The Man with the Iron Heart

Army, happier I’ll be.”

You earned discharge points for time in the service, for time overseas, for medals, for campaign stars on theater ribbons, and for kids under eighteen back home. Eighty-five would bring you home. Till now, Pytlak hadn’t worried about them much. But the war was over. That still took getting used to; damned if it didn’t. And damned if I wanna hang around on occupation duty, either, he thought.

“Don’t get hot and bothered, man,” the typist advised him. “They’re gonna ship all our asses to the Pacific so we can punch Hirohito’s ticket for him, too.”

Charlie’s reply was detailed and profane. Dom also chimed in with some relevant opinions. The corporal just grinned. He’d got under their skins, so he won the round. The really evil thing was, on top of that he was liable to be right.

Finally, in disgust, Pytlak said, “I’m gone. Next to this crap, Lichtenau looks goddamn good. You with me, Dom?”

“Oh, hell, yes,” Lombardo said.

They were both shaking their heads as they trudged back toward the town. “Fight the fuckin’ Japs,” Charlie muttered. “That’s just what I fuckin’ need. Time they ship my butt home, I’ll have a long white beard.”

Dom was more than ready to help him bitch. Dom was always ready to help a guy bitch. He’d been pretty handy with that Schmeisser when they really needed it, too. Before long, it’d be nothing but a souvenir-that or more scrap metal, one. Charlie had heard they weren’t letting GIs ship weapons home. One more chickenshit regulation, almost as bad as getting a receipt for POWs.

He and Dom came up to the corpse of the German truck. The scrounger who’d been messing around there was gone. “Who’s that asshole gonna sell his scrap to?” Charlie said. “Us-you wait and see. We’re dumb enough to pay good money to put these mothers back on their feet now that we stomped ’em.”

“Yeah, that’s like us, all right,” Dom agreed. “We-”

The truck blew up. Next thing Charlie knew, he was sprawled on the ground a surprisingly long way from the road. Dom-no, a piece of Dom-lay not far away. Charlie tried to reach out. His arm didn’t want to work. When he looked down at what was left of himself, he understood why. It didn’t hurt. Then, all at once, it did.

His shriek bubbled through the blood filling his mouth. Mercifully, blackness enfolded him.

Lieutenant Lou Weissberg looked at the crater by the side of the road. “Son of a bitch,” he said. “Looks like a five hundred-pound bomb went off here.”

That won him the first respectful glance he’d got from the ordnance sergeant already on the scene. “Damn near, sir,” Toby Benton agreed, his slow Texas or Oklahoma drawl halfway to being a different language from Lou’s clotted New Jersey. “Reckon some Jerries snuck one of their two hundred and fifty-kilo jobs into the truck an’ then touched the mother off. Blew two of our guys to hell and gone.” He pointed over to the corpses.

They’d left the GIs where they lay, so Weissberg could look them over and use his brilliance to pull a Sherlock Holmes and tell everybody what was what. To ordinary soldiers, the Counter-Intelligence Corps did stuff like that. Lou belonged to the CIC. He wished like hell he could do stuff like that. Unfortunately, unlike ordinary soldiers, he knew better.

He went over anyway and trained a camera on the bodies. “I hate taking pictures of these poor guys, you know?” he said, snapping away anyhow. “But I gotta have something to bring back to Nuremberg so the big shots there can see what happened.”

“You better be careful, sir,” Sergeant Benton said.

“How come? Is the ground mined?” Lou stood as still as if he intended to take root right where he was. And if Benton nodded or said yes, that would be about the safest thing he could do.

But the noncom shook his head. “Nah-didn’t mean that. You keep talkin’ the way you are, though, people’re liable to reckon you’re a human being or somethin’.”

“Oh.” Lieutenant Weissberg wondered how to take that. To ordinary grunts, CIC officers probably weren’t human beings, if by human beings you meant those who lived the same way they did. Lou had fired his carbine exactly once during the war, when his outfit almost got overrun during the Battle of the Bulge. He’d slept warm and eaten well, unlike most mudfaces. Therefore…this was likely a genuine compliment. He treated it as one, answering, “Thank you, Sergeant.”

“You’re welcome, sir,” Benton said seriously. “I figured you’d be one o’ them behind-the-lines assholes…uh, no offense. But you don’t want to be doing this shit, neither.”

“You better believe it,” Lou said. “Somebody has to, though. German army surrendered. Unfuckingconditionally surrendered. If they think they can get away with crap like this…”

“What do we do about it?” Benton asked. “Take hostages and shoot ’em if the mothers who did this don’t turn themselves in? That’s what the Jerries woulda done, and you can take it to the bank.”

“I know.” Lou’s voice was troubled. “All kinds of things the Jerries would’ve done that I don’t want anything to do with.”

Toby Benton eyed the CIC man in a way he’d seen before: as someone who knew the straight skinny and might be tempted into talking about it. “That stuff they say about those camps-Dachau an’ Belsen an’ them all-they really that bad?”

“No,” Lou said tightly. Just when Benton started to breathe a sigh of relief, he went on, “They’re worse. They’re a thousand times worse, maybe a million. Far as I’m concerned, we should hang all the mamzrim who ran ’em. And you know what else? I think we’re going to.”

“If that shit is true-Jesus! — we ought to.” Sergeant Benton paused. “The what? Mom-something?”

“Oh.” Weissberg realized what he’d said. “It’s Yiddish. Means bastards. And they are.”

“I ain’t arguin’.” Benton eyed him again, this time not as a source but in another way he’d seen before. “Yiddish, huh? You’re, uh, a Jewish fella?”

“Guilty,” Lou said. How many Jews had the sergeant seen before? If he came off an Oklahoma farm, maybe not many. And was he a Regular Army guy or a draftee? Lou thought he might be career military, and not many Jews were.

“You really don’t like the krauts then, right?”

“You might say so, Sergeant. Yeah, you just might. If they were all in hell screaming for water, I’d pull up with a gasoline truck.”

“Heh.” Benton let out only a syllable’s worth of laughter, but his eyes sparked. “I like that-damned if I don’t.”

“Glad you do.” Lou came back over to the crater. “Me, I don’t like this. If the Germans think they can fuck around with us while we’re occupying their country…” His voice trailed away. What exactly could-would-the United States do about it?

“Awful lot of guys just want to head on home an’ pick up their lives where they left off,” Sergeant Benton remarked. “Hell, I sure do.” He was a draftee, then.

“I know. So do I,” Lou said. He’d been teaching high school English in Jersey City when the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor. Nothing would make him happier than going back to diagramming sentences. But he was not the master of his fate or the captain of his soul. The master of his fate was back in Nuremberg, waiting to hear what he had to say about this. He sighed. What could he say that wasn’t obvious?

Benton’s eyes slid to what was left of the two GIs’ bodies. Those would either get buried in a military cemetery here or go back to the States in sealed coffins, probably with sandbags to keep them company and make them weigh what they should. Lou hoped the Graves Registration people would plant them here. The less these guys’ relatives knew about what had happened to them, the better.

He walked over to the jeep that had brought him out from Nuremberg. Benton had his own jeep. A bored- looking private sat in Lou’s machine, checking out a magazine full of girls in pinup poses. Reluctantly, the driver set down the literature. “Take you back now, sir?” he asked. Violation of the surrender terms? A honking big crater and two mangled bodies? He probably didn’t care much about anything, but he cared more about the leg art than this business.

And maybe he had the right attitude, too.

“Yeah, let’s go,” Lou said.

The driver started the engine. Jeeps were almost as reliable as Zippos. They fired up first time every time.