He was a rookie, and he was not alone. Allied efforts throughout Italy had baked the dangers of combat into a few of those who followed the bloody landing on Normandy's beaches, but Alvin Gray Wolf* was wholly untested when the First Army followed up the beachhead and headed inland from coastal France.
He had no idea at the time, but the German Wehrmacht had suffered dreadful losses during the Allied invasion on June 6, and in Russia, on an immense front where thousands died. Hitler was micro-managing the war effort, in part because he'd lost trust in many of his generals after the ill-fated assassination attempt. The whole Western front appeared undermanned, so he simply took some of his decimated Eastern front companies out of Russia and realigned them along the coast in France to strengthen his defenses.
By the time Alvin's company was moved into position, he found himself in an area unlike anything he'd ever seen on the reservation. Mile after mile of the French countryside's open fields were knitted by steep and heavy lines of brush and trees that stood, one after another, like successive walls. Fighting with so much cover was, for him at least, impossible to imagine.
He was told the French called it bocage, but the brass called those steep barriers "hedgerows." They lay over the French fields that lay between the front and the road to Germany. Such oddly fragmented topography would make fighting difficult--that was clear to all of them. The battle for St. Lo, not far at all from the Utah beach, became the site of a fight that rivaled June 6 in ferocity.
And he was a rookie. But he told himself, in confidence, that he was warrior, a soldier, an infantryman, a Lakota. Still, like so many others of the First Army, he hadn't looked down the barrel of enemy artillery or faced Panzer tanks. He was a kid, just 19, fearful, sure, but he was a warrior, ready for battle he hadn't yet tasted.
General Bradley's mission was to work the army's painful way through the hedgerows to St. Lo, a French village directly in harm's way, break down German defenses all around, create a means by which to establish power and presence sufficient to provide a base for advances that would take the Allies all the way to Berlin, the enemy's heart, and thereby end a war that had already killed thousands of American boys, and millions throughout eastern and western Europe.
It was that simple.
When he woke up he was in bed, a pillow behind his head. It took him some time to recognize that his legs were gone, that what there was protruding from the lines beneath the lay of his blankets stopped at abruptly his knees. An hour maybe it took before his memory offered him fleeting images, before he had memory of a kid from a ranch in Wyoming, a white kid, his buddy. They'd been together, dug into a row of trees, waiting for a signal to advance, when that tank--when they heard it, they'd simply assumed it one of theirs--when that tank came up over a hedgerow as if it had been hunting the two of them only and alone.
He didn't even remember the sound or see the fire from the barrell. What came to him, slowly as if his eyes required focusing, was that Wyoming kid--they were buddies really--dead, is body simply destroyed beside him like nothing he'd ever seen. And then he remembered that his own legs were gone. He remembered having to tell himself that he wasn't dead, that he was alive and that his life blood was leaving him. Almost instinctively, he stanched the bleeding with the dirt thrown up from their digging and the blast the two of them had taken. He remembered he felt no pain and wondered if he was dying, if he was already in passage to the spirit world.
To say he remembered all of that is to only poorly describe the fragmentary images passing into and through his consciousness. None of what he remembered came in anything but random order. What he knew, what slowly registered in his mind and memory, was that he was still alive, he was in a tent, a hospital, and there were nurses, that he wasn't alone either, but there were other guys, many others.
And what he knew for sure was that he had no legs. There'd been a tank coming up and over the hedgerows and his friend wasn't here, wasn't even there anymore. He knew that his friend was dead.
"Well," the nurse said, "it's so nice to have you with us." She sat on the bed beside him, adjusted the pillow behind his head. "We knew it would just be a matter of time. You'd lost a lot of blood, but the surgeon said he knew you'd make it."
He didn't know her. She was talking to him with a familiarity that made him uncomfortable.
"I can get you something to eat," she said. "I don't know if you're hungry or if you feel like eating, but I can get you something to eat."
By instinct and tradition, he didn't look at her either. He didn't speak, and he didn't look at her. He heard every word, felt her hand on his shoulder, behind his head, but he didn't speak.
"It's okay," she said. "I'll be around. When you need me, I'll be here--someone will." Then she stood--he watched her from below her waist. "I'll be back. We'll get you strong again, strong enough to get you out of here because you're going home, you know," she said. And then, "Where's home anyway?"
He kept silent. He wouldn't speak, not because he was angry or embarrassed or without words. He kept silent because it was his way.
___________________
I'm weaving together an essay/story here that will offer me the opportunity to share with readers the growing understanding of significant historical events that you can't help feel when you read and hear personal stories about those events. I'm going to try to do that weaving here on the blog.
The first section appeared about a week ago, a nurse, a Lakota woman from South Dakota, who told me her story in great detail. The second character, above, is also Lakota, whose family knows very little about his army experience.
*I've changed his name.
No comments:
Post a Comment