A pair of mossy boulders situated close together provided both a bracing for the bipod of the BAR and a measure of cover from return fire, almost like the embrasure of a fortification.
He took the time to once more scan his target area with the pair of binoculars and shrewdly estimated the range at about eight hundred yards, .give or take some dozen or so yards. With the bipod resting securely on the gray boulders at either side, he slid backward and calibrated the rear sights for the range he had guessed. Then he set the steel-shod butt firmly into the hollow of his shoulder, nestled his cheek against the stock, took the grip in his hand and crooked his forefinger around the trigger.
X
Expertly feathering the trigger so as to loose off only three rounds per firing until he knew himself to be dead on target, Milo cruelly shocked the understrength squad of Wehrmacht as they were preparing their deadly surprise for the two small units of attacking Americans.
As the bursts of .30 caliber bullets struck the fire-blackened stones and ricocheted around and about the area of the ruined house, the Gefreite reared up high enough from where he lay to use his missing Zugsfuhrer’s fine binoculars to sweep the area from which the fire seemed to be coming. It did not take the twenty-year-old veteran long to spot the flashes of the BAR, and as the present danger to his squad superseded in his experienced mind the planned ambush, he pointed out the location of the automatic weapon that now had them under its well-aimed fire to the Maschinengetoehrmann and ordered return fire.
When he had caught the glint of sun on glass, Milo had anticipated counterbattery fire and had scooted his body off to one side, behind the larger and longer of the two boulders, pressing himself tightly against it and the hard, pebbly ground, so he only had to wait until the German machine gun ceased firing, brush off stone shards and bits of moss, then get back into firing position. As he dropped the partially emptied magazine into a waiting hand, then slipped and hooked in a fresh one, he smiled coldly. Now he knew he had the range.
As Chamberlin later stated it, “Well, when I beard that damn fuckin’ tearing-linoleum sound, I knew fuckin’ well it was more up there ahead than just some friggin’ Jerry sniper in that place, so I just stayed down myself, and I hoped old Gardner would have the fuckin’ good sense to do the same thing, and of course he did.
“Then, when the BAR cut in on full—for some reason, I hadn’t heard the fucker before then—and I realized it must be shooting at the Jerries from the fuckin’ road, all I could figger then was that old Pettus, he hadn’t been killed after all and was giving us covering fire, keeping the fuckin’ Jerries down so’s we could get up to hand-grenade range of them. So I waved my boys on, slung my MI and got a pineapple out and ready.”
Milo was working on the seventh magazine when he saw the flash, then after a pause heard the cruummpp of the first grenade explosion within the perimeter of the German position. At that point, he ceased firing lest he find himself shooting at his own men. When he had collected the emptied magazines, he reslung the BAR and Thompson, slid down the bank and was there to greet the two sections as they straggled back to their starting point.
When Sergeant Chamberlin saw Milo standing there, his eyes widened, boggled out, and he almost dropped the cased pair of fine Zeiss binoculars he had stripped from off the now incomplete corpse of the Wehrmacht Gefreite, and he still was just standing and staring, trying to comprehend the incomprehensible, as the others came up behind him.
“Fuck a fuckin’ duck!” Corporal Gardner exclaimed, letting the bolstered broomstick Mauser that had been the machine gunner’s sidearm dangle in the dust beside his worn field shoes. “Sarge … I means, lootinunt, we thought you’s daid, fer shure. I know damn well that fuckin’ bullet hit you, Gawd dammit! I seen the dust fly up outen your fuckin’ shirt, I did. So why the fuck ain’t you a’layin’ dead, like old Pettus there, huh?”
And Milo had no real answer for the understandable questions of the squad members—Chamberlin, Gardner and the rest—or for his own, not then, not for years yet to come. So recalling old John Saxon’s explanation of the last unexplainable incident of similar nature back in the States, he spun a tale of the bullet passing through his loose-fitting field shirt without fleshing anywhere, opined that he must have struck hard enough when he dove to the rocky ground at the sound of the first shot, the one that had killed Pettus, to briefly stun him. The blood still wet in his clothing he blamed on wrestling with the BAR man’s gory corpse to free the automatic rifle and its belt of magazines.
Although he still caught the odd stare from Chamber-lin and Gardner, now and again, for weeks, they and the squad members all ended up believing him, for disbelief would have meant a descent into madness, after all. But Milo himself did not, could not put any stock in his glib fabrications. He knew damned good and well that the sniper’s shot had been accurate and should by all rights have been his death wound. In a logical world, he should be back there rotting in a shallow grave beside Pettus, with a steel pot and an identity tag for a marker, waiting for the attention of a graves registration unit. But he was not, and that inescapable fact cost him more than one sleepless night of wondering and speculation as to just what made him so different from the millions of other men now fighting and dying on the continent of Europe and elsewhere around the world.
In August of that momentous year of 1944, a second Allied invasion of Fortress Europe took place, this one in southern France, and eventually elements of this force hooked up with General George Patton’s hell-bent-for-leather Third Army. But these events were of little interest to the men of a certain battalion of General Courtney Hodges’ First Army. They had all they could do just trying to stay alive and still do the tasks assigned their much-reduced, worn-out, fought-out units. When, in early September, the entire forward movement ground to a halt through lack of gasoline, lubricants and most of the other sinews of modern mechanized warfare, the respite was none too soon for the common soldiers and the company-grade officers.
In their encampment by the side of a meandering tributary stream to the nearby Meuse River, the twenty-two men of Lieutenant Milo Moray’s platoon moved like automatons and as little as possible, their exhaustion and malnutrition writ large upon their dirty, stubbly faces and staring from the deep-sunk, dark-circled bloodshot eyes. With a seven-man strength, Chamberlin’s still was the largest “squad” of the “platoon”; Bernie Cohen had five men left in his third squad, but Ryan had been seriously wounded and the second squad now was being led by Corporal Gardner.
But high as had been the losses of enlisted personnel in Charlie Company during their hotly resisted advance across France, the proportionate loss of commissioned officers had been even higher; Milo was now not the only platoon leader commissioned from the ranks since D-Day. None of the original second lieutenants was left with a platoon, in fact. Captain Leo Burke had lost part of a leg when his jeep had triggered off a land mine. He had been replaced by his exec, First Lieutenant Tom Beverley, like Burke a Virginian and a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute, though a year or so after Burke. His new exec was an OCS second lieutenant sent down to Charlie Company by division, a replacement officer who had still been Stateside on D-Day, Lieutenant John Brettmann.