CHARLIE’S WAR STORY

Sample from GI Blues

10/22/1972, 18:15:22

Somewhere in the Owyhee Mountain Range, Idaho

Baker and Juliet could smell food cooking before they walked inside through the double doors of the church. There was a table in the center of the great big room lit with a couple dozen short table lamps that didn’t match, all sitting on the ground, connected by a daisy chain of extension cords. All of the church benches had been pushed to one side and piled up into a mess of wooden legs and cushions.

Charlie’s voice came from somewhere in a nearby room and called out faintly, “Grab a seat. Dinner’s almost ready.”

The two sat at the small table that already had three places set. In the yellow glowing ring with the ceiling so high and lighting so dim, all they could see above them was blackness. It was anticlaustrophobic like the weight of emptiness could smother them. The only decoration was the great big cross behind the pew and the pair of stained glass windows. The old man came out of the door behind the pew with a great big steaming pot and set it on the table with his oven-pitted hands.

“The only decent working kitchen is in the church. Hope you don’t mind.”

“Smells good, Charlie,” said Juliet.

Charlie ladled out the deer chili into bowls for the young people and then for himself. Deep red, thick and chunky. Charlie took a seat and started digging in.

Baker started out slowly and cautiously, not sure if his cooking and sculptures would share their aesthetic. But it was fine. Perfectly respectable chili.

“You kids got here just in time, too. It’s almost getting to be about that season. It’s not too bad while the sun’s up, but when it goes down it gets cold quick. When that snow comes down, these roads are car proof. Too dangerous to drive. Worse is when the sun comes up. Melts it all, then it’s frozen again a couple hours after sunset. Whole damn thing’s so slippery, a car can slide right off the side. I remember a couple horses and riders going like that when I was a boy. Y’all want a drink?"

“Yes, please.” Juliet held up the empty coffee mug on the table in front of her.

Charlie took her cup, filled it from a large glass jar full of corn mash liquor mixed with canned peaches. Charlie looked at Baker and raised his eyebrows, silently saying, “You want some, too?”

Baker nodded and Charlie poured him a glass. Baker took a swig and made a face and said, “Jesus Christ!” Juliet laughed. Then she tried it and said, “Oh goddamn, Charlie! What is this?”

“My daddy’s recipe’s so good it made the both you two blaspheme in God’s house,” he laughed then coughed. “The trick is to put in just a little bit of that cookoff back in. Kick’s like a mule. Same recipe we used since that Wilson fucker sent a generation of boys to die and then some sharper from Minnesota told them they couldn’t even have a drink after. Those uppity suffrage bearcat bitches made us some money, though. No prohis coming all the way up here, no way, no how.”

Juliet raised a glass, “Here’s to uppity suffrage bitches!” The others raised their glasses in a toast and took a swig and Baker and Juliet didn’t handle it better the second time.

Juliet shoveled down some chili and between bites said, “So, uh, Charlie. I been up here a few times and you never told me any of your war stories…”

Baker’s eyes locked onto Juliet without moving his head and he said, “Don’t.”

Juliet’s words were getting slippery from the moonshine, “No, come on, you were a cavalryman, right? You rode horses. That’s far out. C’mon.”

“Meh. My memory’s not so good.”

“Come on,” Juliet gave the old man a look that she’d given Baker plenty of times when she needed something.

"Hmmm." The old man took a swig of the shine and swished it in his mouth a bit and his eyes looked up and around like he was trying to remember something or about to make something up. Finally he started to tell his story.

Charlie’s War Story

“I was with the 3rd cavalry on account I was good on a horse. Grew up on horses. I joined up with the Army when I was just 16 and spent the first year patrolling the desert on the Mexican border, wasting time looking for that Pancho Villa fucker. Never did get him. One time I made the mistake of saying I was bored. God musta overheard me say that. I’m sure of it, cus it was just a week later that America joined in the war in Europe. They pulled us off the border and sent us to France.

“We were scouts. The days of glorious cavalry charges were over. Took about a hundred thousand dead men and dead horses for them to finally figure it out, but the Frenchies and Limeys learned what happens when you run horses towards machine guns. I guess they weren’t quick learners. The days of cavalry charges were over. Did I say that already? Horsemen moved messages. Mostly, we scouted ahead of the main battle group. Dangerous work, scouting. Ten dead scouts can save a general the trouble of fighting 100,000 infantry. Whenever those square-heads caught a glimpse of us, they wanted us. They wanted us bad. Messenger horses had the worst time of it. A lot of those boys who volunteered didn’t come back.

“They gave me a battlefield commission on my first day. They made me Captain. I didn’t know why, but I didn’t argue. I learned later that there was a fuckup. Turns out I had the same name as a guy who was the son of the governor of Arkansas or some shit. He went to a military academy and shit. I wonder whatever happened to him, sometimes.

“Anyway, we were 35 miles from Paris by this river, the Aisne. It was Spring. I think it was Spring. It was rainy. I forget things sometimes. We were the only thing between the French getting their capitol marauded by the Huns. It was us, the expeditionary force, and some Limeys helping us out. By then, the Frenchies were barely in the fight anymore.

“My platoon was sneaking way back behind the lines. We caught sight of infantry disembarking a train, pulling some 28mm Kurfürsts… no. Wait. 28cm. Anyway, they were disembarking and getting ready to march ahead and join their square-head buddies on the line.

“The weather was gray and cloudy. We knew the bigshots didn’t want to attack through the rain and mud, which would slow the boys down. We had to go now, when the enemy wasn’t reinforced yet, before the rain got too heavy. We had to get back and tell the line about it so they could attack now. It would be impossible later after all those fresh square-heads arrived.

“Well, like I said. They always wanted to kill scouts whenever they could. Some of them saw us and blew a horn and they chased us most of the ways back. They sent a lot of horsemen after us and they cut us off and had no choice but to run through the open ground of the no-man's-land between the lines.

“A bullet went right through my horse’s face and out the other side, in and out, and the bullet hit me right here in the sternum. My horse’s skull slowed it down enough and flattened it a bit. It didn’t puncture me, but it felt like a goddamn hammer to my chest. A fell off her, and my leg got twisted up in the stirrup and she fell right into a crumphole. I tried to catch my breath and rolled over to get myself out from under the horse. It was chilly out and I saw the puffs of breath coming out of her mouth and head holes. Somehow, she wasn’t dead yet, still breathing even with her head near gone. I couldn’t see my platoon. Just dead men and horses and tracer rounds overhead. A shell popped off damn close. There was a lot of smoke and dirt in the air and it fucked up my ears. They popped like I swam too deep underwater. The explosion Cut up my horse pretty badly. Big piece of her belly was just gone. What was her name? Shit I can’t remember my damn horse’s name anymore.

“Then I heard the horns blowing, signaling an attack. The Huns popped out of their trenches and ran across the bloody human debris, and our machine gun bullets were whistling overhead. I got as close to the horse as I could, the only real cover I had. I climbed so close, I climbed into it, smothered in the guts and the shit inside her. I hid. I could hear some screams out there. Some were coming from my men. Some were Huns. Not too long after, I heard through the skin and the guts the sounds of crunching Heinie boots in the field. I heard the cracks of their rifles as they quieted the screams of pain and begs for mercy. Only reason I wasn’t one of ‘em ‘cus of that horse. That damn horse saved my keister more times than I can count and even when it was dead, she was saving me. But I can’t remember his name. Was it peaches? It might have been peaches.

“I hid, hoping to get out when the coast was clear, but the square-heads didn’t leave. They set up right there and started digging out more holes and moving artillery up closer. They were all around me. Mw inside half of a dead horse in a crumphole. And when it rained, it started filling up with brown, muddy water. I was pinned under my horse and the water level kept rising and rising up to my neck, and then my chin. I held my head up  until my neck muscles felt like they were full of battery acid and the water was up to my nose. I took my rifle and bayonet and stabbed up through my horse. We’d been there for at least a day, I think. Smelled awful. I would have vomited if anything was in my stomach. I stabbed my way through and when I cut into him the tiniest hole on the other side, I opened the breach and breathed through my rifle like a snorkel. I took as much air in as I could. And the water rose until I was submerged. I breathed like that for I don’t know how long. I couldn’t sleep. If I lost the seal for evena  second, I’d drown. With the horse and water, I was totally under water. No sound. No light. Just the taste of gunpowder. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t tell if I was awake or asleep, and my mind became louder than anything outside of me. 

“I had a vision. Or a dream. Or a daydream. I can’t tell what. A trance maybe? I saw something more real than real things I’ve seen. A spirit. A manitou. A thing like a mangling of meat and iron, entangled together, inseparable. A bloody, stompy machine that cut through people like wheat threshers. The machine spirit told me a secret. They told me I was descended from the Shoshone Sheepeaters. The machine spirit knew things because they live inside the all machinery in the universe, their rules control the machines, the predictability of it. Cus it’s all a machine. It’s all preordained. I learned I wouldn’t die there inside that horse. The spirit told me the exact day I would die. I was born on January 1st 1900. And it told me I will die December 31st, 2000. I am a centurion, a hundred-year man, the beginning and end of this age, a mile marker on the highway of history.

“So, anyway. The horse smelled foul. I ate a few flies that came down the snorkel. After a few days, the Huns decided to burn the horse. I could taste the gasoline fumes through my rifle. Then I felt the heat. I started screaming. I fought my way out. I had no choice. I must’ve been a damn sight to them cus here I come, climbing out of a flaming dead horse that’d been there for days, naked and bloody. It must’ve looked like the birth of a demon from Hell. Yeah, I was naked. I forgot to mention that. I guess I took off my clothes. I don’t remember doing that, but I don’t know how else to explain where my clothes disappeared to.

“I didn’t speak at all, and they assumed I was a Heinie, too. I don’t know why. They reckoned my mind was fried, shell-shocked to hell, so they took me to a German hospital in the country, far from the battlefield, and they gave me drugs that made me sleepy and forgetful. I didn’t speak that whole time. I didn’t dare. They were pretty good to me at the hospital and I didn’t know what they’d do to me if they thought I was a sane Yankee. I learned a little German, just by listening. I could understand them sometimes. The doctors noticed me reacting more to others talking, and they seemed to think that meant I was making progress. So one day a nurse said something about the war but in the past tense. I knew enough German by then to ask, ‘Wie viel Zeit?’ And the staff went crazy thinking I had made some kind of breakthrough and they all gathered around me and wanted me to talk more. The man had been silent for a year. What changed? What treatment worked? But I just kept saying it. ‘Wie viel Zeit? Wie viel Zeit? Wie viel Zeit?’ Finally a doctor said to me, ‘Ein Jahr.’ Ein whole fucking Jahr. So that night I didn’t take my meds and I broke out of the hospital and snuck to the American embassy. They sent me back to the States. And, anyway, I’ve been back here at home ever since.”

Charlie’s dinner guests were speechless and no longer hungry.

The old man finished his story by mentioning, “My memory’s not so good anymore. What was the question again?”