The evening of December 17^th was much like any other for John and the other paratroopers at Camp Mourmellon. It was cold and rainy (Critchell 210), so the guys in John’s barracks probably gathered around the inadequate coal stove in the barracks to play cards, dice, and pass those long, dark hours of the early evening. Some of them probably turned in early to escape the weight of the cold. As the night wore on, more and more of them settled into their bunks. The evening ended no differently than any of the others, the barracks dark and quiet save for the snores of sleeping men.

It must have been nearly morning when were awakened by booming voice of one of the C Company sergeants. “Fall out!” he shouted to the paratroopers as they sat up in the half-darkness, no doubt wondering if it was some kind of joke. “We’re going back into combat,” he announced. ‘The Germans broke through and they’re headed this way. Grab all the ammunition you can get.”

John must have been shocked. Headed this way? The Germans were on the run, and the war was all but over. What in the hell was going on? He quickly dressed, and threw his gear together. It didn’t take long, because he didn’t have much; whoever was in charge of supplies had also assumed that the war was nearly over, and the 101^st had not been re-supplied with anything. His raincoat was the warmest piece of clothing he had, so he put that on, shouldered his rifle and pack, and headed out.

They milled around outside as they waited for the troop trucks to arrive. “Where in the hell are we going?” a paratrooper asked, his breath billowing in the cold morning air.

“To a town called Bastogne, in Belgium,” one of the officers answered. “Orders are to hold the town at all costs.”

When the trucks finally arrived, they climbed in and began the long drive into Belgium. There must have been slow going at times, with the long line of trucks backing up and stopping as they passed through towns and crossed bridges. When they were in the open country, they would have moved faster, and the paratroopers, huddled in the open beds of the trucks, did their best to ignore the throbbing cold. John was glad he had hung onto his raincoat; some guys had nothing but their jumpsuits. Some didn’t even have rifles.

Darkness fell, and they kept driving. In the cold and the dark, John would not have noticed when the convoy crossed the border into Belgium, but he must have noticed when all the trucks turned off their headlights. They were at Bouillon, Belgium, and though few of them could have read the sign and known that, they certainly knew that they were getting close. The trucks rattled on in the darkness.

After some time, the convoy slowed and stopped dead. While sitting and idling in the dark, the exhaust of John’s truck pluming in the headlights of the truck behind, they heard a commotion of voices approaching from in front of the convoy. As they peered into the darkness, they could see the silhouettes of hunched, exhausted men shuffling toward them out of the darkness. John and the others would have quickly recognized that they were American soldiers, but it may have taken them a few seconds to realize that they were retreating from whatever the 101^st was headed toward.

Paratroopers were climbing out of the trucks ahead and taking whatever ammunition and supplies the retreating soldiers had left. John and the guys in his truck did the same. The soldiers willingly surrendered their ammunition, and some even gave up their rifles to paratroopers who needed them. “Where are you going?” one of the retreating soldiers asked.

“We’re going to meet the Germans,” a paratrooper responded.

‘There are thousands of them,” one of the retreating soldiers said, “and they have tanks.”

“We have these secret can openers,” one of the paratroopers responded. “We’ll just jump on the tanks, open them up, and take the Germans out.” The retreating soldiers probably didn’t laugh.

The trucks continued on. Progress must have been slow as they encountered more and more retreating soldiers, shuffling up the dark road like dazed refugees. Each time the trucks stopped, John and the others would hop down and take whatever ammunition the soldiers were willing to part with. Many of them, exhausted and shell-shocked from the sudden attack, were happy to give up every round they had left. As John climbed back onto the truck and watched them limp off into the darkness, he must have wondered what he was heading into.

After what must have been several more stops and starts, they were finally given the order to disembark. After grabbing their meager packs and climbing out of the trucks, they would have stood at the edge of the road, grateful to be out of the cramped truck beds, waiting for the next order. The countryside around them was open, though they would not have been able to make out anything more in the misty dark. If John expected a night march, he was surprised when the order came: they were to bivouac where they were for the remainder of the night (Critchell 214).

The weather was cold and wet, so it could not have been a restful night. As the eastern sky finally began to brighten, the officers ordered them up and onto the road. As tired as he must have felt after the long truck ride and his few hours of fitful sleep, John must have been happy to be moving. The 1^st Battalion of the 501^st – A, B, and C Companies – was to move through town and push up Longvilly Road into the outlying countryside (214). They marched through town, which must have been dark and shrouded in fog, and passed an intersection as they emerged into the countryside. After marching for quite a while, they were ordered to turn around and head back toward town; they had taken the wrong road (Rappaport and Norwood 444). They marched back to the intersection, and took the other road.

As they marched, John must have been struck with how much C Company had changed since those early days in the States. Bobby Harwell had not been with them since the jump in Normandy. Francis Beavers and Lieutenant Jansen were no longer there. There were several new faces, including a fellow named Barney Momcilovich, who had transferred to C Company, and who John liked quite a lot. Most noticeable of all. Captain Phillips was not there. Without him, it must have felt like a different company altogether. Still, many of John’s old friends were still there. Bill DeHuff, John Simmons, and Hank Centrella were all there. So were Harold Paulsen and Emo Cassidy. That wasn’t bad for a company that had seen so much combat. Longvilly Road led them into a wide valley broken by sparse stands of spruce (Critchell 215). Low hills, still blurred with fog, rose to their left (Rappaport and Norwood 445), and to their left, the road ended at the edge of a small gully, in which they could hear the burbling of a creek (446). They would have walked along quietly, scanning the distance ahead, but seeing little besides the uncertain contours of the hills and dark shapes of trees. On a sunny day in peacetime, it would have been a lovely place, but as the dark shapes of trees loomed out of the gray mist, with the Wehrmacht somewhere just ahead of them, it must have felt more like a scene from a Bela Lugosi movie.

The crash of machine gun fire splintered the quiet, sending everyone to the ground. Up ahead, they could make out the shapes of two Mark IV tanks on the road ahead (Critchell 216), and could see the muzzle flashes of machine guns through the fog. After several uncertain minutes, during which they must have sporadically returned fire, they were ordered them to deploy across the open hillside to their left (Rappaport and Norwood 446). They managed to do this without a great deal of trouble – no doubt some of 1^st Battalion’s machine guns and mortars were laying down suppressing fire -but as they tried to probe forward toward the German position, it quickly became apparent that they were not going to be able to crack it. It was also apparent, however, that the Germans could not move forward either. They dug in and waited.

At nightfall, they shifted position (Critchell 219). C company moved into a wooded area just off the road and began to establish their new position. John was with Simmons, so the two of them began digging. Though John must have been happy to be up and moving, and warming up a little, the digging could not have been easy. The soil in any woodlot is woven through with sinewy roots, so any digging is a combination of shoveling, chopping, and pulling. As they dug, a few soldiers from the 28^th Infantry Division and other outfits that had been overrun by the German onslaught, may have approached their lines. Many were dazed and listless, and wanted nothing more than to leave the fighting behind them, but some of them, after a tin of rations and a cigarette, asked where they should dig in (Rappaport and Norwood 475).

The weather grew colder through the night, but the ferocious attack that many of them must have expected did not materialize. As news began to trickle in the following morning, John and the others must have begun to understand the larger, strategic picture. The Germans had launched a counterattack that had taken everyone by surprise. Bastogne was at a crossroads that the Germans needed to control if they were to continue their advance. The 101^st had arrived just in time. There had been pitched engagements all around Bastogne the previous day, but the 101^st had kept the Germans out of Bastogne. Their job, for however long it took, was to keep doing the same thing until the Germans gave up or reinforcements arrived.

Captain Owens must have sent out patrols that morning to locate the German positions, but John must have spent most of the time in his foxhole, shivering, cursing, and scanning the distance for the attack he knew was coming. As the day wore on, other bad news trickled in. Company I, of the 3^rd Battalion, had been completely wiped out the previous day in a village named Wardin (Critchell 220). They had driven a handful of Germans from the village and begun to solidify their position when the Germans hit the village with a force of tanks and a battalion of infantrymen. Only a handful of men made it back to Bastogne; the rest, including the CO, Captain Wallace, never made it out. Another piece of bad news, even more troubling to John, also arrived that day:

Father Sampson was missing. He had left Bastogne in a jeep to aid some wounded paratroopers on the outskirts of town, but had not returned (Grayson).

The attack did not come until 7 PM that night (Critchell 227). John must have crouched in his foxhole as the tree bursts cascaded through the forest, as splintered limbs spun to the ground, shells exploded thickly in the snow, and terrified cries for a medic filled the short silences between bursts. When the barrage slackened, John must have steadied his rifle on the bank of dirt in front of his foxhole, looked down the barrel and waited until an uneven line of white silhouettes advanced through the haze, picking their way through the rubble of trees and battered ground. The paratroopers’ ammunition was limited, so they would have waited as bullets snapped through the air and chipped into trees, until the Germans were within range. Then, the crackle of small arms fire, and the clatter of machine gup fire, would have washed down the line. Some of the figures must have spun violently and toppled to the ground, thrashing and kicking, while others slowly sank to their knees, slumped forward and lay still, as if sleeping. The other German soldiers would have dived for cover, returned fire, and moved forward again, as C Company’s mortars flashed and plumed around them.

The fight went on for hours. The Germans would have fallen back several times to regroup, after which the cries of the wounded quickly filled the silence that the guns had left behind. It would not have surprised John to see a man staggering armless through the trees, or another lying helpless in the frozen pine duff, slowly suffocating on his own blood. Others were not wounded as severely, and sat quietly, numbly awaiting a medic. It must have felt much like the orchard battle in Holland, only colder, and even more desperate.

John, like most soldiers, viewed a wounded man with a mixture of pity, relief, and envy: pity for his pain and terror; relief that it was someone besides himself who was wounded; and envy that, should that man recover and be shipped home, he would no longer have to suffer and kill. He may have left his foxhole to help the medics who were sprinting back and forth through the woods. He would have helped to slide them onto stretchers and hoist them into the backs of jeeps, so they could be transported to the aid station in town. After the jeeps left, the woods would fall quiet, and John would be left with the dead. As he walked back to his foxhole, John would have seen men lying huddled in their foxholes, as if sleeping, while others lay sprawled on the ground, staring blankly into the treetops.

During those interludes, John would have been able to hear the muted boom and clatter of engagements to his left and to his right. The Germans were attacking all along the line. The heaviest volume of fire was to John’s right, along the road where they had first encountered the Germans. Over and over, the sound of gunfire and artillery swelled and ebbed as the Germans advanced and the paratroopers drove them back. There were several artillery pieces in Bastogne that were zeroed in on the road, so the whoosh and thump of shells must have punctuated the clangor of machine gun and small arms fire. 

The attacks finally ceased at midnight (230). John and the others would not have known  that immediately, and would have kept waiting for the next wave of attackers. Finally, however, as the night wore on, they would have decided that it was over and tried to sleep, huddling in their foxholes, shivering in their meager clothing as the uneasy silence closed in around them.

The following morning, it began to snow. John was used to snow-there was usually snow on the ground in Rochester from late November until March – but in the current circumstances, he couldn’t have welcomed yet another dimension of misery. As the snow began to collect on the ground, some of the men went out on patrol, while the rest waited in their foxholes, scanning the distance as the snowy haze thickened like some white glaucoma. As the day wore on, some guys returned wearing white bed sheets they had cut and stitched into makeshift ponchos. Little happened that day. The snow continued to fall, and John and the others continued to wait.

At 5:25 PM, the shriek and whump of nearby artillery broke the silence (Rappaport and Norwood 515). John would have been able to tell that the Germans were shelling the American position immediately to the right of the 501^st. He must have been grateful that the shells weren’t falling on him, but he certainly felt for the guys who were at the receiving end of the barrage. Gunfire broke out soon after as the Germans began to advance. As the battle ebbed and flowed, John and Simmons must have scanned the trees and braced for an attack on their sector. They both must have known that if the Germans failed to break through quickly, they would shift their attack to another sector, and that could very well be theirs.

An attack did come, but not the overwhelming assault they were expecting. Given the poor visibility, the Germans must have been close before John and the others were able to see them, but once their silhouettes appeared through the curtain of snowfall, C Company’s machine guns and mortars quickly drove them back. There were several more probing attacks along the 501^st main line of resistance throughout the night (Critchell 234), but the paratroopers drove them all back. The main thrust of the attack was clearly to their right.

The fighting, and the snow, continued into the night. In between attacks, John and Simmons must have tracked the sounds of battle anxiously, hoping that the clangor of battle would not drop too far behind them, a sure sign that the Germans were breaking through. Fortunately, the Germans did not break through, and the clamor of battle finally faded into the silence of the nighted woods. John and Simmons settled in to doze and shiver as the bodies of fallen Germans in the woods before them faded into the snowy ground.

As the feeble winter sunrise began to brighten the snowy murk of the forest, John and the others began to stir from their foxholes. Normandy had been brutal and difficult, but at least it had been warm. He had thought those last weeks in Holland were cold and miserable, but as John huddled in his foxhole with nothing but a raincoat to ward off the bitter, Belgian winter, he must have felt almost nostalgic the mud and rain that he had endured on that miserable spit of land north of Nijmegan. The throbbing cold made the simplest task difficult, if not or impossible. Opening a can of K-rations, retying a boot lace, or feeding rounds into a clip with thick, numb hands could be infuriatingly difficult.

Clambering out of the foxhole to take a leak, especially on windy nights, was a hellish ordeal. Water froze in the men’s canteens, making it tough to even take a drink. Many of the men shuddered so violently all night that sleep was impossible. Add to this the fact that each man’s body, in its struggle to continue generating heat, was consuming more calories than he was able to eke out of his thin rations, and one can imagine the deep, bone-weary fatigue that afflicted each soldier, and added to his suffering.

As the day wore on and the snow continued to fall, news began to make its way up and down the lines. Some of it was good. The outfit to John’s right was the 2^nd Battalion of the 327^th Glider Regiment, and it had held its ground through the night against that fierce attack that John and Simmons had heard. Patton’s 4^th Armored Division was fighting its way toward Bastogne, and was expected to arrive within a few days (Rappaport and Norwood 528). Other news was not so cheerful. Though it could not have been surprising, the news that they were surrounded could not have been welcome (502). Athough they had held out thus far, ammunition was running dangerously low (527). As determined as they were to hold out, they couldn’t hold off the Germans without bullets and artillery shells. If they weren’t re-supplied soon, the gig would be up.

As the afternoon began to fade into evening, another piece of news reached them: The Germans had asked General McAuliffe to surrender, and he had refused. The idea that the Germans thought the 101^st was ready to surrender must have seemed ludicrous to John, given that every attack the Germans had launched at Bastogne had failed, but that only made General McAuliffe’s response that much more amusing. The note that he sent to the Germans had only one word: “Nuts!”

The men’s mood was lightened further when they awoke on the morning of the 23^rd to a clear, frigid day. Each of them knew, as soon as they saw the blue sky, that it was finally clear enough for Allied planes to reach Bastogne and re-supply them. It wasn’t long before they heard the drone of American and British fighter planes. John, Simmons, and the others must have cheered as the fighters swooped in, strafing and bombing the German positions relentlessly. Even if John wasn’t able to see them through the trees, he was able to hear rattle of the guns and the hiss of rockets from the Typhoons, and feel the dull concussions of the bombs (Critchell 239). All around Bastogne, the paratroopers must have cheered wildly.

Around 11:50, they heard the low roar of hundreds of C-47 supply planes (240). As the fighters continued to strafe and bomb, the C-47s came in low to drop the supplies and equipment that the 101^st so desperately needed. Some men from C Company may have been selected to report to the drop zone and help with retrieval. Throughout the day, as parachutes plumed down onto the drop zone by the hundreds, the paratroopers hauled and sorted equipment as the fighters continued to pound the German positions. By nightfall, they had the food and ammunition that they had been waiting for. They also had blankets, which must have been most welcome of all.

The next day, Christmas Eve, the equipment drops continued. John must have heard that two sticks of Pathfinders had landed and set up radar beacons, which continued to guide the planes in to Bastogne and to the drop zone (Killblane). As the supplies grew, so must have their confidence. Properly supplied, they could take anything the Germans threw at them.

The equipment certainly cheered everyone up, but the fact that it was Christmas, and he was not only far away from home, but fighting a desperate battle in the frozen woods still made John depressed and miserable. He and a few buddies decorated a scrubby spruce with foil from their cigarette packs, lids from their K-ration tins, empty shell casings, anything that could brighten up the bleak landscape of drifting snow, steel-gray sky and ravaged forest. While the pleasant work of trimming the tree distracted John temporarily, he still faced those long hours in the foxhole, with nothing to do but think of all those Christmases in Rochester, of the snow falling outside a window steamed with the warmth of people chattering and laughing over hand after hand of penny-ante poker while a heavy pot of sauce bubbled on the stove. Sometime after eleven o’clock, everyone would leave to sit through the sleepy solemnity of midnight mass, after which they would return home again to fry skillet after skillet of Italian sausage, drink homemade wine, and play more poker until the sky grayed with impending dawn. A few hours of sleep and then Christmas morning, followed by another feast in the early afternoon, this time of spaghetti, meatballs, Italian bread and ham. The cold K-rations, the stiff slices of Spam and the gummy cheese that John subsisted on at Bastogne were a pathetic substitute for those Christmas feasts that he had always taken for granted.

The Germans tried to take advantage of that homesickness. Sometime during the day on Christmas Eve, John heard the whine of incoming 88s. They all would have dived for their foxholes, and braced themselves for the inevitable crash and boom of exploding shells. Instead, there was nothing. All duds? Then papers began sluicing down on them. Propaganda flyers. One had a picture of a little girl. “Daddy, I’m so afraid,” it said underneath. Next to the picture was a note intended to make the men homesick: their families and sweethearts missed them; Christmas was a time to be with those people, not in no-man’s land so far away from home. “Man, have you thought about it, what if you don’t come back… what of those loved ones?” the note ended. “Well soldier, PEACE ON EARTH GOOD WILL TOWARDS MEN… for where there’s a will there’s a way… only 500 yards ahead and MERRY CHRISTMAS.” (Rappaport and Norwood 544).

John was not quite homesick enough to surrender to the Germans. The other paratroopers felt pretty much the same way.

That night, John and Simmons were allowed to leave their foxhole and find someplace to warm up. The men rotated in and out like that regularly, a few at a time, so that everyone would have a chance to stop shivering for a short while, and perhaps even have something hot to eat or drink. As John and Simmons toward town, they came upon a small cluster of houses, one of which had smoke curling from the chimney. The windows were dimly lighted, and they could probably hear the quiet mutter of voices inside. One thing was certain: it was a lot warmer inside that house than outside on the road. John and Simmons walked up to the door and opened it.

The house was filled with Belgian civilians. John and Simmons couldn’t have been the first soldiers who had come upon that house and gone inside to escape the cold, so the civilians would not have been overly startled to see them, and probably welcomed them inside. There were people in every room, including the basement, so John and Simmons may have had to shift around to find a few feet of floor space. Once they did, however, they must have felt like they were in heaven. The fire in the hearth and the warmth of all those huddled bodies must have made the house luxuriously warm, at least in comparison to their foxhole in the woods. As exhausted as he was, John may have dozed off as he sat there listening to the quiet chatter of the civilians and the crackle and hiss of the fireplace.

The shriek and thump of distant artillery suddenly broke through the quiet. John would have been able to tell instantly that the Germans were shelling Bastogne. If he counted himself lucky to be on the outskirts of town, that luck suddenly swirled down the drain as the whine of one of those distant shells crescendoed into a deafening shriek. A booming crash, as the windows flashed and rattled and the civilians cried out in fear. Through the window, John could see that the house next door had taken a direct hit. John and Simmons excused themselves and headed back to their foxhole. As nice as the warmth was, it was not worth a direct hit by an 88.

The shelling continued into the night as John shivered and cursed in his foxhole. It must have seemed an apt way to celebrate Christmas in what seemed like an increasingly brutal and futile war. When in the hell would it end? France was free, Hitler had been on the run, and the end had seemed near. Now they were stuck in some godforsaken woods outside of some little town in Belgium, surrounded by the Germans and battling hypothermia just as hard as they were battling the Wehrmacht.

There were no major attacks on Christmas, but as John crouched in his foxhole and scanned snowy distances, he could not have felt cheerful. The homesickness that he felt that first Christmas back in Toccoa must have seemed almost quaint to him. That Christmas he had been safe and warm, and had enjoyed a nice dinner with that kind waitress and her family. This Christmas there was no comfort of any kind, only the relentless snow, the seething cold, and the constant threat of the Wehrmacht just beyond the distance.

December 27^th arrived like any other day, the distant sunrise blowing its dusty light across the clouded sky, whirlwinds of snow roaming through the creaking trees. A pretty picture, John may have thought, except for the cold and the corpses. John and Simmons rotated to the roadside and took over a foxhole there.

Late in the day, as John was pacing the edge of the road while Simmons huddled in their nearby foxhole shivering over a cigarette, John heard what sounded like a distant rumble. At first, he thought it might be planes, or the wind rising into another damn storm, but as it deepened into a steady thrum, John realized that something was coming up the road. Soon, a dark shape became visible up the road behind him, followed by another dark shape, and then another. Tanks. They were Shermans, and they were moving out of Bastogne. The lead tank stopped a hundred or so feet up the road as a soldier stepped into the road.

“Come out and be recognized,” a soldier up the road shouted.

A man’s head popped out of the turret. “We’re 4^th Armored,” he shouted through a cloud of breath.

“The road’s mined,” the soldier on the ground replied. “We have to clear them.”

The tanker nodded and dropped back into the tank. As men began to emerge from the tanks and the woods, milling about and talking as they prepared to clear the road, John watched a man, clearly an officer, climb from the third tank in the line and stride up the roadside toward him. The officer stopped in front of the foxhole and scowled down at Simmons, who was hunched in the same spot he had been before the tanks’ arrival.

“Soldier,” the officer barked, “what are you doing in that hole?”

John studied the man’s face intently. He looked awfully damn familiar. As his gaze shifted from the officer’s face, John noticed that the man was wearing an ivory-handed revolver on each hip.

“If you were here, sir, you’d still be digging,” Simmons replied. He obviously had no idea who he was talking to.

“Bah!” The officer spat into the snow. “If you guys keep moving, you don’t have to dig holes.” He spun and stalked off.

“Do you know who that was?” John asked as he watched the man disappear up the road.

“No,” Simmons replied.

“That was Patton.”

Simmons’ face went ashen. “Patton?” he stood up and strained to get another look, but the general was gone. “I’m lucky he didn’t slap me silly.”

Patton rode victoriously into Bastogne that afternoon while infantry dug in along the road in order to ensure a safe corridor into the town. John must have been ecstatic. They were no longer surrounded, and supplies and reinforcements could finally be brought through. There must have been a good deal of celebration along the line that night.

Despite Patton’s breakthrough, however, John’s day-to-day situation changed little. While food, ammunition, medical supplies and, most welcome of all, winter gear, finally began to flow into Bastogne, the Germans kept resolutely to their foxholes on the thick hillsides, and continued to harass the beleaguered town. Thus, when Patton moved on, the corridor was secure, but the surrounding countryside was not. Since no one had arrived to replace the 101^st, the exhausted paratroopers stayed on the line.

The days wore on, each seeming colder and more endless than the last. They must have patrolled extensively, in order to map the German positions and track their movements as closely as possible. When they weren’t patrolling, they must have spent most of their time huddled in their foxholes, waiting for their turn to plod into town to warm up for a few hours.

The Graves Registration Service had begun to collect bodies (Rappaport and Norwood 600), but they had a lot of work ahead of them, as the dead were everywhere by then. John had gotten used to living with the dead a long time ago. A corpse was simply that: a corpse. John, like so many others, did his best to ignore the dead, to think of the stiff, broken men who lay scattered throughout the woods as little more than windfall. Some men managed to find humor in the human waste: the trail to C Company’s command post had been stomped out next to a frozen German who lay in the snow with his arm outstretched, as if he were reaching toward the treetops; someone had attached a small sign to his crooked fingers, which read, “CP ->.”

Sometimes, however, the position of a body, the expression on a dead man’s face, would remind John that the litter of corpses had once been men. One gusty afternoon, John was sent out on patrol. They spread out and began moving toward the German line, stooping and crawling beneath low branches, ducking between narrow places in the brush, painfully aware of how easily a musette bag or ammunition belt could snag a limb and upset the delicate balance of snow piled high on the tree’s branches; the cascading snow could easily be seen from German lines, and would probably bring on a crushing artillery strike. Unfortunately, their caution made tittle difference. John had just dropped to his knees in order to snake beneath some low brush when he heard the unmistakable shriek of incoming artillery.

The first salvo smashed into the treetops. John must have been able to hear the hum of blood coursing through his head as he dashed forward in a crouching run, frantically searching the snowy ground for a foxhole, a ditch, anything to protect him from the tree-bursts. He would have been able to feel the air shudder with each explosion, hear the whistle of shrapnel as it sawed through the air and thudded into the ground. He also must have been able to see the pulverized bodies of every friend and enemy who had been hit by a shell.

A helmet at ground level ahead of him. John took a deep breath of searing cold air, and sprinted for the foxhole as an avalanche of explosions rolled at him through the trees. The creak of a falling tree, a distant shriek, and John was wedged next to another soldier in a shallow shell-hole. As John shouldered himself between the other man and the side of the hole, he grabbed the man’s shoulder and shook him. “Buddy, give me a little room,” John shouted above the roar of artillery.

The soldier slumped forward, and his head fell heavily against the side of the hole. He was dead. Unlike the tortured looks that John had seen in the faces of most dead, there was a sad, tired expression in this man’s eyes. One of his legs had been blown off at the knee. His pant leg had frozen into a tangled nest of bloody tatters, from which a sharp splinter of bone protruded. His arms were clasped tightly to his chest, as if he were still trying to keep warm.

He had been caught beneath an artillery attack just like John was now. It may have been American artillery, or perhaps a stray German shell had hit him as he advanced on the American line or made his way through the snow back to the safety of his own foxhole. Whatever kind of shell it was, it had landed practically at his feet. He probably cried out for a medic, cried out to anyone who could hear him, and finally crawled into a shell hole as the last of his comrades disappeared into the trees. He must have hoped that he would live long enough for somebody to find him. The soldier must have died alone from blood loss and hypothermia long before anyone realized he was missing. As another salvo echoed off through the woods, John leapt out of the shell hole to seek shelter elsewhere.

There were some rare moments of levity. On another patrol, after they came under fire and dived into the snow, they began firing and advancing on the German’s position. John was toward the rear of the group, most likely covering some of the others as they advanced. Lieutenant DeFelice was just ahead of John, and as he scrambled forward, John saw some bullets plume into the snow next to him. As John watched, the back of DePelice’s pants began to smoke, and then burst into flame at the edge of one of his buttocks. A bullet had grazed his pocket and hit his cigarette lighter. John burst into laughter.

Defelice, still unaware that his pants were on fire, heard John and turned. “What in the hell are you laughing at, Cipolla?” he asked.

“Sir,” John replied, still convulsing with laughter, “your ass is on fire!”

Defelice promptly rolled in the snow to put the fire out, and continued advancing.

As Patton pushed on, the fighting continued around Bastogne. John must have been numb by this point, not just from the cold, but from the deadly repetition of battle. He must have lost count of the times he fired at shapes moving through the trees, or fired into the cold mist as the bazooka teams moved forward. Every time the shells slammed down around him and ripped through the treetops, sending white-hot shrapnel spinning down onto the foxholes. Men screamed and cursed in English and German. At every instant, death was only a split second away, but each time John somehow managed to survive, and each time they managed to beat the Germans back. As the battles ground on, and the cold tightened its grip on the countryside, John must have wondered how much more he could take.

One night, shortly after Christmas, it nearly broke him.

John shuddered into wakefulness as Simmons slid into the foxhole next to him. He hadn’t really been asleep – he couldn’t remember the last time he had truly slept -but the combination of cold, fatigue and hunger had dazed him into a bleary stupor. He hunched forward, straightened, and climbed out of the foxhole, his feet thick and numb, as Simmons pulled on his raincoat, hugged his knees to his chest, and settled in for his hour of rest. John stomped his feet, took a deep, shuddering breath of cold air, and started circling the foxhole. This was the routine on outpost: an hour of pacing and watching, followed by another hour in the hole listening to Simmons huffing and muttering, and then back out, again and again through the dawn.

A whisper of movement. John stopped his pacing, knelt down behind a tree and peered into the tangle of shadows beyond the outpost. He could see the dark shapes of broken limbs littering the ground, the silhouette of a dead German slumped against a tree, the curved back of a man curled totally in the snow. Nothing else. John waited, wondering if it had been a trick of the falling snow and shifting moonlight.

Then they were there: dark figures in long coats moving toward him through the trees. John heard the snap of his M-l unroll through the woods, felt the heavy stock slam into his shoulder, before he realized that he was firing. His sights had been dead on the lead figure, but instead of slumping into the snow, the man stopped, swayed drunkenly, and pressed on. John took a deep breath, set his bead directly beneath the man’s upper torso, and squeezed the trigger. This time the figure didn’t even waver.

“Did you get him?” Simmons was peering over the edge of the foxhole, frantically scanning the woods. Was he half asleep already? Why couldn’t he see them?

John steadied his breathing and fired two shots at a second figure. Nothing. John fired again, swallowed a wave of panic as his shot echoed uselessly through the woods and the figures moved closer and closer. Was something wrong with his ammunition? What the hell was wrong with Simmons? They were going to be overrun and killed, and Simmons still hadn’t fired a damn shot.

A hand on his shoulder. John spun around, half expecting a knife in the kidney, wondered how in the hell a German had gotten around behind him. It wasn’t a German. The man’s face was clearly visible in the pallid moonlight: it was the lieutenant.

“What the hell’s wrong Cipolla? What do you see?” Like Simmons, he peered into the woods as if he couldn’t see anything.

“Look,” John said. “Right in front of us.” He turned and pointed at the dark figures still shambling soundlessly toward them.

“What do you see?” the lieutenant squinted, darted a confused look at John.

“Germans!” John snapped. “They’re coming!” Why couldn’t anyone else see them? As John raised his rifle, he felt the lieutenant’s hand on his arm.

“You’re pretty cold and sleepy, aren’t you? You’re firing at trees.”

Trees? John swept his gaze across the woods, expecting to see the figures looming directly in front of him. They were gone. Where the lead figure had been, John could make out nothing but a narrow spruce sapling. The other figures, too, had dissolved into the uneven shapes of the forest. John lowered his rifle.

“I want you to go back to company headquarters and spend the night over there.” The lieutenant put his hand on John’s shoulder. “You’re just half-asleep and you’re seeing things.”

“I guess so,” John muttered. He rose and followed the lieutenant through the trees toward the main line of resistance and, beyond that, the relative warmth and security of headquarters. As John struggled to keep pace with the lieutenant, his legs aching with the effort of plunging through the deep snow, he realized that he was exhausted. A warm night away from the line would be a good thing. Although John was still confused about what he had or hadn’t seen, the sense of relief, which deepened with every step he took away from the line, drowned out anything else he might have been feeling. Within a few minutes of arriving at the CP, John was warm and asleep.

It wasn’t until the next day, when John awoke feeling more rested than he had been in weeks, that he felt embarrassed. As he returned to his hole, he found himself glancing at the other guys in the company, wondering if they knew. His shots must have woken every one of them up and put them on alert. He had seen men do things that were far worse, such as throwing their guns down and running away, but he still couldn’t help feeling like a nutcase.

He need not have worried. Everyone was in the same place, fighting fatigue and hypothermia and simply hoping that they could hold on. Though they could not have known it, the winter of 1944-45 was one of the coldest on record in the Ardennes. Everyone was suffering, soldiers and civilians alike.

1945 came in with a flourish as the American artillery hammered the German positions with a sustained artillery barrage (Rappaport and Norwood 612). John must have sat there listening to the hiss and roar of the barrage, and watching the dull flicker of the explosions through the trees. It was a little more than four years since the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, and it had been nearly three years since John had boarded the train forToccoa. He must have been aware of how much he had changed since then, how the training and the war had shaped him and transformed him into something more than the reckless young man he had been before the war. John had seen more combat than he ever imagined, and all of it had been within the past year. He must have felt as if he had lived an entire lifetime in 1944. John also must have hoped that 1945 would be the last year of the war. It could not have seemed likely just then, after nearly two weeks of desperate fighting, but John was so exhausted, so sick of fighting and killing, that another full Year of war must have seemed unimaginable.

Things were quiet in the first days of 1945. Although the paratroopers must have welcomed the quiet, it was apparently worrisome to the officers at Company Headquarters, because on the morning of January 3^rd, one of C Company’s lieutenants knelt down at the edge of John’s foxhole and told him that he was going on a two-man patrol. The men on outpost had reported hearing voices and vehicles beyond a knoll that rose several hundred yards beyond the OP. The lieutenant suspected the Germans were planning an attack, so John was to take another man, climb the knoll, and report what he saw.

“Who’s going with me?” John asked. He ground his cigarette into the side of the foxhole and pulled the wool blanket more tightly around him.

“We’ll get you another man,” the lieutenant replied.

“Do I get to choose him?” John asked hopefully.

“No,” the lieutenant replied, rubbing his hands together vigorously, “we already got you a man.”

“Okay, who is he?” John asked suspiciously.

“He’s a replacement. Private Cutarus. I don’t know if you ran into him. He’s been staying close to Company Headquarters,” the lieutenant said absently.

John’s previous experience with patrols, particularly the bayonet fight in Holland, had given him a healthy respect for the dangers. The idea of approaching the German line with only an inexperienced replacement for backup scared the hell out of him. “No, I don’t know him,” John answered.

“We’ll get him over here,” the lieutenant said, turning. ‘Tell Cutarus to get over here,” he shouted into the woods. John stood up reluctantly, but kept the blanket draped over his shoulders

A moment later, a soldier stumbled out of the trees, looked around until he caught sight of the lieutenant, and started stomping toward John’s foxhole. He looked young, no more than eighteen or nineteen. It wasn’t so much his physical appearance that made him look young, but the expression on his face: he looked eager, which told John that he had not seen much in the way of combat

‘That the one?” John asked, even though he already knew the answer.

“Yup,” the lieutenant nodded.

“Oh my God,” John meant to mutter under his breath, but the words came out louder than he intended.

The lieutenant spun his head around and smiled. “What’s the matter?”

“He just doesn’t look like somebody I’d like to have come with me on a patrol.”

“Well,” the lieutenant replied, reaching under his coat and pulling out a pack of cigarettes, “we picked him because he needs some combat experience.” He tapped a cigarette out of the pack and put it in his mouth. “I told you what the mission is, so you can explain it to Cutarus. He’s all yours.” He lit the cigarette and stood. ‘Take him somewhere away from the other men and brief him.”

“Okay,” John said. As the lieutenant headed back toward the CP, Cutarus came huffing up and stood, staring at John. Cutarus was lanky, his face dark and angular. John wadded up his blanket and climbed out of the foxhole. He clapped Cutarus on the shoulder. “Come on Cutarus, let’s go”

“Let’s go,” Cutarus nodded, and followed John as he headed toward a quiet place behind the foxholes.

John stopped in a small clearing a few hundred feet away and turned to Cutarus. “Cutarus, I’m John Cipolla,” he said.

“Ya. See-polla,” Cutarus replied, nodding.

“No, John Si-pole-uh,” John corrected him.

“See-polla,” he repeated.

“All right,” John said, reaching for a cigarette, “that’s good enough.” John studied Private Cutarus closely as he lit his cigarette. Not only was he young, but he just didn’t look like much of a soldier. He was slouched over, and his uniform was baggy and unkempt. John couldn’t imagine this untucked, uncoordinated kid moving faster than a slow shuffle, let alone fighting.

As John tucked his cigarettes back into his pocket, he realized that Cutarus was staring at him expectantly. “You know what we’re gonna have to do, don’t you?” John asked.

“No, I don’t know what we’re going to have to do,” Cutarus replied.

“We’re going on patrol.” John lit his cigarette.

“Patrol?”

“Yes, patrol.” John pointed. “See that clearing over there?” Several hundred yards beyond the line of foxholes, the trees opened into a wide clearing. Beyond the clearing, the sparsely wooded ground began to rise into a low knoll.

“Clearing?” Cutarus asked, sniffing.

“No trees, no nothing,” John explained, wondering how was he supposed to brief the kid if he didn’t speak English.

“Oh, yes.” Cutarus nodded, wiped his nose with his sleeve.

“We’re going to go past that clearing,” John explained. “Come here,” John said, pulling Cutarus next to him. “Look through these trees. See that knoll, “John pointed, “that hill?”

Cutarus nodded. “I see hill.”

“Beyond that hill, they expect there’s Germans there. There’s activity.”

“Activity?”

“Activity,” John repeated. He was too exhausted to feel frustrated. “Noises and movements. We’re gonna have to go over there and see what we can and come back and report it to our commanders.”

“Oh, yea,” Cutarus nodded excitedly, “report it to our commanders.”

John took a long pull on his cigarette and shook his head. “And Cutarus, do me a favor. Don’t repeat everything I tell you.”

“Oh, no,” Cutarus agreed, nodding vigorously. “I don’t repeat everything you tell me.”

John laughed, but it sounded more like a cough. “Where’s your weapon?” he asked.

“Weapon?”

“Your gun,” John said, feeling slightly like a thesaurus. “Boom boom. Your gun.”

“Oh, gun. Ya, ya,” Cutarus nodded, unslinging his rifle.

“Is it loaded?” John could see that there was no clip in the gun. Cutarus slid back the bolt to reveal that the chamber was empty. “Cutarus, load that gun,” John ordered.

As Cutarus pulled a clip out of his belt pouch and began fumbling with the rifle, John felt a rising wave of apprehension, which turned to alarm as Cutarus leveled the rifle at John’s chest while he struggled to load it. After a short lecture on gun safety, most of which Cutarus probably didn’t understand, he figured out how to work his weapon, and John went on with the briefing. “Now,” John explained carefully, “when we leave the line, I want you to stay twenty paces behind me.”

“Twenty paces behind you.”

“You know, paces.”

“No.”

John took a step. “One,” he counted, and took another. “Two.” He took a third step. “Three. Do you understand?”

“Oh, ya,” Cutarus replied, nodding his head vigorously. He began walking and counting just as John had done, but when he hit three he kept on going. “Ten, eleven, twelve…”

“God damn, Cutarus, get back here,” John snapped, not sure whether to get pissed off or laugh. “You don’t have to go all twenty paces right now. Just stay behind me twenty paces, like from here to that tree. You understand?” When Cutarus nodded, John continued. “Now, if I go like this,” John motioned downward with his right hand, “I want you to hit the ground.”

Cutarus crouched. “Ground,” he repeated, looking up at John and nodding.

“Down, like get your face right in the snow. When I go like this,” he motioned again. “I want you to get on the ground, stick your face in the snow and not get up until I tell you, okay?”

John still wasn’t sure whether or not Cutarus understood enough to approach enemy lines, but if the Germans were gathering for an attack beyond the knoll, speed was crucial, so John unslung his Thompson, chambered a round, and began moving cautiously through the trees. As he came up behind the American outpost, he stopped and turned toward Cutarus, who he expected to see twenty paces behind him. Instead, he saw the butt of Cutarus’ rifle as it smacked him in the face. John staggered backward a step or two, grabbed the branch of a pine tree to keep from falling on his ass. Cutarus stood there and looked apologetic.

“Damn it, Cutarus,” John hissed, “I told you to stay back twenty paces. Twenty paces!” Cutarus took a step backward, nodded, and turned.

As Cutarus shuffled away, John turned to the two men on outpost and described his orders to them. As he moved on into no man’s land, he felt his breathing tighten, his hands close tightly around the Thompson. He skirted the edge of some blowdown, dropped to one knee, and looked over his shoulder to make sure that Cutarus was still twenty paces away. He was. John rose and moved carefully through a narrow thicket. As he reached the edge of the clearing he motioned for Cutarus to stop, knelt behind a thick spruce, and scanned the area ahead. The morning sun reflected brilliantly off the deep snow, so brilliantly that John had to squint and shield his eyes in order to see anything besides white. The clearing was a few hundred feet wide, and ended at the foot of the knoll; it was clear. The knoll itself was fairly open, with a few shrubby trees lining its flank, and a few ragged, broomsticked spruces outlined along the crest. So far as John could see, the hill was clear, too.

John rose to his feet, motioned to Cutarus, and began to move slowly along the edge of the clearing. Perhaps, John thought, we won’t see anything; the woods beyond the knoll will be empty and we can go back and have some Spam and cheese. A slight breeze rattled the trees as he reached the far end of the clearing. A shot rang out.

John instinctively dove to the ground. He looked up, swiped the snow from his face, and scanned the hillside. Shimmering snow and the twisted shapes of trees, but nothing else. A few seconds of quiet and he rose slowly to his knees. Nothing. In the empty woods, sounds can seem much closer than they really are. John brushed the snow off of his gun, checked the muzzle to make sure it wasn’t clogged with snow, and stood up. As he stepped forward, he heard the sharp pop of a second shot, then a third, and a fourth. Who the hell was shooting? John was still glancing frantically across the hillside when he heard a voice call out in thickly-accented German, “Come out with you hands up.”

John followed the voice and spotted him: a solitary figure silhouetted at the top of the knoll, pointing some kind of handgun down the hill at John. “What did you say?” John shouted back.

“Come out with you hands up!”

A lone German firing a handgun was unusual. If the Kraut was on patrol or outpost, he would be armed with a rifle or at least a submachine gun. A soldier who was lost or separated from his company would never open fire, especially at such long range, on a pair of enemy soldiers who were better armed and quite possibly the spearhead of a larger force; any man in his right mind would run or hide. The only explanation that made any sense was that the German was battle fatigued, that he had become confused and delusional and wandered away from his company.

John heard the fourth round plunk into the snow a few feet behind him before he heard the report. Before he could react, before he could even register the fact that he had almost been hit, his right arm was wrenched violently backwards. He felt himself spinning, and suddenly he was sitting on the ground as a fifth shot rolled down the hillside.

“Jesus Christ,” John gasped. His hand was tingling and throbbing, just like the time when, during a boyhood snowball fight, his friend had hit pelted his numb hand with a chunk of ice. He could see a hole in his glove, some frozen blood at the edges.

John picked up his Thompson, but he couldn’t move the fingers on his right hand. He choked back a wave of panic, cradled the gun in the crook of his right elbow, fingered the trigger with his left hand, and aimed at the German. The Kraut fired again, and again, but the bullets went high and thumped through the trees behind John. John steadied his breathing, took careful aim, squeezed the trigger and held it. The gun bucked up and to the right as the crash of six, seven, eight rounds rolled across the hillside. John brought the gun back down, aimed, waited. After what seemed like several seconds, the German lowered his gun, bowed his head, and toppled face-first into the snow. As he hit, his helmet came off and tumbled downhill, finally coming to rest in deep snow several feet below him.

Cutarus. Those shots that went high, John realized, may not have been meant for him. He stood and spun around, hoping to God that the kid wasn’t hurt. Cutarus was standing at the far edge of the clearing, about twenty paces behind, holding his rifle and staring up the hill with a puzzled look on his face. John motioned for him to get down, and as Cutarus belly-flopped into the snow, John turned and started up the hill. His heart was battering itself against his ribs, his gut aching with fear. If there were Germans on the other side of the knoll, they had heard the shots, and were on their way up the other side. He couldn’t turn back and tell the lieutenant that he’d shot one man and run away without finishing the job, couldn’t face the other guys if they were surprised with an attack he could have alerted them to. He started up the hill.

John plunged uphill through the knee deep snow as quickly as he could, taking the most direct, open line he could see. The gunfire had alerted everyone within miles, so there was no longer any need for stealth. He paused when he reached the corpse. The German’s face was buried in the snow, and John could tell that at least three of his rounds had hit: the back of the Kraut’s coat was soaked with blood. In two spots, and his lower right arm, which still clutched a Luger, was bent backwards at a sickly angle. Guys always talked about meeting Jerry face to face and killing him in a one-on-one duel as if that was the highest form of combat, but strangely, John felt no elation, not even a hint of satisfaction, at having fought and killed so well. He shook the body to be sure that it was dead and moved on. When John neared the top, he dropped to his stomach and crawled onto the narrow crest to peer over the other side.

A few hundred yards away, John could make out the unmistakable shapes of four Tiger tanks idling in the woods, the smoke of their exhaust rising through the cold air above them. As John looked closer, he was able to see a long line of men standing and sitting among the trees. It was a full company at least, and since they were deployed in a skirmish line, it wasn’t hard to see that they were getting ready to attack. John turned and crawled back into the lee of the hill, stood, and dashed downhill toward Cutarus and the safety of the American lines.

John had to collect the dead German’s papers, so he stopped again, knelt down and laid his Thompson in the snow. He grabbed the German’s coat with his left hand, wedged his right elbow into the armpit, and pushed the corpse onto its side. John let the body’s limp weight rest on his knee as he fumbled awkwardly through the coat pockets with his left hand, all the while trying to avoid looking at the face. When he found his identification papers, John tucked them into his own pocket and let the body flop back onto its stomach. John paused a second, and then pried the Luger from the German’s fingers and tucked that into his pocket as well. He stood and continued down the hill. The drum of a Tiger’s engine ground through the monotony of John’s huffing and stomping. He had to hurry.

John glanced at the helmet lying upside down in the snow as he passed it. The thought of the German’s bare head in the snow flashed through John’s mind, then the image of him dropping soundlessly to the ground as the last of John’s spent cartriges hissed into the snow. As the low growl of the Tigers’ engines grew closer, John retraced his steps to the helmet, picked it up, and walked back up the hill. He knelt down, lifted the German’s head, and brushed the snow off his face. The thin blond mustache did little to disguise how young he was. Before the war, John had always imagined the Huns as grizzled, bloodthirsty veterans, but each time he looked closely, he was confronted with young men his age, boys who might have sat across from him at school and played against him at baseball during the muggy Rochester summers. There was still the hint of bewilderment in his gray eyes. John put the boy’s helmet back on, stood, and started back down the hill.

As John plunged through the snow as quickly as he could, he saw Cutarus still sprawled face down in the snow at the far edge of the clearing. John worried that perhaps he had somehow been hit by one of the German’s bullets, although he wasn’t sure how, since Cutarus had been standing after the German was dead. John post-holed across the clearing, glancing over his shoulder several times at the crest of the knoll, knelt down next to Cutarus and shook his shoulder. “Cutarus. Cutarus!” John shook him harder.

Cutarus lifted his face out of the snow. “Ya?”

“Are you all right? Are you hit?” John asked.

Cutarus climbed to his knees and sat back in the snow. “I no hit,” he replied. “I’m all right.”

As John began to brush the snow off Cutarus’ face with his left hand, Cutarus grinned. “I like you See-polla,” he said.

Perhaps it was the grin, or the way that Cutarus sat there with his legs splayed out in the snow, but as John brushed the last bit of snow from Cutarus’ forehead, he was back in Rochester, dusting the snow off a little boy’s face. A light snow drifted down Jay Street as the voices of other children rang out through the shrill air. At that moment, the melancholy, the cold sense of loneliness that John had felt for so long seemed to dissipate. John smiled. “I like you too, Cutarus.”

The chugg of a Tiger’s engine shook John from his reverie. He grabbed Cutarus by the arm. “You listen to me and listen good. Did you hear all that shooting?”

“Ya,” Cutarus replied, “I hear shooting.”

‘The Germans heard it, too. They’ll be coming down over that knoll after us, so we’ve got to get the hell out of here, and get out of here fast. And one other thing I’ve got to tell you – I got hit.”

A look of terror washed over Cutarus’ face. “You got hit?”

“I got hit in my right hand, so I have to use my left hand to shoot. Use your weapon if you have to.”

Cutarus was visibly shaken. “You got hit?” he repeated. “You got hit?”

“Quit your whining,” John snapped. “I’m all right. Now this time, no more twenty paces. Let’s get the hell out of here into the woods as fast as we can, because they’re going to come after us.”

“Okay!” Cutarus replied. He turned and bounded into the woods like a deer. As John struggled to keep up, huffing and kicking through the snow, he couldn’t help but wonder what else he had misjudged about the kid.

John and Cutarus reached the outpost safely. John paused to warn the two men of the impending attack while Cutarus kept running toward the main line of resistance. When John arrived back at the line, the lieutenant was waiting for him. John briefed him as well, and soon found himself bouncing down a narrow road in a jeep, bound for the field hospital. After he repeated his story a third time, John handed the German’s identification papers to the lieutenant, who looked them over and grunted in surprise. “He was a captain,” the lieutenant said, and tucked the papers into his own coat. John shook his head, and glanced out into the woods, not as happy as he thought he would be about killing an officer.

A few minutes later, as John sat at a table in the field hospital while a medic pulled the bullet from his hand and carefully bandaged the wound, John realized, with a start, that he was in a good mood for the first time in almost a month. He was finished, at least temporarily, with Bastogne, finished with the cold, the killing, the misery of the foxholes. He had a warm bed, hot meals and pretty nurses to look forward to. Maybe the war would even end while he was laid up, and he could go home to Rochester.

As nice as all that would be, it wasn’t why he was smiling.