Righteous Sniper

CHAPTER FIVE

Darkness enabled the convoy of reinforcements to slip past the Germans and get into Bastogne. For Cole and the other snipers, it was a relief to finally get off the truck.

“I hope I never have to ride on a truck again,” Vaccaro groaned. He stretched his arms over his head and walked stiffly away from the vehicle. “That thing bounced around so much that my legs hurt, my spine hurts. Hell, even my teeth hurt. As for my ass, it’s gonna be sore for a week.”

“At least we were better off than those poor bastards who had to ride in the jeep,” Cole said. “They couldn’t even grab some sleep because they had to hang on for dear life the whole way.”

Lieutenant Mulholland gathered the men, taking charge of the group that had ridden up in the truck, not just the snipers. “Listen up, we’re going to bed down in one of the buildings and get our orders in the morning. Meanwhile, I’ll see if I can find us some hot chow.”

They would be spending the night in the cellar of an old furniture shop. In the dim light of an oil lamp, they descended well-worn wooden stairs, brushing against ancient stone walls that exuded dampness. There was no heat, but they were out of the wind. More importantly, the cellar provided shelter from the shells that the enemy occasionally lobbed into the town just to keep anyone from getting a good night’s sleep.

The electricity had long since gone out, and the only light came from candles and lanterns. A few lucky residents still had enough coal to heat their homes, but others were forced to huddle under blankets or put on all their sweaters to fend off the cold. Families sheltered in basements between bombings, praying that this nightmare would end sooner rather than later. Food and clean drinking water were getting scarce.

Cole took off the sheet that he had been using as improvised camouflage. It had once been a blinding white but was now soiled, spotted with mud and blood. He spread his blankets on the hard-packed dirt floor of the cellar, with Vaccaro and the kid doing the same.

“To be honest, it’s not much of a place to bed down,” Vaccaro said.

“I’ve slept in worse,” Cole said. The dirt-floored cellar reminded him of how he had slept under the porch back home when his pa was on a bender. “We all have.”

“I guess it does beat a foxhole.”

Cole stood up and stretched his stiff arms and legs. Vaccaro wasn’t the only one who felt sore right down to his bones. It had been a miserable trip, made worse by the constant threat of attack. At least here in the cellar he felt as if he could finally let his guard down, no longer having to worry about being ambushed by Germans hiding in the woods beside the road.

Exhausted though he was, Cole set to work cleaning his rifle. He slid the bolt out and ran a patch through the barrel to clear any fouling.

Watching him, Vaccaro just shook his head. He’d made no move to clean his own weapon. “Hillbilly, you must already have the cleanest rifle in Bastogne. They don’t give out medals for that, you know. Why the hell don’t you relax a little for once?”

“I don’t need a medal,” Cole said. “I just need to hit what I’m shooting at tomorrow.”

“You haven’t missed yet,” Vaccaro said. “That’s what they should give you a medal for.”

“I’m just doing my job, city boy. Shooting things is what I do best.”

Cole returned his attention to the rifle. He knew that his life depended on the Springfield functioning properly. It hadn’t let him down yet. Vaccaro had told him to relax, but truth be told, cleaning the rifle did help him relax. He found going through the ritual of breaking down the rifle and cleaning it to be soothing, a way to clear his mind before turning in. Other men might dip into a paperback or read a letter from home for the umpteenth time if they weren’t too exhausted, but that wasn’t an option for Cole. Even if he could have read them, he never got any letters.

Vaccaro was just about the only one who knew the truth, which was that Cole was illiterate. Anybody else who figured it out and made fun of Cole for being a dumb cracker risked having his teeth bashed in.

He’d never had much of a chance for book learning back home in the mountains. The nearest school was miles away, and it always seemed like there were more chores to do. Besides, Cole had always preferred spending his free time wandering the woods and hills, usually with a rifle in his hands. The woods had provided the only education he’d needed.

He could read signs in the woods the way most men could read a newspaper. Words just looked like so much chicken scratch on the page to him. Hell, he could pick out the shapes and patterns of the constellations in the clear night sky better than he could make sense of a jumble of letters.

His parents hadn’t put much stock in book learning, especially his pa. Cole’s old man had been what folks called woodsy, in that he scrounged a living from the hills and forests of the Appalachians by cutting firewood, trapping, and making moonshine. Unfortunately, his pa had been a bit too fond of his own product. He was a mean drunk, and it was best to keep out of his way if you didn’t want to get your head busted by his hard fists.

But when he was sober, Pa had been a good teacher in the ways of the mountains, showing Cole and his brothers how to shoot, hunt, and trap. Being a good shot meant the difference between meat for supper — or just some eggs and potatoes fried up in lard.

Cole reckoned that some of his best memories were of his pa — along with some of his worst. He supposed that was like most people in that there was often good with the bad, like a tiny vein of silver running through rock.

Pa’s hardscrabble occupations meant that the Cole family had been dirt poor, living in a shack near Gashey’s Creek on land they couldn’t rightly say they owned except by the fact of living upon it. They were just squatters when you got right down to it. A lot of mountain people didn’t rightly know if they owned the land they lived on, but it was mostly land nobody much wanted anyhow.

The shack was hammered together out of discarded lumber with a roof made from scrap metal. That roof leaked when it rained, but Cole still missed the sound of the rain drumming on the sheet metal as he slept under the eaves with his brothers.

When he hadn’t been hiding out from his drunken pa, sharing the space under the porch with the hound dogs.

This war had been an escape from that life.

He might return to it someday and build himself a little cabin all his own back in the mountains where he could live off the land.

Something to think about after the war.

If he survived.

Lieutenant Mulholland returned with hot grub. He’d found a pot full of what was purported to be stew. As the icing on the cake, he had somehow procured a couple of bottles of red wine — just enough for each man to have a cupful.

Mulholland didn’t say how he had come into possession of the stew, and nobody asked. For all they knew, he had taken the stew and wine from one of the town residents at gunpoint. It might not have been Mulholland’s style when he had come ashore on D-Day, but long months of combat had hardened the young officer.

The food cheered the men. It had been a long time since they had eaten anything other than cold rations.

“Now this is the way to fight a war,” Vaccaro said, taking a healthy slug of wine.

But not everyone was as convinced.

“What is this?” somebody asked, peering with suspicion at a chunk of meat on his spoon. “I hope to hell this isn’t horsemeat.”

“Don’t matter if it’s horsemeat or filet mignon — it’s warm, ain’t it?”

Nobody could argue with that. The stew was quickly devoured. For the first time in several nights, the men went to bed with full bellies, warmed by the wine.

The distant thump of artillery lulled them to sleep.

By the gray light of a winter’s morning, what they found when they ascended from the cellar was a battered town under siege. The slush-covered streets were churned up from the passage of vehicles and pockmarked with shell holes. Both the commercial and residential buildings were mostly covered in stucco, but the intermittent bombardment had opened spiderweb patterns of cracks across their facades.

Hasty defenses had been set up to stop the Germans if they did make it into town. Side streets were blocked with overturned wagons, dining room tables and sofas, even the carcasses of burned automobiles. Household goods and debris from bombed houses were strewn across the sidewalks. The overall effect was as if there had been a riot at a rummage sale where a fire had broken out.

“I’ll be right back,” Cole announced.

“Where you going?”

“Shopping.”

Most of the houses were empty, their owners having fled — or else they were hiding in their basements. He picked a house a couple of blocks down from the main street, figuring it wouldn’t have been as picked over. It was a neat and tidy two-story town house, its stucco exterior untouched so far by war. The only hint at the beating that the town had taken from the Germans was a wooden shutter hanging askew.

Although the house was modest by most standards, it seemed impossibly palatial compared to the shack where Cole had grown up.

Keeping his rifle ready, he pushed through the door, which was unlocked.

“Howdy?” he called.

There was no answer. The house had that air of stillness that comes from being empty. With the house left unheated, the winter cold and damp had crept in, making the interior feel even chillier than the outside air. Away from the noise and activity of the troops, he might have been the last person alive in this whole damn place.

He moved deeper into the house. Whoever had lived here must have left in a hurry. There were dishes still on the dining room table, set out on a cheerful tablecloth the bright yellow of buttercups. A couple of dirty dishes sat in the sink. On the counter stood a cup of tea with a skim of ice and curdled milk.

A framed picture of an old couple wearing fancy clothes stared down at him from the wall, their eyes disapproving.

Damn, if this don’t feel spooky.

He was pretty sure he would find what he needed upstairs. He started up them, leading with the muzzle of his rifle. Each creak of the stair treads sounded as loud as a gunshot in the empty house.

He poked his head into a bedroom and saw just what he needed.

White bedsheets. He stripped them off and went to the next bedroom and did the same.

The bed had been neatly made as if whoever lived in this house had fully expected to be sleeping there. Cole hoped they would again — although they might wonder what had happened to their bedsheets.

He went down the stairs and back out of the house, then found Vaccaro and the other soldiers where he had left them. He gave a sheet to Vaccaro, then another to Hank and the lieutenant, and he kept one for himself.

“Fresh camouflage so we blend into the snow,” he explained.

Vaccaro nodded his thanks, then nodded around at the battle-damaged town. “I’m surprised you found anything. This place is a damn mess,” he said.

“You won’t get no argument from me,” Cole agreed. Bastogne looked like many towns they had passed through where war had taken its toll.

“Maybe we just ought to let the Krauts have it if they want it so bad,” Vaccaro said. “It’s sure as hell not much to fight over.”

Lieutenant Mulholland had overheard. “I agree it’s not much to look at right now, but you know what they say in the real estate business, right? Location, location, location. This town is smack-dab in the middle of the path that the Krauts need to take, and they can’t go around it because there aren’t any decent roads. The bottom line is that we’re not letting the Krauts have it. Now everybody back on the trucks. We’re being moved to where they need us.”

Everyone groaned. Nobody was looking forward to another joyride in the back of an open truck.

“Lieutenant, can I ride up front with you?” Vaccaro asked. “I promise not to ask if we’re there yet.”

“Just shut up and get in the truck, Vaccaro.”

Groaning and cursing at their stiff bodies, the men climbed back in. It was a rare infantryman who turned down a ride, but today was an exception.

As their truck drove through town, Cole spotted a skinny boy rooting through a garbage can for something to eat. The boy froze as the truck approached, caught in the act like a foraging raccoon. Cole fished in his haversack and tossed the kid a tin of rations. The boy pounced on it, then scurried away into the gloomy shadows of an alley.

“You might regret that later if they can’t get any supplies in here,” Vaccaro said.

“I’ll take my chances. Besides, that was lima beans and ham,” Cole replied, identifying one of the least favorite C rations. Having grown up hungry, Cole was never all that particular about what he ate, but even he had his limits.

“In that case, you should have thrown him two cans,” Vaccaro said. “Better yet, throw one at the Krauts. It’ll be just as deadly as a grenade — it just takes longer.”

The squads of soldiers they passed looked muddy, cold, and exhausted. Then again, Cole figured that their own group of so-called reinforcements weren’t in much better condition. They could hardly be called fresh troops.

The soldiers in Bastogne had been fighting for days on end without relief. In addition to the artillery fire, on Christmas Eve the Luftwaffe had made an appearance, bombing the town and even strafing it with machine-gun fire. It had been one hell of a Christmas present.

At the edge of the town, the truck stopped, and they all piled out once again, joining a larger group of soldiers assembling there. Some of the men had already been fighting in Bastogne for several days, and others, like Cole’s own squad, had been rushed in to hold off the German attacks.

A veteran of the Bastogne fight wandered over to bum a cigarette. Those had become scarce. Supplies had been dropped from the air, but ammo and medical supplies had been the priority, not cigarettes.

“Here you go, buddy,” Vaccaro said. “Take the rest of the pack. It looks like you could use it.”

“Thanks,” said the soldier, who was muddy and had a large patch of what looked like dried blood down the leg of his britches. Considering that he wasn’t limping, it probably wasn’t his own. He lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. “Welcome to the circus,” he said.

“It’s quite a show,” Vaccaro agreed.

“The Krauts won’t quit and neither will we. Did you hear what we said to the Germans when they asked us to surrender?” the soldier asked.

He spoke with a pride as if he had personally negotiated with the Germans.

“From the looks of the place, I’m guessing you told them to forget it. The Krauts are still pounding away.”

“You’ve got that right, buddy. General McAuliffe had one word for them, that’s what. ‘Nuts!’”

“Boy, are we glad to see you,” another soldier said as the reinforcements jumped down from the truck. “It’s about time you ladies got here.”

“Yeah, yeah, we already licked our Germans south of here in La Gleize, so they sent us up here to help you handle your Krauts.”

The soldier snorted. “Be my guest. The thing is, the Krauts don’t like being handled by you or anything else.”

“We’ll see about that.”

The soldier noticed their rifles. “Are you guys snipers? That’s a good thing. The Krauts like to set up in the hills or in one of the church steeples outside town and pick us off. It’s about time we had somebody who could shoot back.”

“That’s what we do.”

As it turned out, their skills as snipers wouldn’t be put to use right away.

Lieutenant Mulholland gathered the men to be addressed by a captain who seemed to be in charge.

“All right, I know you men are from different units and some of you just got here,” the officer said. “I’m Captain Brown. We appreciate the help, believe me. Since this group is kind of cobbled together, you’re now officially part of Team SNAFU.”

Several of the men chuckled. SNAFU was a popular military acronym for “situation normal, all fouled up.” The name Team SNAFU seemed to fit the circumstances. The unit had been thrown together by order of Colonel Roberts as a way to get every possible soldier into action. Meanwhile, the 101st Airborne anchored the defense of Bastogne.

“SNAFU sounds about right!” someone yelled.

“Listen up,” the captain said, raising his arms to tamp things down. “The first job for Team SNAFU is to hold back the Germans who will be coming along this road soon enough. They want to get into Bastogne, and we’re not going to let them, are we?”

“No, sir!” several men shouted in unison.

Cole had to hand it to Captain Brown. He was managing to rally tired and exhausted troops in time to face a new threat from the enemy.

“We’re going to follow this road here and then get into the trees and dig in. Remember that if the Krauts get past us, this road takes them right into Bastogne. So don’t let them by, goddammit.”

That was it for the speech, and it was too damn cold to stand around listening to speeches anyway. Captain Brown climbed into a jeep that rushed up the road, and the infantrymen followed on foot.