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JOE PASTOR—HÜRTGEN FOREST, NAZI GERMANY

Joe Pastor climbs down from the truck. He is in a forest, has been in a forest for an hour now, bumping along in the back of the deuce-and-a-half. The truck is jammed with men and women, almost all young, all white, none capable of looking tough.

Joe notices things like that, like the looks in people’s eyes. He’s a watcher, one of those people happiest on the sidelines observing. He observes a woman trying persistently to write a letter despite the jerkiness of the transport. She struggles over each word, puzzling it out before putting pencil to paper, more often than not tearing the paper in the process.

He observes a man who has rolled the sleeves of his uniform up to reveal a lurid tattoo on his forearm of a scantily clad woman entwined around the word Texas.

He observes a man who chews gum, snapping it, blowing bubbles, looking around constantly as if anxious for conversation and finding none in this taciturn group.

They are all wet through to the bone, having been left standing for an hour and a half, waiting on the truck to arrive at what had come to be called the Repple Depple, a torturing of the words Replacement Depot.

Joe wonders if these are the men and women he’ll be fighting alongside. And he wonders if he shouldn’t force himself out of his shell and actually engage some of them. Try to make friends, for once.

But Joe Pastor comes from quiet folk in Boston, his father a newspaper editor and his mother active in causes and charities. His father is the shy, quiet one, and Joe’s mother rolls her eyes in mock despair at how much her “two boys” are alike. Fortunately, Joe’s little sister, Barb, is practically a carbon copy of their mother, so there is balance in the home.

The home that Joe suddenly misses with a pang so intense it almost doubles him over.

I didn’t know homesickness could hurt so bad.

The truck rattles to a stop. Joe leans out of the back, peering around the canvas cover. He sees no special reason to stop here, except for a tiny sign stenciled by engineers with some incomprehensible numbers. A female corporal stands with an M1 carbine hiked on her hip, a cigarette dangling from her full lips, and an expression of weariness bordering on catatonic.

The driver clambers down with his clipboard held importantly and says, “Pastor. Joe Pastor.”

“That’s me!”

“Swell. Grab your gear and get off. This is your new home. Lucky you.”

Joe does as instructed. He jumps down, and the truck quickly lurches away to deliver the rest of its replacements.

“I’m Castain,” the corporal says. “Let’s go. We’ve got a little rumble scheduled for—”

Suddenly they hear the crash and pound of artillery. It’s not on them, but it’s near enough for Joe to think he should get into the ditch. Which he does. And then notices Castain looking down at him with a puzzled look.

“Hey, pal. That arty’s a good mile away, and it’s dropping on Germans. That’s ours.” She waves a hand. “You’ll get so you know which is which, not that we may not get an accidental shellacking by our own artillery, but in this case, it’s just a little wake-up call for Fritz.”

“Fritz?”

Her answer is a slow drawl. “Yeah. You know, the Germans? They’re this bunch of assholes who keep shooting at us. We don’t know why. I think they don’t like us.”

He climbs up out of the ditch.

“You smoke?” Castain asks.

“No.”

Castain nods. “Then give me your issue. Otherwise you might be tempted, and it’s a bad habit.”

Joe dutifully digs out his army-issued tobacco ration and hands it to Castain, who favors him with the kind of smile you reserve for dealing with the not-quite-all-there.

“Green as a whole field of new alfalfa,” Castain says. “A little suggestion? See how you got your grenades hanging? You don’t hang them by the fugging pin. See, because when you’re running around, the weight of the grenade could pull the pin and you blow yourself up and me, and I will not be happy. I will resent it!”

For some reason that phrase brings a crooked smile to the corporal’s face, and for the first time it occurs to Joe that she is actually quite pretty. Which does not help, because if there’s one thing that intimidates Joe more than a foulmouthed veteran, it’s a pretty girl.

He quickly rearranges his grenades.

“Okay, let’s go,” Castain says. “Listen up, because we are going right into the shit when that barrage stops.”

He falls into step behind her, confident that he can easily keep up with the young woman. He is quickly disabused of this notion, because Castain moves through the dense forest like a monkey, stepping narrow, sliding through gaps, jumping fallen logs, and using close-packed trunks like a gymnast. Joe is soon panting. And all the while Castain keeps up a stream of words that is at once laconic, constant, and sometimes incomprehensible.