Mitla Pass (55 page)

The countryside was interspersed by a number of small woods of silver-barked birch and second-growth scrub and thickets. One of these stands of trees was Belleau Wood. It lay on a hillock west of Chateau-Thierry. The wood was about a mile in length and several hundred yards deep, flanked by five lovely little farming villages. Before the war, Belleau Wood had been the private hunting preserve of a wealthy Frenchman.

The German offensive had swept forward so rapidly it had outrun its artillery and supplies and had to stop to consolidate in Belleau Wood.

To outflank the Marne River, the Germans had to strike right through the middle of a thin line held by the 5th and 6th Marines. We were green, untested troops, but we had been trained well and we were not war-weary as the French were.

My unit set up in a field hospital in the cellar of the church of one of the villages, Lucy de Bocage, just a few hundred yards to the rear of the front lines.

When the artillery fire opened, we had never experienced anything like it and the rest of the battle seemed like a surrealistic play, seen through a gauze
... a
haze ... exhaustion
...
smoke ... and we listened to voices and gunfire like they were distant echoes. We were there and functioning, but we were not there, if you know what I mean.

During the course of the war, the snipers from all of the armies had eventually been killed or crippled. The emphasis was now on massive fire, mostly by machine gun. The Germans did not realize that the Marines were the best rifle shots in the world. When they came out of Belleau Wood, our men started picking them off at distances of six hundred yards. We shot them down, accurately, as fast as we could load and fire. Hell, the Krauts never knew what hit them, but on they came, pouring out of the wood into the wheat field. They came all day long and continued through the night. We kept chopping them down, our rifles so hot we could hardly work the bolts. By the end of the second day, they had still not been able to reach our lines. On the third day, they threw everything at us
—
maybe five or six hundred artillery pieces. They threw out a solid curtain of machine-gun fire and they came again in droves, in hordes. By night, they had to leave the wheat field and retreat into the wood, leaving hundreds, maybe thousands, of their dead on the field.

The instant they stopped to regroup, the 5th and 6th Marines went on to the offensive. I watched them run at high port in line after line and disappear over the ridge.

Inside Belleau Wood ... that tiny space was honeycombed with a hundred or more German machine-gun nests, dug in behind boulders, hidden in jungle-like thickets. Our job was to flush them out, nest by nest, with grenades and bayonets.

I was on a four-day cycle.

Day one, I drove casualties back to a base hospital about ten miles away and returned with supplies.

Day two, I worked in the field hospital treating the wounded and assisting in surgery.

Day three, I did battlefield duty, finding the wounded, treating them, and taking them back by stretcher.

Day four was my “rest” day. I was given four hours’ straight sleep, checked the inventory, and caught up with the reports. One, two, three, four, around the clock without respite.

The worst of it was the field hospital. The wounded were coming off the field so fast we couldn’t get to half of them in time. Gangrene set in quickly and some of the arms and legs turned slimy and green and scarlet and lots of bare bones were sticking out. Our medication was primitive. Fever, give them castor oil. Iodine on open wounds, or peroxide. The smell of gangrene ... ugh ... I can still smell it. Infection, aspirin. Mustard gas wounds, we just washed them with water. Lot of screaming, moaning, dying. Thank God we had morphine and codeine.

In the operating theaters the floor always had a half inch of blood and the surgeons and assistants like myself slipped and fell and were drenched in blood a half-dozen times a day.

In those days, we didn’t
 
know how to type a man’s blood. If he needed blood, one of us would volunteer, and as often as not, the Marine died on the spot because we were different blood types. I gave blood twice during the battle.

Our offensive went on day after day. Our gains through Belleau Wood could be counted in yards. Most of the European armies rotated their troops off the front every five or six days, but we didn’t have the experience and we didn’t have the replacements. The Marines went on, day and night, for fifteen straight days until an American Army unit came in and relieved us.

They generally sent the troops back about six or seven miles behind the lines, out of German artillery range. The first thing was to get deloused. They’d boil their clothing in acid and shave their hair off and give them a sheep dip. Then they’d usually sleep for twenty to thirty straight hours. After that, they’d get their one hot meal and march back to the lines and rotate again.

As I said, we didn’t get relieved till two weeks into the battle. We were in back of the lines for only five hours. Five stinking hours, after fourteen days of constant battle. The unit that replaced us were green and it began losing all the ground we had gained, so ... after five hours we had to march back to Belleau Wood and continue the fight.

Baltimore

W
HEN
I
HAD
finished, I couldn’t tell whether Gideon was entranced or horrified. I did something then I had never done before. I always wore a high-necked undershirt to hide my wound, even when I went swimming. No one had ever seen it but Simone and my doctor. I took my shirt and undertop off and showed it to him. It was a hideous scar filled with little black specks.

“The black specks are part of a German officer’s face. He was blown up right in front of me. They’ll never come out.”

We sat looking at one another for an infinity of time, holding hands, like Simone and I do.

It was twenty minutes before we spoke. It seemed an eternity. Had I talked him out of it?

“You understand that I have to go,” Gideon said. “Don’t you, Uncle Lazar?”

“Yes, I know,” I said. “We’ve all got to carry the burden of our times, fight our own wars, both inside us and out there on the battlefield. It’s the way men have always done things. Don’t try to be a hero. Do your job, and part of your job is coming through alive.”

I scratched my signature on the document, giving him permission to join the Corps. I took off my Marine ring and put it into the palm of his hand and closed his fist around it. “Take it. This little sucker got me through. You’ll need all the luck you can get.”

PART FIVE

JUST BEFORE THE BATTLE, MOTHER

MITLA PASS

October 31, 1956

1100 HOURS, D DAY PLUS TWO

Southern Command to Lions STOP Enemy convoy spotted from air moving on west side of Mitla heading for the Pass STOP We have diverted our air cover from Para 202 to attack convoy STOP We are out of communication with Para 202 STOP Do you know their location SIGNED Ram.

Lions to Southern Command—1130 Hours STOP Negative STOP we are not in contact with Para 202 SIGNED Ben Asher.

Southern Command to Lions STOP Our two northern columns have been slowed at Gaza and Jebel Livni STOP We have not made sufficient penetration for you to try evacuation by land STOP Attempt to clear your runway to length of twenty-five hundred feet by forty feet in order to accommodate Dakotas for possible air evacuation SIGNED Ram

Lions to Southern Command STOP Impossible to clear field by hand STOP Large rocks and boulders can’t be moved STOP Advise SIGNED Ben Asher

Southern Command to Lions STOP Will attempt to parachute two bulldozers STOP SIGNED Ram

High Noon

Lions to Southern Command High Noon STOP One bulldozer received in operating condition STOP Estimate airstrip can be cleared by 1600 Hours SIGNED Ben Asher

Southern Command to Lions STOP Air strike against enemy convoy west of Mitla Pass successful STOP New intelligence directly from Cairo sources indicate that only two Egyptian companies are inside Pass STOP Included in enemy force are two mortar and two machine-gun platoons STOP Air Recon reports no activity now on western side of Mitla SIGNED Ram

The sun this day was another brutal bone bleacher. Lethargy had all but consumed the Lions. They shifted about lazily to conserve every molecule of energy. Soft voices were heard from the command post and hospital tent. The bulldozer inched forward, backward, forward, backward, shoving the larger rocks and boulders aside and filling in the pockets they left. Now and again, an Egyptian mortar from high up in the Pass tried to reach the airstrip, without success.

This indicated to Major Ben Asher that the Egyptians didn’t have any larger artillery with them, or they would have certainly been using it. He was encouraged by the latest intelligence. The report had come from Cairo. An Israeli spy was apparently inside the Egyptian high command and in a position to know the size and whereabouts of the enemy deployments.

Two companies inside? Not too bad. A few hundred men, more or less. It also appeared that the Israeli Air Force owned the skies and had the western side of the Pass under constant scrutiny.

Gideon’s leg seemed miraculously better. The blood had drained away from the enormous swelling in his hip, reducing it to nearly normal size. It was still tender and bruised, but he had gained back nearly full use of the leg.

“Come on, Zechariah, where the fuck are you!” someone shouted every five or ten minutes.

Their eyes were all reddened from constantly straining in the sun for a sign of Para 202. Earlier they thought they had spotted dust rising and sent out a patrol jeep to lead Zechariah’s men in. It turned out to be a false alarm. The dust had originated from a sudden lurch of wind winding through a narrow opening in some rocky cliffs.

Ration time. To hell with it, Gideon thought.

“Eat or you’ll get weak,” Shlomo said. “Eat, this sun sucks the starch out of you.”

“You sound like my stepmother, Lena. Did you ever know anybody who got their sex kicks out of stuffing people with food?”

“Yeah,” Shlomo answered, “half the women in Israel.”

Gideon ran his hand over his face. The stubble was getting prickly. He hated wearing a beard. It itched constantly. Penelope and Roxy had made him grow one once, a long one, because some of their girlfriends’ daddies were growing them.

“Suppose you were in a nice comfortable sheik’s tent,” Shlomo ventured between vocal bites of food, “and you had a choice between Val and Natasha?”

“Who am I? King Solomon?” Gideon answered. “They come from two different planets. On the one hand, peace, comfort, steadiness, softness, fidelity, trust. On the other hand, it’s wild fantasy, sensuality, the fine cutting line between love and rage.”

“They both sound pretty good to me,” Shlomo said.

“Sometimes you need one, sometimes you need the other. Too bad they don’t come in the same package.”

“What makes a woman like Natasha tick?”

“All women have a labyrinth inside their heads. Emotion is a woman’s first priority. When a woman gets devious, I’m screwed. I went through every crooked move as a kid, in Hollywood, in my marriage. But I couldn’t be as devious as the simplest woman. Anyhow, I’m pretty up front now. After Val went on her little binge and tore my office to pieces, I didn’t want to shelter lies anymore. Even the most honest of women have crooked minds, and being a concentration camp survivor, Natasha is even more complicated.”

“How many concentration camp survivors do you suppose we have interviewed?” Shlomo asked, rummaging through his pack. The fruit had gone soft and squishy. He tossed it, grudgingly, and out of nowhere little ants started appearing and feasted.

“I count between fifty and sixty,” Gideon said. “Besides that, I’ve read maybe three hundred case histories. I’d read more than a hundred in St. Barths before I got to Israel.”

“Every one different?”

“Every one different, but certain similarities in all of them. Every person who got through the camps left behind twenty, thirty members of their families dead. I found that everyone who survived had to use their wits. But every person who walked out of a concentration camp alive had run into a piece of golden luck at the right moment. Sometimes four or five pieces of luck. This kind of luck produces guilt.”

“My father died, my brothers died, but I got through because I had luck at the right moment and they didn’t. That what you mean?” Shlomo asked.

“That’s right,” Gideon said. “I’ve never met a survivor who didn’t carry the cross of guilt on his shoulder because his being alive represented twenty who were sent to the gas chamber. Why did I, who was no more worthy than the next guy, get through? Why am I alive? I’m guilty for being alive.”

“What’s the toll on Natasha’s family?”

“All of them. A big family ... all of them ... not only mother, father, brothers, but uncles, cousins, the works. Natasha’s guilt is compounded because she hated her father before the war. He was a professional, respected, important member of the community. Apparently he was a cold number, very strict. He didn’t abuse her physically, but she was frightened of him and he brought a great deal of pain, sexually, to his wife. She loved her mother dearly. And ... she’s got more than ordinary, garden-variety guilt about her father’s death. She felt responsible for his death because she hated him.”

“So she looks for her father through lovers?”

“I read it this way,” Gideon said. “She finds an attractive man and gets him to fall for her. No trick, she oozes sex from every pore. She loves him with a fury he didn’t know existed. And she drinks him dry. When he is completely exhausted, she has the symbol she is looking for. She’s killed her daddy again. So, she discards him like a dishrag, but she always has a sentimental feeling for him. Poor dog, just couldn’t cut it. But her drive to find another man, and another and another, is insatiable. She can’t control herself from playing it out, over and over.”