She grinned wickedly and lathered the front of his body, taking special care to stroke his manhood. She hadn’t played scrub-a-dub with a guy since her sophomore year in college with one of her brother’s friends. Her brother had been really angry when he found out. The young man she’d cleansed had joined the Marines and gone on to fight on Guadalcanal. He’d come back with his body intact but his mind totally and horribly vacant. She’d gone to see him at the Bethesda Naval Hospital and been horrified. Her once vibrant friend who might have been a lover and even a serious suitor was nothing more than a vacant shell. His eyes were focused on something distant. Winnie had stayed for only a few minutes before leaving in tears. It was all the more reason to do what she could to end this damn war.
Ah well. It didn’t take more than a minute or two before Ernie gasped and climaxed.
“I owe you,” he said.
“And maybe someday I’ll let you pay me back,” she said. She was realizing that she was reconsidering Ernie and their relationship. So what if he was a puppy that needed a lot of training? She was a good trainer. She realized that she had compared Ernie to her brother and brought up his memory without feeling like crying. Maybe Ernie was good for her. “Now finish up and get out of there. You can buy me dinner.”
* * *
Wally Oster had been as surprised as anyone when he’d been reclassified from 4-F to 1-A. His 4-F classification meant he had been rejected for military service because of his mental deficiencies. Even his grandfather said the boy was dumber than a stone. His family felt that his reclassification to 1-A, ready and eligible to be drafted, was due to several circumstances. First, the local draft board in their small west Texas town was under pressure to supply more warm bodies for the military. Thus, they had revisited a number of people whom they had deemed unqualified in the past. The second reason was that Wally had been caught vandalizing some of farms in the area that were owned by prominent citizens and even members of the board.
After being drafted, Wally had somehow muddled through basic training. The normally harsh and often brutal drill sergeants recognized that the lost and ignorant boy was a hopeless case, so they gave up trying and just passed him through. It was much like his teacher in the one-room schoolhouse out on the west Texas flatlands. She’d promoted him through to eighth grade and then he’d dropped out of school to work and earn pennies an hour as a laborer.
After basic, he’d been shipped directly to Europe where he’d wound up in the 105th Infantry Division. He didn’t realize it, but there were a number of former rejects like him in it and other divisions as the army began to scrape the bottom of the barrel and beneath.
Wally did like carrying a rifle. It made him feel powerful. So, when someone asked for a volunteer to take a German prisoner back to the stockade, he’d jumped at the chance. When he saw the scrawny young boy he was supposed to guard, he’d been disappointed. The boy was just a little smaller than he, scared, and not a threat and certainly not a superman. He’d giggled. The boy wasn’t even Clark Kent. Wally liked the Superman stories. They were even better than Batman.
Someone had worked the kid over pretty thoroughly. His face was red and bruised, his eyes were swollen and his lower lip was split. Tough shit, thought Wally. He was a Nazi.
His orders were simple. Take him directly to the stockade and do not let him escape. Wally was given an M1 carbine and a fifteen round clip of ammunition. He loaded the carbine but was careful not to release the safety.
The prisoner was handcuffed with his hands to his front. He wondered why the people from Seventh Army who had come to interrogate him had waited until it was almost dark to send him back. Wally thought that they must know what they were doing since they were officers. His real concern was that he might miss dinner. He was one of a number who actually liked army food since it was so much better than what families back home had been able to afford. He’d gained weight on mess hall chow and even liked chipped beef on toast, which was always called shit on a shingle. Some of his friends laughed at him, but he didn’t notice any of them skipping a meal. Since he spent much of his work day doing menial chores at the mess hall, he thought he could probably manage to scrounge up a meal.
They had gone about halfway when the boy announced that he had to pee. Wally had come from a German enclave in Texas and understood. “Why didn’t you go before we started out?”
“I have to pee now,” the boy announced and abruptly turned into an alleyway between several large tents.
Wally swore. He had no choice but to follow him. With astonishing quickness, the boy wheeled and yanked the carbine from Wally’s grip and pointed it at him.
“Take off your uniform and boots.”
Wally whimpered and complied. He had heard the slight click of the safety releasing. He was in grave danger. He also realized that the boy had somehow gotten out of his handcuffs. Damn. The boy had said they were too tight and one of the officers had loosened them. Damn.
“Lie down,” Wally was ordered, and now crying openly, he obeyed.
“I don’t want to die,” he sobbed. “I want my mother.”
“Coward,” Hans Gruber said as he hit Wally in the head with the stock of his carbine. Wally tried to speak, but his world had become dark.
* * *
“Captain Tanner I presume.”
Tanner laughed. They were outside a former school that had been designated as a hospital. “Doctor Hagerman, are you following me? Are you that concerned about my keeping my feet dry that you came all this way?”
The two men shook hands warmly. “No, I did not travel all the way from Belgium to see how your feet are doing. I got tired of treating GIs with penicillin for the clap and wanted to do some real doctoring.”
Tanner pretended to be puzzled. “Clap? How on earth could our innocent soldiers get the clap since Ike has forbidden any contact between our horny GIs and equally horny German women?”
“Ike is doing as well with his nonfraternization rule as King Cnut did in trying to keep the tide from coming in. There are tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of German women who would like to make an arrangement with an American to provide them with food, shelter, and other basics. And so what if it means having sex with a stranger, or even several strangers? Does desperation make a woman a prostitute? I don’t know. I’m not terribly religious, but I think I’ll let God figure that out. Talk to a woman who would otherwise starve or her child would die if she didn’t have sex with a GI, and then try to judge. I don’t think anyone has a real idea how destitute the German people are, and many who do just don’t give a damn.”
“Obviously, you really feel strongly about this.”
“Yes, and one last thing-When the savages from Russia rolled in, they gang-raped several million women. Most were German but the Reds really didn’t care where they were from. Now, many of them are suffering from venereal diseases or unwanted pregnancies. I don’t do abortions myself; they are illegal after all. But some of my associates do, and I’m not going to turn them in or criticize them.”
Hagerman took a deep breath and smiled sheepishly. “Sometimes I get worked up and I shouldn’t. I understand that Ike is going to rescind that stupid and unenforceable nonfraternization policy. At any rate, you came here to see Private Oster, didn’t you?”
The two men went down a hallway and into a ward where a curtain had been drawn around a bed. “Is he going to make it?” Tanner asked, suddenly worried. He’d been told that Oster had been wounded, but giving him such a degree of privacy was unusual if the wounds weren’t grievous.
“He should recover nicely. His physical wounds aren’t that serious. He’s got a mildly fractured skull, if there is such a thing and, ah, one other problem.”
Hagerman pulled the curtain and the two men stepped in. Oster was awake and looked at them in confusion. “Why are you here now? Did I do something else?”