“Isn’t it time we deal with what we’ve got instead of what we wish we had?” he asked. “Let the damned Nazis come out in the open-not because we love them, because we know they’re there. Once they are out in the open, they won’t be able to cause nearly so much trouble.”
“Tell it to Frankfurt,” Sam Rayburn said. “How many years before it’ll be fit for human beings to live there again?”
“Mr. Duncan has the floor,” the Speaker said, and used the gavel again.
“Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The partisans weren’t out in the open when they attacked our poorly guarded compound in Frankfurt,” Jerry said. “When they come out of hiding, we’ll know who they are and where their strength lies. And we will sit over them with our planes and our bombs, and we will make sure they stay inside their own borders.”
“Till one of their rockets lands on New York City-or Washington,” Rayburn said.
“Oh, come off it!” Jerry rolled his eyes. “I do believe the distinguished gentleman from Texas has been pawing through too many of those magazines with the bug-eyed monsters on the cover.”
He got a laugh, but it was a more nervous laugh than he would have liked. And Rayburn said, “The gentleman from Indiana had better tell that to London and Antwerp. Anybody who hit London yesterday will be able to hit New York-and Moscow-tomorrow.”
Jerry was saved not by the bell but by the gavel. “The gentleman from Texas is out of order, as I’ve reminded him before,” Joe Martin said. “It’s also my opinion that his argument forgets all about where we are today.”
Martin got a much bigger, much deeper laugh than Jerry Duncan had. When the Speaker of the House cracked a joke, Congressmen who knew what was good for them found it funny. Some Speakers had long memories for slights of any kind. Sam Rayburn had, when he was on the rostrum in front of the House. You crossed him at your professional peril. Joe Martin seemed more easygoing than the dour Texan, but he might yet find he needed to toughen up one of these days.
Now he nodded to Jerry. “You may continue, Mr. Duncan. Hopefully, you may continue without further interruptions from the peanut gallery.” He glanced in Sam Rayburn’s direction. Rayburn looked back, unrepentant.
“Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I was almost done,” Jerry said. “I did want to add for the record that I’m proud the person who first publicly pointed out that the President’s German policy has no clothes on is from my district. The whole country owes Mrs. Diana McGraw a vote of thanks.”
“She has a lot to answer for, all right, but that’s not the same thing,” Rayburn said. Speaker Martin gaveled him into silence-about a dozen words too late to suit Jerry.
By now, Bernie Cobb had seen too goddamn many German Alpine valleys. The most excitement he’d ever got was when the blast that sealed one mineshaft touched off an underground collapse.
When they stuck him in the back of a truck and hauled him off on what he figured was another wild-goose chase, he just shrugged. Most of the other soldiers under the canvas roof pissed and moaned right from the start. One of them even asked him, “Why aren’t you bitching like the rest of us?”
“What’s the use?” Bernie answered. “We’re going where they tell us to, and we’ll do what they say once we get there.”
“That’s what’s wrong,” the other GI said.
“It’s the fuckin’ Army. This is how it works,” Bernie said, more patiently than he’d expected. “Besides, would you rather be back in Nuremberg or Munich or somewhere like that? Out in the open, at least you’ve got a chance of seeing the fanatics before they start shooting at you.”
“I don’t want to be here at all,” the other soldier said. Several more men nodded. The guy doing the talking went on, “Damn war was supposed to be over almost two and a half years ago. Only reason we’re still fucking around in this miserable country is that Harry Truman’s a goddamn jerk.” His friends nodded some more.
The sentiment had its points. Bernie had said things not very different himself. Hearing it from a punk who plainly hadn’t seen Germany before V-E Day only pissed him off, though. “You better remember, the Jerries don’t know you don’t wanna be here,” he said. “You don’t keep your eyes open, they’ll punch your ticket for you toot sweet. Or else you’ll be the star in one of their movies, and then we’ll find what’s left of you by the side of the road. So keep your eyes open and your mouth shut, huh?”
“Sorry, General!” the new draftee said. His friends snickered. They would all have edged away from Bernie, except the truck was too tightly packed to make edging away possible, let alone practical.
Bernie barely had room to snake a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket pocket. After he lit up, one of the guys who’d made it plainest that he thought Bernie was an idiot tried to cadge a smoke from him. Bernie was tempted to tell him to shove it. The other guy likely would have done that to him. But he’d learned you always shared in the field-if you ran out of this or that, somebody else would share with you.
He couldn’t help saying, “I don’t look like such a jerk now that I’ve got something you want, huh?”
“Yeah, well-” The fellow did manage to seem faintly embarrassed. He held the Chesterfield out to Bernie. “Can you give me a light, too?”
“Jeez Louise!” Bernie said, but he did.
After a while, the truck stopped at a checkpoint. An MP with a grease gun eyed the soldiers in the back with a look that said he thought they were all SS men in disguise. “Who won the American League pennant in ’44?” he demanded fiercely.
“The Browns. Only time they’ve ever done it,” Bernie answered before anybody else could. “I was already over here by then, but I know that.”
He figured the MP would shut up, but the guy didn’t. “Did they win the Series?” the snowdrop asked. “One of you other clowns-not him.”
“No,” said the soldier who didn’t want to be in Germany at all. “The Cards beat ’em in…was it seven games?”
“Six,” Bernie said.
“Okay.” Now the MP was satisfied. “You guys are Americans, all right. You can go on.”
“What the hell are we getting into?” Bernie asked.
“You think they tell me what’s going on?” the MP said. The PFC driving the truck put it back in gear. It rolled down into the valley.
“Wonder what they woulda done if we didn’t know baseball,” said one of the GIs in the back.
“Fucked us over and wasted a bunch of everybody’s time,” Bernie said. “Then when it finally did get straightened out they would’ve acted like it was our fault for being such a dumb bunch of cocksuckers.”
“You don’t like MPs, do you?” the soldier asked him.
“Gee, how’d you figure that out?” Bernie said, deadpan. Almost everybody back there laughed.
It got warmer as the truck went down into the valley-not warm, but warmer. Bernie munched on part of a D-ration bar. The damn thing tasted the way he’d always thought a chocolate-flavored candle would. It was too waxy to be enjoyable, but a whole bar would keep you running all day. D-rats were supposed to have all the vitamins and stuff you needed. Bernie didn’t know about that. He did know they were the perfect antidote for prunes; if you had to live on them for two or three days, the memory, among other things, lingered for quite a while afterwards. But it was what he had on him. Unlike these new guys, he didn’t feel like scrounging from people he didn’t know.
After a while, the truck stopped. “Ritz Hotel!” the driver shouted. “All ashore that’s going ashore!”
“Funny guy-a fuckin’ comedian,” Bernie said. “He should take it on the radio…and then stuff it.”
“There you go, man,” said the kid who didn’t want to be there. They agreed about something, anyhow.
One by one, the GIs hopped out. It wasn’t the Ritz. It was a bunch of olive-drab tents set down in the middle of the valley. A barbed-wire perimeter and machine-gun nests protected by thick layers of sandbags protected the camp from direct assault.