Robert Forrest-Webb - Chieftains

‘What are you doing, for God’s sake?’

‘Taking his pulse,’ said Adams, coolly. The man’s eyes flickered, then opened. Suddenly there was no more movement; muscles relaxed. ‘I don’t feel none. I’d say he was dead.’

‘Mother of God, you killed him!’

‘Me, or you, Pino? Take a good look at him. Look down there.’ Adams rolled aside a large stone that was lying across the man’s abdomen. Intestines were trailed across the rubble. A sharp splinter of white bone from the crushed pelvis stuck up through the bloody mess of cloth and flesh. ‘There ain’t no MASH here… wouldn’t do him no good, anyway. I did him a favour. Now help me lift him.’

There were three bodies draped across the hull of the XM1, one obscenely dangling from the main hatch. Without close examination, their nationalities were unrecognizable. A fire of dry branches and the rubber-tyred wheel of a wrecked gun curled black smoke across her. It would smoulder for a long time, well into darkness. Utah looked no different from the other wrecks on the battlefield.

Browning, Podini and Ginsborough lay beneath the heavy trunk of a fallen chestnut, its branches a cave around them fifty meters to the left of the tank. Adams was hidden in the gorse on the ridge, with the machine gun.

That’s what’ we could be looking like, thought Browning, staring at the XM1 and its bloody corpses. It could be us there. It could be us in any of the hugs out there in the fields, twisted, broken. God almighty! There had been guys back home who thought he was crazy when he had joined the army; maybe he had been… maybe he still was.

Thirty-eight years old, and the only thing he could do well was kill. Some of the men he had been at school with were executives in companies now… owned their businesses, were married, with kids at college, mowed lawns in the evenings, watched television. Family? All he had was a sister somewhere, wedded to an insurance salesman. Last he heard of her was that she had gone to live in Detroit. He’d lost her address, and she hadn’t written again. He couldn’t remember her married name.

Podini. For Christ’s sake, he would never lose a member of his family. There seemed to be dozens of them, scattered across the States from Jersey City to Los Angeles. ‘You hear on the radio, Pino, some guy in Memphis killed eight cops in a raid on a gas station?’

‘Memphis… gee, I got an aunt there.’ Podini always had aunts, and uncles, sisters, brothers, cousins… family.

And what about Adams? Six kids! Pretty wife too. She was sixteen when they got married. Half Sioux, half black; the best of both. Was going to be a dancer, ended up a baby factory. Got a good lively sense of humour… you needed one with six kids in eight years, in military accommodation. They were back home in Fort Dix, waiting for Mike Adams to finish his tour of duty. He’d have been with them in another eight weeks. Eight weeks. Shit… eight weeks was no time.

Hal Ginsborough, twenty-one years old. A loader in every sense of the word. All he was interested in were girls, booze and craps; which meant he never had any money.

Three weeks ago… two… even one, there hadn’t been a war. There hadn’t been a war yesterday. Browning hadn’t wanted one… perhaps no one in the whole world wanted a war, but here it was.

One week ago in Kohlhaus, the Edelweiss Bar. Gins drunk and Podini paying. Mike Adams back in camp writing a letter home; he did that three nights a week, at least. Fritz behind the bar, a German American accent ‘There will be no war.’ Germanic finality. ‘We have fought two wars this century, that is two too many. Here we know what war is like.’ Christ, hadn’t they heard that the Yanks fought, too? And in Korea, and Vietnam. ‘This is Communist bluff. All talk… big wind. Have more drink, enjoy yourselves. No war… this time there will be no war. In two weeks my wife and I go to Spain… close bar for one month. Take vacation and sit in sun and forget politics. Eat paella. Drink wine. Dance a little. There can be no war, Sergeant.’ Fritz was wrong.

‘Ulli, what time d’you finish? Like to come for supper some place?

Her place… afterwards. Ulli Waldeck, age somewhere around twenty-nine. Waitress in the Edelweiss. Divorced. Black curly hair, reasonable looker, a little on the plump side.

‘You like to stay, Will?’

‘Yes, sure.’ Her arms around his neck, her lips soft.

Bed. Energetic, warm, damp and then comforting afterwards.

‘Why you never married, Will?’

‘Who knows? Never got around to it.’

‘Sergeant Acklin’s married.’

Del Acklin. He was out there now, in the wreckage of Idaho. Maybe he was still alive, lying there in the twisted steel and smoke, trapped, wounded. And he’d told him this morning maybe it wouldn’t happen. No, Del Acklin was dead… Browning could sense it. Like Jones, Stromberg, Woolett, Hughes, Valori, Erikson, Scarsdale… Browning could name twenty more. Vietnam! Just names, rifles dug into mounds with helmets on the butts. Identity discs wedged between teeth… plastic sacks. All they’d found of Stromberg was a kneecap, and that could have belonged to someone else. They’d put it in a bag and sent it home in a coffin, just like a real body. Whoever carried the coffin to the grave must have thought Stromberg had starved to death; he weighed less than a kilo.

Harvey Kossof had been killed in the tank sheds, rolled along the wall by the hull of an XM1 only five weeks ago. Kossof had never even seen the war! He was just signalling a tank into the service bay and didn’t leave himself enough room. He’d screamed until they gave him a heavy shot of morphine, and then died. Now he was a name, just like all the others. They promised you a stone in Arlington; the only bit of land most of the guys ever managed to own.

Podini was snoring, his thin face buried in the crook of one arm, his helmet cradled protectively like a kid’s teddy bear in the other. Podini had a fiancée; Italian, very respectable. Her father ran a pizza bar in Jersey City, decorated with Chianti and Frascati bottles, so Podini said. He would marry her when he was Stateside again; a hundred guests, all in tuxedos or dark wedding suits. Then he’d quit the army, start work in his father-in-law’s pizza bar, and get fat. If Browning ever dropped in there, Podini would beam a welcome. ‘Hi, well I’m damned, Will, Jeez, great to see you. Heh, Momma, see who’s here… you remember Will! Best table, Will…it’s on the house, vino, anything. How are you? You look great! Remember how it was; you, me, Mike and Gins. Jeez, those were the days! How about that?’

The days? It was one of those days, today. They’d all forget how bad it had been…one day.

‘This is London. Seventeen hundred hours Greenwich Mean Time. BBC World Service. Here is the news, read by Hugh Dermot.’ The newscaster’s voice was grave. ‘A state of war now exists between Great Britain and the Soviet Union.’

‘Switch that fucking tranny off, Corporal.’ The staff sergeant’s temper was barely under control. Not a minute previously he had been requested to organize coffee for the C-in-C and his staff; as it wasn’t his job and he was already busy, he was feeling as though he had been demoted to a mess orderly.

‘It’s the BBC, Staff… first news we’ve managed to get.’ The corporal was speaking over the newscaster and the men standing nearby leant closer to catch Dermot’s voice.

‘…Soviet troops, backed by mechanized infantry from the Warsaw Pact countries and with heavy air support, simultaneously invaded the territorial sovereignty of West Germany, Turkey and Austria at dawn today.’

The staff sergeant wanted to hear it himself. ‘Okay, two minutes then.’ There was a gangly private standing beside a filing cabinet, he made the mistake of catching the staff sergeant’s eyes. ‘You, Roberts, go and get a can of coffee from the cooks. And about two dozen cups… get ’em up to the boss, fast… get a move on, lad.’