Tom Hanks - Uncommon Type - Some Stories

“Doing well, are you?”

“Bud, I’ve got so many orders I’m working six-day weeks.”

“Hell on earth.”

“I’m serious, Bud. You come work with me and you’d be set for years.”

“I’m already set for years.”

“I’ll pay you more than you’re worth.”

“I ain’t worth a flat plug nickel, Virgin. You know that.”

Virgil laughed. “Then just come by for a visit. In the summer. Hop in that Buick and we’ll go fishing.”

“You country boys always make a big deal about fishing.”

“I’d just like to see you, Bud. Del, too. Little Davey would be over the moon to meet you.”

“Maybe next year.”

“You say that every Christmas.” Virgil kept going. “Come see us, Bud. We’ll go to Midnight Mass. We’ll say prayers for all the fellows.”

“I’ve already said all the prayers for all the fellows I’m ever going to pray for.”

“Aw, come on. Next year will be ten years.”

“Ten years?” Bud let the static crackle on the long-distance line. “Ten years for who ? Ten years for what ?”

Virgil felt like a fool.

Bob Clay had been killed in Normandy on the same day that Ernie, wounded in his right thigh, had bled out. No one realized his artery had been severed because the pool of blood under Ernie never spread, but was absorbed by the damp ground. Nobody saw it. Attention was not paid as closely as it should have been since there were Germans trying to kill them from somewhere on the other side of a thick hedgerow in the French bocage . Mortar rounds coming at them from the unseen enemy kept the outfit pinned down for nearly an hour. Bud and Virgil were in two squads sent to hack through the roots and trees—impossible but for the use of grenades. They flanked the enemy position and killed all of them, but at a cost. Bud’s squad leader, Corporal Emery, was cut in two, literally, by a German machine gun. Virgil was unsuccessful giving first aid to Sergeant Castle, who took three rounds in the chest that severed his spine. Burke’s head wound was beyond aid, and a fellow named Corcoran lost an arm that was cut clean from his shoulder and he was moved back to an aid station. No one knew if he lived or not.

A week later Johnny Boy disappeared and the other Johnny Boy cracked, and one by one, others in the outfit were lost in ways soldiers are lost. For fifty-eight days, from the seventh of June to early August, the outfit was either fighting or moving toward the fighting. Bud was promoted to corporal and Virgil’s teeth began to go rotten from eating nothing but K rations.

On Day 59, the outfit rested at a camp in France—there were cots with blankets and relatively warm showers, hot food, and all the coffee a GI could stomach. Later, a big tent served as a theater where movies where played. Clyde was transferred to Intelligence because he spoke decent French. Every airplane in the sky was either the RAF or the USAAF, and the word was the Germans were on the run, that the worst of the fighting had happened and they’d all be home by Christmas. New guys came in from the replacement depots and had to be drilled and trained. Bud was tough on all of them, and Virgil didn’t want to learn any of their names.

In the middle of September the outfit was given new uniforms, rearmed, and loaded into transports for an offensive in Holland. Four of the trucks slammed into each other in the dark of night. Five soldiers were killed, three were so injured they were no good for the war anymore. The trucks were repaired and moving by daylight. Three days later the outfit was surprised by a German attack just before dawn. The command post was blown up, leading to a confused, chaotic battle that had Virgil and Bud fighting the enemy hand to hand. By chance, three tanks, British Cromwells, were close enough to roar in and overpower the German advance. Many of the new guys were killed in what was their first time in combat, and plenty happened that made no sense, no sense at all.

Virgil lost count of the days before he found himself back in France, where he and Bud slept and slept and slept. They walked around huge, ancient cathedrals and played football. Movie stars came to put on shows. There was a cathouse not far from the barracks, a place called Madame Sophia’s. While many of the officers had three-day passes in Paris, Bud and Virgil and the other enlisted men drilled and trained more replacements, even in the rain. There was a different movie every night. Then came the coldest December on record, and the Germans roared into Belgium. The outfit was loaded onto trucks, driven hell-bent into the night, and dropped off on a road somewhere between Paris and Berlin. Virgil appreciated the spirit of one driver—a colored fellow—who gave him a pack of Lucky Strikes and a wish for God to look out for him.

The outfit marched on roads and across ice-solid fields, along trails dragged out in the gathered snow, hauling ammo and supplies for themselves as well as for others who were already up ahead in the fighting, which Virgil could see in the distance like Fourth of July fireworks. They fought along with the paratroopers who had taken heavy casualties, moving forward in a show of arms meant to convince the Germans that an entire division was at the ready to take them on. The ruse worked. But lives were lost.

The outfit came under artillery fire in the Belgian woods and some guys were blown apart, vaporized. Then Virgil, Bud, and the outfit were sent marching the other way, through Bastogne proper. They passed a neatly arranged stack of dead soldiers just outside the church, burned-out, useless tanks with their treads thrown off, and a pair of cows eating hay a farmer had stocked. The farmer and the cows seemed oblivious to the Germans, who were trying to retake the port at Antwerp, and to the general hullaballoo. The cold cut them all to the bone. It was inescapable. The cold killed some men in the outfit. Sleep was so rare, some guys went nuts and had to be sent back into Bastogne. The hope was that they could gather themselves so they could return to the cold and the fighting.

A new kid—Something Something, Jr.—had the watch. Virgil was in the hole, under the roof of branches, on top of the pine needles that lined the floor, wrapped in a single GI blanket. Sleep was a joke. He had a few Charms fruit candies left in a roll, so popped two into his mouth. One remained, so he rose up from the frozen-ground floor of the hole and palmed the final square of hard candy into the hand of the new kid.

“Merry fucking Christmas,” Virgil whispered.

“Thanks, Virgin.”

“Junior, call me Virgin again and I’ll crack you one.”

“Isn’t your name Virgin?”

“Not to fucking new guys.”

The hole was at the far left of these woods, two trees in from the edge of the rise, overlooking, in daylight, a Belgian farmer’s barren field and, just beyond it, a collection of houses built along a narrow road leading northeast. At night, there was only the void. Somewhere down there were supposed to be the German soldiers. The rest of the outfit was in holes and shelters of their own, spaced off to the right. This was the main line of defense, theoretically. In reality, the idea of an MLD was as laughable as that of a cozy nap. The line was so thin there was no listening post forward of the trees. There was little heavy armor in the rear. The big guns had only a few shells left. There was no kitchen and thus no hot food for miles.

This hole was the seventh Virgil had chipped out of the frozen ground and covered with tree limbs since they had walked through Bastogne. Virgil didn’t want to dig any more of them. Moving to another position meant shouldering weapons and gear, carrying it who knew how far or for how long, digging another hole, and building another shelter, working up the sweat that, in the subzero winter, caused a man’s uniform to freeze to his back. Frostbite had taken more men off the line than wounds from enemy fire. Some of the freezing guys had been able to get out before the encirclement. Those that hadn’t had already lost toes and fingers, some even their feet and hands.