Joseph Heller - Closing Time

Way back, I never felt that way, that life for me ever could be short, not even in the army in my infantry combat in Europe. I knew there was danger, I saw it right off the bat, but I never thought it could touch me. Coming through in August as a replacement into a French town called Falaise after the big battle there, I saw enough dead Germans rotting in stacks on the ground to last me a lifetime. I saw dozens more before I was through. I saw dead Americans. I saw Eisenhower there reviewing the victory scene, and I thought he looked sick too. In a town called Grosshau past Belgium at the German border near another town, called Hürtgen, I was standing no more than two feet away from Hammer, who was telling me the Germans had pulled out and the place was clear, when he was hit by a sniper in the back of the head. He was still reporting it was safe when he fell forward into my arms and sank down into the snow. It didn't surprise me that it was him, not me. I took for granted I would always be lucky. It turned out I was right. Even in the prison camp I was lucky and not really afraid. The day we finally got there after that miserable train trip and were put on line to be registered in, I saw this cold-looking skinny officer in a clean uniform staring at another Jewish prisoner, named Siegel, in a way I didn't like, and without even thinking I decided to speak up and do something. I was filthy like the rest, lousy, dead tired too, and stank of diarrhea also, but I moved to the officer, making myself look timid, and smiling very politely asked him: "Bist Du auch Jude?"

His mouth opened and he gaped at me like I was mad. I've never seen anyone look more surprised. I have to laugh again when I think of it. I don't think he'd been asked very often in his German army if he also was Jewish.

"Sag das noch einmal," he ordered sharply. He couldn't believe it.

I did what he told me and said it again. Shaking his head, he began to chuckle to himself, and he tossed me a hard biscuit from a small pack he was holding.

"No, I'm afraid not," he answered in English, with a laugh. "Why do you wish to know if I am Jewish?"

Because I was, I told him in German, and showed him that letter J on my dog tags. My name was Rabinowitz, Lewis Rabinowitz, I went on, and then added something I wanted him to think about. "And I can speak German a little."

He snickered again with a look like he couldn't believe me and then drifted away and left us alone.

"Hey, buddy, are you crazy?" said a tall guy behind me with curly, rusty hair, whose name was Vonnegut and who later wrote books. He couldn't believe it either.

They would have found out anyway at the front of the line, I figured.

I was still not afraid.

I was in love with my gun from the first day I had one, and nobody ever had to remind me to keep it clean. After all that junk in the old man's junkshop, it was something like heaven to find myself with a machine like new that worked and could be put to good use. I had great faith in all my guns. When I came into the squad overseas as a new guy and a replacement, I was happy to take the BAR, that Browning automatic rifle, even after I noticed the guys who knew better shying away from it and soon found out why. The man with the firepower was the one who would draw it. It was best never to fire at all unless we had to. I learned that one fast too. The man who gave our position away when there was nothing more important to shoot at than just another German soldier risked being battered around by the rest of us. I had faith in my guns, but I can't remember that I had to fire them much. As a corporal first and then a squad leader, I mostly told the rest of the twelve where to put themselves and what to go for. We were pushing forward into France toward Germany, and it's a fact that we did not often see the human figures we were shooting at until they were dead and we passed them lying stiff on the ground. That part was eerie. We saw empty space, we spotted gun bursts and directed fire there, we shrank from tanks and armored cars, and hugged ground from artillery shells; but in our own platoon we almost never laid eyes on the people we were warring with, and when they weren't charging or bombarding us, it was almost like being back in a Coney Island shooting gallery or a penny arcade.

Except it wasn't always much fun. We were wet, we were cold, we were dirty. The others had a tendency to huddle up together under barrages, and I had to keep bellowing at them to spread out and get away from me and each other, like they were supposed to. I didn't want anybody too close fouling up my own bright destiny.

I came as a replacement into a platoon already filled with replacements, and it didn't take long to figure out what that meant. No one lasted long. The only one I met who had lasted from D day was Buchanan, my sergeant, and he was losing his grip by the time I got there and was cut down later by machine gun fire in a dash from cover to some hedges across the road in this town of Grosshau in the Hürtgen forest that was supposed to be clear. Then there was David Craig, who had landed in Normandy on D day plus nine and took out the Tiger tank, and he was soon in a hospital with a leg wound from artillery outside a place called Luneville.

By the time of the tank, Buchanan did not know what to do when he got the order and he looked at me. I could see the poor guy was shaking. We had no guns with us that would pierce a Tiger. The tank had pinned down the rest of our platoon.

I made the call. "Who's got the bazooka?" I asked, and looked around. "David? Craig? You'll go. Slip through the street through the houses and come up on the back or side."

"Aw, shit, Lew!" By then he'd had enough too.

Aw, shit, I thought, and said, "I'll go with you. I'll handle the shells. Find out where to hit." A rocket from a bazooka would not go through a Tiger's armor plate either.

The instructions were good. Put a shell in the seam of the turret of the cannon. Put another in the tracks if we could, from no more than a hundred feet away. I carried four shells. Once past the houses and outside the village, we followed a gully with a thin stream of green water until we came to a bend, and then it was there, straddling the ditch, no more than thirty feet in front of us. All sixty tons of that big thing right up above us, with a soldier with binoculars in the open hatch, wearing a smile I couldn't stand that made that nerve in the side of rny jaw turn tight and start to tick. We made not a sound. I put a finger to my lips anyway, slipped in a shell and wired it up. Craig had hunted in Indiana. He landed right on target. The binoculars flew when the rocket shell exploded, and the German dropped down out of sight with his head limp. The tank started backing. The second shot hit the tracks and the wheels stopped turning. We watched long enough to see the guys from the rest of the platoon drop grenades down inside as they went charging past, and soon that whole thing was on fire.

Craig and I were put in for a Bronze Star for that one. He was wounded in the thigh from a tree burst outside that place called Luneville before he could get his, and I was a prisoner of war before I got mine. On the ground on the other side of me about five yards away when Craig got hit was a dead kid with his head opened by that same shell, and I wasn't touched. The tree burst got eight of our twelve.

That German soldier in the tank was the one German soldier I ever saw who wasn't dead or a prisoner, except for the ones who captured me, and those looked good as new.

Snow fell in December in the Hürtgen forest, and we knew we would not be home for Christmas. David Craig might be, but not us.

In the middle of the month we were packed up in a hurry in a convoy of troop trucks to be shipped south as reinforcements to a regiment outside a different forest, near a town called Ardennes. When we got there and dismounted, a captain was waiting in the clearing to greet us, and as soon as we were assembled to hear him, he announced: "Men, we're surrounded."