A Hollow Target
Skinny Sisk/Joe Liebgott, PG-13

At night Skinny often loses himself between foxholes, mesmerized by the subtleness of Bastogne’s woods, because they don’t seem as ominous as they do in daylight. In the dark, when Bastogne stands breathless with sleep, it is harder to see the frozen dead bodies profiled in ice, and Bastogne’s torn trees.

More often than not, when silence has descended Skinny finds his memories reeling him painfully back to West Virginia and the morning he left for basic training. He recalls his mother, too furious to touch, as she sat at their little kitchen table wearing her pale nightgown and long black mourning beads. She kept drawing tremulous breaths from the thin cigarette she held to her lips and exhaling the noxious smoke on soft sighs.

Mrs. Sisk was, in reality, a very frail woman, but her presence forbade you to think it. Skinny had never been ashamed to admit that he had lived in fear of her all through his formative years. But now he had something else to fear.

War. All his life he thought he knew what it meant.

Mrs Sisk told him what war was while Skinny stood in the doorway and watched his mother with a swelling guilt that gnawed at his innards.

She began.

"It binds some people together," her voiced hitched on the last part of "together". It startled Skinny to hear such raw emotion in her voice, but she had not finished, "But it also destroys the bonds between others."

***

Skinny can still feel the fluttering sensation of her lips pressed firmly against the corner of his mouth. Her slight body was stiff against his chest as she clutched his arms with an overbearing possession that threatened to bruise. She was so warm; even now the remembrance of her warmth is tangible in Bastogne.

***

Wandering amongst foxholes Skinny feels like a sleepwalker, never aware of his destination, until a friendly greeting extended determines it, and he is invited to slide into a foxhole.

Like most nights, Alley and Liebgott were pulsating with energy, refreshing among most of the otherwise (and understandably so) solemn members of E Company. After the last barrage of artillery, the smell of burning wood lingered in the air, a scent that Skinny found reminiscent of his childhood and quiet evenings before the fireplace back home.

When Alley crawled out of the foxhole to relieve himself, Liebgott pulled Skinny to him by the breast of his uniform, against his chest. At night, the temperature dropped so low that it appeared the sky itself would crack like ice. The cold in Bastogne is dangerous. It doesn’t tinge your cheeks in a soft red, instead the bitter air ravages all colour from your skin, until you’re the colour of death. Now that Skinny was so close, he realized that’s what Liebgott looked like.

With the dark surrounding everything, he felt Liebgott’s hand slip between them and splayed fingers squirm against his belly, struggling to feel his body beneath the layers of dirty fatigue. The loneliness in Liebgott, in everyone, seemed unbearable. Skinny, bewildered but compliant, tried to hold on to Liebgott as the pressure against his stomach descended.

***

"The thing about Liebgott," Alley said quietly hours later, while Liebgott was vacant from their foxhole, "he makes no more apology for being Jewish than he does for hating the Germans."

"Ev’ryone hates the Germans," Skinny said.

"Not like he does."

Skinny didn’t understand what Alley meant, but he pretended to because Alley seemed to know more about Liebgott and the mechanics of his mind than Skinny did.

"You’re not like him," Alley said squinting as he tried to penetrate the darkness with his vision in order to see Skinny’s face. "All of this," Alley continued, "It’s going to catch up with you sooner than you think, the guilt."

Alley’s talking fades out altogether as Skinny crosses his arms and turns his face upward, to the opening of the foxhole. He watches the snow fall now with a hollow feeling expanding in his chest.

***

Nearly every night they were in Haguenau Liebgott found Skinny in his bunk. Curious, demanding fingers drawing him from the warm confines of his bed, to the privacy of a vacant cellar, or cold basement.

Skinny couldn’t see the scar on Liebgott’s neck, but he knew it was there under his fingertips. He knew its history the same way Liebgott knew the deep, puckered mark across his lower leg.

It was also in Haguenau that Webster rejoined Easy Company. His explanations for his absence seemed to wither and die out on his tongue a little more each time he opened his mouth. The bitterness in Liebgott was a barrier strong enough to prevent anyone’s words from emitting their mouth, Skinny observed. Webster learnt quickly, he was a Harvard boy after all, that the only place his excuses belonged in the middle of a war was behind his teeth.

Skinny was not so indifferent that he did not recall a time when he’d helped patch Webster’s leg up at the crossroads, and sat in admiration, as Webster relayed to him his philosophy on war. He wonders what the cause of it was, exactly, that made Webster choose to tell him. If it had been to impress him, it had.

He liked listening to Webster talk; everything that came from his mouth was unfamiliar to Skinny. He especially enjoyed Webster’s use of diction, words he’d never considered using in a sentence out loud. Sometimes he spoke with words Skinny hadn’t heard before, but within the context in which Webster used them, he had fun guessing their meaning.

Perhaps unlike the others, Skinny never doubted that Webster knew things were different. He wasn't sure Web understood how much they'd changed, though.

***

Skinny’s arms sag over the steering wheel of the Jeep. He wonders fleetingly if it is spring, as absurd as the thought is he has no recollection of which month they are in. He sees the grass surrounding the little cabin sitting peacefully on the hill and thinks it must be spring for the grass to be this green but all he knows is he still feels the cold of Bastogne like little cobwebs in his joints. Tiny reminders of a past horror his brain and heart refuse to discard.

"Is it spring yet?" Skinny asks quietly when the hostility waging between Liebgott and Webster comes to a brief pause. Behind him Webster’s handsome face splits into a smile, while a warm breeze licks across their faces, as if adding to the hilarity of Skinny’s question. But beside Skinny, Liebgott does not laugh.

***

Skinny lingered behind as the three of them drew closer to the cabin. He busied himself with looking at the ground while he tried to ignore Webster and Liebgott talking at one another. He heard Liebgott’s anger mounting, the disgust Lieb projected at Webster, all the while putting himself in a mentality in order to pull the trigger if he had to. He couldn’t think of that German as an innocent civilian, or someone’s husband, or father. He had to remove the humanity of his victim, reduce the man before him to a hollow target before he obliterated the life within it. Skinny always aimed for the heart, or the brain, so afterward he didn’t have to witness the flailing limbs or hear the tortured, shuddering breaths.

Later, when Webster asked him why he did it, Skinny answered him with a waning numbness that pulled at his heart. Back in Holland Webster told him that war makes some men bestial and others noble; throws up great leaders while ruining some who professed to be leaders. He’d grinned despite his wounded leg as he said the last bit and jabbed a finger at Peacock.

But the war was over now, and Skinny wondered if Webster still felt the same, if he’d still organize the war into a definition fit for a textbook.

The truth about war, Skinny was beginning to realize, was much more simple than someone like Webster would have ever liked to discuss. The truth is that war breaks bodies and hearts and what Web called ‘systems of ethics’.

In the war, the centre of the world had been himself, it was all about keeping himself alive, keeping his own sanity. Webster wasn’t him, Liebgott wasn’t him, Alley wasn’t him. No one knew the things that he did, and none of them had experienced what he had during the war. Everyone’s experiences were unique, and their responses to them were too. So why did he need to explain himself to Webster?

Because Webster was there.

Skinny kept his back to Web so he didn’t have to see the judgement. Was he "bestial"? Skinny wondered, it was a word he did not know, but opposed to "noble" it wasn’t that difficult to figure out.

He had shot the German.

Liebgott, despite all the violence he held inside, had no blood on his hands--not in the end--and neither did Webster. The longer Skinny thought about it, the more the body lying in that field began to transform back into a human being. Alley was right. This would catch up with him.

***

Cradling his rifle against his chest Skinny turned to Webster, his jaw was stiff and his reply mechanical.

"‘Cause Liebgott said he was guilty."