He frowned. “What’d you just call me?”
“A misanthrope is somebody who hates everybody,” Wade said.
“Misanthrope.” Swanson savored the word. Yup, that was him.
“Scustumad,” Russo chimed in.
“We speak American in my tank,” Sergeant Austin said.
“That’s right,” Swanson said.
“And you, don’t talk at all. Shut up—”
Across the airfield, tankers and armored infantry belted out a ragged cheer. The men looked up. Fighter planes were approaching.
“I’m guessing by the cheering that they’re ours,” Wade said.
Austin climbed up the sponson and trained his binoculars across the airfield to the northwest. “Yup, they’re ours. Twelfth Air Force Spitfires from Gibraltar. They’re late, and we’re behind schedule.”
They’d been cooling their heels for hours out of concern, if they pressed on, the French would take their airfield back and stage bombing missions from their rear. Some French planes had counterattacked, only to be shot down by Royal Navy fighters. For now, while French 75s intermittently lobbed shells at them from the nearby hills, the battalion would wait for reinforcements to take over here so they could get back on the attack. So far, only an ammunition train had driven onto the airfield, which turned out to be French and was promptly captured.
At this rate, they’d be lucky if they made it to La Sénia before tomorrow.
The Spitfires converged into a line for landing. Another four planes approached from the west.
“More of ours?” Wade wondered.
“The lieutenant says we’re expecting some Hurricanes and C47s to show up,” Austin said. “The Spitfires aren’t reacting, so I’m guessing they’re—”
“Mannaggia,” Russo said as the newcomers broadsided the Spitfires.
Tracers flicked across the sky, guiding cannon fire toward the lead American plane. Trailing smoke, the Spitfire spiraled to the earth and crashed in a wave of dirt, taking with it some poor bastard dying on his first day of combat because his squadron had mistakenly identified the French planes as Allied.
The rest of the Spitfires veered into the attack. The ensuing dogfight weaved across the sky.
“Wow.” Clay’s eyes gleamed at the show.
One by one, the French planes flamed out of the sky. French 1, Americans 4.
“Mannaggia,” Swanson echoed the driver. “Good word.”
“Yeah,” said Russo.
“What’s it mean? ‘Long live Mussolini’?”
Sergeant Austin glared at him, but the loader smirked. Go ahead and transfer me, he thought. He didn’t care. He didn’t want to be here. He wanted to serve in a maintenance platoon where he could work on tanks all day, safe behind the idiots getting themselves killed by the idiots they were trying to liberate.
Some of the Spitfires buzzed like angry wasps around the sky, searching for enemy planes, while the rest reformed a line to land on the airfield.
A man called out: “Incoming!”
Across the airfield, tankers hit the dirt. Battalion had placed the company far from the airstrip, which the 75s were aiming at, but the shells were all over the place. A few rounds fell near their hangar, angry blasts that filled the air with dust. The first Spitfire landed in propeller roar, followed by another.
Clay crashed next to Swanson in the slit trench they’d dug beside Boomer. “Why aren’t we moving? We’re sitting ducks here.”
“We’re sitting ducks out there too,” the loader said.
“We’ll go when they tell us to go,” Austin said.
Without orders, they had nothing to do but wait. Swanson lay in the trench and wished they’d dug it deeper. He suddenly felt homesick, though home had little going for it. Moonshine merchants but otherwise doing as little as possible and never having enough to get by, his clan were mountain people, isolated and suspicious of anybody who wasn’t kin. No, he didn’t miss that life, but it was familiar, made sense, and was safer than this.
If only he hadn’t fallen for a girl. Hadn’t dreamed of her every night before he went to sleep. Hadn’t seen her with another man. Hadn’t cut that man in a fight and started a feud that could end only with somebody dying, maybe him.
Hadn’t enlisted to get out of Dodge.
Oh boy, what a mistake. Talk about out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Whatever his privation and social status, he’d had it easy in Applewood compared to the Army. Armored Force School at Fort Knox, Kentucky. Reveille at 4 AM, sitting at attention during class, always some NCO yelling in his face and calling him a hillbilly and giving him demerits during every inspection. The heat, sweat, hard work, bare-bones food, raw tedium—even the marches up and down Agony Hill to get to the live-fire range—didn’t bother him. He hated the ass-chewing, regimentation, and endless chicken-shit pep drills—in general, having to kow-tow to authority with no real purpose to it. In the Army, you were just a pair of dog tags, and a whole lot of shit rolled downhill.
After a few months of this, the instructors put him in a worn-out M4 with a 37mm gun. Swanson spent the next few months roaming around brush and gullies, shooting at wood panels representing enemy tanks, antitank guns, and infantry. When the red flag went up, the commander shouted the order to fire. Swanson bivouacked, loaded during the simulations, scraped and polished his tank, played war games at Camp Polk in Louisiana, and suffered endless inspections. The only bright spot was a cold beer waiting for him at the PX at the end of the day.
Then for once, the latrine rumors proved right, and the division was packed like cattle into Pullman sleeper cars and trained out to Fort Dix. After that, the Brooklyn Army Terminal, where they shouldered their musette bags and tramped aboard the RMS Queen Mary while big cranes hauled their tanks into the holds. Thousands of soldiers waved at the cheering crowds from the railings. Later, they drifted past the Statue of Liberty and wondered if this was the last time they’d see their homeland.
Across the Atlantic, the division landed in Ireland, where they trained for months on the moors and spent their liberty chasing the colleens. When the medics punched them with another round of inoculations, Swanson knew they’d be shipping out soon. By the time they embarked again, even he was chomping at the bit for some action. Allowed topside to get some sun, the tanker gaped at the sight of American and British transports and warships filling the sea to the horizon. All the brass told them was they’d get off their ships fighting. The general consensus among the boys was they were going to France to start the drive to Berlin, but as usual, the consensus was wrong, and now here they were in some godforsaken patch of Africa, about as far away from home as Swanson could get.
Huddled in their trench, Sergeant Austin gave him the stink-eye again for his remark about being sitting ducks, but the man said nothing. Swanson would have no luck getting himself booted into the maintenance platoon. For some reason, the sergeant considered it his duty to convince his tank’s loader they were all brothers in arms and needed to do or die for each other.
The attack trickled off, and orders came down that the battalion was bivouacking here for the night. Remain overnight, or RON in Army lingo. Rumor had it the French had stopped the Allied advance and were gathering their strength for a counterattack. They weren’t the allies everybody assumed they were, and they weren’t pushovers, either.
The tankers set up their stove to make chow. Swanson watched them work and listened to them bitch, and thought, I ain’t dying for you.
A C47 landed on the airstrip and unloaded paratroopers who dodged another French barrage. Several planes had already been hit and were burning. The supply train arrived to deliver water, heavy oil, and gasoline, escorted by Buckshot, which had gotten its maintenance and was back to rolling. The camp quieted as night fell. Swanson pulled first watch, giving him some peace and quiet for two hours.