Shrapnel Read online

At night, I can’t even make it to the john in the dark, and no one knows what’s wrong. I buy a flashlight for nights. I think I might finally be going psycho but they think I’m goofing off. It turns out that in the powerful one hundred and fifty five mm explosion of an American artillery shell right next to me, the one that gave me the shrapnel wounds, I seem to have lost the vestibular and semicircular canals in my ears. I don’t know this yet, and the doctors don’t either. Also, the repair they did in my groin at the field hospital, taking out some shrapnel and stitching the muscles together, didn’t work right. I need to have it redone later.

  However, it’s slowly coming toward the end of the war. For reasons I still don’t understand, when we cross the Rhine, they round up all the walking wounded, including me. I’m considered walking, although wobbly. I walk rather peculiarly because if you don’t have any vestibular canals you don’t have much in the way of balance. I’m walking around like a drunken sailor, complaining of being dizzy all the time, not knowing what the matter is, and everybody’s telling me the American one five five shells went off to close to me and my brains were shaken up a bit but it will be all right. I’m something like a punch drunk fighter.

  Everything now is rough and ready. The doctors are suspecting everyone of trying to get out of combat for medical reasons. They are. However, at the same time, I have something seriously wrong and they won’t listen. It’s a bit like ‘cry wolf’; when it comes to the real thing, they won’t believe me. They send me back to my outfit, to K Company. We cross the Rhine River in little boats with the help, of all things, of the US Navy. American troops have already crossed the river up north of us, over the Remagen railroad bridge, so this crossing is totally unnecessary. It’s probably because they’ve got all this equipment ready to do a water crossing; they’re going to do it anyway, practising for the next war maybe, who knows. Anyway, we bounce across, and I’m miserable. I can hardly hold a rifle, one arm is completely bandaged and I have a sling. I don’t need to keep my arm in the sling, so I have it slung around my neck, sort of for decoration and maybe to ring up a note of pity. I’m like something out of a French Revolutionary War painting by Delacroix.

  We get on the other side and charge up the slippery slope of the Rhine River bank. We have had little trouble crossing, no heavy fire at us or anything, just some random small arms stuff. Probably civilians defending their home turf from the marauding Americans. The Germans know we crossed at Remagen, a bridge someone forgot to blow up, and so they’ve generally pulled back. They’re just a bit smarter than our officers. It’s a challenge, climbing and scrambling through grapevines on the steep bank, but we finally get to the town of Koblenz.

  Well, there are enough German soldiers left in the town to make it tough. It’s the only street fighting, house to house, operation I’m involved in during the entire war. We’re going along, block by block, trying to capture and hold high points, flushing out snipers. We’d think we have them all, when some other fanatic would start picking us off. Usually three or four GIs will be down before we can figure out where the sniper is. Then we’ll toss a grenade, or lob in some mortars, whatever it takes.

  I decide to retire from this war for a little while. The whole affair’s getting to be like something straight out of a grade C movie and I don’t want to be involved. I duck down in a cellar and hang out there until I stop hearing rifle fire, grenade bangs and mortar thumps.

  I don’t think any prisoners are taken and I don’t care much. In the wine cellar where I’m hiding, I discover racks and racks of champagne! This isn’t champagne country, so it must be stuff the Germans confiscated in France. I’m down there and I don’t know how to open a champagne bottle, especially with my hand still bandaged. The wire wrappings are hard to get off.

  Finally, I get the wire off, and it pops, so I lose most of the champagne because it isn’t cold enough. I’ve never been a big drinker, but I’m dying of thirst because there isn’t any water, so I drink champagne.

  When everything has settled down and the guys come back, I tell them what I’ve found. I should have known better. They come charging down to my cellar. Everybody takes a bottle, figures out how to open it and we’re all down there drinking champagne, bubbles flowing out our mouths and over everything.

  Then someone has the idea it would be fun to take a champagne bath like one of those naked movie stars. We’re all filthy and sweaty anyway. We form long lines like a fireman’s bucket brigade and pass the bottles up two floors to the bathtub. We fill the bathtub with this bubbly wine. Unfortunately, the guys at the tub don’t know the first thing about how to get the corks out either, so they’re just knocking the necks against the wall and pouring what’s left into the tub. It’s a real bash, like the celebration of a winning team after a football game. We take turns in the tub. As soon as the champagne gets so we can’t see the bottom of the tub we pull the plug, let it drain out, and start the bucket brigade coming up from the cellar again.

  Then, of course, we can’t find anything to dry ourselves with and we’re all sticky. It’s something we didn’t think of. So, we rip down the drapes in this handsome house. The windows are about two storeys high. We dry ourselves off on the drapes and then dress again. Our pants, even our underwear, are sticking to us. And we’re still drinking champagne. People are passing out dead drunk or throwing up all over the place. The last thing I remember is standing in a doorway, slipping to the floor and thinking if the Germans counterattack it’s all over. At that point, I couldn’t care less.

  Of course, when the Quartermaster supply does get water to us in Jerry cans we all pass out again on water.

  I’m sent back to the hospital, thank goodness. Someone figures out how dumb this is, having a guy with a sling, drunk and with a bandaged hand and hernia operation walking around. So they put me in a truck, drive me to the river and put me on a boat to cross it. They’re ferrying equipment and stuff back and forth, now. They ship me back like a sack of beans, put me on another truck, still no ambulance, and drive me to a hospital.

  5. MEN AT WAR

  RUSSIAN ROULETTE

  The hospital is in Metz. It’s a long ride and I’m really feeling rotten, upset stomach and in shock, probably also still drunk from all the champagne. I stay in the field hospital there for two weeks, during which time I read in Stars and Stripes that the Soviets are advancing on Berlin. I’m thinking this is the way to run a war, as a spectator, in a bed.

  I come back to my outfit on the line just in time, by two days, to meet the Russians. This is the great thing everybody’s been preparing for and afraid of. Any German prisoners we have who speak English try to convince us that the Russians won’t stop, they’ll go right through us.

  These Soviets we meet are from Mongolia. They wear fur hats with flaps, not helmets. The only things I can compare them to are teddy bears, or a freshman football team on the way to a game. At the same time they’re deadly dangerous.

  We share guard posts. The first time I’m on post with one we only smile a lot. There’s no way we can communicate. At the end of two hours, one of their trucks comes by to pick up this guy and leave off his replacement.

  I’ll never forget it; they’re picking up these Russian soldiers at different posts. They only slow down, not stop, and these guys try to jump over the tailgate into the back of the truck. But the Russians on the flat bed of the truck push them off. Then the soldiers laugh, pick themselves up out of the dust, run after the truck with ear flaps flapping and are pushed to the ground again. They keep running after the truck until they catch up. Everybody in the truck is laughing and drinking. This happens two or three times while I’m watching and no one seems to get mad, they’re all still laughing.

  I think they’re so glad to have beaten the Germans after the incredible five years of horror they’ve gone through, they feel nothing can hurt them. Or maybe this is the way they are naturally. I hope I never need to know.

  These wild men are issued about a litre of vodka a day, a cant
een full, and they drink it in great gulps and insist we drink it, too. Well, I’d never seen or tasted vodka in my life. Champagne and applejack are like water compared to this stuff. Every day, we’re all half looped, and they’re completely looped, looped and laughing.

  In the US Army we have very strict rules about when you can and when you can’t fire your rifle. You just can’t shoot when you feel like it. These Russians are shooting anything that moves. Also, they’re deep into loot and rape.

  I don’t know why the German women don’t hide more than they do. These guys run them down the way you would a deer or a rabbit, shouting and hollering the whole way. Seduction you can’t call it. It’s rape. Most times, they pull them into a doorway rather than do it out on the street, but not always. The women are begging us to protect them from these beasts. We try, but the Russians point their rifles at us. There’s no question that they’ll shoot. We’re just other targets of opportunity. I begin to think those German prisoners were right.

  Also, of course, the same women are taking cigarettes and chocolate from the GIs who are doing their own somewhat more subtle seduction scene, as close to rape as you can get, but not too much rampant violence.

  I’m nineteen and I’m really losing confidence in human beings. My morale was pretty low before, but here I am watching all kinds of mayhem going on, things I never even heard of, dreamed of, had nightmares about. With these guys, both Russians and Americans, it isn’t just fornication. They’re degrading these women, passing them on to each other. I won’t go into the details, but it’s worse than anyone can imagine.

  And no one is controlling this. There are no MPs up with us, the officers, by this time, are as afraid of the non-coms and enlisted men as they are of the enemy. The war is almost over. Some of the officers have been okay, only doing their duty, but others have been mean or tough for no reason, just power mad. These hard-nose guys are mostly in hiding now, hiding from their own troops.

  It’s terrible. One time, an old German man comes up to me on guard, absolutely trembling and he has a camera. The rule is, all Germans are to turn in their cameras. I don’t know why, and I didn’t even know about this rule.

  He’s trying to push off the camera on me and makes me take it. I think he’s trying to sell it to me. I don’t want a camera, I don’t have any use for a camera. I can hardly carry what I have. Besides, I have no film. But he keeps begging me to take his camera. I offer him some cigarettes, some candy, but he won’t take anything. He’s practically crying. I take the camera just to shut him up and get him away from the other guys. I sit down on a piece of rubble to have a look. He runs away. It’s a beautiful, old, folding bellows camera. It’s one of the few things I manage to get home. Until my house burned down, I kept it on my desk to remind me of how brutal and cruel this war is, how helpless the non-combatants are.

  RAPE RAP

  Finally, the Russians are pulled out. Some kind of settlement is made between the Soviets and the Americans, where they occupy certain areas and we occupy others. Our outfit winds up in a town called Plauen in what used to be East Germany. There aren’t many buildings standing, I don’t think there’s a pane of glass in the whole town. It’s a shambles, absolute rubble.

  But this looting and raping starts again. I’m Sergeant of the Guard for about ten men in my squad. These are guys I know. They’re in my squad. We eat together, laugh together, are scared together. The Russians are gone, but something appears to have broken down when the Russians were here. The guys start thinking ‘If they can do it, so can we.’ It seems the way many people are, they tend to follow whatever’s going on, no matter how bad it might be. Look at boxing, or spectators at football games today, or even basketball, a supposed non-contact sport. It’s vicious, violent and everyone is cheering them on.

  I can see how what we call the Holocaust happened. It’s a weakness in human beings, all human beings, that we must guard against. The herd instinct is strong in most people and they will follow a leader, in almost any insane programme, no matter how inhuman, just because he’s the leader and other people are doing it. People who would never think of doing things like burning, gassing people, on their own, find themselves doing what they are told, no matter how cruel, vicious, murderous it might be. And, it’s just because the rest of the people are doing it.

  Look at the French in their revolution, at the Inquisition in Spain, at the pogroms against Jews in Russia, the campaign against the Kulaks, the murders by Mao in China, the white men in America against the Afro-Americans or the indigenous Amerindians. History is filled with these horrible lapses from acceptable human behaviour. Our natural survival systems collapse in our fears. Civilization as we know it fails, the barriers fall, and the worst aspects in human nature are revealed. The façade of civilization is eliminated.

  These are the thoughts that run through my mind. I’m finding it hard to hang on.

  We’re guarding the weirdest things. For example, someone has come down in a parachute and the parachute is hooked up in a tree. We’re guarding the parachute, I guess because the silk is valuable and they don’t want it stolen, or maybe it’s just to give us something to do, hopefully, hopelessly, to keep us out of trouble.

  In the cellars of destroyed buildings are stored all kinds of valuable merchandise. It’s supposed to be protected from looting by our own soldiers and the German civilians who are still there. There are no German soldiers. They’ve been pressed back, are still involved in fighting the Russians and being gathered in by the thousands, as prisoners.

  We’re guarding a lumber yard. A bunch of valuable seeming stuff in a cellar under rubble is to be guarded by us. But we’re spread out pretty thin from post to post. I’m supposed to go around on my tour of guard duty and see that everybody is at their post, not asleep or anything. It’s late afternoon, we’re doing four on and two off.

  I’m out on my rounds. I come to the ones who are guarding a cellar with fancy clothes in it. They have beautiful silk scarves, I don’t think they were made in Germany, I don’t know where they were made, and there are no tags on them. But they’re paisley type silk scarves so I dump the water out of a ‘liberated’ German canteen and just start stuffing those scarves in, tying them one onto the other, like elephants on parade at a circus. I keep stuffing them in. I manage to stuff about seventy scarves into a single canteen, then screw the top on. I have my own canteen for water. This canteen, with the scarves, I put in my duffel bag. I actually get these home to my mother, sister and girlfriend. For years thereafter they have absolutely gorgeous silk scarves. My excuse is, it’s German loot. We’re allowed to take things like canteens and such stuff as souvenirs of war and ship them home. But, I also ship home a German camouflage jacket and a dress sword I’d taken from a German officer, and the scarves.

  It’s easy to lose respect for yourself but that’s what war does, maybe that’s what it’s supposed to do. I’m following the herd, ‘If they can do it, so can I.’

  I go over to these two GIs who are supposedly on guard. They have a couple of women down in the cellar under all the rubble and are doing the obvious with great glee. I’m pissed.

  ‘Get these women out of there, you two. I’m going to tour the rounds one more time and when I come back they’d better be gone.’

  I’m really playing Sergeant, somebody has to. I go back to where the GIs who are not on guard are hanging out under the parachute. It’s the most comfortable of the guard posts. There’s a little overhang left on one building, so we can duck under it if it rains.

  ‘Pete, I’m going out to check if those guys really did get rid of those women.’

  After a while I walk back over and the guys are carrying out my orders, but slowly, very slowly. The women have gotten dressed and are just coming out. They need to come up out of a slanted cellar door type thing. It’s heavy, it isn’t just made of wood, it’s steel. The whole cellar might have been some kind of bomb shelter.

  So the women go through the gate out onto the s
treet, afraid of me. They start running.

  And who should come rolling down the street? Who would believe it? It’s the General of our whole division, a man named General Collier. With him is his son who is a Major, also his adjutant, a classic case of nepotism. It means he gets to stay with Daddy all the time. There’s a lot of resentment within the officers of our division about this particular arrangement. General Collier is quite an old man – maybe he wasn’t – but he seemed old to me then. Even for a division commander, he’s old.

  They stop the jeep and the General sends his son over to find out what’s going on and why these two women are running away from the post.

  Just then, the GIs, who should be on the post, come tearing out. They’re dressed, but they don’t have their helmets on, and they don’t have their rifles. In other words, by military standards, they’re semi-dressed.

  Wow, what a set-up for a court martial! Here we go again. It happens to be a time when everyone is getting all upset with ideas of ‘fraternisation’. By this, they generally mean getting close to the German women. In England, they showed us movies about German Frauleins who are shown dancing to accordion music, dressed in long skirts and skimpy blouses pushing their boobs up. Later, these same German women are shown stabbing GIs in the back or passing on information, or poisoning GIs in their coffee or beer. The movies were almost as bad as the VD films they showed us in boot camp. We all had a big laugh and the officer in charge kept stopping the film and hollering at us.

  Fraternising must have been happening everywhere. The trouble is, right now they’re looking for a good case of fraternisation to build up a court martial and scare everybody. We look like just the kind of example they’re searching for, but, at first, they seem to let it go by.

  When I get those two jerks back to the home guard post I really play Sergeant and give them hell. I tell them they’re getting as bad as the Russians. I mean it and I believe it.