After being given the location where the first sergeant had the rest of Team Yankee and congratulating both him and Uleski on a job well done, both Reynolds and Jordan left in order to make it to a another meeting.
When they were gone, Bannon and Uleski sat in the silent room, staring at the floor in front of them. Without looking up, Uleski quietly asked, “Did we really do as well as they seem to think we did?”
Bannon thought for a moment. In the discussion, it had all seemed so easy. It was as if they had been discussing a tactical exercise at Fort Knox, not a battle that had meant life and death for the thirty-five men that had set out to defend Hill 214 yesterday. Their discussion had covered the effects of weapons, the deployment of forces, and the application of firepower. In the cool, quiet setting of the German classroom it all seemed to make sense, to fit together. The dread and fear of dying was absent. The stinging, cutting emotional pain he had felt as the crew of 66 removed Ortelli’s shattered body from the burning tank had not been covered. The disgust and anger he had experienced when it seemed that Team Yankee had been wiped out was not important to their discussion. The battle they had talked about and the one Team Yankee had fought were not the same, and never would be. At least not for those who had been there.
Bannon turned to Uleski, “What do you think, Bob?”
The XO stared at Bannon for a moment before answering, “I think we were lucky. Damned lucky.”
“You know, Bob, I think you’re right.” With that, they left the classroom and went about rebuilding the Team.
Over the next three days Team Yankee licked its wounds and pulled itself back together in an assembly area a kilometer outside of town First Sergeant Harrert had found and claimed. Soon after arriving, Bannon found out why he had picked it.
In the center of a well-tended patch of forest was a small gasthaus where Germans taking long weekend walks through the forest had frequented before the war. The old man and woman who ran the place were indifferent to the Team at first. That quickly changed when the old woman discovered First Sergeant Harriet was more than ready to see to it she and her husband got whatever he could spare in the way of food, fuel, and the use of a generator Harrert had “found” during his forays through the Division’s rear area. By end of the second day, the old woman was cooking for them and doing their laundry. She said that since she couldn’t take care of her son, and since their mothers couldn’t take care of them, she would. After the old man finally warmed up to the Americans, he told them his son was a panzer trooper like them before regaling anyone who would listen of his own experiences in what he called The Last War, taking care to make sure they understood he’d only fought the Russians, never the Americans.
Replacements arrived in dribs and drabs in for men, equipment, ammunition, uniforms, weapons, radios, and a myriad of other things modern war required. The first people they got were the infantrymen stripped from the other companies. While the Team didn’t exactly get the pick of the litter, those they were sent were at least competent and reliable according to Polgar. The first thing he did whenever a new batch of fresh faced grunts reported to him was to lay down the law according to Polgar. The first rule he made sure they understood was that they were never to forget they now belonged to Team Yankee. The emphasis he put on this at first struck Bannon a little odd. In the past, a mech platoon belonging to 3rd of the 78th Infantry that was attached to Bannon’s company considered that assignment akin to being exiled to Siberia. Now, it was a matter of pride. As one of the new men who volunteered to come over to Team Yankee told Polgar when asked why he had done so, regarded Polgar as if he’d just been asked the dumbest question he’d ever heard. “If I have to be in this war,” the soldier replied. “I wanted to be with people who know what they’re doing.”
The Team was not as fortunate in the replacements they received for the tank crews. Most of them came straight from the advanced individual training course at Fort Knox. Some had never even been in a tank when a round had been fired. Bob Uleski was only half joking when he told Bannon they, the Team, were fortunate that most of the newbies were at least able to recognize a tank two out of three times. Given that sad state of affairs, the Team’s number-one priority became integrating them into the crews as quickly as possible and training them as best the tank commanders could in what little time they had.
One of the most interesting transitions that had occurred in the Team that Bannon could not help but take note of was in the way Pfc. Richard Kelp went about his duties. Before the war he had always been an average soldier, nothing more, nothing less. Since the Team had come off Hill 214, however, he had become a man possessed. When they picked up a replacement tank from war stocks, Kelp was the first man on it. Instead of Folk having to keep on him to stay on task, it was Folk who now found he was having to scramble to keep up with him.
With the new Alpha 66 came a new man. As it is easier to train a loader, Kelp was reassigned as the driver and given the mission of training Pvt. Leo Dowd as the loader. After conducting several hours of crew drills on the second day, Bannon asked Dowd how things were going. At first the street smart African-American Chicago native was reluctant to say anything. When he finally did after some coxing, he informed Bannon that he thought Kelp was being too hard on him. “I’m doing the best I can, but that is never good enough to Kelp.”
Stifling an urge to chuckle, Bannon put on his official company commander’s face and told Dowd that everything Kelp was doing was for his own good. He added that if Dowd paid attention to everything Kelp was telling him, maybe, just maybe he would make it out of this war alive. “The one thing I’ve been told there’s no shortage of is body bags,” Bannon concluded. “So unless you’re in a hurry to fill one of them, do what you’re told.” After that, there were no more complaints, at least not any that Dowd shared with his tank commander.
Along with his new direction in life, Kelp received official recognition for his efforts in the defense of Hill 214. After questioning both of the privates who had come back from the tank-killing detail that night, Polgar put each of them in for Bronze Stars with V device. As the Dragon gunner who had been killed had led the group out and had taken out the first tank, Bannon added him for a posthumous award. By the time the citations made it to division level, the efforts of the three men took on epic proportions. The story was enhanced ever so slightly until the killing of the two tanks became the pivotal event for the battle of Hill 214 that caused the whole Soviet battalion to withdraw. In reality, things weren’t that clear cut, but Bannon went along with it since it expedited the awards.
One change that had taken place that was not to Bannon’s liking at all. It concerned the outlook on life Bob Uleski had adopted. The injury to his arm had been minor, a dislocated shoulder that was easily tended to without his needing to go any further than 1st of the 4th Armor’s aid station where the battalion physician’s assistant had popped it back into place while the cut on Bannon’s face was being cleaned and dressed by a medic. Despite a recommendation that Uleski be allowed to spend a few days in a field hospital in order to give his arm a chance to heal properly, he refused. As the Team was short of officers, Bannon did not object, allowing him to stay with the Team as long as he could perform his duties.