Fic: "Shallow Graves" (Gen, PG-13)
Title : Shallow Graves
Author : valmontheights
Rating : PG-13 (gen)
Characters : Sgt. James “Moe” Alley, miscellaneous others.
Disclaimer : “Band of Brothers” is a property of HBO, and while the series itself is based on the true story of Easy Company, this story is purely a work of fiction, based on the fictionalized movieverse with no disrespect intended towards the actual people and events on which it is based.
’It’s me!’ cried Tab, ‘Don’t do it!’ and yet
Smith charged toute de suite with bayonet
He lunged, he thrust, both high and low
And skewered the boy from Kokomo.
Damn you’re good, Smokey. Maybe you’ll write a little something for me this time.
Say, what rhymes with ‘riddled full of holes and bleeding from each one’?
---
It was a grey, overcast day when he set foot in Mourmelon, having busted out of Repo Depo and hitched a ride through Le Havre to get there. There was no feast to welcome him, no poetry, but he knew that he was back where he belonged. They saw him coming and soon there were pats on his back, light punches on his shoulders, while someone-Liebgott?-slipped a cigarette between his lips and lit it for him. They called him a ‘crazy bastard’ and goaded him about the scars on his face, and there was Luz dutifully cracking a half-hearted joke about having one less asshole to compete with for the ladies’ attention. Alley smiled through all this, smiled because it seemed the right thing to do, and he didn’t tell them that he still woke at night fearing that the punctures in his flesh had started bleeding again, or that he could still feel the jab of Doc Roe’s morphine syrette in his left thigh. He didn’t tell them that when he was lying on that table looking up at the beamwork that held up the roof of the old barn, he’d actually felt like giving up. He could tell that he was slipping, eyesight growing blurry in the haze of Doc Roe’s voice and the hands that were fussing over his wounds-there were too many to count, gushing rich crimson life all over the hay-strewn floor.
So why’d they call those things potato mashers, anyway?
What a silly thought to end a life with, and maybe that’s what saved him. The refusal to go down unless in glorified heroics, Jimmy Alley the stubborn GI who believed everything the recruitment posters promised him. Fifty dollars more than the average soldier and pride enough to burst his lungs. He still believed this when he was jumping into the lacerated darkness of Normandy under a deployed canopy, like a messenger of God with silken white wings, though he was pretty sure that angels didn’t cut themselves on broken glass whilst landing on their asses. The damn French and their damn gardens. Maybe it was the twinge of those old wounds that dulled the pain of new ones, that kept his eyes open long after he could no longer understand the things he was seeing, Doc’s voice thick with its bayou sway telling him you’re gonna be okay, Alley and giving him no option other than to believe.
In the end, whose decision was it that the bits of shrapnel all missed his major organs and arteries and stopped him from dying? What kept his heart beating and his mind lucid through all that? Was it God? Was it Doc? Was it Talbert’s damn dog licking profusely at his hand as they bandaged him up and got him ready to move out? Crazy bastard, lucky bastard. He ain’t nothing if not both.
“They gave you a Purple Heart for this?” that was Smokey. “What a waste.”
“Why?” Alley smirked at his buddy. “Not like I had to con them into giving it to me or nothin’.”
“You’re a magnet for disaster, Moe.”
“Says the one who was hopping around on crutches for a good week or so-”
“Hey, it worked on the Aldbourne gals,” Smokey grinned. “Makes them sympathetic and all.”
Alley huffed. “Always figured you’d need help just to get skirts to notice you.”
“Yeah, well good luck trying to get laid with these, buddy.” Smokey prodded lightly at the scars on Alley’s face with two fingers, tapping the pinkish new skin as if wanting to see if it would come off. “They’ll notice you all right, then run away screaming.”
“We’ll see,” Alley said.
The very next day, Hitler launched the Ardennes offensive and they never got to see.
---
“Berlin by Christmas,” Alley grumbled as curled himself up as tight as his ODs would allow. “Nice one, More. Real nice.”
Alton More gave him a lazy kick with one soggy boot. This cold, Alley could barely feel it. “Shut up, Moe. I wasn’t the one who fucked up Market Garden, y’know.”
“Yeah? Well you’re the one who’s been saying we’ll be home by Christmas since Carentan-”
“Fuck off.”
“-and look where we ended up? Freezin’ our asses off in this goddamn forest-”
“Well, I don’t hear you comin’ up with any bright ideas, Sergeant.”
“Will you two knock it off?” Smokey groaned from under his blankets, bodily squeezed in between the other two in their dank, cold foxhole. “M’trying to get some sleep here.”
More stared at the helmet-topped bundle for a moment, dim eyes shaded under the tarp, and looked back at Alley. “You’d best be getting back to your hole, Sarge. Getting crowded in here.” His voice wasn’t anything friendly.
Alley gave him a half-snarl that was lost somewhere between his throat and his frozen lips. He crawled out of the machine gunners’ foxhole, making sure to catch a bit of More’s extended leg under his boot, earning him a curse and another kick in the shin, not so lazily this time.
---
“You ain’t using this stuff are ya, Doc? I mean personal, like.”
Liebgott laughed. Then he sang. He was singing when Alley first came upon him in his open foxhole and somehow roped the passing sergeant in to keep him company. Alley never thought to ask why, not with this man. Liebgott wanted to sing, so he sang. Whatever Liebgott wanted to do, he simply did.
Later, after Guarnere’d shut them up with no small amount of cussing and hobbled away, Liebgott would turn to Alley and ask, “You think he’s really doing it?”
“What?”
“Doc. The morphine. Using it himself.”
“Nah,” he replied almost without thinking. “Was only joking. We’re low enough on supplies already, Gene wouldn’t even think of it-”
“But what if he is?”
“Don’t think so, Lieb.”
“But what if?”
Liebgott let his question hang in the air. Alley stared at him quietly, the gaunt face under a helmet that seemed too big for his slender neck, the odd planes and angles of a face that could, under a certain kind of light, look wild and cold and frightening.
You’re gonna be okay, Alley
A jab in his left thigh, cold and sharp and precise, Doc Roe standing over him with hands on either end of his body like a medicine man, and his vision fading into a blissful haze where pain was just a soft murmur through his body. Removed from himself, safe, unaware of the movements of the truck that rushed through muddy autumn roads. What would a man give to feel such carefree detachment now?
“If he is…” Alley said. “I wouldn’t blame him.”
---
More lit the cigarette with the hand that hadn’t ceased to tremble since that morning. One, two, three long drags as if his life depended on it, and he passed the precious Lucky to Alley, who sat opposite him in a foxhole that wasn’t so crowded anymore.
“Thanks…” muttered the sergeant.
“I should be saying that, too…” the gruff private replied. “You know, for what you did today.”
“Did what I had to. You needed help with this,” Alley tapped two fingers against the now-quiet barrell of the machine gun. “Besides, ain’t much use being in the mortar squad if you don’t have any rounds to fire.”
More smiled, weakly, and accepted the cigarette back after Alley had filled his mouth and lungs with its acrid taste. “You think Smokey’ll be okay?”
“I don’t know,” Alley said, trying not to think of the dark bloodstains on his ODs. “I really don’t.”
It was odd to sit here with More, quieter than he’d ever been, the self-assured lilt in his voice reduced to a soft Wyoming drawl, without Smokey to mediate between them now that they’ve run out of things to bitch each other about. The smell of spilt coffee was long gone from the dirt around them and the machine gun was cold again, but he could still smell the blood-Smokey’s blood, deep and rich red against the white snow, mixed with the tang of bullets slicing the air. Alley could feel their heat, their urgency, the split-second warmth of lethal fire, and he wondered if in the back of his mind he’d been tempted to throw himself in their path, just to free himself off the icy shroud of Bastgone’s weather and feel alive again, if only briefly, before they cut through him and end him, for real this time. But he’d kept low instead, helping More feed the rapidly-depleting ammo into the machine gun, swiveling from side to side as they searched for targets, working together far better than either of them had ever thought possible. They’re looking at each other now, knee to knee inside the foxhole More had dug while Smokey brewed his coffee, and Alley realized that he’d never felt closer to More than he did this morning, when they were both working that machine gun with fire in their hands and anger in their bodies, hot enough to thaw the freeze Bastogne had wrapped them in, even if the fire burned too bright and spent itself too quick. He and More had only ever had one thing in common, and that was Smokey.
Don’t die, Walter…whatever you do, don’t die. There’s another Purple Heart with your name on it out there, and this time you’ve earned it.
Poems for the wounded, Smokey leaning on his crutch and basking in the attention, smiling and reading from the scribbled note in his hand, Talbert shaking his head in mild annoyance and Smith blushing fiercely under his boyish eyes. Aldbourne, a spin around the dance floor with a beer in his hand and a girl in his arms, flowers in the grass, the jump over serene skies, Nuenen, Veghel, the dark crossroads at night, the stilling shock as a hundred pieces of shrapnel pierced his body. Somewhere between Doc Roe’s hands on the thick wooden table inside that old barn and the bitter stench of the hospital, he died. He died and came back half-alive, changed forever.
---
“’Cept for Alley here, he’s a two-timer. He landed on broken glass in Normandy and got peppered by a potato-masher in Holland.”
Alley drawled out, “You’ll soon find out, son.”
Leaning against that tree, listening to another sweet-faced replacement, Webb or Wade or whoever ask stupid questions, he began to feel his age again-not in years but in scars. Good ol’ Jimmy Alley, wounded twice and still ticking, a veteran of Normandy, of Market Garden, and if somehow they get out of this God-forsaken place alive in fuck knows how many pieces, a survivor of the Ardennes campaign. A tough guy. Isn’t that what he wanted these new guys to see in him? Never said the Airborne were modest or anything. That was his hero’s moment right there, leaning against a dead tree in a snowy forest, doing his best John Wayne, wondering about how strange it was that Bastogne, the place that had stripped many of them of their minds, of who they were, had pretty much left their vanity intact. Muck was happily reciting the various wounds of the Toccoa men, Bull’s shoulder, Liebgott’s neck, Popeye’s scrawny butt and Buck’s large one, Lipton nearly screwed out of the chance to continue his bloodline.
“There’s enough crap flyin’ round here, you’re bound to get dinged sometime,” he heard his fellow sergeant say assuringly.
Later, but not much later, the words echoed painfully in his ears as he stared down at the cratered earth where Skip Muck and Alex Penkala died, and his old wounds reopened, spilling unseen blood onto the snow. He longed not so much for a stab of morphine in his thigh than he did a bullet in his head.
---
“Take it.”
“I ain’t taking it, Moe.”
“You ought to,” Alley held up Smokey’s .45 in More’s face.
“Why?”
“If track record’s anything go by, you’ve got a much better chance at seeing this thing through than I do.”
It was faulty logic and they both knew it, and More said as much. “Bullshit.”
---
It took a moment for him to realize that the blood wasn’t his, that he wasn’t dead, but that he would be if he didn’t move out of the clearing fast enough. Mellet’s blood, warm on his face, the erstwhile living soldier dropping to the ground stiffly, a note of song dying with him on his lips, and already his face was paling, melding with the snow. Alley jumped off the tank, heard another shot ring out, and a soldierless BAR fell to the ground beside him. He ran, zipped and ducked, leaping into the safety of a building’s cover as his heart tried to claw its way out of his chest. Not a morphine shot this time, just an adrenaline rush, and where he pressed his face against the wall to calm his breathing there was a red-rust stain, and it took all his resolve not to just bend over and retch into the snow.
---
After the sniper was taken care of Alley went back to the tank, helped move the bodies and picked up Herron’s BAR, carrying it with him until he found Lipton and left it with him to be catalogued and passed onto someone else. On his short trek he came upon another body lying in the snow, another bullet hole neatly drilled into the skull from lethal, uncaring distance.
You’ll soon find out, son.
And Webb did.
That night Alley offered Shifty Powers a cigarette, and as he excused himself to leave he discreetly left the rest of the newly-opened pack behind, where Shifty would surely find it.
---
“So who’s in charge of this bullshit?” he asked without masking his discontent.
Over his shoulder was the new louie, child-faced and West Point fresh, standing at the doorway nervously as men he outranked but who knew more about this war than he ever would sat around the table and leered at him disdainfully.
“If it ain’t him then it’s you, Chuck. Or Shifty, or Moe.”
It seemed to Alley that the war kept conspiring to kill him and he kept dodging its final bullet, but in Haguenau he began to doubt if his determination to survive was still as strong as it had been that night, when Normandy’s darkness swallowed him whole and drove shards of glass into his flesh.
In the early evening, coming back to first platoon’s billet to catch a nap, he found Pat Christenson sitting on his bunk and staring at a blank wall as if he longed to paint on it, draw on it, smear it with charcoal, make something out of nothing, chewed pencil in one hand and Bill Kiehn’s dog tags in the other. Earlier, Alley’d discarded the sackfuls of potatoes he and Bill had been lugging around in a ditch by the side of a muddy road. He was sure at that point that he wouldn't have an appetite for spuds again for as long as he lived.
---
Fifteen men rowed across the dark river that night. Twelve made it safely to the German-occupied side. A hail of artillery and gunfire and screeching whistles later, fourteen rowed frantically back across. One would only make it as far as the nearest basement.
“I don’t wana die, I don’t wanna die…”
But what people want and what actually happens to them don’t always agree-in times of war, they tend not to. There were tears in his eyes and this time he made no effort to stop them-wasn’t worth it. So he stood there with his rifle in his hand and cried, tall and strong James “Moe” Alley with his shrapnel and scars, he cried over a dead boy’s body and cared none if anyone thought any less of him for it. First tears he’d shed since the war started, since he was a boy, even. There was not a single one for Smokey, not one for Hoobler, for Muck and Penk or Webb or Mellet and Herron and all those countless faces marching across forgotten fields where wars were no longer being fought. He wasn’t fucking made of stone. He wasn’t Alton More, he wasn’t Ronald Speirs, and he didn’t want to be. Better a dead man than a living statue.
---
The second time he cried during the entire war was with his arm around Janovec’s shoulders as the younger man knelt before the remains of a burnt hut in Landsberg and wept into his hands. This time his tears were quiet, as were his lips, because no words he could ever come up with would seem fit to describe what he was seeing. This wasn’t death the way he’d seen it, not the death he’d so closely scraped with on more than one occasion, not the cruel trick of fate that sent a mortar shell into a direct hit on one foxhole while sending a dud to another. No, this death wielded its hand in broad, sweeping gestures, indiscriminate, and stripped humanity off both its victims and their killers.
Alley ducked his face into his helmet to fend off the horrible stench. Janovec’s shoulders trembled. Liebgott’s voice was shrill in the foul-smelling wind, speaking another language, not getting two sentences in before a roar of weak, famished discontent drowned him out.
“I need a smoke,” he said. Janovec nodded and went with him. But the cigarette was stale in his mouth and he threw it away after four quick, disappointing drags and that was when he heard the word spreading amongst the soldiers that one of the prisoners had mentioned something about a separate camp for women just down the railroad.
Alley fought the urge to flip his lighter out again and burn his own eyes with it.
---
“He had 75 points,” Webster said, his voice quivering a lot more than it usually did.
“Shit,” was all that came out of More.
Alley said nothing. He stared at the empty bed in front of him-they had real beds now, with fresh sheets and down pillows-still tussled from when Janovec had risen from it this morning.
If this war was still conspiring to kill him, it now wanted to kill him from within.
---
He could see the replacement’s rib crack, like a snapping twig, upon contact with More’s fist. The reek of blood and alcohol was thick on the young man’s face, disfigured by God knows how many punches, a number of his teeth knocked out. Still, it was hardly enough. Ramirez was at it again, grabbing fistfuls of the bastard’s blood-matted hair and shouting Spanish profanities at him while Popeye held him down by the shoulder and Liebgott clenched his fist to take another swing.
Alley watched as Speirs leveled the gun at the private’s head, wondering if he wanted to see this, if he had any choice. But the captain’s hand, so swift in dealing death on countless occasions before, did not pull the trigger.
“Have the MPs take care of this piece of shit,” he said before leaving.
“Grant’s dead?” Talbert asked on behalf of them all.
“No,” Speirs holstered his gun. “Kraut surgeon says he’s gonna make it.”
Alley hopped off the expensive-looking table he’d been sitting on and pulled a pack of Camels out of his pocket with shaking, blood-stained hands. How’s a man supposed to stay alive around here if people on his own side are trying to kill him?
---
The men in the photographs posed proudly in their uniforms, shaking hands, clinking glasses full of expensive liquor, marching in parades in streets Alley himself had walked on, sunning themselves out on lavish decks with the Alps towering behind them. All those faces, strong and self-assured, unwavering in their belief of their cause for going to war.
“You’re a crazy fucker, More…”
More sniggered and turned another page. “He knew. Speirs knew.”
“And he let it go?”
“Didn’t think he would’ve if Tab hadn’t walked in…” More said. “But he’s never asked about it since.”
“No, he’ll just give you a cigarette and shoot you in the head.”
These were bad men who did bad things for the worst of reasons. Most of them were now dead, captured, or missing-their empire undone, their haughty fortresses of wealth and power now overrun with country boys and coal miners, drinking their wine and sleeping in their beds. It didn’t feel like winning to Alley. He doubted anything would.
Leaving home for Toccoa three years ago, he’d imagined himself coming back a hero. Now he knew that he will come back, above anything else, a stranger. To his friends and his family and his town, but most of all to himself. He will come back to them as he is now, and they will make of him what they will-a man, a soldier, a survivor, or whatever else they see fit to view him as. He’d fought, full of will and determination, and he’d refused to die because he hadn’t yet become what the recruitment posters promised him he would be, a mighty paratrooper dropping from the skies to free the world and rid it of the Axis’ evil. Young Jimmy Alley had believed in those things. The war-bruised Sergeant Alley, twice wounded and many times dead, still carrying bits of shrapnel under his skin and the ghosts of the dead on his back, didn’t.
The only heroes he knew were dead men, lying in shallow graves dotted all across Europe and beyond, young and slain before their time. At different points during this war, Alley had found himself wishing for his life to end as much as he wished it to continue. Now, his only wish was to come home, to whatever would be waiting there for him.
It was, after all, only a matter of dying one more time and living again, changed again.
~FIN~
Author : valmontheights
Rating : PG-13 (gen)
Characters : Sgt. James “Moe” Alley, miscellaneous others.
Disclaimer : “Band of Brothers” is a property of HBO, and while the series itself is based on the true story of Easy Company, this story is purely a work of fiction, based on the fictionalized movieverse with no disrespect intended towards the actual people and events on which it is based.
’It’s me!’ cried Tab, ‘Don’t do it!’ and yet
Smith charged toute de suite with bayonet
He lunged, he thrust, both high and low
And skewered the boy from Kokomo.
Damn you’re good, Smokey. Maybe you’ll write a little something for me this time.
Say, what rhymes with ‘riddled full of holes and bleeding from each one’?
---
It was a grey, overcast day when he set foot in Mourmelon, having busted out of Repo Depo and hitched a ride through Le Havre to get there. There was no feast to welcome him, no poetry, but he knew that he was back where he belonged. They saw him coming and soon there were pats on his back, light punches on his shoulders, while someone-Liebgott?-slipped a cigarette between his lips and lit it for him. They called him a ‘crazy bastard’ and goaded him about the scars on his face, and there was Luz dutifully cracking a half-hearted joke about having one less asshole to compete with for the ladies’ attention. Alley smiled through all this, smiled because it seemed the right thing to do, and he didn’t tell them that he still woke at night fearing that the punctures in his flesh had started bleeding again, or that he could still feel the jab of Doc Roe’s morphine syrette in his left thigh. He didn’t tell them that when he was lying on that table looking up at the beamwork that held up the roof of the old barn, he’d actually felt like giving up. He could tell that he was slipping, eyesight growing blurry in the haze of Doc Roe’s voice and the hands that were fussing over his wounds-there were too many to count, gushing rich crimson life all over the hay-strewn floor.
So why’d they call those things potato mashers, anyway?
What a silly thought to end a life with, and maybe that’s what saved him. The refusal to go down unless in glorified heroics, Jimmy Alley the stubborn GI who believed everything the recruitment posters promised him. Fifty dollars more than the average soldier and pride enough to burst his lungs. He still believed this when he was jumping into the lacerated darkness of Normandy under a deployed canopy, like a messenger of God with silken white wings, though he was pretty sure that angels didn’t cut themselves on broken glass whilst landing on their asses. The damn French and their damn gardens. Maybe it was the twinge of those old wounds that dulled the pain of new ones, that kept his eyes open long after he could no longer understand the things he was seeing, Doc’s voice thick with its bayou sway telling him you’re gonna be okay, Alley and giving him no option other than to believe.
In the end, whose decision was it that the bits of shrapnel all missed his major organs and arteries and stopped him from dying? What kept his heart beating and his mind lucid through all that? Was it God? Was it Doc? Was it Talbert’s damn dog licking profusely at his hand as they bandaged him up and got him ready to move out? Crazy bastard, lucky bastard. He ain’t nothing if not both.
“They gave you a Purple Heart for this?” that was Smokey. “What a waste.”
“Why?” Alley smirked at his buddy. “Not like I had to con them into giving it to me or nothin’.”
“You’re a magnet for disaster, Moe.”
“Says the one who was hopping around on crutches for a good week or so-”
“Hey, it worked on the Aldbourne gals,” Smokey grinned. “Makes them sympathetic and all.”
Alley huffed. “Always figured you’d need help just to get skirts to notice you.”
“Yeah, well good luck trying to get laid with these, buddy.” Smokey prodded lightly at the scars on Alley’s face with two fingers, tapping the pinkish new skin as if wanting to see if it would come off. “They’ll notice you all right, then run away screaming.”
“We’ll see,” Alley said.
The very next day, Hitler launched the Ardennes offensive and they never got to see.
---
“Berlin by Christmas,” Alley grumbled as curled himself up as tight as his ODs would allow. “Nice one, More. Real nice.”
Alton More gave him a lazy kick with one soggy boot. This cold, Alley could barely feel it. “Shut up, Moe. I wasn’t the one who fucked up Market Garden, y’know.”
“Yeah? Well you’re the one who’s been saying we’ll be home by Christmas since Carentan-”
“Fuck off.”
“-and look where we ended up? Freezin’ our asses off in this goddamn forest-”
“Well, I don’t hear you comin’ up with any bright ideas, Sergeant.”
“Will you two knock it off?” Smokey groaned from under his blankets, bodily squeezed in between the other two in their dank, cold foxhole. “M’trying to get some sleep here.”
More stared at the helmet-topped bundle for a moment, dim eyes shaded under the tarp, and looked back at Alley. “You’d best be getting back to your hole, Sarge. Getting crowded in here.” His voice wasn’t anything friendly.
Alley gave him a half-snarl that was lost somewhere between his throat and his frozen lips. He crawled out of the machine gunners’ foxhole, making sure to catch a bit of More’s extended leg under his boot, earning him a curse and another kick in the shin, not so lazily this time.
---
“You ain’t using this stuff are ya, Doc? I mean personal, like.”
Liebgott laughed. Then he sang. He was singing when Alley first came upon him in his open foxhole and somehow roped the passing sergeant in to keep him company. Alley never thought to ask why, not with this man. Liebgott wanted to sing, so he sang. Whatever Liebgott wanted to do, he simply did.
Later, after Guarnere’d shut them up with no small amount of cussing and hobbled away, Liebgott would turn to Alley and ask, “You think he’s really doing it?”
“What?”
“Doc. The morphine. Using it himself.”
“Nah,” he replied almost without thinking. “Was only joking. We’re low enough on supplies already, Gene wouldn’t even think of it-”
“But what if he is?”
“Don’t think so, Lieb.”
“But what if?”
Liebgott let his question hang in the air. Alley stared at him quietly, the gaunt face under a helmet that seemed too big for his slender neck, the odd planes and angles of a face that could, under a certain kind of light, look wild and cold and frightening.
You’re gonna be okay, Alley
A jab in his left thigh, cold and sharp and precise, Doc Roe standing over him with hands on either end of his body like a medicine man, and his vision fading into a blissful haze where pain was just a soft murmur through his body. Removed from himself, safe, unaware of the movements of the truck that rushed through muddy autumn roads. What would a man give to feel such carefree detachment now?
“If he is…” Alley said. “I wouldn’t blame him.”
---
More lit the cigarette with the hand that hadn’t ceased to tremble since that morning. One, two, three long drags as if his life depended on it, and he passed the precious Lucky to Alley, who sat opposite him in a foxhole that wasn’t so crowded anymore.
“Thanks…” muttered the sergeant.
“I should be saying that, too…” the gruff private replied. “You know, for what you did today.”
“Did what I had to. You needed help with this,” Alley tapped two fingers against the now-quiet barrell of the machine gun. “Besides, ain’t much use being in the mortar squad if you don’t have any rounds to fire.”
More smiled, weakly, and accepted the cigarette back after Alley had filled his mouth and lungs with its acrid taste. “You think Smokey’ll be okay?”
“I don’t know,” Alley said, trying not to think of the dark bloodstains on his ODs. “I really don’t.”
It was odd to sit here with More, quieter than he’d ever been, the self-assured lilt in his voice reduced to a soft Wyoming drawl, without Smokey to mediate between them now that they’ve run out of things to bitch each other about. The smell of spilt coffee was long gone from the dirt around them and the machine gun was cold again, but he could still smell the blood-Smokey’s blood, deep and rich red against the white snow, mixed with the tang of bullets slicing the air. Alley could feel their heat, their urgency, the split-second warmth of lethal fire, and he wondered if in the back of his mind he’d been tempted to throw himself in their path, just to free himself off the icy shroud of Bastgone’s weather and feel alive again, if only briefly, before they cut through him and end him, for real this time. But he’d kept low instead, helping More feed the rapidly-depleting ammo into the machine gun, swiveling from side to side as they searched for targets, working together far better than either of them had ever thought possible. They’re looking at each other now, knee to knee inside the foxhole More had dug while Smokey brewed his coffee, and Alley realized that he’d never felt closer to More than he did this morning, when they were both working that machine gun with fire in their hands and anger in their bodies, hot enough to thaw the freeze Bastogne had wrapped them in, even if the fire burned too bright and spent itself too quick. He and More had only ever had one thing in common, and that was Smokey.
Don’t die, Walter…whatever you do, don’t die. There’s another Purple Heart with your name on it out there, and this time you’ve earned it.
Poems for the wounded, Smokey leaning on his crutch and basking in the attention, smiling and reading from the scribbled note in his hand, Talbert shaking his head in mild annoyance and Smith blushing fiercely under his boyish eyes. Aldbourne, a spin around the dance floor with a beer in his hand and a girl in his arms, flowers in the grass, the jump over serene skies, Nuenen, Veghel, the dark crossroads at night, the stilling shock as a hundred pieces of shrapnel pierced his body. Somewhere between Doc Roe’s hands on the thick wooden table inside that old barn and the bitter stench of the hospital, he died. He died and came back half-alive, changed forever.
---
“’Cept for Alley here, he’s a two-timer. He landed on broken glass in Normandy and got peppered by a potato-masher in Holland.”
Alley drawled out, “You’ll soon find out, son.”
Leaning against that tree, listening to another sweet-faced replacement, Webb or Wade or whoever ask stupid questions, he began to feel his age again-not in years but in scars. Good ol’ Jimmy Alley, wounded twice and still ticking, a veteran of Normandy, of Market Garden, and if somehow they get out of this God-forsaken place alive in fuck knows how many pieces, a survivor of the Ardennes campaign. A tough guy. Isn’t that what he wanted these new guys to see in him? Never said the Airborne were modest or anything. That was his hero’s moment right there, leaning against a dead tree in a snowy forest, doing his best John Wayne, wondering about how strange it was that Bastogne, the place that had stripped many of them of their minds, of who they were, had pretty much left their vanity intact. Muck was happily reciting the various wounds of the Toccoa men, Bull’s shoulder, Liebgott’s neck, Popeye’s scrawny butt and Buck’s large one, Lipton nearly screwed out of the chance to continue his bloodline.
“There’s enough crap flyin’ round here, you’re bound to get dinged sometime,” he heard his fellow sergeant say assuringly.
Later, but not much later, the words echoed painfully in his ears as he stared down at the cratered earth where Skip Muck and Alex Penkala died, and his old wounds reopened, spilling unseen blood onto the snow. He longed not so much for a stab of morphine in his thigh than he did a bullet in his head.
---
“Take it.”
“I ain’t taking it, Moe.”
“You ought to,” Alley held up Smokey’s .45 in More’s face.
“Why?”
“If track record’s anything go by, you’ve got a much better chance at seeing this thing through than I do.”
It was faulty logic and they both knew it, and More said as much. “Bullshit.”
---
It took a moment for him to realize that the blood wasn’t his, that he wasn’t dead, but that he would be if he didn’t move out of the clearing fast enough. Mellet’s blood, warm on his face, the erstwhile living soldier dropping to the ground stiffly, a note of song dying with him on his lips, and already his face was paling, melding with the snow. Alley jumped off the tank, heard another shot ring out, and a soldierless BAR fell to the ground beside him. He ran, zipped and ducked, leaping into the safety of a building’s cover as his heart tried to claw its way out of his chest. Not a morphine shot this time, just an adrenaline rush, and where he pressed his face against the wall to calm his breathing there was a red-rust stain, and it took all his resolve not to just bend over and retch into the snow.
---
After the sniper was taken care of Alley went back to the tank, helped move the bodies and picked up Herron’s BAR, carrying it with him until he found Lipton and left it with him to be catalogued and passed onto someone else. On his short trek he came upon another body lying in the snow, another bullet hole neatly drilled into the skull from lethal, uncaring distance.
You’ll soon find out, son.
And Webb did.
That night Alley offered Shifty Powers a cigarette, and as he excused himself to leave he discreetly left the rest of the newly-opened pack behind, where Shifty would surely find it.
---
“So who’s in charge of this bullshit?” he asked without masking his discontent.
Over his shoulder was the new louie, child-faced and West Point fresh, standing at the doorway nervously as men he outranked but who knew more about this war than he ever would sat around the table and leered at him disdainfully.
“If it ain’t him then it’s you, Chuck. Or Shifty, or Moe.”
It seemed to Alley that the war kept conspiring to kill him and he kept dodging its final bullet, but in Haguenau he began to doubt if his determination to survive was still as strong as it had been that night, when Normandy’s darkness swallowed him whole and drove shards of glass into his flesh.
In the early evening, coming back to first platoon’s billet to catch a nap, he found Pat Christenson sitting on his bunk and staring at a blank wall as if he longed to paint on it, draw on it, smear it with charcoal, make something out of nothing, chewed pencil in one hand and Bill Kiehn’s dog tags in the other. Earlier, Alley’d discarded the sackfuls of potatoes he and Bill had been lugging around in a ditch by the side of a muddy road. He was sure at that point that he wouldn't have an appetite for spuds again for as long as he lived.
---
Fifteen men rowed across the dark river that night. Twelve made it safely to the German-occupied side. A hail of artillery and gunfire and screeching whistles later, fourteen rowed frantically back across. One would only make it as far as the nearest basement.
“I don’t wana die, I don’t wanna die…”
But what people want and what actually happens to them don’t always agree-in times of war, they tend not to. There were tears in his eyes and this time he made no effort to stop them-wasn’t worth it. So he stood there with his rifle in his hand and cried, tall and strong James “Moe” Alley with his shrapnel and scars, he cried over a dead boy’s body and cared none if anyone thought any less of him for it. First tears he’d shed since the war started, since he was a boy, even. There was not a single one for Smokey, not one for Hoobler, for Muck and Penk or Webb or Mellet and Herron and all those countless faces marching across forgotten fields where wars were no longer being fought. He wasn’t fucking made of stone. He wasn’t Alton More, he wasn’t Ronald Speirs, and he didn’t want to be. Better a dead man than a living statue.
---
The second time he cried during the entire war was with his arm around Janovec’s shoulders as the younger man knelt before the remains of a burnt hut in Landsberg and wept into his hands. This time his tears were quiet, as were his lips, because no words he could ever come up with would seem fit to describe what he was seeing. This wasn’t death the way he’d seen it, not the death he’d so closely scraped with on more than one occasion, not the cruel trick of fate that sent a mortar shell into a direct hit on one foxhole while sending a dud to another. No, this death wielded its hand in broad, sweeping gestures, indiscriminate, and stripped humanity off both its victims and their killers.
Alley ducked his face into his helmet to fend off the horrible stench. Janovec’s shoulders trembled. Liebgott’s voice was shrill in the foul-smelling wind, speaking another language, not getting two sentences in before a roar of weak, famished discontent drowned him out.
“I need a smoke,” he said. Janovec nodded and went with him. But the cigarette was stale in his mouth and he threw it away after four quick, disappointing drags and that was when he heard the word spreading amongst the soldiers that one of the prisoners had mentioned something about a separate camp for women just down the railroad.
Alley fought the urge to flip his lighter out again and burn his own eyes with it.
---
“He had 75 points,” Webster said, his voice quivering a lot more than it usually did.
“Shit,” was all that came out of More.
Alley said nothing. He stared at the empty bed in front of him-they had real beds now, with fresh sheets and down pillows-still tussled from when Janovec had risen from it this morning.
If this war was still conspiring to kill him, it now wanted to kill him from within.
---
He could see the replacement’s rib crack, like a snapping twig, upon contact with More’s fist. The reek of blood and alcohol was thick on the young man’s face, disfigured by God knows how many punches, a number of his teeth knocked out. Still, it was hardly enough. Ramirez was at it again, grabbing fistfuls of the bastard’s blood-matted hair and shouting Spanish profanities at him while Popeye held him down by the shoulder and Liebgott clenched his fist to take another swing.
Alley watched as Speirs leveled the gun at the private’s head, wondering if he wanted to see this, if he had any choice. But the captain’s hand, so swift in dealing death on countless occasions before, did not pull the trigger.
“Have the MPs take care of this piece of shit,” he said before leaving.
“Grant’s dead?” Talbert asked on behalf of them all.
“No,” Speirs holstered his gun. “Kraut surgeon says he’s gonna make it.”
Alley hopped off the expensive-looking table he’d been sitting on and pulled a pack of Camels out of his pocket with shaking, blood-stained hands. How’s a man supposed to stay alive around here if people on his own side are trying to kill him?
---
The men in the photographs posed proudly in their uniforms, shaking hands, clinking glasses full of expensive liquor, marching in parades in streets Alley himself had walked on, sunning themselves out on lavish decks with the Alps towering behind them. All those faces, strong and self-assured, unwavering in their belief of their cause for going to war.
“You’re a crazy fucker, More…”
More sniggered and turned another page. “He knew. Speirs knew.”
“And he let it go?”
“Didn’t think he would’ve if Tab hadn’t walked in…” More said. “But he’s never asked about it since.”
“No, he’ll just give you a cigarette and shoot you in the head.”
These were bad men who did bad things for the worst of reasons. Most of them were now dead, captured, or missing-their empire undone, their haughty fortresses of wealth and power now overrun with country boys and coal miners, drinking their wine and sleeping in their beds. It didn’t feel like winning to Alley. He doubted anything would.
Leaving home for Toccoa three years ago, he’d imagined himself coming back a hero. Now he knew that he will come back, above anything else, a stranger. To his friends and his family and his town, but most of all to himself. He will come back to them as he is now, and they will make of him what they will-a man, a soldier, a survivor, or whatever else they see fit to view him as. He’d fought, full of will and determination, and he’d refused to die because he hadn’t yet become what the recruitment posters promised him he would be, a mighty paratrooper dropping from the skies to free the world and rid it of the Axis’ evil. Young Jimmy Alley had believed in those things. The war-bruised Sergeant Alley, twice wounded and many times dead, still carrying bits of shrapnel under his skin and the ghosts of the dead on his back, didn’t.
The only heroes he knew were dead men, lying in shallow graves dotted all across Europe and beyond, young and slain before their time. At different points during this war, Alley had found himself wishing for his life to end as much as he wished it to continue. Now, his only wish was to come home, to whatever would be waiting there for him.
It was, after all, only a matter of dying one more time and living again, changed again.
~FIN~