“I think you’re too ornery to die,” Red said. “But you’d best take care, anyways.” It might destroy Gerald and Arielle Potts if anything happened to their only child. They’d always doted on him.
Ivan had been the most rambunctious of Red’s friends throughout their school years, leading the gang when it came to childish pranks, overnight hunting parties and outhouse tipping. He’d given his poor parents a lot of grief. Red recalled one night when Ivan had sneaked a cow from the barn of a local farmer into a high-school classroom. It wasn’t discovered until the morning—along with a big mess.
“I’ve made it this far.” Ivan’s voice snapped Red from his memories. “I plan to make it through this war alive.”
Once more, Red eyed the decorations on his friend’s chest. Ivan Potts had a right to be proud of the medals he’d earned. He’d proven himself to be a man in this war, and his parents would be more than proud.
Red’s medals were packed away in the duffle under his feet. He wore his regular uniform instead of military dress, and he had kept his head down most times on the trip home, hoping nobody’d notice him and start asking questions. The last thing he wanted to do was talk about the war. Or talk about anything, for that matter.
War sure changed people.
All his life, Red had started conversations easily with strangers, never running out of something to talk about. But that had been a different Charles Frederick Meyer.
Ivan glanced out the window. “We’re getting close.”
Red nodded, rubbing sweat from his forehead as the sunlight beat down through the window. “It’s nice to be nearing home, sure enough.” The hills got a little taller, the valleys deeper in the southwest part of Missouri.
“I can’t wait to be back for good,” Ivan said. “How about you, Red? Are you coming home to stay, or do they have plans for you over on our side of the world? To hear Bertie tell it, the Army can’t do without you.”
Red warmed at that but he didn’t know what to say now. “War’s over for me, probably.” He couldn’t bring himself to explain why.
It’d be easy for a man in his shape to think he wasn’t worth much of anything anymore, since he probably wouldn’t even be able to do the work that needed doing at home now, much less help tidy things up after the ruin of a whole continent. He’d wanted to be there still, liberating the prisoners and helping set things in order again.
He squeezed his eyes shut against the June morning sun, but he opened them again quickly, and caught Ivan watching him.
“I don’t think the war will ever be over for us,” Ivan said, his voice suddenly soft. “It follows a guy wherever he goes.”
Red nodded. The nightmares…
“Thanks to Bertie and her friends, I’ve kept up with your whereabouts most of the year,” Ivan said. “How’s Italy?”
“Hardly anything there anymore,” Red said. “Except the mud and rubble of wrecked buildings. Always the mud. Heard you took Iwo Jima.”
Pain crossed Ivan’s features, and Red knew he’d said the wrong thing. Would life ever get back to the way it had been, when everyone didn’t have to tiptoe around minefields of conversation?
“You don’t have to answer that,” Red told him.
Ivan nodded slowly. He swallowed and met Red’s gaze with a fierce stare. Then he looked down and swallowed again.
“We were landing on the beach,” he said, his voice so soft Red had to strain to hear. “Next thing I knew, the night sky seemed to explode all around us.”
Red winced. He knew what that meant.
“Five of my best buddies were killed before I could move.” The words seemed to spring from Ivan—fast, hard, his voice low—as if he’d been bottling them up inside.
Red studied his friend, but didn’t see any signs of damage, no Purple Heart. “But they didn’t get you.”
Ivan shook his head. “Sometimes I think it would’ve been better if I’d gotten a bullet, too.”
“No, it wouldn’t.” But Red understood.
Ivan glanced at Red, eyes narrowing. “What’s your worst memory?”
Red couldn’t tell him. He could probably never tell anybody. So he pulled out another recollection. “German soldiers surrounding our fire support team.”
The surprise didn’t show in Ivan’s eyes as much as it did in the sudden jutting of his strong chin—as if bracing himself for details. “You were captured.”
“It’s been a couple of months.” Even now, Red could picture in his mind the grim, white faces of his captors. He could feel the fear licking at his insides, almost feel the rough hands shoving him and Conner and Beall through fields of mud.
“When?” Ivan asked. “Why didn’t I hear about it? Bertie would have told me about it in a letter.” He looked at Red’s uniform for the first time. “Where are your medals?”
Red shrugged. “It don’t matter. I’m alive. Before word could be carried back home that we were prisoners of war, we escaped in the middle of the night.”
Ivan gave a low whistle. “If that doesn’t beat all.”
“Just in time, too. I got the impression, picking up on some of their words, that they’d planned to kill us soon.”
“You speak German?”
Red nodded. “I learned some words from my pa years ago. I hadn’t even realized I remembered them until I listened to our captors talking to one another. There were five of them and only three of us. I thought we were goners.”
“How’d you get away?”
Red shrugged. He couldn’t talk about the whole thing. “The fifth night, after a long day’s march, we got loose from our bonds.” He couldn’t go into more detail without explaining more than he wanted to.
Ivan waited, eyes slightly narrowed in confusion. “Just like that?”
Red nodded. He’d never thought much about the humanity of the enemy. That wasn’t something they talked about in the foxholes or on the scoutin’ trail. All they did in the foxholes was curse the enemy, and do everything they could to make sure he died.
The rattle-clack-rattle-clack of the train filled the silence for a few long moments as the two men sat steeping in the ugliness they’d seen.
“Don’t mention that bit about the massacre to my parents,” Ivan said softly. “Why worry them about something that’s already happened? They’ve worried enough about me in the past three years.”
“Reckon there’s lots our families are never gonna know about.”
“Sometimes it seems the farther I get from the war, the more I remember,” Ivan said.
Red knew what he meant. All that loud commotion clattered around in his mind, along with pictures of mangled or dead friends. He still felt the pain of his own wounds—both in his flesh and in his heart.
“Maybe we have to remember,” Ivan said. “A man’s got to stay on the alert.”
Red agreed, but he couldn’t help wondering if he was already going soft. Since he was a German by blood, he couldn’t hate his former countrymen.
It was hard not to hate them when he heard about all those concentration camps, the awful things they did to other human beings. Torture? Gas chambers? Trying to stamp out a whole race of people? Genocide, it was called. Devilish. Straight out of the pits of hell.
As