World in Flames

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

From the train, David Brentwood looked out on the rolling green hills of west England’s Herefordshire. He thought it the most beautiful country he’d ever seen. And as the train passed on through Hay-on-Wye over the English-Welsh border, winding its way between the brooding black mountains deep into Brecknockshire toward Brecon at the foot of the two windswept mountains known as the Beacons, slowly and inexorably, everything changed for David. It was as if he had been in this place before. It wasn’t only the smell of the fresh winter air, the earthy dampness that reminded him of the wet winters in the Pacific Northwest in Washington and Oregon, but the wild beauty of the place. The wind-riven hillsides of flattened grasses spoke to him, as they did to few others on that train. Though brought up by his mother in the Protestant faith, which viewed God in deeply personal ways, David could not believe as she did. The suffering of children, the death of Lili — how could there be any good in that? “We all have to die,” his mother would say. “The timing and circumstance of it, David, are only things we fret about so long as we see this life as all there is.” Was this war all there was? he wondered. If so, then winning it seemed more important than ever before, for in mourning Lili’s death, he’d realized in a way he never had before how short life really was. It had been a thing his parents and grandparents had always told him — an old person’s cliche, repeated to the young so many times, it became nothing more than a bore, because inside him there had been the secret belief of all youth that they would not die — at least not before their time, a time which in their own minds was always secure and far in the future.

For a moment he had doubts about volunteering for the SAS force. If this life was such a transitory thing — why bother? Because, he answered himself, corny as he knew it might sound to others, he believed it was right to fight evil. If you didn’t, then people like Lili, Melissa — damn her — would live in a far worse world, a world where there could be no honor, no love, only subservience to the kind of brutality he’d seen as a child the day the newscasts had shown the Communists crushing the movement for democracy with tanks in Tiananmen Square.

As the train carrying him, Thelman, and the other ninety-six volunteers who had been interviewed for the SAS training program pulled into Brecon, David looked up again at the grass-covered sandstone slopes, the sweeping line of the high hills broken now and then by woods of gnarled trees deformed by the wind, and cottages that had looked picturesque from the distance but which now appeared to be deserted and run-down. High above the three- thousand-foot Beacons, buzzards circled, ever patient, waiting, he presumed, for any of the black-faced sheep grazing on the steep slopes to fall. Still, the scene did not depress him, and inhaling the fresh mountain air, he closed his eyes, the better to impress it upon his memory as a new beginning, a place that, whatever happened, would always be close to his heart. Perhaps it was not so much the place at all but that it was a new place where he might regain the old surety of action he’d known before the nerve-shattering experience of Pyongyang and Stadthagen. A new beginning.

“You okay?” asked Thelman.

“Fine,” said David. It was the first time Thelman had seen his old buddy of Parris Island days smile since they’d left France aboard the overnight Hovercraft, the Channel still blocked by the massive explosion that had closed it in the first weeks of the war when a SPETS cell, one of them posing as a cross-channel truck driver, had set off the bomb that had collapsed the two main tunnels, concussion killing most of those in transit, the North Sea pouring in and drowning the rest.

“Nice little town,” remarked Thelman. “Somebody told me Wales was full of slag heaps.”

“Well they’re not here,” replied David. He had no inkling that within forty-eight hours he would hate the place, cursing the moment he had agreed to “try out,” as the English Captain Smythe had so casually put it. Yet the beginning of his time at SAS gave no hint of how quickly he would feel he’d made a mistake, for at first it wasn’t at all like Parris Island or Camp Lejeune. Indeed, when he first stepped out of the train, he and all the others had been struck by an angelic singing, male voices in a harmony he wouldn’t have believed possible outside of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir — voices raised, singing ancient Welsh hymns. It did sound like How Green Was My Valley.

As David looked around at the other ninety-odd volunteers, he saw unit badges from every kind of regiment, including several Dutch and German troops, sappers to engineers, even a Seabee, and at least six men from the Coldstream Guards, all brought to a standstill by a chorus they could hear somewhere beyond the station. Even Thelman, though an avid fan of what David’s father, the admiral, would have described as “moron thump,” stood on the station platform, listening in rapt attention.

“Concert in town?” one of the volunteers asked the SAS regimental sergeant major who turned up to greet them.

“No,” the RSM replied, his quiet Welsh accent surprising to David. “Cymru versus the Barbarians.” Thelman and Brentwood looked at one another in bewilderment.

“Football!” interjected a captain called Cheek-Dawson, wearing the coveted beige SAS beret with the blue- winged dagger above the emblem “Who Dares, Wins.” “Welsh against the English,” he explained. “The singing you hear, needless to say, is coming from the Welsh supporters. If they lose, I daresay we’ll hear a pretty decent requiem.”

“Ah,” said one of the sappers, a Hispanic American, name tag “Bartroli.” “Soccer, right?”

“No, no, man,” said the RSM, his tone good-natured but intent on correction nevertheless. “Not that sissy business. This is rugby.”

“More like American football, right, Sar’Major?” said Cheek-Dawson good-naturedly.

“Without the ruffles,” replied the RSM.

“Ruffles?” challenged Thelman.

“All that padding.”

“Wonder you don’t kill yourselves then,” retorted Thelman.

“It happens,” said the RSM. “All right, lads — into the trucks with kit. Reception at Senny Bridge in—” he glanced at his watch “—half an hour. Fourteen hundred.”

Thelman reminded Brentwood of the joke they’d heard at Parris Island about the first intake of women into the Marine Corps getting it all wrong when the female DI said she’d give them twenty minutes to get ready for kit inspection.

Brentwood fell silent, remembering the last time he’d heard the story was from the British sergeant who’d been murdered along with Lili on the train to Liege.

An Australian listening in to the joke as the trucks pulled away from Brecon station laughed so loud, Thelman thought he’d fall off the tailgate.

“Heard the one about the kangaroo and the priest?” asked the Aussie.

“No,” said Brentwood. The Aussie was talking to them as if he’d known them all his life. He didn’t get to tell them his joke, however, as they were passing the football ground, and a surge of Welsh patriotism, mainly the voices of old men— most of the young ones having been drafted — filled the truck with such emotion that men who’d never heard of rugby were moved.

“You play that in Australia, don’t you?” asked David.

“Yeah, but Australian Rules mainly,” said the Aussie.

“Australian rules?” put in Cheek-Dawson with good cheer. “I should have thought that an oxymoron.”

“What d’ya mean?” said the Aussie. “Moron?”

“Ah — I meant a contradiction in terms,” explained Cheek-Dawson, “You know — Australians and rules? No offense meant.”

The Aussie grinned. “None taken, mate. The name’s Mick. Mick Lewis. They say that with a name like that, I’m half-Irish and half-Welsh. But I can’t sing a bloody note.”

The first hour was like that — informal, the distinction between officer, NCO, and other ranks not paid anywhere like the attention it received elsewhere, particularly in the British forces, where class differences readily became recognizable to even the most recent arrival from overseas. It was different, too, from Parris Island, which surprised David and Thelman, and no doubt many of the other American recruits. No DIs screaming hysterically at you, treating you like dirt even before you got off their bus. And David couldn’t imagine a regular British officer elsewhere joking with the Australian— there certainly wouldn’t have been any apology so