Balm In Gilead: A Story from the War

By John L. Withers II

In May 1945, as World War II ended, an all-black U.S. Army truck company, including Lieutenant John L. Withers of Greensboro, North Carolina, rushed emergency supplies to an unknown German town. Long victims of harsh racial abuse, the soldiers were nonetheless shocked at the horrors they witnessed when the “town” turned out to be the Dachau concentration camp. They were further shocked, days later, when two destitute young Jews, former Dachau inmates, appeared at their encampment and pleaded for help. Housing non-military personnel was strictly forbidden, but the soldiers, with their Lieutenant’s endorsement, sheltered the boys nevertheless. After the war, as he raised a family and launched a career in government, Withers always remembered the Jewish boys and told of the year they hid out in his unit, working alongside and forging close friendships with his soldiers. He himself became their surrogate parent, guiding them towards understanding that, however horrid the past, the future yet held hope.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Jan 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781684716425

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II

Copyright © 2019 John L. Withers II.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

Scripture taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

ISBN: 978-1-68471-643-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-68471-641-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-68471-642-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019920849

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 12/30/2019

To the families Weigen, Joskowicz, and Withers:

Together again.

When the Baal Shem had a difficult task before him, he would go to a certain place in the woods, light a fire and meditate in prayer—and what he had set out to perform was done. When a generation later, the Maggid of Meseritz was faced with the same task, he would go the same place in the woods and say: We can no longer light the fire, but we can still speak the prayers—and what he wanted done became a reality. Again, a generation later, Rabbi Moshe Leib of Sassov had to perform the task. And he too went into the woods and said: We can no longer light a fire, nor do we know the secret meditations belonging to the prayer, but we do know the place in the woods to which it all belongs—and that must be sufficient; and sufficient it was. But when another generation had passed and Rabbi Israel of Rishin was called upon to perform the task, he sat down on his golden chair in his castle and said: We cannot light the fire, we cannot speak the prayers, we do not know the place, but we can tell the story of how it was done.

—Hasidic tale, retold by

Gershom C. Scholem, 1946.

TO THE READER

This book tells the story, or rather a compendium of stories, centered on my father’s friendship with two Holocaust survivors at the end of World War II. Writing it was a challenge. His account of the episode rarely came forth as a chronicle laid out from beginning to end. Instead, it emerged piecemeal, sometimes in a broad overview of the tale, but often in increments, snatches of thought, or fleeting references in casual conversations. Cumulatively, his words were riveting, but we listeners generally had to piece the fragments together to form a complete narrative.

Which was my task in undertaking this work. The key challenge was achieving coherency from the disparate elements I inherited—a job further complicated by the numerous details lost or confused over the years. Myriad times, especially as he aged, he began a gripping yarn with the phrase, There was a guy in the Company, who …—with the names, times, and locations otherwise forgotten. So, what to do?

On reflection, I decided that the best means of imparting my father’s story to others in the compelling way that he had imparted it to me was to stick closely to what he actually said, both in the words he spoke and in the tone he adopted. My goal was not simply to record the facts of his experience, but also the feeling with which he imbued it. Yet, I found I could not avoid a degree of license to ensure the clarity and the flow of the narrative.

Thus, in Part I, while I related most of the individual episodes as told, I had to craft other elements—the transitions between events or the order in which they occurred—according to my best surmise. Further, to capture their actions and attitudes, I humanized the soldiers in the ranks—his anonymous guys—by incorporating their perspectives within composite characters like Emerson, Smitty, Dawkins, and Tomlin. In addition, rather than careen among the three Companies—the 3511th, the 3512th, and the 3537th—in which my father actually served, I folded their various adventures into those of Company 3511 alone. Finally, for those curious as to how this amalgam of memories matched true history, I record in Part II my search for his old friends, any witnesses to the events, and such documentary material as I could find.

I also made two arbitrary editorial decisions. Diverse local accents prevailed among the soldiers with whom my father served. I have not tried to replicate those speech patterns, but merely to suggest them in such dialogue as I presented. Second, the terms to describe black people during my father’s youth—Negro and colored—are largely discarded now, but were standard usage in his day. In the interest of historical veracity, I have utilized the bygone wording when referring to the past and contemporary terminology, African-American and black, when speaking of the present.

In all this, my lodestar was and remains to intrude as little as possible upon my father’s recollections, and to let his remarkable story speak for itself.

Biblical Citations

All the Biblical references and quotations in this work are drawn from the King James translation of the Bible. Please note that in some instances, in order to make my father’s spontaneous recollections of a passage appear more realistic, I have altered the original wording slightly.

The specific quotations from Scripture are as follows:

• The quote in Chapter 4 beginning, Thus saith the Lord: A voice was heard in Ramah … is from Jeremiah 31:15.

• The quote in Chapter 4 beginning, For the hurt of the daughter of my people am I hurt … is from Jeremiah 8:21-22

• The quote in Chapter 7 beginning, And the waters returned, and covered the chariots, and the horsemen … is from Exodus14:28-29.

PROLOGUE

Only late in his life, when he fell ill, did I realize how little I knew about my father. And that was strange because, from my earliest days, we had been close. People said, in fact, that we looked alike, spoke with the same soft intonations, and had many mannerisms in common—although both of us denied it.

What linked us were common interests. As a boy, I delighted in listening to him: his stories, his jokes, his favorite poems (which he could recite at length), his casual reflections on people and the world around us. Long after my mother and younger brother, bored with his musings, wandered away, we would go on talking.

He had so vivid an imagination, so magical a gift with words that he never failed to entrance with tales of mystery and adventure dear to my boyish heart. As I grew older, the topics became less imaginative, more serious and adult—that is, more problem-related. But even as we aged, and the demands of career and family brought me home less often, the vibrancy of our exchanges endured. Without fail, we would resume a conversation, ongoing since my childhood, that had never really ceased.

Of course, I knew certain things about him. He had come far in life—from boyhood in a poor family in Greensboro, North Carolina, to a senior official in the U.S. Foreign Service—and was proud of it. I recalled how he worked his way up from a B.A. at the impoverished North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College (commonly called A & T) in Greensboro to a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. (I had been eight when he received that last degree, but was less interested in the graduation ceremony than in scampering about on the Midway.) I was aware of his role as one of the earliest African-American officers in the Foreign Service and his awards from foreign governments for his help in their economic development. I was in attendance when he was sworn in to his last and most distinguished assignment, Director of the U.S. Agency for International Development Mission to India, and listened to the Agency’s Administrator extol his leadership, his devotion to duty, and his rags-to-riches rise in government service.

Such was his public image, but over time, I realized that there was a persona within that even close friends did not see. Hidden in the shadows of his past was an uncertain youth, quite at odds with the confident public figure later on display. He was a man who had given his life to professional success in the belief it would protect us, his family, from the tribulations he had known. But as he grew older and fell ill, he seemed inwardly concerned over missing something that was now too late to regain. Was the frightened boy he once had been, and had managed to subdue, emerging once more in old age?

I had seen that doubting man only rarely. My father was to outer appearances the most self-possessed person I had known. Confident, even-tempered, never moody or depressed, he was always ready with a kindly laugh, a pleasantry, a gracious word for others. People referred to him as courtly, a description that struck me as arcane, but somehow apt. Still, there were those instances, the more striking for their rarity, in which he flashed anger for unaccountable reasons or clouded with melancholy at some passing thought known only to him.

These moments were arresting, the more so because he refused to say what caused them. When he was like that, even my mother, who was closest to him, was at a loss.

Leave him be, she would counsel, he’ll be fine in a moment.

They were unsettling, those times. I could not account for them, except for an inchoate feeling that they touched elements of his past that he was most reluctant to discuss: the war and Jim Crow.

His illness changed all that. For one thing, I became insistent on asking questions that I had avoided before. Ill, he seemed mortal. That fueled in me an urgency to know, to share, to reach him as I hadn’t earlier. To clasp him the more tightly in the time at hand.

Not that I feared losing him right then. His doctors and a quick review of the medical literature told me that his disease, prostate cancer, could be fought successfully. No, his illness was a prophecy—of the stark truth, which I had refused to confront before, of a time when he would be with us no longer. And that was hard because he had always been with us and, we somehow imagined, always would be. If I was to seek answers, I had to seek them now.

To my surprise, he did not resist my curiosity, although, to my greater surprise, he did not respond well to certain questions. This normally loquacious man, this most gripping of raconteurs, was suddenly halting, stuttering, at a loss for those compelling phrases, those captivating words that had come so naturally in the past. His formerly clear, well-constructed presentations now disintegrated into fragmented shards of thought, like a shattered urn, removed from the earth, that must be carefully reassembled to have recognizable form again.

I was not alone in my urgency. He wanted to share with me as much as I with him, but, after years of avoidance, found he was no longer sure where to begin. As he struggled, it came to me that he was also asking something of me, something with which he desperately needed my help. He strained to make me understand, but try as I might, I could not. I turned again to my mother.

She was an effervescent, energetic woman, who was as instinctive and intuitive as my father was reasoned and diagnostic. Thoughts tumbled out of her in jumbled profusion, but they were fueled by an understanding and compassion that made her insights telling.

Your father feels weak, frightened, she told me. Now that he can do nothing about it, he is looking back over his life, summing it up, wondering what it means. He wants to know how he did.

That’s crazy, I objected. He’s had a great life. He’s a good man. Everybody knows that.

Everybody but him.

I pondered for a moment.

So, how do we turn him around? I asked. How do we get him to snap out of it? We need to tell him straight to stop all this nonsense and get going again.

She stared at me fixedly.

You can’t tell him, she said pointedly. You have to show him.

Me? I said, startled. How can I show him anything?

She dismissed me with a wave.

Oh, you’re full of ideas. You’ll think of something.

No, I thought, this is a request I cannot honor. How was I to collate the pieces of his life—many of which I didn’t know—into a whole that he would deem worthy? It was all too sudden. It required too great a reversal of our roles.

All my life, I had relied upon him for guidance, reassurance, succor. Now, he needed those very things and was calling on me to provide them. But how could I—pampered, well-to-do, protected from the world’s harshness by his very sacrifice—convey meaning to a life such as his? A life formed amid poverty and discrimination beyond anything I had ever experienced and of which I had paltry knowledge?

And why should I? Wasn’t it plain, even to him, that he had achieved beyond anything a janitor’s son from Greensboro could ever have expected? That he had provided for us in our every need, given us every opportunity, blessed us with his intelligence, his imagination, his caring? That we loved him with the deepest love that we could give?

Yes, all that was plain to him, but it was not what he was seeking. He couldn’t give voice to it, but hoped I would understand. He was looking for a summation, not of the facts of his life, but of those indefinable qualities that give deeds a final value, that define the worth of a man. He had led an active life, fraught with struggle and uncertainty, but what did it add up to? What had it meant? The skein of his existence had long been woven, but did it contain a golden thread? His was a story that wanted a moral.

I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t judge this man. After all, it wasn’t important what I felt. What I saw meant nothing unless he saw it too. How could I convince him if I hadn’t already done so? How could I persuade him if he wasn’t persuaded already?

One afternoon, we were sitting on his back porch, drinking his favorite iced tea. Recently, our conversations had been difficult to sustain. I found it hard to know what to say, so much was I aware that I wasn’t touching what he wanted me to say. He was in his eighties then and dozed off periodically in mid-sentence. A moment later, he would reawaken with a start and try to pick up where we had left off. It made dialogue challenging.

That afternoon, however, he remained alert. Public television was showing a documentary on the final months of World War II. He seemed transfixed by the faded images, all in black-and-white, of D-Day and the Bulge, tattered GI’s with unshaven faces, scared villagers with haunted eyes, long truck convoys stretching endlessly along unnamed German roads. A sonorous voice began speaking: a narrator recounting the liberation of Dachau. Images of the infamous camp appeared.

My father stirred.

It’s like I remember it, he said slowly.

You were there, weren’t you?

Yes, he said, a couple of times. Not right at liberation, but soon after. Maybe two or three weeks later. They had started cleaning it up, but it was still a mess, still horrible. Just like on TV.

With no particular purpose, I began asking questions. How long had he been there? What had he seen? How had he felt? He didn’t seem much interested in talking. His answers were short. He didn’t elaborate. I kept after him, more to extend conversation than to learn anything new, for I had heard much of this before. Then suddenly, unexpectedly, the words I sought came, the words that would bring us together again and launch our final journey together.

You met Pee Wee and Salomon in Dachau?

He looked at me quizzically.

Yes, he said at last, yes, I believe I did.

Tell me again, I asked, tell me that story again.

He frowned as though displeased.

You’ve heard it a thousand times.

But not for a while. Not since I was a kid. Tell it again.

He paused for what seemed an eternity. I worried I had somehow upset him. But he settled back in his chair, reflecting, as memories coalesced and enveloped him. He began to speak.

And again it was springtime in 1945 and he was young once more and the war at last was over.

PART ONE

The Soldier

Not they who soar, but they who plod

Their rugged way, unhelped to God

Are heroes …

—Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)

CHAPTER 1

Convoy To Prittlbach

The convoy mustered in a dawn so quiet he could hear the roosters crowing in the farmsteads back of town. Quiet, that is, until Sergeant Emerson signaled and all God’s noise burst loose. In an instant, the sleepy Bavarian hamlet, where Lieutenant John L. Withers and the men of Quartermaster Truck Company 3511 had holed up for the night, dissolved in metallic cacophony. Engines coughed to life, gears wheezed, brakes squealed as, one by one, fifty two-and-a-half ton trucks swung into line on the road east.

Nothing in Withers’ wartime experience matched a dawn convoy. In the brackish light, vapor clouds from the tailpipes rose like steam vents from the earth, pierced only by the dull red and white gleam of the cat’s eye headlights, designed to limit detection by enemy planes. Soldiers in combat gear, flitting silhouettes in the gloom, hurried to their stations. Amid the clamor, Withers could see the men speaking, but couldn’t make out the words; watch them move, but not hear footsteps. They appeared as ragged, black shapes, shooting noiselessly out of the dark into the half-light, and just as noiselessly back into it again, not as humans might, but like those ghostly shadows in folklore dancing through ghostly shadow lands.

An eerie scene, part beautiful, part macabre—and one that touched that element of the soldier within him. There was power in this moment, a rising energy ready to burst into kinetic force. Within minutes, these giant trucks would surge forward, slowly at first, but with a gathering intensity, a primal strength, a raw defiance of anything in their way.

Sergeant Emerson came up, yelling to make himself heard.

Looks like Purgatory, don’t it?

Withers followed the Sergeant’s stare. An apt metaphor, he decided, Purgatory being, after all, not so different from war.

They moved down the column for the final inspection. A more mismatched pair was hard to imagine. Emerson was six feet four and two hundred muscular pounds—that is, some eighty pounds heavier and sixteen inches taller than the Lieutenant, who was perhaps five-three on tiptoe. Still, this Alabama sharecropper of a sergeant and this bookish little officer made a good team. Withers had a knack for putting military jargon into words an ordinary being could understand and Emerson had a knack for turning words into action. Snicker the soldiers might at their Mutt and Jeff appearance, but together, they ran a tight outfit.

Halfway along the line, Withers cupped his hand to his ear, made a show of listening.

How do the engines sound, Sergeant? he yelled.

Emerson chuckled. It was their little joke, worn smooth from much use. Old-timers like the Sergeant insisted their hearing was so finely tuned that they could pick out one malfunctioning motor through the din of all the others. The Lieutenant was unconvinced. For three years, since his training days at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, he had listened to the engines and heard nothing but noise.

Emerson bellowed the expected answer.

Humming along, Lieutenant. Just humming along.

An orderly appeared. Despite the hour, Corporal Knox, the Company clerk, had prepared the Morning Report. Would the Lieutenant please sign? Withers shook his head in disbelief. Nothing ever came between Knox and paperwork. He glanced at the form. Two men on sick leave; three on furlough; six on TDY with other units. Present and accounted for: five officers and one hundred thirty-nine enlisted. Total: one hundred forty-four men.

He glanced at the day’s order: Company 3511 was to transport supplies to a German village with an unpronounceable name somewhere east. Standard. Also standard: the convoy was to leave immediately and arrive even sooner.

Withers had never heard of the village. He was sure no one else in the Company had either. Nobody knew why it needed supplies. Nor did anyone care. Two weeks earlier, Germany had surrendered. The war in Europe was over.

Withers had been with Company 3511 since it shipped out of New York harbor in the autumn of 1944. Just eight months ago, but it seemed an eon. So much had happened since they landed in Normandy in October. So much had changed. It was not the same Company. They were not the same men.

Normandy sobered them. The invasion was five months past, but the evidence of terrible fighting was everywhere. The beaches were littered with discarded weaponry and machinery. Barbwire bristled in massive tangles at every turn. Scorched German pillboxes and mangled guns loomed menacingly on the heights. Withers was transfixed by the sheer numbers of landing craft, amphibious trucks, and transport ships that lay sunken in the waters offshore. It took little imagination to realize how many men had died in those vessels without ever reaching land, their battle over before it began.

He had little time for shock. The beachhead was in turmoil. The Norman coast had been transformed into a giant, artificial port. Enormous concrete blocks, hauled from Britain, formed a breakwater. A pontoon bridge, two thousand feet long, served as the pier. Tankers and transport ships of all descriptions crammed the makeshift harbor, and men and materiel were pouring ashore in massive quantities.

It was jarring to discover the gigantic scale of the war and also their smallness within it. They suddenly realized they were nothing special. There was nothing to distinguish their unit from the hundreds of others about. They were no smarter than other soldiers, no better trained or equipped in any way; no braver, honest, pious, upright than anyone else. They were just standard issue: a tiny company of men lost amid the colossal forces battling throughout Europe.

With exceptions like Emerson, who was regular army, the men of Company 3511 had entered the military through the draft. Most were from the deep South with the odd city boy from the North or the West scattered throughout. Not one was beyond his twenties at the time. One or two were married; the rest, barely thinking on it. In an army segregated by race, all of them, save for Captain Marx, the company commander, were Negroes.

Before Pearl Harbor and the draft, they had been dirt farmers, sharecroppers, factory workers, part-time laborers. Some had no job at all. Like most folks during the Depression, none had any money—food on the table and a roof overhead counted as success back then. Some few had basic schooling; many, none at all. Only a very few—like Withers, who had a Masters degree—had any advanced education.

These men had rarely ventured beyond their Georgia or Mississippi homes. They knew little about the world beyond the obscure towns and lonely farmsteads where they grew up, although there was always someone around who claimed he did. They traveled nowhere (a bus ride across the county was an odyssey to them), their experiences were limited, their horizons confined—until the Army shipped them halfway around the world.

They were not glory soldiers, like the tank crews or the flyboys. Their names never appeared in the papers or their photos in the newsreels. No one ever stood them for drinks in a bar. They didn’t carry rifles, fight battles, win medals. They didn’t fire a shot in the entire war.

They were truckers—quartermasters was the formal term—who spent the war in olive-drab convoys on the long roads to the front, transporting supplies to the troops on the battle lines. They were constantly moving, their forays so numerous that, in time, they could not recall when they had gone where or where they had done what—the landmarks they’d passed, the towns where they’d bivouacked, the highways they’d traveled, indistinguishable in memory.

But they’d always keep the images of rasping vehicles lumbering forward, dumping supplies, scrambling to the rear for more, in an endless cycle that might put two thousand miles on the trucks in a month, burn up six thousand gallons of gas, and wear out more tires, fan belts, and carburetors than anyone could count, but that kept right on going and never stopped.

They went on in obscurity, from one convoy to the next, not knowing if any of it added up to anything, or to what if it did. They were deeply engaged in the war, yet somehow apart from it, doing things that might mean something to somebody, but not much to themselves. So that victory, when it came, was remote to them, removed from them, disconnected from anything they had done. Something that happened at a distance, but didn’t belong to them; something they heard about on Army radio, read about in the Stars and Stripes newspaper, picked up through the grapevine, but had themselves played no clear part in winning.

Once, mused Withers, it had all been clear. The whole of Company 3511 had entered military service, as had all their generation, innocently, unquestioningly, in the uncomplicated belief that they were doing something good, becoming part of something big, achieving something important, although soon they were no longer certain what that important something might be. Revenging Pearl Harbor, of course, although it was a Japanese, not a German, attack. Defending the Four Freedoms, although they seldom could remember more than three or see how they applied to Negroes in any event. Making the world safe for somebody. Roosevelt, probably. Maybe Rockefeller, too. Hard to say.

Long ago, it seemed, that simple, uncluttered time. Funny to recall how young they had been back then and, they now ruefully admitted, how stupid, credulous and naïve. Strange to think they had actually been excited to be drafted, pleased to receive their Greetings letters and, despite the anxiety of leaving home, proud to be joining the military.

For the Army, they were convinced, would better them, turning some of them into heroes and all of them into men. Before they learned better, they conceived themselves as fighters (not quartermasters—hell, none of them knew the meaning of the word), marching in crisp, new uniforms in a cavalcade to Berlin. They imagined battle to be antiseptic, without death or pain, replete with flags and trumpets, headed inevitably towards victory. In the Army, they believed, there would be no color line: one man’s blood, they told themselves, was as red as the next’s, and a grateful nation would acknowledge their service and respect them as equals at last. It occurred to no one that he might not survive.

Withers cringed now to think of them after the call-up, standing wide-eyed at the induction stations, dressed in their Sunday best, carrying in their cardboard suitcases the useless things that boys bring to war. It had taken the Army barely an hour to disabuse them, to turn them from gullible bumpkins into shorn, despondent dogfaces, indistinguishable from one another in drab, shapeless uniforms, their fancy civilian clothing and stylish hairdos gone for the duration. In less than two, they had been reduced, as they later saw it, to cattle in a pen, as steely-eyed doctors, like ranchers at an auction, poked chests, thumped backs, prodded testicles to see if the beef was grade A. By day’s end, there was not one among them who didn’t want to go home.

Dust hadn’t been part of their image of war back then, nor mud, gangrene or dysentery. Nor that peculiar combination of tedium and fear that is the soldier’s common condition. In Europe, they discovered reality: that military duty entailed more boredom than excitement; more confusion than direction; more posturing than substance; and no glory at all. More soldiers seemed to die in traffic accidents than in battle; more still in hospital beds. Officers weren’t always right; orders didn’t always make sense; wartime propaganda rarely accorded with what was in front of your eyes—and you’d better believe your eyes if you wanted to stay healthy. The generals might know what they were doing, but likely did not. And most of a soldier’s time was spent performing chicken shit tasks that boosted some officer’s ego, but the war effort not one whit.

Fear, they discovered, wasn’t only for cowards. Everybody knew fear. It was just that most of them kept on in spite of their fears. They despised cowards: not for avoiding danger—nobody sane liked danger—but for leaving the rest of them in the lurch, for letting buddies down. That was the worst, betraying a buddy. Buddies got you through the war. They were the men you could trust to stick with you, to back you every time. You could share your deepest feelings with a buddy, your darkest fears. He knew your every failing, but never scoffed. He accepted you as you were, loyally, unquestioningly, in spite of all you lacked. He’d give anything for you, even life, as you would for him. Yet, cowards let buddies down, when buddies were all you had in the war.

In the end, that was why they fought: for each other, nothing more. Not for harbors or freedoms or safer worlds. Or Roosevelt or Rockefeller either. To stay alive and to keep their buddies alive—those were their goals, and they didn’t look beyond them, for nothing else made sense. If there had once been a higher reason for what they were doing, they had long since forgotten it. If there had once been a nobler aim, they had lost it early on. They strove simply to keep on going, to outlast the war’s terrible incomprehensibility, to survive the mad condition of their existence, and if there was any figuring out to do about larger meanings … well, they’d do it later on, when they got out of the service maybe, whenever that might be.

Now they had survived. Now they were going home.

A small delegation had approached Withers the previous evening. He was pleased, yet surprised, at their attention. He was quiet, introverted, contemplative, lacking the gregarious personality common to so many of them. He knew that they found it odd that he never swore, rarely took a drink, and avoided the raucous partying they so enjoyed. Yet, at key moments, they sought him out. Somehow, they found in him a fairness, a truthfulness they needed in stressful moments. He might never be one selected for any of their sports teams, but he was always in demand as an umpire.

He looked at the little group and smiled. Normally, it was futile to guess what was on their minds—only that it was likely to be preposterous and probably illegal. Tonight, he knew.

The weather was too nice to stay indoors, so they found him on a camp chair under an old linden tree. He had hung a kerosene lantern from a limb, ostensibly to read, although the book lay closed on his lap. Instead, he just absorbed the friendliness of the twilight, soaking up breezes gliding through the dark and gazing into a limitless purple sky.

Evening, Lieutenant, said Emerson.

The great round face loomed above him. Withers discerned others a few feet behind.

Trouble you, sir?

No trouble, Sergeant. Make yourselves comfortable.

The little group settled around him, faces flickering in the lamplight. They were the core of the Company, its veterans. Others had joined and left the outfit at various times, for various reasons. But these men had been here from the beginning and had made it to the end. He felt close to them tonight, oddly, unusually so. But then, they had shared a war together.

He waited quietly.

Tomlin asked the expected question:

Smitty says we’re going home soon. By the Fourth of July even. That right, Lieutenant? We’re going home?

Withers stirred. Tomlin was the baby of the group. The one Army life had softened, not hardened; the one who’d never developed the tough shell that allowed others to cope with the war. He was too trusting, too ready to take every word to heart, too easily hurt if things didn’t work out as promised.

A Louisiana boy, raised in Cajun country, Tomlin was a rare Catholic in a Company heavy on Baptists, Methodists, and practicing skeptics. By its standards, he had led a sheltered existence. His family wasn’t rich, but not poor either. Tomlin’s father made decent money as an undertaker—Always a clientele, the old man would grin—and provided young Tommy with nice clothes and good schooling. His mama managed a clean home and polite manners. He was an only child and had never really worked, the litmus test of manhood among his peers. After school, he’d sweep out the funeral parlor or help the priest around the church. But he’d never labored in the fields or on the shop floor.

Picked on by other soldiers, he tried to buck himself up by acting older and bolder than he actually was. He took up smoking, even though he hated it. Made a point of cussing, just for show. For a while, he picked fights to prove that he would fight, but repeated pummeling didn’t earn him respect, only bruises. The playacting fooled no one. The harder he tried to blend in, the more he stood out, and he had a tough time of it, which might have been tougher, had the guys assembled here not stood up for him.

Withers responded carefully.

I’ve heard nothing officially, he replied, but they can’t maintain an army without a war. Someone will set out a plan soon.

And then we can go home?

Withers again took his time. He was no oracle, whatever Tomlin might think.

Yes, he agreed, then they’ll start sending us home. He hesitated, thinking, and went on. But you know the Army, Tomlin. It’ll send a few units right away to boost morale. The rest, I expect, will rotate out over time. Truckers like us … well, we’ll be here a while. Somebody’s going to have to ferry stuff around until things sort out.

Tomlin shook his head.

Black man’s luck in a white man’s army, he said.

Emerson spoke up.

What kind of rotation you suppose it’ll be, Lieutenant? Can’t pull the whole army out at once. They’ll be needing an occupation force.

Maybe unit by unit, Withers surmised. One company will move out from here. Another from there. Just to keep things balanced.

Dawkins cut in.

Naw, he said flatly, it’ll be a point system.

Point system? Tomlin was perplexed. What point system?

I figure like this, Dawkins explained. Each man gets points depending on his particulars. How long he been in service. He gets so many points for that. Or how many days in combat. Maybe he got kids at home. Points for that, too. Or if he’s married to the general’s daughter. Lots of points for that. And when your points add up to, say, a hundred … well, you just hand in your uniform and head for the boat. Point system—only logical way.

How come logical?

Cause you don’t get no griping. No guys complaining that they been in for years and got to stay, while somebody called up yesterday gets to go. No mommas and daddies whining about when little Jimmy’s gonna come back. No politicians speechifying about bringing the boys home. Question comes up, why HQ just pull out your scoreboard and say, ‘Tommy, my man, you got twenty points. That mean at normal rates, you’ll be in the Army … forever!’

Tomlin chuckled, gazed at Dawkins with respect.

Withers smiled watching Dawkins, as always, accept the admiration as his due. He expected it, being who he was, coming where he came from, looking like he looked. Which, incidentally in Dawkins’ own estimation, was downright handsome. Light complexion, wavy hair, refined features—all the looks a man could want in life. Somehow, he managed to look good under any conditions. Heads shook at the sheer time he spent pruning his mustache or slicking his hair. Grace. Polish. Cool. That was Dawkins’ style. Including his walk: a smooth, effortless glide, with no visible exertion. A sensuous motion, women said, which, of course, was the idea.

He was, he liked to say, from Dee-troit City, where the girls are pretty. One of the few Northerners and city boys in this pack of Southern hicks. An aura of glamor swirled about him—of the fast life, of glittering streets, of easy money; of worldly sophistication and experience, suggesting realms of luxury and temptation beyond anything that the other men could imagine in the humble Southern towns they came from.

Dawkins traded on his supposed superiority. When the mood was on him—and the mood was often on him—he enthralled the troop at length with tales of bright lights, flashy clothes, and urban sin. When he really wanted to snow them, he’d pass around a photograph of his girlfriend, Charlene.

They all look this good in Detroit? asked Tomlin, the first time he’d viewed the picture.

Sure do, said Dawkins offhandedly. Got the best for myself, of course, but they mostly look like that.

Sweet Jesus Lord! murmured Smitty with reverence. After the war, I’m heading to Dee-troit City!

Won’t do no good, Dawkins sneered. Ain’t no classy Detroit dame going to look at your ugly face.

Withers glanced at Smitty. Loose—that was the word that attached to him. One look at his long, gangly body with all its joints and angles, his narrow face with its wide eyes and convex mouth with teeth going in all directions, his bouncy walk on springy knees, his arms that flailed around like a weathervane—and loose invariably sprang to mind. Smitty’s loose, everyone said. Loose how he walks, thinks, plays fast with reality. Loose joints, loose spirit, loose attitude.

Loose bowels, growled Dawkins when he wanted to start something.

Smitty protested.

Ain’t loose, he insisted. And if I am, don’t see nothing wrong with it.

After all, he declared, what had their uptight attitudes done for them that was so all-fired wonderful? Far as he could see, it hadn’t gotten them any farther along than his loose one had gotten him. As for reality—he kept asking about it, but couldn’t find out what it was. One set of folks said one thing; another, something else. No one could agree on it for more than five minutes at a time. So, he didn’t have much use for reality either. Easier to make it up as he went along.

He argued, but never won. No matter what he said, loose just stuck. Yet, to his immense satisfaction, there were times when every man in the Company, Dawkins included, liked him loose, respected him even. No smirking or snickering then. No, they all looked up to ol’ Smitty then.

Times like when the convoy, after all day on the road, holed up in some smelly barn facing field rations for supper and, out of nowhere, Smitty’d turn up with a chicken, already plucked. Thirsty? He’d magically produce a snifter of brandy. It was uncanny how, reaching a town for the first time, he’d lead you straight to the bar. Need something not quite according to regulations? Smitty’d know just the staff officer to fix it. When’s the next snap inspection gonna be—Smitty’d give you the date, time and name of the inspecting officer, too. Of course, his record wasn’t perfect. Many was the time that the military police had awakened Withers in the middle of the night to extricate members of the Company from some mess Smitty had gotten them into. Still, he did pretty well.

There were things about Smitty that weren’t clear because, garrulous as he was, he never spoke of them. He never said, for example, where he came from. Which made the men suspect Mississippi on the premise that it was the only place about which it made sense to be secretive. There was a restlessness in him they couldn’t pinpoint. He couldn’t bear to be stuck to anything or tied down anywhere, hated being put