War Stories Page 2

  So far, there was no such thing as the Battle of Sainte-Régine. But the next few hours should take care of that.

  “It’s not about the mission,” Jacob went on around a mouthful of sour apple. “It’s about what job you do. I could wake up in some posh HQ, take a hot shower, put on clean, dry socks, point to a dot on the map, and say, ‘I want that.’ Then my part’s over, and some poor platoon or company or battalion has to go out and get it for me.”

  “That’s us,” Beau observed, checking his rifle to make sure it was fully loaded. Not that he hadn’t checked five minutes ago. And five minutes before that.

  “Right?” Jacob added. “It would almost be funny except that some of us are going to buy it today.”

  Jacob wasn’t sure about other units, but in Bravo, almost no one ever talked about dying. It was always “buying it.” You couldn’t let yourself think about things like that, or you’d be too scared to move. Jacob had seen that too—men so terrified they were frozen in place, incapable of putting one foot in front of the other, even to run away. He had no explanation for why he wasn’t one of them. The fear was 100 percent real, the danger even more so. Why one soldier got shot—or blown up, bayoneted, crushed by debris—was the luck of the draw. Of the 172 members of Bravo Company who’d hit Omaha Beach on the morning of June 6, only 51 were part of the unit poised to attack Sainte-Régine. Of those 121 casualties, nearly half had “bought it.”

  Jacob picked another green apple and Beau whacked it out of his hand with the butt of his rifle.

  “Stop eating those things, High School. They’ll turn your guts to water. Bad enough we have to fight for this Podunk town. You don’t want to lead the charge looking for a bathroom!”

  “I’m hungry! You can’t live on canned Spam—”

  That was the end of all conversation. Behind them, the American field artillery opened up, pounding the tiny village a little more than a kilometer up the hillside. Jacob had gotten used to a lot of things in this war; he’d never get used to the noise. No matter how far away the guns happened to be, it always seemed like the explosions were right inside your head. The concussion waves battered you through the air, and there was no place to hide. The scream of the shells overhead sent shivers down your spine. The only thing worse was being in the target zone where the shells detonated. Jacob had experienced that too, huddled in a foxhole, making deals with God. He already owed God about two hundred years of good behavior just to have survived this far.

  It was probably only about ten minutes, but while it was going on, Jacob lost track of time. In the roaring/screaming/pounding of it, he very nearly lost track of his boots on the ground and his body plastered up against the tree. He had endured much worse before—hours of bombing, enough to reduce whole towns to mounds of rubble. Then it was over, and the sudden absence of noise was almost as jarring as the noise itself.

  Still deafened by the racket, he didn’t hear the order to move out. Instead, he was swept along with everyone else. A hand reached back, grabbed him by the field jacket, and hauled him forward. Beau—they always stuck together going into battle, as if each was the other’s lucky charm. Maybe it was true. They had gotten each other this far. Other friends hadn’t been so lucky.

  Soon sweat was stinging his eyes and bathing his body. It wasn’t hot, but fifty pounds of equipment made your uniform an instant steam room. That was another thing about war, besides the noise, pain, death, destruction—it smelled bad too.

  About fifty meters to the left, along the single road that cut through the trees, the first Sherman tank lumbered up the slope. That was what made the invasion of Sainte-Régine more complicated than it should have been. Vast apple orchards surrounded the village, the mature trees planted so close together that no vehicle could get through. For the tanks, trucks, half-tracks, and jeeps of the mechanized army, there was only one way in: this road.

  A sergeant emerged from the tank turret and grinned at the infantry slogging through the orchard. “Enjoying the walk, gentlemen?”

  Soldiers pelted him and the tank with fallen apples. Months spent shoulder to shoulder, fighting for their lives, had turned Bravo Company into a tight-knit family. Compared to the bonds they had forged with one another, the men of the armored unit were strangers.

  “What’s he so happy about?” Beau grumbled.

  “You’d smile too if you had thirty-three tons of tank protecting you,” Jacob commented, sidestepping a low branch.

  His hearing still deadened by the booming of the American guns, Jacob didn’t notice the incoming shell until it was too late. Some of the men flattened themselves to the ground, but Jacob could only watch as the round screamed into the Sherman and detonated. The concussion of the blast knocked him to his knees. By the time he looked up again, the smiling sergeant had been replaced by a pillar of flame spewing from the hatch.

  “Medic!” Jacob rasped, scrambling toward the burning tank. “Med—!”

  That was all he got out before a second, even more fiery explosion enveloped the Sherman as the gas tank blew. Jacob stared in horror. No need for a medic now. The five men of the tank crew had surely bought it.

  A second Sherman came up behind what was left of the first. This commander wasn’t grinning. His face was all business as he shouted instructions to the crewmen below him. Carefully, the second tank tried to nudge the flaming iron husk out of the way so it could pass on the narrow road.

  No one missed the scream of the incoming shell this time. Jacob was flat on his face when it exploded just a few meters short of its target. If the burning remains of the first tank hadn’t slowed down the second, it would have been a direct hit. The second tank roared into action, trying to drive around the block in the road. But the space was too narrow, and the left track bumped into a tree. The tree bent, its roots tearing up through the muddy ground.

  Boom! Another shell struck, blowing the right track clean off. One by one, the five members of the crew scrambled out of the hatch. The last of them hurled himself free just as the second Sherman burst into flame.

  By now, the infantry advance had ground to a halt. Everyone was staring at the spectacle of the two burning tanks.

  “Keep moving!” Lieutenant McCoy exhorted his soldiers.

  With the column of armor hung up on the road, Bravo Company had little interest in advancing. The last thing the soldiers wanted was to take on Sainte-Régine’s defenses with zero tank support and nothing but the rifles in their hands.

  “Let’s go!” McCoy bawled.

  Jacob felt the perspiration inside his uniform turn to ice. It had been information from him that had led to the plan to take out the big German gun that menaced everything on the road into Sainte-Régine. McCoy and Captain Marone, the company commander, had trusted him. What had gone wrong?

  The firefight began in earnest. Bullets whined through the orchard, thwacking into tree trunks and singing past Jacob’s ears. The illuminated tracer rounds glowed like lethal lightning bugs, even in broad daylight. Answering fire came from Bravo Company. Jacob flopped onto his belly, raising a splash of mud into his face. Desperately, he wiped his eyes clear, scanning for the enemy. There were figures darting from tree to tree, armed men coming at him.

  He fired in their general direction—there was no time to aim and shoot. A grunt of pain and one of the shadows went down. Jacob had no idea whether or not it was his bullet that had done the job. There were too many shooters; too many targets. The moment was total chaos.

  Sprays of heavy-caliber machine-gun fire ripped through the trees. Apple-laden boughs came raining down on Bravo Company. Cries of “Medic!” rang out through the American ranks.

  On the road, an enormous army bulldozer was trying to clear the debris of the two burning Shermans when another artillery blast came screaming down from Sainte-Régine. With a clang so loud it could be heard over the explosion, the shell slammed into the huge blade and went off, mangling it like it was made of paper. The dozer hung there, unable to gain any tracti
on, the twisted metal holding its tracks above the pavement.

  Jacob’s attention was torn away from the drama on the road by an explosion overhead. A mortar shell detonated in the treetop above, dislodging a huge branch. It dropped, striking Beau across the back, sending him sprawling.

  It should have taken a crane to lift the gigantic bough off the fallen GI, but scrawny seventeen-year-old Jacob managed it in one frantic effort. Two German bullets ripped into the wood, but he didn’t let go of the branch until it was clear of his fallen friend.

  “Beau—don’t be dead!” Jacob shouted. “Don’t you dare be dead!” He dropped to his knees and rolled Beau over. It took almost as much energy as moving the heavy bough. But it was worth it to see Beau’s eyes flutter open.

  Beau was dazed and very pale. “Tell General Eisenhower I’m ready for that shower now.”

  Truly he was. If the ground hadn’t been so wet and muddy, the blow might have squashed him like a bug. That was what saved him—that and the fact that his heavy pack had absorbed the brunt of the branch’s weight.

  “I’ll tell him,” Jacob promised shakily. “As soon as we get out of this orchard!”

  Two medics approached on the run and began to load Beau onto a stretcher. Watching them work, Jacob realized for the first time that the orchard was suddenly quiet.

  “What’s going on?” Jacob hissed. “Why has the shooting stopped?”

  “The Germans are falling back toward the town,” the lead medic explained. “We’ve got orders to pick up the wounded before we press on.”

  As if on cue, Lieutenant McCoy bellowed, “Move out!”

  On the road, the disabled bulldozer took another hit, dislodging the blade completely.

  “Looks like you got the short end of the stick, High School,” Beau commented in a weak voice. “I’m going on vacation and you’re still on the clock.”

  Jacob tried not to let his friend see his fear. Bravo Company would never be able to take the town without tank support.

  In other words, if the plan to silence that German gun failed, the attack force was doomed.

  Trevor’s mother was definitely not a fan of plucking her son out of school and, as she put it, “letting him skylark all across Europe with his father and great-grandfather.”

  “Come on, Julia,” Daniel Firestone reasoned. “How many opportunities is a twelve-year-old going to get for a fantastic trip like this?”

  His ex-wife stood her ground. “He’ll be missing three weeks of school. How can that be good for a B-minus student?”

  “You forget that I’m a teacher,” Daniel reminded her. “I’ll be with him every step of the way. I’ll make sure he keeps up. And remember, there’s more to education than what happens in a classroom. This will be a kid who’s fascinated with history walking in the footsteps of the real thing.”

  “Give me a break, Daniel. Trevor doesn’t care about history. He’s just obsessed with your grandpa’s larger-than-life war stories—which, by the way, get even less believable over the years. Every time he tells them, a few more buildings get blown up, and the branch he lifted off his buddy weighs an extra hundred pounds. That’s not history; that’s superhero comics.”

  “Okay,” Daniel conceded. “The war stories are a little overblown. Grandpa’s ninety-three now. He probably doesn’t remember as well as he used to.”

  “Are you joking? Your grandfather’s too ornery ever to forget anything. He remembers the first waiter who overcharged him for coleslaw in 1940. There’s nothing wrong with his memory. The stories are over-the-top because he knows that’s what Trevor wants to hear. Our son doesn’t love history. He loves explosions.”

  “He doesn’t love explosions—”

  “Really?” Trevor’s mom swung open the door to his bedroom. Explosions of all shapes and sizes shone down from the posters on the wall—war scenes depicting detonating bombs, tank battles, aerial dogfights, torpedo strikes, V-2 rockets, grenades going off, flamethrowers, and artillery barrages.

  A suitcase lay open on the bed and Trevor stood by the dresser, selecting underwear and socks. Kira and Kelsey—his six-year-old twin sisters—were circling the room, each waving a World War II model fighter plane, whooping loudly and yelling, “Blam! Blam! You’re dead!”

  “No, you’re dead!”

  “Girls!” Their mother was horrified. “What are you doing?”

  “War!” Kelsey crowed.

  “Just like Trevor!” Kira added.

  The girls ran off under their mother’s stern eye. Then she transferred her disapproving gaze to her son.

  Trevor shrugged. “It’s not my fault they like playing with my stuff.”

  His father changed the subject. “A little early to be packing, isn’t it? The trip isn’t for nearly a month.”

  “And it hasn’t been decided yet if you’re going,” his mother added. “You’re very young, you know. Europe will still be there when you don’t have to take three weeks out of your education.”

  “But this could be my only chance to go with G.G. We’ve got it all planned out to retrace his steps exactly from 1944! From basic training in Georgia, to England for staging, and across the English Channel for the invasion of Normandy on D-Day!”

  “It’s the first I’m hearing about Georgia,” Daniel mumbled when his ex-wife shot him an accusing look.

  “It’s going to be so awesome,” Trevor pleaded. “It would be great to see these places anyway, but to be there with G.G., who could tell me exactly what it felt like—that would be the best thing in the world. Plus, we’re going to Reims for the seventy-fifth anniversary of V-E Day. That’s where the official surrender was signed, you know. And before that, G.G. is going to be the guest of honor in the French village he liberated from the Nazis!”

  “He didn’t do it all by himself,” his father reminded him. “The rest of the army was there too.”

  “Well, yeah,” Trevor admitted. “But he’s the last survivor of the battle. He’s a hero in that town! You should see the Sainte-Régine Facebook page—they’ve got his picture all over it to get people psyched for the ceremony!”

  Daniel cast him a crooked smile. Trevor had shown him the Facebook page—but Trevor didn’t speak French. There was a long list of comments from villagers. Most were expressing their excitement about the ceremony and the chance to honor the last surviving hero of Sainte-Régine. But one post, buried in the middle of the stack, was not quite so friendly. It translated to: Jacob Firestone is no hero and is not welcome here. It also said Vive la Vérité, which meant Long Live the Truth.

  Oh well; there was always one discontented crab in every group. Grandpa would surely understand. More often than not, that discontented crab was Grandpa himself. Still, it bothered Daniel that someone in Sainte-Régine wasn’t quite so welcoming as everybody else.

  “It’s important, Julia,” Daniel said in an undertone. “You know me. I take the war stories with a grain of salt just like you do. But Grandpa’s ninety-three—he isn’t going to be around forever. This honor could be his last hurrah. Trevor should be there to share it. We can work on the explosions some other time.”

  Trevor’s mother thought it over. “I guess you’re right. But you’re making the phone calls to his school.”

  Trevor homed in on this like a bat using echolocation. “So I can go?” He threw his arms around his mother and hugged her. “The girls can use all my stuff while I’m gone. I promise!”

  Julia took in the arsenal of lethal military hardware cluttering every surface in the room. “That’s okay. I’ll keep them busy so they don’t—uh—miss you too much.”

  Jacob slapped three pennies onto the counter and waited while the clerk carefully tore a single postage stamp off an entire sheet.

  He licked the back and affixed it to his letter. Ma and Pa would have this tomorrow, or maybe the next day. They’d be upset—or maybe not. It was no secret how determined he was to enlist in the army.

  That was what had brought him to New Haven. The
recruiting center in his hometown never would have taken him. Everybody there knew he was underage. But the sergeant here in New Haven wasn’t too fussy about the rubbed-out area on his birth certificate—the part where 1926 had been doctored to look a lot like 1925. The center was packed to the rafters, and they were running volunteers through physicals as fast as they could stamp 1-A on the exam forms.

  The loudspeaker, crackling with static, was almost impossible to make out, but Jacob knew they were calling his train—the one to New York City and Washington, DC, where he’d catch a connection south to Georgia for basic training. He swung his overstuffed duffel over his shoulder—he had written FORT BENNING OR BUST on the canvas in splotchy ink. The bag felt light, but for some reason, the letter had gotten a lot heavier, as if the stamp had added a lead weight.

  He hated to do this to Ma and Pa. He was their only son. But how could he ignore his country’s call? Across the ocean, the fate of the human race was being decided. How could he sit in English class, reading Shakespeare, when his fellow Americans were risking their lives half a world away? He held the letter out toward the mail slot—

  And froze. Had he said everything he needed to in the letter? Had he apologized to his parents? Promised to be careful? Told them he loved them?

  A train whistle blew. Something was leaving—his train! If he didn’t get to Fort Benning on time, he’d be AWOL before his army career had even started!

  Panicking, he dropped the envelope in the slot and darted for track six on the dead run. He scrambled down the stairs, where an appalling sight met his eyes. His train was already on the move.

  He sprinted across the concrete, the heavy duffel pounding against his back with every flying step.

  “Hey!” he panted. “Wait for me!”

  Just before he ran out of platform, a conductor at the door of the very last car reached out and hauled him and his bag aboard.

  Weak with relief, Jacob slumped against the steps, too winded to gasp out a thank-you.