"Let's all take a moment to bask in the scintillant glow of our acquired mediocrity."
-~CattleBruiser~
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| Leaders 03: Endless Rain | | | Author: | | | IP: | cache-mtXXXX | | Date: | 07/18/03 04:07 | | Game Type: | Other | | Labels: | none | | Report Rating: , # of Ratings: 1, Max: 7, Min: 7
Lifetime Rating for SupeRc0pKr: 8.2353 |  |
Endless Rain
Wescott watched the sanitation crews dump the bodies of A and B Company troops into the beds of the deuce-and-half trucks. It was a morbid business, though the servicemen, now having operated in Normandy for several weeks, didn't show much sign of discomfort at tossing blood-stained, stiff corpses, sagging in their black covers, into the trucks. The rain hadn't stopped, and one or two times the servicemen slipped and fell to lie down alongside the dead.
The village was virtually empty. Though it was declared secure, there were still a few points of resistance - the machine gun that Burkeley's platoon had run into had simply been by-passed in the end - and traffic on the streets was kept to a minimum, though here and there the muted flicker of cigarettes could be seen in the open lobbies of the French buildings.
Captain Wayne appeared from the church courtyard, and walked very casually towards the sanitation crews. He paused for a moment, staring as the blackened bodies dropped face-down into the deuce-and-a-halfs. Perhaps two weeks ago he might have stopped the servicemen. He might have been disgusted.
"If you pitch another one of my men into those vehicles, toss them around like that, you will be joining them before your shift is over."
But Normandy had taught him that there was no point in reverence for the dead. A soldier who had stopped breathing was only so much flesh, just a mutilated human body. Occasionally they would carry useable supplies such as ammunition, a medical kit, canteen, and these would be stripped from their bodies before an officer would come along and take one of their dogtags. Then, once the position was declared secure, the sanitation crews would come up and clear the area.
God, Wayne mused at one point, would take care of the rest.
It had been in a street lined with bloated corpses, growing ripe in the sunlight, that Wayne had received his promotion to captain. The battalion commander - after a particularly violent action - deemed Wayne's leadership ability to be adequate to allow him to formally assume command.
"Congratulations, Captain," he had said, and walked away to his transport.
Burkeley watched Wayne look at the flashing insignia that glittered in his palm. Wayne had turned to Burkeley with a black grin and laughed, though it sounded almost like a sob, "Oh, I'm a captain now."
Wayne had never replaced the ranks on his shoulder lapels - leaders in Normandy quickly learned to make their presence inconspicuous, as German snipers tended to aim specifically for officers - but everyone in the company had heard about the promotion, because everyone had been there to see it. They had all seen the irrepressible disgust that Wayne held in his face once the battalion CO had handed him the shiny gold bars, and they knew why he felt that way. He was getting promoted because A Company had suffered tremendous loss, and yet Wayne continued to complete his objectives - that is, he produced results even with his unit at fifty-percent strength.
And so he was a captain, because he was oblivious to human loss.
Casualty rates had become so much of a problem to battalion that shortly after the Maisy-Grandcamp road was taken, A Company was assigned a new first sergeant in order to provide for its need of a tactical training advisor. Sergeant, first class John Wescott of the 2nd Ranger Battalion had been re-assigned to the 116th RCT, 1st Battalion. His experience and Ranger training, it was thought, could be spread among the remaining A Company NCOs in order to alleviate combat losses. He had received a promotion, and was then transferred onto A Company's roster.
Before he had received word of his re-assignment, Wescott had relaxed in a peaceful moment just outside of Isigny, with King and Martin and seven other Rangers. King clutched Penn's deck of cards in his palm, and he played solitaire very slowly, idly.
Solitaire would be King's game for a while, Wescott thought; Martin didn't play cards, and Wescott had never been one to socialize so casually. 2nd Ranger's roster had been cut so short that finding a good pot would be difficult. Solitaire, it seemed, would be the game for many in Normandy.
A staff lieutenant had found the Rangers in the open cafe, where nothing worked; what electricity the city had had been cut during the preliminary American barrage, followed by the German counter-barrage. He greeted Wescott curtly, handed him his assignment papers from battalion hq, and then wished him luck, all very formally.
"What's the news?" Martin asked after the staff officer had left.
"I've been re-assigned," Wescott told him. "As a company first sergeant, part of the Twenty-Ninth."
"I see," Martin had replied. "Well, Sergeant, good luck, then. We'll try to find someone who can fill in your shoes."
"Yeah."
King didn't look up from his game. "See ya 'round, Sarge."
Good-byes had never been difficult in the Army.
Wescott had found himself standing in front of Captain Wayne not very long after. A Company was perhaps sixty men strong; again at 50% combat strength. Several key junior leaders had been lost; all of Wayne's platoons lacked lieutenants, and were under the command of sergeants. Several squads were led by mere privates, first class, but while the leaders of A Company were deficient in rank, they were not so lacking in experience. Those who were not replacements, a few days' in the field, knew the rules of the game, and they formed the backbone of the five dozen or so that kept the company fighting.
"You will not be baby-sitting," Wayne told Wescott, in a matter-of-fact tone. "These men know what they are doing. You are here to help with the training of the replacements that come in, not to advise my sergeants on how to act."
"Understood, sir."
That had been perhaps a week ago. Wescott had lost track of the days. He measured time in the hedgerows he covered and in the villages he secured, and time was very, very long in Normandy.
"You're crazy." Wayne told Wescott, walking back from the pile of bodies stacked at a street corner. "You went out there while a machine gun had the road covered, and got that squad into some protection."
"I had to."
"Why? Because they would have gotten killed?" Wayne took a seat next to him.
"Yes, Captain, you would have done the same. Those men are as much under my responsibility as they are yours."
"All that means is that if they die, it's your leadership ability that's at fault. It's your fault."
Wescott knew that Wayne was bitter, could tell that the moment he'd stepped into that foxhole next to his at Pointe-du-Hoc. And from the way he talked, Wayne seemed to believe that leading the men was an executioner's job.
"You're the only one in the company that actually gives a damn about anyone else," Wayne said, looking out at the sanitation crews. "Everyone else sticks with their buddies, and they help each other out because they know that the only way to get out of this alive is to watch each other's back. But they don't look at any of the replacements like that. They get each other killed. So nobody sticks to them when the shooting starts."
"Except for you."
"No. I don't do anything, I just give them their orders. It's my 'responsibility.'" Wayne pulled a slip of paper and a pencil from his breast pocket.
After a moment Wayne asked Wescott, "When the shooting starts, when you watch those kids start dropping like slaughtered animals, what makes you care about what happens to the rest, John?"
It was the first time Wayne had ever addressed him by name, and the question surprised him. Wescott looked down at his hands, black with dirt and gunpowder, loosely wrapped around the Thompson. "I couldn't tell you, Captain." Wescott's gaze went to Wayne's hands, snub-nosed pencil scribbling onto a wrinkled slip of paper. "Why do you do it?"
"I don't know. I'm an officer. They look to me for leadership. If I don't lead them, if I'm not there when they need me, they've got no coordination between platoons, they get isolated and are broken down, and then they are cut to pieces." Wayne pocketed the pencil and paper and looked up at the falling droplets that pattered down. "But I tell this platoon, 'take that position,' and they are still cut to pieces, some fucking German with a machine gun. But atleast I'm trying to keep them alive, you know? Atleast I'm not just watching them die. Maybe I get lucky, maybe I make a good move and the boys come out okay. Maybe we drive the Germans off for a while. But unless we hit them hard they always come back, and then we lose what we've gained. So I get orders to re-take this-and-that position, and I take the boys back and they walk into machine guns. I don't do it because I care, John. I can't care. Not when they go down as fast as that."
Wescott nodded, knew what Wayne was talking about. It was always like that; ten or twenty men dying for ten or twenty feet of road. Eventually a numbness set in, and every death wasn't a tragedy.
"Do you remember Isigny? That counter-attack? The Germans didn't have anything else behind them when they hit us. They were fully committed to just breaking-through. They knew that they wouldn't make it through. And even if they did, what were they going to do? They were just one battalion. But they hit us anyway. They knew that they would just lose men and kill a few of ours, for nothing. There was no point to it. No fucking point at all."
"Is that why you killed them?" Wescott asked. "The prisoners."
Wayne didn't nod, didn't grimace, only answered, "Yeah. Yeah, that's why I killed them," and Truttman's words, so seemingly far away, three weeks ago - an eternity in Normandy - came to mind.
"Because you want to be a hero."
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