The next time I look, I don’t see Mother anywhere. We’re still in forest but we’ve gone down a steep hill. Then I spot him. He’s flopped into a streambed and is digging in it, throwing rocks left and right like a dog searching a bone. I slow down, stunned, and stop, staring, while I catch my breath.
I start moving slowly downhill toward him, wondering what’s next. What happens now? What sergeant-like thing am I supposed to do? I’m sliding and slipping on a combination of iced snow and pine needles. My entire body’s shaking. These days, I’m so shaky most of the time I need to wait for a good quiet moment to draw or even write a letter. I’ve taken to printing in capital letters, short quick strokes; not much chance for a wild, erratic, uncontrolled twitch to give me away.
I squat at the edge of the stream beside Mother. That water’s got to be ice cold but he’s kneeling in it on naked, white legs. I know I’m thin, what with my GIs and all, but Mother’s so skinny it’s hard to believe he’s even alive.
I stay there quietly, watching him toss stones, concentrating between his knees. I’ve got to do something.
‘Here, Mother, I have your glasses. You forgot them up there in our dent.’
He turns and stares blankly at me, stops digging, kneeling in that fast-running, cold, clear stream. I hold the glasses out. Slowly he crawls toward me, takes hold and slips the glasses across his eyes, carefully hooking behind his ears. He’d stopped crying but now he starts again. I help pull him out of the creek and we don’t say anything. I can’t think of a single word I can possibly say to make any sense and I’m not sure Mother could talk if he wanted to.
Piece by piece, I hand him his clothes and he puts them on. He dresses slowly, taking deep breaths, as if he’s in a barracks on a Sunday morning. His boots and socks are soaking wet, but after he buttons his field jacket, he looks almost normal; except for his blue-white face and the crying.
‘Mother, I’ve got your rifle, helmet and webbing stuff back there at the edge of the forest. How are you feeling?’
Mother looks into my eyes for the first time since he started running. Snot and tears are smeared across his face. God, it’s so weird seeing our Mother Wilkins like this.
We call him Mother Hen Wilkins because he’s always hounding us for being sloppy, bugging us about leaving things around or not cleaning out mess kits and canteen cups. Once Fred Brandt complained how Wilkins would sneak up on everyone after breakfast and give the sniff test to see if we’d brushed our teeth.
Mother’s one of the oldest in our squad and he’s married. He had his twenty-sixth birthday two days before his baby was born dead. Mundy told me that. Some birthday present!
Mother’s still staring at me through his fogged-up glasses. He’s leaning slightly forward with his arms dangling in front of him, a puppet waiting to be used. He starts talking in his slow, careful way, thinking out each word, every phrase, sentence, as if it’s going to be engraved on platinum.
‘You know, Wont, I don’t know if I have combat fatigue or not. One whole part of me knows everything I just did, from tossing my M1 to scratching in this frozen creek. One part of me knew and wanted to stop, but another part kept going, wanted to keep running, throwing off things, doing any kind of crazy business it could think of. That part was definitely bucking for Section Eight. That part, the deepest inside part of me, will do anything to get out of all this and go home with Linda.’
‘Want me to turn you in, Vance? I could write up the most beautiful Section Eight certification evidence anybody ever heard of. Between the actual wild things you just did and the stuff I’d make up, you’d at least get back to some psychiatrist in a hospital.’
Mother lowers himself cross-legged onto the ground. He props his head in his frozen hands, his elbows on his knees. He’s thinking about it all right.
‘No, I’d never make it. I’m still not scared enough. I’m too scared of them and not scared enough of myself. I couldn’t fool anybody. Part of what let me go through all this shit was it was only you there and it didn’t really count.’
‘You sure fooled me, Mother; I’ll tell you that. You also broke a squad rule.’
He lifts his head off his hands, straightens up.
‘What rule? What squad rule did I break?’
‘You said “shit.” What would Father say? Don’t let them get to you, Mother. No matter what happens, don’t let them get you.’
There are many peculiar things about our squad. I’ll start out with a few. First, we almost never call the Germans KRAUT or JERRY or HUN or NAZIS, any of the usual army names. At the most, they’re ‘the enemy.’ Only Stan Shutzer, our professional Jew, calls them anything he wants. Father Paul Mundy gave him a special dispensation. Yes, we have a squad father, too; Mother Wilkins, Father Mundy. But that isn’t the second squad’s second peculiarity, it’s only an accident.
Father Mundy invented our squad ‘no obscenity’ rule. We want to make it clear we are not actually part of this army. We’re princely orphans left on the wrong doorstep, maybe bastards of the blood. It helps. This might well be one of Father’s greatest coups. For a guy who acts so dumb sometimes, he can be shrewd. Mundy’s twenty-six, a dropout – but not fallen – almost priest. He and Mother are the old men in the squad now, the rest of us are under twenty.
We pick up our equipment at the edge of the forest and are back in our dirt dent before the next guard comes on. Mother’s got himself fairly well in hand. It’ll be Bud Miller, our mechanical genius, crossword-puzzle inventor and child poet, along with Stan Shutzer, Jewish avenger and aspiring millionaire advertising executive. Both Bud and Stan have jewelers for fathers, but I think it’s about the only thing they have in common, except being smart and at the same time dumb enough to be in an infantry I and R squad. They’re on the next four, from two to six. Edwards’s squad’s got the night part but then there’re twelve of them so they can keep it two hours each, and it shouldn’t be bad. After the ball is over, the musicians will take their usual guard duty again.
Mother and I straggle back to our bivouac. He and I are tenting together now. Before the Saar, he was with Jim Freize. Jim was definitely a close second to Mother in the neatness competition. They’d fuss around getting their area cleaned up, everything neatly packed away; then they’d meander down to the motor pool to wipe and shine their jeep. Neither of them knew the first thing about how to keep a jeep running, but theirs was always spic and span, even in the damned Metz mud. Miller, the mad mechanic, won’t let the motor pool jocks near any of our squad jeeps, but he’d only laugh at Jim and Mother puttering around.
I crawl into my sloppy side of our tent and pull out the book we’re reading right now. It’s called A Farewell to Arms. I have pages 215 to 310. Wilkins is ahead of me and Shutzer behind. Shutzer’s been hounding me all day to hurry it up; Wilkins finished last night. It’s just my luck being caught between two of the fastest readers on our side of the Siegfried Line. We rip books apart so we can read them together.
The book before this was All Quiet on the Western Front. We talked it over and voted as a squad to quit the war first chance we got. We were still together then, outside Saarbrücken. Father Mundy didn’t realize, until we told him, the characters in the book were German. But he might have gotten skipped over with some pages. We usually leave Father until last; he reads each word as if he’s licking it.
I finish my pages and put them at the opening of our tent for Shutzer.
This chapter is called briefing. There is a typical military briefing coming up soon but I think I should give our real briefing here while I’m supposed to be drifting off to sleep.
Briefing, in the army, means explaining. The army mind wants everything short and simple, except wars. Maybe that’s why they call it briefing. But sometimes it’s hard to be short and simple. Probably, in a certain way, this whole book, not just this chapter, is a briefing; but I’m not quite sure for or about what.
Our