By the time that young Terence Hunicutter was cut almost in two by a burst of fire from a Maschinengewehr hidden behind a Normandy hedgerow, old John Saxon, now a major, had been sent back to replace the dead battalion commander, and he was quick to approve Captain Leo Burke’s recommendation of a battlefield commission for Master Sergeant Milo Moray.
There were no significant changes to Milo’s life in the wake of the promotion, for he had been doing the identical job since they had waded ashore on the 6th of June, anyway. He just cut off his stripes and pinned the pair of gold bars gifted him by Leo Burke onto his epaulets. Then he buckled on his pistol belt, shouldered a packload of ammo and grenades for his platoon, clapped his battered steel pot on his dirty head, picked up his Thompson and departed the Company CP.
Taking a long and circuitous but relatively safe route, Milo^ot back to the somewhat reduced platoon tired but elated that at least they now had their expended ammo replaced and a musette bag full of chocolate D-bars and cigarettes to help keep body and soul together until someone got combat rations up to them again.
His inherited command now included the remnants of three rifle squads—one of eleven, one of nine and one of eight men. The last remaining light machine gun section had been pulled away from him two days earlier to be added to the CP guard lines; indeed, he had seen and traded friendly obscenities with two of those men while in the CP area.
Calling over Sergeants Chamberlin and Ryan and Corporal Bernie Cohen, who now led the third squad, Milo laid the two golden bars out on the palm of his filthy hand, saying, “Take a good, long look at them, gentlemen, because this is the last time you’re going to see the fuckers until we get somewhere where nobody’s shooting at officers and noncoms, in particular. The pack has ammo and grenades—divvy them up equally. I couldn’t get more than four new BAR magazines, so give the extra one to Pettus—he’s better with the weapon than the other two are.
“Tell your boys they better all start saving their Garand clips. There’s been another fucking snafu in supply, I’d say, because I got the last clipped .30-06 that company had. All the new ammo that came in on the last truckload is linked for machine guns, and I brought along a couple boxes of that, too, for the BAR men. No rifle grenades came, only pineapples and no adapters for those, so no point in lugging along the grenade launchers on tomorrow morning’s patrol, Greg.”
The hulking Greg Chamberlin nodded. “First squad is it again, huh, Milo … uhh, lootenant?”
Milo grinned briefly, his teeth gleaming against his dirty stubbled face. “Yep. Always a bride, never a bridesmaid, right, Greg? That’s what happens when you’re the best—or claim you are—though. And Greg, Gus, Bernie, so long as I’m the highest-ranking man around, it’s still Milo to you.
“Okay, let’s get the ammo distributed, then you can hand out some D-bars and smokes I brought. Then, Greg, come back here and I’ll go over the map with you; I’ll be going along on this one.”
“Don’t you allus?” remarked Chamberlin, chuckling.
The patrol set out at dawn and had moved well out into the unknown countryside by the time it was light enough to see clearly for any great distance. It was then that Pettus slammed his body sideways into the high, grassy bank on his right, his slung BAR under his lanky body, a hole in his head just under the rim of his helmet, blood beginning to dribble from it as tobacco juice was dribbling from the corners of his slackening mouth. He was already down and dead before any of the rest of them even heard the sound of the shot that had killed him.
Before any man could react in any way, a 7.9mm bullet took Milo in the pit of the arm he had just raised to dash the sweat away from his eyes. The bullet bored completely through his chest before exiting in the left-frontal quadrant and going through the biceps, as well, prior to speeding on. Milo later figured that it had skewered both lungs as well as his heart. The lancing agony had been exquisite, unbearable, and Milo screamed. He drew in a deep, agonizing breath to scream once again, and that second scream choked away as he coughed up a boiling rush of blood. He almost strangled on the blood.
All of the patrol had gone to ground. Chamberlin wriggled over to first Pettus, then Milo. After the most cursory of examinations and a brief, futile attempt to wrestle the BAR from under Pettus’ dead weight, the big sergeant got the men off the exposed section of roadway without any more losses. Having fortunately spotted the flash of the shot that had struck Milo, Chamberlin and Corporal Gardner divided the riflemen between them, then Chamberlin set out in a wide swing with his section, going to the left fast, while Gardner’s section moved more slowly, almost directly at the objective, now and then having one of his men gingerly expose himself to keep the attention of the sniper on this nearer unit.
Milo, back at the ambush point, just lay still, hoping that by so doing he could hold the pain at bay until he had lost enough blood to pass into a coma and so die in peace and relative comfort. But he did not, he could not find and sink into that warm, soft, all-enveloping darkness, and the pain went on and on, unabated, movement or no movement. In instinctive response to his body’s demands, he of course continued to breathe, but he did so as shallowly as possible, lest he bring on another bout of coughing and choking on his own blood.
The pain grew worse as he lay there; so bad was it that he gritted his teeth, grinding them and groaning. But then, strangely, the pain began to slowly ebb away, to lessen imperceptibly. Although he felt weak and terribly thirsty, he felt no more drowsiness than he had before he had been shot. He opened his eyes then, to find that he could see, and see very clearly, which last surprised him. What he saw was the two sections of Chamberlin’s squad parting and wriggling, then proceeding at a crouching run in two directions clearly intended to converge upon what must be the sniper’s nest—the jumbled stones and still-standing chimney of a burned-out farmhouse.
Something deep within him told him to take a better look, a closer look at the distant objective against which his last full rifle squad was now advancing. He cautiously raised himself just enough to drag from beneath him his cased binoculars, gritting his teeth against the renewed waves of pain that never materialized. What he saw through the optics was three figures clad in Wehrmacht Feldgrau, busily setting up a light machine gun, an MG-42, by the look of it, and fitted out with one of the Doppeltrommel drum magazines. The thing was on one of the rare tripods, which would serve to make its fire more accurate and devastating than the usual unsteady bipodal mount.
With no base of fire to cover them and their advance, he knew that those men of his would be slaughtered. They would not know of that deadly machine gun— for, after all, they thought themselves to be stalking only a sniper and an assistant or two and could not see from their positions just what a hideous surprise the Krauts were setting up for them—until the high rate of fire of the MG-42 was engaged in ripping the very life from out of them.
He immediately dismissed his Thompson. The submachine gun was a superlative, if very heavy, weapon at normal combat ranges, but in this instance, he knew it just could not reach the needed distance. Forgetting his wounds and his pain in his worry for his men in such a state of deadly danger out there, he allowed his body to slide down the bank, then wormed his way back to where Pettus lay.
All of his strength was required to shift the big man s weight enough to get both the BAR and the six-pocket magazine belt off it without standing up and giving that sniper a new target. Then, laden with his own weapons and equipment, as well as the twenty-odd pounds of automatic rifle and its seven weighty twenty-round magazines, he crawled up the bank to its brushy top and took up a position that allowed him a splendid field of fire.