CHAPTER FIVE AFRICA
CHAPTER
FIVE
Africa
Benny worried about Harrison so much after the team leader saw Cora’s picture that he almost threw it away to get rid of the evidence, but Harrison never mentioned it to anyone.
Instead, he made loud jokes about men who preferred colored girls, always with a side-eye to Benny.
The ribbing, intended to rile Benny, finally made him relax, because if Harrison could see that picture and still not guess that Benny was colored, he knew his secret was safe.
In the spring of 1942, they got the call to ship out, and when Benny asked where they were going, his sergeant only said, ‘You’ll know when you get there.’
The guys took bets on whether it’d be Germany or Japan, but in the end, they went to Tunisia. Benny had never even heard of the place before, and when Harrison discovered it was in northern Africa, there was no end to the colored-girl jokes.
The Tunisian campaign started in November, and already by December, Benny was dreaming of being back home.
Real war was nothing like training. There was no way to simulate the chaos and carnage, or to prepare a man to see his friends gunned down beside him and still have to keep fighting.
Africa taught Benny that men die with their eyes open.
In his letters home, he didn’t know what to say.
He wouldn’t tell them the truth: that there was no fear like going to war.
It lived day and night in the pit of his belly, and he woke every morning knowing it might be his last. He fought alongside men who wouldn’t have spoken two words to him before he enlisted, but now that he was here with them, he’d stopped thinking of them as different.
He couldn’t say any of that to Momma and Cora, who didn’t even know he was passing, so he wrote stiff, withdrawn letters about the weather or some cactus growing nearby or a snake that got into the tents, and hoped that his paychecks home made up for what he didn’t tell them.
On the battlefield, the 34th Infantry kept losing ground as seasoned German troops pushed and pushed, fighting all day long and straight through the nights. Benny’s bone-weary exhaustion distracted him from his fear as he dodged bullets on nothing but adrenaline.
When word came down to stop retreating, reinforcements were on the way, they dug-in in total chaos, bullets flying overhead.
Guys were hit up and down the line, and the casualties piled up.
Then the Germans started tossing grenades into their trenches.
Benny watched men pick them up with their bare hands and throw them back.
One landed three feet away from Harrison, who took too long to notice, too long to get there.
It exploded in his hand and took out Adams next to him too.
And then one landed at Benny’s feet. Today is the day I die, he thought, but already he had grabbed it and with all his strength, he flung it toward the Germans.
Benny didn’t die. Instead, the reinforcements showed up like a hallelujah miracle and turned the Germans back.
They lost a third of the company holding on to that little bit of ground, but the army just reshuffled things and sent them out again.
That winter was hell on earth. Benny stopped writing letters home altogether, but in the spring General Patton stepped in to take charge, and the tide began to turn.
By April they had Rommel’s troops sandwiched between Americans on one side and Brits on the other, and in May Rommel threw in the towel. And thank God too, because the May heat in Africa was already oppressive, and Benny didn’t want to think what fighting through summer would have been like.
The 34th Infantry celebrated right through the night.
They drank and sang and hugged, happy to be alive.
And they remembered their fallen. They all understood, without saying it out loud, that they needed each other to survive, and that bonded them into something like brothers.
With his secret buried deep, the men of the 34th embraced Benny as one of their own, but in the jovial aftermath of battle, a niggly voice wondered what they would do if they knew.