Next came the battalion commander's Bradley. No one on the ground realized that the young major riding high in the hatch had not started out in that position. Not that Major Harold Cerro's story was any different than that of hundreds of other officers and sergeants in the Tenth Corps. Military necessity, a term often applied to something that was often unpleasant, had resulted in the sudden shifting of officers and NCOs into positions vacated by those who had fallen in battle, collapsed due to stress and strain, or proved incapable of dealing with the responsibilities of the position. In peacetime, Cerro, like many of his fellow officers, had joked about the wonderful opportunities that war offered a professional soldier. The reality of how such opportunities came about, coupled with the grim realization that a friend or peer had to fall in order to advance in such a manner, made such a promotion a thing to dread. For Cerro, because he lived, there was no escaping the price that others had paid so that he could be where he was. When his Bradley slowly trundled by the corps chief of staff, he like Kozak saluted him. After passing, Cerro looked to the north, toward the sea, and returned to his own grim thoughts and memories.
Next came an ancient M-113 armored personnel carrier with a Russian colonel standing upright in the open cargo hatch. With his field cap pulled down low over his eyes, Colonel Vorishnov looked neither left nor right until his vehicle came abreast of the corps chief of staff. He too saluted and then looked back to the front, his gaze, unblinking like Sergeant Wolf's, fixed straight ahead at nothing in particular.
Finally came the tank. As it came up even with the corps chief of staff, the chief seemed to stiffen his already rigid position of attention just as every officer and NCO gathered about him did. There was no loader in the hatch of this tank. Only Colonel Scott Dixon, commander of the 1st Brigade, 4th Armored Division. Dixon stood in the commander's hatch of the tank, exposed from his hips up. Holding on to the open hatch with his left hand and the machine gun with his right, Dixon never altered his expressionless stare from a fixed point on the distant horizon to the north. He did not salute the corps chief, for the salute that the corps chief and his staff were waiting for from this vehicle could not be returned. For Lieutenant General Alvin Malin, whose body lay wrapped in a poncho and strapped over the loader's hatch next to Scott Dixon, had been killed in action on the morning of the 25th, just as his greatest military feat was coming to an end.
Only after the procession had passed did anyone take the time to tell the press what had happened. When they found out, there was an immediate rush north to follow the procession. This rush, much to their anger, was stopped short of the coastline. Only the five vehicles of General Malin's funeral procession were allowed onto the flat windswept expanses of the desolate cold beach. There, the deputy corps commander and the corps sergeant major waited to receive the body of their former commander. Behind them stood a small honor guard with the corps flag and the national colors. Behind them, in an extended line that stretched out to either side, stood representatives from all the units of the Tenth Corps, each with its own unit flags, flags that represented all of the units that had made the long march north. As before with the corps staff, when the procession had passed the main command post, the party assembled on the beach saluted the arrival of their commanding officer.
Slowly and in turn, the lead vehicles of the procession moved to one side to make way for Dixon's tank. When they were all clear, Dixon ordered his driver forward until, finally, the treads of his tank were only meters away from the edge of the North Sea. By the time Dixon had stopped his tank and climbed out of his hatch, Cerro and Kozak had come up to his tank and climbed aboard. Together they undid the straps that held Malin's body securely to the top of the turret. Dixon, dismounting, was joined by Vorishnov, the deputy corps commander, and the corps sergeant major on the left side of Dixon's tank. When these four men were ready, Cerro and Kozak slowly, carefully passed Malin's body down to them.
Hoisting the general's body aloft on their shoulders, with the deputy corps commander on the front right, Dixon to his left, and Vorishnov and the sergeant major in the rear, this party carried Big Al's body the few feet that separated them from the sea. When they reached the surf, the party in unison lowered Big Al's body down until it rested on the beach so that the waves rushed about his lifeless body. Having completed their last duty to General Malin, the four men took several steps back, lined up, and, without any order being necessary, saluted their former commander.
For several moments as the sun began to dip below the horizon behind them, the assembled mourners stood there in silence looking at their fallen commander; and then, to a man, each lifted his gaze beyond him to the sea.
EPILOGUE
Neither Nancy Kozak nor her family were ready to deal with each other when she came back to her childhood home west of Lawrence, Kansas, on leave. Though everyone was anxious to see her, they were put off by the cold aloofness with which she held herself. Even when her mother hugged Nancy, whom she still called her baby, she felt no emotion, no warmth in her daughter. Everything about her homecoming was uncomfortable for all involved.
It was only when they went to visit Nancy's grandfather that she finally found someone with whom she could talk, someone that understood. After a quiet dinner, which everyone but Nancy and her Grandfather George enjoyed, the bulk of the family returned to the living room, leaving Nancy and George Kozak to go to his den. For Nancy, this was home, a room filled with books representing knowledge, adventure, and wisdom.
She had always had a special affinity for her Grandfather George, a man who had dedicated his life to study and teaching after he returned home from Europe in 1945. Earning his master's, then his doctorate in history, Grandfather George had spent the rest of his life in an effort to understand what had driven a handful of ambitious men to wage a war that had denied him his youth and his friends their lives. That there wasn't an answer, a really good one, took years to accept. Yet whenever he had been ready to accept this as true, deep in his soul a voice told him he could not dismiss the savagery of war as mindless, random, and meaningless. So he studied and read more, keeping more and more to himself. Only Nancy, of all the many grandchildren that he could claim, had found a way into the heart of a man who had allowed his spirit to die a little each time a friend had fallen from the line of march that led from Normandy in France to the streets of Regensburg, Germany.
In the quietness of the den, neither spoke for the longest time. Grandfather George busied himself in the little open-hearth fireplace until the fire was going. Satisfied with his efforts, Grandfather George settled in a chair next to the one that Nancy sat in. With the stacked logs engulfed in flame, they both sat and watched in silence, each recalling names and faces that were burned into their minds forever. Finally Nancy looked over to Grandfather George. "They never go away, do they?"