The ditch you find yourself in Holland is just like every other ditch you’ve been in thus far, which is unfortunate because all of the ditches you’ve seen up to this point have been cold, damp, and uncomfortable. It’s been a few hours since Luz radioed in Captain Winters’ request for Welsh to bring the rest of first platoon and the rain is falling now in short, sporadic gusts onto the men and into the ditch, soaking through your ODs in dark wet patches. Somewhere across the field and over the ridge is the enemy, but you can’t see them and their guns have gone quiet as you lie low in the grass with the rest of Easy and wait for orders.
You’re on your stomach, trying to discern the subtle movement in the distance, when Joe Liebgott crawls up next to you and elbows you in the side. “Ow, for christssake, Joe!” you hiss at him.
He snickers amusedly and does it again, harder this time. “You gotta smoke?” he asks. His face is turned towards you but his eyes are trained on the distant hill; you blink at him incredulously for a moment before choking back a laugh.
“We’re about to charge a German force of indeterminate size and strength from a vulnerable position, and all you’re worried about right now is a cigarette?”
“It’s all about priorities, Web,” Liebgott says. He grins and releases his gun to offer you an open palm with wriggling fingers. “I know you got ‘em, might as well just cough one up now.”
When you go rooting around in your jacket, what you find is a crumpled packet of Lucky Strikes containing one slightly damaged and almost soggy cigarette. You try to pull a disappointed face that reads “I’m all out” but before you can manage, Liegbott’s fingers are in your pocket, fishing out your last smoke.
“C’mon, Lieb!” you whisper sharply, unsuccessfully trying to bat him away. “It’s all I’ve got left.”
“Lucky me then, eh, Web? Here, c’mon,” he then says as he lights it, the cigarette bobbing up and down between his lips as he speaks. “Open your mouth.”
You blink at him again. “My mouth?”
“Yeah, open your mouth, we’ll share it,” he says casually, shifting closer along the tall line of weeds until his arm is pressed firmly against the side of your body. When you fail to move, he finally looks at you, his brow furrowed and his expression slightly offended. “What?” he asks. “You never done this before?”
“Done what?” you say, sounding more horrified by the second. The other men are all looking at you now, you can feel it – Grant and Hoobler, Cobb and Luz. You’re half expecting one of them call Liebgott’s bluff at any minute, but none of them say a word. Just cough and pretend to be distracted by bayonets and ammo rounds and sight calibrations.
Liebgott nudges you with his arm and turns towards you before pulling off the cigarette, squinting in the flat early morning light. “Just don’t close your eyes, ‘kay, Web? This ain’t romance,” he explains. Slowly, he leans forward and into your personal space, crowding your comfort levels. His lips are pursed into a tight ‘O’ – head tilted slightly to one side, eyes open and watching and waiting for a reaction.
“It won’t work if you don’t breathe, Web,” Luz says lowly from behind you, and without thinking, you inhale sharply just in time to catch the steady stream of smoke that Liebgott exhales into your mouth. It tickles in your throat, the nicotine dulled down from the passage of Liebgott’s lungs. He smiles at you as the last traces dissipate between his lips, his mouth still inches away from your own, threatening intimacy when there really is none.
“See?” he says happily. “More bang for ya buck this way, you know?”
Before you can pull away, Talbert comes up from the side and nudges you with the end of his rifle, whispering, “Webster, Liebgott, stop messing around! Captain Winters wants us all at the ready.” The sudden jostle makes you surge forward accidentally against Liebgott’s mouth; startled lips brush against one another briefly before you’re able to push yourself away with both hands.
When you meet Liebgott’s eyes he’s smiling crookedly, some snide remark and another laugh poised on his lips. Somewhere down the line, Bull is snickering around his cigar as Johnny Martin mutters, “More bang for your buck.”
Liebgott shrugs and claps you on the shoulder, obviously enjoying the color rising in your cheeks and your awkward, flustered laughing. “They teach ya that kinda stuff at Harvard, Web?” he asks.
Carefully, he takes one more drag off the barely-smoked cigarette before stubbing it out in the dirt and turning his attention back to the line.
ii. the Hospital
Looking back, you don’t actually remember getting hit.
One minute you were parroting orders in mangled German to the captured SS, the next you were horizontal – thrown backwards onto the ground as Skinny scrambled towards you with grit smeared across his face. The dirt rained down upon you then, as the rolling Dutch landscape suddenly began to explode in short, concentrated bursts. It wasn’t until you tried to move, hands fumbling for your gun and for your helmet, that you felt the pain race up your spine and settle behind your eyes, making your vision swim.
“They got me,” that’s what you said next, the nausea coming in shuddering waves as you looked down and saw blood on the cuff of your ODs, imagining torn ligament and ruptured muscle underneath.
In the end, it wasn’t nearly as bad as you originally thought; not even bad enough to warrant a visit from Doc Roe. Skinny did the mending instead, his hands rummaging through your pockets to find your aid kit. You recall the sterile white cotton of the bandage as he unfurled it from its binding; the knot that he tied bit into your skin, making every nerve in your body aware of your injury.
There’s not much to do in the hospital as you recuperate so you spend a lot of time smoking and thinking about that last day in Holland. You had hobbled back to battalion CP on your own, refusing a ride from a passing jeep because you were afraid that those broken steps would be your last in the war. It wasn’t until they rolled your cot into the recovery room that you realized your wound was pretty much a ticket straight back to the front line. After all, you still have a full compliment of limbs, both eyes and a mouthful of teeth with a functioning tongue behind it. Given the opportunity, you can still charge the enemy, fire your rifle, and translate the Sergeants’ orders.
Many of the men in the hospital with you are not nearly as fortunate, though some of them disappear in the middle of the night. Their cots are found empty in the morning, their personal affects missing. You watch quietly as the nurses strip the sheets from the vacated beds at midday, carefully marking the missing soldiers’ charts.
You recognize the official stamp of AWOL, rectangular and bright red and visible from across the room.
iii. the Depot
It takes two and half months for you to get your reassignment, typed out onto official-looking stationery with the name Private Webster, David K. written on the envelope. The walls of the replacement depot are cement brick, painted over with several coats of white house paint and by the time you finally get your letter, you’ve grown tired of all of the waiting, all the small talk, and all the coffee. Too much of your time has been spent watching fresh-faced boys fill out paperwork, each of them fumbling and awkward and uncomfortable in their neat uniforms.
All you know is what’s in the paper – every report vague and equally hyperbolic – and you’re too much of a soldier and too much of a writer to give it much stock.
“I will see you someplace else.” That’s what you had told Skinny in Holland. Slipping the neatly folded sheet of paper from its envelope, you skim its contents quickly to find out where exactly that someplace is. Your hands shake; you’ve been sent back to Easy.
Haguenau, France, the letter tells you. Assignment effective immediately.
iv. the Truck
One of the first things Liebgott says to you is not “Hello” or “Welcome back” or “Nice to see you, Web”. Rather, it’s: "What's it like in that hospital?" and the tone of his voice is so loaded and deliberate that the muscles in your face flinch involuntarily. When he speaks, each phrase is delivered like a blow to the head or a swift kick to the stomach. The ends of his sentences sting like steel glancing between your ribs and he acknowledges the damage he’s dealt with a tight-lipped smile.
The look he gives you across the back of the truck makes any excuse you have to offer seem weak and petty; the explanations crumble, half-formed in your mouth, leaving behind only the taste of dry ash. The hospital, rehabilitation, the replacement depot – none of that seems to mean shit anymore. Not when Joe Liebgott is looking at you with a sneer on his face and insult in his eyes.
You watch wordlessly as he turns away, feeding the end of a cigarette into his frown. Liebgott lights it and exhales smoke for a moment before passing it to Babe Heffron who sits beside him silently, his eyes unfocused and distant. Babe’s fingers shiver around the filter as he raises it to his mouth and you wonder what’s happened in the past four months to the redheaded boy from South Philly. Before you can ask, Haguenau rolls to a slow halt around you; the truck lurches and then stops, spilling men out onto the muddy grey streets.
"You shoulda been there, Web," Liebgott eventually says. The edge in his voice is suddenly gone and has been replaced with something else. Something quieter and more painful than anger. It makes you shudder for the first time since your injury. "Things ain't the same any more," he adds sharply, and descends from the back of truck without giving you a second look.
v. the Bedroom
0200 hours and all the other men are asleep in their cots when, in actuality, they are supposed to be crossing the river into enemy territory to capture prisoners. Tonight is your last night on the line, or at least that’s what the officers tell you, and for some reason the news keeps you from sleeping. Whenever you close your eyes and start to drift, your ears begin to play tricks on you, and you swear you can hear Jackson whimpering behind the walls, the sound muffled by the memory of Vest’s screaming. Refrains of “He’s dead, he’s dead, you fucking Kraut, you’ve killed him” confuse the words “I don’t want to die”, sobbed over and over and over again.
On the bunk beneath you, Ramirez shifts quietly onto his side as Babe half-murmurs something unintelligible across the way. You know the noise that gathers inside your head is only a whisper compared to Bastogne, and yet the occupied bedroom is thick with a stillness that is more chilling than any cry for medic, any heavy shellacking.
How anyone in this company manages to sleep at night, you will never fully understand.
vi. the Basement
The flares have stopped streaking across the winter sky when you finally give up on sleep and crawl out of bed. After wandering the broken hallways of the house, you find Liebgott in the basement, swishing the last dregs of cold coffee around in the bottom of his cup.
He starts when he hears the noise coming down the stairs, but eases when you appear the doorway. His shoulders droop and he lowers his gun, saying quietly, “Oh, it’s you.” He turns back towards the table and lights a cigarette as you settle down on the bench beside him.
You study his profile as he smokes, the wisps curling from the down-turned corners of his mouth – shifting, rising to catch the dull yellow light. He rubs at his brow using the edge of his thumb, the cigarette pinched between middle and index. Right below the second knuckle, that’s where he’d always hold it, and that’s where he’s holding it now – fingers obscuring the bottom half of his face as he takes a drag. His other hand traces abstract patterns on the scarred tabletop, ragged nails chipping away at the all the splinters, revealing pale wood underneath. You open your mouth to say something, but you’re not sure what that something is, so you close it again and look away.
“We’re just tired, Web, you know?” he says suddenly; his voice is disused and hoarse. He looks at you sideways – expectantly – and in the brief silence that follows, you are unable to rectify the man you once knew with the man sitting beside to you.
“Yeah, Lieb,” you eventually say. “I know.”
Your skin brushes against his as you pluck the cigarette from between his fingers. The filter is moist from where it’s been in his mouth. When you inhale, the tip glows red and Liebgott is so close that the faint smolder illuminates his face, the light ghosting across the surface of his dark, black eyes. His breathing is measured and even upon your cheeks, passing between his slightly parted lips to stir the smoke between you.
Leaning forward, he takes the cigarette from your mouth and asks you quietly if you still remember.
For a moment, you’re not quite sure what he’s talking about, because yes, you remember a lot of things. But what you’ve come to realize is that everything you seem to have known is suddenly very different. The men you left behind in Holland are either gone or broken – collaged back together by medics with not enough skill to hide the seams. Unrecognizable beneath their wounds, once-familiar faces are now cloaked with fatigue – lined with worries and cares and the weight of the dead.
And then again, the answer to his question is also no, because there are some very important things you can’t seem to remember at all. Like how to be a soldier, for one thing, which doesn’t come naturally anymore. The smallest noises startle you – the rustling of leaves or the hail of a mortar. Now muscle and scar tissue begin to itch beneath your clothes at the faintest sound of war, and it bothers you. Makes you feel green and inexperienced even though you dropped on Normandy and have the star and the commendation to prove it.
“Nervous in the service,” that’s what Malarkey had said, and it had stung then and it stings now to think of it. Because it’s the kind of thing you’d say to a replacement with not enough sense not to shoot his own CO. You wouldn’t say that sort of thing to a Toccoa man, which is what you are. Or perhaps, you’re beginning to realize, that’s what you were.
All that time in the hospital has made your skin soft and thin in places where other Easy men have grown calluses, and the only reason you’re so aware of this painful fact is because none of the other men will let you forget it. Least of all, Liebgott.
Before you can say any of this, Liebgott is taking one last drag from his dying cigarette and pulling you close with a lungful of smoke behind his lips. It takes you off guard when he pushes his mouth against yours and exhales into you with slow, even measure. One of his hands cradles the back of your skull, fingertips lost in your hair, sliding downward and forward to urge your jaw open.
You try not to choke as you let him in – past lip, teeth, and tongue – the smoke and his hands making you cough despite yourself. You mean to turn away when the two of you pull apart but Liebgott holds you there, still inches away from his face, his eyes sizing you up, searching and smiling suddenly.
“You remember, Web?” he asks again, his voice surprisingly soft despite the hand grasped firmly around your chin.
“Yeah. I remember,” you say quietly.
You can practically hear the smile break onto Liebgott’s face, and although you can’t see it properly, you can still feel it and taste it. “Knew you would,” he eventually says and shifts along the bench to let you move closer in the darkness, his hands searching your pockets for another cigarette.
