by Max Collins (1998), based on screenplay by Robert Rodat
| CONTENTS: | |
| Prolog | |
| Part 1, Chapters: | 1, 2, 3, 4 |
| Part 2, Chapters: | 5 |
| Part 3, Chapters: | 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, |
| 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 | |
| Epilog |
Immaculately trimmed hedgerows, high enough to block all else from view, edged the pathway. Up ahead, Grandpa -- in his plaid shirt and gray slacks and socks and sandals -- was padding quickly down the tunnel of green, and little Jimmy -- at seven, the youngest of the two brothers and two sisters (Sue, at twenty, was the oldest) -- could hardly keep up.
Jimmy could hardly believe a geezer like Grandpa could move so fast, hunched over, sunlight glinting off the tufts of his white hair. Mom and Dad, and the rest of the family, were almost running, trying to catch up (though Grandma wasn't even trying), as if the old man had escaped and they were hoping to recapture him.
Then Grandpa stopped.
Like he'd run into an invisible brick wall, and Jimmy could hear his grandfather's breathing quickening, as if he were still running, ever faster, ever faster -- only he wasn't: Grandpa was falling to his knees, and as he did, he sucked in wind in an awful wheeze, which made Jimmy think Grandpa was collapsing or something.
"Dad!"
Mom's voice, from behind Jimmy, carried concern, but Jimmy knew now that Grandpa hadn't fallen; it was more like he was ... kneeling. Praying.
Pretty soon Jimmy knew why. When he came up beside his grandfather, whose eyes were riveted on the landscape that had finally revealed itself as the path sloped down, Jimmy saw an amazing abstract design, a collaboration by God and man. The green of the grass on the gently rolling hill was God's work, while the sea of white crosses, interspersed with an occasional Star of David, was man's.
To Jimmy, who at seven had only been to a cemetery one other time (and not an extraordinary cemetery like this one), it was as if everybody on earth had died and been buried here; acres and acres of green and white filled his eyes, no sky above or even to the left or right, just green, white, green, white, green, white, till the boy's eyes blurred.
Then Mom and Dad were running up and hugging Grandpa; Jimmy's brother and sisters were coming, too, and finally his grandmother -- though she alone was in no hurry. Grandma, whose hair wasn't as white as Grandpa's, had a funny expression; Jimmy couldn't tell whether she was happy or sad.
Grandpa didn't have any expression at all. His eyes were wide open, as if he were trying to fill them up with the green and whire landscape. Jimmy had noticed Grandpa's eyes, before -- the rest of the old man's face was pretty ordinary, kind of wrinkly like any grandfather's.
But Grandpa's eyes were frequently the way Grandma's smile was, right now -- they seemed sad and happy at the same time, and never more so than right now, as they fixed themselves upon a geometrically straight line of crosses. Those eyes must have seen a lot of things in all those years, Jimmy thought.
The boy wondered if Grandpa was thinking about people who were buried in this place, friends of his. Dad said Grandpa had fought in the war here, but Jimmy didn't understand, not really. He had heard of that war in Vietnam. But this was France.
Maybe a war was fought here, once, too.
A gunmetal gray sea clawed at the gunmetal gray sky, but the Allied Armada -- its five thousand ships shades of deeper gray -- moved inexorably forward, the Channel's icy waves cleaved by waves of warships. Perturbed by neither the glowering sky nor the towering whitecaps came ten lanes, twenty miles across, of sleek new attack transports, rust-pocketed old freighters, converted ocean liners and steamers, tankers and tugs, Coast Guard cutters, minesweepers, motor launches, buoy-layers, and convoy upon convoy of cruisers, destroyers, and battleships.
The assault on the beaches of Normandy, however, would be the work of fifteen hundred landing craft, which would make the twelve-mile trip from the armada to the beach in three and a half endless hours. Among them, out in front, two hundred craft headed for shore in the first wave, including LCIs (Landing Craft, Infantry) carrying two hundred-some troops apiece, and the smaller LCVIs (Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel), each carrying a platoon of thirty, or twelve plus a jeep.
In one of the latter -- a Higgins boat, named after its inventor, Andrew Jackson Higgins, Jr., who made his fortune selling speedy boats to bootleggers (and speedier ones to the Coast Guard) -- Captain John H. Miller of Addley, Pennsylvania, sat with his men, "new meat" fresh out of basic.
Miller, Charley Company, Second Ranger Battalion, was not a career soldier; his rank reflected escalating battlefield commissions, earned by surviving Arzew in North Africa, Gela in Sicily, and Salerno in Italy. He was thirty-eight years old and by far the oldest man on the flat-bottomed landing craft, a small taxicab of combat piloted by a single Navy coxswain, a big trough of humans with a gate waiting to empty them onto a beach that could not yet be seen.
As baby-faced as any of his men, with clean-shaven soft features betrayed by ancient eyes, Miller -- like all survivers of multiple combat campaigns -- knew all too well that he was a fugitive from the law of averages. How many sevens in a row can one man roll in the same game?
His hand might have been shaking dice, at that -- but it was just shaking. And this was no game. He hoped his boys had not seen his trembling hand. He stared at it, willing it to stop, forcing the fear back within him, and the flesh obeyed.
None of his boys had noticed their captain's trembling hand; they were busy, caught up in the reigning madness as the flat bow of the boat plowed into swell after swell, a freezing spray blowing in, soaking their fatigues and the woolen ODs (olive drabs) underneath. The boat battling the waves tossed the soldiers like rag dolls, sending them smashing and tumbling into each other, slender young men fat with equipment, wearing inflatable "Mae West" life preservers, carrying various weapons (rifles, mortars, bazookas, flamethrowers), canvas bags, gas masks, first-aid kits, canteens, entrenching tools, knives, wire cutters, rations, grenades, explosives, ammo. Their helmets, laced with netting, bobbed like the heads-on-springs of carnival hula dolls. The smell of diesel oil and salty metal smudged the sea breeze.
Periodically seasickness would spread across the little ship, as if it had been spilled from a container. And containers were what the men were seeking, their barf bags (each man having been issued by the Army "Bag, vomit, one") long since filled and buried at sea. Their helmets came off and were soon brimming with the remnants of the fabulous condemned-man style meals thay'd been served last night, steak dinner send-offs the Army had provided, the "Last Supper", the man had called it.
At least with the water sloshing in, cleaning the helmets out wasn't a problem. A lot of the guys were helping out the craft's pump by bailing with their helmets anyway.
Everybody had been issued anti-seasickness pills, but many a would-be tough guy had pooh-poohed the need for them, and private Anthony Caparzo, twenty-two, Chicago, Illinois, had bought them up for a nickel apiece, on the troop ship, throughout their several long days of waiting. Caparzo had figured to make a small fortune, selling the pills for a quarter apiece, but now -- with his buddies moaning and puking around him -- he just didn't have the heart for it, or the stomach.
Caparzo, full-lipped, blunt-nosed, eyes so small and dark in his pale oval face hey seemed like black beads, began handing out the pills, solemn as a priest giving the Eucharist.
The boat lurched, and so did Stanley Mellish, twenty-one, Yonkers, New York. He lunged right at Caparzo, snatching the handfull of pills.
"Gimme some more of those!" Mellish said after the fact. He had the soft petulant features and dark yearning eyes of a spoiled child.
"That's my entire wartime supply, you shithead!"
"Put it on the war debt." The boat bounced again. "Anyway, what the hell difference does it make? You really think we're gonna be takin' any more boat rides after this?"
Caparzo had no answer for that, but the boat responded, lifting from the water just as a fifteen-inch navel shell went streaking overhead. Soon its whistle had died, and an explosion on the unseen land ahead told them they were close. H-hour had arrived.
Those whom weren't puking were praying. Mellish quickly transferred from the latter group to the former, his face turning camouflage green, his neck extending like a cannon taking aim, and the anti-seasickness pills exploding out of him, the deck their target. Bull's-eye.
Then, as Mellish hung over the side, Caparzo glanced around, and when he felt sure no one was looking, he plucked the slimy but hardly used pills from the puke puddle, found a pocket to stow them in, and wiped his hands on his soaked fatigues.
His captain had seen this, but Miller understood the secrets men kept in combat -- like his own tremulous hand. Agin he stared at it, as if it belonged to someone else. And again it stopped shaking.
Next to him was Sergeant Michael Horvath, Minneapolis, Minnesota, a blocky battle-scarred vet pushing thirty. Like the captain, the sergeant was discreet and may or may not have seen Miller's shaking hand. Sarge gestured to their praying, puking troops.
"Guess they don't do much boating," Sarge said, "back in the boonies."
"It's not the old fishing hole," Miller admitted.
Miller loved the kids. On the transport ship his boys had enjoyed a final burst of adolescence, sleeping all over the place, on the decks, in and on top of and under vehicles, smoking, playing cards, horsing around, talking about their girls back home. Everybody had their individual letter from the Supreme Commander -- General Eisenhower -- and the kids went around signing each other's letter, like a high school yearbook. Theie innocence had warmed his heart, and broken it.
One of the boys, Danny Delancey, where was he from? Cleveland? He was a sweet kid who did a pretty fair imitation of Sinatra, particularly when accompanied by a shipboard guitar, and right now was peeking over the gunwale at the Higgins boad directly off the port side.
"Heads down!" Miller barked. "There's nothing to see!"
But before Delancey could obey that order, and as if in contradiction to the captain, the Higgins boat next door ran into a mine, setting off a huge explosion that shattered and ignited the overcast morning in a shower of fuel, fire, metal, and human debris.
Delancey fell back as he and everyone else aboard the rocking boat was showered in flaming oil, seared body parts, and metallic splinters, the burning remains clunking to deck like a hellish hailstorm. Helmets used to bail became a fire brigade as the water was used to put out the flames, aided by the sloshing in of icy Channel water, roused by the explosion.
Curses and screams accompanied the frantic but focused cleansing of the boat. Miller tossed a foot in a boot overboard, and Sarge disposed of a charred arm, with a hand that seemed outstretched in unanswered plea. Tossing body parts over the side, even as the boat pitched along, the two battle vets exchanged weary glances -- no dignity for the goddamned dead in this war -- and the youthful faces around them turned toward their leadership for guidance.
"Injuries?" Miller called out.
Heads shook no, all around -- a small miracle with all that searing flying shrapnel. Faces were turning toward the water, where bodies, and body parts, floated.
"Heads down, I said!"
"Captain" -- Delancey's eyes were like a fucking puppy dog's -- "are we all gonna die?"
Miller was searching for the right words -- he didn't want to bullshit these boys, but they needed something to hang onto, to take with them into battle -- when Lieutenant Frank Briggs responded for him.
"Hell, no, Delancey!" Briggs said with bravado-laced cheer. "Two-thirds, tops!"
Those weren't the sort of words Miller had in mind.
"Oh, Jesus," Delancey said. The line between curses and prayers blurred in the war.
Briggs -- thirty, Dallas, Texas, sturdy of build with close-set glittering eyes -- cupped his mouth and hollered, his voice carrying across the water to neighboring Higgins boats. "Look at the man on your left! Every rootin' tootin' one of you. Now look at the man on your right!"
All around the boat, the boys obeyed, numbly.
Briggs grinned. "Say a prayer for those two sons of bitches, 'cause they're not comin' back. You, on the other hand, ain't gettin' a goddamn scratch!"
Delancey smiled weakly, as if the lieutenant's words had encouraged nothing more than another urge to puke. This "pep talk" had clearly made the platoon more uneasy than ever.
"Lieutenant," Miller said to Briggs softly.
Briggs' eyes were bright. "Yes, sir?"
Miller shot him a glare. "Never answer questions directed to me. Understood?"
The light in the lieutenant's eyes dulled. "Yes, sir."
Orange-white light washed across the boat, and all eyes lifted heavenward, as if checking for angels, finding instead thousands of rockets flashing overhead, shoreward, their whoosh followed by explosions making not-too-distant thunder.
"See that?" Miller yelled. "Hear that? That's every German strong point gettin' blown to hell and gone!"
"Go LCTs!" Lieutenant Briggs called out, as if cheering from the stands of a big game. "Light 'em up like Christmas!"
"Now get those heads back down," Miller said, even as he peered over the gunwale at the recent-shaped mist-shrouded shoreline, bluffs rising vaguely behind the shelf of sand and formation seawall, yellow cordite mingling with stirred-up dust to create a ghostly landscape.
But poking out of the sand, where the tide was way back, a mile back, spouting like bizarre mushrooms, were imperfect rows of gatelike iron-frame structures, wooded logs wearing Teller mines for caps and crossed steel rails, all angled seaward, planted by the Jerries to tear apart landing craft on a high-tide landing. At low tide they would provide cover for foot soldiers moving across the beach -- although taking shelter behind an obstacle attached to a mine was essentially hiding behind a bomb in a firefight.
A chill ran through an already bone-chilled Miller. Those underwater obstacles were supposed to be gone. He had been briefed that combat engineers, before dawn, would have removed them all.
Yet there they were, Xs of steel, like grotesque grave markers in a cemetary waiting to be filled.
The Naval barrage, it seemed to Miller, was falling short, the big shells from the big guns sending up geysers of water, black as oil. He hoped to hell, when they got there, the beach would be pocked with shell craters, as promised. That was how he had trained his men, moving in and out and around bomb craters. ...
"Gonna be a big show!" some kid shouted.
"Piece of cake!" another said.
Caparzo leaned against the side, keepin his body in rhythm with the rocking as the shell-stirred waters roughed their ride. "Sounds like the Midnight Limited!"
More like a chain flush," Mellish said, managing a nervous smile.
Nearby, gangly Daniel Boone Jackson, twenty-three, Hickory Valley, Tennessee, hugged his sharpshooter's rifle and bowed his head.
"Best make yourself right with the Lord," Jackson advised his buddies in a soothing drawl at odds with the turbulence underneath, and around, them.
Spookily, as if the Southern boy had commanded it, a silence fell upon the choppy waters. The Naval barrage had lifted, leaving only the thrum of the Higgins boat engines, a sound so familiar to these passengers they had long since blotted it out. The big guns were, no doubt, readjusting to direct their fire inland. But the effect was as if the war had halted to give these boys the moment of silence they needed.
Miller knew this instant of accidental mercy was all the leeway his kids were likely to find on this cold gray morning, on the hazy shore ahead. He glanced at the coxswain, who held up three fingers.
His boys were gazing up at him. They knew this was it; they needed only their final cue.
It was not Miller's way to make final speeches, so after a glance at the sergeant, and an exchange of tiny smiles that each knew might be a final farewell, the captain moved among his boys, winding rhrough them, his manner, his voice, conversational, calm.
"Keep it simple." he soothed, "sides of the ramp, move fast, no bunchin' up. ... Good luck, Godspeed, lock and load."
Occasionally he would grant a small smile, even a wink, now and then a shoulder pat. Several times he adjusted the inflatable life jackets the boys wore, knowing if a Mae West hiked too high and the vest inflated, a soldier getting into deep water or stepping in a shell hole was in deep shit.
"You can wind up with your head down and your legs sticking out of the water," Miller chided gently. He moved on, making eye contact, little nods, tight smiles.
"Keep sand out of the actions," he said. Many of the men had condoms snugged over their rifle barrels, an absurd sight but a rational precaution for the watery landing ahead. "Good luck, men."
The Navy's big guns started in again, but so did something else: enemy artillery and mortar fire, raining down on the approaching landing craft, plumes of water blossoming nearby, from guns that should not have survived the Allied bombardment. The nasty purr of machine guns sounded at right and left, and Miller saw tracer bullets dancing in the water and careening off the ramp and sides of the LCVP to the side of them. Miller knew all too well that for every tracer bullet you saw, there were four more bullets you didn't. Then as water sprayed in from enemy shells, the boat lurched, running into a sandbar, jerking all aboard rudely forward.
"Piece of cake my ass," Caparzo muttered to Mellish.
"Looks like there's a little opposition," Mellish said glumly.
And as the men stared straight ahead at the steel gate before them, a gate that would lower into a ramp and send them into battle, a sudden metallic hailstorm hammered against it.
Shit, Miller thought. He had two choices: send his men directly into the machine-gun fire that was knocking so insistently at their door, or stay put until mortar fire or an artillery shell took them all out in one fiery ball.
But the machine-gun fire was sporadic. He would find a gap, and charge through it ... and as these thoughts swirled through his brain, the boys who were his men backed away from the bullets pounding at the barricade, jockeying for position as best they could in the cramped craft. A few of them unleashed their bladders, warm wetness mingling with the chill Channel water already soaking them.
"I'm so fuckin' seasick," said Private Brad Lewis, twenty, Bayonne, New Jersey, to anyone interested, "that beach'll be a fuckin' cure."
Pudgy Brad Lewis, a grocer's son, had never used the word "fuck" until about three months ago; now some form of it found its way into everything he said or thought, with the exception of prayers.
"Not yet!" Miller called to the coxswain, who would lower the gate, which another barrage of machine-gun fire was battering. Miller hollered to his boys: "When that gate comes down, I want you to debark both sides of the ramp! Understood? ... See you on the beach! Good luck!"
Every boy on the ship was listening to the same small inner voice: It can't happen to me ... can it?
Then the machine-gun fire let up, and Miller hollered, "Now!" and the gate came down.
And the machine-gun fire resumed.
Miller, at the rear of the boat, heard it more than saw it -- the sound of the triangulated .30-caliber machine-gun fire, chewing up men and metal, his boys screaming as they died. All he saw, at first, was the metal minutiae, pink and gray matter, human dust, smoke and sparks exploding past him.
"Fuck -- fuck!" Private Lewis screamed. His last words.
All Miller could see was the backs of his boys, as the heavy caliber slugs exploded through them, sending sprays of blood but more so shrapnel of shovel and canteen and canvas, even rubber from rended Mae Wests. As many times as Miller had been in combat, he was not prepared for this, as in less than twenty seconds two-thirds of his platoon was stacked up like human cordwood, only not neatly. Like the steel-rail dragon's teeth on the beach, the dead and dying were obstacles that a dozen survivors had to find their way over and around, to make their way to the ramp and hurl themselves into the water. And they were, splashing like stones, stones with frantic eyes.
Behind them Miller charged, shouting, "Go! Go!" working his voice above the machine-gun storm.
Private Delancey was screaming. The scream was neither of fear nor pain, but horror, caught as he was under a pile of corpses that had moments before been comrades. The moans and whimpers of the wounded could not be heard over the machine-gun chatter and the engine thrum. Miller, staying low, kept his steel helmet between him and the gunfire. He plucked the boy from the pile -- yanking him by the backpack and pulling his trapped legs out from under the bodies -- a moment before the machine-gun fire stitched across where tha boy had just been.
Then Miller dragged the boy to the ramp and, still holding onto him, plunged himself, and Delancey, into the water, deep water, to the left of the sandbar the LCVP had rammed into.
As he splashed into the water, Miller -- lungs filled with cold morning air -- released the boy and punched his carbon dioxide cartridges, to inflate his Mae West. This, along with his gas mask casing, provided buoyancy, but not enough to appreciably slow his plunge. Sixty pounds of gear sank him like a rock, and a strong undercurrent pulled him to the left, as he careened down and through an underwater nightmare of foundering, drowning soldiers, the wounded ones staining the greenish-blue world with contrails of red.
With men flailing around him, releasing equipment to survive, Miller resolved to cling to his rifle even as his backpack dragged him to the sandy floor. Tumbling around him in slow-motion underwater ballet were helmets, M-1 rifles, flamethrowers, walkie-talkies, a mortar, a bazooka, even a scaling ladder.
And as he struggled to release himself from the burden of his heavy backpack, Miller -- lungs bursting, bubbles trailing from his nostrils -- looked up toward the surface. Freezing though the water was, it was as if he were cooking at the bottom of an immense pot, the surface boiling with shell bursts, shrapnel splashes, and most ominously, the rain-like pitter-patter of machine-gun fire. Bullets piercing the water's skin left fizzy trails before slowing and settling gently around him on the murky, sandy bottom, harmless metal pebbles now.
Backpack off, Miller realized the floundering soldier nearest him was Private Delancey, dancing a frenzied water-retarded tarantella, impotently attempting to undo the straps of his own heavy pack. Withdrawing a trench knife from his boot, Miller slashed the boy's backpack straps, the pack joining the parade of discarded gear marching to the sandy floor.
But the kid was panicking by now, air bubbles streaming out of an open silently screaming mouth, eyes wide with fear. The captain looped an arm around the private, tight, and swam with the boy, underwater, staying below the shooting gallery that was the water's surface.
As Miller, lifeguarding Delancey, lungs bursting, moved nearer the shore, the sandy floor inclined until that bullet-riddled skin of water overhead was ever nearer. Miller punched the boy's CO2 tubes, inflating the Mae West, and soon the captain and the private broke the surface.
They gasped for air as their ears filled with the chaotic symphony of carnage that was Omaha Beach, shells and men screaming, fire crackling as oil burned atop the water, gunfire popping like firecrackers, machine guns kissing the sand, sppp sppp, sppp sppp. Floating around them were landing craft and jeeps and DUKWs and rubber-skirted tanks, dead vehicles alive with flame and smoke, none of them reaching the shore, mechanical corpses among the flesh-and-blood ones.
Miller fell back into the water, a wave taking him, the terrible cacophony mercifully muted underwater, but then he gained his footing, as Delancey, clung to him like a frightened child to its parent, gasping a curse or a prayer: "Jesus ... Mary ... Joseph ..."
The captain waded with his human cargo through the shallow water, bullets pinging and splashing around them, bodies drifting; other soldiers around them slogged the same rough road, many without helmets or weapons, highly trained crack infantrymen arriving on the beachhead as exhausted, waterlogged, shipwrecked survivors. Miller hauled the barely conscious Delancey by a strap on his backpack, navigating their way around the steel dragon's teeth obstacles, sometimes pausing behind them, even latching on to them for support.
They were doing this when machine-gun fire wrote its name on Delancey's back; the private arched in the captain's grasp, the boy's face slack with the surprise of his death. Even in a hellish landscape like this, death has the power to amaze.
The body fell onto Miller, pinning him in two feet of water. There was no helping the boy now, and the compassionate captain made a cruel decision: he would use the boy's body as a shield. Struggling, paddling toward shore, Miller felt Delancey taking more hits, seven or eight of them, jerking violently in his grasp, puffs of blood misting the air. Miller wondered if this might not finally be the moment he should choose to go insane.
Panting ith exhaustion, he paused beneath the bloody body of the boy he'd tried to save and looked around, seeing he was not alone in such thoughts, or actions: scores of other men, from other boats, were working their way grimly toward the smoke- and dust-draped shore. Some, like him, were using corpses for cover, moving past the tangled and burning wreckage of their well-planned assault, wending through wave- and surf-tossed bodies. Absurdly, dead fish by the hundreds were washing ashore, their peaceful world disrupted by man's squabble.
Nearby a soldier raised his head and winced, and rolled onto his back on the shallow water lapping the shoreline. Miller grimaced as he tossed aside the human shield, dropped his life belt, and splashed to the aid of a wounded man.
Or what he thought was a wounded man.
"Get away," the soldier snarled as Miller moved in to drag him to shore. "No, no -- leave me!"
Miller understood, and wondered how many other men were pretending to be dead, in hopes the machine guns and small arms fire would seek out living target instead.
The captain, not wanting to provide such a target, hurled himself behind another cross-steel obstacle, pressing against it for dear life as machine-gun rounds hammered the metal, whanging, ricocheting, death pounding at the door.
Several soldiers making their way to shore still wore their Mae Wests, which as they moved onto the beach would prove cumbersome. Miller was hollering to them to drop the life belts when an artillery shell, a big 88, exploded just in back of him, slamming him into the water as debris flew and smoke plumed.
When he came to, seconds later, he pushed up from the sand and the water, dripping, dizzy with concussion, and leaned into the cross-steel obstacle like a drunk propping himself up against a barroom wall. He looked into the water and saw a helmet floating there: his. He put it on, his gaze catching the water's shimmery blue-green surface, and a vaguely familiar face looked back blankly at him: the face of a man at the end of a road. Not a captain's face, not a soldier's, just the face of a man willing to crawl into his wicker basket and stay there.
His fatigues had little tears and charred patches, and anywhere his flesh was showing was nicked and bleeding, as if he'd cut himself shaving, all over. He wondered why the shooting had stopped; was the battle over?
The world was a grotesque silent film. Hundreds of dead soldiers littered the beach, staining golden sand red as yellow smoke drifted like fog; countless others, wounded, thrashed in pain and fear, writhing like worms, their mouths moving, some silently crying for help, or their mothers, others moaning, others screaming, but no sound, no sound.
Miller watched the pantomime battle continue: four soldiers trudged onto the beach -- in their waterlogged uniforms it was as though they were walking against a strong wind -- and then two of them pitched forward, joining the other bodies, apparently cut down by machine-gun fire, but Miller couldn't hear it. Couldn't hear a thing.
He could see, though, all too well. The sand was scattered with rifles and helmets and gas masks and blankets. A Sherman tank had made it to the water's edge, only to aim its barrel at nothing, its charred bulk shrouded in flame, sending clouds of greasy black smoke roiling into the sky. Some men had made it onto the beach, and were returning fire toward the nebulous enemy in the bluffs and the cliffs that bookended them. One GI dropped to the sand and fired back at the invisible Jerries, but caught instead one of his buddies running ahead of him, killing him instantly.
The poor bastard -- the living one -- looked around frantically, wondering if anybody had seen what he'd done; Miller had, and their eyes met, but the captain looked away. He knew that the guilt and horror of that fuckup would follow that kid till the day he died, whether today or sixty years from now. But it would probably be today.
When he turned away, Miller suddenly stared into the face of a private, a blue-eyed boy whose expectant expression baffled the captain. A few feet away three more young privates were huddled behind an X of steel, shivering in the cold water, looking at him in that same manner.
"Huh?" Miller managed.
The blue-eyed private's mouth moved, and sound seemed to be returning; finally the cobwebs cleared and Miller understood his disorientation and impaired hearing had to do with an 88 going off under his ass.
"You say something, soldier?" Miller said.
The private said, "What now, sir?" but Miller only saw lips moving, though the rumble of war was gradually turning up the volume.
"What?" Miller screamed, unaware he was screaming. "What are you saying?"
"I said," the private screamed back at the captain, "what the hell do we do now, sir?"
Miller glanced around, forcing himself to look past the carnage, to see beyond the catastrophe of this landing, realizing that he was not alone. Those privates and many others were alive, taking shelter behind the dragon's teeth obstacles, hanging on by their figurative fingernails, but alive.
"Captain! Captain!". The familiar voice found him even as his hearing returned, more or less, to normal. On the other side of him, Miller could see Sergeant Michael Horvath, crouched behind another steel-rail barrier; from Sarge's expression, Miller gathered the man had been shouting at him for some time.
Miller granted himself a tiny millisecond smile at seeing his friend still alive, then in a voice that was all business, said, "Take these men off the beach."
One of the cluster of young privates squeaked, "Sir, what's the rallying point?"
Miller pointed toward the cliffs to one side of the bluff, a distance of perhaps two hundred meters. "Get to where they can't shoot you!"
Through the smoke and dust, beyond the dragon's teeth rising from the lowitide sands, the body-littered beach gently sloped to a shingle of gravel that rose, in stair-step fashion, to a seawall of stone and masonry. At some points along the beach, that seawall was as high as twelve or fifteen feet -- but here it was a mere three or four. All along the top of the seawall was a nasty concertina snap of barbed wire. Snugged along that seawall, ragged groups of GIs were already avoiding the machine-gun and small-arms fire pouring down from the bluffs and cliffs, struggling to dig foxholes, keeping low, tending wounded.
"The seawall!" Miller hollered to the twenty or thirty privates huddling behind obstacles in he shallow water. "You see it?"
A soldier's voice cried out: "I'm stayin' here!" It was the voice of a
frightened, pouting child, who'd been lied to by his parents once too often.
The boy meant the triangle of steel rail he hid behind.
Miller's voice cut through the concerto of exploding shells and the
machine-gun fire. "Every foot of this beach is in some Kraut's crosshairs!
If the machine guns don't get you, an 88 will! And this tide is rising,
an inch a minute! That seawall is life ... you're all dead here!"
No more talking. They would either follow him or not.
And Miller charged out from behind the steel-rail obstacle, rifle at the
ready, splashing though the shallows, weaving around dragon's teeth and
floating casualties, while dozens of men emerged from behind the obstacles,
joining him in the assault, whimpering survivors suddenly soldiers again.
Boys became men as they crossed the killing zone of Omaha Beach, often dead
men, but men; many of their fathers had crossed a similar no-man's-land of
furious enemy fire, a war ago. Running, yelling, screaming, crawling,
scrambling on hands and knees, leapfrogging positions, zigzagging, high
school athletes summoning their broken-field running skills, they worked
their way toward the seawall.
Men whose rifles were jammed with sand, or who had lost their weapons in
the water, plucked replacement guns from the dead. Shell holes provided
temporary foxholes, a knocked-out tank -- one of the few that had made
it this far -- provided cover. And as some men were brutally cut down,
dropping to the sand or the gravel as the signal from their brain to the
legs was severed, the merely wounded often found themselves scooped into
the arms of a fellow GI, for hauling. Others could not be helped; the
sound of wounded and dying men reverting to boys echoed across the smoky
beach in an eerie lullaby: Mama! Mama! Mother! Mom!
Miller was crouched behind an obstacle, grabbing breath; not a steel-rail
hedgehog this time, but one of the angled mine-capped logs, this one
tree-trunk thick and providing decent cover. Huddled behind the obstacle
next to him were a trio of wild-eyed privates clutching typewriters and
cardboard boxes.
"What the hell are you doing?" Miller shouted, getting his voice over the
popping gunfire.
A freckle-faced kid answered, "One Hundred and Fourth Medical Battalion,
sir! Here to set up field operations!"
"Do you see anybody who could use a fucking typewriter right now?"
"No, sir."
"Get rid of that shit and find a weapon. Follow me!"
On the sand now, out of the surf, but the going still slow, Miller didn't
risk firing, too many GIs up ahead of him. Many of the men were so burdened
down with waterlogged gear they could barely walk let alone run, some of
them shedding gear as they went.
Tow kids, trotting weaponless to the sanctuary of that seawall, helped each
other out of wet uniforms. They were down to trousers and T-shirts when a
GI with a flamethrower next to them caught a round in the canister. Flames
burst out, engulfing him and the two boys as well. The boys ran like human
bonfires screaming along the beach, other soldiers staying out of their way
as they dashed along in an orange and blue blur, until machine-gun fire
mercifully cut them down. Now thet were just three more burning obstacles
to navigate.
Next to Miller a soldier muttered, "That's goin' to hell in a hurry."
Miller, the horror of that knotting his bowels, dove behind another
steel-rail obstacle. He needed a moment. Just a moment ...
"Help me outa here," a voice said.
Behind the steel-rail obstacle next door, Lieutenant Frank Briggs lay,
slumped in the sand.
"Caught one low," Briggs gritted. "Something hot ... inside me.
Feels like there's a fuckin' shot put in there. ..."
But Briggs was not alone. A pair of combat engineers were wiring the
dragon's tooth Briggs was sheltered behind, working quickly and nimbly.
Miller scrambled over and shoved the nearest of the two, who was wrapping
explosives around the base of the obstacle. "What the hell do you think
you're doing?" Miller demanded.
"Navy Beach Battalion, sir!" The engineer was in his mid-twenties with a
pale oblong face and unblinking brown eyes; he nodded to the dragon's tooth.
"Gotta blow this bastard."
"Why in Hell?"
"Make a hole for the tanks."
"What fucking tanks?"
The engineer returned to his work. "Orders, sir!"
"All our armor is floatin' in the fucking Channel! Look around you!"
"Go away, sir!" Suddenly the engineer had a fuse lighter in his hand.
"We're blowing this one."
Time for discussion seemed over; Miller grabbed Briggs by his pack harness,
leaving the stupidity behind, dragging the lieutenant into the smoky rain
clouds ahead, and their deluge of bullets. A soldier running alongside
Miller soon passed him, and the captain realized the GI was shouting,
"Medic, medic, medic!" was carrying something like a rifle that was in fact
his arm; the recent amputee made it to the seawall, hurling his severed arm
over it as if it were a grenade and flopped to the relative safety along
the wall.
In combat, such strange sights could only be witnessed, not absorbed.
But Miller's mind was still in the process of cataloging the oddity
for later reflection when the mortar shell landed nearby, throwing him
in the air, and setting him back down again.
Miller swallowed, brain whirling, ears ringing -- but at least his hearing
hadn't gone this time -- and checked for his legs, knowing that wounds
sometimes didn't register at first, shock stiffling the pain. Bullets were
buzzing like stirred-up hornets all around him. His nostrils were choked
with the stench of burned powder, and the acrid, grey taste of it was in
his mouth, as well.
But he was not wounded, anyway nothing more than assorted new shrapnel nicks.
He grabbed Lieutenant Briggs by the pack harness strap, and scrambled to his
feet, hauling Briggs toward that seawall again. Only Miller seemed stronger
now, as if the impact of the mortar shell had bolstered rather than sapped
him; no -- it wasn't that he was stronger, but that Briggs was lighter. ...
The lower half of the lieutenant was gone.
Woozy, Miller dropped the half-a-man, like a suitcase, and suddenly
something slammed into him, someone slammed into him: Sarge.
And the sergeant was grabbing hold of him now, propelling him along.
Then miller got into the swing of it, hobbling with Sarge the last
dozen yards as bullets pinged and popped around them.
They hurled themselves to the gravelly ground along the edge of the seawall.
Miller had never been this exhausted, this spent, not in civilian life
certainly, not even in battle. His eyeballs burned, his every bone ached,
his muscles were a twitchy, aching unresponsive mass.
All along the seawall, other brave, lucky, exhausted soldiers were tossing
themselves to the relative safety of the seawall, up and down the beach.
Still, the machine-gun and mortar fire continued, raining lead on the gravel
and the sand inches away; the noise of this storm of bullets and shells was
relentless. Near the seawall casualties were mounting, piling up.
"Can't tell the dead from the wounded," Miller said.
"Not without a score card, Sarge said.
They spoke over the constant cries of "Medic!" "Corpsman!" "Aidman!"
Along the seawall, faces were turned toward Miller, faces belonging to
soldiers largely stripped of their gear, not to mention their dignity,
huddling under the scant cover. They had made men of themselves, crossing
that bloody beach. But now, at a sort of rest, the scramble across the
beach over, they were boys again, their precarious shelter allowing the
fear to take over.
Miller looked at these scareed kids, some of them weeping, out of control,
and asked anyone who cared to respond to the terrible question: "Who's in
command up here?"
Two answers were simultaneous: machine-gun and small-arms fire, from the
pillboxes and dugouts above, said that the Jerries were in command.
But several of the young privates shouted the other awful answer to that
question: "You are!" "You are, sir!"
Miller looked at Sarge and whispered, "That's what I was afraid of."
"Don't get your ass killed," Sarge whispered back, "or I'll be in
charge."
"Hell, we don't want that," Miller said, finding a smile somewhere.
"Then you would be a sorry bunch of sons of bitches. ... You recognize
where we are?"
Sarge shrugged. "About a mile from where we're supposed to be?"
Hearing this, a soldier down the seawall called out, "Nobody's where we're
supposed to be!"
The private next to Sarge, a round-faced kid, said, "He's right, sir, we're
all mixed-up. We got leftovers from Fox company, Able, George, plus some
Navy demo guys and beach masters."
Miller surveyed his ragged mix of regiments and companies, and, knowing
that their seawall shelter was only a temporary stop on their way,
repeated to himself, That's what I was afraid of.
Taking inventory of his men, Miller moved low along the seawall, with
Sarge trailing after him. Amid the chaos of the living, dying, and wounded,
a young radioman was keeping his head, barking into his shoebox-like
antenna-sprouting handset. Miller scrambled up to him, grabbing on to
a shoulder. The radioman, a blond kid, craned around and found himself
looking at a captain.
"Ask about our air support!" Miller demanded, shouting above the gunfire.
"Tell 'em we got no goddamn air support!"
The kid nodded, turned away, relaying the message. The cough, cough, cough
of mortars was followed by booming blasts and the whistling of shrapnel.
Miller grabbed the kid's shoulder again, and the radioman looked back
expectantly.
"And tell 'em," Miller continued, "no heavy armor is making it onshore!
The C-3 gully is not open! Ask 'em, where are the fucking DD tanks?
They're nowhere near the draws!"
The radioman nodded again, turned away, hollering into his headset.
Machine-gun fire rattled from above. The boy had finished relaying his
message, and Miller again grabbed him by the shoulder, pulling him around,
saying, "And tell 'em ..."
But the words caught in the captain's throat: the young radioman was no
longer listening, having finally lost his head, half of it anyway, his face
shot away. The boy tumbled lifelessly to the sand, and Miller grabbed for
his radio, but it, too, was bullet-riddled, shot to shit. Miller drew back
against the seawall, away from the beach where bullets continued kicking up
little sandstorms.
Private Robert Reiben, twenty-four, Brooklyn, New York, plunged from the
beach under a welcoming committee of machine-gun chatter and hurtled
himself against the seawall, between his captain and sergeant.
"I'm takin' this up with Eisenhower," he said. Reiben was a lanky
fair-haired smart-ass whose old man was Jewish and mother Irish,
explaining the kid's reddish hair, pasty looks.
Sarge asked him, "Seen anybody else from the platoon?"
"Jackson," Reiben said, nodding down the seawall a ways. The Southern
sharpshooter, his beloved Springfield rifle in hand, had made it to
temporary safety. "But that's it."
"Mellish, here, sir!" a voice called from the other direction, along the
seawall.
"Caparzo, too, sir!" another voice called from the same direction.
Miller craned out enough to spot them, sharing cover; then he ducked back
as Caparzo's voice continued: "Wade's back there with DeForest, but Dee's
so shot to hell, he's sprung a hundred leaks."
"Where is Wade?" Miller called back.
"Out there on the beach," Caparzo yelled, "tryin' to plug up those holes!"
Finally, through the floating smoke and scrambling men, Miller spotted the
company medic, Corporal Edward Wade, San Diego, California, at twenty-eight
one of the oldest of the captain's boys. The small dark Wade was kneeling
over Private Brian DeForest, twenty-one, DeKalb, Illinois, trying to save
him, despite a sucking chest wound that would seem to make the effort futile.
Wade was bloody up to his elbows, his white armband spattered as if its red
cross were dripping.
Wade was ignoring a senior medical officer's orders to move on to the next
patient, insisting, "He's not gone, sir." As men dropped around him in the
killing zone, Wade calmly piled up bodies, using them as human sandbags,
to give himself some cover to keep working on his buddy.
"Wade!" Miller called from the seawall. "Wade! Aidman! Wade!"
But Wade either did not hear his captain or ignored him, too.
Miller shouted, "Mellish -- Caparzo ... haul Wade's ass off that beach!
We're not losing our fucking medic!"
The sandbagged bodies were getting chewed up by machine-gun fire, like a saw
through wood, but Wade kept at it, administering plasma. Then a slug passed
through one of the corpses and caught DeForest in the side of the head,
and the medic lost his patient.
"Fuck!" Wade screamed, shaking bloody fists, "Shit!"
That was when Caparzo and Mellish hauled the medic off the beach, dragging
him to the seawall.
Miller turned to Sarge. "That's it? That's all of us that's left?"
"Not necessarily, sir. We got scattered pretty bad. Bound to be more
of us around, somewhere."
"Not enough. Not enough."
Miller was thinking of that LCVP and how he sent his boys out into the
slaughterhouse of machine-gun fire. But the harsh cough of mortars and
the whistle of shrapnel was all around -- no time for reflection.
"Where's DOG-1?" he asked Sarge. "Where's our damn exit?"
"Gotta be that cut on the right."
"Yeah?"
"Or maybe that one on the left?"
"No," Miller said, thinking: "Vierville is west of us. It's gotta be the
one on the right."
A mortar blast hit the sand near enough the seawall to kill three of the
huddling soldiers, ripping them to pieces.
A voice near the carnage shouted hysterically: "They're killing us!
They're fucking killing us! We don't have a chance! It ain't fair!"
Miller looked toward the voice. It belonged to a corporal, and experienced
"old man" like himself, probably in his late twenties. If somebody like
that could come apart, these younger inexperienced boys were like grenades
with the pin out. Time to move.
"Gather firepower!" Miller announced. "Whatever you got, whatever you can
find! Drag 'em in off the sand if you have to! Those weapons aren't doing
anybody any good out there!"
Word was relayed up and down the seawall; hollers followed by a murmuring
among the men, who seemed spurred by the thought of taking action. Sitting
along this seawall, waiting for shrapnel or an exploding 88 or a ricocheting
slug to catch them, had lost its appeal.
Sarge turned to reuben. "Where's your B.A.R., Reiben?
"Bottom of the drink, Sarge." He grinned. "Bastard tried to drown me."
"Find another."
"It's in the bag, Sarge."
And the cocky bastard scrambled out onto the beach to find a replacement
for his Browning Automatic Rifle. Similar actions were being taken all
along the seawall, as troops, galvanized by the thought of a breakout, were
gathering guns and ammo, fishing for armament, braving bullets to pull in
such valuable catches as machine guns, bazookas, M-1's, and .45 automatics.
Miller had his eye on the thicket-line concertina-curl of barbed wire atop
the seawall.
"We need stovepipes," he said. "That'll tear up the barbed wire and set off
any mines in the ground nearby."
"Stovepipes!" Sarge called, and the word was picked up along the line,
up and down the seawall, various voices calling, "Stovepipes!"
"We need Bangers!" "Bangalore torpedoes!"
Then somebody called back, "We're lookin', we're lookin'. ... Where are
those engineers? ... Jackpot! Bangalore torpedoes!"
Elsewhere along the seawall, privates Caparzo and Mellish, joining the
scavenger hunt for weapons, were hungrily eyeing a .30-caliber machine gun
that lay on the sand like a child's discarded toy.
"You run faster than I do," Mellish said.
"You're a smaller target," Caparzo said.
"You're Italian. They might take you for an ally."
"Oh, yeah?"
"Yeah. Plus you kinda look German."
"Shove it. First one there owns the son of a bitch!" And they both broke
cover, racing out to grab the weapon, scrambling in the sand, returning
moments later, holding the weapon in both their arms, grinning at each other
like proud parents mutually cradling a newborn.
Elsewhere along the seawall, Sergeant Horvath had just presented Miller
with a Thompson submachine gun and several spare clips.
"Hot damn," Miller said.
"So you can let 'em know we was here," Sarge said with a nod at the Thompson.
Other wepons -- and men willing to use them -- were gathering on either side
of the captain and sergeant. A private with a flamethrower still strapped
on his back reported to Miller, staying low, as well he should.
"I'm impressed," Miller admitted with a tiny smile. "You brought that all
the way in, from the other side of hell?"
More LCVP's were landing, even now. Waterspouts geysered in the sea and
surf, courtesy of German 88's.
"Not by choice, sir" the boys grinned. He was a slightly goofy-looking kid
with an overbite. "Buckle jammed, and I couldn't get the damn thing off me!"
The boy proved his point by yanking on the strap.
"Don't tell 'em that when they put you up for a medal," Miller advised the
private.
"No, sir."
A pair of sergeants from the 149th Engineer Combat Battalion crawled along
the seawall, staying low, each with a pair of TNT-packed three-foot lengths
of pipe -- bangalore's. When they reached Miller, the captain directed that
the procedure begin. These torpedoes were designed for assembly under fire,
the lengths of tubing inserted into another and another until they formed
a long pole-like pipe that could be edged up on top of the seawall and
threaded through the nest of barbed wire. When the bangalores blew,
it would burst sideways, ripping a passageway in the concertina wire.
That, at least, was the plan.
It took many hands to accomplish this, and Miller knew that if this day, the
invasion, was to succeed after all the failed planning and miscalculations
by the brass, it would be thanks to ragtag teams of common soldiers,
improvising desperately, like these men around him. These kids in khaki
were gearing up, cleaning the sand out of weapons as best they could,
working bolts, checking actions, loading ammo, kissing rosary beads.
He caught a glimpse of Mellish and Caparzo grinning as they oiled the kinks
out of their newly acquired machine gun. But most of them were strangers
to Miller, and he loved them like the two children waiting for him at home.
The stovepipe assembly of TNT was inching toward its mark, edging up
the seawall, nosing into the tangle of barbed wire. Miller watched the
bangalore's progress, riveted, as Wade moved in alongside him, medic's
pack at the ready, the blood wiped from his hands, though his sleeves
were damply black and his palms were stained a deep terrible pink.
"Good to see you, sir," Wade said quietly.
Rock steady, this one.
"Good to be seen," Miller admitted.
"Papa loves his new baby," Beiben was saying, nearby. He was loading a
B.A.R.
One of the engineer sergeants from the 149th gave Miller a thumbs-up:
the bangalore was in position.
"At your discretion, Sergent," Miller told him.
The sergeant pulled the pin on the ignition cap in the final tube, shouted,
"Fire in the hole!"
"Fire in the hole!" Reiben shouted, and the cry was picked up all along
the seawall as soldiers took cover.
The explosion was just another of many on this overcast morning, though it
multiplied with mines it set off. When the smoke and dust cleared, a wide
gap in the barbed-wire barricade provided an exit from this bloody beach.
"We're in business!" Sarge shouted. "Let's get through that hole!"
Miller heaved himself up the seawall and scrambled through the gap, a dozen
men right behind hi, Reiben and Mellish and Caparzo and Wade and, of course,
Sarge among them, sprinting into the beach flat beyond, where waited patches
of high grass and marsh, dotted with scorched areas where the bangalores had
set off land mines. The soggy, swampy terrain slowed the soldiers only
slightly, as they raced toward the steep, eroded slope that promised cover
in its deep, winding furrows.
But the fire of the German machine guns was redirected, to track the
runners and try to stop those coming through that gap in the barbed wire.
Two men went down in the marsh, and another died tangled in barbed wire.
And on the beach side of the firewall, this discouraged other soldiers who
were considering making the run through that hole in the concertina tangle.
The one private said, "Shit, if I'm gonna die, least let me be headin'
uphill," and lunged over, and through the wire. That ignited the remaining
troops. Two more waves of a dozen men or more broke cover to follow the
private's lead in the footsteps of Miller and his men.
By that time, however, Miller and the remains of his platoon and a few other
hearty soldiers were starting up the slope, sticking to the deepest furrows,
which provided natural cover. Of course, the erosion furrows could just as
easily cloister Germans, and surely did. But none had shown themselves thus
far. ...
As the other troops joined them, the machine-gun fire halted, lending an
eerie silence to their efforts. The GIs traversed different winding furrows
of the escarpment, breaking off into little groups slinking through the maze
of natural trenches, leap-frogging positions, keeping low, working their way
uphill. Now and then they would pause to assess a blind turn.
A group of five soldiers in the erosion trench ahead of Reiben was doing
just that; then they looked at each other, exchanged mutual shrugs of
What the hell, and took the turn. Another group was right behind
them, and Reiben, cut off from Miller and the other guys from the platoon,
was bringing up the rear. But before the second group rounded that blind
curve, small-arms fire so dense it sounded like an explosion ripped the
silence to shreds.
Two of the first group that had rounded that corner came scurrying, screaming
back, olive-drabs red-splotched, eyes popping, legs churning, colliding into
the next group, knocking them over like bowling pins. Suddenly everybody
was piling up in the narrow passage, clogging it, creating a bottleneck of
tumbling, fumbling men, trapped among their own flailing arms and legs
as if dancing to the dissonant music of small-arms fire.
This ungodly human traffic jam stopped Reiben in his tracks, and he watched
with a weird sense of detachment as German potato-masher grenades came
cascading from around the corner, arcing through air, four of them, eight,
twelve of the damn things, plummeting down on them like tiny bombs from
tiny planes.
Reiben dove in the opposite direction, hitting the dirt just as the dozen
small explosions collaborated into something terrible and large. Then as
he propped himself up on an elbow, alive, unwounded, a yellow-gray cloud
of dirt and cordite rolled through nd a dreadfull red rain fell,
spattering the trench, and Reiben.
Sicked, frightened, smeared with gore and dirt, he scrambled to his feet
and went back the way he came. Just then a familiar voice reached out to
him, and he followed it, the captain's voice calling, "This way!
This way!"
Miller, spurred by the sounds of gunfire and exploding grenades, was running
up a deep rut with half a dozen soldiers following his confident lead: Sarge
and Mellish and Caparzo among them. A relieved Reiben, taking a fork in the
furrowed pathways, fell behind the pack. Up ahead of Miller were three
privates who rounded a corner and were barely out of view when the twin
thunder of exploding land mines signaled Miller to throw on the brakes.
The captain caught himself with the heel of a palm, digging a crumbly groove
in a dry dirt wall; then he peered around the corner of his gully-like path
and saw the sad, seared remains of two of the soldiers, tossed to either
side, like fender-flung animals along a roadway.
And an equally sad sight tightened Miller's eye: blue-yellow-brown smoke
floating over and around him and his dead buddies, the third GI, eyes wide,
face clenched, stood petrified with the knowledge that he was a human tree
planted in a minefield.
Then came an incongruous sound: whistling. Not the whistling of artillery
shells or mortar shrapnel, but human whistling, as if to summon a prize pet.
The common sound, so eerie in this context, echoed down the furrow, and was
followed by a voice: "Fritz! Fritz!"
A German voice.
Sure enough, a dog came charging through the narrow gully from behind them,
like an apparition froma simpler, kinder time, surprising Miller and his men.
They reflexively grinned at the dog, not even thinking to catch it, as it
bolted right past them, a Rin Tin Tin trailing its leash, eyes bright and
alert, tongue lolling. The animal took a fork away from the furrow where
land mines held their terrified hostage, and Miller glimpsed a gray-coated,
kettle-helmeted form dart from behind a turn in the path to take the
joyfully barking, leaping German Shepard into his arms and pull the
animal into safety, around the corner, out of sight.
Miller was momentarily toughed by this shared humanity: here was a soldier
who loved his dog, like any boy would love his dog.
This rare moment of brotherly contemplation was interrupted by the German
soldier reappearing to aim his rifle and shoot the land-mine-locked GI in
the side of the head. The bullet entered the boy's left ear and traveled
through the brain and sent him tumbling to the ground, where he did not
set off a mine.
Then the German was gonna, the barks of his dog diminishing as master and
mutt retreated to some unknown position.
Smoke drifted lazily bearing the sour fumes of powder and the appalling
stench of singed hair and burned flesh as Miller paused at this fork in the
trench pathways. The execution-like death of the private trapped in the
minefield did not elicit a comment from the captain or the boys bunched up
behind him, a motley group of muddy, bloody GIs that included the remnants
of his platoon. Some things were too terrible to comment upon. perhaps
what was most terrible was the shared knowledge that in the German's place,
they might have done the same.
"We're fucked!" a boy behind him was saying, trying to sound angry but
fright coming through. "The Krauts got all the exits mined!"
The slightly muffled sound of war continued as machine guns from somewhere
above them sprayed the beach, and the occasional 88 shell made the earth
shiver.
Sarge said to Miller, quietly, "It wasn't no picnic gettin' here, sir,
but gettin' out's really gonna be a bitch."
"A son of a bitch is more like it," Miller said, and turned to give his boys
a smile that he hoped didn't look as forced as it felt. "That dog, Fritz,
knew the way out."
Mellish, chewing gum nervously, said, "You think that mutt knows where the
mines are?"
"That hound is German personnel," Miller said matter-of-factly, "and they
got to travel up and down these draws every day, don't they?"
And with that, Miller, the Thompson in his hands poised for mayhem, took off
at a trot up the pathway Fritz had chosen. After the slightest hesitation,
his troops followed after him, and they had gone a good distance up the
inclining trench when their captain raised his hand for them to halt.
The pathway was rising to, and about to empty out into, a gap in the
escarpment, the walls of the trench ending. Though their position was low
essentially placing them at a dead end, the GIs could view across the slope
of thirty feet of hard, dry earth to an outcropping of rocks and dirt.
It was an inviting straightaway, with one exception: the rattle of machine
guns and the popping of small-arms fire blasting down at the beach had
gradually risen in volume, and the poof poof poof of mortars
sounded close by, too. Running across that gap might put Miller and
his men in range, in sight, of the Germans manning those positions.
"We're at a blind angle," Sarge said as the group huddled within the walls of
the trench. "Won't know what we're up against till we poke our heads out."
"Who's got a bayonet?" Millar asked, and one was passed to him. "Who's got
a mirror?"
A small shaving mirror found its way to the captain, who looked back at
Mellish and said, "Say 'ah'."
"Huh?"
"Close enough," Miller said, plucking the wad of chewing gum from the
private's open mouth.
Puzzled eyes were fixed on Miller as he stuck the sticky wad to the tip of
the bayonet blade and stick the little mirror into the gum; the mirror was
wobbly in its perch, but secure enough to do the job, he figured. Then as
his men grinned and nodded around him, the captain eased the bayonet out,
just enough to angle it around and get a view.
A hell of a view, in the shaky little mirror: about twenty yard beyond their
position, and another thirty yards to the left, rose a bluff overlooking the
beach; but it also flanked the gap between their sheltering trench and that
protective outcropping. Roosted there, twenty-some feet above them, were
two two-man machine-gun crews, blasting down with tripod-perched MG-42's at
the beach from their heavily sandbagged emplacements. Two mortar teams were
firing their deadly rockets from the bluff as well, and a handful of infantry
were guarding the position, popping occasional small-arms fire at the beach
below, as if shooting pigeons.
Miller swallowed, and carefully angled his makeshift periscope higher,
hoping he'd seen the extent of it; he hadn't.
Ten yards beyond the machine-gun nest, built into that bluff, squatted a
camouflage-draped, wire-festooned, flat-headed concrete bunker, the long
thick tapering snout of an 88mm cannon jutting from the wide narrow smile
of the bunker's firing port. The big gun belched fire and thunder, shaking
the ground, almost toppling the little bayonet-mounted mirror.
Pulling the mirror back in, Miller reported: "We got a nest on the bluff,
with a pair of Hitler's zippers." Miller was referring to the MG-42's
with their capacity of ripping through 1200 rounds per minute. "Plus
two mortars, and an 88 through an embrasure to the rear of 'em."
"Position?" Sarge asked.
"Add twenty yards, left thirty."
Sarge nodded toward the outcropping. "There's our perfact firing position;
we can hit their flank. But it's no walk in the sunshine."
Miller twitched a non-smile. "Let's get off our dead asses and get these
draws open." He turned to the four GIs huddled nearest him and nodded to
each in turn
He spoke to the other troops gathered in the trench. "When they take off,
we'll cover 'em with suppressing fire. At this angle we're not likely to
hit anything, but it'll distract the bastards, keep 'em busy."
Nods from all around. Reiben patted his new B.A.R., as if soothing it.
Those MG-42's are heavy sons-of-bitches," Miller told the four boys.
The Jerries shouldn't be able to jockey 'em around in time. There's some
infantry up there, so you're gonna get some small arms thrown at you.
Zigzag ... don't bunch up. Weave like a drunk on New Year's ... got it?"
Four young faces looked at him and nodded, two of the boys swallowing.
"Then go!"
Rifles in hand, the quartet of soldiers scrambled up the furrow and
disappeared over the rise, dashing into the open area.
Miller blasted up toward the bluff with the Thompson, firing blindly from
the trench. The others joined in and sent a firestorm in the general
direction of the German position. Small-arms fire returned, intense
volleys, but none of the slugs seemed directed toward the trench where
Miller and the others were shooting.
That could only mean the Germans' lead was raining down on that open area
where the boys had run.
When the shooting stopped, cordite scorching the air, Miller called out,
"Report in!"
Silence.
The captain scrambled up the rise and ducked out for a quick look. The four
sprawled, smoking, blood-soaked bodies of the boys were scattered about the
open area as if they were making snow angels.
Miller dove back, as rifle shots narrowly missed him, turning dirt to dust.
Sarge greeted him with a whisper: "It's a fucking firing squad. You oughta
hand out blindfolds."
Miller whispered harshly back: You got any other ideas for getting the hell
out of here?"
The captain turned and selected four more man, saying, "You're next."
"Captain," Sarge said softly, "they're gonna have those zippers in position
now ..."
Miller didn't acknowledge the remark. To the other troops, he said,
"Let's see if we can get a better angle. ..."
As Miller and his men repositioned themselves in the trench, the second
group of four moved solemnly to the rise of the pathway.
"Go!" Miller shouted.
And the four boys grabbed deep breaths and scurried up the rise, racing out
into the open, even as Miller's Thompson opened up, and Reiben's B.A.R. and
every rifle in that trench, fired upward, blindly, but firing. Jackson had
positioned himself up on the racky wall within the trench to get a shot,
and one of the infantrymen crumbled under the Southern boy's dead aim.
That wasn't enough to quell the river of gunfire the Germans were pouring
down into that open area, and this time, when the firing ceased, and
Miller's cry of "Report!" went unanswered, the captain did not bother
going out to look to see what had occurred.
He knew. He knew.
Miller looked out at the eight men who remained, and his eyes fell on
Reiben's blood-speckled mug. The boy grinned suddenly and said,
"Captain, is this a bad time to put in for my transfer?"
"Not at all," Miller said, managing the barest grin himself.
"I'll meet you on the other side, and we'll start the paperwork."
Then he selected another three boys, as Sarge looked at him with an
expression that stopped short of accusation, but conveyed to Miller
the madness of what they were doing.
This caught Miller short, and he stopped and considered his options for a
moment. Then he said to Reiben and the other boys, "Let's hold up a second
... Jackson!"
The lanky sharpshooter ambled forward. "Yes, sir?"
"You ready to get across?"
"Good a time as any, sir."
"Get ready for my signal," Miller said, and he scrambled up the rise
into the open and just stood there brazenly, presenting a perfect target.
Up on the bluff the nearer of two machine-gun teams reacted as if he'd
goosed them, and began repositioning their bulky weapon on its tripod.
"Go!" Miller hollered.
And Jackson was taking off through the open space just as the machine-gun
was redirected toward Miller, chewing up the ground, stirring dirt clouds.
The captain dove back in the trench, machine-gun rounds ripping the heel
off his boot. In the meantime, a zigzagging Jackson was dodging small-arms
fire as he neared the outcropping of rock and dirt.
Sarge and Reiben had caught the diving captain, dragging him down into the
furrow.
"Your mother would be very upset with you," Sarge said, "if she saw that
kind of behavior."
"I thought you were my mother," Miller managed, breathing hard.
Then Miller called out: "Report!"
Jackson's voice returned: "Yo!"
Miller and Sarge exchanged grins. Others in the trench were smiling, too.
Suddenly machine-gun fire hammered down on them, and they sank down as low
as they could in the furrow, dust and rocks flying, stirred up from the
thunderous machine-gun barrage. Reiben screamed obscenities, and the
others were yelling, too, and it was as if the world had gone mad.
But Miller -- who figured this rapid-fire bullet storm was an expression
of frustration from those pissed-off machine-gunners, at having their fire
drawn away from the gap -- knew that Jackson would not likely succumb to
the madness of the moment.
Right about now, Miller figured, Jackson would be praying. ...
And Jackson, standing behind the hillock of rock and dirt, rifle propped
and angled toward that bluff, doing his bast to tune out the noise and
furry surrounding him, was in fact softly saying, "Be thou not far from me,
O Lord." He was also taking careful aim at one of the German machine
gunners hunkered over an MG-42 tripod. Motion and smoke were blurring
in the crosshairs of Jackson's sharpshooter rifle.
From across the way, the captain's voice came: "Jackson -- do you have a
shot?"
Target steady in his crosshairs, Jackson called back: "Send over a batch!"
And the Southern sharpshooter squeezed the trigger, gently, so gently, and
the rifle crack was lost in the machine-gun fire, which suddenly halted as
the man firing stopped. A bullet had snapped the gunner's head back, as
the bullet sped through his forehead, through his head, punching an exit
out of the back of the steel helmet. The dead gunner's partner, stunned,
was moving the body aside, fumbling as he took over the weapon. ...
Down in the trench, Sarge was saying, "We're in business!"
And three more GIs, Reiben among them, scrambled from the trench and
sprinted like hell. More followed, including Sarge, Mellish, and Caparzo
carrying their heavy .30 caliber machine gun.
At his outcropping position, Jackson was taking aim again, and praying,
"Oh, my strength, haste thee to help me," firing again, sending to hell or
glory the German who'd replaced his dead partner, the Jerry pitching over,
knocking the MG-42 off its tripod. Its chattering halted, the heavy machine
gun tumbled down the bluff, and its barrel caught one of the GIs running
below on the back of the head, dropping him unconscious to the dirt.
Reiben grabbed him and dragged the man behind the outcropping.
From up on the bluff, a German voice rang out: "Die flanke!
Die flanke!"
They were his last words: a classic between-the-eyes shot by Jackson made
it three for three.
"Amen," Jackson said.
With the machine gun down, the German flank was wide open. Everybody picked
up on Miller's wild cry and he and his spitting Thompson led his boys out
from behind the outcropping they'd worked so hard to reach. Then they
charged up the steep but navigable slope.
The other German machine-gun team, who had kept their aim on the beach
throughout this episode, were now desperately, frantically trying to
reposition the bulky weapon on its tripod. They shifted it to their flank,
where the handful of supporting infantry was taking position, and mortar
teams were scattering for weapons.
Miller was yelling, "Pour it in there, goddamn it! Pour it on!"
Two thirds of the way up the slope, Caparzo and Mellish were able to slam
their machine gun down and open fire, raking shrieking German off their feet.
Reiben was at the top already, advancing toward the machine-gun nest where
that gun was not yet repositioned, training the deadly force of his B.A.R.
on them, blowing huge holes through the sandbags and only slightly smaller
ones into the pair of Germans who'd been manning the gun. Both flopped,
dead, one onto the MG-42, the other across the ruptured sandbags, blood
and sand seeping.
The battle was fierce and short. Miller and his boys swarmed the German
position, and while a few GIs fell, every one of the Jerries went down.
That kid who'd made it to shore with a flamethrower had the last word,
spraying the area with fire, incinerating the enemy, bullets on cartridge
belts on burning bodies exploding like firecrackers. Orange and blue
flames licked the sky, and thick black curls of smoke accompanied them.
"Bunker!" Miller shouted.
The GIs pressed on, racing for the bunker, from which erupted scattered
rifle and machine-gun fire, angling through its firing port. Two boys went
down, but the rest were too fast, coming in too low, slamming themselves
against the cement below the port and the shaft of the 88 muzzle.
"Grenades," Miller said, and pins were popped, pineapples lobbed over their
heads, pitched right through the horizontal port, and the boys ducked and
covered as multiple blasts soon followed, and dark smoke streamed out like
fleeing ghosts.
"Let 'em have it!" Miller shouted, getting onto his feet, his boys following
his example as he emptied his Thompson through that port, which didn't seem
like a smile at all now. The GIs pounded rifle and even handgun fire through
the concrete mouth into that fucking bunker, just to make goddamn good and
sure. ...
The aftermath was a dazed fever dream, as the living moved among the dead,
the terror and adrenaline wearing off into numbed aftershock. The only one
who didn't seem to be sleepwalking was Wade, his medic duties at the fore
now; he was hurrying to the aid of wounded men, summoned by moans and cries.
Some of the boys helped him out.
Limping due not to a wound but his shot-off heel, Miller, Thompson in hand,
stumbled across the charred bluff, the stink of burned hair and flesh and
gunpowder no longer bothering him -- he was alive. He wasn't happy; more
like stunned. He had never expected to make it off that goddamn beach.
That he had made it this far was more than he, or any of his men, had
expected.
This shared feeling went unremarked upon. No need to express the obvious.
The words didn't exist, anyway. They were here, they were alive; that was
all. That was enough.
Sarge was kneeling to scoop up some dirt and shovel a handful into a small
metal container, with a white slash of tape across it, inscribed in smeary
blue ink, "France". Miller smiled to himself as he watched Horvath screw
the tin lid back on, and stuff it back into his pack where the captain knew
two other, already earth-filled tin cans waited: one marked "Africa", the
other "Italy".
Reiben, walking in circles, B.A.R. hanging, was saying, "I'm not dead,"
over and over again, softly, a shell-shocked mantra.
Mellish had discovered a souvenir. He rose from where he had found a knife
that had fallen to the ground. Its blade was wicked, its handle inscribed
with a swastika.
"Hitler Youth knife," Miller informed him.
Mellish smirked. "Now it's a Shabbat challah cutter."
"What," Caparzo said, "you gonna circumcise some German with that thing?"
"I said a bread knife, shithead," Mellish said, tucking it into his belt.
"Not that that's a bad idea. ..."
"My God," Sarge said softly. Almost prayerfully.
Miller joined the sergeant, who was standing at the edge of the bluff
looking out on the beach.
"Hell of a view," Sarge said.
On the horizon an endless row of Allied ships watched silently as landing
craft after landing craft weaved through carnage and obstacles, headin
scampering through the surf, streaming onto the sands, seeking cover behind
dragon's teeth, running for the safety of the seawall through an obstacle
course of flames, smoke, and the scattered refuse of the fallen. Along the
shoreline dead Americans floated, bumping each other, near the shattered,
burning hulks of wrecked landing craft. Tanks and bulldozers slept through
it all, on their sides, snoring smoke and flame. Shells continued to burst,
in the water, on shore, geysers of water, showers of dirt and sand and stone.
Yet still the American soldiers came. Nothing stopping them. Advancing.
It was a terrible landscape of destruction and death. And a magnificant
testimony to the resolve of those fighting and dying here.
"Hell of a view," Miller agreed.
The tide had come way in, and -- though from his vantage point, Miller
couldn't tell -- had gentled, breaking easily over the debris all along
the scorched, disrupted beach. Helmets, smashed radios, gas masks, mine
detectors, reels of wire, weapons of all stripe -- rifles and machine guns
and bazookas -- and bodies, so many bodies, lay on the sand, the driftwood
of battle carried in and out with each wave. Stenciled on the backpack of
just another one of the many dead soldiers sunning on this beach was a last
name: RYAN.
But, of course, from where he stood, Miller couldn't see that.
Within the limestone walls of the sprawling, fortresslike War Department
building -- a year-and-a-half old, the five-sided edifice was the largest
office building in the world -- another battalion fought the war. The
rat-ta-tat-tat was not that of machine guns, however, but typewriters,
and foxholes were replaced by desks, as row upon row of somber clerks
served their country, typing the words "We regret to inform you
... killed in action ... heroic service ..."
In its way this duty was as harrowing as combat. These men and women
-- middle-aged and older, most of them, many with sons in the service,
with daughters married to boys who were serving -- were creating telegrams
that would break the hearts of mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters,
sons and daughters, all around forty-eight states.
But typing the same words again and again can numb the senses. Still,
no one in this vast chamber of an office took the work lightly, or became
indifferent to the paperwork of death; no small talk or laughter, even the
nervous variety, here.
And when Lucy Freemont -- forty-two, a local girl, brunette, married,
her husband overseas, a Navy ensign -- placed a sheet of paper atop the
ever-growing pile in her "OUT" box, and moved onto the next file, the name
"RYAN" did not at first penetrate her boredom. She had scrolled a fresh
sheet of paper in her typewriter before a second word -- "IOWA" --
registered upon her, and a frown tightened her sad expression into
something troubled.
The terrible tedium was suddenly broken, as Lucy rustled and ruffled through
the stack of papers in that "OUT" box, looking for a telegram she'd typed up
a little more than an hour ago. Then she flipped through the manila-folder
files and double-checked. The eyes of her coworkers followed her as she
rose quickly from her desk and hurried from the typing pool.
From Lucy Freemont to the lieutenant supervising her, and to his supervising
captain, the disturbing news was passed. The reaction of the female civilian
clerk was mirrored by the Army men, who were visibly shaken by what she had
discovered.
Lucy was out of the picture by the time Captain John McRae -- twenty-eight,
Peoria, Illinois, clear-eyed, square-jawed -- carried the news to the next
link on the chain of command.
Colonel Richard Wilson, who had lost an arm in Sicily, was typical of
General George Marshall's habit of appointing wounded officers to his staff.
The colonel oversaw a bustling war room whose walls were papered in maps
of Normandy and whose desks were spread with complex deployment charts.
Coffee and cigarettes were the fuel of the military and civilian aides
and secretaries scurrying around.
Colonel Wilson, forty-seven, Atlanta, Georgia, had the grizzled look of a
combat veteran, though his uniform with its pinned-up left sleeve and chest
full of ribbons looked crisp, particularly considering its wearer hadn't
slept for a day and a half. He was pouring himself the latest of an endless
succession of cups of coffee when Captain McRae approached him.
"Colonel," the captain said, "something's come up you should know about."
Wilson, standing near a map on the wall, pins indicating troop positions,
sipped his coffee, noting the three sheets of paper the captain was holding
in two hands, like notes for a speech he was about to make.
"Well, what is it, Captain?"
"Better read for yourself, sir."
The captain handed him two of the three sheets. Wilson glanced at them,
and the words "RYAN" and "IOWA" were on both of them. He sat at the nearest
desk as the captain hovered, a third sheet ominously in hand.
"These two men died in Normandy," McRay said, leaning in. "One at Omaha
Beach, the other at Utah."
"I can see that," Wilson said, reading the death notifications. "Thomas
Ryan. Peter Ryan. Brothers?"
"Yes sir. And this man ..." He handed Wilson the third sheet of paper.
"... This man was killed last week in New Guinea."
"Daniel Ryan." the colonel said. That word "IOWA" again.
"My God ... brothers? Three brothers, all killed in action?"
"Yes, sir. And I've just learned that this afternoon their mother will be
receiving all three telegrams."
Color drained from the colonel's face. "Jesus," he said. It was almost
a shout.
The bustling in the room stopped; the aides, the secretaries, froze at the
colonel's uncharacteristic outburst.
"Jesus," Wilson said again, more softly now.
"There's a fourth brother in Normandy, sir."
Wilson frowned. "I don't see a fourth death notification. ..."
"No. At least not yet, sir. The fourth brother, James, he's the youngest,
sir -- parachuted in with the 101st Airborne, night before the invasion."
"Where the hell is he now?"
"We don't know, sir. Somewhere in Normandy, presumably."
"Alive?"
"We don't know that, either, sir."
Wilson covered his eyes with his hand, leaning on his elbow. Whether he was
thinking or praying, his team around him couldn't say; but they provided him
with the respectful silence he required.
When he noticed this, it embarrassed him, and he barked, "Get back to work,"
rose from the desk, nodded curtly to McRae, saying, "Come with me."
As the colonel and captain in Washington, D.C., strode from the war room,
a black government sedan was tooling along a dirt road in Mansfield County,
Iowa, in the rich farm country outside Peyton. Dust stirred as the sedan
moved through a corridor of ripening corn, endlessly green in buttery
sunlight. The black sedan -- out of place in this all-American landscape,
a hearse at a county fair -- turned at the big metal mailbox painted with
the name RYAN down a lane leading to a white farmhouse and a red barn and a
green windbreak, on a manicured yard that was an island in a cornfield ocean.
Kids grew up here -- boys. The evidence still remained: a tire swing in the
yard, a bushel basket nailed high on the side of the barn over a hard-dirt
basketball court. Those boys had no doubt sat in the porch swing now and
then. It was empty now -- though the wind was moving it, gently, as if
two invisible young lovers were sitting there, spooning.
In the window of the farmhouse was the proudly displayed flag of blue stars
-- four of them, one for every member of the family in the armed services.
The mother of the four boys, Margaret, sixty, stepped onto the porch,
her blue and white calico dress lifting gently in the wind's whisper.
Her husband, William, was in town buying supplies; she was alone on
the farm. Just how alone, she would soon know.
She had been smooth and pretty as a girl, but a life of hard work on
this farm, and raising four boys into men, had grooved her face handsome.
The sound of the approaching car had summoned her from her cornbread batter,
and she wiped her hands on her apron as she wathed the dust rising behind
the black sedan.
Seeing that sedan approach her house made her uneasy, but this lane was
shared by four farms. They might not be stopping here.
But they did, and as the three men stepped somberly from the car -- one
of them in clerical collar -- she collapsed against a post of the porch,
hugging it as if it were a small child. She bagan to cry, knowing that she
had lost one of her boys, thinking of how hard her husband would take this,
never imagining the terrible news could be worse. Far worse.
By this time, half a country away, in the Pentagon, the Army Chief of Staff,
General Marshall, was meeting with Colonel Wilson and the general's aide,
Colonel Louis Dye.
Wilson stood to one side, in the wood-paneled, spartanly appointed office
of the general, his neat-as-a-pin desk flanked by American and District
of Columbia flags. The general and the colonel were poised at a nearby
conference table, on their feet, reading the files on the Ryan brothers.
General Marshall, a tall, fit, weathered sixty-four, dark close-set eyes
and a thin line of a mouth highlighting a ruddy, unsymmetrical, rather
homely face, softly said, "Goddamn it."
He tossed the file on the conference table.
"Iowa again," he muttered. Then he demanded: "How did we let this happen,
after the Sullivans?"
The question seemed to have been lobbed the captain's way, so McRae said,
"Originally, all four of them were in the same company in the 29th Division,
but we split them up after the Sullivans."
The five Sullivan brothers of Waterloo, Iowa, had all served on the same
ship, the Juneau, torpedoed at Guadalcanal in November, 1942.
The tragedy had alarmed and even outraged the public.
"Sir," Colonel Dye offered, "It's not even official Army policy to separate
or protect brothers in any way. It's the Navy who put that rule into motion,
and besides, as I say, these Ryans weren't serving together. ..."
"Would you like to be the one who informs Surles of this?" Marshall snapped.
Brigadier General Alexander Surles headed up the War Department Bureau of
Public Relations.
"Not particularly, sir," Dye admitted.
"Can't you hear him?" Marshall asked dryly. "'The public's going to think
the armed services declared open season on Iowa boys!' ... Any contact with
fourth brother ... what's the boy's name?"
"James," Wilson said. "No sir. He was dropped about fifteen miles inland,
near Neuville."
The thin line of Marshall's mouth twitched. "And even now that's deep
behind German lines, I take it?"
Yes, sir."
"We don't know that for sure, sir," Dye said, stepping forward. First
reports from Ike's guys at the SHAEF said the 101st got scattered to hell
and gone." The colonel shrugged and spread his hands. "Mis-drops all
over Normandy. We had a high casualty rate, after all. He may not even
have survived the jump. Even then, he's probably KIA."
Marshall said nothing; his homely face was set into a grave mask. He moved
to his desk and flipped the intercom switch. "Captain Newsome, the Bixby
file, please."
"Yes, General," a female replied from the intercom.
"Private Ryan could be anywhere, sir," Dye picked up again. "If we send
a patrol flat-hatting around, through swarms of German reinforcements, all
along our axis of advance ... we'll be sending out death notifications to
all of their mothers."
Marshall shook his head, seemed to sigh but no sound came out.
A businesslike, rather severely attractive dark-blond WAC entered: Captain
Florence J. Newsome, Marshall's personal secretary. She handed him a manila
folder, he thanked her, and she exited.
The general moved slowly to his desk, got behind it, and withdrew a worn
sheet of paper from the folder. "I have a letter here, written some time
ago, to a Mrs. Bixby in Boston ... if you'll bear with me. ..."
The colonel and the captain exchanged glances -- a soldier would always
"bear with" a general -- as Marshall put on his reading glasses.
"'Dear Madam,'" he read. "'I have been shown in the files of the War
Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts that you
are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle.
I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt
to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot
refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the
thanks of the Republic they died to save.'"
Marshall put the well-worn piece of paper down on his desk, atop the folder.
But he was not finished: merely finished reading.
"'I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your
bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost,
and the solemn pride that must be yours, to have laid so costly a sacrifice
upon the altar of Freedom.' And it is signed: 'Yours very sincerely and
respectfully, Abraham Lincoln.'"
The captain and the colonel exchanged another glance; both were moved,
deeply so, but neither was surprised by Marshall's feeling on this subject.
This was a general who had refused to accept medals for himself for service
on the home from while boys were shedding blood overseas.
The soft contours of the general's uncomely features hardened -- the eyes
glittered with resolve.
"If that boy is alive," Marshall said, "we're going to send somebody to
find him ... and get him the hell out of there."
That was just what Captain McRae had been hoping to hear; and, judging by
the faint smile Dye was wearing, McRae suspected that the colonel, for all
his attempts to discourage Marshall, felt exactly the same.
As a convoy of jeeps, tanks and other vehicles rumbled along nearby, Captain
John Miller sat with the remnants of his platoon -- privates Reiben, Caparzo,
Mellish, and company medic Wade -- within the scooped-out shelter of an
88-shell hole in a field of such craters, enjoying a few moments of R & R
after a C-ration lunch. Their khaki green almost blending with the caked
brown of the crater, Miller's men looked older to their captain, their
rumpled uniforms, several days growth of beard, and half-lidded eyes telling
a story of coming to age the hard way. Only Seageant Horvath had carried
this look into combat with him; and even he seemed older now. Or at least,
more weary.
"You think it's true," Reiben wintered aloud, lanky frame sparked out,
holding his B.A.R. straight up like a flagpole, "that the Japs pull out
your toenails with pliers, to make you talk?"
"Wrong theater," Sarge said.
"I'm just thinkin'," Reiben said, "maybe we're lucky, not being in the
Pacific. I hear stories about bamboo shoots and a guy's dick I wouldn't
wanna repeat in such tender company."
Mellish, the youngest among them, took that as an insult and blustered,
"Hey, they don't have a shoot long enough for me to even feel it."
That made everybody laugh, though muffled explosions, at some distance,
cut the laughter off abruptly, the war reminding them it would be waiting
for them after their breather.
"Still," Reiben mused, "this is pure fucking torture, sitin' here,
six measly miles from Caen."
"What's in Caen that's such a big hairy deal?" Sarge asked, lighting up
a Lucky.
"Jesus, Sarge," Reiben said, grinning, "don't you even know what Caen's
famous for?"
"Frog nuts a la mode?"
Reiben shook his head as if pitying his sergeant. "It's hard on a cultured
guy like me, keepin' such unrefined company.
"We were 'tender' company a minute ago," Caparzo said, lighting up his own
smoke, a Chesterfield.
Reiben chose his words carefully, painting a picture. "Caen, in historic
Normandy, is noted for the manufacture, the ... fabricatication ... of"
-- the private's eyebrows flicked up and down -- "lingerie."
"Yeah?" Sarge said, and farted with his lips. "So?"
"Imagine some little French number, a curvy Caen cutie pie" -- Reiben traced
imaginary curves in the air with one hand -- "raven-black hair, blue eyes,
little beauty mark near red-rouged lips. ... After she's been spendin' all
day, every day, sewing cream-colored, sheer-body nighties with gathered
empire waists and silk cups, with gentle uplift." He demonstrated with a
cupped hand. "What the hell you think she's gonna wear at night?"
"Dr. Denton's?" Sarge asked.
Reiben frowned. "Sarge, you got no romance."
"Hey," Sarge said defensively, "she works around the stuff all day.
It's a busman's holiday."
"On the other hand," Mellish said, caught up in Reiben's word rhapsody,
"maybe she gets a discount."
"Reiben," Miller said, genuinely interested, Thompson submachine gun in his
lap, "what the hell makes you such a lingerie authority?"
Pride perked the private; beneath the stubble of beard and rumpled ODs,
an American kid still dwelled. "Family business, sir. Lingerie's my life.
My mother's got a shop in Brooklyn. Grew up around it. From the time
I could crawl, I knew about Caen lingerie. Best there is, lotta demand --
men buyin' for their wives and/or girlfriends, females for their fella. ..."
"Case you haven't heard, there's a war on," Miller said. "I kinda doubt
they're still makin' lingerie down the road there."
"Oh, Captain," Reiben said, shaking his head no, a thousand times, no,
"they'll always make lingerie in Caen. It's one of the three basic needs
of man -- food, shelter, unmentionables."
The rest of the platoon was considering that proposition, and finding
nothing in it to argue with, when Miller noticed a runner who seemed to
be heading their way. The captain nodded to Caparzo to meet the runner
and retrieve the message. Caparzo nodded and clambered out of the crater.
"If things hadn't been so foobar on the beach," Reiben said,
"we'd probably be in Caen right now, hip deep in glamour pusses and silk."
He smirked humorlessly, shook his head. "I mean, what the hell Einstein
was it came up with this plan? Send a thousand guys fresh off the base
into a fuckin' hell storm?"
"You're Rangers," Miller said flatly. "Elite trained troops."
"Yeah, sure," Mellish said. "No offense, sir, but would they send a guy
from the farm league to play the fifth game of the World Series?"
"If the draft board took the first team away," Sarge said, "you bet your
ass."
"Back in the States and across the Channel," Mellish continued, "they told
us what it was supposed to be like, and we talked about it and everything,
and we trained our asses off, simulations and that shit. But the second
I jumped off that Higgins boat, I thought, fuck a duck! Nothin' coulda
prepared me for this!"
A distant explosion added a second exclamation point to Mellish's sentence.
This, and his words, provided food for thought for the men in the shell
crater.
Finally the medic, Wade, said, "Big show like that, they can't prepare you
for." He shrugged. "Maybe they figure if you're surprised enough, the fear
won't kick in so bad."
"Maybe," Mellish said. "But if that was the plan, it didn't work for shit."
Miller asked, "Hey, Reiben, tell me -- if you had to hit bloody Omaha Beach
again, how d'you think you'd react the second time around?"
Reiben didn't miss a beat. "By shooting myself before I ever got off that
goddamn boat."
"Let me know if you need any help," Sarge said, good-naturedly, and evertbody
laughed a little. But the laughter was followed by solemn thoughtful nods
from men who knew what Reiben meant.
Caparzo hopped into the crater. "Captain," he said, "Battalion C.O. wants
you back in the rear area in a hurry."
"Maybe the war's over," Miller said, and he climbed out of the hole.
"Be sure to let us know who won," Sarge said, a wry half-smile dimpling his
stubby cheek.
Field headquarters, above the beach, was a dizzying swirl of vehicle and
personnel and kicked-up dust, spurred by the rumble of explosions that
weren't next door, but weren't far away, either. Miller wove through men
and jeeps, making his way across ground pocked with the aftermath of shell
fire from weapons of every size. He was heading to a sprawling, heavily
damaged concrete bunker that the Americans had taken over as their HQ.
Within, the remnants of the former occupants -- debris and abandoned
equipment, twisted rebar, cement fragments from pebble to slab, a few
dented German helmets, even a tattered Nazi flag -- had been shoved over
and unceremoniously piled to one side. Otherwise, the bunker complex
had been tidied up, providing an orderly contrast to the chaos outside.
Miller was met by a surprisingly crisp-looking major of about forty,
who the captain saluted, saying, "Miller, C Company, Second Rangers,
reporting as ordered, sir."
"Go on in, Captain," the major said, gesturing, and Miller moved deeper into
the complex.
Perhaps a dozen officers were bustling within the bunker, and at least as
many aides, runners, and radiomen, all of them in uniforms that, while not
pristine, maintained a trouser crease, at least. Within this proper
military setting, the captain stuck out like the dirty, unshaven,
blood-spattered sore thumb he was, but his presence brought only
respectful nods and the occasional combat-casual salute.
Seated at a small scarred wooden table, talking on a field phone, was
Lieutenant Colonel Walter Anderson, footy-two, Denver, Colorado, the
commanding officer of the Second Ranger Battalion. Slender, his narrow
face grooved with character, the C.O. acknowledged Miller with a nod,
then motioned with a traffic-cop palm, for him to wait.
"We expected third-two tanks to float to the beach," Anderson was saying
into the phone. "Twenty-seven went underwater. ... I understand your
problem, but if we don't get those dual drive Shermans onto the beach by
oh-six-hundred, we're gonna have an entire division at Carentan with its
pants down around its ankles and a target painted on its ass."
A steaming cup of coffee and a half-eaten sandwich were on the small table.
Anderson ignored them.
"All right," Anderson concluded curtly, "let me know when." He slammed the
field phone into the hook and spoke to a passing aide: "Hold Baker Company
up at Vierville till we get some armor up to them."
"Yes, sir," the aide said, and scurried off.
Anderson rose and strode to a large map pinned to the concrete wall,
gesturing for Miller to join him, which the captain did.
"Airborne was supposed to open a door for the rest of us," the lieutenant
colonel said, shaking his head as his eyes searched the map. "Instead
they mis-drop, scatter all their damn sticks to the wind. ... What's your
situation, John?"
"Sector four is secured," Miller said. His manner was quick, methodical.
"We took out the 88's here, here and here." And he pointed to the spots on
the map. "Unfortunately, this was just after they'd nailed four Shermans
and some trucks." He pointed to another area. "Your map indicates two
minefields, but it's actually one big one."
"How did you determine that?"
"By trying to go between them."
This was Miller's way of telling his C.O. that he had taken casualties due,
in part, to faulty intelligence.
"It's a mixed, high-density field," Miller reported, coolly, almost coldly.
"Sprengmine 44's, Schumine 42's, Pot Mines, the A200's, and a few of those
little wooden sons of bitches that out detectors can't pick up on."
Miller pointed to another section of the map. "They also planted some big
mushrooms in the road for tanks, Tellermine 43's, I'd say, from here all
the way to the edge of the village."
"You marked them?"
"Yes, and called for engineers."
Resistance?"
"Mainly pocket actions. I had higher support expectations. No counterfire,
though." He pointed to yet another area of the map. "We encountered an
understrength company with the artillery ... Wehrmacht, 346th Infantry,
von Luck Kampfgruppe."
"Prisoners?"
"Twenty-three. Turned 'em over to division MPs from the 29th."
Well done. Our casualties?"
"Thirty-five dead. Wounded, times two, sir."
Everyone in the room had heard this, but no one looked Miller's way.
Only the silence that draped the bunker indicated the horror and respect
shared within these concrete walls.
"Jesus," the C.O. said finally.
"The Jerries didn't want to give up those 88's, sir," Miller said
matter-of-factly.
Anderson's mouth twitched in a non-smile. "It was a tough, thankless
assignment. That's why I picked you for it."
"Yes, sir."
"And I have another on for you."
Sir?"
"It's another beauty, John." Anderson shook his head, laughed a little;
there wasn't much humor in it. "This one's straight from the top."
Miller felt as if he'd been struck a blow in the pit of the stomach.
Eisenhower, sir?"
"Marshall," Anderson nodded to the little table. "Find a chair,
get yourself some coffee. I'm to give you all the background. ..."
When Miller trooped back into the crater field, a little less than an hour
later, he was greeted by Sergeant Horvath, with a simple one-word question:
"Caen?"
"Not hardly. We're taking a squad up to Neuville on a mission."
Sarge pushed his helmet back, exposing his frowning forehead. "A captain
leading a squad? What the hell kinda mission can that be?"
Miller grunted a laugh, smiled half a smile. "A public relations mission,
Sergeant."
"What the hell ...?"
"Some private in the Hundred-and-First ... three brothers bought the farm,
and little brother a ticket home."
"I'll be damned. Why Neuville?"
"That's where the brass thinks he's landed. He's up there somewhere,
one of those poor misbegotten mis-dropped bastards."
Sarge blew some air out. "This ain't gonna be easy, tryin' to find one lone
soldier in the middle of this big goddamn war. Findin' a fuckin' needle in
a haystack."
"A haystack of needles," Miller said glumly.
Sarge nodded his head toward the crater, where the platoon's remnants still
lounged. "What about Charlie Company?"
"I get the pick of the litter. Rest get folded into Baker."
Sarge's eye popped, his jaw dropped. "Jesus Christ, they took away your
company for this?"
"First of all, it's not my company, it's the Army's. ... The C.O. reminded
me of that, in case I forget. Second of all, there's not that many of us
left. Anyway, I want Reiben on B.A.R., Jackson, Wade, of course, Caparzo,
Beasley ..."
Beasley bought it."
"Shit. Okay, that kid Mellish. We got anybody that speaks French?"
"Reiben is fluent in lingerie. Other than that, not that I know of."
"Talbot, then. His accent is for shit, but he knows his stuff."
Sarge shook his head. "Gone. This morning."
"Damn." Miller sighed. "I'll go see if I can find another victim.
A French-speaking one. ... Round up the rest, meet me at Battalion
Motor Pool, on the beach."
"Yes, sir."
Above the beach a short distance, in the midst of a staging area, rose the
clean taut lines of a tent, a beacon of order in the brouhaha of roaring
vehicles and babbling GIs. Moving slowly but steadily, as unnoticed as
a ghost, Miller wove through this movement of men and machines, skirting
as well stacks of supplies and heaps of equipment. He entered the tent,
which housed that contradiction of terms, military intelligence.
At three tables were three corporals, huddled over maps like bookworms
boning up for the big test. It was tedious, precise work, gridding maps,
covering them in plastic; but it was not terribly dangerous, unless
a stray shell should find them.
"I'm looking for Corporal Upham," Miller announced.
One of the boys raised his eyes from his map: slender, rather baby-faced,
his eyes were gentle, thoughtful, and gray behind thick glasses. They
refocused as he looked at Miller. A distant explosion -- very distant --
was enough to make him jump.
"Sir," he said, "I'm Upham."
"I understand you speak French and German."
"Yes, sir," said Corporal Tim Upham, twenty-four, Boston, Massachusetts.
Miller came closer. "How's you accent?"
Upham pushed at the bridge of his glasses, which were slipping down his
unsubstantial nose. "A slight one in French, My German is clean, with
a touch of the Bavarian."
"Good. I'm Captain Miller. You've been reassigned to me. Get your gear."
"Sir?"
"We're going to Neuville."
Upham smiled nervously and gestured back to his map, spead out like
a tablecloth. "Uh, sir, there are Germans at Neuville."
"That's my understanding."
"Quite a few of them, is my understanding."
Miller glowered at the kid. "Wouldn't you expect to find Germans, behind
enemy lines, Corporal?"
Upham motioned to himself with both hands. "Sir, I've never been in combat.
I'm afraid I'd be a liability to you, sir. I'm a mapmaker. I translate."
"I need a translator."
"You do?"
"Both of mine were killed."
Upham, who was pale to begin with, whitened further. "Sir, I haven't fired
a rifle since basic training. ..."
"It's just like riding a bicycle -- you never forget."
"I never learned how to ride one of those, either. Sir ..."
"Where's your gear stowed?"
"I'll, uh ... I'll get it, sir."
"Good."
"Sir?"
"What?"
"Can I bring my typewriter?"
"Your typewriter?"
"I'm writing a book, and I ..."
Miller just looked at him. Was he kidding?
The nervous smile again. "Well, then .. how 'bout a pencil?"
Miller made a small "C" of his thumb and forefinger. "A little one,"
he said.
Upham nodded sickly, and turned to go retrieve his gear.
"Look at the bright side, son," Miller told the boy's back. "Live through
it, it's research. You'll have some good stories to tell."
Upham just looked at him. Was he kidding?
"Go, go," Miller said, shooing him off.
The other two corporals, hunkered over their maps, wore faint smiles of
relief. Miller sighed and went back out into the war.
The dead and wounded were long gone, the wreckage cleared, Omaha Beach
a vast tableau of military history in the making. Barrage baloons hovered
over the sloping sand and its swarming troops and mountain range of stacked
material. Just offshore, a horde of bustling engineers were assembling
the sections of a massive Mulberry harbor, towed across the Channel in
treacherous weather. Ships' cranes lowered brimming cargo nets into
waiting DUKWs, and tanks and bulldozers began their cumbersome crawl off
the sand. On the horizon of waters that looked blue now, not gray, the
thousands of disparate ships comprising the Allied Armada kept watch as
explosions inland provided a rumbling reminder, for all the stunning scope
of the invasion, of a campaign not yet won.
Streams of vehicles wound up on sand dunes, moving off the beach, and among
them was a jeep crammed with GIs: Captain Miller (riding shotgun, navigating)
and his squad of seven -- Sergeant Horvath driving, Corporal Upham between
the sergeant and captain, and in back, sardines, the medic Wade and privates
Reiben, Caparzo, Jackson, and Mellish. Speeding along, weaving around the
various other vehicles and slogging-along advancing infantrymen, the jeep
of GIs seemed to be leaving the bulk of the American Army behind.
Soon they were tooling down a hard-packed dirt road, stirring dust, bouncing
along through sun-dappled, lushly green countryside broken up periodically
by the occasional quaint stone farmhouse. This scenic route was grotesquely
littered with the roadside refuse of war: twisted, burning vehicles, cars,
trucks, wagons, German and American alike, abandoned equipment, and bodies
carefully laid out and cloaked with mattress covers. Occasionally a dead
animal, a horse or cow with spilled entrails, added to the stench of death
-- singed hair, burned flesh, vacated bowels -- that wafted on the gentle
breeze riffling roadside foliage.
Bespectacled Corporal Upham was taking this in with eyes bulging in an
ashen, nostril-flared face, as he sat cradling a pristine M-1, nestled
between Sarge and the captain, who ignored both the glorious and grotesque
aspects of the scenery in favor of the map he was unfolding.
From the cramped backseat, where soldiers seasoned by bloody Omaha Beach
were taking in the view calmly, came Reiben's voice: "Captain, would a
question be out of line?"
"Depends on the question."
"Where are you plannin' to put Private Ryan, sir? I mean, this buggy
doesn't have a rumble seat."
Miller, eyes serching the map, didn't reply.
"I mean, sir, it's just that it's kind of crowded back here."
Miller unfolded more of the map, eyes narrowing.
"I was just wondering," Reiben continued, "if maybe you're expecting to have
more room on the way back."
Miller gestured to the left at a fork in the road ahead.
Sarge, following the captain's directions, asked, "We in radio contact with
anybody up there?"
"Most of our radios are lost or busted," Miller said. "Somebody fucked up
and sent the wrong crystals for the ones we do have left. The few that work
are gettin' jammed by German signals. We're goin' in blind."
"Hell of a mission. Regular walk in the park."
"Yep. Hell of a mission."
Upham cleared his throat. "So, uh, you're all Rangers?"
Reiben, Jackson, and Caparzo glanced toward the front seat as if an insect
had landed there and they wondered if it were worth swatting. Wade was
watching the countryside glide by. The debris of war was easing as they
moved deeper inland.
"I'm Upham," Upham said cheerfully, glancing back, offering a hand that
nobody shook. "That's Corporal Upham ... but you don't have to call me
that. I know you don't stand on formality in combat."
Npbody said anything.
"I mean," Upham said, pushing his glasses up his nose, nervously smiling,
"I realize all of that, uh, military etiquette kinda breaks down in battle.
..."
Mellish fixed a ferrety gaze upon the new meat. "There's only one reason
you're along for this ride, Upham."
"Yes. To Translate."
"No. As food, in case we get lost, or get bored with K-rations."
"Amen," Jackson said, his sharpshooter's rifle held protectively to him,
like a child he was sheltering.
"Nobody's eating the corporal," Miller interjected absently, eyes still
slowly scanning the map. "Violation of the Geneva Convention."
"Even the Germans won't do that, Corporal," Sarge reassured Upham, taking
his eyes off the road, despite his alarming speed. "Like the man said,
they can kill you but they can't eat you. It's against the law."
"Besides," Miller said, "Upham here speaks French, and his German has
a touch of the Bavarian."
The men in the backseat shrugged and looked away. Upham withdrew into
himself, like a turtle into its shell. They jostled along, occasionally
hitting a rut and bouncing. After a while Caparzo leaned forward.
"Captain, where's this Ryan from, anyway?"
"Iowa, Private Caparzo. The great Middle West."
"Iowa?" Reiben echoed caustically. "Oh. well, that's different.
Who wouldn't mind riskin' his ass to save some fuckin' farmer? The world
couldn't get along wuth one less sodbuster, it's not like it's rainin'
fuckin' sodbusters back home or anything. Western civilization would cease."
"You know Gleason, in Baker Company?" Caparzo asked Reiben.
"Yeah, I know the asshole."
"Asshole is right. Always picking fights, when he isn't pickin' his nose."
"Gleason, who spits on the mess hall floor?" Mellish asked.
"That Gleason?"
"Gleason," Jackson asked, "who don't go to chapel?"
"That's the shitbird," Caparzo confirmed. "I'm pretty fuckin' sure
he's from Iowa."
"We're not saving Private Gleason," Miller said. He hesitated, as if
caught up in a moment of soul-searching. "I'm going to tell you all
something you're not supposed to know."
All eyes fell on Miller -- even Sarge's, which was disconcerting considering
they were flying along the rutted dirt road, which they seemed to have to
themselves now. The thunder of explosions continued -- not as distant.
"I got a look at Ryan's service record," Miller said, "which is exemplary."
"That changes everything," Reiben said.
"But," Miller continued, "it also included his high school report cards
-- he got an A-plus in civics and won the school's Good Citizenship Award
... two years in a row. Now -- isn't that worth risking your asses over?
Upham clearly didn't know what to make of this dry sarcasm, but Reiben
played along.
"Was he an Eagle Scout, sir," the private asked.
"Youngest in the history of the state of Iowa. Forty-eight merit badges."
"Jack Armstrong, all-American boy," Reiben said. "That's who we're
rescuing."
"Pretty much."
"Well, you're sacrificing Beethoven to do it."
Mellish couldn't follow that; neither could anyone else in the jeep,
except Reiben himself, who explained, "See, it's like I'm Beethoven."
"You couldn't carry a tune in your helmet," Caparzo said.
Reiben gestured with one hand, as if directing an orchestra clumsily.
Beethoven was the greatest composer who ever lived and then he goes deaf;
some fuckin' irony, huh?"
"What the fuck's 'irony'?" Caparzo asked. "The next village over?"
"No, shit for brains. Irony is me, the Beethoven of ladies' foundation
garments, footsteps away from Caen, the center of the lingerie universe,
and instead I'm going to Neuville to save some fuckhead farmer who's
probably already dead, is irony."
"Look at the bright side, Reiben," Miller said.
"What bright side is that? Sir, you know what Neuville is famous for?"
"No."
"Cheese."
"Really."
"Everybody and his duck is goin' to Caen, where the only way you won't get
laid tonight is if your dick got blown off in the bad sense of the phrase,
and we, the gallant survivors of Charlie Company, we're goin' to the
goddamned cheese capital of France. There is no bright side. Sir."
"There's always a bright side, Reiben."
"I'm listening, sir."
"Well, I, for one, like cheese. When's the last time you had a decent
piece? Of cheese?"
Reiben glowered, hugging his B.A.R.
Upham asked Miller, "Shouldn't we really have a tank for this mission, sir?"
Miller didn't get the chance to answer that -- which he wouldn't have,
anyway -- because the jeep was rounding a corner and Sarge was skidding to
a stop, confronted suddenly by a bottleneck of backed-up American vehicles,
tanks, dozers, jeeps. Through the dust cloud Sarge had stirred moved an
M.P. -- a first lieutenant -- and three enlisted men, playing traffic cop
along the roadside.
"Lieutenant!" Miller called.
The M.P. spotted the twin captain's bars on Miller's helmet and came quickly
over, leaned against the jeep like a drive-in waitress taking an order.
"We gotta hold up here, sir. Eight-eights are knocking hell out of our
traffic."
"How's the road to Neuville?"
"Suicide run, sir."
Miller glanced at Sarge. They traded facial shrugs, knowing they had no
choice. Orders from General Marshall were not to be ignored.
"Let us through, lieutenant," Miller said.
"Sir ..."
"Let us through."
"Yes, sir."
The M.P. waved them through, and Sarge rode the side of the road and bridged
the shoulder, passing the traffic jam, and soon they had the dirt road to
themselves.
Or nearly so. The crater-pocked roadway was strewn with burning wreckage,
the fog of dust and smoke creating an obstacle course that Sarge swerved
through with set jaw and glittering eyes. Barreling along, Sarge veered
without slowing around first one jeep, then another, both having taken
direct hits and were now scorched, smoldering abstract sculptures.
Then the jeep of GIs roared around an American troop truck, on its side,
torn apart as if it were a paper bag, spilling flame. The truck had
already spilled and strewn onto the roadside the charred bodies,
the glowing human embers, of at least a dozen soldiers.
"It's something out of Bosch," Upham uttered, unable to look away from
the nightmare vision. Nobody in the jeep knew what he was talking about,
except Miller, though his expression gave no indication of that.
"Shhh," Miller said.
Upham said, "I told you, we coulda used a tank. ..."
"Quiet, I said."
Calm green hills rose on either side of the road now, and Miller's eyes
were slowly scanning them, searching for the source of the 88 shell that
had destroyed that troop truck.
Sarge eyed the captain. "Got a line on it?"
"No. Step on it, will you?"
"Why didn't you say so?"
And Sarge floored it, hitting ruts, narrowly avoiding craters, bouncing the
boys in back like rubber balls. They gripped the sides and each other and
did whatever the could not to get themselves and their weapons and gear
flung out.
"Hell," Caparzo yelled, "this beats Coney Island all to shit."
Then they hit a crater, and the bump was huge, almost wrecking the vehicle,
shaking its every nut and bolt apart, sending Reiben up in the air like
a teeter-totter, and slamming him back down.
"Shit, fuck!" Reiben yowled. "I landed on my goddamn entrenching tool!"
"Just trying to make room for Private Ryan," Miller said, eyes still glued
to those hills.
Reiben, who appreciated dark humor, grinned at that, and shifted his
entrenching tool from under his bruised behind.
When they rounded the next bend, a long, straight stretch of road awaited,
but half-a-dozen smoldering, smashed vehicles littered it, indicating the
gauntlet they would have to run.
Sarge barreled down the road, as all eyes -- except Corporal Upham's --
nervously searched the surrounding hills.
"Captain," Mellish said with brittle, forced good humor, "something just
occurred to me. ..."
"What would that be, Private?"
"We're the front now. Point of the spear. Leading the charge.
We go a foot, the front goes with us. Wouldn't that be correct, sir?"
"That would be correct. Everybody else is behind us."
Sarge was slowing now, trying to dodge the craters.
"And by everybody," Mellish picked up, "of course you mean, the other one
hundred and fifty thousand GIs and the four thousand armored vehicles, all
the ammo, the food. That's the everybody you're talking about, right, sir?"
"That's correct."
"Just checking, sir."
The unmistakable screech of an incoming 88 seemed headed right for them,
then hit right in back of them, blasting a new crater in a shower of dirt
and rock, easy black fingers of smoke reaching out for the jeep.
"Sarge?" Miller prompted through a clench-toothed smile.
Sarge floored the jeep again, craters be damned. Everybody held on
to whatever they could as the little vehicle rocketed along, swerving,
jostling, but mostly flying. Then another shell screamed in and hit hard,
and the earth seemed to quiver as they drove right toward the blossom of
black smoke mingled with dust-dirt-rock debris.
Somehow, Sarge skirted this new hellish pothole, and they came out of the
smoke and dust like a plane through a cloud.
Sarge asked the captain, "You got him?"
Miller had caught the muzzle flash from the hills. But his eyes were fixed
on another wooded hillside now, maybe three quarters of a mile from the road
-- possible cover, and out of the big gun's range. ...
"Yeah," Miller said. "This road is zeroed ... one big fuckin' target!"
Miller nodded toward the left, where a farmer's field lay fallow.
"Make a new road!"
Sarge yanked the wheel over, and the jeep dropped off the cliff of the
shoulder, nearly throwing everybody out. Somehow they held on, and stayed
on the bucking bronco's back, settling in for the rough ride ahead, the
jeep's gears gnashing as Sarge guided them up onto the fallow field,
where the vehicle soon tore along the rutted terrain.
Behind them, like the footstep of a giant in pursuit, a screaming shell
landed and ruptured the earth in a shower of dirt and rock. Smoke chased
them as Sarge, not slowing a whit, did his best to avoid the biggest ruts,
the nastiest bumps; occasionally he succeeded.
To their left, another shell hit, and dirt clods and stones cascaded down
on them, hammering the jeep like hailstones, salt-and-peppering them with
debris. They covered their faces, though not their eyes, from the dirt
and smoke. Upham was coughing.
"Christ, they're pulling lead!" Sarge shouted. "Fuckers are good!"
Another explosion rocked the earth, lifted the jeep onto its left side
wheels, then set it back down, hard, as dirt and debris pummeled the jeep
and its occupants.
"Try S-curves," Miller told Sarge.
Horvath did as he was told, turning shallow curves without slowing, and the
maneuver seemed to be working, until suddenly they had S-curved themselves
toward a drainage ditch. Sarge tried to avoid it, jerking the wheel around,
braking, but it was no good: the jeep took the fall and half its nose plowed
into the dirt, in an abrupt stop that sent Reiben, Upham, and Wade flying
out of the vehicle in various directions, depositing them rudely on the
rutted earth, a child's scattered toys.
None of them were hurt, to speak of, and Jackson, Caparzo, Miller, and
Sarge, who'd managed to stay in the vehicle, were more shaken than those
who'd exited; battered by the sudden stop, they sat there stunned,
jeep nosed in the ditch.
Miller, first to regain his bearings, leapt from the jeep and gave the
vehicle a quick once-over.
"She's fine," he said. "This dirt is soft. ..."
The banshee shriek of an 88 had everybody ducking. The boom was nearby,
rupturing the earth perhaps thirty yards away, sending a mild shower of
debris on them this time.
"Sarge," Miller said, scrambling into the shallow ditch, throwing his
shoulder against the jeep. "Reverse!"
Sarge shook his head, clearing it, and threw the jeep into reverse, its
wheels spinning as Miller dug his heels in and pushed, at the exposed left
of the vehicle.
"Come on, you shitbirds!" Miller yelled at the men in the jeep, and the
others, who'd tumbled into the dirt, and were struggling to their feet,
dusting themselves off. "You wanna ride or walk?"
Dazed, his squad -- minus Sarge at the wheel -- assembled themselves on
either side of the jeep and did their best, putting their shoulders into it,
trying to push that bastard out. But the wheels kept spinning, mocking them.
Then another 88 wailed toward them, and they ducked and covered as it blew
another crater in the rutted field, with the expected debris and smoke
pelting them, after.
This time, however, the big shell had landed to their right, again about
thirty yards away.
Miller ignored that, and dug his heels back in, shouldering the jeep.
"Captain," Sarge said, hands tight on the wheel, eyes anxious. "They got us
bracketed. ..."
"I know about bracketing," Upham said, stepping away from the jeep,
turning in a fidgety circle, "I've read extensively on that subject. ..."
The others were back at it, ignoring the corporal, working with their
captain as he directed the sergeant to drive forward, then put it in
reverse, getting a rocking motion going.
"Listen to me," Upham said. "The next shell is going to hit us!"
Miller kept at it, and everybody pitched in, even Upham, but the corporal's
concern was catching, and all eyes were skyward but Miller's as they waited
for the next shell to screech in.
"Captain ..." Sarge began.
"Push!" Miller commanded, and his men did. They were making process:
The jeep was damn near out of the ditch.
"Uh, Captain," Sarge said, even as the schema of tires seemed to foreshadow
that of the next shell. Wade, pushing along the side of the jeep, reached
in and plucked his medic's pack out of the back, clutching it tight under
one arm.
"Jesus Christ," Upham said near tears, "It's gonna hit any second.
..."
This time whwn the jeep rocked, it lost ground, digging back in, deeper.
"Shit!" Miller screamed, and a shell screamed, too, coming right at them.
Time was up. Snatching up his Thompson from the ground, the captain
shouted, "Go! Go! Go!"
And then they were grabbing what they could from the jeep, weapons, gear,
anything, scrambling, scattering, hauling ass and gaining precious yards.
"Hit the dirt!" Miller cried, and they did, tumbling to the rutted earth,
sending small puffs of dust up as the shell howled in and hit and seemed
to snatch the jeep in beastly tearing jaws and shake it, a direct hit,
a stunning blast, the shredded vehicle cartwheeling thirty feet in the air,
then slamming back down again in a flaming, flattened heap.
Barely outside the blast perimeter, the team felt the earth shudder and
shake and held their helmets on tight as a deluge of rubble, dirt, rock,
debris threatened to bury them. Slowly, they raised their heads, then
themselves, their eyes traveling to the fiery, flat snarl of metal
that had been their ride.
"Fucker's out of the ditch, at least," Caparzo observed.
A familiar, sinister coughing -- so soft, compared to the 88's blare --
sent Miller and his men to their feet, shaking off the detritus without
trying.
"Here come the mortars!" Miller said, but the comment was redundant, as
they all, except perhaps Upham, had recognized that harsh poof poof poof
poof, and were taking off like sprinters toward those sheltering trees.
"Mama said there'd be days like this!" Reiben yelled as they ran.
The eight men dashed across the open field as small explosions went off
around them, each man knowing that the exploding shells were throwing
whistling fragments upward, outward, in a cone-like shower of death
at worst and pain at best.
Upham stumbled, fell, and Miller plucked him from the ground like a flower
and half dragged him to the edge of the field, where the trees awaited,
cover, shelter. At various intervals every one of the went crashing into
the trees, breaking and snapping branches and twigs, collapsing to safety,
perhaps twenty yards in.
The cough of Mortars soon stopped.
Miller's men were here and there, flopped onto the sloping ground, leaning
against trees, heavingly out of breath.
"Sound off if you're hit," Sarge said.
Nothing.
"Anybody?" Sarge asked, looking around him, not believing it.
"Not even a shrapnel wound?"
Upham's hand was to his face. "My nose is bleeding, a little ... but I'm
kinda prone to that. ..."
Everybody stumbled to their feet and looker around at each other,
apparitions considering each other's existence. Amazement slowly dawned,
as fear and adrenaline drained away.
"Nobody hit," Miller said matter-of-fact. "Good."
Panting, the men checked their body parts, found them present and accounted
for. Everybody had their weapons, but some gear had been left behind or
lost, in the jeep, on the run.
"It's a miracle," Wade said softly, still clutching his medic's pack.
If anybody else had said that but Wade, the squad might have laughed.
Considering how much shrapnel had been flying out there, however,
they all knew he was right.
"Yea, though I walk through the shadow of the valley of death," Jackson
dragged softly, "I will fear no evil. Thank you, Lord. World without end,
Amen."
"Maybe we got an angel on our shoulder," Wade said. "Maybe this Private
Ryan's good luck."
Reiben looked back across the field at the smoldering, shattered carcass
of the jeep.
"Let's not be too fuckin' grateful to that farmer," Reiben smirked, shaking
his head. "He's makin' us walk the rest of the way, isn't he?"
Working their way through the wooded hillside, their captain led the squad
to a pastoral vista as yet undisrupted by the war. No fresh sod thrown up
by 88's or mortars, no ruptures in the pasture's grass to indicate land
mines. That didn't mean the peaceful surface of the pasture, with its
scattering of munching cows, didn't conceal mines; little of this
countryside didn't secrete the Germans' deadly little welcome mats.
"Form a column and follow me," Miller instructed the men. "Flankers out."
"Yes, sir!" Upham said, saluting.
Miller rolled his eyes, while the rest of the squad shook their heads.
How had this idiot lasted this far into the afternoon?"
Miller began his slow, careful trudge across the corn field, stepping in
cow pies as if they were stepping stones.
"Ah, hell's bells." Upham said as his boots sank in shit.
Behind the corporal, Reiben -- following in the shitty path -- uttered
various obscenities, then called out his captain, "Uh, sir -- maybe you
haven't noticed it, but we're up to our hips in yesterday's cow banquet
here. There's trees edging the entire pasture -- think maybe we should
move over there?"
"No," Miller said. "Stick to the manure."
"Cap, it's sticking to me!"
"Follow my lead, all of you."
The men looked around at each other, realizing that their captain was
intentionally walking in cow pies.
Caparzo's eyes narrowed as he tried to figure out this strategy, then he
announced, "I get it -- the cows know where the mines are. They got some
kinds sixth sense or something."
"Yeah!" Mellish said from behind him, seeing the brilliance of that logic.
"Nature builds in all kinds of defenses in helpless animals."
As the men gingerly stepped on manure piles, some of which were fresh enough
to send ripe Bronx cheers back at them, Reiben, up ahead, said, "I don't get
it. ... If they got a sixth sense for recognizin' land mines, why do the
dumb fucks walk right into the gaddamn slaughterhouse?"
"Dumb fucks is right," Sarge's voice came from behind them. "You walk in
the cow shit, you walk in the same path as the cows. None of these cows
got blown to hamburger yet, so you 'helpless animals' won't either. ...
Sixth sense my bleedin' ass."
Miller, hearing this, said, "Cows may not have a sixth sense, but they
are naturally curious creatures. ... Look at 'em."
The cows had all gradually turned to face the GIs crossing their field,
brown and white statues, big eyes watching.
Miller, stepping in yet another squishy pie, grinned back at his men.
"They're waitin' to be milked. Anybody thirsty?"
Having crossed the pasture, they came to a hedgerow, an example of Normandy's
towering shrubs, so ubiquitous and potentially deadly; a mound of dirt half
a dozen feet high topped by a lushly green jungle of vines, branches, roots,
and trunks, the hedgerow was virtually impenetrable. They came upon a single
gap in the row, where the farmer whose pasture this was could get his cows
and equipment in and out. Through that doorway in the shrubs, a narrow,
hard-dirt cart lane beckoned between this and a parallel hedgerow.
Sunken between hedgerows as it was, the road was a virtual trench, and
should provide safe passage -- as long as the Germans weren't covering
that gap with machine-gun fire. Miller, when briefed by his C.O., had
been informed of this threat, and decided to handle it himself, his own way.
"Hit the dirt," the captain told his men as they approached the opening in
the shrub wall.
"You mean hit the grass," Reiben said. "Is it okay, sir, if we avoid the
cow pies?"
"Stay low in case return fire comes flying through those bushes," Miller
said.
"What does he mean, 'return fire'?" Mellish asked Reiben as they -- and
everyone else -- had positioned themselves flat on the pasture floor.
Then their captain stepped out into the opening, blasting away with his
Thompson, ejected shells flying, fanning the deadly gun around, muzzle
belching flame and bullets, as he traced a wide C with the chopper that
included chewing holes in the hedgerow opposite.
Ducking quickly back in, Miller threw himself to the ground. And waited.
Ten of fifteen seconds had passed when Miller got to his feet, "No return
fire -- should be okay -- on your dogs."
And the squad, exchanging wild, wild-eyed expressions, the scent of cordite
drifting, got up and followed their captain out into the shaded shelter of
the hedgerow-lined lane.
"Sometimes I think the captain is tryin' to win the Wooden Cross," Reiben
said.
"Bastard's charmed, I tell you," Caparzo said.
"The Lord's on that man's side," Jackson drawled solemnly.
As Miller -- Thompson at the ready -- walked point down the lane, his squad
followed him warily in two groups of three, Sarge bringing up the rear.
The shade helped, but in their heavy uniforms and gear, they were hot on
this June afternoon, and worn-out. An utterly miserable Upham, who had been
assigned the task of hauling B.A.R. ammo, was loaded down like a packhorse
appropriately, he was slapping at horseflies.
The hedgerow gaps into fields were rare, but whenever they approached one,
they slowed, eyes cautiously scanning. Between gaps, they talked quietly,
killing the time, seeking to make their hazard less burdensome by losing
themselves in the common human act of conversation.
"So, um," Upham said to Mellish, "where are you from?"
"Go fuck yourself."
Upham swallowed. So much for Mellish. Waving off a horsefly, he turned to
Caparzo. "How about you? Where you from?"
"Shove it, shithead," Caparzo said, and spat. "And another thing, every
time you salute the captain, you're pinnin' a big fat target on him.
So knock it the hell off ... 'specially when I'm standin' near him."
"Oh-okay," Upham said, and smiled feebly. "I mean, live and learn."
"Drop dead."
From behind him a more friendly voice -- Wade's -- offered, "So I understand
you're a writer. What's your book about, Corporal?"
Upham, loaded down as he was, still managed a shrug. "I don't know now."
"Yeah?"
"It was gonna be about the bonds of brotherhood that develop between
soldiers in combat."
Caparzo almost whispered as he said to Upham, "Why don't you ask the captain
where he's from, Upchuck?"
"Why?" The men around Upham, as they walked the green-walled shady lane,
were snickering. "Why not?"
"Private joke," Mellish said.
Upham managed to work up some indignation. "Hey, I'm part of this squad."
"Yeah," Caparzo said, "but you're not a private."
Upham decided to trudge along silently for a while.
Up at point Reiben was falling in alongside Miller.
"You know, Captain, this little expedition goes against everything the Army
taught me."
"How so?"
"I mean, it doesn't make any sense."
"What doesn't make sense, Reiben?
"The math, sir, the sheer fuckin' math of it. Maybe you could explain it
to me."
"Sure," Miller said casually, though the way he held his machine gun as he
walked was anything but casual. "That's what I'm here for. To make you
boys feel everything we do is logical."
"Gimme a break, Cap."
"So what do you want to know?"
"Well, sir, strictly just talkin' arithmetic here, what's the sense, the
strategy, in risking eight lives to save one? I mean, it's not like we're
goin' in to save Eisenhower or Patton or something. The guy's a fuckin'
private, sir."
"And we all know how worthless privates are."
Reiben grinned. "Hey my privates are valuable to me. But how about it,
Cap? How about an answer?"
Miller threw the briefest glance back, saying, "Anybody wanna take a crack
at that?"
"Jesus, Reiben," Wade said immediately, "think of the poor bastard's mother."
"Nice, Wade," Miller said, pleased, as if responding to a star pupil.
"Very good."
"Hey," Reiben threw back at Wade, "what about my mother? What about
your mother? We all got mothers, you, me, Sarge, even Corporal Upchuck."
Reiben, having to work a little to keep up with Miller, said, "Captain,
I'll even bet you have a mother."
Miller smiled faintly, but his eyes never left the lane and the hedgerows
on its either side.
"Well," Reiben said, reconsidering, "the rest of us got mothers."
"'Theirs not to reason why,'" Upham recited softly, glumly. "'Theirs but
to do or die.'"
Miller glanced back at Upham, recognizing the reference, though no one else
did.
"What's that supposed to mean?" Mellish asked crankily. "That we're all
supposed to die?"
"Nothing," Upham said. "Never mind."
"He's talking about duty," Miller said, working his voice up a little.
"He's saying that we've got orders. And those orders supersede everything
... including your mommies."
"Even if you think a mission's foobar?" Reiben asked.
"Especially if you think a mission's foobar," Miller said.
"That's the definition of duty."
Upham risked a question of Mellish. "What's the definition of
'foobar'?"
Mellish glanced at Caparzo, and the replied with a straight face, "it's
a German word. Surprised a smart translator like you don't know it."
"German? Well, I never heard it before."
Jackson suddenly entered the colloquy. "Sir, I have an opinion on this
subject."
"let's hear it," Miller said. "By all means."
"Seems to me, Cap'n," Jackson offered in his soothing drawl, "this mission
is a serious misallocation of valuable military resources."
"Go on, Private."
"Well, sir, seems to me, God gave me a special gift, namely I can shoot the
eye out of a needle. The Good Lord fashioned in me a fine instrument of
warfare."
"Reiben," Miller said to the private trudging alongside him, "pay attention
... This is the way to bitch. Jackson! Continue."
"What I mean, sir, is if you was to put me with this here Springfield rifle
anywhere up to and including one mile from Adolf Hitler, and give this
country boy a nice clear line of sight ... well, hell. War's over.
Amen and good night."
Reiben was studying his captain. Finally he asked, "What's your opinion,
Captain? You still haven't answered my question. I'd say you're duckin'
it."
Miller's expression was good-humoredly disgusted. "Reiben, what the hell's
the matter with you? I don't bitch do you. I'm a captain. There's a chain
of fuckin' command. Bitchin' only goes one way -- up. Only up, never down."
"I was just askin' your opinion, sir. ..."
"Here's how it works -- you gripe to me, I gripe to my superior officers.
Shit goes upstream, got it? I don't gripe to you, I don't gripe in front
of you. How long have you been in this man's Army?"
"You're right," Reiben admitted. "I'm sorry." Then, slyly, he went on:
"But, Captain, if you weren't a captain, or if I were, say,
a major ... then what would you say?"
Miller thought about that even as his eyes searched the green barriers of
the hedgerows. "In that case, I would say this is an excellent mission,
sir, with an extremely valuable objective, sir, worthy of my best efforts,
a privilege to serve my country in this way ... sir."
Reiben rolled his eyes, shook his head, smirked, nearly laughed.
"Moreover," Miller said, quietly, almost solemnly, "I feel heartfelt sorrow
for the mother of Private James Ryan, and I am more than willing to lay down
my life, and the lives of my men ... especially yours, Reiben ... to help
relieve her suffering."
Behind him the men had thoroughly enjoyed this performance, laughing, even
clapping a little, including -- perhaps especially -- Upham. But Reiben,
the master of sarcasm, was confused, not sure whether to take his captain at
face value, or admit to himself that Miller had beaten him at his own game.
To the north of Ste.-Mere-Eglise -- the surrounding hills humming with medium
artillery, the late afternoon punctuated by occasional small-arms fire and
mortar and grenade explosions -- the little village of Neuville-au-Plain had
been reduced from a picturesque tourist's dream to a rudely distributed pile
of rubble. One- and two-story cottages and buildings, having withstood
centuries of weather abuse and human use, had crumbled like stale cake.
Other structures were architectural amputees, half standing, a wall
sheared away here, a roof caved in there.
Wood and stone and debris litter the cobblestone street as Captain Miller
led his squad toward the sound of a sporadic firefight, which seemed just
around the corner of a half-shot-away wall where Miller, hand in the air,
gestured to his men to follow his lead and flatten against the brick.
They did, closing ranks behind him.
He poked his head out, just as a handful of villagers dashed across the
detritus-cluttered street. A family appeared, father, wife, perhaps and
aunt, several children, wore the dazed expression of earthquake survivors.
Miller couldn't help being touched by this poignant reminder of real life,
these civilians in the attire of daily living interrupting his olive-drab
world -- a man in a dark suit, two women in gay print dresses, a girl in a
short skirt, a boy in white shirt and shorts -- and was relieved the little
family made it safely across into a half-demolished building. Was it their
home, or what was left of it? Had enemy shells killed this town, or
friendly artillery?
He pulled back, just as a bullet carved a chunk out of the brick near his
head, only after he'd taken a mental snapshot of a virtual sniper's alley,
where American paratroopers -- one of the 101st, no doubt -- crouched in
doorways, hunkered behind wreckage, exchanging gunfire with an unseen enemy.
"Thunder!" Miller yelled.
A moment later came the response: "Flash! Come on across!"
Miller looked back at his men. "When I call for you, make the run,
one at a time. Broken field running, girls."
His men nodded, amd Miller sucked in a breath and took off, quick,
unpredictable in his zigs and zags as German bullets seemed to trail him,
landing just behind him, never finding where he was, only where he'd been.
Within seconds he had taken cover in a doorway across the way.
Upham, whose admiration for Miller was about all that was keeping him going,
had gone pale white.
Jackson, noting this, said, "Don't worry, kid. They can't kill the captain."
Sarge said, "Like hell they can't."
"Jackson's right, Sarge," Reiben put in. "It's some kinds supernatural or
maybe scientific thing. I can't explain it, but I've seen it. It's like
he's magnetized and the bullets get repelled."
"We've all seen it," Caparzo said, grinning, shaking his head. "He's got
nine lives or somethin'. Like he's bulletproof, or some damn thing."
"Nobody's bulletproof," Sarge said, his disgust at this combination of
jocularity and admiration apparent. "Don't kid yourself -- nobody
is."
Across the sniper's alley, Miller ducked out of his doorway, staying low
as he charged down the block, Thompson in his hands seeming to pull him
along, slipping into the alleyway where a cluster of paratroopers awaited.
Just out of the line of fire -- and under it, the alley wall's top half
shot away, a jagged sawtooth smile of brick above them -- sat ten dirty,
battered, exhausted paratroopers with their backs to the wall and weapons
at the ready; four of them were wounded, nothing that looked fatal,
blood-splotched legs and arms, accompanied by smudged in-shock faces.
Crouching before them, Miller called back down the block. "Wade! Wounded!"
"Private Goldman, sir," a round-faced kid said by way of introduction.
"Miller."
Small-arms fire popped. Wade was making his run.
"Are you a sight for sore fuckin' eyes!" Goldman, twenty-three, Chicago,
Illinois, called out to his sergeant: "Sarge! Our relief showed up!"
And Sergeant William Hill, twenty-nine, Pensacola, Florida, scurried down
the line to where Miller knelt, leaning on his Thompson.
"How many are you?" Sergeant Hill asked, desperation leaking into his voice.
Wade ducked into the alley, and Miller directed him to the wounded, who Wade
quickly began attending.
"Sorry to disappoint you," Miller said, "but we're not your relief.
There's just the eight of us."
Gunfire popped -- another man made the run.
"No? What the hell ...?" Then catching himself, the sergeant asked,
"What do you mean, sir?"
"We're on a special assignment, looking for a Private James Ryan."
"Who?" Goldman asked, more confused than disappointed.
"Private James Ryan," Miller repeated patiently.
"What for?" the sergeant asked, bewildered and mildly pissed.
Reiben scrambled into the alleyway, B.A.R. in hand.
Miller nodded to him, then asked Sergeant Hill, "Is he here?"
Hill rolled his eyes, shook his head in frustration, forced himself to be
civil to this officer, saying, "Maybe in a mixed unit on the other side of
town. Hard to get to ... Germans punched a hole in our center a few hours
ago, cut us in two. What was his name again?"
More popping of small-arms fire, another of his men taking the deadly run.
"Ryan," Miller said. "James. Private. Dropped in with you guys, 101st.
They waited for the rest of Miller's men to arrive, one by one, even
milk-faced Upham, all of them successfully dodging the small-arms fire
that welcomed them.
Only then did Hill yell back over his shoulder: "Runner! Get that runner
up here now!"
Private Harold Nelson, twenty-one, Omaha, Nebraska, scurried forward,
a wiry-looking, freckle-faced kid, unencumbered by gear. The better to
run a gauntlet.
"Locatr Captain Hamill," the sergeant told his runner. "There's a patrol
here looking for a Private Ryan, James. Probable mis-drop from the
One-oh-One."
The kid nodded, then stole a look up over the wall, picking his pathway,
then skirted the corner and took off in a sprint that would have landed him
a spot in any college's backfield. Small college, anyway.
Miller and the others leaned out, just enough to get a decent position to
watch the runner, who was ducking behind walls, dipping into doorways,
quickly scampering across streets.
With Miller's squad interspersed with the paratroopers, Sergeant Hill
explained his situation.
"We got stopped here by intense rifle action from the eastward," he told
them. "Jerries been reinforcing two regiments all day long. Streets have
been pretty quiet for" -- he checked his wristwatch -- "damn near forty-five
minutes. Jerries are concentrating most of their fire westward now."
"It didn't seem quiet to me," Reiben said, "when those bullets were making
me dance."
As if making his point, small-arms fire kicked in, sounding surprisingly
innocuous, like theater popcorn popping, alerting them to the runner's peril.
Miller leaned out, seeing the hard-packed dirt of the street puffing around
the runner as bullets struck. Then one clipped the runner, in the leg,
and the kid went down on his good knee.
"Suppressing fire!" Hill yelled, and his men, and Miller's, stood at the
half wall of the alley and threw bullets everywhere but at the fallen kid.
"Where the fuck do we shoot?" Reiben asked, between volleys from his B.A.R.
"Where are those shots coming from?"
"Around that blind corner," Miller said. "We're wasting ammo, but we are
making noise."
Hill finaly said glumly, "Hold your fire. ... Give him room."
The poor wounded kid wasn't a runner, anymore -- just a crawler, that
popcorn popping sound all around him, little puffs of dust bursting about
him as he snaked on his stomach, seeming to try to swim to safety, crawling
for cover.
Then at last, he lay very still. And the sound of popping corn stopped.
"Poor bastard," Reiben said.
"Our father, who art in heaven," Jackson began, then kept the rest of it
to himself.
Then, startling to the GIs, it was like another batch of theater popcorn had
started popping. Bullets were riddling the obviously dead body, shaking it
like a disobedient child. Puffs of dust, puffs of blood mist.
"Fucking animals!" Caparzo screamed, eyes huge, veins and cords on his neck
sticking out. "You sadistic fucking cocksuckers!"
The unnecessary desecration of the runner's corpse continued; dozens of
rounds gave a quivering false life to the dead body.
Quietly, Sergeant Hill said. "They know we're not in direct contact.
They're gonna single out the runners. Discourage us from sending others."
"Jesus Christ!" Caparzo yelled. "Why do the keep shooting him up like that?"
"As long as there's any chance there's a breath in him," Miller said,
"the message he carries is alive."
Rage and fear mingled on the faces of the men before him, hunkered under
that half-wall clutching their weapons, and Miller commented flatly,
"We'd do the same thing."
That sobered the men, erasing the rage, and even the fear, but leaving an
emptiness.
Miller told his medic to get the wounded ready to travel, which Wade did,
as Sergeant Hill called a private over, saying, "Boyd, try again. See if
you can raise Captain Hamill, and let him know we're comin'."
Private Jerry Boyd, twenty-two, Cleveland, Ohio, nodded and began trying to
get something other than static out of his SCR-536 walkie-talkie.
Miller stepped to the mouth of the alley, where the half-wall was at its
highest, and eyeballed the street. Sergeant Hill came to his side.
"Next block is two-story buildings, both sides of the street," the sergeant
said. "Lots of windows, then a wide-open square."
"Another shooting gallery?"
"Not necessarily. Pretty good cover on the left."
"Okay," Miller said, thinking quickly. "We'll backtrack two blocks,
then cut over right, and get those buildings between us and wherever
that fucking enfilading fire is coming from."
Sergeant Hill was studying the captain, clearly sizing him up.
Miller said, "Four men up. Two of mine, two of yours.
Hill's expression indicated to Miller that the sergeant believed this
captain knew what he was doing.
"Yes, sir," Hill nodded. "Hastings! Goldman! Up front."
"Reiben," Miller called. "Caparzo."
Private Boyd, nearby, was shaking his head no. "Still jamming us, Sarge."
The four men summoned moved up in position, while the rest got ready,
helping the wounded, bandaged by Wade, to their feet.
"Fundamentals," Miller said calmly. "Short runs, double up at the corners,
one man close, one man wide."
Nods all around.
Miller added: "Prepare for close contact."
More nods, from all but Upham, who was peering over the wall, at the fallen,
shot-to-shit runner. Upham's expression was blank, but the corporal was
shaking. Of course, so was Miller's hand, but no one had noticed.
Except Miller.
"Upham," Miller said not unkindly. "The pointed part of the bayonet blade
faces out."
Upham swallowed, muttered, "Yes, sir," and corrected his mistake.
Soon, bathed in the light of the dying sun, throwing long shadows, they
took off, scurrying, crouching, darting through the rubbish pile that had
been a village -- bricks, stones, chunks of cement, portions of walls,
scatterings of wooden plank, as if a lumber wagon had upended and spilled
and scattered itself. Miller led the way through the obstacle course of
rubble as those at the rear helped the wounded along. Wade kept a watchful
eye on them. Quickly they made their way up the street, leapfrogging
positions, hugging the recessions of doorways for cover, eyes searching
windows and rooftops for that glint of gunmetal that signaled a sniper.
Upham and Reiben shared a doorway, along the way, Upham whispering,
"So where's the captain from, anyway?"
Reiben whispered back: "Figure that one out, Upchuck, you win the big
cee-gar."
Jackson had just ducked in a nearby doorway, and had overheard this
whispered discussion. Clutching his precious sharpshooter rifle,
he added his two cents: "Over three hundred smackers, last I heard."
Mellish was moving quickly past, heading for a rubble pile to duck behind.
Along the way he offered this information to Upham: "Company's got a pool
goin'! Five bucks gets ya in."
Moments later the entire group was edging along a stone wall.
Miller, up ahead, wasn't hearing himself discussed.
Upham asked whoever might care to answer, "Doesn't anybody know where he's
from, or what he did for a living?"
Sarge yanked Upham and dragged him along, backs to the wall. "Been with him
since Kasserine Pass," Horvath said, "and I ain't got the foggiest."
Reiben was coming up behind them, also with his back to the wall.
"It's easy. They assembled the cap at O.C.S., from spare body parts
offa dead GI joes."
From up ahead Caparzo said, "Hey, I know all about the captain. I sneaked
a look inside his pack one time."
"Bullshit, Caparzo!" Jackson said in a rare outburst of profanity, though
significantly not one that took the Lord's name in vain. "You don't know
nothin', boy."
"Call it bullshit if you want, ya dumb hillbilly," Caparzo said cockily.
"I'm just bidin' my time for the pool to get big enough to make it worth
my while. Then I'll pass it along to the rest of you bums, and you can
read it and weep."
"Shhhh!" Sarge said from behind.
After that no more talk ensued as the screws of tension seemed to tighten,
the squad getting closer to their precarious destination, where snipers
waited. Their boots scuffed over cobblestones, Miller's men darted this
way and that, like figures from one bedroom to another in a French farce,
though despite the French trappings, there was nothing farcical about it,
moving from position to position, trading looks and acknowledgments, Miller
motioning them forward, his expression saying, Let's go, keep moving,
you next. ...
Soon they were edged along a three-story house where the wall had collapsed,
baring three stories of rooms, intact but for the missing wall, furniture
still in place, like an exhibit in a museum showing middle-class life in
a French village.
Something above them creaked, and the squad dropped into a crouch, weapons
tilted, ready to open fire upward.
Sergeant Hill called out the word: "Thunder!" Long seconds passed with no
response.
"Thinder, goddamn it, thunder! Or we will open up on you. ..."
A man's voice drifted down to them. "Ne tire pas! On set Francis!"
"Hold it, hold it!" Upham called. "They're civilians!"
"Yeah?" Horvath said. "Let's see the color of their duds!"
The male voice again: Montrez-vous!"
A man stepped into view from the second story, clearly a local resident,
slender, perhaps thirty, brown suit, yellow tie, distraught expression on
a narrow face. His hands were raised.
"Ne tire pas!" he said, a peculiar mix of hope and despair coloring
his voice.
A woman in a floral-print dress stepped into view, pretty, perhaps
twenty-five, with an infant bundled in her arms; her expression asked
for pity, for understanding.
On est pas des soldats et on est pas arnes," she said, while at
the same time her husband said, "Baissez von fusils, nous sommes vos
amis!"
To the Americans, this would have sounded like gibberish even if the
apparent husband and wife weren't talking on top of each other.
"Stop jabbering!" Miller commanded, holding up a palm in the universal
gesture of "stop". "One at a time!"
The captain motioned for Upham, who scurried up as Miller said, "Ask them
where the Germans are."
Upham nodded, looked up at the couple and child and asked, "Ou sont les
allemands?"
The man nodded frantically, the words streaming out of him: "Ca va pas!
Ils sont partout, vous devez emmener les enfants!"
"What about infants?" Miller asked, frowning. "What the hell's he saying?"
"I don't know exactly," Upham said, frustrated. He's talking so quickly
... something about taking the children. ..."
The couple stepped from view for a few moments, then returned with the
father holding the hand of a girl who couldn't have been older than four;
holding on to the mother's skirts was a frighted boy of maybe five.
The father escorted the daughter to the edge of what appeared to be
their living room, grasped her by the wrists and suddenly dangled her
off into the air, lowering her toward the soldier. The girl began crying,
her legs kicking under the short blue skirt with petticoats.
"Je vois la passe!" the father said, suspending his daughter over
them, as if offering her to firemen from a burning building.
"Shit!" Miller said.
"I think that's merde around here," Reiben said, using up about
a third of his vocabulary in the language of the village.
"They want us to take their kids," Upham said meekly.
"I figured that out." Miller said as the girl swung over them.
"You tell him we can't take children. ..."
"Don't cry, sweetie," Caparzo was saying to the little girl, smiling up
at her. Hr made faces, and she began to laugh; now it was as if they
were playing, father swinging the child, the funny men below.
Upham was saying, "... Nous ne pouvons les prendre avec nous!"
But Caparzo was reaching up for her, arms out, and she squealed with delight
as her father let loose of her and she leapt into the American soldier's
arms.
Smiling, taking this as a seal of approval, the father pulled his son away
from the mother, and clutched him by the wrists as well, lowering him.
The boy didn't cry -- he was scared, confused -- but then so were Mellish
and Jackson, who together received the boy, setting him gently down.
The mother above was quietly weeping; her infant was crying, too, but not
at all quietly.
Miller sucked in air, tried not to get completely pissed of, even though
suddenly two French kids were in the middle of his world.
"Je veuz pas y aller!" the little girl said aglow.
Joyfully teary, the mother above called, "Tu dois! Vous serz en securite
avec les americains!"
Upham said to Miller, "They figure the kids'll be safe with us."
"It's not safe with us," Miller snarled. He sighed, and more kindly said,
"Tell 'em it's not safe anywhere, but it's particularly not safe with us.
Tell them."
Upham nodded. "Ils ne seront pas en securite avec nous, vous ne
comprenez pas, on ne peut pas les emmener!"
Caparzo and the little girl were playing, the boy from Chicago, Illinois,
swinging in his arms the girl from Neuville-au-Plain. "Reminds me of my
little niece," Caparzo said. "Sofie."
"Caparzo," Miller said, refusing to lose control of the situation.
"Put that kid down."
But the child was having fun in Caparzo's arms, and Caparzo seemed pretty
damn content holding on to her.
"Captain," he said. "Let's do the decent thing."
"The decent thing."
"The decent thing." And the tone in Caparzo's voice was one none of his
combat buddies had ever heard before; it held a softness, a tenderness,
that had been part of the hard-boiled Italian's civilian life.
"Let's at least take these kids down the road to the next town,"
Miller was not untouched by this, but the hardness of his tone did
not betray that. He snapped, "We're not here to do the decent thing.
We're here to follow orders. You're here to follow orders."
"Captain ..."
"Now, hand that fucking kid back to her fucking parents."
Around him Miller's squad blinked in surprise. Their captain was a decent
man, and hard-nosed military though he might be at times, this seemed unduly
harsh. Even Sergeant Hill's battle-worn paratroopers were taken aback.
Caparzo looked at the child in his arms, and she giggled and snuggled
to him. He swallowed. His eyes were wet.
"Hand her back up, Caparzo," Miller said, his voice gentle but not soft.
"Do it. Now."
"But, sir," Caparzo said. "I don't think --"
They never knew what he thought, because a bullet whined in, a sniper's
bullet from a high-powered rifle not unlike Jackson's and blew right through
the private, through his chest, in a spray of blood that spattered the family
furniture in the sitting room exposed by the missing wall. The impact took
Caparzo off his feet and slammed him to the cobblestones. Only then did the
sound of the gunshot catch up with the bullet, ringing through the street.
The private from Chicago had finally let loose of the little girl from
Neuville. She fell, but landed on her feet, unhurt, though terrified
and confused.
Like everyone around her.
Screams of surprise and shouted obscenities mingled with the distressed
babble of the children's parents, who hovered at the edge of their exposed
living room. Rising above it all were the howls of pain from private
Caparzo, a bug on his back, yelling, "I'm shot! I'm shot!" and spilling
blood like a sieve.
Just across the way, heaped in the street, rose a hillock of rubble that
Miller and most of his squad scrambled behind, planks and pebbles, slabs of
cement, chunks of brick wall, topped off by a decorative wrought-iron tangle
that had been a balcony railing. Sergeant Hill and his paratroopers sought
the same refuge, though a few found recessions of doorways to flatten into.
But two of the captain's squad lingered in the kill zone: the medic, Wade,
was heading to his fallen comrade's side, and Upham was going after the two
kids. The girl and boy stood paralyzed, eyes huge, hands frozen in midair,
like tiny statues in a park.
"Caparzo!" Mellish cried from behind the rubble pile.
"I'm shot!" Caparzo screamed, thrashing, bleeding. "Oh, God have mercy,
I'm shot!"
"You're gonna be fine, buddy," Wade said a moment before Sarge grabbed the
medic and hauled him bodily to cover. Miller had bolted out in the open,
too, to snatch Upham by the collar. Miller yanked him back so roughly,
the corporal began to choke, to gag, as the captain hauled him away from
the petrified children.
Another shot zinged by, slamming into a stone wall -- traveling through
the space Upham had just occupied -- and its resounding report followed a
second or so after. The children, standing fear-frozen but crying now,
were unharmed. They were not targets. But as any of his men tried to
help them, Miller knew, the kids would serve as bait.
Miller's men kept craning up above the rubbish mound to view Caparzo, on
his back, writhing in pain, screaming to his friends and his God for help,
blood spreading in a widening pool. Caparzo's torture was their torture.
"Stay down!" Sarge snapped at them, and they reluctantly obeyed.
"Goddamn it!" Sergeant Hill had his back to the rubble pile, rifle in hand;
he was next to Miller. "Where the fuck did that shot come from?"
Miller said nothing, but glanced at the man next to him -- his own
sharpshooter, Jackson -- for an expert opinion.
"Weren't close," Jackson said. "Bullet laid 'im on the ground, 'fore we
even heard the shot."
Caparzo's wailing agony was tearing the squad apart. The cries and shrieks
of fear of the father and mother for their children, stranded weeping below
them, frozen in the line of fire, weren't helping either.
Wade scooted up next to his captain; the medic's face was contorted with
frustration and concern. "We gotta get Caparzo the hell outa there!"
"Stay put, Wade," Miller said. "That's an order."
Suddenly Caparzo stopped screaming, as if that had become too difficult to
maintain, and poked and prodded himself with his left hand, examining his
wound at the right of his chest. The entry point wasn't bleeding so bad,
but the exit wound was a faucet, the puddle of red enlarging around him,
putting the private in a crimson spotlight. He seemed to be trying to
move his right arm, which he couldn't; it lay inert, human debris.
The Caparzo's left hand found its way under his jacket and into a blouse
pocket, from which he withdrew an envelope, a V-mail letter, red and damp
with the life he was leaking. He seemed to try to sit up, not getting very
far, but able to view the puddle of blood as it expanded into a rippling
pool.
"Oh, God ... oh ... oh, God," Caparzo said, watching survival seeping out
of him, streaming away from him. "God ... God ..."
Prayer? Curse? Was there a difference in this war? Miller was dying
inside, witnessing this, but he didn't show his men -- couldn't show his men.
He told Jackson, "Give me an estimate."
Reiben was peering out from behind the rubble heap, desperately wanting to
pull Caparzo to cover and to hell with the captain, when a chunk of cement
on the pile at his left seemed to suddenly explode, cement shrapnel flying.
This prompted Miller to dash out, snatch the kids in his arms, and he
was dragging them to cover, even as the gunshot's report arrived and
reverberated. He deposited the children in a doorway behind him,
motioning for them to stay low, which they did.
"Fuck," Reiben was saying, somewhat stunned; he was back behind the pile
of debris again, blood trickling down his left cheek; a sharp fragment of
cement had caught him.
Miller was standing, Jackson at his side. "Private?"
"Four hundred fifty yards, Cap'n. Give or take."
Upham, who was seated, his back to the rubble pile, looked up, bewildered,
somewhat in shock. "Is that a long shot?"
In the house with the missing wall, across the way, the parents were
huddling, infant in the mother's arms, and they were sobbing with relief,
their children in sight and safe.
"I'd say that's where the eagle's roosting," Miller said, pointing,
eyes gazing way down the street toward the green hillside beyond the village,
where a quarter mile away a chateau nestled, with a chapel bell tower,
quaint, scenic, strategic.
That's where I'd perch," Jackson agreed. The narrow eyes in his narrow face
might have been an Indian's.
"One man's vantage point," Miller said, "is another man's target."
Jackson nodded. "Reckon that's what they pay me sixty bucks a month for,
sir."
And Jackson withdrew from his pack a long leather case that might have
shielded a pool shark's favorite cue. he unsnapped it to reveal a gleaming,
elongated telescopic sight.
Caparzo was fading. He held up the blood-soaked letter in his left hand,
as if offering it to anyone who might be willing to take it. He might have
been floating on a lake of his blood.
"Help me ... somebody ... I'm losing my blood ... blood's goin' out of me
... help ..."
Mellish, trying to hold back tears, fists clenched, yelled, "Hand on, pal!
You hang on, buddy!"
Jackson was crouched down, attaching the telescopic sight to his Springfield
sniper rifle. Upham hunkered next to him, asking, "What is that thing?"
"Unertl special scope for my thirty-ought-six," he said. "Made the mounts
myself. Not bad for a hick, huh?"
Jackson worked the bolt, inserted a single oversize shell that might have
been a dame's lipstick tube if she had a generous mouth.
Upham swallowed. "You must be a hell of a shot."
"Back where I come from," he said, "'bout middlin'."
That precious letter Caparzo was holding was suddenly forgotten as
the wounded man wadded it in a fist; the pain must have intensified.
Miller kept his face blank while inside he shared the private's torment,
and that of his men, watching their brother bleed.
"Help me," Caparzo whimpered.
"Don't talk!" Wade called from behind the rubble pile. "Save your energy."
Mellish, next to Wade, and like the medic, dying to rush to their friend's
aid, called out, "We'll be with you in a sec, buddy! Just hold on!"
"No ..." Caparzo was trying to sit up again. His eyes fixed upon them,
dull and yet filled with urgency. "... This letter ... important ...
it's to my pop ... but it's all bloody ..."
"You be quiet, now," Wade said, almost scolding. Then the medic turned to
Miller and pleaded, "You got to let me get out there."
"Stay put, Wade."
"Captain, please ..."
"The order stands. Jackson! Today?"
"'Bout there, sir."
Jackson's sniper rifle was fully assembled now, and he stood behind the
rubble hill and sighted something on the hillside -- clearly not the
chateau or its bell tower --- and squeezed the trigger. On the hill,
five-hundred-some yards away, a branch snapped off a tree, shattering
into twigs.
"Checkin' for drift," Jackson said casually.
The lanky private reloaded and raised his rifle, which he held tenderly,
his touch light, bracing with his shoulder, his body one with the rifle.
Jackson's namesake, Daniel Boone, had drawn a bead like this -- Davy
Crockett, too. Bears and Indians and Mexicans had fallen under the cool
considerate aim of backwoods Americans like Jackson. Now it was the
Germans' turn.
Caparzo was unaware that he was about to be avenged. His only concern was
to use all the strength his drained body could muster -- which wasn't much --
to toss the balled-up bloody letter toward his friends, to Wade and Mellish.
"All bloody ... copy it ... don't want Papa, Mama ... see the blood. ...
Copy it over. ..."
"You shut up, now," Wade said, "you're gonna be okay, I'm gonna see to it.
... Then to Miller, Wade whispered desperately: "Captain ... he may still
have a chance. ..."
"Stay put," Miller said. "Jackson?"
"O my God, I trust in thee," Jackson said quietly, solemnly. His eye at the
scope. Waiting. Waiting for his shot. "Let me be not afraid. ..."
In the chateau bell tower, on his stomach in the shadows, perfectly put but
rather precariously positioned beside a gaping hole in the floor near his
window on the village, Corporal Wolfgang Gottberg, twenty-three, Cologne,
was attempting to fix another target in his crosshairs. His first hit was
still alive, but not worth another bullet, thrashing in his own blood as he
was. Panning his sniperscope toward the rubble pile, behind which the other
Americans had scurried, Gottberg focused on a helmeted head that had poked
up above the detritus. Something glinted in the late afternoon sunlight.
Something metallic.
Hair prickled on the back of the German's neck. The barrel of a rifle,
in fact, the long barrel of a sniper's rifle. ...
Aiming that rifle, Private Daniel Boone Jackson said, "O my God, I trust in
thee; let me not be ashamed. ..."
And Wolfgang Gottberg suddenly realized another sniper was aiming right back
at him. He quickly fixed the man in his crosshairs, knowing he was already
locked in his opposite's sights. His finger moved frantically to the
trigger, but it never squeezed. The American's bullet had entered through
the German's rifle scope, the through Gottberg's blue right eye, popping it
like a grape, traveling through his cerebrum and blowing out the back of his
helmeted head in an eruption of shattered glass and blossoming blood and
brain matter.
Gottberg's rifle tumbled from fingers and hands to which signals had ceased,
pitching through the collapsed floor to clunk below, followed by
Gottberg himself, who was dead before the American's gunshot echoed through
the countryside and the chateau courtyard -- his death far more merciful
than the one in progress, which Gottberg's final victim was yet suffering.
Jackson lowered his rifle, nodded to Miller and the rest, and said,
"Amen. Lord have mercy on a soldier's soul."
It was unclear whether he was referring to himself or the German.
"Go," Miller said to Wade.
The medic rushed toward Caparzo, Mellish scampering after, and then they
stopped at the edge of the sea of blood, as if to go farther would somehow
be disrespectful to their now obviously dead comrade. Caparzo's head was
tilted toward that expanse of shimmering red, eyes wide open and unblinking,
his glazed stare seeming to assess the liquid that represented the life
he had lost.
"Aw, shit," Mellish said, voice tremulous.
Stepping out from behind the hillock of refuse, Reiben muttered,
"Goddamn it ... Goddamn it ..."
Miller approached, and Wade shot him a glare. The captain didn't't avoid
the medic's accusing eyes.
"And that," Miller said brusquely, with a nod to the village children behind
him, "is why we don't baby-sit."
This jarred his squad, even Sarge. With shaking heads, intakes of breath,
humorless laughs, they looked numbly at the captain. The smile Reiben sent
Miller's way was nearly a sneer.
"What do you expect?" Miller asked. "You want me to lead you in a few hymns?
Or shall we just stand around and pout and wait for the next goddamn sniper?"
The captain waded through the blood of the dead private and crouched,
yanking off one of Caparzo's dog tags, pocketing it. Then he stood
and nodded in the direction they'd been heading.
"Jackson," Miller said with a sideways glance, "take Mellish. Check that
chateau. Make sure it's secure."
"Yes, sir," Jackson said, and Mellish fell in with him, moving past Reiben,
whose gash on the side of his forehead was being cleaned by Wade.
Reiben snorted a dark laugh and said, "So the angel on our shoulder was
a sniper."
"Oh, no, we still got our angel," Mellish said, tromping by, rifle
cradled in both hands. "Can't you feel him shittin' down our shirts?"
"Well, I say fuck Private James Ryan," Reiben said, "fuck him sideways,
fuck him six ways to Sunday, just so you fuck the goddamned son of a bitch."
"Lord A'mighty, Reiben," Jackson said as he and Mellish headed off,
"give it a rest. You're killin' me, boy."
"It's not me killin' you, Li'l Abner. Caparzo's just the first of us to pay
for private Ryan's ticket home. Just you wait and see."
Warily, as he pressed Reiben's bandage in place, Wade said, "Private Ryan
didn't kill Caparzo. A German sniper did."
As Jackson and Mellish trudged toward the hillside where the chateau awaited,
Miller told Horvath to take point. While his men resumed their journey to
the town square, Miller eyed Caparzo's bloody, wadded-up letter. He was
about to pick it up when he realized Wade was standing there; the medic's
gaze was shifting from the letter to the captain. Like western gunfighters,
each waiting for the other to draw, the two hesitated. Finally Wade bent
down, plucked the letter from the hard dirt street and stuffed it in a
pocket. Then the medic fell in behind the other men as they hugged walls,
ducked into doorways, leapfrogging, darting here, there.
Miller glanced up at the man and his wife enfolding their youngest child
in their arms; their dismayed expression told him they at last understood
that the Americans would not be taking their two older children along to
a safer haven. He flicked a smile at the two kids in the doorway behind
him; they waved good-bye. So did he, a little.
Then he fell in behind his men, carefully scrutinizing the street, the
surrounding buildings, doing his best to keep his men safe. To not lose
another man ...
Within the chateau's simple, deserted chapel, dying sun filtered through
the stained-glass windows that had survived an onslaught that cluttered the
church with its own remains, including floorboards from above. Pebbles of
plaster, paint chips, and chunks of building materials sat in the pews,
a congregation of ruin.
Long-barreled rifle in his bony hands, Jackson entered silently, not
out of respect for his Lord, but for any Germans that might be lurking.
Mellish followed him in, then stayed downstairs while Jackson took the
tower stairs to a small landing, where he faced a closed door.
Jackson kicked the damn thing in, rifle ready -- and found an empty bell
chamber the rope of the bell dangling from above and arched open windows
looking out on the green countryside and Neuville-au-Plain ... but no
sniper, alive or dead.
"Jackson!" Mellish called from below, voice echoing up. Found something
you left behind."
The lanky sharpshooter ignored that, creeping into the small chamber,
knowing there was no place an enemy could hide, fanning around cautiously
just the same. Then he spotted the collapsed area in the floor, off to the
side near the window facing the village. He edged closer to the jagged
hole, until the opening in the floorboards revealed the twisted sprawl
of his dead German counterpart a story below.
And Mellish standing near the corpse, looking up. "Come on, Jackson,"
Mellish said irritably. "Let's get the hell outa here -- joint's empty,
and this bastard's shot his last round."
Jackson lowered himself through the hole in the floor, and dropped down
beside the dead German, debris crunching under his boots.
"Gimme a second," Jackson told the other private.
The tall Tennesseean crouched over his late counterpart.
"Dear God," Jackson said softly.
"Christ," Mellish said, "you ain't gonna pray for him or anything are you?
How can you feel sorry for a --"
"Will ya look at that shootin' iron." He began to inspect the German's
rifle, its shattered sniperscope loose and hanging, holding the weapon up,
working the bolt, letting out a low whistle. "Lord have mercy. ..."
"If you're through checkin' out the competition, Jackson, there's a war on.
Fuck this guy! Let's go!"
"Comin', Mother," Jackson said, but he lingered. When Mellish was out of
the room, Jackson lifted the soldier's lapel and saw the dead German's
sniper badge pinned there.
"Bingo," Jackson said, undid and pocketed it, and hustled after his pal.
Soon Jackson and Mellish had caught up with Miller and the squad,
and Sergeant Hill and his men, in the town square, flattened into the
recessions of doorways of two-story houses. The rattle of small-arms fire
tinged the air, not close, not far, but near enough to keep these men tense
and cautious, fingers poised on triggers. Across the open if debris-strewn
square, a brick three-story structure identified by Hill as the town hall,
vines crawling its brick walls, perhaps the grandest building in the
village, seemed battered but unbowed.
Miller and Hill were sharing a doorway. The captain nudged the sergeant,
then nodded and pointed toward a window where a machine-gun muzzle poked
between third-floor shutters. Time to move, and quickly. ...
But a voice from that window called out: "Thunder!"
A very American voice.
Relief flooded through the men, as Sergeant Hill called back, "Flash!"
The machine-gun muzzle withdrew, and Hill and Miller traded tiny smiles and
let out some air.
Then Miller stepped out, Thompson ready, and motioned Let's go, and
he and all the men broke cover and hustled across the wide square, drawing
no fire, using a pair of huge crumbled holes in the town hall brick walls
that served as doorways. Hill and his men went in one of the impromptu
entrances, on one side of the building, while Miller and his squad used
another, around behind.
Miller's group found themselves in a back room, moving past sections of
caved-in ceiling, into a central lobby, two floors of banister landings
above, overseen by a fairly fancy cut-glass chandelier that had somehow
survived the war thus far. The place was otherwise a claustrophobic
disarray of overturned, broken-up furnishings, fallen beams, and scattered
bricks and brick wall chunks -- a dusty, gloomy area the GIs' eyes had
trouble adapting to.
A handful of men in the lobby shadows were huddled and whispering, but
Miller thought nothing of it, the town hall having been identified as
American held. Their boots crunching on fallen plaster, Miller's squad
skirted an ungainly stack of fallen beams, just as these men -- five of
them -- turned to face the newcomers.
The five soldiers wore gray uniforms, not olive drab, which was appropriate,
because they were Germans.
The briefest moment of shock on both sides elapsed into screaming
pandemonium as in both groups, men shouted in their native language for
the other sons of bitches to surrender. Weapons jerked up into position,
fingers taut on triggers.
And as quickly as it had erupted, the shouting stopped. In both languages.
The Americans and the Germans were in a Mexican standoff, and both sides
knew it. For what seemed a very long time -- and was, in fact, fifteen
seconds -- no one spoke, no one moved.
Then a young German wielding a Lugar panicked, squeezing the trigger but
producing only the click of a hammer falling on an empty chamber. But as
clicks went, this was a loud one, announcing to Miller and his men the
German's intention to shoot them. ...
And before Miller could sort through his options, knowing that to open fire
could only initiate a mutual slaughter, machine gun fire rained down from
above. Muzzle flashes lighted the gloom like the flames of wind-tossed
matches, metal snouts poked through banister posts, spitting fire and lead
and smoke. The quintet of German soldiers did a grotesque marionette's
dance as the gunfire chewed through them (and as Miller and his men hit
the deck), tossing them, tangling them in each other. Clouds of blood mist
mingled with the sour cordite fumes and the stirred-up dust of debris, and
the gray uniforms had scarlet polka-dots now. Hitting the floor, a dying
German returned fire. Finally, his Schmeisser, belching bullets and flames
at the ceiling, succeeded only in bringing down the chandelier, on the floor
and on himself, throwing glass shards that had Miller and his men protecting
their faces with forearms.
The silence was as abrupt as the barrage of gunfire it followed. Banister
fragments fluttered down and settled. Cordite smoke drifted like fog.
Sergeant Hill and his men entered the lobby through a wall and appraised
the carnage. Weapons were lifted into firing position -- eyebrows were
lifted as well.
From above came a voice: "Clear, up!"
"Clear, down!" Sergeant Hill returned.
On the floor Horvath and Miller exchanged blankly stunned expressions.
"Enough to make an old man out of ya," Sarge said.
"Let's hope." Miller said.
The captain rose and then so did his men, debris powder on them like ungodly
dandruff. They moved deeper into the lobby so they could look up at their
saviors.
All along the banister, or what was left of it after catching some of that
machine-gun fire, were airborne paratroopers, a dozen of them, gazing down
at their grisly handiwork, nodding to the men whose lives they'd just saved.
Their leader, Captain DeWayne Hamill, thirty-one, San Diego, California,
blond, jut-jawed, peered down through the haze of dust and gunpowder at
Miller and his squad of Rangers, his expression thoroughly puzzled.
"We've come for Private Ryan," Miller explained.
With the aid of heaped rubble and freshly dug foxholes, paratroopers of
the 101st Airborne Division had established a defensive perimeter along the
northern edge of the city. Despite the occasional sound of small-arms fire,
this section of Neuville was relatively secure. The sight of American tanks
poised in the perimeter's machine-gun-protected half-circle was a comfort to
Miller. He and his squad, mingled with Sergeant Hill and his men, trooped
along with Captain Hamill and his paratroopers as they crossed the train
tracks.
"How was the road in?" Hamill asked.
"Scenic," Miller said. "Lost a jeep, some gear, some ammo."
"And a man," Sarge put in dryly, trudging along next to Miller.
Miller pretended to ignore that, though in truth it bothered him that
Horvath felt compelled to play Jiminy Cricket. He expected boys fresh off
the base to question his seeming heartlessness; but the battle-say Sarge
should know better.
Hamill angled over to a scrawny, thirty-day-wonder lieutenant who stood
halfway across the tracks, directing some tanks into position. Miller
and his squad paused while the Airborne captain approached the man.
"Get Private Ryan up here," Hamill ordered.
"Ryan!" the lieutenant called out to the paratroopers lining the perimeter.
"Front and center!"
A helmeted head popped out of a foxhole, and the soldier under the helmet
came running, almost dropping his rifle, finally tripping on the train
tracks. As he neared them, his looks proved no less goofy than his gangly
gait: close-set eyes, lingering acne, a beaver overbite, and Andy Gump's
chin, or lack of one.
"Sir," Ryan squawked, saluting the two captains with absurd, intense
formality. "Private James Ryan reporting as ordered, sir!"
Reiben, leaning on his B.A.R., rolled his eyes and said to Mellish,
"Told ya he'd be an asshole."
"At ease," Hamill was saying. "Captain Miller here wants a word with you."
Ryan frowned, as if this concept were beyond him, as if Hamill had just
proposed an arcane calculus problem. "Sir?"
"Private," Miller said, businesslike but gentle, "I'm afraid I have some
bad news for you."
The close-set eyes narrowed, the pimply forehead clenching like a fist.
"Sir?"
Miller felt like he was getting ready to kick a stray puppy dog. "There's no
easy way to ay this, son, so I'll just spit it out. Your brothers are dead."
"What?". The color drained from the boy's face; he had the expression
of a man struck a blow in the pit of his stomach. His flabby stomach.
"Your brothers are gone ... son?"
Ryan sat, almost collapsing, as if the steel switching box his behind found
was purely coincidental. "Dead ... dead, sir? All dead?"
Miller nodded somberly down at him. "We've been sent to take you home, son.
You're going home."
"Oh, my God," the boy said, and his rifle clunked to the tracks, his hands
flying to his face to catch the tears that were bursting from him, as if
this were a sorrow he'd been holding in. Of course, any man in this war
was holding back those kinds of feelings. ...
"My brothers ... oh, my God, my sweet little brothers ..."
Reiben whispered to Mellish, "Really takin' it like a man, ain't he?"
Hamill squeezed the boy's shoulder. "We're sorry for your loss, James.
Can't tell you how much."
"My piles bleed for him," Mellish whispered to Reiben, but Mellish actually
did feel sorry for the goofy kid; he had brothers of his own.
Face streaked with tears, Ryan sobbed and hiccuped but managed to get out,
"How ... how did they ... die?"
"They were killed in action," Miller said.
The boy frowned, puzzled. "What ... what kind of action?"
"Well ... I don't know the details. I'm truly sorry."
"This can't be ..."
"It's always hard to accept something like this."
The boy's tears had eased. "No, I mean it just can't be. Ned and Richie,
they're both in grammar school."
Now Miller was the one who felt he'd been struck a blow.
"Is that it?" Ryan asked. "A school yard accident? Like a slide collapsed,
or maybe a better-totter went haywire?"
Miller studied the boy as if he were a germ under a microscope.
"You are James Ryan?"
"Sure." He was sniffling.
"James F.?"
"That's right. So they are dead?" And the tears began anew.
Reiben, amused now, whispered to Mellish: "Maybe a land mine went off
under the jungle gym. Maybe the Japs sabotaged a swing set."
Miller tried again. "You're James Francis Ryan?"
He shook his head, tears flying, spattering Miller like raindrops.
"James Frederick Ryan."
Could be a typo on the middle name, a screwup. Miller asked, "Iowa?"
"Minnesota. Brainerd." And still the tears came. "Does ... does this mean
my brothers are all right?"
"Uh, I'm sure they are," Miller said. "We're looking for another James
Ryan."
Ryan, James Frederick, was still sobbing. "Are you sure my brothers are
okay? How do you know they are?"
"This is just a foul-up, son. I'm sorry."
"Maybe the foul-up is his brothers are okay, and mine are ... oh, God
..."
"No. I don't think so."
He blinked, tears pearling his eyelashes. "So you're not takin' me home?"
"No. We're not."
Now the tears really flew, and Hamill motioned some of Ryan's comrades
over to comfort and settle him down as he squatted on the switching box.
Paratroopers along the perimeter had heard enough of this to be amused, and
derisive laughter at the squad's expense kept Reiben from laughing himself.
Felling like a jackass, Miller buttonholed Captain Hamill, saying, "Jesus,
sorry for the mix-up."
"Military intelligence strikes again," Hamill said.
They moved off the train tracks, Hamill staying with them, Sarge moving up
to Miller to ask, "So where the hell is our Ryan?"
"You got me by the short ones," Miller said. He turned to Hamill.
"You in contact with your C.O.?"
"Not unless you got a spare Ouija board."
Miller grunted. "That's what I figured."
But Hamill was thinking, wanting to help. "What unit is you Ryan in?"
"Baker Company, five-oh-sixth."
That tightened Hamill's eyes. He called over to Sergeant Hill,
who was having a smoke with his men, "That guy who busted his foot,
he's five-oh-sixth isn't he?"
"Yeah -- Charlie Company, I think."
Hamill looked at Miller. "It's not Baker Company, but it's a start."
"Beats anything I got. Where too?"
"Follow me. ..."
Soon Hamill and Miller were visiting the bombed-out grocery store where the
wounded of the 101st were huddled. One of them, Lou Oliver, twenty-four,
Phoenix, Arizona, sat with his broken foot bandaged to the size of a loaf
of bread, looking up at the two captains, saying, "Ryan? Sorry, don't know
him."
"What was your drop zone?" Miller asked.
"Near Vierville."
Miller blinked. "Well, how the hell did you wind up way up here?"
Oliver let out something that was half a laugh, half a sigh. "Just lucky
I guess. Sir, our C-47 drew heavy fire, and our pilot was just doing his
best to dodge that heavy shit ... sir. Turning every which way, and we
took even more fire during the drop ... got pretty messy."
Miller nodded.
"Anyway, I ended up here, glad to be anywhere. And I haven't seen a single
guy from my stick. God knows where they are."
"Did any blowhard in Baker Company let slip where their primary drop zone
was? Any loose lips?"
"No, sir ... but I know Baker Company had the same rally point as us."
Miller sighed with satisfaction; finally, a real lead. He withdrew a map
and began unfolding it.
"Good," Miller said. "Show me."
Within minutes Miller and Hamill were rejoining the squad and Sergeant Hill
and his men, who were loitering outside the gutted grocery.
"We got someplace to go?" Sarge asked Miller.
"Yup," Miller said. "We'll wait till dark before we head out."
"What's that ... three hours?"
"Three hours." Miller swiveled to Hamill. "Can you recommend a good hotel?
Clean sheet, soft beds, room service?"
"Hot and cold running French maids," Reiben put in. "Except not running
fast, sir."
Everybody laughed at that.
"I think we can fix you fellas up," Hamill said. "Sergeant Hill, take 'em
to church."
"Yes, sir," Hill said, and the men followed the sergeant, boots scuffing
cobblestones, leaving the two captains by themselves in the ruined street.
"So," Hamill said, lighting up a K-ration Lucky Strike, finding a cement
chunk to sit down on, "what do you hear? How's it all falling together?"
"Beachhead's secure, but it's slow goin'." Miller found his own concrete
chair. "Montgomery's takin' his time getting to Caen, and we're treadin'
water till he's ready."
"Monty," Hamill snorted, smoke trailing from his nostrils, dragon-style.
"That Brit twit's overrated."
"No shit," Miller grunted.
They were strangers, these two captains, yet they spoke like old friends, as
if they were picking up on a conversation they had left off only yesterday.
It was a small club they belonged to -- that brotherhood of combat captains
-- and when members ran into each other, they took advantage of finding
someone they could talk to.
"We gotta take Caen to take St. Lo," Hamill observed.
"And we gotta take St. Lo," Miller added, "to take Valognes."
Hamill nodded. "Gotta take Valognes to take Cherbourg."
"Gotta take Cherbourg to take Paris."
"Gotta take Paris to take Berlin."
"Gotta take Berlin," Miller finished, "to take that boat home."
They allowed each other a few moments to think of their respective homes,
then Hamill shook his head and said, "We sure as hell could use your help
here."
"I sure as hell would like to pitch in. But orders are orders."
"I know. Anyway, I understand what you're doing."
"Really? Well, maybe you can tell me, so I'll know."
Hamill sucked on the cigarette, let it pull on his lungs.
"That business with the Sullivans, it was tough on the moms and dads
back home. Bad headlines ... plus, I got brothers myself."
Miller nodded. "You're comin' in loud and clear."
"Good luck with this mission, buddy."
"Thank you, Captain."
"Find that lucky bastard, and ship him home."
They spoke for perhaps another hour, watching the sun turn the devastated
village beautiful with hot orange light and cool blue shadows. Then Miller
got directions to the church, and with nightfall to deceive him, he could
almost tell what this village had looked like before the Germans and
Americans had come.
At the church he found Jackson on guard duty not at the front door of the
church, which was buried in rubble, but at the wall a mortar had made a
sloping pile of stones.
"Thunder," he said.
"Flash," Jackson drawled, Springfield draped lovingly in his arms.
"Welcome to the Ritz, Cap'n."
"Jackson," Miller said, taking a moment, "why is it you're the only one
in the squad that doesn't think I'm a heartless Bastard?"
"No, sir, I think you're a heartless bastard myself," he said.
"That's your job right new, and thank God you're doin' it. And well, sir."
He smiled at Jackson, nodded, edged inside and poked his way through the
piled stone and building materials and debris. Nothing much remained to
say this was a church: a single stained-glass window depicting young Jesus
teaching his teachers, a broken-winged angel watching down in a halo of
moonlight filtering in, the occasional pew. Wade was in one of them,
writing something.
Miller knew instinctively what Wade was doing: copying Caparzo's letter,
moving the words from the bloody crumpled sheet to clean, fresh V-mail.
"We move out in two hours," Miller announced, "Try to catch some sleep."
Wade glanced up, almost glared at Miller, and returned to his copying.
Miller moved down the aisle, noticing Upham on his back in a pew, glasses
off, staring at the crumbly ceiling, shaking as if he were suffering
a mild case od St. Vitus' dance.
The captain paused. Very quiet he asked, "How you holding up, Corporal?"
Upham smiled; it was a pretty ghastly smile, but a smile. "This is good
for me, sir. All of it."
"How's that, son?"
He sat up and recited, clinging to the words like a life raft: "'War educates
the senses, calls into action the will, perfects the physical constitution,
brings men into such swift and close collision in critical moments that man
measures man.'"
Miller chuckled softly. "I guess that's Emerson's way of lookin' at the
brighter side."
Upham blinked, the stared at his captain. "You, uh ... you're familiar
with the work of Emerson, sir?"
"Ralph Waldo and me, we're friendly acquaintances."
Upham was interested now, and his shaking had stopped, though he hadn't
noticed. "Captain ... where are you from, anyway?"
"Why?"
"You know, just wondering .. what you did for a living in the real world
... that kinda thing."
"What's the pool up to?"
Caught, Upham grinned. "Uh, it's up over three hundred."
Miller considered that, said, "Not bad. ... Tell ya what, when it hits
five c's, I'll pass you the answer and we'll go fifty-fifty."
Eyes narrowing, Upham whispered conspiratorially, "If that's how you feel,
why don't we wait till it's up to a grand?"
Miller shook his head. "I might not live that long."
Upham's grin faded as he realized his captain was not kidding.
"Okay," Upham said. "Five hundred, then."
"It's a deal, kid."
Miller winked at him, and moved to one side of the church, found
a clear spot on the floor to sit, and began to spread out his maps,
using a flashlight to study them, occasionally marking them.
Before long, his men asleep around him, their snoring rumbling gently
through the little sanctuary, Miller began having trouble steadying
the hand holding the flashlight; damn thing was shaking again.
"How long has this been goin' on?"
The voice was Sarge's; it was neither loud nor unkind. Horvath crouched
next to his captain who said, "Started in Portsmouth, when they brought us
down for loading ... comes and goes."
"Maybe you should think about gettin' in a new line of work. This one
doesn't seem to be agreein' with you anymore."
Miller laughed gently. "Yeah. This current occupation is losin'
it's charm."
Sarge sat next to him; Miller took it as a the gesture of reconsiliation
it was.
"What was the name of that kid at Anzio?" Miller asked.
"There were a lot of kids at Anzio. Too many fuckin' kids at Anzio."
"The one that walked on his hands, singin' that filthy song?"
Sarge laughed. "The man on the flyin' trapeze, with the 'unexpurgated'
lyrics?"
Miller laughed too. "That's the one."
"Vecchio."
"Yeah, yeah -- Vecchio." Miller shook his head. "Goofy fuckin' kid ...
Vecchio. Caparzo. Jesus ..."
"Jesus?" Sarge gave him the needle: "You mean, you got him killed,
too? I had no idea. You're at the right place to make amends."
Miller smiled at that, shaking his head; he was working to keep the tears
inside -- he understood how that other Private Ryan had come so unglued.
"Every time you get one of your boys killed," Miller said softly, almost
prayerfully, "you tell yourself you just saved the lives of two, three, ten,
maybe a hundred other men and boys,"
"Not a bad way to look at it."
"You know how many men I've lost under my command?"
"Not offhand."
"Caparzo made ninety-four. So, hell, that means I probably saved the lives
of ten times that many. Maybe twenty times. See, it's simple. Just do
the math -- it lets you choose the mission over the men, every time."
"Except this time," Sarge said, "the mission is a man."
Miller laughed again, but it was bitter. "Suppose it had been that goofy
kid today -- suppose he had been our Private Ryan. Would he have been worth
Caparzo?"
"Maybe to his mother."
"I got a mother, you got a mother, Caparzo had a mother, Jesus fuckin'
Christ ..." And he was staring at the stained-glass window as if daring God
to do something about his blasphemy. "... This Private James Francis Ryan
better be pretty goddamn special. He better get his ass home and cure cancer
or invent a lightbulb that never fuckin' burns out, or a car that runs on
water. Because the truth is, I wouldn't trade ten Ryans for one Vecchio
or one Caparzo."
Horvath thought about that, then said, "You know, Ryan doesn't just have
a mother ... he has a captain, too, who probably feels the same way about
him as you do about these kids."
Miller's mouth twitched with something that wasn't a smile. "Well, then,
let him get his precious Ryan's ass home. Shit ... there it goes
again."
His hand was shaking, the way Upham had trembled. He focused on it,
willing it to stop. Finally, it did.
He got onto his feet, checked his watch, barked out: "On your dogs, girls!
Rise and shine. Beauty sleep's over. Let's go. Go! Go!"
And, grumbling, bones creaking, leaving dreams of home and mothers and
naked girlfriends behind, they crawled off the floor and out of pews and
shouldered their gear, following their heartless captain, trading the
shelter of the church for the waiting night.
And the waiting war.
Moonlight washed the countryside, and Miller and his men, in a soothing
ivory. The quiet of the night was broken only by the sound of crickets,
an occasional questioning owl, and the footsteps of the seven soldiers
themselves, as they moved cautiously along the edge of a field,
parallel to the grooves of a cart path.
Miller was proud of his boys, his men. They were a small group, relatively
new to fighting, but Omaha Beach had been one hell of a crash course. They
were seasoned combat vets now, and with their heavy weaponry and in their
full-battle gear, his little squad looked formidable.
He noticed Jackson and Wade drifting to close to each other, and snapped his
fingers. All eyes went to him, and he motioned curtly for the pair to open
it up a bit. He'd warned them about bunching up.
A sudden flash of light in the sky might have been lightning, but it wasn't;
rumbling shook both the sky and the earth. The horizon began to strobe an
orangish-white, the ground quivering beneath their boots, with the tremors
of shells bursting in the distance.
The sky behind them lighted up as well, and soon opposite ends of the sky
seemed on fire. The tidal wave of sound kept rolling over and under them,
and they could see the mighty shells streaking, hear them whizzing, overhead.
For a few moments the squad stood frozen in the neutral zone of a massive
artillery battle, in the quiet of the eye of a manmade hurricane.
This battle would not touch them, Miller knew, unless by freak chance an
American 88 collided in midair with a German one and showered death down
on them. He tried to catch the attention of his men, but their faces were
turned toward one end or other of the burning sky. They were transfixed
by the otherworldly beauty of warfare at a distance, and shaken by the
magnitude of its fury, the orange and white lights playing on their faces
like kids at a Fourth of July fireworks show.
He snapped his fingers again, and the tiny sound stood out against the
battle thunder. His men blinked out of their spell and trudged on.
They walked through the night, the sound of artillery growing ever distant,
the sky lighting again, this time with the threat of dawn, not conflict.
At a crossroads Miller paused to check his map while Sarge shone a
red-filtered flashlight onto an array of directional signs, giving
them plenty of options to unpronounceable French villages.
The captain refolded and tucked away his map. "Be light soon. Let's pick
up the pace."
Avoiding hedgerow-lined lanes, they stayed on flat farmland, pastures, and
fields, and soon -- Sarge taking point, Miller tail end -- they were walking
in dewy grass with the chirp of waking birds and the pleasant gray-blue sky
to lull them -- and the weapons in their hands to remind them why they were
taking this pleasant morning jaunt.
Reiben, who'd been uncharacteristically quiet for some time, burdened with
both the B.A.R. and its heavy ammo, posed a question: "You know what the
best thing could happen is?"
"How 'bout," Jackson offered, "Private Reiben steps on a rusty nail,
comes down with lockjaw, and never says another word, long as he lives?"
Miller laughed at that, loud ebough for the men to hear, not because he
thought it was particularly funny, but to keep his squad's spirits up.
"I'll bite, Reiben," Miller said as they moved along at a pretty good clip.
"What's the best thing that could happen?"
"Best thing," Reiben said, "is we find Ryan, croaked."
"And why's that?"
"Sir, consider the possibilities. A: Ryan is alive, and we have to haul
his sorry ass back to the beach. Knowing you, Cap, you don't let him carry
our gear, even though he should pitch in like any other dogface, and we
carry him back on a pillow so him and his mom get reunited like the brass
wants, and us? We all get killed trying to keep the son of a bitch alive."
In the distance a dog barked, not very urgently.
"Okay," Miller said, as if he agreed with all of that, which made the men
smile.
Reiben went on: "Or, 2: Ryan is dead and --"
"Wait a minute," Mellish said. "You said 'A'. Now you're sayin' '2' ..."
"Yeah, yeah," Reiben said, "or B: Ryan's dead, blown to shit, millions of
pieces floating in some creek bumping into himself. And you, sir, you make
us fish him out a piece at a time and we're trying to put Humpty-Dumpty back
together, you know, to make sure we got the right Private Ryan this time,
while the Krauts pick us off, one by one."
"That one I don't much care for," Miller said.
They were at a hedgerow, but one of the lower-standing ones, not
impenetrable. They were able to squeeze through onto the next field,
where Reiben resumed his discourse.
"I don't like that one myself, either, sir. So let's look a C: we find
Ryan and he's wounded."
"Not good," Mellish said.
"The worst," Reiben agreed. "Not only does he not carry our gear,
we gotta carry his gear. Not to mention Private Ryan himself and
his sorry, wounded ass."
"Could happen," Miller said.
"That's what I'm saying, sir. Best possible situation is, D: he's dead,
as a mackerel, more or less intact. We grab one of his dog tags, and
hotfoot it back to the beach."
"Do we take his body? hellish asked.
"Hell no! Leave him to some lucky burial squad."
"I got a better idea."
Reiben smirked. "I'm sure, Mellish."
Mellish looked around at his fellow ground pounders and asked,
"Anybody besides me ever notice how close the name 'Reiben' is to 'Ryan'?
Reiben, Ryan ... Wry-ben, Wry-yan."
The squad was nodding, grinning -- except for Reiben.
Mellish continued: "I vote we shoot Reiben, leave him for the burial squad,
and scratch over his dog tags, passing him off as Ryan."
"Mighty temptin'," Jackson said. "But what if somebody catches on?"
"Mistakes happen," Mellish shrugged. "It's a sloppy war ... worst thing is,
we have to keep lookin' ... few days from now, when things are gettin'
quieter."
"Interesting," Miller said, keeping a straight face. "A real possibility."
"No offense, sir," Reiben said, beaten at his own game, "but I like my idea
better."
Wade, who had not been playing along with the black comedy, said, "I don't
think Ryan's mother would."
"Ryan's mother!" Reiben shook his head. "Jesus Christ, let's not start
with Ryan's mother again. What did Ryan's mother ever do for you? Did she
ever tuck you in, or haul your ashes or anything? Ever occur to you, maybe
she doesn't even like her goddamn kid? Maybe he was a pain in the
ass down on the farm? A bad apple!"
"She loves him," Upham said.
"How do you know?"
"She's his mother."
"So? Maybe she didn't't even want him. Maybe the rubber broke. Maybe it
was the other three kids she loved, and she woulda just as soon sent little
Jimmy back for a nickel refund."
"Or how 'bout this?" Jackson asked, getting into the swing of it.
"How about he accidentally killed ol' Bessie, the prize-winnin' Hereford?"
"How'd he kill her?" Mellish asked.
Jackson was ready: "Burned down the barn by accident playin' with matches."
Mellish's eyes glittered. "Maybe it wasn't an accident!"
"Yeah," Reiben said, having fun, back on top of his game, "maybe he's one
of those sadistic farm boys you hear about, likes to torture chickens,
and rub the blood on his overalls. ..."
"No," Upham said, "you're wrong -- he's not sadistic."
Everybody looked at the corporal.
"He's amoral," Upham said, "unprincipled and thoroughly corrupt. He's
depraved, dishonest, and tricky. He's slippery, fibbing, unreliable,
utterly useless bovine fornicating farm boy ... that's a cow fucker,
in case anybody's interested ... but sadistic? No."
The men around him were grinning, nodding, viewing the new meat with sudden
respect. Mellish whistled appreciatively, and Reiben was eyeing the corporal
with a new regard, wondering if he had a rival now, in the bullshit-slinging
arena.
Miller was pleased, even relieved, to see Upham assert himself and the group
finally accept the four-eyed corporal into its fold. But the griping sure
had taken a weird turn. ...
Walking through the night, it had been as if the squad were exploring an
otherwise unpopulated planet. The morning began the same way, then perhaps
an hour into sunshine, after moving across fields and pastures, encountering
occasional cows but no people, Miller and his men exchanged wary glances as
a murmuring of activity beckoned them through a hedgerow.
Pushing through the hedge, which was more forgiving than many of its ilk,
the squad was confronted by (as Reiben immediately put it) "Grand Central
Station in a bean field."
American troops, paratroopers mostly, had set up a circular perimeter
-- freshly dug foxholes, machine-gun positions guarding the flanks --
within which, like performers in the center ring of a circus, clusters
of GIs wandered aimlessly, and French refugees milled and squatted.
Hedgerows hemmed the field on three sides, a dirt road on the fourth.
The soldiers, smoking and swapping stories, were clearly a ragtag assortment
cut off from their companies. The civilians were old and young, women and
children outnumbering men and the elderly, clutching salvaged possessions
that ranged from absolutely essential to poignantly personal. One camped-out
family was having a sort of picnic from the food carted here in an elegant
suitcase, while an old lady clasped framed family photographs to he bosom,
and a little girl pushed her doll in a tiny stroller. Other kids, eyes wide
with hero worship, were watching the soldiers who guarded the perimeter.
The soldiers and refugees were navigating a graveyard of gliders.
Flung about the flatness of the field were half a dozen of the low-slung,
wide-winged ships, with American markings, scattered like huge discarded
toys. Their plywood husks yawned open at the rear, where men and gear
had departed.
Five were intact, but a sixth glider had crashed into the hedgerow on the
far side of the field, and a score or more of wounded American soldiers
were clustered there, some using a broken wing for shade. Other wounded
were being shuttled to the holding area, in commandeered civilian vehicles,
including a battered old farm truck and a horse-drawn milk wagon.
Still others were making their way under their own steam.
As the squad tramped onto the field, a ragged group from the 506th wearing
the blue and red double-A patch of the 101st Airborne was escorting a
handful of German prisoners to a holding area.
Miller realized this was the first close-up look most of his squad had ever
had at the enemy, living examples anyway, and knew his boys would be shocked,
as he had been, by how normal they looked and how young many of them were.
They bore the unmistakable odor of sweat and leather and unwashed uniforms
so typical of the German combat soldier. And they seemed dazed, amazed,
that they'd been captured.
"Master race my ass," Reiben muttered.
As they passed, Mellish identified himself as a Jew. "Juden," he said
to them again and again, "Juden," pointing to himself and his gun.
Just letting them know. ...
Over by the wrecked glider, where the wounded were gathered, a young
American Air Corps pilot was motioning them over, calling to Miller,
"Captain! Captain!"
As they trooped over, Miller turned to tell Wade to tend to the wounded,
but Wade was already halfway there.
Miller stopped in front of the pilot. "Want to fill me in here, Lieutenant?"
"Dewindt, sir," the pilot said. William Dewindt was slim, blond,
twenty-five, from Scottsdale, Arizona. "Ninety-ninth Troop Carrier
Squadron, carrying the 325th glider infantry. This wrecked baby wss
mine. ... Twenty-two dead."
Miller's mouth flinched in sympathy.
"I got tossed ass over teakettle," Dewindt said, pointing into the field,
"windin' up over there. Not a scratch. My copilot lost his head.
"What did he do?" Miller asked. "Panic?"
"No, no! I guess I didn't make myself clear. He was decapitated."
There wasn't much to say to that. So Miller stayed businesslike, asking,
"Where's the unit? Who the hell are all these people?"
"The guys we brought in, sir, they went off, first night, and we haven't
seen 'em since. Meantime, guys keep showin' up, one, two, half a dozen at
a time. Sooner or later some officer'll come along, patch together a mixed
unit, and head off to make noise. You must have had heavy losses yourself,
sir."
That was a natural assumption to make, a small group like his headed up by
a captain.
"No," Miller said, "we're on a special patrol, Lieutenant. Looking for a
Private James Ryan. Baker Company of the five-oh-sixth. Seen him?
Dewindt shrugged. "Wouldn't know if I had, sir. Lot of guys have been
through here, in and out."
"Yeah." He glanced over at his medic. "Anything?"
Wade looked up from the man he was bandaging to say, "He's not among these
joes."
"Jesus," somebody said.
It was Sarge.
"Take a look at this," Horvath said, and Miller went over to where the
sergeant was standing.
A corpse of an officer was wedged between what remained of the glider's
bulkhead and a jeep that had been sent smashing forward, on impact.
"Couldn't pry him out of there," Dewindt said, then wryly added,
"You wouldn't happen th have a spare winch on you?"
"Not hardly," Miller said. "Are those stars on his helmet?"
"Sure are," Sarge said.
"That's General Amend, Deputy Commander, 101st," Dewindt said.
"No shit," Sarge breathed. "How did he manage to die like that?"
Dewindt smirked. "Some fucking genius had the brilliant idea of welding
steel plates onto our deck to keep the general safe from ground fire.
Unfortunately, nobody bothered to tell me about this little precaution
till we were just gettin airborne."
"Sounds like fun," Miller said.
"Fun, like trying to fly a freight train. Gross overload, trim
characteristics shot to hell. I almost broke my damn arms tryin' to
keep 'er level."
The squad had gathered around; this was worth hearing.
"When we released," Dewindt continued, "I cut as hard as I could, tried
to gain some altitude, keep 'er from stallin'. We came down like a safe
somebody dropped out of a high window. And you can see how we ended up."
He pointed out to the other gliders. "Everybody else stopped on a dime ...
we were just too damn heavy. Wet grass, downward slope ... twenty-two men
dead. ... Guess it was real important to keep General Amend alive."
He grunted a humorless laugh. "One man."
"Lot of that goin' around," Reiben nodded.
Miller shot a glance at Reiben, but Reiben just stared calmly back at his
captain. And finally Miller shrugged, nodded; how could he argue?
Reiben sighed, said, "Another typical foobar."
"Fuckin' A," Mellish said.
"Hey," Upham said, "how do you spell that, anyway?"
"F-U." Reiben grinned, then patted his B.A.R.
"That's how I thought you spelled it," Upham said. "I looked it up in my
German dictionary. No such word.
"Upham," Miller said.
"Sir?"
"Talk to every one of these paratroopers, on the perimeter, inside the
circle. Look for Ryan or word of him."
"Yes, sir."
And Upham hustled off.
Dewindt shook a little pouch tied on his belt. "Might want to check these
out, too."
"Yeah?" Miller said, not understanding.
The pilot untied the pouch and handed it to the captain. "That's my
dog-tag collection," he said wearily. "More of 'em than I care to count.
Those cover a lot of bodies, sir. Your man could be in there."
Miller took the sack from the pilot, then handed it to Jackson, saying,
"See if you can find Private Ryan."
"Yes, sir."
"I'll help," Reiben chimed.
They sat on the grass, and Mellish joined them, like kids playing with
jacks or marbles. They passed the bag, each taking a handful, checking,
then tossing tags in a pile on the empty pouch at their center.
"Think he's in here?" Reiben asked.
"Bet ya he is," Jackson said. "Bet that barn-burnin', cow-lovin' bastard's
just waitin' for us. ..."
"Bet ya I find him," Mellish said.
"Five bucks says I find him," Reiben said.
"You're on," Mellish said.
"I'm in," Jackson said.
Now it was more like a back of the barracks craps game. A good-natured
gambling fever gripped them as they searched faster and faster through
the metal tags.
"Come on, baby, come on, I know you're in here," Mellish said.
"Screw you, buddy," Reiben said to Mellish, "he's mine!"
"No use hidin', Ryan," Jackson said. "Cain't hide from this ol' hound dog.
..."
"Olly olly oxen free," Mellish said.
Reiben, laughing, said, "Let's make it really interesting ... make it ten
bucks. ..."
"Ten's fine with me," Mellish said, then announced, "I got him!" He held up
the tag like it was the winning ticket stub on free dish night at the movies.
"Here he is -- Ryan! I got him!"
Miller, from the sidelines, asked, "James Francis?"
"Uh ... no ... shit. It's not Ryan, it's Reyes ... R-E-Y-E-S. Hell,
that's close."
"This ain't horseshoes," Jackson said.
"Piss on it," Mellish said, tossing the tag on the pile and digging back in.
"Close my ass," Reiben laughed.
Miller smiled, too, then he glared at Sarge and saw disgust. Dewindt had
a similar sickened expression.
Then Wade, hands bloody from tending wounds, strode over to the little game
circle, his face tight with fury, but his voice was a whisper, a steady one,
as he said, "What the hell do you think you're doin'? Those guys can hear
you."
Wade nodded toward the huddled, ashen-faced wounded under the broken wing.
"Every one of those dog tags is a dead man, you dumb fucks," Wade
said, almost spitting the words.
Like scolded children -- children who knew they'd done wrong -- the trio
whitened and went silent as they continued to check the names on the dog
tags, slowly now, somberly.
Miller's hand was shaking. He clutched it with his other hand, while his
mind swam with doubt and guilt: how could he have gone along with
that?. He had been telling himself the hardened surface he showed
his men was a facade, for their benefit; but had he gone hard underneath
the facade now?
Or was there nothing left behind it? Had this fucking war killed his
humanity like it killed Vecchio and Caparzo and the rest?
Reiben, Mellish, and Jackson were getting to their feet now, finished with
their search.
"He's not here, sir," Jackson said, handing the refilled pouch respectfully
back to Dewindt. "Sorry, sir. Guess we're a little battle-wacky."
The pilot said nothing.
Miller nodded to Dewindt and, seeing Upham moving his way, walked toward the
corporal, moving toward the middle of the field. The squad followed along.
"No Ryan," Upham shrugged with a nod back at the cluster of men he'd just
spoken with.
Miller kept walking, joining the jumbled chaos of civilians and GIs,
and his men followed.
"Now what, sir?" Sarge asked him.
Miller just shot him a dirty look -- thanks for asking, drop dead -- and
stalked off toward the road, where more refugees and wounded were coming
along to join the circus.
"Goddamn radios don't work," Miller muttered. "Chain of command
nonexistent ..."
As his men tagged after him, they exchanged glances of concern.
"Is he bitching," Reiben whispered to Mellish, "or cracking up?"
Miller stopped suddenly and so did everybody else, piling on top of each
other like bowling pins struggling not to be a strike.
"Here's an idea," he said. "Let's split up into two groups and wander
the fucking countryside. Like town criers, you know? Calling his name?
Sooner or later, he's bound to hear us."
"Good thought, sir," Sarge said, clearly not sure whether Miller was kidding
or not, "but that could take a while."
"I hope he's just bitching," Mellish whispered back to Reiben.
"Okay, let's ask the locals," Miller said, "maybe they've seen him."
An old couple moving down off the road into the field recoiled as the captain
moved quickly toward them, saying, "Parlez vous Ryan? Oui? Non?"
Speaking to each other in frantic French, the old couple moved quickly away
from Miller, as if he'd been about to assault them.
Upham whispered to Reiben and Mellish: "They think he's cracking up."
Another group of German prisoners was being paraded from the road onto the
field, escorted by more paratroopers wearing the blue and red insignia of
the 101st. The prisoners looked fresher than their paratrooper guards,
who had obviously seen heavy action; many were walking wounded.
"Hey!" Miller called to them. "One hundred first! Any of you fellas know
a guy named Ryan?"
The men passing shook their heads, no.
But as the ragged column continued on, Miller kept asking, his desperation
showing, his men behind him shaking their heads with worry. The paratroopers
were shaking their heads, too -- no.
"Anybody know a James Ryan?" the captain persisted.
Then a voice from down the line called out, not to Miller but to announce
even farther back: "Hey, Joe -- isn't Ryan that guy Michaelson pals around
with? The one from Company C?"
"I think so, yeah!" a voice returned.
"Well get his ass up here," the paratrooper hollered back, "would ya?"
Pretty soon a pair of paratroopers had separated from the prisoner escort
group and planted themselves before Miller and his squad.
"Either of you know a guy named Ryan?" Miller asked.
Michaelson here knows a Ryan, Captain," the paratrooper on the left said.
He was Private Joe D'Amato, twenty-two, Elizabeth, New Jersey. "But you'll
have to speak up, sir, his hearing's not so good."
"My hearing's messed up, sir!" Private Roger Michaelson said,
twenty-three, Rock Island, Illinois. "You'll have to speak up!"
"German grenade went off next to him," D'Amato said. "His hearing comes
and goes."
"Grenade went off next to me!" Michaelson began to explain.
"Yeah, yeah, I get it!" Miller said, weary of this Abbott and
Costello routine already. "You know Ryan?"
"Who?"
"Ryan! Do you know Ryan?"
"Jimmy Ryan?"
Behind him, Miller's men perked up at this.
Reiben whispered to Mellish, "He ain't craking up, he's a human devinin'
rod."
Miller was grinning, nodding. "James Francis Ryan?"
Michaelson winced. "Jimmy Ryan? What?
Miller turned to his squad. "Who's got a pencil?"
The men started patting their pockets.
"A pencil, anybody! Come on!"
"Sir ..."
It was Upham, holding out a stubby pencil.
"... Just this small one, sir."
The captain and corporal exchanged stony deadpan expressions, but their eyes
shared a smile and a private moment.
Then Miller asked, "Paper, Upham?"
"Yes, sir," he said, and held up a small notebook.
"Good. Now write this down: 'Do you know James Francis Ryan?'"
Upham nodded, jotted that down, and held up the little notebook like a flash
card for Michaelson to read.
"Of course I know him!" Michaelson exploded. "He's my best
pal!"
"Ask him if he knows where Ryan is," Miller said to Upham, who jotted that,
and held up the notebook page.
Michaelson nodded and said, "Yeah. We missed our drop zone by
about twenty miles, ended up way over by Bum-ville or some damn place!
Jimmy, me, and a couple other guys were headin' here, to our rally point!
Ran into a colonel who was gatherin' men to go to Ramelle. ... That's the
last I seen of him!"
The men of Miller's squad were energized by this news, trading smiles,
shaking fists in triump; their fishing expedition had turned into a real
mission.
Miller patted Michaelson's shoulder and began, "Thank you!"
"What?"
The captain sighed, told the other paratrooper, "Just thank him for me,
will ya? When his hearing comes back."
A minute later Miller had spread a map out on the grass with his men
gathering around him as he pointed, saying, "We're here -- Ramelle is there.
On the Merderet River, about fifteen miles west by northwest."
Sarge was squinting in thought. "Why Ramelle?"
Miller unfolded the map farther, amd pointed as he spoke. He didn't
notice his hand was shaking, but his men did -- they were staring not
at the locations he was singling out, but at his trembling fingers.
"The target has always been Cherbourg," Miller said. "We can't push on to
Paris unless we take a major port. Rommel knows that, of course, and'll
come across the Merderet and hit us in the flank when we make that right
turn for Cherbourg. ... That makes any village on the river with a bridge
valuable fucking real estate."
And the captain dimpled the map with a fingertip. Right at Ramelle,
its bridge indicated boldly on the map.
"That's where we'll find Private Ryan," he said.
And he looked up at the hovering faces, to see how well thay'd taken
in this lesson, and realized at last that their focus was on his hand.
His trembling hand.
But he did not acknowledge that this was any big deal; he just folded up
the map.
"Let's get moving," he said.
He did, and they did.
Morning turned into afternoon, and the shadows the squad threw across the
French countryside had changed direction. Reiben hadn't: he was still
bitching.
"I'm just saying," he said, loaded down with his B.A.R. and its ammo,
as they trudged through yet another hedgerow-lined field, "the guys in
the Pacific got it easier."
"I don't know," Mellish said, "they gotta catch malaria before they start
raving -- with you it comes natural."
"I'm tellin' ya, shootin' Japs is easier, on account of Nips don't look
as much like people as Krauts do."
Miller, walking point, smiled knowingly to himself; seeing those Germans
up close had gotten to his boys, some.
"I don't have any trouble shootin' Krauts," Mellish said.
"Killing a man is killing a man," Wade said, "no matter what he looks like."
"Not that there ever was a German worth a flying fuck," Reiben observed.
"They're all cocksuckers and pricks. Always have been. It's in the blood."
Miller glanced back. "What about Beethoven? Remember him?"
Everybody recalled Reiben's rant about the irony and tragedy of the great
composer going deaf.
"A prick," Reiben said.
Miller tried again. "Martin Luther."
"Cocksucker."
"Hwy," Sarge growled from the tail end, "I'm a Lutheran!"
"What about Immanuel Kant?" Upham asked.
"Who?"
"He was a great philosopher."
"Prick."
"Yeah?" Mellish said. "What about Marlene Dietrich?"
"Cocksucker," Reiben said. The he grinned. "But that could just be wishful
thinkin'. ..."
Everybody laughed, even Wade. Their footsteps padded over the grass, their
gear clinked and clanked along. In the distance, small-arms fire chattered,
so common a sound walking through this otherwise quiet countryside, it might
have been birds chirping or a horse braying.
"Still," Upham said, "they can't all be pricks and cocksuckers."
"Sure they can," Reiben said.
Wade, serious again, snapped, "Are you listening to yourself?"
"Would you," Mellish posed, "if you were him?"
Wade, taking this entirely too seriously, continued: "Just so I get this
straight, Reiben ... there isn't a decent man, woman, and child in their
entire country."
"Hey, you're being too generous," Reiben said, shifting, trying to
find some way he didn't feel like a pack mule with all the gear he
was burdened with. "I'd include every dog, cat, squirrel, horse, cow
... any sauerkraut-snapping, schnitzel-munching, son-of-a-bithin',
Hitler-lovin' thing that breathes. All pricks."
"And cocksuckers." Mellish reminded him.
"That, too," Reiben nodded.
"Reiben," Wade said, with no humor at all, "you have to be the most
backward, bigoted, ignorant excuse for a human being I've ever met."
"Maybe," Reiben said. "But I'm not a prick or a cocksucker."
"Let's take a vote," Mellish said.
"Yeah, yeah, all right -- name me one decent German. Go ahead ... just one.
..."
Nobady said anything.
Reiben grinned. "Ain't so easy, is it?"
Not when Martin Luther's a prick," Mellish said, "it isn't."
"Cocksucker," Reiben corrected.
"Albert Schweitzer," Wade said.
"Who?"
"Albert Schweitzer. He's a German."
Reiben had the expression of a man sniffing sour milk. "Who the hell is
that? Not that it matters. He already sounds like a prick."
Wade was shaking his head, frustrated. "Albert Schweitzer's' only the most
famous fucking doctor in history! Spent the last thirty years in Africa,
helping natives. ..."
"Why's he do that?" Reiben asked.
Wade exploded: "Because he was trying to help his fellow man! Because he
isn't a selfish asshole like you, Reiben!"
"Hey, you think I came to France for the cheese?"
The usually low-key Wade was getting worked up. "Look, shithead ... Albert
Schweitzer is the reason I became a doctor in the first place. So the next
time you step on a land mine, you better hope I feel like slappin' a bandage
on an asshole like you!"
Reiben smirked and shook his head.
"What?" Wade demanded.
"Nothin'."
"What>"
Reiben shrugged. "It's just, I thought you said, one time, both your
parents are doctors."
"That's right, Reiben. What about it?"
Reiben reared back in mock shock. "And it takes some fuckin' prick Kraut
to convince you to go into the family business?"
"Somebody hand me a weapon," Wade said.
Miller, weary of this discourse, called back, "Reiben, lose an argument,
for once, okay? Albert Schweitzer was not a prick and not a cocksucker.
You, however, are an asshole."
Laughter rippled over the squad, except for Reiben, who said, "Okay, okay,"
shrugged again and shut up.
"Take point, Sarge," Miller said, and as he and Horvath traded places, the
captain fell briefly in alongside Wade and, making sure Reiben was out of
earshot, whispered, "Albert Schweitzer was born in Alsace."
Wade looked in sharp surprise at Miller.
"He's of German descent, all right," Miller whispered, "but he's officially
French.
Wade processed that.
"It's be our secret," Miller assured him.
Then Wade gave Miller the slightest smile. But that smile felt very good to
the captain, who valued his medic's friendship, and was glad to have worked
his way off Wade's shit list.
This time, woods bordered the far end of the field, rather than the
thickness of those ubiquitous hedgerows, and the seven soldiers worked
their way carefully through the trees, Miller halting them at the thick,
waist-high brush at the edge of the adjacent field, not allowing his men
to emerge until he'd completely scanned the landscape.
Atop a rise overlooking a vast pasture were the concrete pickup sticks of a
destroyed German radar station and its pillbox support bunkers, blasted to
slabs and chunks and pebbles, probably by the massive air strike that had
flashed over the heads of the squad last night. The surrounding pasture
was pitted with bomb craters; it looked like the moon's surface with grass.
All around the pasture, cows seemed to be on their sides, sleeping. But
they were all dead, like discarded toy animals, a distant fence hemming
them in, though they weren't going anywhere.
Miller motioned to his men to stay back and stay down. He moved, keeping
low, into thinning trees and high brush, peering at the grassy rise and the
concrete rubble ruins, like relics of some ancient Grecian temple, the torn
radar panel silhouetted starkly against the sky.
He waved at Horvath and Jackson to join him in the weeds, and something
nearby caught Sarge's eye.
"Good Christ," Sarge whispered. "Look at this, Cap. ..."
Miller turned and saw nearby trees, smaller ones at the woods' edge,
that had been pockmarked with bullets, in some cases shattered, splintered,
shot to shit.
"When did that happen?" Miller asked.
Sarge was taking a close look. "Recently."
"You mean, after that station and bunkers got hit?"
"I'd say."
From the thicker trees came Wade's quiet but urgent call: "Captain! Y'gotta
see this. ..."
Keeping low, Miller and the sergeant and the sharpshooter scurried through
the whispery brush. An ashen Wade was crouching, pointing to a trail of
blood spatter -- fresh enough to still look red, not black -- which led to
grass that was flatted with a scattering of fresh bodies, sprayed in the
weeds, paratroopers, bullet-chewed. At Wade's prompting, Miller and Sarge
rose just enough to see more corpses littering the brush -- a patrol like
theirs, a little larger, a lot deader.
Miller gazed over the top of the weeds, studying the rise and its apparently
out-of-commision installations. "Below that bunker, Sarge -- y'see that
hole? At one-thirty?"
"Yeah," Sarge nodded, hunkered next to him. "That'd be my guess, too."
"Look hard -- you can see the sandbags."
The rest of the squad had gathered around now. Upham, eyes wide and bright
behind the glasses, looked out at the torn bodies and asked, "What do you
think did this? A machine gun?"
Jackson spat, nodded. "Yep. ... I'd say a MG-42."
"Jesus, one gun did that?"
Mellish, also gazing at he corpses, said, "Paratroopers ... maybe one of
them's Private Ryan."
"Check out the 82nd patches, you birdbrain," Miller said irritably.
You guys aren't getting off that easy."
"Sir," Reiben said, and he pointed off to the left. "Why don't we just
head over that way, stay in the woods, hustle around, quick and quiet.
They'll never know we were here."
Miller was slamming a full magazine into his Thompson.
"I mean, sir," Reiben went on, "what I'm saying is, why borrow trouble when
we can just go around it?"
"We're not going around it," Miller said, "we're going to take it."
"Maybe Reiben's right, sir," Jackson said. "I mean we left them
eighty-eights behind. ..."
"For the Air Force to take out," Miller said. "But the flyboys aren't gonna
expend their ordinance on one little machine gun, are they? That's what they
pay the infantry for."
"I'd like to wait to see if my latest check clears, sir," Reiben said.
"Sir, don't take this wrong," Mellish said, "but we can skip this step,
and still accomplish our mission. ... Actually, get right down to it,
this isn't our mission. ..."
"So we should just leave this machine-gun nest for the next company that
stumbles along?" Miller said, looking pointedly at Mellish. "A company
that might not notice these dead bodies in the high grass?"
"That's not what I meant, sir. It just seems ... like an unnecessary risk,
given our objective."
Our objective's to win the war, Private."
"I thought we were here to save Ryan."
"Yeah," Reiben said, brightening, "I mean, it'd be great to wipe these
Jerries out, but think of Private Ryan. Think of his poor mom."
"Reiben ..." Miller began ominously.
"It's just that I got a bad feeling about this one, sir."
"Yeah?" Miller asked, slipping off his pack, fishing out two grenades.
"And when did you ever have a good feeling about anything?"
Reiben didn't have an answer for that one.
"Okay," Miller said, "three runners with surpressing fire, take off one at
a time -- on, two, three. Mellish, you hook right. I'll head up the middle.
We need somebody to handle the third baseline. ... Who wants to go left?"
He was clipping the grenades onto the webbing of his gear, not aware the
hand he was using was trembling like a drunk checking an empty glass.
When he got no volunteers, Miller frowned and snarled, "Who's goin' fucking
left?"
"Uh, I'll take it, sir," Jackson said.
"Good. Jackson goes left." He looked from Mellish to Jackson and back
again, saying, "Shoot and scoot, till we're within grenade range."
"How 'bout if I go up the middle, sir?" Sarge asked. "We really shouldn't
be risking our --"
"My grandmother runs faster than you, and she's dead."
"I'll go left, then," Sarge said.
"You'll shut up," Miller snapped. "That would be a stupid risk,
sending both ... Reiben, base of fire."
Reiben nodded, businesslike now."
"Keep those clips and mags where you can reach 'em," Miller continued.
"You'll sound the starting gun. ... When your B.A.R. goes off, we go."
Reiben nodded again, so did Mellish and Jackson, to whom Miller added,
"Extra grenades for the runners."
Reiben and Upham handed their grenades over.
The trio of runners positioned themselves, waiting. Miller gave Reiben
a curt nod, and the B.A.R. opened up, shattering the afternoon with its
thunder.
Keeping low, under Reiben's covering fire, Mellish sprinted toward the hill,
cutting right, then Miller took off right down its throat, and Jackson
headed left, each of them finding a crater to roll into for cover,
before the machine-gun nest even came awake.
But once they had found cover, it roused, big time, spitting flame,
spitting bullets, and Miller had caught a glimpse of the crew in the nest,
just before he ducked into the shell hole: three flat-helmeted Krauts in
camouflage, one firing, one feeding, one spotting.
From the high weeds, Reiben was pouring it on with the B.A.R., and Sarge and
Upham were pounding return fire, too, bullets cracking by, over and above
and around them.
Miller looked toward Jackson, who was in his own crater. "You were right,"
the captain told the private. "MG-42."
On the other side of him, from where he hid behind a ridge of
artillery-plowed dirt, Mellish said, "Figures. Who are these guys?"
"Falshirmjager," Miller said, almost yelling to be heard over the
firefight raging above their heads. "Elite paratroopers. Fuckin' fanatics."
"I was hopin' for the Hitler youth," Mellish said, hugging his carbine like
his best girl.
"If we press 'em," Miller said, "they'll have to change barrels." He nodded
toward the grenades hanging off his webbing. "Then we can throw the ball to
home."
"What do you mean, 'press 'em'?" Mellish asked.
"Shoot and scoot!" Miller said. "Move out!"
"That's what I was afraid you meant. ..."
Mellish scrambled toward the next dip in the defilade, blasting up at the
machine-gun nest, then burrowing in and banging away, emptying a full clip
up at the nest, attracting the fire-and-lead-spitting snout of the MG-42.
And as the machine gun swung in Melish's direction, Jackson dashed
to a twisted steel section blown from the destroyed radar tower.
He took cover there even as the machine gun swung, this time in his
direction, slugs spattering dirt, clanging off metal.
This prompted Miller, temporarily under the arc of fire, to run straight up
toward a zigzag trench near the bottom of the hill. The machine gun dropped
to try to get at him, but the angle was wrong, so it swung instead toward
Mellish, who was blasting away as he cut back to another, smaller shell hole,
bullets dancing in the dirt. Miller rolled into the trench, then scurried
down its zigs and zags, looking up to see Jackson as the sharpshooter and
his Springfield moved along that long twisted tower wreckage, the nest
raining lead down on his position, bullets whining and changing off metal.
Miller smiled tightly. That machine-gun barrel had to be overheating about
new -- they'd attracted a hell of a lot of fire, without getting a scratch.
He glanced back at Mellish, signaling him to follow, and the captain scooted
out of the trench toward another shell crater, with the private tagging
along, machine-gun fire arcing overhead. Then both men went sliding
into a shell hole, and found they weren't alone.
Two American paratroopers were already there. Dead ones, eyes wide and
empty, khaki splotched red.
"Where the hell did they come from?" Mellish asked, drawing away from the
dead men as if what they had were catching.
"Something's wrong," Miller said, whitening. "That MG-42 couldn't have hit
these boys, at this angle. ..."
As if proving Miller's point, the machine-gun nest sent a short burst
slamming their way, but arcing over, falling short of its target.
Then silence.
Miller waited -- were they switching barrels?
Jackson lunged from behind the twisted steel debris, firing up at the nest
as he went, heading for a trench. The machine gun let a short burst out,
and spun him to the ground.
"Jackson!" Mellish cried.
"Shit," Miller said.
Silence again.
A more lingering silence. ...
They were changing barrels!
"Grenades," Miller instructed.
Miller pulled a pin, Mellish the same, rose, reared back, lobbed, and ducked
back down.
"We were high," Miller said, knowing the grenades had landed on the slope
above the hole that housed the nest.
More silence.
"Go again!" Miller yelled. "Get that runner out at third base!"
he pulled a pin, and threw. he could hear the grenade thus against a
sandbag. First one, then another explosion -- the first two grenades they'd
thrown, doing the nest no damage -- and it was a perfect lob, only one of
the Germans managed to hurl both grenades back out and they exploded one,
two, like ugly fireworks over the pasture -- none of their nasty fragments
finding Miller or Mellish.
Someone was yelling: "Christ!"
It was Wade's voice, from the weeds, where the medic had been moving quick
and low, heading toward the fallen Jackson,
"Another gun!" The medic was standing up, yelling, waving his arms,
signaling, Red Cross armband apparent. "Sir, another gun!"
Miller whirled and saw, just over at the left, another flat-helmeted,
camouflaged Kraut. Lifting from where he'd been concealed by grass and
dirt, his hands held an FG-42 machine gun. With a magazine like that,
sticking out at the side, he could lay flat on the ground and wait for
his prey to move into his kill zone. ...
But one of his previous victims, a dead paratrooper, had been blocking his
shot at Miller and Mellish, and so he raised up. ...
Almost simultaneously, three things happened.
The machine-gun nest, a fresh barrel on their MG-42, resumed their firing
and took advantage of a new target -- Wade -- and Miller caught a terrible
glimpse of the medic crumpling, his startled expression disappearing into
the weeds.
Jackson, his forearm bloody, managed to lean on his rifle and fire it at
the same time, catching the camouflaged second machine gunner with a hole
through the front of the helmet. Pitching his handheld machine gun,
the sniper slumped, spasmed, and died.
And finally, Mellish peppered another grenade in the nest, hard, the kind
of fastball that burns a catcher's mitt. The trio of Germans were fumbling
around, trying to retrieve it before it went off.
And then it went off.
In the weeds Sarge was saying, "All right ... now we're in business.
..."
Upham had noticed Wade, sitting in the grass, looking embarrassed, exhaling
slowly, looking up at the hill and the hole exuding smoke beneath the
defunct bunkers.
"All right," Wade said softly. "all right ..."
"Wade," Upham said, alarmed. "Wade!"
"Wade?" Sarge asked, coming over. "You get hit, buddy?"
Miller and Mellish were already running over, dodging craters. Reiben, too,
followed, leaving the B.A.R. behind, and Jackson scrambled over, clutching
his grazed arm. Everyone put on the brakes when their eyes met the same
appalling sight: their medic was sitting in the weeds, looking down,
astounded, at the five blood-leaching bullet wounds in his torso.
Miller heard somebody say, "Oh, Wade, oh, Jesus Christ," then realized it
was himself, looking down at the four bullets stitched across the medic's
abdomen and the other in the lower right chest. Wade was having trouble
breathing. Upham, stunned, said, "They're not supposed to shoot medics,
they're not supposed to shoot medics."
Then multiple hands, Miller's among them, were grabbing and ripping through
Wade's medical pack in a flurry. Other hands, Sarge's among them, were
tearing the medic's shirtt open, baring the terrible wounds, and everybody
was talking and shouting at once.
"Sulfa," Miller said to Jackson, who was rummaging through the medical pack
with him, "gimme the sulfa ..."
"He was helpin' me, goddamn it, Jackson said. "Comin' after
me, ..."
"Shit," Sarge said, hunkered over the bleeding medic, "get some pressure on
it. ..."
"Help me out, Upchuck!" Mellish yelled, hands red with Wade's blood,
"shit, help me out here, use your hands!"
Upham got in and helped, while Jackson, fumbling with his medical supplies,
his own arm bleeding, was not his usual cool country self. "Oh, God, oh,
Jesus," he was saying.
Prayer? Curse?
"Sulfa, where's the goddamn sulfa," Miller said.
"Fuck sulfa, he needs morphine," Sarge called back, wild-eyed. "Morphine!"
The they were injecting the morphine, poring sulfa, blood everywhere,
a blur of help and panic and adrenaline.
Miller, hovering over the medic, said, "Wade? Wade? Can you hear me?"
Wade's body was shaking, as if he were piloting a crashing plane that was
coming apart. In a way he was, he was riding the pain, looking at them with
distant eyes and a feeble smile.
"How's it look?" he asked, voice calm, body shivering.
"You're fine," Miller said. "You'll be okay. ..."
Wade reached out and gripped Miller's left wrist with surprising strength.
"Don't lie to the doctor. ..."
Miller swallowed. "Hell, I don't know, Wade. Doesn't look so good,
I guess."
The shaking eased; the morphine was taking effect. Wade tried to raise his
head to see his wounds, but couldn't, gasping with the effort.
"Am I ... am I shot in the ... spine?
"I don't know," Miller admitted. Then said to Sarge, "Here ... lift him up
a little. ..."
Sarge and Miller lifted the medic gently, slightly onto one side, carefully,
so carefully, as Upham and Mellish kept pressure on the wounds.
"What ... what do you see?" the medic asked.
Miller was sliding a hand underneath Wade, touching the man's back gently,
searching, probing with delicate care, fingertips finding gaping exit
wounds, blood drizzling through his fingers like melting ice cream,
only much warmer.
"Exit wound right on the spine," Miller reported. "Small of the back."
Wade, craning to watch Miller, gulped air. "How ... how big's the hole?"
"Size of an acorn."
Wade gulped air again, but it was more of a sob. Miller withdrew his
bloody hand and eased Wade back to the grassy ground, the others keeping the
pressure on; the gushing wound beneath Wade's right nipple was the nastiest,
and took both Mellish and Upham's efforts to minimize the bleeding.
"I ... can't move," Wade said. His voice was thinning, fading like an old
photograph.
"You're not dead, Wade, goddamn it!" Mellish insisted, even as he worked to
keep the man's blood inside his chest cavity. "This doesn't mean you're
dead!"
"Let me ... let me feel. ..."
Wade was trying to find his stomach wounds, but his hand missed,
his coordination off.
"Help me ..."
Miller took the medic's wrist and guided his hand, allowing him to slide
it under where Sarge and Jackson were covering the wounds staving off the
bleeding. The groggy wounded doctor tried to determine the severity of
his wounds by feel.
"Any ... anything ... bleeding worse than others ...?"
"Yeah," Mellish said, "me and Upham are pressing on it. ... I don't think
we oughta move our hands. ..."
"Show me ... gotta feel ..."
Exchanging tortured expressions as they hunkered over their shot-up comrade,
various hands guided the medic's hand as Upham's and Mellish's lifted off
the nasty wound, below the right nipple. Wade inserted his fingers down
into the wound, and blood burbled up past his knuckles. The squad, who
had seen terrible things in recent days, watched in unsurpassed horror.
Then Wade's expression was not one of pain, but of a sad child, a child
holding back tears to be brave. "Oh, God ... it's my liver ... my liver.
..."
Upham, trying not to panic, not doing very well, blurted, "What do we do
about it? You're a doctor! Tell us how to fix you!"
Wade looked at Miller, and the medic's eyes tightened, sending his friend
an unmistakable message: it's over; nothing you can do. ...
The medic's hand withdrew from his wound, and Mellish and Upham pressed down
on it again.
Wade's voice was suddenly calm; resignation softened his tone. "I could use
a little morphine ... really could. ..."
The eyes of the captain and the medic were still locked; Miller knew exactly
what his friend was asking him to do.
"More morphine," Miller said to Sarge.
Sarge complied, handing him the ampoule. Miller injected Wade,
who immediately said, "Another one."
"One more," Miller said to Sarge.
"Sir, I ..."
The squad's eyes were on Miller. And on Sarge.
"Do I heve to repeat every goddamn order? I said another one."
"Yes, sir," Sarge said, handing it over.
Miller injected Wade a third time.
"Jackson ..." Wade muttered.
"Right here, Wade,"
"Lord's ... Lord's Prayer. ..."
Jackson nodded and began. "Our Father ..."
They kept the pressure on the medic's wounds, frustrated faith healers in
a futile laying on of hands. They waited, Jackson prayed aloud, and Wade
smiled, his eyes hooded, as he drifted in and out.
Woozy with morphine now, Wade managed to lift his right arm and direct
Miller's attention to something: on the ground, near the spilled contents
of the medical pack, was a V-mail.
The letter Wade had recopied for Caparzo.
Miller's eyes went back to Wade's, and he nodded, moved away from the
bleeding medic and retrieved the letter. Then he made sure Wade saw him
put the letter into his breast pocket.
"I'll see it gets where it needs to," Miller assured Wade.
And Wade, drifting on the drug, eyes glazing, smiled faintly at his friend,
Captain John H. Miller, Addley, Pennsylvania. Then he was looking upward,
as if seeing someone, greeting someone, when he said, "Mama ... Mama ..."
The men could feel the life beneath their bloody hands leaving; more than
just air had escaped this body. Wade was gone, leaving the torn bloody
husk behind.
For a long time they didn't move; just sat there and stared at their dead
friend. No one offered words of faith or anger either. No recriminations
to Miller, whose insistence on taking that machine-gun nest had cost this
life -- none were necessary, because Miller considered this his fault.
Stealing looks at their captain, each man knew his sleepy-eyed expression
conveyed as much.
Only Upham was crying, sobbing, weeping openly. He had known Wade two days,
and felt a depth of sorrow that could not have been greater had a sibling
been taken from him.
"Kamerad!"
All heads whipped toward the crater-pocked pasture, across which came
stumbling a German soldier, in camouflage uniform, staggering toward them
from the direction of the hill, arms raised, blood trickling down his
china-blue-eyed face from under his flat helmet.
"Kamerad! Ich ergebe mich! Nicht schiessen!"
"Thst tears it," Reiben snarled, and grabbed the nearest M-1 from the ground
and lurched to his feet and charged to the German who was backing up in
terror as the private was on top of him, slamming him in the face with
the rifle butt.
The German dropped in an untidy pile as Reiben began kicking him, driving
his right boot into the bastard's body; then that Christian country boy
Jackson was there, kicking along, and Mellish, too, joining in the beating.
"You prick!" Reiben was saying. "You cocksucker!"
"Was it you, Heinie?" Mellish was saying. "Did you kill Wade?
You don't kill fuckin' medics, you garbage bag!"
Miller stood on the sidelines, in the grass, watching. His boys might have
been kicking a tin can around the pasture, for all the emotion he showed.
Or felt. At his side, Sarge said and did nothing, either.
"Aw, hell," Jackson said, "Let's quit beatin' 'round the bush and git it
over with. ..."
Mellish pointed his carbine in the German's wide-eyed face. "Any last
words, Kraut? Before we send you off to meet Moses and my Grandpa Max?"
Reiben was yanking the German to his feet, the others readying their weapons
for an impromptu firing squad, when Miller finally called out, "First make
him cover up Wade for the burial squad."
Their eyes went to Miller; they didn't like having their moment taken from
them, but he was their captain.
"Those poor bastards, too," Miller said, motioning toward the dead
paratroopers, sprawled in the grass nearby.
The terrified German was on his feet now, eyes wild and wide and white in
a bloody red mess of a face; his hands were in the air. Reiben was just
staring at the enemy soldier, blankly; suddenly the wisecracking private
didn't have anything to say.
"Check him for weapons," Miller advised.
Staring at his prisoner, Reiben stood frozen -- whether with rage or shame,
Miller couldn't say; maybe it was both.
"I'll handle it, sir," Jackson said.
The sharpshooter patted down the German, whose legs wer shaking as he kept
his arms raised high.
"Ask him one thing for me, Upchuck," Mellish said bitterly. "Ask him if
he's the one that killed Wade."
From the weeds Sarge called out, "Fuck that. It doesn't matter.
Wade's dead either way."
Miller was approaching the sharpshooter, whose arm was still trailing blood.
"Jackson, are you okay?"
"Bullet took a little bite outa me," Jackson said. "I'll be all right."
Get it cleaned and dressed. We're our own medics now."
"Yes, sir."
"Then you and me'll stand watch. You're south perimeter, I'll takr north."
"Nicht schiessen!"
Miller wheeled casually and looked at the battered, bloody German.
"Ich will mich ergeben!". He seemed on the verge of tears.
He continued, his voice small, pitiful: "... Bitte ... totet mich nicht
... Ich will mich ergeben. ..."
"Sir," Upham said, "he says --"
"I don't give a shit what he says," Miller replied, walking past the German,
out into the crater-ruptured pasture. Reiben, come with me. ..."
Reiben fell in with Miller, while Upham, behind them said, "Sir, you're not
gonna let them just kill this guy?"
Miller said nothing.
"Sir -- this isn't tight, sir. There are rules ..."
Miller didn't stop, but looked over his shoulder and said, "Help the fucker
with the bodies."
They climbed the hill, the captain and private, and entered the machine-gun
nest, where the lingering smell of singed hair and seared flesh mingled with
acrid cordite smoke. Two charred, bloody bodies, torn like paper by metal
fragments, lay slumped over their big machine gun and their split-open,
sand-bleeding sandbags. In one corner a soldier's pack, tossed and
ripped apart by the blast, lay open, its contents strewn.
"Check for maps," Miller said. "Any kind of intelligence."
Reiben said nothing; he seemed to be sleepwalking.
"You hear me, Private?"
The boy nodded, staring vacantly at the corpses. Then numbly Reiben
began poking through debris with Miller, crouching over the contents
of a ripped-open pack. German rations -- cans of rice leaching thick
yellow chicken gravy, a change of uniform, a wallet.
The captain checked inside the latter, found some German currency, ticket
stubs from a concert in Munich, a foil-wrapped condom, a ribboned lock of
hair presumably from some girl, several photographs, including a snapshot
of a young man holding a soccer ball, another of the same boy in uniform
posing with his proud, beaming parents.
The grinning young soldier in the photo was their prisoner.
Near the sprawl of bodies, Reiben found a shopping bag with the image of
the Eiffel Tower on it and a Paris address. A smile broke through his dour
mood, and he reached inside, checking the contents, his bloodstained fingers
bringing back a beautiful red silk teddy.
His smile faded. He tossed the lingerie near the corpses and stalked out
of the nest.
Miller, watching him go, said nothing. The photograph of their prisoner and
his parents was still in his hand. He stared at it for several long moments.
Then he ripped it into pieces, flung them fluttering to the debris-strewn
ground, and went out.
In a smaller, adjacent, hedgerow-hemmed field, Upham was supervising,
mostly, as the German prisoner covered bodies with rocks gathered from the
remains of a stone fence that had been dismantled by an artillery shell.
The corporal and the prisoner had potato-sack hauled the nine bodies here
-- the ambushed paratrooper patrol and Wade -- and it was a hard, grisly,
thankless task.
Upham had seen to it that Wade was taken care of first, and now all but two
of the paratroopers had been covered with the stones, the German's breath
heaving with toil and fear, his boyish face blood-streaked, his hands
stained red. The corporal was marking each temporary, aboveground grave
with a rifle, alerting the burial squads to these American bodies.
Now and then the German's eyes would meet Upham's cold gaze, and the
prisoner would work harder, even more industriously covering up the
carnage he'd helped create.
Finally Upham told the prisoner to take a break, and they both sat on the
ground. Upham lighted up a K-ration cigarette, and the German watched
hungrily. Upham gave him one, matched it.
"American cigarette," the German said, puffing, grinning crazily,
desperately. "I like American. ... Steamboat Willie! Oompah! Oooompah!"
Upham nodded, said grimly, "Yeah, yeah. Mickey Mouse. Steamboat Willie."
"Yah! Mickey Mouse!"
They were still smoking when Miller came tromping into the field, followed
by Sergeant Horvath and the rest of the squad, what was left of it anyway:
Reiben, Mellish, Jackson.
"Get him off his Aryan ass," mellish snarled.
Upham rose, pitched his cigarette; the German mimicked him.
Miller went from grave to grave, removing ammunition from the rifles Upham
had set there, deactivating the weapons. Sarge followed, as if he were
tidying up after the captain, gathering the extra ammo. Rifles in hand,
Reiben and Mellish and Jackson moved slowly, ominously toward the prisoner,
forming a loose semicircle around him. The prisoner took anxious notice
of this, and went back to stacking rocks atop the next body, as if getting
the corpse covered would make his problem go away.
"Ich brauche mehr Steiner," he said, and nodded to the rock-pile
graves, still working feverishly, proving his obedience, his worth.
"Sie sind nicht hoch genug. Ich bin nicht fertig ..."
"He says he's not finished," Upham said.
"That's what he thinks," Mellish said. Then to the prisoner, Mellish said,
"You're finished, all right, Adolf!"
Mellish grabbed the prisoner by his camouflage shirt, and Jackson joined in.
They dragged him from the stony grave, the latest rock slipping from his
fingers, his face contorted with fear, as he cried, "Nein! Ich bin nicht
fertig!"
And the German pulled away from his captors, scooping up the rock
he dropped, and hastily returning to covering the latest corpse.
The sound of the bolt on Reiben's rifle racking froze the prisoner,
and he carefully got to his feet and turned to face them.
"Please," he said. "I like America." His accent was thick, almost
precious, his teeth bared in a miserable, desperate excuse for a smile.
"What a cinch! Go fly a kite! Cat got your tongue?"
Jackson racked the bolt on his rifle.
The German began to laugh, softly, hysterically. Tears were welling
as he said, "Betty Boop! What a dish! Betty Grable? Nice gams!"
And the prisoner lifted his trouser legs to the knees, laughing.
Mellish racked the bolt on his rifle.
The prisoner stood straight now, his legs still exposed. He sang,
"Oh, say can you see ..." That was all he knew; he kept singing it again,
and again: "Can you see? ... Oh, say can you see?"
The three privates were standing in firing-squad fashion now, facing the
prisoner. Sickened, Upham looked away. Miller was still dismantling
rifles, Sarge gathering ammo, as if completely unaware, or anyway
unconcerned, about what was happening.
The young prisoner played his trump card: "Fuck Hitler!"
"Fuck you," Reiben said.
The prisoner lurched for Upham, grabbed his arm, and spewed a terrified
stream of German at the corporal: "Tut mir leid fur den Mann, den ihr
verioren habt. Den Sanitater. Das ist halt Krieg, nicht wahr?"
Upham called to Miller, "Sir, he says he's sorry about Wade. I don't think
he was the gunner, sir."
"Tell him 'sorry' don't cut the mustard," Jackson said, that big Springfield
loose and deadly in his hands. "Tell him my piles bleed for him."
"Tell him," Miller said, "The war's over for him."
The squad members were nodding, Mellish saying , "Fuckin' A," and Miller was
dropping the last of the disarmed rifles down and striding over to the
German.
A handkerchief came from one of the captain's pockets, and he swiftly tied
it around the German's head, in blindfold fashion.
"Sir," Upham said softly but urgently, "this isn't right."
"Just tell him, Corporal. Tell him what I said."
Upham did.
Miller spun the German around, so that his back was to the squad. Resigned
to whatever Miller's order might be, Horvath reluctantly fell in line with
the others and racked the bolt on his rifle. The prisoner jumped. Miller
looked at his squad -- Mellish's eyes were glittering, Jackson's were hooded
with a hunter's nonchalance, Reiben's were dead as the stones covering the
corpses.
Then Miller said to Upham, "Tell him to march two hundred paces and wait
until he can't hear us anymore. Then he's to surrender himself to the
first Allied patrol he runs into."
"What?" Reiben said, shaking his head as if his ears wer lying to him.
"Wait a goddamn minute --"
"Yes, sir," Upham said, relieved, not quite smiling. And to the young
German he said, "Wir werden dir die Augen verbinden. Lauf' zwei
hundert Schritte, dann kannst du die Binde abnehmen"
Miller checked the blindfold, snugging the knot tight, then whopped the
German twice on the shoulder, signaling him to take off, which he did.
"Close shave," the German said. "Lucky Strikes! "Ich danke Euch.
Ich gehe jetzt. Bitte mir nicht im Rucken Schiessen."
"You're letting him go?" Reiben asked Miller. The private was reeling in
disbelief.
The German was singing now, voice receding: "Take me out to the ball game!
Take me out to the crowd! Buy me some peanuts ... Ich wed-nicht
haltmachen. Ich werd' nicht zuruck schauen. Ich versprech'es."
"All right," Miller said. "Everybody gear up."
But nobady moved. Everyone was staring at him, or watching the shrinking
figure of the German, heading for the far hedgerow.
Miller sighed. "We can't take him with us. He'll impede our mission.
Direction I sent him, he'll get picked up by our troops."
"If he doesn't get picked up by his own Wehrmacht first," Reiben said
bitterly, " and get back into circulation. Maybe to shoot another of us.
... You just let the enemy go, sir. Just let him walk off."
Mellish was watching the shrinking figure. "It ain't right," he said.
"Right?" Upham exploded. "Jesus! We don't execute prisoners! We're not
goddamn butchers! It's against the goddamn rules!"
"This isn't fucking cribbage," Reiben snapped. "Upchuck, the rules just
walked off with Heinie, over there!"
"Reiben," Miller said flatly, "gear up and shut up."
Reiben didn't move. He heaved a breath, his face twitched with insolence,
and said, "No, sir. I don't think so ... sir."
All eyes were on Miller and Reiben, now -- except for the German, who had
disappeared into the hedges.
"That's not a suggestion, Reiben. It's an order."
"Yeah? Like the one you gave to take that machine-gun nest? 'Cause that
order was a real corker, sir. Fuckin' doozy."
Miller said nothing, but Horvath's face contorted with outrage. "Soldier,
you are way the hell out of line."
Reiben ignored the sergeant, saying to Miller, "Yes, sir, Cap, that was one
hell of a call. We took out that nest all right, and only lost one man
doing it. Just our medic ... course, with you leadin' the charge,
who needs a fuckin' medic? We'll all be dead by sundown."
"Reiben ..." Sarge said, moving toward the private.
But Reiben ignored this considerable threat, saying to his captain,
"The more men we lose, the more it's gonna make Mama Ryan's day, to think
her little boy's life was so valuable. Only, we ain't found her son of a
bitchin' baby boy yet, but that's just a minor fucking detail. ..."
Sarge was on top of Reiben now, almost shouting, "Fall in, Private,
and shut up!"
Reiben snorted a contemptuous, dismissive laugh, and turned and walked away
from them both, captain and sergeant.
Miller was just standing there, motionless, lifeless, but Horvath was white
with rage, shaking as he yelled, "Don't you walk away from your captain!"
"Aw, hell," Jackson said. He was staring at the rifle in his hands, perhaps
reconsidering what he and his buddies had almost done. "Let the loudmouth
go. ... We don't need 'im."
Feeling detached from all this, Miller was watching Reiben stalking off
when suddenly Mellish was in his face, the private's expression, his voice,
tinged with desperation.
"Listen, Captain, never mind Reiben, he's an asshole. I'm with you all the
way. But listen, my sense of things, sir? Ryan's dead. Dead in the grass
someplace just like those paratroopers. I'm positive. We oughta just head
back. Sir."
Miller said nothing, backing away from the private. He saw a nearby stump
and went to it, using it as a stool, where he sat and contemplated how it
had come to this, his squad falling apart in front of him. ...
"Reiben!" Sarge yelled to the departing figure, walking away in the same
direction the German had gone, whether to desert, or track the prisoner
down, was unclear. "Get back in line -- now!"
His back to them, Reiben called, "No, sir. I'll spend the rest of my life in
Leavenworth, if I have to. But I won't be part of this shit detail no more."
"I'm not going to say it again," Sarge said, and the menace in his voice
startled all of them. The .45 came scraping out of its holster.
"Fall in, soldier!"
The sound of Sarge racking the slide on the automatic froze Reiben,
and it caught Miller's attention, too; but the captain remained seated
-- he, too, was frozen, couldn't seem to make himself move from this spot.
Reiben turned and walked back toward the Sarge; his eyes were wide with
fear and amazement and anger as he said, "You'd shoot me over fucking Ryan?
Somebody we never fucking met?"
"Just fall in, soldier," Sarge repeated, softer now, but that .45 was
leveled at the returning Reiben.
"Well, fine! Swell! Good, do it, shoot me in the leg, would you please?
The million-dollar wound that sends me home? Blow me a fuckin' kiss, Sarge!"
"On your lips, shithead," Sarge snarled, still pointing the weapon as Reiben
neared, "and shut you up!"
Reiben threw his hands up, taunted, "Do it, Sarge! Do it!"
Jackson said, "This is gettin' interesting. ..."
"Jesus Christ, Sarge," mellish said. He seemed almost on the verge of
tears. "Put the gun away, will ya!"
But Sarge was boiling with rage as the contemptuous Reiben walked right
toward him, daring, "No, no, don't listen to 'em ... shoot me, Sarge!
Save the Germans some fuckin' ammo!"
Sarge's hand was shaking; he was clearly tempted, and tortured, by Reiben's
taunting.
Upham scrambled over to where Miller sat on his stump, on the sidelines.
The corporal urged, "Sir, do something!"
Miller just looked at Upham.
Reiben's jeering cries continued; he was closing the gap between himself
and the Sarge and the pointed .45.
"What's the pool up to?" Miller asked Upham, casually.
"Huh? What?"
"You know, the Miller pool. What's it up to?"
The corporal's stare was incredulous. "Uh ... I have no idea."
Sarge was yelling, "Just stop right there!"
"Come on, Sarge! Put one in my leg! Send me home!"
"You coward ... you yellow son of a bitch ..."
Reiben planted himself right in front of Horvath, looking right down
the barrel of the big automatic. "You're the coward! Shoot me!
Make Mama Ryan happy!"
Upham, stealing looks back at the bizarre confrontation, stood before his
seated captain and said, "Uh, sir, I really think you need to do
something about this --"
"I'm a high school teacher," Miller said. Casual, but in a firm voice.
Mellish heard him, and looked over.
"I teach English," Miller said, straightening, "at Thomas Alva Edison
High School."
Now Jackson looked over at the captain. So did the Sarge.
And Reiben.
"Addley, Pennsylvania," Miller went on. "Back home, somebody asks me
what I do, and I tell 'em, they take one look at me and say, 'It figures',
or some such. But here ... I guess it's not so obvious. ..." They were
all staring at him. "... by the looks on your faces, anyway."
They moved toward him, slowly, gathering around him.
"Maybe I've changed," he said softly. Then he laughed, just a little.
"Sometimes I wonder if my wife would even recognize me."
Mellish turned to Jackson and mouthed, Wife?, and Jackson, eyes wide
with this new knowledge, shrugged.
Slowly, bones creaking, gear clinking, Miller rose and let out a huge sigh.
Then he said, "Look ... I don't know anything about Private James Ryan, and
I don't give a fuck about him. The man's nothing to me. I just want to go
home and see my kids."
Mellish looked at Jackson and mouthed, Kids?, and got another amazing
shrug.
"And if going on to Ramelle and picking up Ryan gets me closer to goin'
home," Miller continued, "then that's what I'm gonna do." And he looked
from face to face. "If any of you want to go back and fight the war
from some other direction, I won't stop you. I won't report you, either,
should I happen to survive this shit. We just got separated, that's all.
Fucked-up things happen in a war ... I don't know anything anymore,
except that the more killing I do, the farther away from home I feel."
Wind was whispering melodically through the hedgerows, the high grass, the
weeds, the leaves of trees, and these men stood silently listening to that
music for a long time, considering each other. Sarge had long since lowered
and holstered his .45.
Finally Jackson said, "A goddamn schoolteacher?"
"That's right," Miller said.
"Caparzo knew," Upham said. "He told me he knew. ... I say, send the money
in the pool to his folks."
"Good call, Upchuck," hellish said.
Reiben was studying the captain. "Schoolteacher. You know, I enlisted
to get away from shitheads like you."
And Reiben grinned.
So did Miller.
"Otherwise, how's the war workin' out for you?" Mellish asked Reiben.
"I also coach the baseball team," Miller admitted.
Everybody was smiling now. They weren't happy, not in these circumstances,
but they were pleased to be a squad again. Miller directed Upham and
Mellish to finish covering the last two paratrooper bodies with stones
as the rest geared up.
"We in business?" Sarge asked, looking the men over.
"We're in business, sir," Jackson said.
"All right, then," Sarge said. "Fall in."
And they did, moving out.
"Next stop," Reiben said, "Ramelle."
Under a warm but not sweltering afternoon sun, Miller and his men trudged
wearily through the tall grass, the terrain beginning its gentle drop to
the valley where Ramelle nestled along the Merderet River. The slope was
too gradual to allow them a view of the river and the bridge that made
Ramelle so strategically important. But they could see, perhaps half
a mile away, the glorified rubble pile the village had been reduced to,
by the Allied bombing. Neuville-au-Plain was untouched compared to
these ruins, though some buildings remained standing and a church
bell tower had survived, as if God had left a scolding finger.
"Looks pretty quiet down there," Sarge observed, walking point.
"No civilians in sight -- and I don't see any sign of one-oh-one."
Miller, walking tail end, said, "You will when we get to that bridge.
But, yeah ... I'd say the good citizens of Ramelle long since turned
refugee. Just don't count on it staying quiet for long."
As is proving the captain's point, the sound of an engine behind them turned
their heads, a sound that didn't alarm them because it was not unlike that
of the occasional farmer's tractor they'd heard on their jaunt (though the
whinnying of horses pulling plows had been more common).
But the vehicle suddenly bearing down on them was not a tractor, though it
had treads on its rear and front wheels. The vehicle suddenly bearing down
on them was an armored one, a German half-track, barreling across the field,
with a trio of support infantry tagging along on its either side, running
full throttle to keep up, rifles held high above the tall grass.
The German gunner atop the half-track opened fire with his mounted machine
gun as the squad took off running across the town, legs churning through the
high grass, bullets whinning all around. No time to even return fire,
just run like hell. Then a drainage ditch was in their path, a wonderful
obstacle that could put them under the line of fire, and they leapt into it,
some sliding down, as bullets tore up sod along the tip of the ditch,
rifles cracking, machine gun chugging.
On the other side of the ditch were railroad tracks, and probably another
ditch, and then the town. If Miller and his squad could just clamber over
the tracks, they'd have good cover and a fighting chance. They splashed
across the trickle of muddy water at the bottom of the ditch, and began
scrambling up the other side, toward those waiting railroad tracks,
when a barrage of machine-gun fire whittled the wooden railroad ties
to matchsticks, driving the squad down into the muddy ditch.
"Shit," Sarge said.
The half-track engine wasn't sounding much like a farmer's ride now; it
was growling toward them, the machine gun silent but anxious to talk again.
And those half dozen infantrymen would be on top of them, any second. ...
"Dig in!" Miller yelled. "Let 'em have it!"
Using the ditch as an oversize foxhole, they positioned themselves at its
lip and returned fire. But lead was raining on them, driving them back down
to where all they could do was fire up blindly over the edge. The rumbling
clanking of the half-track let them know the armored vehicle was drawing
closer, and closer. ...
"Heads down!" somebody yelled.
Miller and his men obeyed, even as they looked around at each other,
wondering which of them had said it. Then realizing that none of them had,
that it had come from behind them, up on the railroad tracks, they could
see the tubular snout of a bazooka above them, pointing toward the field.
They saw the flame and smoke flash as a projectile hurtled over them.
The boom of a direct hit encouraged the squad to peer up over the lip of
the ditch, and the half-track was streaming black smoke from its engine
compartment, staggering to a halt. The machine gunner was blown out of
his perch, and pieces of him were tossed here and there.
The German foot soldiers wre staggering, too, from surprise, from the tremor
of the earth, waving smoke in their faces. They were still in this awkward
state when four Airborne paratroopers rose like phantoms from the tall grass
to the left of where Miller and his squad were in the ditch. Immediate,
unrelenting American submachine-gun fire raked the Germans, and they
disappeared beneath the sea of weeds, screaming, bleeding, dying.
Then even the screams stopped; nothing remained but silence and black
drifting smoke.
Shaken and relieved, the squad gazed up behind them at a tall, athletically
trim paratrooper, kneeling on the train tracks with his bazooka leaned across
a thigh, gazing back at them. He was a good-looking kid, blond, with pug
nose, apple cheeks, and cleft chin, blue eyes laughing, cute as a cartoon,
though the expression on the oval face was serious, even respectful.
"Everybody okay?" he asked, his voice husky. "Anybody missin' any spare
parts?"
"We're in one piece," Miller said. "Thanks for saving our ass. Who the
hell are you, son?"
"Private First Class Ryan, sir ... sir? Is there something wrong?"
The five GI in the muddy ditch were staring up at their savior with stunned
expressions. Then they began shaking their heads and laughing as thinning
smoke rolled over them. Private James F. Ryan, twenty, Peyton, Iowa,
wondered if these unshaven, disheveled ground pounders, whose lives he'd
just saved, had gone completely battle whacky.
By the time the squad had climbed from the ditch up onto the railroad tracks,
their laughter was over. The terrible familiar fragrance of singed hair and
charred flesh wafted on a breeze riffling the high grass, a sobering reminder
of their purpose. This bright-eyed, farm-fed kid who had rescued them was
not aware of their purpose here -- part of which was to inform him he had
lost his brothers to this war.
Leaving his bazooka behind, Private Ryan and several of the paratroopers
who'd aided in the rescue escorted Captain Miller and his squad through
the ruins of Ramelle. From within the shambles of buildings, an occasional
paratrooper watched as the little group passed. No civilians at all in this
dead village, and the paratroopers, Miller noted, looked at least as scruffy
as he and his men did: haggard, unshaven, occasionaly wounded.
They said nothing to Ryan, as yet. Miller and the men of his squad stole
looks at him, his clean-cut bumpkinish features living up to his Iowa
heritage. But saving their lives had bought Ryan some respect.
The Ramelle bridge over the Merderet was narrow but impressive enough,
a brick-paved steel structure on a stone-pie base. Below, the Merderet
lay wide and glistening blue, looking more like a lake than a river
-- the Germans had opened wide the locks at the mouth of the river,
by Carentan, creating minor flooding to drown invading paratroopers.
Either end of the bridge was blocked, heavily sandbagged machine-gun
emplacements barring the way. From behind the first of these, nearer the
town, emerged Corporal Fred Henderson, twenty-four, St. Louis, Missouri,
brawny, blond, shovel-jawed. A world-weary smile formed as he got a good
look at the small bedraggled patrol coming his way.
"Sir," Henderson said as Miller and his group trooped toward him,
"if you're our relief, I may just file a complaint."
"Can't blame you," Corporal," Miller said. "I need to report to your
commanding officer."
"That would have been Colonel Jennings, sir." And the corporal nodded
toward the nearest riverbank, where two dozen corpses lay under mattress
covers, waiting for the burial squad.
"I'm afraid," the corporal said, "I'm the highest-ranking officer we can
muster. Henderson, sir."
"What brings you to this former town, Captain?"
"Him," Miller said, thumb indicating Ryan, whose surprise was immediate and
wide-eyed. "We came looking for Private Ryan."
"Me?" Ryan squinted in amazement. "Why in hell ...?"
Now in the presence of the closest thing to a commanding officer as Ryan
had, Miller was ready to get this over with. "James Francis Ryan? Iowa?"
"Yes, sir," Ryan said, bewildered, a little worried, "Peyton, Iowa, sir. ...
"What's this about?"
"There's no easy way to say this, soldier," Miller said. "James, your
brothers have all been killed in action."
Ryan swallowed; he had the tough veneer any man who'd lived through combat
acquires. But his voice sounded frail, as he asked, "All of them? Not all
of them ... must be some mistake ..."
"No mistake, Private. Thomas died on Omaha Beach; Peter on Utah.
Daniel died over a week ago, in New Guinea. ... I'm sorry, son."
The tough paratrooper who'd been standing before them melted away, and in
his place was a kid barely out of his teens. His face, his eyes, flickering
with the dire news that the boys he'd grown up with, brothers he'd fought
with and laughed with and sometimes loathed and always loved, were gone.
They may have died by bullets or artillery fire or a land mine, but to James
Ryan, words had taken them from him -- words that seemed unreal, without
substance. Yet he knew they were as real as a bullet or artillery fire or a
land mine. He knew his brothers were gone. He would never see them again,
not even in a casket. They had vaporized with Captain Miller's words.
Removing his helmet, running a hand through shock of dark blond hair,
Ryan stumbled toward a bridge girder and leaned there. Miller and his squad
looked at their feet, studied the bricks beneath their boots, not watching
as tears rolled down the apple cheeks. Ryan's paratrooper pals looked away,
gazing out at a shimmering river, letting him get it out.
Soon the private wiped the tears from his eyes, dried his hand on his
trousers, and looked toward Miller. Then he asked, "How far did you come
to deliver this massage?"
"From Omaha Beach."
His eyes tightened. "All that way, just to tell me this? Why? What's this
really about, sir?"
Miller walked over to where Ryan was still bracing himself against the
girder. "They're sending you back home, son. We have orders to bring
you back."
"Just that. You're from Iowa. I don't have to tell you about the
Sullivans."
A faint smirk passed across his somber features, and he said, "I'm bad
publicity, dead."
"Your mother's suffered enough of a loss. ... You can take ten minutes to
get your gear, say your good-byes."
Ryan was reeling with all this, understandably. Miller turned to Henderson
and asked, "Any chance of reinforcements reaching you out here?"
"Never can tell, sir."
"Radios working yet?"
"Jammed or broken. We got no idea what's happening south of us."
Then Ryan said, "I have orders, too, sir." The private wasn't leaning
against the girder now -- he was right at Miller's side, spine straight,
voice firm. "And they don't include deserting my post."
Miller swallowed, sighed, said, "I understand how you feel. I'd feel
the same way, if I were you. But I'm afraid my orders supersede yours."
"I don't look at it like that, sir."
It had already been a long, hard, costly day, and despite the sympathy he
had for this kid, Miller was getting irked. "Private, these orders come
directly from General Marshall, Chief of Staff of the United States Army."
"With all due respect, sir," Henderson chimed in boldly, "Private Ryan has a
point. General Marshall isn't here to judge the situation as it now stands."
Miller's mouth tightened. "In town five minutes, and challenged by both
a private and a corporal -- you must do things differently in the
one-oh-one than we do in the Rangers."
"Sir," Henderson said, "our orders are to hold this bridge -- at all costs.
Our planes and the 82nd have blown every bridge across the Merderet, except
for two -- one at Valognes and this one. If the Germans take them, we'll
lose our foothold and have to retreat."
"I didn't come to pull you and your men off this bridge, Corporal, or out
of this town. And I don't envy you your job, or doubt its importance.
But you're going to have to manage with one less man."
Ryan was shaking his head, no. "I can't leave them, sir. At least until
reinforcements arrive."
Miller's smile had little to do with smiling. "Apparently while my squad
and I were on our way here, skipping through the French countryside, picking
daisies, having picnics, and laying farmers' daughters, the Army must have
turned into a democracy."
"Sir," Ryan said, "There's barely enough of us as it is. ..."
"Private, forget about that ten minutes I offered you. You've got five
to grab your gear and report back to me."
Ryan was shaking his head, no. "Captain, if I go, what are they gonna --"
"Hey, asshole!" Reiben exploded. "Two of us died, buyin' you this ticket
home! Fuckin' take it! I would."
It was as if Ryan had been hit by a bullet; blood drained from his face.
He looked at Miller for confirmation, and Miller nodded. Then again Ryan
stumbled, this time over to the sandbags of the machine-gun emplacement,
where he sat.
He mumbled a question.
Miller asked, "What was that, son?"
"What ... what were their names?"
With just a hint of accusation in his voice, Mellish said, "Wade and
Caparzo."
Ryan repeated: "Wade ... and ..."
"Caparzo," Mellish finished.
The private repeated the names quietly, to himself, several times,
memorizing them, and trying to turn these words into dead men.
Finally Ryan said to Miller, "Sir, this doesn't make any sense. What have
I done to deserve special treatment?"
"Give that man a cigar," reiben said.
Miller shot Reiben a glare, then said to Ryan, "This isn't about you.
It's about politics ... and your mother."
But Ryan didn't seem to hear that. "I mean, for Christ's sake, my life
isn't worth the lives of two others.
The men in Miller's squad were looking at each other, confused, and a little
ashamed, at hearing their preconceived opinions about Ryan thrown back at
them by Ryan himself.
The private gestured to his comrades around him, the paratroopers who'd
accompanied the squad here, and the pair manning the machine-gun nest,
Corporal Henderson, too.
"Hell," Ryan said, "these guys deserve to go home as much as I do, as much
as anybody. They've fought just as long, just as hard."
"Should I tell your mother that?" Miller asked. "That she can look forward
to another flag in her window?"
Ryan's expression went suddenly cold. "My mother didn't raise any of us
as cowards."
The captain stared at the private. "She didn't raise you to lose you."
"Well, then, you just tell her when you found me, I was with the only
brothers I had left. Tell her that there was no way I was going to
desert those brothers. You tell her that ... and she'll understand."
And the private stared at the captain.
Miller said nothing.
"I'm not leaving this bridge, sir," Ryan said. "If you'd care to shoot me
for not deserting my post, go right ahead ... though I'm not sure how you'll
explain that to my mother."
Ryan moved past Miller and his men and got behind the sandbags in the
machine-gun emplacement, hunkering in.
Miller stood staring out at the sun-dappled river hugged by trees.
The world seemed peaceful now. Perhaps coming all this way was worth it,
with a view like this. ...
"What are your orders, sir?" Sarge was at his side now. His expression was
blank, but his eyes seemed strangely alive.
Horvath had spoken softly, and Miller's response was that way, too -- their
conversation was a private one, and no one even attempted to eavesdrop.
"Sergeant," Miller said, "we have crossed over some invisible boundary.
Stumbled over a booby trap and tumbled down a rabbit's hole."
"'Curiouser and curiouser', sir."
And Miller smiled at this literary reference coming from this rough-hewn
man, who added, "But the question stands, sir: what are your orders?
Arrest, perhaps shoot this man, who General Marshall wants delivered to
his Iowa mother? We could wound him and cart him back the way we came;
it'd only slow us down by half, and who know? Maybe we've met all the
Germans in Normandy already."
"What are you thinking, Sarge?"
Sarge flinched a smile. "I'm not sure you really want to know, sir."
"Mike, I really do."
Horvath hesitated, but Miller's eyes tightened and signaled that he meant
what he said.
"Hell, I don't know," Horvath sighed. "Part of me thinks the kid's right
-- he doesn't deserve special treatment, and he doesn't deserve getting
pulled off his post, leavin' his buddies in the lurch, either. He wants
to stay here, fine -- let's fucking leave hime and go home."
"Part of you thinks that."
"Yeah. The other part thinks ... what if we stay and give these poor
bastards a little of the reinforcement they need? And what if then
we actually make it out of here, with Private Ryan willingly in tow?"
"Yeah?"
Sarge shrugged. "We did that, someday we might look back on this and
figure savin' Private Ryan was the one decent thing we were able to
pull out of this goddamn shithole of a war."
Miller thought about that.
Sarge continued: "You said it yourself, Cap -- maybe if we do that,
we all earn the right to go home."
The captain sighed, smiled. "You know, for a minute there ... I thought
I was listening to Wade."
"I, uh, appreciate the compliment, sir. ... Anyway, those are just my
thoughts, sir."
And Horvath stepped away, rejoining the squad, allowing Miller a few moments
of privacy, of reflection, while they waited for his decision.
Then, casually, Miller ambled over to Corporal Henderson, who stood near
the sandbagged emplacement, and asked him, "What's your plan, Corporal?"
"My plan, sir?"
"Just how do you propose preventing the Krauts from crossing this bridge?"
Henderson gestured. "Well, uh ... we've machine guns at either end,
as you can see ... plus we mined the road through town. ..."
Miller nodded, considering that. "Machine guns and mines'll slow 'em down
for thirty seconds, maybe a minute. Anything else?"
Henderson seemed embarrassed. "No, sir. Just that and the dozen of us
left, sir."
"What, you think they're gonna come at you with donkey carts?
So far they've been picking on you like a little scab, pecking at you
with a little infantry, maybe an armored vehicle. But when they come
to town to cross this bridge, they'll be coming with tanks."
"I'm aware of that, sir."
"Maybe your new commanding officer can come up with something better."
Henderson frowned in confusion. "Who, sir?"
"Your new commanding officer," Miller said. "Me."
On the ground near the mouth of the bridge, with the ruins of Ramelle
looking on, an array of weapons awaited Captain Miller's inspection: a pair
of thirty-caliber machine guns, seventeen grenades, eleven Hawkins mines,
two bazookas with eight rounds, a flamethrower, and assorted small arms.
"Is this everything?" Miller asked. Sarge was at his side, taking the same
tour, and the boys of the squad were gathered beside them, like judges at a
beauty contest who'd been hoping for prettier girls. Ryan was tagging
along, too.
The two paratroopers who'd been manning the nearby sandbagged machine-gun
nest with Corporal Henderson were making this presentation of their unit's
meager arsenal. Bill Trask, twenty-three, Dallas, Texas, was dark and lanky
like Jackson, while fair-haired Ray Rice, twenty-two, Tulsa, Oklahoma, had
the compact frame of a halfback.
"Except for carbines and side arms, sir, yes," Trask said. Apologetically
he added, "We had a sixty mortar, but an artillery round took 'er out."
"We might as well be shootin' spitballs at 'em," Rice said glumly,
if they roll on us with tanks."
"When they roll on us with tanks," Miller corrected.
Sarge was gazing down at the handful of weapons, knowing Rice was right;
but Miller's eyes had raised to the cobblestone road that curved from sight
through the devastated village.
"What are you thinkin', Cap?" the sergeant asked.
"I'm thinkin'," Miller said, "the Jerries are gonna whip around the flanks
and squeeze us."
"Yeah," Sarge nodded. "And pop us like a pimple."
Miller was pointing. "But what if we can suck some of 'em into the main road
... between those building? There's enough rubble to create a bottleneck."
Ryan said, "Not enough to stop a tank ... unless you disabled one of 'em.
..."
"Yeah!" Miller said grinning. "We turn one of their tanks into a fuckin'
sixty-ton roadblock. We do that, we got a fightin' chance on the flanks."
Nobody was grinning back at him. Much as they would like to have shared
his enthusiasm, these soldiers knew what Miller was suggesting would have
been a tall order, even if they had a tank or two, themselves. Which they
definately didn't.
But Corporal Henderson was nodding, seeing the potential. "Yeah ... that
would split 'em up. Don't let 'em mass anywhere."
"Right," Miller said. "Then we could hit 'em hard, one on one, not one big
battle, little battles we win one at a time, and as we do, we keep fallin'
back toward the bridge, and take on what's left of 'em.
Sarge was nodding now and pointing along the roadway. "We can have a
machine gun on the move down here. ..." His pointing finger moved up to
indicate the bell tower. "Number two machine gun up there, nice and high,
where we can piss some lead on their heads."
"Good, good," Miller said, approving both notions. He turned back to
Jackson, "You want to keep that machine gun company in that bell tower?"
"Kind of a waste, Cap'n, makin' me a spotter," Jackson drawled, leaning on
his Springfield.
Miller slowly scanned the faces of his men. "Opinions?"
"You're askin' us, sir?" Reiben said.
"I appear to be."
"Well ... this is not the worst idea I ever heard."
Mellish said, "Yeah -- that would be Omaha Beach."
Grim laughs and nods followed; even Miller smiled.
"It's just that everything depends on gettin' a tank to roll down main
street," Reiben said
"Yeah," Miller said. "That, and takin' him out."
"Well, uh ... how exactly do we do that?"
Sarge twitched a humorless smirk. "Much as I hate to admit it, Reiben's
right for once." He nodded toward the display of weapons. "Who are we
to argue with the Airborne? They're right: we're shootin' spitballs.
How do we stop a tank with peashooters? Better yet, how do we make
a tank go where we want it to?"
"Give him a rabbit to chase," Miller said. "Then we hit the tracks."
"Bait I understand," Reiben said. "But what do we hit the bastard with?"
"Sticky bombs."
And now his squad, the paratroopers, even the Sarge, were looking at Miller
like he had finally gone Sectiom Eight on them.
"Uh," Reiben said, "sticky bombs, sir?"
"You're making that up," Henderson said.
"It's in the field manual," Miller said casually. "Look it up."
"We would, sir," Ryan said politely, sarcasm barely discernible, "if we
had a field manual handy. Lacking one, perhaps you could enlighten us."
"Glad to. You got demo handy?"
"Sure," Henderson said.
"Composition B or TNT?"
"Wanna speak to that, Private Toynbe?" Henderson asked another of the
paratroopers who'd accompanied Ryan here with Miller's squad. "Toynbe's
our demo expert."
"Plenty of both," said Alan Toynbe, twenty-five, Malden, Massachusetts.
"Explosives are one thing we got plenty of. That bridge is wired with
enough TNT to blow up twice."
"Then pull some offa there," Miller said, "and settle for blowin' it up
once."
"Okay," Henderson said. "Why?"
"To make a sticky bomb. Here's how its done, boys: take one standard issue
GI sock, cram as much TNT inside as you can, rig a simple fuse, coat the
baby with axle grease so it sticks when you throw ... presto, one sticky
bomb. Only we're gonna make a lot more than just one."
They were still looking at him like he was nuts.
"Where' you get that recipe?" Reiben asked. "Off the back of a Bisquick
box? Or in a comic book?"
"Can you think of another way to knock the treads off a tank, smart-ass?
"No ... but keep this in mind, Cap. Next time you tell us to drop our cocks
and grab our socks, we're gonna be missin' the latter."
"At least," Miller said over the laughter.
Soon, Toynbe, rigged in a rope harness, was dangling under the bridge,
pulling down TNT charges. He handed them over to Trask and Rice, also
dandling, who relayed them up to Mellish and Upham on the bridge.
Mellish and Upham delivered them to Miller, Ryan, Sarge, and several
paratroopers, who had formed an assembly line of sticky bomb manufacture.
Sarge stuffed a sock with TNT and handed it to the next man down, saying,
"I feel like fuckin' Santa Claus."
"And you thought getting coal in your stocking was punishment," Miller said.
In the church midway through the village, more battle preparations were
under way. Jackson pushed up through a trapdoor into the bell tower,
and his Springfield was handed up to him, followed by the much heavier
.30-caliber machine gun. On the ladder below, a pair of Paratroopers
-- privates Ron Parker, twenty-one, Somerville, Vermont, and Steve Weller,
twenty-two, Omaha, Nebraska, two of the four who'd stood from the high
grass to rescue Miller's squad -- were relaying the weapons up to Jackson,
followed by ammo belts and satchels of supplies.
Corporal Upham, loaded down with four ammo belts, hiked down the
debris-strewn street, the husks of buildings staring at him. At a rubble
pile over to the left, two paratroopers -- privates Bud Lyle, twenty-three,
Baltimore, Maryland, and Bill Fallon, twenty, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina
-- were settling in, sighting their machine gun. Upham delivered two of
the four belts to them, and moved on.
Within the shell of a collapsed building, Private Mellish and Corporal
Henderson were setting up the second machine-gun position, angling the
muzzle through what had once been a window. As Upham approached to drop
off the other two ammo belts, Mellish was oiling the bolt of the big gun,
working it back and forth.
"Upchuck," Mellish said, "listen to me. You listening? This little perch
is just the starting point."
"I know."
"We're gonna be fallin' back like crazy sons of bitches, findin' a new
temporary home, and then movin' on again. Got that?"
"Got it."
"So you're gonna be Johnny-on-the-spot with the ammo."
Upham took a deep breath, nodded.
"You okay, Upchuck?"
"I'm okay. ... Just wondering how the hell I got here, is all."
Mellish grinned. "That's the question of the hour, ain't it? Ever see
anything like this?"
"No. Unbelievable."
"Fucked up beyond all recognition."
Upham removed the helmet, massaged his scalp. "Yeah ... hey.
Foobar!"
Mellish grinned, and ruffled the corporal's hair. "Yeah. F-o-o-b-a-r. ...
Look at it this way, Upham. Wherever we are, you're close behind ...
which means, wherever you are, you got a front seat on one hell of a show."
At the mouth of the bridge, the sticky bombs ready, Miller was on his way
into the town, to check angles of fire and general battle prep. The group
tagging after him included the demo man, Toynbe, Sarge, and Private Ryan.
Miller paused at the sandbagged machine-gun emplacement just past the
bridge entrance.
"Not bad for a forward position," Miller said. He turned and looked back at
the similar sandbagged nest at the far end of the bridge. That position
back there? That's the Alamo."
Nobody liked the sound of that; but they understood. Miller clarified
anyway.
"They push us back that far," Miller said, "the last man alive's got to
blow the son of a bitchin' bridge."
"We have a thirty-second delay on the fuse," Toynbe said. "Last man alive
won't be for long, unless he hightails it off that bridge like Jesse Owens."
Miller nodded grimly; Sarge, too.
To the captain, Private Ryan quietly asked, "What's my position?"
Never more that two feet away from me. That's an order, Private. You do
still, on occasion, obey orders?"
With an embarrassed, almost shy smile, Ryan mumbled, "Yes, sir."
Miller's inspection indicated things were going well. Demo teams were
concealing Hawkins mines along walls, behind shutters, in window boxes,
angling the nasty devices to blow their death outward, into the street,
horizontally, to take down infantry. Paratroopers were picking positions in
rubble piles, hunkering in the ruins, finding lines of sight onto the street.
Within the bell tower, Jackson had aided Parker in setting up a machine-gun
nest, muzzle of the gun aiming down through the balusters. Jackson had
found his own perch, where he could sweep up and over the balustrade,
aiming and bracing his Springfield over that railing, targeting one end
of the street to the other, eye pressed to the scope, checking his freedom
of movement, which was good.
"Thank you, Lord," he said.
Then he did it again, practicing the move.
From below came Miller's voice: "Everything all right up there, Private
Jackson?"
"Yes, sir, Cap'n! God's in His heaven, alls right with the world ...
or it will be when we finish with these bastards."
"Amen, Private," Miller said, and moved on.
When he had finished his inspection, satisfied that the welcoming committee
was well positioned, Miller -- with Private Ryan tagging along -- chose as
his own post the roofless remains of the building nearest the bridge,
apparently a former cafe. With the private's help, the captain cleared
enough wreckage aside to create a position at a window whose panes and
frame and glass were rubble under their feet. Exploring the former cafe,
Miller salvaged a windup Victrola and several disks; he sorted through them,
smiling at a familiar name on a label.
Soon courtesy of the scratchy seventy-eight, the melancholy voice of
Edith Piaf was wafting from the window out into the hot, motionless air of
midafternoon. It carried to the bridge, where near the forward sandbagged
machine-gun emplacement, the rest of Miller's squad was taking a smoke break.
"What's that broad singin' about, Upchuck?" Mellish said. "The Army pays
you to translate ... translate, already."
Upham, as he sat lounged against the sandbags, had a distant look. "'Even
life itself represents only you. Sometimes I dream that I am in your arms.'"
Listening to the repetition, haunting melody, Sarge said, "What's she sayin'
now? She said that before."
"That's the chorus," Upham said. "'You are ... speaking softly in my ear.
You say things that make my eyes close, and I find that ... marvelous.'"
Mellish grinned. "I'm findin' myself curiously attracted to you, suddenly,
Upham."
"Cut it out," he said. "Don't you get it? It's a sad song. Tragic, even."
"Tragic my achin' ass!" Mellish said, between puffs of Lucky Strike.
"She's happy, can't you hear it?"
"No," Upham insisted gently. "Very first thing she said was, 'Then one day
you left me. I've been desperate ever since ... I see you all over the sky.
I see you all over the earth,'"
"Why, did her lover boy step on a land mine?" Reiben asked.
The voice, sounding so eloquent in a language only Upham understood
(and to him it was eloquent, too), seemed to throb with sadness now;
even Mellish sensed it.
"Shit," Sarge said, tossing his cigarette in a high arc into the river.
"One more song from that depressin' skirt, and the Krauts won't have to
shoot me. I'll just slit my own wrists."
Horvath rose and wandered off toward the village. The rest of the squad
stood or sat and smoked and thought. Reiben laughed to himself, a light
little private laugh, but Upham caught it.
"What's so funny?"
"Nothin'," Reiben said.
"Come on. I could use a laugh about now,"
"It's just Rachel Trouowitz, is all."
"Rachel who?"
"Trouowitz. I was thinkin' about what she said to me, 'fore I left for
Basic."
"What, I have to beg for this story?"
"She's our super's wife. Came into my mom's shop, the day I hadda leave for
Basic. Tried on a few things. Ever see Carole Landis?"
"Isn't she that babe in the dinosaur movie?"
"Yeah! Well, Mrs. Trouowitz makes Carole Landis look flat-chested."
"Wow ..."
"She's a forty-four double E, easy. I'm sitting there, and she's in the
dressing room, with the curtain back just enough for me to see ... maybe she
did that on purpose, maybe it was a patriotic gesture. But she asks me to
hand her this side-stay, silk-ribboned, three-panel girdle with a shelf-lift
brassiere. So I hand her a 38 D cup, and she says, isn't this a little
small, and I say naw, that oughta be perfect. ..."
"Nice," Mellish said. "Now, this is a story. ..."
"So there she is with the curtain half open, and I'm watching her try to
squeeze into that thing, and she looks at me, and sees me looking at her
with the eyes popping' outa my skull, and she kinds smiles and says,
'Robert -- this is one of those moments.' And I say, 'Moments, ma'am?'
And she says, 'One of those moments when you're over there, and you're
scared or see something terrible, you just close your eyes and see me
instead. Would you do that for me, Robert?' And I says, 'Yes,
ma'am!'"
The music was still going, but the French songstress' voice seemed less sad
now, and every man had his eyes closed, picturing Mrs. Troubowitz in his
own special way.
Within the remains of the building nearest the bridge, Miller was in
position at the window. Ryan, seated in a corner on a salvaged chair,
sipping from his canteen, asked the captain who the woman singing was,
and Miller told him.
"What's her problem?" Ryan asked.
"Her lover left her, and everywhere she looks, she sees his face.
"That'd do it. ... Want a swing?"
"Sure."
Ryan tossed Miller the canteen, and the captain lifted it to his lips with
a shaking hand that the private noticed.
"You all right, sir?"
"Just keeping rhythm," Miller said with a wry smile, and tossed the canteen
back.
Ryan studied Miller for a while, then asked, "Is it true what they say about
you?"
"Now, you'll have to narrow that down."
"That you're a schoolteacher?"
"Yep."
Ryan shook his head. "That's something I could never do. Not after I saw
what my brothers and me put those poor sons of bitches through. No way,
sir."
Miller glanced at Ryan and saw that the private was lost in thought.
The kid was grabbing his moments of grief wherever he could find them,
wherever those moments could be spared.
"You know," the boy began, "I'm having trouble."
"Yeah. I can understand that."
"That's not what I mean. It's ... I'm having trouble seeing their faces.
I keep trying, but I don't have any pictures with me, you know, photos,
and my memory -- do you believe it? I can't see 'em. Can't make 'em form
in my head."
"Gotta think of them in some context or other."
"What do you mean, sir?"
"Don't try to think of their faces, try to remember some thing you did with
them, someplace you went together. What I do, when I want to think about
home, is think about lyin' in my hammock in my backyard, or my wife bendin'
over, pruning roses in my old gloves. I do that, and I'm right there."
Ryan sat back and seemed to think that advice over. Then a smile lighted
his face, and his eyes were suddenly elsewhere.
But his voice remained in the ruined building, reporting to Miller:
"One night, well after dark, Tom and Pete dragged me out of bed, sayin'
they had something to show me in the barn. Somethin' really special. I was
afraid maybe it was some kinda practical joke on me ... I mean, you wouldn't
believe some of the stuff older brothers can pull on ya, particularly on a
farm. ... Anyway, we sneaked up into the hayloft, and Tom and Pete make
these hand signals down. I peek over and so do they, and Alice Jardine,
who's this blonde who looks like Lana Turner only better, is in the back of
the hay wagon with Danny. Danny has her sweater off and he's about to undo
her bra, which was pink and looked like a couple of really pointed artillery
shells, and then she hears somethin' and looks up and sees these three guys
looking down at her with their tongues hangin' out. And brother, does she
scream bloody murder, runs the hell outa there. Danny, he's so pissed he
chases after us with a pitchfork, knocks over a lantern, and then the hay's
on fire. He's gotta bury the hatchet, though, and help us put out the fire
before the whole damn barn burns down."
Miller smiled and said, "Better not let Reiben hear that one. He's got
a thing about ladies' underwear."
"Danny went off to Basic the next day," Ryan said. "I sure hope he caught
up with Alice Jardine that night; hate to think he went off without ... well.
That was the last time the four of us were all together. Two years ago."
Miller nodded. Edith Piaf was still singing.
"Long record," Ryan noted.
"Yeah."
"How about you tell me one. Tell me about the hammock, why don't you.
"Okay. It's in the backyard."
"You said."
"Yeah. So I'm lying there, half asleep, listening for the sound of
breaking glass. And that's all it takes to take me back home."
"Why? Why breaking glass?"
"You gotta understand, I got the best house in all of Addley. Not the
biggest house, or most expensive, but it's got the best damn windows a
baseball coach could ask for. See, we're right next to the junior high,
or that is, we're behind the junior high baseball field. The garage windows
face left field. Guy who owned the place before me put screens over the
windows, but the first thing I did after I bought the place was take those
damn screens off."
"Why?"
"Well, think about it. It's three hundred twenty-two feet from home plate
to my garage windows. Takes one hell of a junior high baseball player to
hit a ball that far, that high. I look at my garage windows as my baseball
scouts, lookin' out for the junior high kids that are gonna pave my way to
a state high school championship. Every time I hear breakin' glass when
I'm lyin' in that hammock, I just smile and smile ... knowin' I'm that much
closer to a winning season."
Ryan was smiling. "That was swell, Captain. Now, how about your wife,
and those roses?"
Miller pondered that. "I don't think so. ... I think I'll keep that one,
just for me."
The needle was scratching across the label, the record over. Miller was
gazing out the window, listening to the silence, smiling, enjoying the
afterglow of Ryan's memories and his own.
Then his smile began to fade. In the church bell tower, Jackson was perking
up, too, and all around the village and on the bridge, paratroopers and
Miller's men heard it now: the deep rumble of diesel engines, heading
their way.
"Here they come," Miller said, sitting up. "Sweet Jesus, here they come."
All around the ruins of Ramelle, the Americans heard the rumble of the
approaching tanks, a sound they greeted with relief and dread. Cocking
their weapons, sighting down muzzles, crouching in debris, ducking past
broken shutters the welcoming committee watched as diesel fumes rippled
over rooftops, the air distorting with heat haze, as if ghosts were
invading the ghost town,
From Miller's position near the bridge, those fumes weren't yet visible,
but the mechanical groan of tanks growing ever nearer told him battle was
imminent. Sarge and the demo man, Toynbe, hustled into the roofless
building where Miller and Ryan were dug in, Sarge tossing the captain
a pair of binoculars.
Miller went to a former window with a view of the bell tower and brought
Jackson, in his perch, focus. He could see Jackson peering off through
his rifle scope, to get a fix on what exactly was coming their way.
In that bell tower Jackson was telling Parker, at his machine gun, "I see
Tigers. Two of 'em."
Through his binoculars, Miller could see Parker holding up two fingers,
then making a "T" with his hands. Then the machine gunner patted the
air with both palms, signaling Miller more information was forthcoming.
Soon Parker held up two fingers again, this time holding up one hand
sideways and straight and bringing in his cupped other hand to form a "P".
"Four tanks," Miller told the men around him. "Two Tigers, two Panzers."
Mellish and Henderson, at their machine-gun post in another crumbled
building, also had a view of the bell tower, and had seen the signals.
"Tigers," Mellish said, rage and fear quaking through him. "Shit, it would
have to be Tigers. Why didn't they just send fuckin' King Kong?"
The ground under Mellish, and everyone else in Ramelle, began to vibrate,
as if an earthquake were issuing warning tremors. Bits of plaster and rock
and stone began shaking loose, hellish dandruff drifting from the rafters
of roofless buildings onto waiting Americans.
Looming into view around the curve of the main street was a Royal Tiger,
sixty-eight-point-six rumbling, clanking tons of tank, montrous of size,
monstrous of mien, carrying an 88-millimeter gun and a trio of machine
guns, shielded by seven-inch-thick armor. With its sloping sides and the
hideous smiles of its six steel wheels per side and the probing snout of
its cannon barrel, it seemed inaptly named, less a sleek jungle cat than
a bulky prehistoric beast, crushing rubble to dust beneath its treads,
Riding the turret was a hawkish-featured S.S. tank commander, a major,
who was surveying the ruins of Ramelle with the haughty expression of
a conquerer, even though this destruction had been the friendly fire
of the Allies.
Another Tiger shadowed the first, and on the heels of the larger tanks
clanked the pair of much smaller Panzers, twenty-three tons each. Trooping
along in the dust-stirred, diesel-fuel-shimmering wake of this impressive
armor was a company of elite troops, Wafen S.S. from the Das Reich Division,
perhaps a hundred men strong.
"Lord grant me strength," Jackson said in the bell tower, peering down at
the procession passing awesomely below.
"Ask Him to save me some, too," Parker said breathlessly.
But back in the building near the bridge, Miller, peering through his
binoculars, was smiling a little. "Looks like we've caught one break,"
he said. "Those tanks are headed down main street. ..."
Half a dozen men, Reiben and five paratroopers, had been selected to bear
the sticky bombs. They lay hidden in various positions at the outskirts of
town, each man ready to emerge and play rabbit to draw those tanks down the
main street. But that part of the plan was unnecessary now -- the shuddering
steel beasts were rolling down main street of their own volition -- and the
men, conveying the bombs, big gooey bizarre globs of grease that sprouted
fuses, scurried to new positions on either side of main street.
Miller was watching through his binoculars, waiting for that lead Tiger to
reach the rubble-clogged impasse between husks of buildings. Toynbe at a
detonator, eyes riveted on the captain, waited for the word to throw the
switch. Miller's hand was raised, poised to give that signal, as the
captain watched and waited, watched and waited.
The hand lowered, Toynbe threw the switch, and the parade of tanks and men
down main street was greeted not by confetti and cheers but a thunderous
hell of exploding Hawkins mines, walls erupting in flying stone shards,
fire and shrapnel streaming in a horizontal deluge of death. A dozen S.S.
troopers fell shredded, dead. The rest scattered, seeking cover, reeling
with concussion, choking with smoke. Both machine-gun nests opened up,
raking the street in intersecting angles of slaughter, sending the German
infantry yelling, screaming, scrambling for cover, dying in rubble,
as lead hammered at them from seemingly every direction.
The machine gun in the bell tower, manned by Parker, threw its own
thunderstorm of bullets down onto the street, spraying lead at the S.S.
Jackson had drawn a bead on the tank commander, the major's head fixed
in his crosshairs. But just as Jackson squeezed his trigger, the major
-- bullets flying all around him -- ducked down into the turret,
pulling the hatch shut, Jackson's slug whanging off the metal.
The tank rolled on, leaving its dead infantry behind, impervious to the
machine-gun fire. Staying low, Reiben and the five other men bearing black
globs, trailing smoke from lighted fuses, swarmed alongside it like insects.
They hurled their gooey packages at the treads and steel wheels, then veered
away, bats out of hell, scrambling this direction and that, finding rubble
piles to duck behind.
The second Tiger spotted the fleeing saboteurs, the tank's forward machine
gun nailing one of the runners, tearing him to pieces, dropping him like
so much debris.
When the sticky bombs went off, it was like six cannons firing one after
the other, and gouts of blue and orange flame blew sideways over both sides
of the street, as if the tank had sprouted fiery wings, which promptly
disappeared, leaving black smoke ...
... and a Royal Tiger tank that was still rumbling along.
Reiben, crouched behind wreckage, said, "Damn!" thinking their efforts,
and the life of a man, had been wasted.
Then the tank's treads separated and peeled off the idler wheel, and the
big machine skidded, skewing to one side, a staggering drunk, steel wheels
spinning. The tank tried baking up but even more tread unspooled, and it
jerked to a gear-grinding halt.
Now, as Miller had intended, the huge tank was a sixty-eight-ton roadblock,
creating a traffic jam with the tanks following it, their brakes whining,
treads and wheels groaning as the other three tanks were caught at the
barricade of the first.
But that wrecked tank was still a fighting force to be reckoned with.
Its turret, and those of the three tanks clogged behind it, cranked and
swung around, muzzles leveling at the surrounding, surviving buildings
where the attacking Americans were hiding. The big guns began blasting,
thunderclap muzzle blasts that punched holes in some buildings and turned
others into storms of deadly hurtling debris.
Even in his relatively remote position, Miller had to duck, Ryan, too,
fragments flying, as the tanks pounded away. Americans posted about the
village scrambled behind rubble piles, diving for cover. Reiben watched
as a paratrooper got in the way of the methodical blasting of the tanks
and blew apart like a human bomb.
The S.S. infantrymen were scrambling for shelter, too, pulling their wounded
off the street, herding behind half-walls and trash heaps, their spiffy
uniforms spattered with dust and blood. When they had taken cover, they
began returning fire as the three tanks at the rear of the stranded Tiger
seemed to desert them, backing up, blasting away as they went.
From behind rubble Sarge jack-in-the-boxed into position, a bazooka
shouldered. He let go, and his projectile whooshed toward its target
-- the middle tank -- only it deflected off the turret, exploding against
the freestanding wall behind it, demolishing that wall, collapsing it,
a ton of fragmented stone dropping down on the tank in an avalanche.
The sticken tank lurched, backing up, doing its best to get clear of the
debris, muzzle cranking toward where Sarge had fired, and Horvath ran for
his life.
From his position, Reiben saw this happen, saw the rubble pile behind
where Sarge had fired go up in a cloud of smoke and flame and fragments.
When the smoke cleared some, there was no sign of Sarge, and Reiben
couldn't be sure if Horvath had made it or been blown to atoms.
The tanks lurched forward, clanking, wheezing, veering off in various
directions, down side streets, leaving the main street and the stranded
Tiger, heading through the havoc, making their way toward the bridge
as best they could.
This was exactly what Miller had hoped for, and -- seeing these results in
his binoculars from his forward position -- he shouted to Ryan and Toynbe,
"Let's go!"
In the killing zone of main street, the machine-gun nests at their opposite
stations were hurling lead at the S.S. troops. The Americans had hit them
hard, the crossfire costing the Germans dearly, but the sheer numbers of
the enemy, pressing forward in the demolishment, carried the threat of
those nests getting overwhelmed.
Privates Lyle and Fallon knew it was time to displace, and used rags
to pick up the machine gun, its barrel boiling hot, charring the cloth.
Upham, like a man without an umbrella trying to duck raindrops, zigzagging
through singing bullets and airborne rubble, delivered a pair of fresh
ammo belts even as the nest was moving out.
Terrified, the world around him getting shot to pieces, Upham moved on to
the other nest, where Mellish and Henderson were hauling their griddle-hot
machine gun off its rubble-pile perch, too.
"Displacing!" Mellish yelled redundantly.
He and Henderson were already frantically falling back under heavy fire from
advancing infantry. Upham, hugging the ammo belts, trailed after them as
they found new cover and slammed their machine gun down, and again started
blasting.
In the church bell tower, Parker was blazing away with his machine gun,
and Jackson's eye was pressed to his sniperscope, picking off Germans like
carnival targets, never missing, thinning the infantry ranks with deadly
precision.
Then bullets impacted the balustrade Jackson was leaning against, chewing
up the wood, spitting it out into splinters. The sharpshooter ducked back,
none of the bullets catching him. He flashed a look at Parker, who flashed
one back.
"Those Nazi ground pounders finally figured out we're up here," Parker said,
hunkered over his big weapon. "Let's hope they don't tell their friends in
the tanks. ..."
One of the smaller tanks was plowing through what had days before bee some
family's living room, shattering plaster and lathe, grinding furnishings to
garbage. But then the Panzer got bogged down, hitting a stone wall that
didn't want to give, grinding against a pile of rocks, struggling to push
through.
Flatted against a wall nearby, Miller noted this and motioned privates Rice
and Garrity (David, twenty-one, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania) to the attack.
From the rubble the two privates raced and bobbed, sticky bombs in hand,
heading for the struggling Panzer.
Private Ryan began to follow them, but Miller grasped his arm, saying,
"Not you."
Ryan might have argued if the advancing S.S. troops hadn't taken precedence.
The private and the captain laid down cover for the two sprinters with bombs
in hand, Ryan with his M-1, Miller with his Thompson, sending the Germans
scrambling for safety, pinning them down.
The Panzer was doing its best to maneuver out of the dead end, grinding,
whining, groaning, and seemed about to batter through that wall when Rice
and Garrity reached the tank, pausing to get their fuses going ...
... and one of the homemade bombs went off, a premature detonation that
made the two soldiers vanish like a magician's assistant. Only this puff of
smoke had a reddish tinge accompanied by ghastly spattering human shrapnel.
The wall the Panzer had been caught against became a hailstorm of stone
fragments, and the blast slammed both Miller and Ryan to the ground, hard.
And the Panzer lumbered on, unfazed -- in fact, aided by the bomb, which
had helped dislodge the tank.
All around, a battle was raging in the rubble of Ramelle, smoke and
dust creating a wicked fog through which German infantry emerged like
materializing ghosts, ever firing, pushing forward by inches and yards.
Still the machine-gun nests pummeled away at the S.S., continually getting
pushed back by their sheer numbers, falling back to a new post, and pummeling
away again. Through this nightmare of gunfire and smoke and dust and screams
and blood mist, Corporal Upham shuttled ammo to both teams, keeping up with
their new positions, running like an escaped lunatic through the devastation.
A squad of Germans advanced on Mellish and Henderson as they were displacing,
the big hot gun in their hands. Then private Trask stepped out from behind
a wall, wielding a flamethrower, and bathed the charging S.S. with flame
streaming like water from a fire hose. Men turned orange and blue and
danced to their deaths in a hell of mushrooming smoke.
While the S.S. fried and died, the tanks rolled inexorably along, plowing
through walls, battering down buildings, crushing rock and rubbish, turrets
swinging, picking targets, firing, taking down any obstacles in their paths.
Grinding through the decimation came the second Panzer, and invitation
for Reiben and Toynbe to run and attack it. And they did, each slamming a
pair of fuse-lighted sticky bombs onto the treads and steel wheels, then
scurrying away like naughty children. In their wake they left multiple
explosions that were like a thunderous firing squad, as gouts of flame
and tufts of smoke shot from the tank. The blast knocked Reiben ass over
teakettle, asprawl on a rubble pile.
Dazed, Reiben raised up on his elbows, ears ringing, trying to clear
his head. When he looked over at the tank, to admire his own handiwork,
he saw that goddamn thing rolling right along, unharmed!
The fucking tank swerved toward him. He scrambled on the rocks,
desperately, trying to get out of the Panzer's path, but still reeling
from the concussive impact of his own bombs and stumbling and tumbling. ...
From where he scrambled, Reiben couldn't see the bazooka projectile give
the tank a flaming enema, blowing out its engine. But he did hear the tank
stutter and hitch and groan to a halt.
Reiben glanced back and saw the stopped tank, and saw, too, a soot-covered
Sarge, smoking bazooka in his hands, perched on a pile of rocks. Their eyes
met, and Sarge winked, smiled, and took off running, ducking out of sight
behind a half-wall.
Relieved, Reiben turned his eyes back toward that tank, where the turret
hatch lifted, and a Panzer crewman popped out, Luger in hand. From that
perch the German picked off Toynbe, where he was hunkered behind a trash
heap.
And the Luger was panning Reiben's way when a bullet blew through the
crewman's chest, sending him flopping over sideways on the turret,
out of the war.
Stunned, Reiben whirled and looked up, knowing that shot had come from the
bell tower -- knowing Jackson had saved him. Like Sarge had saved him ...
his life saved twice within seconds by two of his brothers. ...
In the bell tower Jackson was already working his rifle bolt, turning away
from the tank, eyes to the sniperscope, searching out more targets.
"'Blessed be the Lord my strength,'" he muttered, "'which teacheth my hands
to war, and my fingers to fight. ...'"
Paratroopers emerged from the ruins to attack the crippled Panzer, Reiben
leading the charge. When a second crewman popped up past his dead comrade,
Reiben shot the bastard with his .45, then joined in as pins were popped
and grenades tossed in and down. The GIs scrambled away as behind them
the concussive blast shook the tank. Black fire-laced smoke puffed from
its turret as if from a volcano.
In the bell tower, Jackson at his Springfield was searching out another
target, and he was saying, praying, "'My goodness and my fortress;
my high tower, and my deliverer; my shield and He in whom I ...'"
In his sniperscope sights now was the crippled Tiger, which still blocked
the main street. Its turret was cranking around, the muzzle raising.
Right at the bell tower.
"'... trust,'" Jackson said, pulling his eye back from the scope, allowing
himself a heartbeat of stunned horror. "Parker! Git outa here now!"
Jackson was already at the trapdoor, and Parker was behind him, but they
both knew they'd never make it, and Jackson said, "Jesus," a prayer, not
a curse, right before the tank's thunderclap blast turned the bell tower
into a fireball of hurtling debris.
The tank lowered its muzzle and blasted again, and the rest of the church
was blown to smithereens.
From their latest machine-gun position, Mellish and Henderson had witnessed
this, had watched Jackson die in church, and watched the church die, too.
"Jackson," Mellish said, staring in horror. "Goddamn it, Jackson!"
"Knocking the treads off that bastard ain't enough," Henderson said.
"We gotta take that Tiger out."
Mellish fired a burst and sent some S.S. scurrying for cover.
"Yeah?" Mellish said, still reeling from the loss of Jackson.
"And how in hell you suggest doin' that?"
"I got an idea," Henderson said, and plucked a grenade off his webbing.
"You fuckin' nuts? That's a Tiger! Grenades bounce off those fuckers
like Superman!"
Henderson's grin was like a little boy's. "Didn't ya ever hear of
kryptonite? Keep me covered. ..."
And he dashed into the street, weaving through the ravagement, as behind
him Mellish kept the machine gun rattling, keeping the Germans pinned down,
giving Henderson the cover he needed to get close to that crippled tank.
Henderson crouched behind a rubble pile near the stalled Tiger,
pulled the grenade pin, holding onto it tight, waiting, waiting, waiting.
Then the muzzle turned, adjusting, seeking a new target. Henderson
pressed his forearms to his ears, in anticipation of the thunderous muzzle
blast -- when it came, that was his cue. he lunged from cover, running
straight at the tank, jumping up and hooking his arm around the muzzle,
hanging like a monkey, hurling the grenade straight down that barrel. ...
Henderson dropped to the street and kept low, yanking another grenade free,
popping its pin, holding down its lever, waiting, not long, for the tank to
shutter from the blast. Then he scrambled up onto the tank, and the hatch
opened, smoke billowing, the hawk-faced S.S. major pushing up, coughing,
ears and nose bleeding, glazed with shock. Henderson stuffed the grenade
down the major's blouse and leaned hard against the hatch door, stuffing
the major back down into the tank.
The next blast opened the hatch rudely, sending Henderson flying off the
tank, depositing him on the street.
Mellish paused in his firing, amazed by this feat. Henderson didn't seem
at all injured, was picking himself up, grinning, running back toward
Mellish, energized, exultant.
"Did you see that?" Henderson yelled. "Did you fuckin' see that?"
And from somewhere, German machine-gun fire stitched across the corporal,
spinning him around, slamming him to the street, before he even had time to
scream, before he even had time to take the triumphant smile off his face.
Mellish had time to scream, though, and he did. He screamed and kept firing
and screaming and firing with the machine gun, raking the German positions
with bullet after bullet.
And then Mellish's ammo belt ran out. Upham had delivered the last of the
machine-gun ammunition already. The S.S. wasn't out of bullets, though,
and lead was spattering against the rubble around him, driving him down.
Mellish grabbed his M-1 and fell back, running for his life.
On the move, the clank and wheeze of the remaining Royal Tiger building
in their ears, Miller ran with Ryan tagging after him. They ducked to take
advantage of the cover of half-crumbled-away walls, and almost stumbled over
Sergeant Horvath, who was lying in wait for that tank, bazooka propped over
the edge of a half tier of brick.
"Gatta aim for the treads!" Sarge yelled, and demonstrated, the fiery
projectile streaming toward the oncoming Tiger, which was in the process of
plowing through a stone wall like it was papier-mache. The bazooka round
connected, exploded resoundingly ... and the tank kept coming, ramping up,
slamming back down again. ...
"Fall back!" Miller shouted. "Fall back!"
"Go," Sarge yelled, "Go! Go!"
The Tiger was crashing through, bearing right down on them, and they took
off like bandits. Sarge abandoned the bazooka, which with the half-wall
was soon crushed under the massive treads.
Nearby Lyle and Fallon, in the remaining of the two machine-gun nests,
threw blstering rounds at the tank. The gun swiveled, chattering, but got
nowhere with the Tiger, which was in the process of rolling over a wounded
paratrooper, grinding him under.
Seeing this, the machine gunners began screaming as they fed and fired.
The knew they were on their last ammo belt and would have to fall back
-- only they didn't have to. A potato-masher grenade came spinning toward
them and exploded before it landed. By the time the smoke had cleared over
the remains of the two Americans, the Germans were overrunning the position.
Mellish, on the run, saw Upham up ahead, confused, disoriented in the haze
of smoke and dust.
"Upham!" mellish yelled, and Upham looked back at him. "The bridge is
straight ahead! Run!"
Barely had Mellish said this when a young S.S. trooper darted from the
battle fog into Mellish's path. They faced each other in a frozen moment,
like two gunfighters poised for a fast draw. But they were not gunfighters,
they were boys serving their respective countries, though one of them
was faster: the German.
While both their weapons raised at once, the German's Schmeisser submachine
gun belched bullets before Mellish's finger could squeeze the M-1 trigger.
Hot rounds slammed into him; a bloody stitch-work pattern appeared across
the private's belly as he tumbled backward, dead before he hit the ground.
"Mellish!", Upham cried.
And the German whirled, turning the Schmeisser toward Upham, who froze,
staring down the black empty eye of its barrel. The corporal knew this to
be his last moment, but it wasn't: the martial music of a B.A.R. punched
one, two, three holes through the German's chest, absurdly massive wounds
that sprayed blood and bone and tissue and leaked sunlight. The Schmeisser
belched again, this time at the sky, as the German arced back into a rubble
pile where he lay staring, shocked to be dead.
Upham, on the other hand, was shocked to be alive, and when Reiben
-- his B.A.R. in his hands -- appeared next to the corporal, saying,
"C'mon, Upchuck, we gotta fall back," Upham was slow to move.
So Reiben dragged him along, firing his B.A.R. one-handed, covering their
retreat. Rally point was the detritus-choked town square, and they scurried
down a side street in that direction.
Miller, zigzagging through the devastation with Ryan and Sarge tagging
after him, was headed for the same spot. They could hear the Tiger nearby,
bashing down walls, bullying what was left of Ramelle out of its path.
Trask had the Tiger in view and hosed it with flame, fire and smoke
mushrooming, but the tank couldn't be bothered, and Trask was soon
out of fuel. He shrugged out of his harness, ditching the now useless
flamethrower, and hightailed for the town square.
They all made it there more or less at once -- Miller, Ryan, Sarge, Trask,
then Reiben and Upham -- and now they raced for the steel-and-stone span
over the sparkling blue river. Up ahead they could see Private Weller
-- one of the paratroopers who had saved Miller's squad when they arrived
at Ramelle -- already hunkered in behind the sandbags of the machine-gun
nest near the bridge entrance, racking the big gun's bolt.
But behind them, the Tiger's cannon blew a wall apart and the tank came
thundering into the square, treads grinding. It made a massive turn,
its forward machine gun blasting flame and bullets, swiveling, tracking
the men running toward the bridge.
The head start the Americans had was enough to best the tank's bullets to
those sandbags. Every one of them went hurtling over, ducking down into
safety, half a moment before the machine-gun fire tore into the sandbags,
ripping the bags apart, sending up clouds of sand.
The remaining Panzer was joining the bigger tank in the square, and both
tanks began to close in on the bridge and its defenders. The remaining
S.S. troops -- their numbers well thinned -- were plodding alongside.
As Weller opened fire with the machine gun, Ryan snatched up one of the two
remaining bazookas. Laying it over the lip of the shredded sandbags, taking
aim at the oncoming Tiger, Miller loaded, pounding the private on the helmet
to indicate the bazooka was ready to fire -- which Ryan did. But the
projectile exploded off the tank treads, with no discernable impact.
"Reload!" Ryan called.
"Reiben and me'll take it," Sarge told Ryan, then looked pointedly at
Miller, reminding him why they'd come. "You two fall back!"
Miller nodded, grabbing Ryan by the arm, saying to Horvath, "You
can't maintain this position much longer -- follow right behind us!"
"Yeah, right, go!"
Ryan and Miller snatched up all the armaments they could, and left the
forward emplacement, dashing across the bridge.
Sarge leveled the bazooka up over the sandbags while Reiben loaded.
Then Reiben tapped Sarge on the shoulder. Sarge blasted away, this
projectile also exploding off the Tiger's treads to no effect. Upham
and Trask were firing their rifles, trying to pick off the S.S. troops,
with only occasional success.
The Tiger and its tagalong Panzer kept coming, ever nearer, and Sarge
yelled, "Fall back!" as he and Reiben and the rest snatched up whatever they
could and ran for it. Only Weller stayed behind, blasting away with the
machine gun. He tagged some of the S.S. troops at least, providing cover as
the sergeant and three privates sprinted toward the sandbags at the far end.
Seeing the Tiger swiveling its muzzle toward his sandbagged position, Weller
jumped from the machine-gun nest and scurried after Sarge and the others.
But the thunderous blast from the tank's cannon exploded the emplacement
into a swirling ball of flame, sand, and debris. Too close to the blast,
Weller got tossed like a rag doll, slamming facedown into the brick
pavement, breaking many bones, but he was already dead, his back
pulverized by shrapnel.
Miller and Ryan had reached the sandbags, throwing themselves over.
The captain grabbed the final bazooka, yelling to Ryan, "Connect
those wires! We can't let the bastards take this bridge!"
While Ryan frantically connected wires to the detonator, spinning wing nuts,
Miller laid the bazooka over the sandbags, aiming at the bridge where the
tank would be coming. Through the fog of smoke and dust and sand, though,
first Sarge, Reiben, Trask, and Upham emerged, on the run.
And looming right behind them, seeming vague at first in the haze then
taking terrible shape, came the Tiger, clanking and whining and lumbering.
"Shit," Miller yelled, "Run! Goddamn it, run!"
The tank's forward machine gun opened up on them, first ripping up the brick
pavement, then catching up with the runners, who were hurling themselves to
either side of the bridge, looking for something to hide behind. Trask
caught a slug in the leg, and Sarge, not missing stride, plucked him
from the pavement and hauled him behind a buttress.
"Get down!" Miller called.
And he fired the bazooka. A projectile rocketed down the center of the
bridge past the two men huddling behind the buttress and over the heads of
Reiben and Upham, who lay flattened on the brick. Then traveling the length
of the bridge, it exploded harmlessly on the sloping front of the tank.
As Miller desperately reloaded the bazooka, Sarge, hauling Trask under the
temporary cover of smoke, called to Reiben and Upham, "Go! Go!"
And they joined Sarge, helping him drag Trask toward relative safety.
The tank's forward machine gun opened up again, and a pair of slugs ripped
into Sarge, in his back, and he dropped.
"Sarge!" Reiben screamed.
"Goddamn it!" Miller said, resting the bazooka on the lip of the sandbags,
aiming again. "Down, down!"
And Reiben and Upham hit the deck, next to the fallen Sarge and wounded
Trask, Miller firing another projectile over their heads, flaming its way
to the Tiger, where it exploded to no avail.
The noise and smoke, however, encouraged Reiben and Upham to jump to their
feet. Reiben dragged Sarge, and Upham dragged Trask, giving the effort
everything they had -- but it was like running in mud, running in slow
motion. Then the Tiger fired that 88 cannon, and the explosion seemed to
tear the world itself apart, to rip the air to shreds, flinging heat and
shrapnel in all directions, sending the running men and wounded they were
lugging to the pavement with heads spinning and ears ringing. ...
Miller wasn't as close as those men were, but the monstrous discharge had
deafened him, much as another explosion had on Omaha Beach. It was as if
all the sound had drained from the world, with the exception of faint,
disembodied sounds that somehow worked their way in. ...
Not sure where the 88 shell had finally found purchase, Miller knew only
that he was alive and that the bridge was standing. And, yes, Private Ryan
was alive, tossed like rubbish within the tumbled mess of the sandbagged
emplacement, where everything lay strewn and smoking. Battered, stunned,
head reeling in a manner that seemed to slow everything down, Miller could
make out, in the nearly silent world, the muffled sound of the clanking
Tiger pressing toward them.
He peered up and saw, through the swirling dust and smoke, the sprawled
corpse of Sergeant Michael Horvath. He didn't scream or weep; there would
be time for that only if he himself could survive these next minutes, perhaps
moments. He saw Upham crawling like a baby, looking down at the dead Sarge,
as Reiben -- huddled behind a bridge buttress, half of his face blackened
like a minstrel who'd removed only some of his makeup -- motioned
frantically for Upham to get off the middle of that bridge.
The Tiger was materializing again through the smoke, and its muzzle was
pointed toward Miller's encampment, above the childlike crawling figure
of Upham as he moved toward Reiben and the cover of that buttress.
Ryan reached for the toppled .30-caliber machine gun, and Miller joined in.
The captain glimpsed Reiben grabbing Upham's hand and pulling the private
to some seconds of safety, anyway. The two clung together, like scared
children, brothers fearing a scolding for some mutual shenanigan.
Together the captain and private slammed the big machine gun atop the
sandbags. Ryan worked the bolt, its echoing clack-clatch signaling
the gradual return of Miller's hearing. They opened fire, and strangely,
Miller could barely hear that, though the bolt whacking back and forth seemed
clear to him as shells ejected, their faint metallic shriek also audible.
The Tiger rumbled forward, bullets having no effect even though the metal
beast seemed to howl in pain. One side of it scraped the steelwork of the
bridge. Its forward machine gun swiveled into position, taking aim at the
sandbagged nest. Miller remembered the look Sarge had shot him when they'd
fallen back to this position -- that reminder of his mission. Thinking of
nothing but saving Private Ryan now, he threw his arms over the boy, shoving
him down out of the path of the bullets.
Those bullets missed Miller, too, but one of the surviving S.S. troops,
alongside the Tiger, caught sight of the two figures behind the sandbag
and let rip with his Schmeisser.
And these bullets found the high school teacher from Addley, Pennsylvania,
two rounds anyway, traveling into and through his chest. Both Miller and
Ryan dropped from view, behind the sandbags, but Upham had seen the shooting,
had seen it all from behind the buttress he shared with Reiben, who was
screaming Miller's name.
Upham had seen it, all right; he had even recognized the German who shot
the captain.
And the corporal who would one day record all of this in a novel stepped
from behind the buttress, .45 in hand, and looked at the German soldier,
the boyish prisoner who liked Steamboat Willie and Mickey Mouse, and who
Miller had in his fatal compassion allowed to live.
That soldier, that former prisoner, had not recognized the man he shot;
but Upham he recognized. Upham was closer.
"Upham!" the German said, lowering his weapon for a moment.
That moment was enough. Upham shot the son of a bitch through the heart
and let him die smiling.
And as Upham and Reiben worked their way from one buttress to another,
trying to make it to the sandbagged nest, the wounded Miller was rising up
to play out the rest of the game because he was not, the coach of the Addley
High School baseball team was definitely not, a quitter. He didn't hurt,
exactly, though the burning sensations in his chest told him he'd been
wounded, and he fumbled for the only weapon he had left, his sidearm,
his holstered .45.
Captain Miller fires his .45 at the oncoming tank, knowing the effort was
futile but pumping that trigger anyway. The pistol jumped in his fist,
its loud report faint in his stunned ears, and he ran the magazine down
to the final bullet.
He shot the final .45 round at the approaching Tiger, and the tank exploded.
Ducking down, astonished, Miller stared at the pistol in his hand; how the
hell could he have done that? How could one .45 slug blow up a Royal Tiger?
p>Something had: flame touting from the shell of the beast, a second explosion
blasted the Tiger's turret into the air, where it spun like a flaming
pinwheel. Then the tank itself seemed to lose balance, slamming into
the side of the bridge. Taking steel and stonework with it, groaning,
screeching, it crashed into the water like a huge stone, sending
wavelike ripples over its blue surface.
Miller heard the splash, his hearing almost back, and he heard something
else, too, something that brought his eyes skyward, heavenly voices,
a choir of angels whose song built into the throaty roar of a Packard
engine. And, as the P-51 Mustang swooped over the bridge, Miller
suddenly knew his .45 had not been responsible for that damage.
Reiben and Upham watched from behind the buttress as the tank-buster plane
peeled overhead and came around for another pass. The Panzer was desperately
trying to back off the bridge and away from the burning shell of its larger
brother. The few remaining S.S. foot soldiers were scurrying in retreat.
The smaller tank no longer a threat, the two privates left cover and ran
to the sandbag emplacement.
They found Miller slumped in Ryan's arms. Tears were streaking Ryan's face;
blood was streaking Miller's blouse.
"Captain," Reiben said. "Oh, God ... Captain."
Reiben and Upham dropped to their knees, as if in prayer. They grabbed on
to Miller, took him in their arms hoping to transmit some of their life
into him. Reiben was screaming at the sky, curses and prayers.
Upham was bawling like a baby.
At the far end of the bridge, the smaller tank exploded into a ball of
flame, Mustang roaring past, rising in a steep climb.
Miller was watching the clouds. He tried to say something, but nothing came
out. But he did manage to raise a bloody hand -- his trembling hand -- and
point toward the ascending P-51, as it made its damn near vertical climb,
straining magnificently at its apex.
"Tank busters, sir," Ryan said, not bothering to brush the tears from his
cheeks. "P-51's."
Behind the cluster of battle-torn soldiers in the machine-gun nest,
Sherman tanks approached, merging from the tree line, accompanied by waves
of supporting infantry.
But Miller wasn't aware of that. He saw only the sky, and the P-51, and
the clouds.
"See ... Wade was ... right," Miller managed. "Angels ... on our shoulders.
..."
Someone's feet on the bridge crunched glass.
Miller smiled distantly. "Winning season," he said.
"Don't talk, Cap," Reiben said.
But his captain was looking up at Private Ryan, the man they'd come to save.
The man they'd saved.
"Earn this," Miller said softly.
"Sir?" Ryan asked.
Now the captain repeated it firmly, and order: "Earn this."
His last words.
With the clank and wheeze of friendly tanks in their ears, Ryan and Reiben
and Upham carried Captain John H. Miller away from the machine-gun nest to
the stonework wall of the bridge and laid him gently there.
"At least it's not shakin' anymore," Upham said, and swallowed.
"Huh?" Reiben said numbly.
Upham nodded toward Miller's limp hand, draped against the stonework.
"His hand."
Reiben crouched over the captain, finding something in Miller's breast
pocket, removing it, putting it in his own pocket. He said nothing about
it, but Upham saw what Reiben had done, and knew Reiben had taken it upon
himself to deliver the letter to Caparzo's papa.
And the boys from Mr. Miller's class went back to the war.
James Ryan, seventy-four, Peyton, Iowa, threaded through the perfectly
lined rows of crosses until he found the right marker. None of his family,
not even his little grandson, could keep up with him.
And that was fine, because he wanted a private moment -- that is, a moment
between private and captain.
He looked at the white cross and said, "My family's with me today.
They wanted to come. Vacation. Me, I didn't know how I'd feel,
coming back here."
"Grandpa!" Jimmy was catching up.
Ryan continued to speak to his captain. "Not a day goes by I don't think
about what happened on that bridge. About what we did, and what you said
to me. And I just want you to know ..."
"Grandpa!"
Ryan turned and saw Jimmy standing nearby, but sensitive enough a lad to
keep his distance. The grandfather patted the air, telling his grandson
to stay back, please, for just a little while.
Then Ryan looked at the cross as if it were a person and said, "I've tried.
Tried to live my life the best I could. I hope that's enough. I didn't
invent anything. I didn't cure any diseases. I worked a farm. I raised
a family. I lived a life. I only hope, in your eyes at least, I earned
what you did for me."
"Jim ..."
Now it was not his grandson's voice, but his wife's. His son, his son's
wife, the four grandkids, were keeping a respectful distance, just over
the rise. Their expressions were touched with confusion, because what
this meant was beyond them. So far beyond them. ...
But not beyond the woman he had lived with, this woman standing beside him
now and always. He'd never really told her anything about this place, no
war stories, except a few funny ones. Still, this was the woman who had
held him, rocked him, comforted him, on those nights, those once frequent,
now occasional nights, when he would wake up screaming, or weeping. Or both.
So pretty, still so pretty. She took his arm, and looked down at the white
cross. "Someone you knew?"
Ryan sighed. "Not really."
"Are you all right, Jim?"
He looked at her, and the tears in his eyes made tears form in hers.
"Alice ... have I lived a good life? Am I a good man?"
"Jim ... what ..."
"Just tell me ... tell me if you think I've earned it."
She studied him, then tenderly touched his face. "Oh, yes. Yes you have."
Then she left him there, joining the family, giving him as many moments
as he needed, to be ready to leave this place.
He didn't need that long. Just long enough to stand erect and give the
grave marker a heartfelt salute.
Then walking with just a little military snap in his step, Private
James Ryan, winner of the Silver Star, rejoined his family, leaving
this well-tended cemetary behind.
... and the grave of Captain John H. Miller, posthumous Medal of Honor
winner, after whom a junior high school in Addley, Pennsylvania, had been
named.
Despite a fancy plaque in the school's front hallway, many of the kids there
today wonder why.
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
PART TWO
The Pentagon, Washington, D.C.
June 8, 1944Chapter 5
PART THREE
Normandy
June 9, 1944Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
EPILOG
St. Laurent Military Graveyard
June 6, 1998