Each morning, the grease pencil generals caused artillery waves to crash to the north as we marched in our sodden rain gear into a slashing, insistent drizzle. We moved two days behind the forward combat units of the Ninety-second, the Negro Buffalo Soldiers, and two battalions of Japanese Nisei from the internment camps, hard men brought in by the grease pencils to do the heavy fighting on the western edge of the Gothic Line. We were goldbricks, mop-ups, arriving hours or days after the Negro and Japanese soldiers had opened the way, happy beneficiaries of the generals’ crude biases. Ours was a recon/intel unit, trained specialists: engineers, carpenters, burial detail, and Italian translators like me and my good friend, Richards. Our marching orders were to come in behind the forward units to the edges of overrun and destroyed villages, help bury the bodies, and hand out candy and smokes in exchange for information from whatever frightened old women and children were left. We were meant to gather from these wraiths intelligence about the fleeing Germans: placement of mines, locations of troops, storage of armaments. Only recently had the grease pencils asked that we also record the names of men who’d escaped the Fascists to fight alongside us, the Communist partisan units in the hills.
“So it’s to be the Communists next,” grumbled Richards, whose Italian mother had taught him the language as a boy and thus saved him from heavy combat years later. “Why can’t they let us finish this war before they start planning the next one?”
Richards and I were older than our platoon-mates, he a twenty-three-year-old two-stripe, me a twenty-two-year-old PFC, both of us with some college. In neither appearance nor manner could anyone tell Richards and me apart: I a lanky towhead from Wisconsin, part-owner of my father’s automobile dealership, he a lanky towhead from Cedar Falls, Iowa, part-owner with his brothers of an insurance firm. But while I had back home only a string of old girlfriends, a job offer to teach English, and a couple of fat nephews, Richards had a loving wife and son eager to see him again.
In 1944 Italy, no piece of intel was too small for Richards and me. We reported how many loaves of bread the Germans had requisitioned and which blankets the partisans had taken, and I wrote two paragraphs about a poor German soldier with impacted bowels cured by an old witch’s palliative of olive oil and ground bonemeal. As dreary as these duties were, we worked hard at them because the alternative was liming and burying corpses.
Clearly, there were larger tactics at play in my war’s end （we heard rumors of nightmare camps and of the grease pencils dividing the world in half）， but for Richards and me, our war consisted of wet, fretful marches up dirt roads and down hillsides to the edges of bombed-out villages, short bursts of interrogating dead-eyed dirty peasants who begged us for food. The clouds had come in November, and now it was March and it felt like one long rain. We marched that March for the sake of marching, not for any tactical reason, but because a wet army not marching begins to smell like a camp of hobos. The bottom two-thirds of Italy was liberated by then, if by liberated one means ground over by armies that chose only to shell the most beautiful buildings, monuments and churches, as if architecture were the true enemy. Soon the North would be a liberated rubble heap as well. We marched up that boot like a woman rolling up a stocking.
It was during one of these routine sorties that I began to imagine shooting myself. And it was while debating where to put the bullet that I met the girl.
We had hiked up some donkey highway, two tracks in the weeds, villages appearing at the tops of knolls and the bottoms of draws, hungry bug-eyed old women slumped alongside roads, children peering from windows of broken houses like modernist portraits, framed by cracked sashes, waving gray fabric, holding out their hands for chocolate: “Dolcie, per favore. Sweeeets, Amer-ee-can?”
A gravel tide had washed over these villages, smashing everything once coming in, again going out. At night we camped on the outskirts of these rutted burgs, in leaning barns, in the carcasses of abandoned farmhouses, in the ruins of old empires. Before crawling in my mummy bag each night, I eased out of my boots, took off my socks and swore at them, pleaded with them and hung them in desperation from a fence post, a windowsill or tent strut. Every morning I woke with great optimism, put these dry socks on my dry feet, and some chemical reaction ensued, turning my feet into moist, larval creatures that fed on my blood and bone. Our supply sergeant, an empathetic, fine-boned young man who Richards believed had his eye on me （“You know what?” I told Richards, “If he can fix my feet I’ll blow taps on his yacker”）， was constantly getting me new pairs of socks and foot powders, but the traitorous creatures always found their way back in. Each morning I sprinkled powder in my boots, put on new dry socks, felt better, took a step, and found rapacious leeches feeding on my toes. They were going to kill me unless I acted soon.