War Stories Page 5

  A long, low snort sounded uncomfortably close by, followed by the stamping of large hoofs. Red eyes glared at them through the gloom.

  “Run!” This from Beau, the Texan, who understood exactly what they were up against.

  A Hereford bull exploded out of the growing darkness. By the time the Americans could all make it out, the huge animal was nearly upon them, head down, horns poised.

  Jacob, Beau, and Leland scattered, but Freddie stood his ground. He pulled out his sidearm, prepared to do battle.

  “Are you nuts?” Jacob practically shrieked. He spun on a dime and hurled himself, horizontal to the ground, at Freddie. He hit the soldier right at the knees, sending the two of them sprawling. When the bull thundered by, it shook the earth and moved the air. It was that close.

  Before the bull could turn around to make another charge at them, Jacob hauled Freddie upright, dragged him to the fence, and heaved the two of them through the rails and into the next pasture.

  “You crazy idiot!” Jacob ranted. “That thing would have skewered you like a shish kebab!”

  “I would have taken him down,” Freddie insisted.

  “You think one little bullet would have stopped a monster like that?” Beau panted. “He’s a thousand pounds if he’s an ounce. His momentum alone would have squashed you like a bug.”

  “And the lieutenant warned us not to antagonize the locals,” added Leland. “We’re supposed to act like guests in England. What kind of guest shoots a farmer’s bull?”

  “I’ll bet the cows wouldn’t have been too thrilled about it either,” Jacob added.

  It broke the mood. The four chuckled as they made their way back to camp.

  “That was pretty impressive, High School,” Beau commented. “Throwing yourself in front of a charging bull. I think you’re destined to be a hero. I’m going to stick close to you when we get to France. The next life you save could be mine.”

  The Texan was joking as usual, but it made Jacob think. At this point, the soldiers of Bravo Company were about as hardened and well trained as it was possible to be. The one thing they could not know was how they would react to the life-and-death conditions of the battlefield. Had he received his first clue? Seeing Freddie in the bull’s path, Jacob had thrown himself into danger without a moment’s hesitation.

  Maybe he really was destined to be a hero. Either that, or the fool who does something stupid and gets everybody killed.

  Blundering through the near-total darkness, they got back to their Nissen hut late for bed check, earning themselves a face-to-face with Lieutenant McCoy.

  “We’ve got live fire exercises at 0800 tomorrow, and you four have just volunteered to take the forward positions.”

  In the morning, Bravo Company was loaded onto trucks and brought to some hilly country east of camp. To simulate real battle conditions, no one was told the exact nature of the exercise. Their only instructions were to dig in and await developments.

  “Figures,” Jacob mumbled as his shovel bit through the hard ground of the slope. “Disciplinary action or no, we’re always digging foxholes.”

  “Better than latrine duty,” called Leland from the position to his left.

  “Maybe,” Jacob shot back grudgingly.

  “Make them deep like your life depends on it!” McCoy hollered. “Because it does!”

  As Jacob dug, perspiration poured from underneath his helmet and into his stinging eyes, forming a clammy, uncomfortable layer of moisture beneath his wool jacket. His uniform stuck to him. No weather conditions, even at the North Pole, could ever be cold enough to avoid sweat while digging a foxhole. It was an infantry regulation: You were required to be covered in sweat at all times or you weren’t doing it right. It was the only thing he regretted about his decision to join the army.

  Exhausted, he climbed into the hole, thinking yearningly of his parents’ house in Connecticut and the dry clothes in his closet.

  “Hey, High School,” Beau hissed. “Not deep enough! Your head’s sticking out!”

  “Let McCoy court-martial me,” he stage-whispered in reply. “I can’t face one more shovelful.”

  At that moment a roaring sound swelled on the other side of the hill. A moment later seven big Sherman tanks crested the rise, firing live ammunition. Jacob could feel the air currents created by one of the shells passing maybe six inches over his helmet.

  He bent his knees in an attempt to collapse into his hole, but the opening was too narrow for him to get low. The tanks continued to fire as they advanced on the dug-in soldiers.

  That was when he saw it—one of the Shermans was coming directly at him.

  “Hey! Veer off! Veer off!”

  It was impossible for the tank crew to hear him over the booming of the guns and the rumble of the engines.

  The tank was less than ten feet away, its left tread poised to pass directly over the foxhole. There was no time to climb out and run for it. Panic-stricken, Jacob came to a desperate decision. The hole would just have to make room for him.

  He pressed his knees and face against the earthen wall and twisted his body, like he was a human drill bit.

  The clatter of the Sherman passing overhead blotted out everything but noise and pressure. For several agonizing seconds, he actually felt the tread making contact with the top of his helmet.

  Then it passed. Daylight returned and he was still alive.

  Jacob remained unmoving in his foxhole, barely allowing himself to breathe, even when the roar of the Sherman faded and McCoy pronounced the exercise a success.

  Finally, Beau hauled the still-trembling Jacob out of the ground.

  “Jeez, High School—you know you got tank tracks on your helmet?”

  Jacob never complained about digging foxholes again.

  The journey across the English Channel from Portsmouth, UK, to Cherbourg, France, was the coldest boat ride Trevor had ever experienced. The temperature wasn’t much below sixty degrees, and it never actually rained. But there was a constant mist driven by strong winds. The Normandie Express—a huge catamaran ferry—was topped by a vast circular sundeck. The only thing missing was sun. Ten minutes on deck, exposed to the elements, left you drenched and half-frozen.

  No wonder G.G. was wearing a heavy wool peacoat. “I told you two idiots to bring something warm,” he informed his grandson and great-grandson with a superior smirk. “The Channel has a climate all its own.”

  Trevor hugged his light jacket to his sides and tried to shrink into the collar. “How do the people who live here stand such awful weather?”

  “Awful?” the old soldier crowed. “This is the good weather. When it’s awful, you’ve got gale-force winds and fog so thick you need radar to find your way to the latrine.”

  Dad stood a short distance away, holding up his phone in search of a signal. “Isn’t this ferry supposed to have Wi-Fi? I can’t pick up the network.”

  “It’s probably the weather,” G.G. said, inhaling a lungful of cold, damp air as if he were enjoying a garden of hyacinths. “Back in the war, it got so nasty that Eisenhower had to postpone the whole invasion. Picture that—more than one hundred fifty thousand soldiers, sailors, and airmen getting told ‘Sorry, we’ll try again tomorrow.’ ”

  “I read about that,” Trevor confirmed. “D-Day was originally supposed to be June fifth, right?”

  His great-grandfather nodded. “Ike pushed back the entire operation thanks to a forty-knot wind and a cloud cover like pea soup. It wasn’t so much about the fleet—what’s a little extra seasickness from a bunch of poor saps who’ve been barfing nonstop since England? But the planes wouldn’t be able to see where they were dropping their paratroopers and gliders. And forget about air support.”

  “And the next day it cleared up?” Trevor queried.

  “Dream on. The next day it improved to just bad.” The old man gestured around them on the ferry. “Like this. If we’d held out for good weather, we’d still be waiting.”

  “At least you g
ot the extra day, though,” Trevor commented. “You know, to get psyched up for battle.”

  “Are you kidding? By that point, I’d spent almost a whole year of my life preparing for one thing—this, the invasion of Europe. Sure, I was scared about what would happen. But mostly, I wanted to get it over with. It had to be done and we were the ones who had to do it. I was packed onto a troop carrier—one of thousands of ships. We were going—and then we were turning around. For days, we’d been writing our wills and saying our prayers, sending letters home that might be the last time our families would ever hear from us. Guys were rubbing rabbits’ feet and having whole conversations with four-leaf clovers. My buddy Beau was jumping into every card game that would have him, determined to gamble away all his money so he could hit the beaches flat broke, with nothing to lose. We were barely human beings at that point. We were trained killers, half-nuts with tension, half-dead with seasickness. The last thing we needed was twenty-four more hours to stew in it.”

  Dad was shaking his phone as if he believed that motion might attract the ferry’s Wi-Fi. Exasperated, Trevor took the device from him, fiddled with it for a few moments, and handed it back.

  “Here you go. You had the password wrong. It’s Normandie with an i-e—the French spelling.”

  “Thanks,” his father acknowledged a little sheepishly.

  The crossing, which had taken all night for the D-Day fleet, was only a three-hour journey for the speedy Normandie Express. Two hours in, the coast of France began to appear on the misty horizon.

  Trevor’s voice suddenly became husky with excitement. “Is that where the invasion happened?”

  G.G. shook his head. “That’s the Cotentin Peninsula. The landing sites were off to the left. The side of that land strip—that’s Utah Beach. Then comes Omaha, where I landed. The British and Canadian beaches—Sword, Juno, and Gold—are farther off.”

  The code names seemed to echo in Trevor’s head: Sword, Juno, Gold, Omaha, Utah. The five Normandy landing spots that signified the beginning of the end for Hitler’s Third Reich. How many times had Trevor read those words in books and on the Internet, heard them in movies and video games? Only now, they were real. He was here—or at least almost here. An hour offshore from the famous places, where so many heroes had been forged under fire, where so many lives had tragically come to an end.

  Now finally connected to Wi-Fi, Daniel was at the rail, checking the Sainte-Régine Facebook page. There were the usual comments expressing excitement about the upcoming celebration. Several old-timers had posted pictures of the village before the war, and during its rebuilding afterward. Residents who now lived in Paris and other cities were planning on coming home for the festivities. There was a little griping about the availability of hotels in the area. Some of the locals were renting out rooms to visitors. And—

  What he saw next chilled him even more than the wind off the water.

  The post was from La Vérité, like some of the ones he’d seen before. The group had been becoming increasingly angry with the town for inviting Jacob Firestone to be honored at the ceremony. He was not a hero, they insisted, and the group had information that would show that he’d been responsible for the deaths of many Frenchmen.

  All those things had been said before, but in this most recent message, La Vérité finished with:

  At this very moment, Jacob Firestone is on his way to the shores of our beloved France. If we celebrate him in Sainte-Régine, it will be a stain on our village and an insult to our honored dead.

  Daniel blinked. On his way to the shores of our beloved France. How could they know that? Who were these people? Were they spying on the Firestones? He glanced around the deck, as if expecting to see enemies in trench coats, watching them through narrowed eyes behind sunglasses.

  He pulled himself up short, feeling a little foolish. There were no enemies on the boat—and certainly no sunglasses in this dark overcast.

  Still, there were other ways to spy in the year 2020. Airline tickets, hotel reservations, rental cars—they were all made electronically. Which meant the Firestones’ travel plans were knowable to anyone with computer skills.

  The question was, what should they do about it? Another hour would put them in France. It would be crazy to turn back now. Over what? Facebook posts? Grandpa would never accept that. And Trevor would be even worse.

  On the other hand, these were threats—almost. For sure, La Vérité was accusing Grandpa of terrible things. And Grandpa hadn’t exactly denied them—he’d just muttered something about the past catching up with him. What was that supposed to mean? Did he really have blood on his hands? Well, why wouldn’t he? He was an active-duty soldier in the middle of a giant shooting war.

  Would Grandpa be safe in Sainte-Régine? Would any of them be?

  On the phone, the screen refreshed and La Vérité’s message disappeared. Daniel felt a little better. That meant that somebody in Sainte-Régine was monitoring the page and deleting the offending posts. At least someone in the village was on Grandpa’s side. He frowned. It also meant that there had probably been even more posts—ones that had been taken down before he’d had a chance to read them and be warned.

  He looked across the deck to where his grandfather and son stood side by side at the rail. The old man was pointing ashore while Trevor watched in rapt attention. Daniel Firestone knew then that he could never put an end to this trip. Besides, La Vérité was probably nothing more than some Internet troll who didn’t like Americans very much. It didn’t make sense to let someone like that spoil the trip of a lifetime.

  Soon, the city of Cherbourg loomed up ahead. The Normandie Express pulled into a slip and the passengers and crew prepared to disembark.

  The wharf bustled with baggage handlers, taxi drivers, and other people greeting the new arrivals. It was a busy place, so no one paid much attention to a motorcycle leaning against a pylon at the far end of the dock. Beside it stood two leather-clad teenagers—a seventeen-year-old boy and his cousin, a thirteen-year-old girl.

  They were acting very casual, but both kept sharp eyes on the stream of passengers coming down the gangway.

  The girl held two photographs in her hand. One was a black-and-white picture of a young American wearing the uniform of the United States Infantry: Private Jacob Firestone. The second was color: the old soldier as he appeared today.

  Five minutes later, the very same man stepped onto French soil for the first time in seventy-five years.

  Five thousand ships—the largest fleet ever assembled.

  Across the darkened Channel they sailed, a vast column many miles across. It reminded Jacob of New York City, only instead of a skyline of buildings, this was a landscape of the conning towers of battleships, destroyers, and troop transports. It almost looked like you could cross all the way to France without getting your feet wet, just by jumping from boat to boat to boat.

  Watching from his Haskell-class Attack Transport Ship, Jacob had never been so physically uncomfortable. He was seasick from the rough crossing, exhausted from tension and lack of sleep, weighed down by equipment, and jam-packed on the deck among the rest of Bravo Company and all the other companies in the battalion, and the other battalions in the regiment. And yet, in the strongest sense since his arrival at Fort Benning, he felt the patriotic spirit that had drawn him to the recruitment center in the first place. Hitler’s Germany was threatening the world, and at long last, the world had an answer: this vast armada.

  And he was a part of it.

  As the Normandy coast appeared, a dark strip in the gray predawn, an odd quiet descended on the troops around Jacob. It was their first glimpse of the objective they had been training for these many months. The urge to get there had been all-consuming. But now that it was before them, they recognized it as the place where many of their young lives would end. That was not merely a possibility; it was a cold, hard fact.

  As they drew closer, a phalanx of minesweepers took the lead. Spaced out across the entire invasi
on zone, these small boats employed broad underwater nets to clear the shipping lanes of hundreds of mines laid by the Nazi defenders. There were muffled explosions and geysers of water shooting up from the surface. As the sweepers advanced, they floated marker buoys to show the safe routes to shore.

  Behind them, the large battleships took their positions. Their big guns could pound targets miles away, along the beaches, the bluffs, and even inland. It was their job to soften up the defenders for the invading force.

  Next came the multitude of troop ships, each one a hive of activity. Winches whirred as thousands of attack boats were filled with soldiers and lowered into the water. Jacob had very little respect for military discipline, but he had to admit that it was coming in handy now. His Attack Transport Ship was utter chaos—more than a thousand soldiers all running in different directions while officers brayed instructions at them. Yet their months of training brought everybody where they were supposed to be with the equipment they were supposed to have.

  With the rest of Bravo Company’s Third Platoon, Jacob climbed into the thirty-six-man LCVP—Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel, aka a Higgins boat—and settled himself behind the drop gate that would become the off-ramp when they reached the beach.

  A hand grabbed him by the collar and dragged him aft. Beau. “You don’t want to be the first guy off, High School. Your peach-fuzz cheeks are too fat a target!”

  Jacob decided this was pretty good advice. He pressed himself in beside Leland and Freddie. Peering over the gunwale, he could see the other boats tossing in the waves like bouncing Ping-Pong balls. The LCVP was designed to go right up to the beach, so it had a flat bottom—which meant it rode like a bucking bronco on the breakers.

  Leland—who had the worst seasickness problems in Bravo Company and possibly the entire Allied Expeditionary Force—was greener than ever. “I’m not going to make it,” he said to no one in particular. “I won’t even be able to blame it on Hitler.”