Imre Kovacs scribbled in a notebook. Was he writing in Magyar or in English? That didn’t matter, either. He’d have to know English, or he wouldn’t be a captain. Closing the book, he said, “If I had a forint for every Magyar POW who told me a story like that, I’d be one of those capitalist oppressors myself.”
“I think you just called me something I’m not, or not exactly,” Istvan said.
“Oh, a Magyar?” Captain Kovacs didn’t pretend to misunderstand him. “If I said ‘every POW from Hungary,’ would you be happier?”
“Happier? Nah, not so you’d notice. I can’t do anything about what I am. But you’d be more, mm, accurate.” Istvan hesitated. “Can I ask you something else?”
“Be my guest.”
“What’s it like for Jews in America?”
Kovacs pursed his lips. “It isn’t perfect. It isn’t perfect for us anywhere, even in Israel. I’m sure of that. But it’s not so bad. There are people who don’t like us, but there aren’t any laws against us.” He smiled a sardonic smile. “It’s not like we’re niggers, after all.”
The key word came out in English. “Like we’re what?” Istvan asked.
“Colored people,” the captain explained. “What Europeans do to Jews, Americans do to them. Everybody does it to somebody, believe me.”
Istvan did, too. He found a different question: “What’s going to happen to me here?”
“You’ll play football on Saturday,” Kovacs answered. “After that, who knows? We may talk some more. Or we may not.” And with that Istvan had to be not especially content.
–
Red Chinese 105s howled in. Cade Curtis crouched in his dugout and hoped one of them wouldn’t come down right where he happened to be. He’d begun to hate just about everything that had anything to do with war, but he hated getting shelled worse than most things. No matter what Einstein said, this was God rolling dice with the universe. Whether you lived or died had nothing to do with you. Luck ruled, luck good or bad.
You were just as dead if you stopped a rifle bullet with your ear. You were just as maimed if you stopped one with your leg. At least someone had aimed the rifle at you, though. Shells came down like rain or snow.
If you lived through a bombardment, you really had to worry when the shells stopped falling. That was when the enemy would try to take advantage while he had you discombobulated.
Better to discombobu late than never, Cade thought vaguely. He wondered if he had combat fatigue. He was sure as hell tired of fighting. The brass insisted that wasn’t the same thing, but when in the whole history of the world had the brass known its ass from third base?
Somebody down the trench was screaming for a medic. Cade bit his lip till he tasted blood. Luck, good or bad.
Then, except for the screams, it was quiet. “Out!” Cade yelled. “Out and up onto the firing step! Be ready!”
He hoped he was giving the right order. The Chinks were sneaky bastards. Sometimes they’d stop the artillery fire, wait till you emerged to repel infantry, and then start shelling you again. They had more tricks than a trained circus monkey.
They weren’t trying that particular one today. Even before Cade got to the firing step, two American machine guns had started raking the ground in front of the trenches. There had been three sandbagged machine-gun positions that should have been banging away, but one was silent. Cade feared he knew what that meant. One of those 105mm rounds, or maybe more than one, had smashed through the protection. There’d be casualties besides the poor guy who was still screaming his head off.
Here came the Reds. It wasn’t a human wave like the ones that had swamped the UN forces by the Chosin Reservoir. Mao’s commanders understood they had to spend men to advance, because they had less materiel to spend than the Americans did. But they wasted fewer soldiers than they had at the end of 1950. They’d learned how to do fire-and-move rather than thundering forward in a mob to get chopped down.
Cade fired a short burst from his PPSh. The diagonally cut end of the barrel jacket made a compensator of sorts, so the submachine gun didn’t pull up and to the right as much as it would have otherwise. But it still would if you went through a magazine at a time, so Cade tried not to. When he remembered. When panic didn’t jam his finger to the trigger. Fire discipline, they called that. Like a lot of disciplines, it was more easily preached than practiced.
He ducked down behind the parapet and came up again a few feet away for another quick burst. The Red Chinese soldiers shrieked just like white men when bullets slammed into them.
Howard Sturgis sported a first lieutenant’s silver bar now, not the gold one he’d worn before. He still carried a Garand like an enlisted man, though: no faggy officer’s M-1 carbine or Russian piece for him. “Ain’t this fun?” he said.
“Now that you mention it, no,” Cade answered. “If you want to ask me whether it’s better than getting killed and having buzzards and stray dogs squabbling over your carcass, I may tell you something different.”
“I wish we had some tanks,” Sturgis said.
“Wish for the moon while you’re at it,” Cade advised. “And keep on wishing Stalin doesn’t decide to send the Chinks some more. Wish hard on that one.”
“Bet your ass, sir.” Sturgis fired a couple of shots of his own. The clip on his rifle went dry and popped out with a distinctive ping. He slammed a new one into place.
Another soldier on Cade’s right squeezed off a few rounds of his own. “There you go, Jimmy!” Curtis said. “Give ’em hell.”
“Bet your ass, sir,” Jimmy said, echoing Howard Sturgis. The soldier formerly known as Chun Wong-un was as foulmouthed as any American GI. More and more, Cade thought of him as if he were an American GI. The longer he stayed with the regiment, the more he acted like one.
Jimmy soaked up English like a sponge. He’d been a soldier of sorts even under a son of a bitch like Captain Pak Ho-san. Now, except for his flat face and narrow eyes, he made a near-perfect copy of a dogface.
Oh, there was one other difference. Most dogfaces wanted as little to do with officers as they could finagle. Jimmy thought the sun rose and set on Captain Cade Curtis. Cade had thought of rescuing him as adopting a puppy. Now he had a full-grown companion, but one who still didn’t want to leave his side.
Sturgis didn’t think of it the same way. “You know what he is?” the veteran said. “He’s our Hiwi.”
“Our what?” Cade didn’t know the term.
“Our Hiwi,” Sturgis repeated. “Some of the krauts we faced in France, especially the outfits that came from the Eastern Front, they had these Russians attached to them, doing the cooking and the horseshoeing and the driving and anything else you can think of. Hiwis, they called ’em-it was their slang for volunteers. Sure, some of the Russians joined up to keep from starving to death in POW camps. But the rest were just like Jimmy. They weren’t supposed to fight, but some of ’em sure as hell did that, too.”
“But they were on the other side before, right?” Cade said. “Jimmy was on our team.”
“Yeah. Or I guess so,” Sturgis said. “You ask him how he liked it, though, he’s gonna tell you it wasn’t so hot.”
Cade intended to do no such thing. Jimmy was working as hard as he could to forget the days when he was Chun Won-ung. If he could have turned his eyes blue to seem more American, he would have done it in a flash. In a way, that flattered the United States. In another way, it left the adoptive GI with a problem, one he might not have worried about yet.
“One of these days,” Cade said, “this war’ll be over and done with.”
“You hope!” Sturgis said.
“Fuckin’-A, I hope,” Cade agreed. “It’ll be over, and we’ll go home. Jimmy’s not coming with us, not unless we stencil MEDICAL SUPPLIES on his forehead or something.”