Shrapnel (10 page)

He slides off his cot, groaning, stands. I swing my rifle and smack him in the face. His face turns red with blood, he's screaming. I'm out of control. I'm yelling about what a yellow assed coward he is, and tell him how the whole squad is dead out there in the snow because of him. I'm so worked up, I can hardly talk. I can't breathe. Three motor pool guys roll out of their cots. One has some kind of heavy duty flashlight they use for repairs on the jeeps. He hits me with it then shines it in my eyes. They see Ethridge standing there, rocking back and forth, crying and cursing, frothing blood. They jump me and throw me on the ground. I don't even struggle. I don't have the strength left. I can only cry.

Ethridge is such a mess they call in the medics. They converge and I'm pulled back, my rifle's taken.

They don't want to wake the Company Commander yet. They take turns standing guard over me in an empty pup tent. When Anderson comes, he's in shock and begins reading the riot act to me.

‘What the hell happened?'

I just sit there.

‘Where's the rest of the squad?'

I look up at him, at his clean, white face.

‘Dead, they're all dead Lieutenant, thanks to you and Ethridge.'

It turns out I'm wrong. One other guy, one of the new rifleman replacements, did the same thing I did, following me instinctively. I'm the squad leader, so he's just following me.

Somehow he worked his way back up into the woods. He comes in afterward through C Company. The rest of the squad is still out there, all dead, no one moving. They find them all the next day. I don't go out to look. I'm confined to quarters.

The next day I'm called in front of Colonel Douglas Moore, our Regimental Commander. The S2, Lieutenant Anderson, and the PFC who escaped with me, are there. I tell what we'd come on and how fast it all happened. After the Colonel goes through a lot of nonsense about abandoning my men, I tell how I think it was all Sergeant Ethridge's fault. He's the one who insisted on the patrol although both Lieutenant Anderson and I tried to point out the danger involved. Major Wood didn't know enough to know how dangerous and stupid it all was. It just wasn't the kind of patrol an I&R platoon does. Lieutenant Anderson backs me up. Neither of us really badmouths the new S2 major, Major Wood. It'd only make things worse.

Things are quiet. The Colonel looks us over seriously. In my mind, I can still see him that night wrapped in a shawl, his feet in a bucket of hot water.

‘Soldier, this warrants a special or general court martial, you all know that. Sergeant Ethridge can never serve in the army again. He doesn't have enough teeth. I've recommended him for an honorable discharge, a purple heart and a bronze star. He'll receive a full pension as a disabled veteran.'

He pauses.

‘And you, Sergeant Wharton, due to extenuating circumstances, this is only a summary court martial. It will not be marked against you in your service record except as that. However, you are hereby broken in rank to buck private and transferred out of Headquarters Company back to K Company in the Third Battalion. I don't want to hear any more about this disgraceful incident.'

He pauses to see I've got the message.

‘At ease,' he says, then continues: ‘Off the record, do you realise what you've done, Wharton, attacking a superior non-commissioned officer? You almost killed him. I just got back the medical report from the field hospital. His military career is definitely over. Maybe you did him a favour. Frankly, he'd gotten to the point where he wasn't
doing his job, he was scared all the time and taking it out on the men. I would have had to replace him.'

‘As for you, Wharton, I'm going to try keeping this a summary court martial and see if we can get by with it. I don't think Major Wood is going to make anything of this because he doesn't want it known how he set up this patrol under these conditions.'

Now this regular army bird colonel, Colonel Moore, has control over not just the I&R. He has an entire band within Regimental Headquarters. There are a whole raft of people, the cooks, the laundry and the motor pool people, who really don't have much to do with war. They just keep things going. They're headquarters' personnel. The I&R is the only part of a headquarters company which usually has anything to do with actual fighting and even we, most of the time, rarely do. Ours is a soft berth compared to a line company, except when we need to go on these nutty patrols. So, I'm not enthusiastic about going up to a line company.

That day I'm broken back to private. I clear my things from the company kitchen truck and ship out of the Intelligence and Reconnaissance platoon back to my original company, K Company.

There have been considerable recent losses in K
Company so I'm put in as a replacement. It's a dangerous situation to be in. As a new replacement I'll get all the toughest jobs, but I'm happy to get off with my skin, even if it's only temporary. To be honest, I was really hoping they'd go all the way, send me back and put me in prison. Anything to get out of combat. Lucky Ethridge.

However, at the same time, I'm worried about being stuck with a dishonourable discharge and a whole mess of terrible things I've been conditioned to fear. Even though I know war is a dumb thing, I don't want to come out of it with the lifelong stigma of a dishonourable discharge.

I recognise now that the only heroes of wars are the conscientious objectors. But all the junk they'd pumped into my eighteen year old mind was against me. I didn't have enough information and, also, I probably didn't have enough courage.

As soon as I'm packed I get driven, over muddy roads, by the Headquarters Company cook. He'd been a friend of Ethridge, so he sees me as the villain and won't speak to me the whole way. I know the entire motor pool is against me. They'd won a lot of money from Ethridge playing poker and I've almost killed the golden goose.

When I get to K Company, after I've checked in with the Company Commander, I hunt around
to find my old K Company friends, but most of them are gone, killed or wounded. They've been continuously on the attack since the time I left them, and it stays that way.

Because I'd been a sergeant and an old member of the company, the Commander of K Company, Captain Wall, kind of takes me under his wing. He moves me up pretty fast. Not as fast as they moved Sergeant Hunt, the trigamist, but fast enough. I find out Captain Wall is the fifth K Company Commander, the other four were killed. And Captain Wall looks as if he might have already been killed and doesn't know it.

That bad patrol I took out and lost left me on the edge of sanity, if there'd been any left. I can't work at anything consistently. I just spend my time constantly thinking, ‘How can I get out of this, how can I manage to stay alive and not kill any more people?'

In March, I'm saved from going psycho by being
wounded. It's a minor wound, a piece of shrapnel in my wrist and another lodged in my groin, but the fascinating thing is after they've repaired the shrapnel wounds, I spend my time wandering all around the hospital having a hard time standing up.

At night, I can't even make it to the john in the dark, and no one knows what's wrong. I buy a flashlight for nights. I think I might finally be going psycho but they think I'm goofing off. It turns out that in the powerful one hundred and fifty five mm explosion of an American artillery shell right next to me, the one that gave me the shrapnel wounds, I seem to have lost the vestibular and semicircular canals in my ears. I don't know this yet, and the doctors don't either. Also, the repair they did in my groin at the field hospital, taking out some shrapnel and stitching the muscles together, didn't work right. I need to have it redone later.

However, it's slowly coming toward the end of the war. For reasons I still don't understand, when we cross the Rhine, they round up all the walking wounded, including me. I'm considered walking, although wobbly. I walk rather peculiarly because if you don't have any vestibular canals you don't have much in the way of balance. I'm walking around like a drunken sailor, complaining of being
dizzy all the time, not knowing what the matter is, and everybody's telling me the American one five five shells went off to close to me and my brains were shaken up a bit but it will be all right. I'm something like a punch drunk fighter.

Everything now is rough and ready. The doctors are suspecting everyone of trying to get out of combat for medical reasons. They are. However, at the same time, I have something seriously wrong and they won't listen. It's a bit like ‘cry wolf'; when it comes to the real thing, they won't believe me. They send me back to my outfit, to K Company. We cross the Rhine River in little boats with the help, of all things, of the US Navy. American troops have already crossed the river up north of us, over the Remagen railroad bridge, so this crossing is totally unnecessary. It's probably because they've got all this equipment ready to do a water crossing; they're going to do it anyway, practising for the next war maybe, who knows. Anyway, we bounce across, and I'm miserable. I can hardly hold a rifle, one arm is completely bandaged and I have a sling. I don't need to keep my arm in the sling, so I have it slung around my neck, sort of for decoration and maybe to ring up a note of pity. I'm like something out of a French Revolutionary War painting by Delacroix.

We get on the other side and charge up the slippery slope of the Rhine River bank. We have had little trouble crossing, no heavy fire at us or anything, just some random small arms stuff. Probably civilians defending their home turf from the marauding Americans. The Germans know we crossed at Remagen, a bridge someone forgot to blow up, and so they've generally pulled back. They're just a bit smarter than our officers. It's a challenge, climbing and scrambling through grapevines on the steep bank, but we finally get to the town of Koblenz.

Well, there are enough German soldiers left in the town to make it tough. It's the only street fighting, house to house, operation I'm involved in during the entire war. We're going along, block by block, trying to capture and hold high points, flushing out snipers. We'd think we have them all, when some other fanatic would start picking us off. Usually three or four GIs will be down before we can figure out where the sniper is. Then we'll toss a grenade, or lob in some mortars, whatever it takes.

I decide to retire from this war for a little while. The whole affair's getting to be like something straight out of a grade C movie and I don't want to be involved. I duck down in a cellar and hang
out there until I stop hearing rifle fire, grenade bangs and mortar thumps.

I don't think any prisoners are taken and I don't care much. In the wine cellar where I'm hiding, I discover racks and racks of champagne! This isn't champagne country, so it must be stuff the Germans confiscated in France. I'm down there and I don't know how to open a champagne bottle, especially with my hand still bandaged. The wire wrappings are hard to get off.

Finally, I get the wire off, and it pops, so I lose most of the champagne because it isn't cold enough. I've never been a big drinker, but I'm dying of thirst because there isn't any water, so I drink champagne.

When everything has settled down and the guys come back, I tell them what I've found. I should have known better. They come charging down to my cellar. Everybody takes a bottle, figures out how to open it and we're all down there drinking champagne, bubbles flowing out our mouths and over everything.

Then someone has the idea it would be fun to take a champagne bath like one of those naked movie stars. We're all filthy and sweaty anyway. We form long lines like a fireman's bucket brigade and pass the bottles up two floors to the bathtub.
We fill the bathtub with this bubbly wine. Unfortunately, the guys at the tub don't know the first thing about how to get the corks out either, so they're just knocking the necks against the wall and pouring what's left into the tub. It's a real bash, like the celebration of a winning team after a football game. We take turns in the tub. As soon as the champagne gets so we can't see the bottom of the tub we pull the plug, let it drain out, and start the bucket brigade coming up from the cellar again.

Then, of course, we can't find anything to dry ourselves with and we're all sticky. It's something we didn't think of. So, we rip down the drapes in this handsome house. The windows are about two storeys high. We dry ourselves off on the drapes and then dress again. Our pants, even our underwear, are sticking to us. And we're still drinking champagne. People are passing out dead drunk or throwing up all over the place. The last thing I remember is standing in a doorway, slipping to the floor and thinking if the Germans counterattack it's all over. At that point, I couldn't care less.

Of course, when the Quartermaster supply does get water to us in Jerry cans we all pass out again
on water
.

I'm sent back to the hospital, thank goodness.
Someone figures out how dumb this is, having a guy with a sling, drunk and with a bandaged hand and hernia operation walking around. So they put me in a truck, drive me to the river and put me on a boat to cross it. They're ferrying equipment and stuff back and forth, now. They ship me back like a sack of beans, put me on another truck, still no ambulance, and drive me to a hospital.

The hospital is in Metz. It's a long ride and I'm really feeling rotten, upset stomach and in shock, probably also still drunk from all the champagne. I stay in the field hospital there for two weeks, during which time I read in
Stars and Stripes
that the Soviets are advancing on Berlin. I'm thinking this is the way to run a war, as a spectator, in a bed.

I come back to my outfit on the line just in time, by two days, to meet the Russians. This is the great thing everybody's been preparing for and afraid of. Any German prisoners we have who speak English try to convince us that the Russians won't stop, they'll go right through us.

These Soviets we meet are from Mongolia. They wear fur hats with flaps, not helmets. The only
things I can compare them to are teddy bears, or a freshman football team on the way to a game. At the same time they're deadly dangerous.

We share guard posts. The first time I'm on post with one we only smile a lot. There's no way we can communicate. At the end of two hours, one of their trucks comes by to pick up this guy and leave off his replacement.

I'll never forget it; they're picking up these Russian soldiers at different posts. They only slow down, not stop, and these guys try to jump over the tailgate into the back of the truck. But the Russians on the flat bed of the truck push them off. Then the soldiers laugh, pick themselves up out of the dust, run after the truck with ear flaps flapping and are pushed to the ground again. They keep running after the truck until they catch up. Everybody in the truck is laughing and drinking. This happens two or three times while I'm watching and no one seems to get mad, they're all still laughing.

I think they're so glad to have beaten the Germans after the incredible five years of horror they've gone through, they feel nothing can hurt them. Or maybe this is the way they are naturally. I hope I never need to know.

These wild men are issued about a litre of vodka
a day, a canteen full, and they drink it in great gulps and insist we drink it, too. Well, I'd never seen or tasted vodka in my life. Champagne and applejack are like water compared to this stuff. Every day, we're all half looped, and they're
completely
looped, looped and laughing.

In the US Army we have very strict rules about when you can and when you can't fire your rifle. You just can't shoot when you feel like it. These Russians are shooting anything that moves. Also, they're deep into loot and rape.

I don't know why the German women don't hide more than they do. These guys run them down the way you would a deer or a rabbit, shouting and hollering the whole way. Seduction you can't call it. It's rape. Most times, they pull them into a doorway rather than do it out on the street, but not always. The women are begging us to protect them from these beasts. We try, but the Russians point their rifles at us. There's no question that they'll shoot. We're just other targets of opportunity. I begin to think those German prisoners were right.

Also, of course, the same women are taking cigarettes and chocolate from the GIs who are doing their own somewhat more subtle seduction scene, as close to rape as you can get, but not too much rampant violence.

I'm nineteen and I'm really losing confidence in human beings. My morale was pretty low before, but here I am watching all kinds of mayhem going on, things I never even heard of, dreamed of, had nightmares about. With these guys, both Russians and Americans, it isn't just fornication. They're degrading these women, passing them on to each other. I won't go into the details, but it's worse than anyone can imagine.

And no one is controlling this. There are no MPs up with us, the officers, by this time, are as afraid of the non-coms and enlisted men as they are of the enemy. The war is almost over. Some of the officers have been okay, only doing their duty, but others have been mean or tough for no reason, just power mad. These hard-nose guys are mostly in hiding now, hiding from their own troops.

It's terrible. One time, an old German man comes up to me on guard, absolutely trembling and he has a camera. The rule is, all Germans are to turn in their cameras. I don't know why, and I didn't even know about this rule.

He's trying to push off the camera on me and makes me take it. I think he's trying to sell it to me. I don't want a camera, I don't have any use for a camera. I can hardly carry what I have.
Besides, I have no film. But he keeps begging me to take his camera. I offer him some cigarettes, some candy, but he won't take anything. He's practically crying. I take the camera just to shut him up and get him away from the other guys. I sit down on a piece of rubble to have a look. He runs away. It's a beautiful, old, folding bellows camera. It's one of the few things I manage to get home. Until my house burned down, I kept it on my desk to remind me of how brutal and cruel this war is, how helpless the non-combatants are.