The Man with the Iron Heart

tavern in the Alpine village with the unpronounceable name. As he’d discovered, there were a lot of Alpine villages with unpronounceable names. This one was more unpronounceable than most, which was-or would have been- saying something.

“Thank you kindly.” Toby Benton had taken on a considerable alcoholic cargo, too. The sergeant sounded mushmouthed any old time-that was what coming from Oklahoma did to you. When he was also drunk, you could hardly understand him at all.

“Goin’ home.” Bernie didn’t sound like anybody from the speech and debate team, either. “Man alive…You are a man alive.”

“Sure am.” The demolitions expert nodded. “Sure as hell am. Didn’t know if I was gonna make it through, ’specially with the way they went an’ kept stretchin’ our hitches an’ stretchin’ ’em an’….”

Every guy in the joint growled profane agreement with that, even the fellows who hadn’t been over here since before the shooting was supposed to be over. “Way my points added up, I figured I’d make it back in November or December of ’45,” Bernie said. “I’m still here a year and a half later. God only knows when they’ll turn me loose.”

“Long as you don’t go home in a box, that’s the only thing that matters,” another GI said. He raised his voice a little: “Anybody here not know somebody who got it after fucking V-E Day?”

No one claimed to, not even a couple of kids who’d been here only a few weeks. “It’s a bastard, all right,” Sergeant Benton said. “Ain’t we lucky we won the war?”

“Some luck.” Bernie Cobb peered lugubriously into the bottom of his seidel. “I don’t even have any beer left.”

“You can do something about that, you know,” the dogface sitting next to him said.

“Oh, yeah.” Bernie needed reminding. He waved to the barmaid. “Hey, sweetheart!”

He wouldn’t have called her sweetheart anywhere else, and not without a few under her belt, either. She was somewhere in her mid-thirties. She wasn’t ugly-she wasn’t half bad, in fact, and she had a shape like a Coke bottle. Even drunk, though, he wasn’t tempted to put a move on her. She looked tough, was what she looked. He wondered if she’d been through a denazifying trial. If somebody told him she’d been one of the nasty female guards at a German camp, he would have believed it.

Which didn’t keep her from filling up his beer mug again. She had serious muscles in her forearms, from hauling around so many steins and pitchers. He gave her a dime. “Ja,” she said softly as she made the small silver coin disappear. Would the old man with the gray mustache behind the bar see any of that? Bernie shrugged. It wasn’t his worry.

“Gonna get me a job where the most explosive thing I gotta mess with is the carburetor off an old Ford,” Benton was saying. “Gonna forget all the shit they learned me. Ain’t gonna study war no more, like it says in the Good Book.”

“Wow,” two or three GIs said together, longing in their voices. The Americans in the tavern amassed an impressive amount of lethal hardware. Nobody went anywhere unarmed these days. You might as well tie a bull’s- eye and a SHOOT ME! sign to your back.

“You know what, Sarge?” a soldier said. “Pretty soon we’ll all be coming home, regardless of points or whether the Army likes it or any of that crap. Congress’ll figure we wasted enough time fucking around over here, and that’ll be that.”

“Wouldn’t bother me none,” Benton answered. “Nobody likes the damn Nazis, but nobody wants to get his dick shot off, neither.”

“We want to go home!” several men chorused. Then they started laughing fit to bust. Discipline here was still pretty good-not great, but pretty good. From what Bernie heard, some places hardly anybody obeyed orders he didn’t happen to like.

Toby Benton called for more beer. “One bad thing about goin’ home,” he said, “is I’ll have to drink the horse piss they put in bottles back in the States.” Bernie wasn’t the only guy who nodded-not even close. The stuff they brewed over here had been a revelation to him. Beer didn’t just get you blasted after you poured down enough of it. It could taste good, too. Who would’ve thunk it?

The barmaid came over and filled up Benton’s stein. He gave her a K-ration can and a pack of Luckies. “Ja!” she said, as she had after Bernie handed her the dime, only she sounded a lot happier this time. In a cautious, experimental way, as if he were defusing a mine, Sergeant Benton patted her on the ass.

All the Americans in the tavern tensed. The other half-sloshed GIs must’ve thought the same thing Bernie did: if you messed with this babe, she’d knock your block off. Which only went to show you never could tell. The barmaid plopped herself down in the demolitions expert’s lap, threw her arms around his neck, and gave him the kind of kiss the Hays Office wouldn’t let you film. Bernie wondered if she’d screw him right there where he sat, but she didn’t-quite.

“Hot damn!” Benton said when he finally came up for air. “I’ll miss the easy nookie they got over here, too. Sure as hell can’t get an American girl to put out for beef stew and a pack of smokes.”

“Our side didn’t lose the war,” Bernie said.

“Who says theirs did?” Sergeant Benton regretfully untangled himself from the barmaid. She didn’t seem anywhere near so tough any more.

“You know what I mean,” Bernie persisted. “Other thing is, girls back home don’t know what all we’ve been through.”

“And every goddamn bit of it the past coupla years-all the bombs, all the rockets, all the snipers, all the crap- it’s been nothin’ but a waste of time,” Benton said. “You fuckin’ wait an’ see. We’re gonna chuck it in over here. We’re gonna go home an’ let the Jerries do whatever they want.”

“We’re gonna pay the price for it down the line if we do,” Bernie said.

Benton shrugged-and almost fell off his chair. Yeah, he’d taken on a lot of beer. “It’ll be somebody else’s headache then,” he said. “Long as it ain’t chewing on the guys who’re in right now, they won’t care.”

Whether Benton was drunk or not, that seemed like a pretty good bet to Bernie Cobb. And, now that the ice had been broken, so did the barmaid.

Harry Truman looked hopping mad. Since coming back to Washington, Tom Schmidt had seen the President angry plenty of times. Truman delighted in sticking out such chin as he had and telling the world where to go and how to get there. He could be funny at the same time. He made Tom laugh, and Tom got paid for writing unkind things about him. But today he just looked ticked off.

Overhead lights flashed off his spectacle lenses as he glared out at the assembled reporters. “I called a press conference this afternoon so I could tell the American people why I’m vetoing this joke of a budget bill that has landed on my desk. I warned the Republicans who head up this new Congress-and I warned the Democratic leadership, too-that I would veto any bill that looks like this. They sent me one anyway, and I am sending it back- air-mail, special delivery.”

“Nice of him to get his own party mad at him, too,” Schmidt whispered to the guy sitting next to him.

The other fellow barely had time to nod before Truman went on, “I’m especially unhappy with the so-called Democratic leaders in the Senate.” No, he didn’t care if he antagonized them. “They told me this was the best they could do-a bill that cuts off funds for our boys in Germany at the end of the year instead of right away. If this is the best they can do, I’m here to tell them it isn’t good enough.”

“Why not?” a reporter called.

“I’ll take questions when I’m done with my statement,” the President said. “But since I was coming to why not anyway, it’ll look like I’m answering this one. Congress has got no business tying American foreign policy by the purse strings. Can you imagine what would have happened after Pearl Harbor if Congress told President Roosevelt, ‘You’ve got to win the war by the end of 1943, or we won’t give you any more money to fight it’? Can you imagine?” He quivered with indignation. “If Congress did something that stupid, why, Hitler would be holding a press conference here in the White House right now, for heaven’s sake!”

Several reporters laughed then. Newsreel cameras ground away. One day soon, people all across the country would see him when they went to the movies. “Is it really the same thing, Mr. President?” Tom called.

“You’d better believe it is,” Truman snapped-so much for taking questions after his statement. “We will do what we need to do. It may take longer than we expect right now. It may cost more. We will do it anyway.”