see that you get one. They hand them out now for bleeding piles and ingrown toenails, you know. Another thing—you give me a few good months of work, in my chaotic little hashup here, and you’ll have a pair of gold oak leaves to replace those tracks, that’s a promise, old buddy.”

“Exactly what are you doing down here, colonel?” asked Milo warily. “Or is that restricted information?”

Barstow’s eyes twinkled as he laughed. “Of course it is, Milo. It’s restricted as hell, it’s so fucking restricted that every swinging dick—American, British, French, German, Russian, Pole, Czech and, for all I know, Tonkinese, too—knows exactly what me and my boys are up to here … or so they think. But there are wheels within wheels within other wheels. I’m a fucking devious son of a bitch, Milo.

“Milo, we’ve got an unbelievably fucked-up mess in Germany just now. The Krauts brought in hundreds of thousands of so-called voluntary workers—slave laborers, actually, a page they took from the Russians— from all over the European continent. Every nationality and every race native to Europe and Russia is represented, many of them speaking outré languages we can only guess at.

“Then, there are the hordes of political prisoners freed from the various camps and prisons, the Jews and gypsies who were lucky enough to survive the death camps, the POWs of various nationalities from out of the scattered Stalagen— and it seems like five out of every six of those is a Russian whose native language is not Russian, who does not even speak Russian very well and who hates and despises Russians as much as or more than he hates and despises Germans.

“Then we’ve got the Germans—civilian Nazis, all the varieties of SS and Gestapo, Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe, Kriegsmarine, Hitler Jugend, former police of various kinds, a real hodgepodge. And, to really complicate matters, there’s too a sprinkling of the Axis countries— Eyeties, Vichy French, Hungarians, Rumanians, Albanians, Poles, Vlasoffs Cossacks, Danes, Swedes, some few of Quisling’s Norwegians, Spanish Falangists, Finns, Ukrainian nationalists, Serbs, Croatians, Dalmatians, Montenegrans, Latvians, Esthonians, Lithuanians, Dutch, Flemings, Walloons, a few Swiss nationals, Bessarabians, Turks, even one or two Syrians have turned up. Up north, the British chanced onto some Japs and a Hindu from Meerut trying to pass themselves off as Chinese and Polynesian, respectively, after having gotten out of Berlin just ahead of the Red Army.

“My present command consists of about three hundred officers and men and a few civilians and WAACs. Hell, I’ll take anybody I can sink my claws into who can cut the fucking mustard—male or female, commissioned or warranted or enlisted, white or black or yellow or polka-dot, Christian or Jew or Moslem of Buddhist or atheist, military or civilian. My work is vitally important, Milo, that’s why I’m so powerful just now. When I found out that you’d come through the war in one piece, I knew just how valuable a linguist like you would be to me, and I put things in motion to get you for my team. You can do your country and yourself a hell of a lot more fucking good working under mee, here, than you could going up against the Japs in the invasion of their home islands.

“Just how many languages do you speak, anyhow? We were only able to test you out on ten or twelve, as I recall from Holabird.”

Milo shrugged. “I really don’t know, Colonel Barstow, not for sure. It’s always only when I’m confronted with a person whose speech I can understand or a foreign book I can read that I come to know that I own yet another language. Maybe twenty, I’d say, of present knowledge.”

Barstow just grinned and rubbed his palms together in glee, saying, “Good, good, Milo, you’re an answer to prayers. I’m going to put in the paperwork on your majority today. You won’t ever be sorry you came back to work for me, I promise you.”

After so long wearing uniforms and nothing but uniforms, the civilian clothing issued by Colonel Barstow’s operation felt odd and sloppy to Milo. He was assigned an office equipped with an OD GI steel desk, a dark-oak swivel chair, a straight armless chair for interviewees, a four-drawer steel filing cabinet and three-sided length of wood on which was lettered: “MILO MORAY, CAPTAIN INF., USA.”

But he had not been a week on the job when Barstow gave him a handful of similar wooden name blocks with vastly dissimilar names. “I’ll let you know when and if to use these, Milo. Just stow them away somewhere convenient, for now. Sometimes it’s better that they don’t know they’re talking to military officers.”

During the course of the six weeks that followed, Milo had pass before his desk a broad cross section of the flotsam and jetsam of the war now concluded in Europe, and he determined the most of them to be nothing more or less than just what they were purported to be: frightened, confused, often demoralized, malnourished displaced persons, frequently neurotic, sometimes psychotic. But now and then he was able to unmask a ringer, too. No big fish, just lower-ranking SS, mostly, clumsily essaying to fob themselves off as former political prisoners or nationals of other countries, all of these seemingly desirous of instant repatriation.