Shrapnel (12 page)

Rolin and I get to be good buddies. He's a chess nut and has a small portable chess set we play on. We share easily and, except for Rolin's stinky feet and his size, he's a perfect tent mate. Within a few weeks, while we're in company reserve, I manage to pick up another small shrapnel wound in my shoulder. Flying shrapnel in those days is almost as common as wasps. I'm sent back to the field hospital and they take it out and put in a few stitches.

Once again, I milk this little wound as long as I can to stay off the line. And I get my second purple heart. We're beginning to hear rumblings of a point system for discharging when the war is over. This purple heart is worth five points to me toward discharge.

When I finally come back to the outfit the guys have had some pretty rough stuff again. In particular, they've had a bad time in a place they call ‘the crossroads'. It's like people talking all the time about a movie you haven't seen. It's common with soldiers to name battles as a place personal to themselves. These battles I'm sure have different names and numbers in the military records where such things are kept, but to us, they are private property. When someone is hit or killed we refer to the situation as ‘he got hit at the crossroads', or whichever private landmark is nominated for that bad time.

By being in the hospital, I've missed the ‘battle of the crossroads'. Because there are so many casualties, and because Rolin is such a natural soldier, he's been made a squad leader and a staff sergeant while I've been gone. He wants me for his assistant squad leader. Normally the squad leader and the assistant don't share the same tent or hole, but we pull it off.

For Rolin, the war is like some kind of game, a combination of chess and Russian roulette. He likes it! Of course, I'm still scared out of my mind by the whole thing. So we have a sort of symbiotic relationship in which he plays war hero and I'm his audience. We begin taking patrols
together, just the two of us. This is also not the way it should be done. But Rolin always volunteers us for some of the most treacherous patrols and I go along because he's so persuasive. That's how I get into my second most ridiculous event of the war, after that D-3 day. And it involves a small airplane again, my little personal history repeating itself.

We're roaming around on a vague patrol, looking for an L4 airplane that's been shot down, not too different from the one I was dumped out of at the start of my personal war.

Rolin is acting as combination scout and squad leader. We're in an area where there's been tons of artillery thrown against the enemy, directed by little Piper cubs called L4 artillery observers. The Germans keep trying to shoot them down, but it must be harder than one would think because it's rare they get one. But this time they do, and Rolin swears he saw where it went down.

We, as ground troops, are not too happy having these planes fly over top of us because they give the Germans an idea as to where we are on the ground. Also, there's some shrapnel fallout from the ack-ack of anti-aircraft guns.

Our patrol, as designed by Rolin, is to see if we can locate this L4. He's convinced it's been shot
down in something of a no-man's land between the two meandering front lines. Everything is fairly fluid right now.

It's coming on to early spring and Rolin is all hopped up. We're just wandering and, as usual, I'm scared half to death. I'm trying to keep track with my compass so we can get back, shooting azimuths about every ten minutes.

‘You don't need to do that, Will,' Rolin tells me. ‘I know my way back. Remember, I used to take these Wild Bill hunters into the deep woods of New York and Maine. I know just where we are.'

‘Yeah, but do you know where we're going?' I ask. ‘Remember those two Krauts we shot, just wandering around? Something like that could happen to us, too.'

About five minutes later we look out from the edge of a wood, and sure enough, see that L4 we're looking for. We sit for about half an hour trying to see if anybody's around, either the guys who were flying it, or some Kraut keeping watch on it. We don't see a thing.

‘Hell, I'm getting tired of just sitting around, Will. You cover me.'

With that, he's off with his rifle unslung, moving toward the airplane. I have an M1, I lost my carbine with the filed off sear somewhere in the
trip back to the hospital. I keep the rifle lined up on him, scanning as he goes.

He walks right up to the plane, turns back, and waves for me to come on down. I move toward him cautiously, expecting someone to pick me off. God, how do I get in situations like this?

Rolin's all excited. He's sitting in the cockpit by the time I get there. He wants me to give the prop a twist to start the engine. I've never done anything like that, so he jumps out and demonstrates a few times how to do it, with both hands, pull hard clockwise, then jump out of the way. I do that and he's inside trying to get the motor started but nothing happens. He smiles and jumps out.

‘No gas. Could those idiots have just let this thing go down because they didn't fill it with gas?'

He looks in back of the plane and finds two Jerry cans full of high octane gas. He passes them out to me.

‘I'll bet some lucky Kraut bastard managed to put a bullet hole into the gas tank, or maybe one of those puffs of anti-aircraft smoke we see actually had some shrapnel in it. So there's most likely a hole and the gas drained right on out. Boy, those guys in this bird must have been scared shitless. I don't see any blood in the cockpit so either they
got back somehow, or the Krauts took them prisoner.'

While he's saying this, he's looking around under the airplane. He pushes his finger into a hole.

‘Here it is. Those guys were lucky this thing didn't just blow up on them or burst into flames.'

‘Let's get out of here, Rolin. Those Germans could have a guard on this plane. They must have seen it come down, too.'

‘What, leave a perfectly good plane out here in this field because of an iddy biddy hole? Let's see if we can get this baby off the ground again.'

He's already crawled back into the fuselage and is pounding with a wrench against the inside of the gas tank. He tells me to put the butt of my rifle against the hole on the outside. In five minutes he has that hole pounded out just about smooth.

‘We're lucky,' he says. ‘The gas stopped the bullet or piece of shrapnel, or whatever it was, so there's only one hole. Wait a minute.'

He's searching through his field jacket pockets. He pulls out two sticks of gum and starts chewing one. He gives me the other.

‘My ten year old brother sent these. He knows how much I like to chew bubble gum. Boy, he'll appreciate the way we're going to use it.'

When we have the gum chewed up, he starts sticking it down on the remains of the hole. He smears it tight into the cracks of the hole pressing it inside and out.

‘Man, I hope gum isn't soluble in gasoline, but it doesn't really matter. We probably won't be going that far.'

So we fill the tank with the two Jerry cans and Rolin gets into the cockpit again. After five or six tries, I spin the propeller right and the motor turns over. Rolin motions me into the plane.

‘Come on, Will, we're going to have some fun.'

I've never been in an airplane before except for those parachute jumps at Benning, that channel-hopping ride where I was pushed out, and the short ride with my Dad. But I climb in. In some strange way, I'm mesmerised.

Rolin taxies the plane uphill to the edge of the forest. He turns it around, guns the motor and starts going downhill at full speed. I duck down expecting we're going to crash at any minute. Imagine an infantryman being killed in a little airplane like this in the middle of a field. I can hardly think. Rolin is laughing.

He clears the trees on the other side of the field by about two feet and we're in the air. He waggles the wings for fun.

‘Stop it, Rolin. I can't take it. You'll have me upchucking all over this thing.'

We're heading out over the German lines because that's the direction the hill went down.

‘Rolin, you're going the wrong way. Turn around.'

‘Can't, not yet. The wind's all wrong.'

Just then we start getting bursts of anti-aircraft guns, 88s as far as I can tell, bursting all around us. I'm ducking down in the cockpit and Rolin's grinning and pulling that plane higher, then he practically tips it over in a tight turn which almost throws me against the door and we're heading back to where we've come from. The ack-ack lets up a bit. I climb up from where I was, practically on the floor.

‘I don't think we're finished, Will, unless you can figure how to use the radio in this baby. Our own guys will be taking pot shots at us soon.'

I reach for the radio dials and start spinning them but I'm getting nothing. This is like a bad dream repeating itself. I shout into it, hoping there's somebody out there somewhere listening. At least the light on the dial is lit. But then it comes, more puffs all around us and the ping of shrapnel on the plane.

‘Higher Rolin, can't you get this thing any higher?'

We're just skimming over the trees.

‘Sure, but if I get any higher those fools with the seventy five mm guns will have a better shot at us. If I keep low, they don't have enough time to get a bead on us.'

So we skim along, just missing tops of trees or hills and in about five minutes it stops. Rolin still keeps flying just about the height of telephone poles. He's concentrating.

‘Keep on trying the radio, Will. We've got to let them know we're friendly aircraft, not some Kraut in an L4. Look at the gas gauge too, will you? I can't take my eyes away from what's in front of me.'

I look and it's about half full. So we skip along over ridge and forest, watching lines of troops moving forward or camped or scattering in fear as we swoop low over them. Rolin can't help waving his wings at some of them in a line along a road, especially the tanks. I think it's his way of thumbing his nose. I keep my eye on the gas gauge and watch it slowly swing to the left, wondering what Rolin has in mind.

‘Will, I think we can get this old crate so far behind the lines it won't be worth their while to ship us all the way back to our outfits. It'll be fun, anyway.'

It isn't half an hour after this statement that the
motor starts to cough and we begin losing altitude.

‘Keep an eye out for another open field, Will, or at least some kind of ploughed field where we can set this thing down. I saw two small airfields a ways back, but I don't think we can make it to them.'

We keep chugging, missing, coughing and losing altitude. At the last moment, we do come in on a field of what looks like wheat. It's flat and almost long enough. Rol bears down and takes good aim. I brace my hands against the airplane's equivalent to a dashboard and jam my feet against the floor.

Just as we're about to touch the ground, Rol pulls the nose up so we settle back slightly and hit with hardly a serious bump. I'm so excited I applaud.

‘You should see me land our seaplane on lakes not much bigger than puddles. Taking off again is the hard part.'

We're climbing out of the plane when about twenty men in foreign uniforms come running out at us with rifles. I begin to think we might have gone the wrong way, after all.

We lean our rifles against the plane and put our hands up. I can't understand a word of what this mob is shouting at us. But Rolin starts shouting
back. They surround us and stop. They jabber away with Rolin. Rolin is smiling. It seems we've landed in the middle of a supply dump for a French Canadian outfit.

Rolin apparently explains everything and they start speaking to me in English. French-English, but I can understand enough.

They take us back to the command tent. I can't figure out the rank from the insignia, but this is medium high brass. They talk to Rolin, then the top guy turns to me.

‘Is this true you found this craft in an open field, repaired it and flew it here?'

‘That's right, Sir.'

‘And where is your regular outfit right now?'

I point over my shoulder.

‘Up there, Sir. We're infantry. We flew until we were sure we were in friendly territory.'

He laughs and the others are laughing with him.

‘You practically flew back to England. Where'd you learn to fly like that, buddy? What do you think we can do with you now, anyway?'

I speak up before Rolin gets a chance.

‘We could help with your work. Just notify our outfits by radio that we're here so they won't think we've deserted or something or that we're missing in action. I'm tired of being in the infantry
anyway.'

I can feel this isn't going over very well. The men mutter to themselves in French. There are crowds of soldiers at the open flap of the tent. The officer speaks up again.

‘Sergeant Clairmont is asking to be transported back to your regiment as soon as possible. I'm afraid we must do that. You cannot stay here.'

So, thanks to Rolin and his gung ho war attitude that's just what happens. It's astounding how far we've flown. We're almost a week moving in truck convoys over crowded roads. I remember with sentimental memory how easily we'd flown over this same route going the
right
way. Now we start hearing the crumping sound of big artillery, then the smaller sound of anti-tank guns and anti-craft, then the thump of mortars, finally, the crack and whistling of small arms. We're home! We're back in K Company. All that for nothing.

We're surrounded when we get back. It seems they did send out missing in action telegrams to our families. They countermand those as fast as possible, but I'm sure not fast enough to stop a lot of worrying. I find out later that they came one day after the other, the countermand first. This was obviously confusing and not very convincing to our parents.