The cultural and social changes caused by the United States Army’s occupation of an area, for good or bad, were immediate, overwhelming, and almost cartoonish. The cultural assimilation that usually took place was mind-numbing. Fully equipped field hospitals were in business in hours, showers and sit-down latrines were built, water tankers and ambulances and long convoys of deuce-and-a-half trucks showed up out of nowhere. GIs played touch football in a pasture pockmarked by shell fire; they jitterbugged in a café with local girls who, days earlier, were thought to be the enemy, a Benny Goodman record playing on a hand-crank Victrola.
I should have been overjoyed to be back among my own. At first I was. Then I felt my initial happiness begin to fade, as though I were about to step aboard a passenger train that would take me away from home. The following day I couldn’t find Rosita. I asked Pine where she was.
“Some guys from G-2 were talking to her,” he said.
“What does G-2 want with Rosita?”
“Search me, sir,” he said. “They caught some SS in Wehrmacht uniforms. Some of the women guards in those camps have posed as inmates.”
“G-2 thinks she’s an imposter?”
“She’s probably okay, Loot.”
“When did you last see her?”
“An hour ago. They put her on a truck with some other women.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Sir, the doc says I’m going to lose a couple of toes. I probably won’t be seeing you for a while.”
We were standing in the sunshine outside a mess tent, the wind ballooning the canvas top. I looked at the lean cut of his jaw and the moral clarity in his eyes and regretted my anger. I couldn’t quite accept the fact that we were parting.
“You’ll be headed back to Louisiana.”
“Yes, sir, I will. I owe you, Lieutenant.”
“It doesn’t work that way. We do our job and go home, and then we eventually forget about all this.”
He was shaking his head before I finished speaking. “We’re going to be rich men, sir. I know everything there is to know about pipelining. I was hustling skids on the pipeline when I was thirteen years old. It’ll take some capital, but we’ll pull it off.”
“I’m afraid I’m not connecting here.”
“Know the secret to the Tiger tank’s structural success? It’s the rolled-steel and electro-welding process. When the war is done, the big peacetime score will be in oil and natural gas. That means pipelines, thousands and thousands of miles of them, all over the country. Oil might as well stay in the ground if you cain’t get it to the refinery.”
“I’m sure you’re correct,” I said.
“You all right, sir?”
“Never better,” I said, looking at a deuce-and-half driving down the road, the back loaded with prisoners who may have been SS in civilian clothes.
I RECEIVED TREATMENT FOR frostbite but nothing else. I rejoined the regiment and stayed with it all the way to the Elbe River, where we met the Russians on April 25, 1945. We got wonderfully drunk with them. We punched holes in canned beer with our bayonets, and the Russians drained the fuel from the rockets at a nearby V-2 base. In the morning we woke up with hangovers and the Russians woke up dead.
I thought my hangover would fade as the day warmed and the flowers opened along the banks of the Elbe and the hilarity of the previous night slipped into memory, left behind with all the other departures from sanity that wars allow us to justify. I had never been much of a drinker and thought the weakness in my joints and the spots that swam before my eyes were the result of exposing an inexperienced metabolism to too much alcohol. By evening I began to sweat, and my hair was sopping wet and cold as ice in the wind, and I entered the first stages of a hacking cough that I believed was either bronchitis or walking pneumonia.
There was no transition in the progression of my illness. By nightfall I was burning up and doubling over each time I coughed. I wrote in my notebook, I feel like there’s a chunk of angle iron in my chest. Maybe I’ll be better in the morning. No word about Rosita. A captain in G-2 said many Jewish survivors were being placed in displaced persons camps, but he could find no record of her. I think of her constantly. I see her eyes in my sleep. The coloration and the inner light that shows through them are like none I have ever seen. I don’t think I will be able to rest until I find her.
I just coughed blood on my hand.
A medic came into my tent in
the morning and took my temperature and placed a stethoscope on my chest. He was a tall, bony kid from Alabama and said he had worked in an X-ray unit in a Mobile hospital before he enlisted. He hung the earpieces to the stethoscope on his neck. “Is there a history of respiratory problems in your family, Lieutenant?” he asked.
“As a matter of fact, there is.”
“You smoke a lot?”
“Never took it up. What are we talking about, Doc?”