Chapter 11

After the ordeal with the Happsmans, life became very routine and dull. Well, as dull as two years of raising a daughter, son and niece, all in various sorts of relationships could be.

Creighton was true to his word and remained as chaste as possible with Pauli until her fourteenth birthday. On that day, the dam bust for both of them and after her party, they both disappeared for the evening. Since Pauli had asked many questions about sex and love in the preceding months, I new what was coming. One of her birthday gifts was a package of a dozen condoms. She smiled and kissed me.

Paul and Patty were progressing in a similar manner, but Paul confided in me that he had no intentions of having a sexual relationship with Patty until they were wed. Patty confided the same in a separate conversation. I could tell that they both meant it at the time. Little did I know.

Michelle and Juanita seemed as devoted to the other. During the ensuing years, Juanita’s parents disowned her and moved out of Boise in what they thought was disgrace. She never heard from them again. I became her mother and Michelle her lover when she moved into our home and slept with Michelle.

Paul rose to the top of his class and seemed to have a knack for organization and he seemed to be able to see things coming that most others couldn’t. During his eleventh year in school, and for no apparent reason, he started taking lessons in German and French. He would wander around our house and property, talking to himself.

He would ask himself questions in French and answer himself in German, or vice versa. Of course Patty loved it when he spoke softly to her in French, and she laughed out loud when he said the same loving things in German.

“Paul, how on earth do Germans manage to make love with that language?”

“Patty, I don’t think love is what the German’s plan is for the future.”

“What do you mean, dear?”

“Just a bad feeling I have. Just a feeling.”

By the time Paul turned eighteen, the world was at war and he enlisted in the Army. He wrote regularly and kept me up with his progress. When he was sent overseas, he kept writing to Patty, continuing to profess his love for her. I’m ashamed to say that I took a course of action that I thought, at the time, was in Paul’s best interests. Again, little did I know.

Paul’s story

Basic training was a lot of yelling and being regimented into being a soldier. I was yelled at, pushed, shoved, occasionally kicked in the ass. I never took it to heart. I was my father’s son, an O’Dell, and I was a soldier. It was not easy; but it should not have been easy to be a soldier.

One day in a moment of quiet reflection, I approached my drill instructor,

“Excuse me, Sergeant, may I ask a question?”

“Sure, O’Dell.”

“You’ve been in combat, am I doing a good enough job to do my job in combat??

“You’re doing fine, son.”

I looked him in the eyes and spoke quietly so no one around us could hear me.

“Sergeant, my father fought in the Civil War, but he died before I was born. Tell me that what we’re doing here is going to have me ready for war. If it isn’t then I would ask that you train me harder. When I get to combat, I want it to be easier than the training.”

The sergeant looked at me with a bit of bewilderment.

“In all my years, O’Dell, no man has ever made that request to me.”

He took a deep breathe and then spoke as if revealing a deep dark secret.

“I can’t help you, son. We can’t do anything close to what you will see, and smell, and feel in combat. It’s not possible for you to experience the smell of piss and shit that comes out of a scared or dead man. I can’t shoot the man next to you through the head or blow him up before your eyes, leaving a smoking hole and covering you in his guts. I can only do my best to make you tough enough so when it happens you can move forward.”

I nodded and looked at him understanding that I couldn’t understand.

“Thanks Sergeant. I’ll take your worst and do my best.”

I left basic as a Corporal, in charge of a ten man fire team, consisting of one PFC and eight privates, all of us fresh out of basic training. In our first battle, the PFC was shot and killed, and three of my men were killed by artillery fire. I was horrified, stunned, and still led my surviving men to our objective and took it.

During our next mission, our platoon sergeant was killed and I replaced him. It seemed that after that my platoon was assigned to the toughest spots and my team, the most difficult missions. I saw too much horrible death over the next months. But we did our jobs as assigned. It was soon apparent that the platoon of Sergeant Paul O’Dell, known by my men and those around us as, “The O’Dells”, was living up to the motto the men had come up with, “The O’Dells are not to be trifled with”.

We’d been fighting for three straight months with only a few days off here and there. During that time I’d lost touch with Patty. My many letters were seldom answered. She spoke of going to college and I assumed that she found someone else and between her studies and him, it took up all of her time. But I was in my world and had not time or emotion to deal with hers.

I’d lost a few friends, but not as many as I would have thought during a war. The Germans were beginning to lose their positions at the front, and we were part of a strong push to break through their lines.

My unit was assigned the center of the five mile long assault line. At the right time, everyone was to start moving forward. Our information was that the center of the hill we were approaching had one machine gun nest. When we crested the rise at the base of the hill it became very apparent that there were three machine gun nests in a crossfire set up with the middle nest behind the ones on the left and right.

If the men attacked they would effectively been in a massive kill box. Each nest sounded like it had a .30 cal Madsen machine gun in it. It was a light machine gun, but was accurate and incredibly reliable. And it was as deadly a weapon as I’d ever run into. A lot of men were going to die if we had to blindly charge these nests.

Men were falling all around our position, while my men and I were hunkered down out of the line of fire line waiting for the signal whistle. I knew that we weren’t going to be able to advance at all in this situation, at least not without a lot of men going down. I had a good view of the entire field from my vantage point and I thought I saw an opening to the far left side of the line.

I backed out of my position and, signaling to my team, I led them around to the left of the small rise hiding us. At the end of the rise I found that there was about twenty-five yards of open ground to get to where I would be able to flank the left side machine gun nest. The three guns were raking the rise and it seemed that every time someone popped up their heads to get a look-see they got shot.

Our orders were that on the signal whistle we were to run over the rise and try to overwhelm the enemy by shear numbers. It was obviously a plan put together by someone in the rear echelon who was not on the field of battle and who had never been shot at.

“This isn’t going to work, Woz,” I said to Private Wozniak. “The men are going to get butchered. We need to get to those guns. Tell me when the left side gun is pointing to the right, I’m going to try to flank it.”

“Are you outta your fuckin’ mind?” Private Simms said.

“Yeah, but as I see it there ain’t no other way.”

There was the sound of bullets whistling around us, I looked at Simms, about to give him instructions, and saw his eyes were blank and staring at me, the pupils of his eyes getting larger and larger as there was blood running down his face from the bullet wound to his head

“Woz! Say when.”

“Shit!”

I stripped off my backpack and keeping only my rifle, ammo belt and the three grenades hanging from it. I coiled, ready to sprint around the far side of the hill. Of course, I never stopped to think what was around that side of the hill, but I was about to find out. Besides, no one thought some stupid ass would single-handedly charge the side of a machine gun nest with only a rifle and three grenades.

“All right, Sarge, it looks like he’s going to sweep right. There he goes. GO!”

I took off running in a low crouch and was about five yards away from my target area when I noticed a couple of heads pop up. The trench extended around the hill! I dropped to the ground, pulled off two grenades and flipped them into the trench. The ground around me began to explode as bullets hit around me. The two grenades went off and I swear I jumped the five yards to the trench in a single bound before the dirt thrown up by the explosions settled down.

I hit the side of the trench and rolled into it, before pulling off the last grenade and tossed it to my left away from the machine gun nest, just in case there were any Huns behind me. I brought my rifle to the ready and began to sneak my way over the dead bodies left by the grenades to my right. The German trenches were built with many curves, so I didn’t have to sweat facing a large number of enemy soldiers all at once.

A greenish tunic came around the bend in front of me and I shot it. The soldier dropped and I kept my stead creep forward. There was a lot of shouting and screaming, so I assumed that the whistle had blown, and my men were now trying to rush the hilltop. I sped up to a run and shot another German before coming to the ladder going up to the first machine gun nest.

I looked at the soldier I’d just shot and saw two of their potato masher grenades hanging off his belt. They had wooden handles with a charge on the end. I grabbed them, pulled the string on the bottom of the handle and chucked it up into the machine gun nest. I followed the first with the second because most of those kinds of grenades were just explosive and not real shrapnel producers.

As soon as the second grenade went off, I scrambled up the ladder and quickly shot the three stunned and wounded soldiers in the nest. Looking around, I found more grenades and I set them at the ready to discourage anyone from attacking me by climbing the ladder. Looking out over the guns field of fire, I saw my men and the rest of the attack force in a slaughterhouse. Grabbing the machine gun, I tried to turn it to the left and found that it wouldn’t traverse completely because of the vertical supports that held up the roof of the nest.

I jerked the gun from its anchored position and after considerable effort, pulled the heavy, staked legs of the mount out of the ground and reset the gun so I could shoot into the next nest. I heard German voices yelling and I took a few seconds to drop two grenades to the bottom left and right of the ladder. The voices changed to moans and groans. Going back to the gun, I pulled out the locking pin that stopped the gun barrel from rising or falling and drew a bead on the next nest. I pulled the loading lever to cock the gun and squeezed the trigger.

The gun, without the legs anchored to the ground, climbed. I had to make adjustments to bring the field of fire down and under the roof of the middle nest. The bullets tore the nest to shreds along with its inhabitants. Then I tried to bring the gun to bear down the trench to rake the soldiers coming to defend the nest, but the barrel wouldn’t depress that far. There was an explosion and my ears rang and my head swam from the concussion.

My head quickly cleared, thanks to fear and adrenaline, so I grabbed three of the remaining grenades from the dead soldiers around me and, rifle in hand, made my way down the ladder. Still woozy from the earlier explosion, I staggered towards the middle nest. When I got to the next ladder, I lobbed a suppressing grenade back down the trench behind me and then tossed my last two grenades up into the nest.

I was amazed at how hard it was to climb the ladder into the second nest, but regardless, I was prepared for a fight at the top of the ladder but only found three dead Germans. The middle nest was behind the other two nests, so I was able to easily traverse the gun to my left and bring it to bear on the third nest. I paused shooting long enough to lob a few grenades I’d stripped off the dead soldiers that had been manning the nest down into the trench behind me.

When I did that I saw a group of German soldiers behind the trench line turning a mortar towards my position. I turned the gun to shoot at men approaching to reinforce the trench and to bring fire on the mortar position. I continued to fire the gun until there was another explosion behind me. It felt like my brain was going to explode out of my ears and I tried to stand when my platoon approached the front of the nest, but dropped to its floor.

As I passed out, all I could think of was my men. I kept repeating to myself, “The mission. The mission. The mission...”.

I woke up laying on my stomach in a nice warm, white hospital bed. My face was in a hole in the bed and I was looking at a mirror to see who might be talking to me. A nurse was sitting near me, unless it was an orderly with great legs! I groaned, drawing her attention. Her eyes grew as big as a saucer. She patted my shoulder and rushed out of the curtained area my bed was sitting in. A few seconds later she returned with a doctor. I couldn’t talk or move and was starting to panic, when I heard this soft voice with a sweet American Southern belle accent.