CHAPTER EIGHT BLUE DISCHARGE
CHAPTER
EIGHT
Blue Discharge
Back behind the lines, away from the endless shelling and constant fear, the Black Panthers could get a good look at who they’d been fighting with.
When Benny called his name, Lee thought he was hearing things – hallucinating from exhaustion.
His excitement at seeing his friend standing there died in an instant, when he realized who Benny was standing with.
As his mind caught up with his eyes, and he fit together what it meant, he expected to feel betrayed, but he’d been through too much not to understand.
If war had taught him anything, it was that a man did what he felt he needed to do to survive.
For three nights Lee slept in a bed with a pillow and a blanket pulled over him.
He could have slept for a solid week, but after only a few days off, the Black Panthers got orders to get back to the front.
Fighting like the Devil for the honor of the Negro race had made them invaluable to General Patton.
Either that or they were just more expendable.
In January, the Germans retreated. That little bit of ground had cost thousands of lives, including Green George’s: a man who could make swamp moonshine taste like Jack Daniel’s finest. Armor-piercing artillery had sliced through his tank five days before the German retreat, skewering him like a hog on a stick.
As the Krauts retreated, Patton’s army pushed on through the snow and the frostbite and a winter unlike anything Lee had ever known, with nowhere near enough warm clothes.
By March, when things started to thaw, they’d fought halfway through Germany and kept going until they came out the other side into Austria.
All in all, Lee and the Black Panthers endured six months of near constant fighting, and were rewarded with armfuls of Silver Stars, Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts.
On 7 May, the day Germany surrendered, relief washed through Lee straight to his bones.
His first thought, as ever, was of Cora.
He longed to go home and see her. He couldn’t help his fantasies of the two of them together again the way they once were and had to keep reminding himself that it was impossible.
The post-war clean-up was a completely different pace of work and gradually Lee’s tense shoulders learned to relax, but as they rolled up to the camp at Gunskirchen, a sixth sense wound him up again.
A sick, anxious prickle crept down his spine and settled in his gut, like the feeling he’d get approaching a clearing where he knew the enemy was hiding unseen.
He tried to shake it off, told himself the danger was over, but when he looked at his tank-mates he could tell they felt it too.
As they got closer, he saw why he’d felt the wrongness of the place.
Ghost-like creatures, gray and thin, walked like living skeletons.
It didn’t seem possible that human beings could look that way and still be alive.
The stench was incredible, even in the open air, and when they stepped out of the tank into ankle-deep mud mixed with human waste, Lee gagged. Beside him, Cooper threw up.
Inside, in a room with space for maybe three hundred, at least a thousand people lay on top of each other, flesh to flesh. Not all of them were alive, but the living hadn’t been strong enough to pull out the dead and bury them, or even strong enough to move away from the rotting corpses.
From the floor, an old woman stared at Lee.
When he approached her, he saw she wasn’t that old, but the sagging skin, thin hair and dead eyes made her seem ancient.
In his pocket, Lee had a Clark Bar that he handed to her.
She shoved it into her mouth, wolfing it down like a wild thing.
A man shuffled over, having seen Lee give the woman food, and held out his hand in a begging gesture.
Lee had no more food, but he checked his pockets and found a cigarette that he’d won from Cooper playing cards.
A smoke wasn’t food, but it was something.
‘I’ll see if I can find you a light,’ he said, handing it over.
The man shoved the cigarette into his mouth, chewed and swallowed. These people had gone past hunger and hardship. This was full-on starvation.
Lee had heard of these concentration camps, but no matter how gruesome the descriptions were, nothing compared to seeing this place for himself.
The Black Panthers had captured three thousand enemy soldiers since November, and while he knew those men had nothing to do with this camp, if he’d seen this place in November, he wasn’t sure what he would have done with them.
A part of him wished the Germans hadn’t surrendered the week before so he’d have an excuse to shoot, bomb, blast and destroy.
The ride back to base was somber. When they got there, Lee wanted to find somewhere quiet where he could be alone to process what he’d seen and what he’d felt. Deep in thought as he passed the officers’ club, he overheard two men talking.
‘They say,’ one said, his foot propped against the wall, a cigarette dangling from his fingers, ‘Hitler got his playbook on how to handle the Jews by looking at how we handle our coloreds, but he sure did us one better with those camps.’
The other took a drag of his cigarette. ‘That’s what we need back home.’ His thick accent sounded pure Mississippi. ‘Stick them coons in a camp and let ’em rot out. Problem solved.’
Lee didn’t think about reacting. He just pivoted mid-stride and headed for the men, picking up speed as he approached so that when he slammed his fist into the Mississippian’s face, it hit with the force of his momentum.
He flattened him with that one punch, like a Joe Louis knock-out.
The other man backed away from Lee, yelling for help.
Nearly instantly soldiers wrenched his arms behind his back and pushed him to the ground.
MPs hauled him off and locked him up in the guard house.
The army wanted to court-martial him, but Bates refused to go along with it, and then a major who’d been part of liberating Gunskirchen and who’d heard what Mississippi said spoke in Lee’s defense.
That presented the army with a problem. They could transfer him out from under Bates to court-martial him, but the trial that would go along with it could blow up into a PR disaster.
Lee was a sergeant, with a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart and two high-ranking officers willing to vouch for him.
Mississippi had recently been demoted from first to second lieutenant and had spoken in public about wanting Nazi death camps in America.
But there was no way the army would excuse a colored soldier striking a white officer.
They could have thrown him out with a dishonorable discharge, but if he appealed the decision, the whole thing might still become public and just as much of a PR nightmare.
They found a solution in the blue discharge.
Neither honorable nor dishonorable, the blue discharge could weed out undesirables, like homosexuals and troublesome Negros.
It didn’t need to be explained, couldn’t be appealed, and was non-negotiable.
They released Lee from the guard house and showed him into the office, and when he saw the blue paper, he knew what was coming. His army career would be summed up with four colors: the Black Panthers, the Purple Heart, the Bronze Star and the blue discharge.