I nodded. I could well remember how it had been during the Gulf War (or how it was going to be). You tell people enough that this war is worth fighting and that the soldiers are gods, they start to believe it. If it worked in the cynical nineties I could imagine how well it worked in the comparatively naive forties.
"Even when people I knew," Mr. Blackmore went on, "Started coming back crippled or burned, with arms or legs missing, even when I'd hear they had been killed and buried over there, it still didn't dissuade me. I wanted to go. I thought I wanted to go more than I wanted to stay and start my life with Mary. After all, Mary would still be waiting for me when I got back, wouldn't she?
"When I was a senior all of my buddies started enlisting. You could do that at seventeen if you had your parent's permission. So I asked my Dad if I could go and he let me." He shook his head. "To this day I still don't understand it. He let me drop out of school and go to war. I'd never seen him as proud of me as he was the day I asked him if I could. We went down to the recruiting office together and we signed the papers. I went through all of the induction physicals and testing and finally they gave me my ship off date. I raised my hand and swore an oath and I was a soldier.
"I wanted to get married before I left but Mary's parents wouldn't let her. They gave me all kinds of reasons why she couldn't. All kinds of reasons but the real one. Mary's Dad had been in World War I, a combat soldier. He knew what I was in for. He didn't want his daughter being a war widow at fifteen or sixteen.
"So we promised we'd marry as soon as I got back home. We promised we'd write to each other. We promised." He sighed. "And off I went. Of course merely being in the war wasn't enough for me. Oh no, I had to volunteer for the most dangerous job I could think of; the airborne infantry. Here was a division that had been known to lose more people in routine training than some regular infantry divisions lost in combat. That was for me. After all, when you're seventeen, you don't think you can die, right?"
I nodded solemnly at his words, remembering my own youth the first time around and remembering my feelings of immortality when I'd returned. Feelings that Richard Fairview had ended with a sweep of his knife.
"They took me of course." He went on. "I was assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division. By my eighteenth birthday in late April of 1944, I was at a base in Southern England, training for the invasion of France."
"D-Day." I said, looking at him. I knew that the 82nd had been pummeled on D-Day and on many operations after it. This man had lived through all of that somehow.
He nodded. "Yeah, I was there. I'm coming to that."
"All the time I was in basic and in airborne training, Mary and I wrote letters back and forth. We told each other we loved one another. We promised to be true. I even wrote her love poems and put them at the bottom of each letter. I told her that I missed her and that I couldn't wait to get back so we could have that church wedding. Her letters said the same; she even used to tell me whom she was going to invite to the wedding and who she wasn't. You know how women are?"
Before I could answer that he looked at me sharply. "Oh yeah. You do."
I decided silence was the best answer to that comment. After a moment he went on.
"The rumors about losses in training turned out to be true." He said. "We lost a lot of people before I ever left United States soil. Parachute technology wasn't quite what it is today back then. People would go down and splat when their chutes didn't open for whatever reason. That's what we called it: a splat. Once an entire plane crashed on take-off during a training exercise killing the whole damn platoon inside. Forty airborne troops killed in an instant before they ever got near the war. Gradually I began to realize that I wasn't immortal. If Joe Hecklemeyer, another seventeen year old in my company and a good friend of mine, could die in something so stupid as a training accident, then so could I. I guess I was lucky in a way. I came to the realization that I was in a dangerous business long before D-Day. Those poor slobs in the regular infantry didn't come to that conclusion until the ramps of their landing craft dropped down on the beach.
"The letters from Mary made my day every time I got them. I would read them and they would make me feel better about what I was in for. I was fighting for Mary, for Mary's parents, for the children that Mary and I would someday have. It gave me something to live for, something to hope for. Mary was my reason for coming home, do you understand?"
"Yes." I said. "I do."
He looked at me suspiciously for a moment, not wanting to believe me. But he could see in my eyes that I was not putting him on. "Somehow I think you do." He said.
"The letters from Mary followed me to England when I went, although they'd sometimes take a little longer to reach me. But when late May rolled around I suddenly stopped hearing from her. I didn't know why. I thought at first that it was a screw-up with the mail but other guys were getting letters from home. Some of them were even from Eastern Washington. If they were getting their letters, why wasn't I?
"Before I had a chance to become seriously concerned about this the rumors began to fly through the division. We would be invading France soon and the 82nd and the 101st were slated to be the first in. I began to sense that the time to earn my money was coming soon.
"In the late hours of June 5, we were ordered to assemble. We were told that Eisenhower had given the order and the invasion was on for the next morning. We were a little surprised by this since it had been raining and windy for the past three days and was raining even then, but we were assured that a brief break in the weather would give us a window. My platoon, the forty men I'd trained with since my assignment, a mixed group of combat veterans and green soldiers like me, were assigned as part of a battalion tasked to take a bridge and hold it until the regular infantry, invading from the Normandy coast, could advance to us.
"At 12:30 AM, the morning of June 6th, we were loaded into the C-47s and off we went. I was in the front of the plane, near the pilots, and therefore would be one of the last to jump. I was loaded down with my pack, my rifle, my parachute and a picture of Mary I carried with me for good luck. I simply stood there with the rest of them, waiting for the signal. Finally it came. One by one we walked to the rear of the plane and jumped out, our static lines pulling open our chutes for us. Just before I went I took one last look at Mary's face, gave the picture a kiss, and then stowed it in my pack. Out I went into the night.
"There were five planes in our group and we were supposed to be dropped five miles from our objective. Our rally point was a clearing along the river. From there we were supposed to march in and assault the bridge, taking it by surprise." He snorted in disgust. "Apparently the lead pilot of our group was a little TOO good at his job. He dropped us right over the bridge itself. A bridge that was guarded by anti-aircraft guns and spotlights, a couple of tanks, and a company of German infantry with heavy and light machine guns."
"Jesus." I whispered.
"Jesus is right." He answered, drinking from his beer again. "They slaughtered most of us before we even hit the ground. People I knew intimately, people I'd trained with, my commanding officers, other greenies like me, were shot out of the air by flak shells and machine guns as we floated down. The spotlights would hit a group as they descended and tracers would arc up, blowing them to pieces. As I came down, near the rear of the group, I was forced to watch this in horror, knowing there was nothing I could do about it. I saw hundreds of flashes from the ground as they shot us out of the sky like clay pigeons at a skeet range. Well over half of us were dead by the time our feet hit the earth. Most of our company that lived through this came down around the bridge. They were shot as soon as they landed, most of them before they could even get a shot off. Some of them drowned when they landed in the river. Some got hung up in the trestles of the bridge and were picked off there.