Virgil didn’t want to be one of those guys. He kept his one extra pair of socks tied together and draped across the back of his neck under his uniform to hang in his armpits. His body temperature, what was left of it, would dry the socks out some. He hoped he could always have that reserve of semidry socks to avoid frostbite. He also hoped Hitler was going to come walking across the field waving a white hankie to surrender personally to PFC Virgil Beuell. Right after Rita Hayworth dropped by to offer a blow job.
“I sure could use some coffee,” Junior whispered.
“Tell you what,” Virgil whispered back. “I’ll start a warm and toasty fire to percolate us up a couple of pots. I got some cake mixings, too, and we’ll make a batch for the whole squad and shut the fuck up, you fucking fucker.”
“Butterfly. Butterfly!” A sharp whisper came from the dark to the left of the hole, the password for the day.
“McQueen!” Virgil hissed in response.
A second later, Sergeant Bud Boling tumbled into the shelter, weaponless. He had been trying to sleep during daylight hours, covered up in a hole of his own. Once it got dark he roamed the front in silence, alone, returning at daylight to report whatever he had seen to the CP before tucking away in his dark hole again.
“Krauts. Twenty-five of them. Who the fuck are you?” Bud meant the new guy, Junior. Before a name could be offered Bud said “never mind” and gave an order. “Gimme your rifle and get to the CP and tell them a Kraut probe is coming on the left.”
Junior’s eyes went wide. He had yet to be in any combat. As he kicked his way up and out of the hole, Bud repeated “Kraut probe on our left.” And the kid was gone. Bud readied the M1 rifle, tucking spare ammo clips into his jacket.
Virgil lifted the machine gun in one piece, tripod and all, and faced it at the foxholes nine o’clock. “I was right ahead of them, Virgin.”
“They see you?”
“No fucking Luger-head ever sees me.” The men whispered with the confidence of experienced soldiers, which they were, not like twenty-two-year-old boys, which they also were.
A footfall from the darkness cracked hardened ice.
“Light ’em up,” Bud hissed.
PFC Vigil Beuell pulled the trigger of his machine gun, spitting fire into a column of enemy soldiers not three yards in front of him. Bright muzzle flashes and red tracer rounds illuminated the shapes of bodies and the trunks of trees as other American boys took to their weapons. A fury of fighting lit up the woods, and the thin line of defense took on the look of an impenetrable wall. In a flash as well defined as that from a Speed Graphic camera ringside at a prizefight, Virgil saw the helmet of a German soldier explode in a cloud of fine, blood-red mist and soggy clumps of what had been the man’s head. The German soldiers spread out quickly and spewed death themselves. Bud raised up just high enough to aim his rifle and squeeze out a full clip into the invading force—eight continuous BLAMs—spreading his rounds with a geometric precision until the pi-cling of his empty clip flying out of its breach meant his ammo was spent. Instinctively, Bud reloaded and was raised up again when a body came crashing into the shelter through the pine branch roof.
The German was firing as he fell, hitting Virgil in his left knee without Virgil feeling a thing. Another shot made the fingers on Virgil’s left hand sting like a hornet’s bite.
“Fuck you!” Bud yelled, driving the butt of his M1 across the German’s jaw. “Fucker!” he yelled, smashing the German’s face twice more. Someone began firing parachute flares that lit up the woods in a harsh limelight, and Bud saw he had broken the nose and smashed the jaw of the German, who lay glassy-eyed and motionless. He spun his rifle around, pointed the muzzle at the middle button on the soldier’s uniform, fired two rounds point-blank, and ended the man’s life. “One less of you fuckers,” he said to the dead enemy soldier.
The small reserve force of American boys was coming forward now; what had started as a probe by the enemy had become a severe and deadly mistake for them. A pursuit was under way as the Germans retreated. Virgil ceased fire and was breaking down his weapon to join the move forward when he realized something was wrong. His hand was sticky and his leg was numb.
“My leg fell asleep!” he yelled. Trying to stand, Virgil fell back, on top of the faceless, lifeless German. He tried to stand again, but his left leg bent the wrong way at the knee and Virgil could not figure out what had happened. Luckily Bud Boling was there to help him up. But rather than getting him on his feet, Bud squatted, pulled Virgil over his shoulders, and lifted him clean off the ground.
That much, Virgil remembered of Christmas Eve 1944. Somewhere between the foxhole and the aid station to the rear, he slipped into the slumber of the unconscious.
Virgil felt like a god damn fool.
Next year was an anniversary for him because the war ended for PFC Beuell on Christmas Eve 1944. He awoke at an aid station in Bastogne proper, after the American tanks had come and the German advance had collapsed. A few days later, he woke up again at a field hospital in France. Weeks later he became one of thousands of wounded men in hospitals in England. When Germany surrendered and the war was over in Europe, Virgil began to think of himself as one lucky bastard. His left leg was gone, severed above the knee, and three fingers of his left hand were now stumps, wrapped in so many bandages he looked like he was wearing a gauze catcher’s mitt. But he still had two thumbs, one good leg, his sight, and his manhood. Compared to many other guys in those hospitals and on the ship home, Virgin felt like he had won the 1945 Irish Sweepstake. All he really wanted back was his wedding band, which had been lost somewhere in those woods in Belgium.
Amos “Bud” Boling stayed in Germany for his full enlistment, which meant the duration of the war plus six months. While Virgil was being treated for his wounds and the deadly infections that came with them, Bud was attacking the Siegfried Line and killing his way into Nazi Germany. Then he breached the Rhine River and later the Elbe, swept south into pockets of enemy country that had seen no signs of the war in the four and a half years it had raged around him.
Bud had never been wounded but he’d seen too many who had been, and too many killed. He had also killed a great many German men and boys. He had ended the lives of German soldiers who had been looking to surrender and survive but instead found Sergeant Bud Boling’s merciless eyes. Eighteen German officers were shot dead by his hand, alone or two or three at a time, off the roads and under the cover of trees, behind farmhouse walls or out in open fields. Bud used his .45 sidearm to wring a justice out of the war that made sense only to him. Bud killed one last German in August 1945. He had heard stories about a particular local, a former Nazi Party official who was using the false name of Wolfe. He found the man standing in a line of refugees who were hoping to return to their home cities in different parts of what had been the Third Reich. When Wolfe produced his papers, Bud ordered him out of the line. Behind a low brick wall Bud drew his sidearm and shot Wolfe square through his neck and calmly stood over the former Nazi bigwig as he thrashed about for the last few moments of his life. Bud Boling never talked of any of this. He never talked of the camps he’d seen, either. Virgil never knew any of the specifics. But he suspected. He saw the emptiness, the difference in his friend.