Snowfall dusted the ground, which had hardened to concrete. Overhead, the sky was clear and bright with stars. Swanson joined Buckshot’s crew gathered around a burning pit of gas. The bleary-eyed men shuffled their feet and spoke in grunts that produced clouds of vapor.
The loader rubbed his hands and lit another pungent rosemary cigarette, which he was starting to take a liking to. Beside him, the gunner shivered with his bedroll still wrapped around his shoulders. The man looked miserable. City boy, right. His type wasn’t used to this kind of hardship.
“You had a good job and a pretty wife,” Swanson said. “Why’d you even join the Army?”
The gunner eyed the fire. “What, we’re friends now?”
“Forget it. I’m sorry I asked.”
“Why’d you join? You don’t seem to like it much either.”
Swanson thought about the woman he’d loved, the man she’d loved, and how he’d cut him. “Because I was stupid. We all can’t be smart like you, Wisenheimer.”
“Look at me,” Wade said. “Do I look smart to you?”
“You look—”
The men froze and cocked their ears toward the sky.
A buzz throbbed in the cold night.
Swanson gazed down the road, clearly marked by firelight. “Um.”
The buzz grew louder to a high-pitched whine.
“Everybody, find cover,” Austin roared.
The whine became an anguished, demonic moan building until it seemed to fill the world, paralyzing Swanson where he stood.
“Move it, Swanson!”
He bolted into the dark and ran straight into rosemary bushes. He fell sprawling, every nerve tingling as death howled from the darkness.
The Axis plane opened fire with its machine guns, tracers flashing as the rounds thudded against the ground, ripped through bodies and trucks, and sparked and pinged off tanks. Nobody shot back.
Then the plane zoomed overhead, the terrifying whine dropping to a deep snarl. Men screamed for help in the aftermath.
“Bog,” Austin was shouting. “Fire the .50! Clay!”
The plane’s plaintive grumble signaled it was still up there somewhere, banking. Then the sound’s pitch changed.
Another whine, rapidly intensifying.
It was coming back.
Lying on his stomach, Swanson whimpered and clawed at the hard ground, trying to dig a shallow trench for cover. It wants me, he thought. It wasn’t a plane; it was a massive bird of prey, the angel of death himself up there, hunting. It’s looking for me, just me, and when it finds me, it’ll take me into the dark with it.
Austin’s silhouette dashed past the fire pit as he made for Boomer like some hero out of Wisenheimer’s stories. The tank commander raced up onto the rear deck and unlimbered the .50-cal AA machine gun.
David, Swanson thought. David and Goliath.
The whine became a metallic shriek as the plane dove into another run and opened up on the column. Austin yanked the charging bolt on the .50 and fired back, the gun pounding shells like a hammer striking sheet metal. The sparks of his tracers zipped into the black. Spent casings clattered on the deck.
The pilot didn’t seem to care, his machine guns a blinding strobe as he strafed the column. The bullets crackled around Boomer and kept going down the road in twin trails of flying dirt clods.
The ground trembled with a boom. In the distance, a fireball soared into the air, followed by another.
A growling retreat, and then the plane was gone, heading east.
Men called to each other, rushed to the wounded, gathered around the tanks in a daze. Swanson didn’t move, even after somebody yelled his name.
No, moving was dumb. Moving got you killed. The cold didn’t matter anymore. He was going to stay put from now on, the way he should have before he ever showed up at the recruiting office in West Virginia.
MAP: Tunisian front, mid-January 1943.
The thick black line represents the Allied front line, with British and American forces stalled out in the north, while a poorly equipped French corps lightly defended the southern front.
CHAPTER NINE
DUST EATERS
Corporal Wade peered through his scope at a world of dust. He imagined Stukas in the roiling clouds. Then he saw his wife’s face. He wasn’t sure which was worse.
Nothing lasts forever. After weeks of slogging through central Tunisia, everything changed. New orders came through, and the sun emerged to bake the mud into concrete that the tanks in turn chewed into waves of brown, airborne filth.
The dust worked its way into Boomer and coated everything. The air filter choked on it. It also nicely marked the column’s position for roving Axis planes and clouded his view. Axis planes that took off from dry, paved airstrips near Tunis, while Allied planes remained stuck on rain-drenched airfields.
A Stuka could be diving toward him right now, and he wouldn’t know it until he heard its siren scream.
Still, it was better than digging the tank out of the mud.
The orders were to move south toward a town called Gafsa.
“You know any good history about Gafsa, Corporal?” Clay said.
“The name rings a bell,” Wade said.
Swanson snorted behind him. “Nice going, Eight Ball.”
“I’m so bored I’d even listen to you guys argue,” the bog said.
“There’s actually not much to yap about,” Wade said. “But Gafsa is supposed to be the last place where Latin was spoken in North Africa after Rome fell.”
“Nobody cares,” the loader said.
“Private Swanson doesn’t get bored,” Wade told the crew. “His whole life has been dedicated to the active pursuit of doing nothing.”
Swanson chortled. “You actually got that right, Wisenheimer. Live and learn.”
During the grueling trek over the mountains, Wade had realized something important. Joining the Army had been an irrational response to his pretty wife’s infidelity. After Oran’s capture, the act felt completed. Thinking about what she’d done didn’t fill him with anger and longing anymore.
The Army didn’t care. His story wasn’t over. He wasn’t going home. During the drive into Tunisia, for the first time, he fully understood just how screwed he was. Whatever he’d signed up for, it would go on and on, possibly for years. He was stuck for the duration, endless drudgery and smelling Swanson’s foul farts.
After the Messerschmitt strafed the column that one night, the stakes also felt different. The plane’s roar too big, too loud, like a force of nature, like a hurricane bearing down to sweep him out to sea. It had torn a tanker in A Company in half. Wade had started to understand he hadn’t joined the Army. He’d joined a war he might not survive.
Every time he’d dug the tank out, it was like digging his own grave.
As depressing as it all was, after a while, it also freed him. He realized he had nothing to prove to these men, no further need to make up a story to fit in. He just didn’t care anymore. Yup, I prefer Charles to Charlie. Yup, I went to college, and then I taught at one until I did something really stupid. Yup, I’m going to yap about history because I LOVE it.
And screw you, Swanson.
“Keep an eye on our loader, Sergeant,” Wade said. “At any minute, he’s going to switch sides and become a Berber. In fact, I think he’s been one all along.”
“Roger,” the tank commander said.