Free My Honor Flight by Dan McCurrigan Page A

where
shrapnel or bullets had ripped into them.
    It was real
quiet in the barn.  No one was firing at us.  The Germans probably figured the
krauts still held the barn and they didn’t want to shoot into it.  Buzz Company
probably thought we were in the barn, so they didn’t shoot into it.  There was
still plenty of ruckus out in the farmyard between the house, the outbuildings,
and Buzz Company to the south.
    I was with a hell
of a group of men.  Torgeson, Taft, Butler, and Jones were natural leaders and
very intelligent.  Without even talking, we all started moving.  We pulled the
bodies toward the walls that faced the house and the outbuilding.  It’s grim,
but we stacked the bodies like sandbags.  We knew the planks didn’t provide
enough protection from gunshots.   But we didn’t have to say anything—we just
worked silently, all knowing what the others were doing.
    The rest of
the battle was pretty nondescript, if there is such a thing.  Pearson and
Perkins softened up the outbuildings by sniping three krauts.  The remaining
five or so bolted for the house.  We cut down two of them, and Buzz Company got
the rest.  The house fell a few minutes later.
    After the
battle, Pearson and Perkins joined us.  We pulled Porter and Dale into the
barn.  We just sat around the bodies.  I felt different this time than with
O’Halloran.  With O’Halloran, it felt like we were ambushed.  I felt like a
victim that time.  And O’Halloran dying really pissed me off.  It pissed off
the whole platoon.
    But this time
it was different.  I was sad more than angry.  When I thought about how I’d
talked with Porter earlier that day, I’d cry a little.  “We can do this,” he
had said. 
    Then I
thought of Duncan’s comments, that we were all going to die here.  That sat
hard in my belly.  In this one battle alone, we lost two of eight men, with a
third seriously injured.  Three out of eight in one battle.  How many more
battles were we going to face?  The best we could do is just keep fighting. 
Keep moving.  And hope someday we would make it home.

Chapter 6 - The Lucky Scarf
    We had a gypsy
in Buzz Company.  For a bunch of young men without a lot of world experience,
that generated a lot of excitement.  You see, back then, gypsies were
mysterious and a little scary.  None of us really knew much about them.  Several
of the guys had heard stories about how they could tell fortunes and make death
curses.  So, we were all pretty nervous around Bo Cooper when we were first
assembled in England.
    Cooper had a
darker complexion, but not as dark as Paul Taylor.  In England, he kept to
himself for the first week or so.  One day Big Swede Torgeson was done with a practice
drill in the rain.  Big Swede was from Minnesota.  He was real approachable—he
smiled a lot, and he loved to tell jokes or laugh at them.  We all gave him a
hard time, calling him nicknames like Viking and Norvegian.  He would always
respond with something like “Ya, you betcha!” or “Don’t be jealous—you can’t
all be perfect!”  He was sturdy.  He was bigger and stronger than Kozlowski, but
he didn’t like to scrap like Kozlowski. 
    Big Swede was
soaked head to toe, and it was about forty degrees.  So he was freezing.  We
were all just watching the rain from a barn that was part of our practice field,
and we had a fire going.  So Big Swede sat down next to the fire and removed
his wet clothes and shivered.
     “Goddamn!”
he shouted.  “It’s fucking cold out there boys!”
    Someone
handed him a cup of coffee and he cupped it in his hands, and moved right up
next to the fire in nothing but his underwear.  Someone threw him a blanket. 
He looked over at Cooper, who was leaning against the barn door, watching the
rain.
     “Hey Cooper,
when’s it gonna get warm again?” he asked.
    The whole
group stiffened.  No one had really talked much to Cooper before.
     “How should
I know?” asked Cooper, as he