Warmth in Cold Places
Doc Gene Roe/Babe Heffron, PG-13

The other guys would kill me if they heard me say it, but I miss Bastogne. Not the trees exploding or the cold that made you feel like your blood was freezing to your bones, not the part that took your friends away on the hood of a Jeep or left them bleeding to death in the snow or blew the legs off the best men in the company. There's a lot not to miss about that place, and I'll be the first one to say it.

But I knew where I was there, more than anywhere else I'd been with Easy. I wasn't just a replacement anymore. I'd made it through Holland without getting myself killed. I'm not saying it made me a Toccoa guy--nothing but Toccoa could do that--but at least it made me not a new guy. I had a step up on the other replacements coming into Easy, got lucky because Bill heard the South Philly in my voice and invited me to sit down with him and his buddies. Greener than grass back then, but Bill made sure I was okay, he looked out for his neighborhood boy.

So when we hit Bastogne, I was practically an old man. I had my own new guy to look after. Fat lotta good I did him. Poor Julian, poor, stupid kid standing out there like that--no cover, no nothing. I shoulda looked out for him like Bill did for me, but I guess there was still a good streak of green in me, made me think I was smarter than I was.

Bastogne was hell on earth, and that's the truest story you'll ever hear from me. But I found something in that place, or something found me, and it's gone now, and I miss it.

I don't even remember getting into that foxhole. I remember Spina saying something about shock and cold--I didn't give a shit, really. No way freezing to death was gonna be worse than watching your buddies retreat while your life dumped out a hole in your neck. I remember thinking freezing is supposed to be a pretty good way to go, and that I probably didn't deserve to go easily after leaving that poor kid to die all alone out there.

I didn't know I'd been looking for Gene until he found me. Spina's arm was still over my shoulder, his blanket around the both of us, but it was Gene who warmed me up, Gene who got me to talk, kept my guts from chewing themselves up, Gene who could tell me it wasn't my fault and make me believe him just enough to get through the night. It wasn't okay like he said, and he knew it, but it wasn't my fault, either.

He don't talk much, our Doc Roe, but he says a lot if you know how to read him. It took me a while to work that out, but that Christmas--hard to think of Christmas in a place like that, but that's what it was--I got my first real lesson. You can tell when a guy's about to lose it. Gene saw it in me, and at the same time I was cursing over the slice across my palm I was thinking he might be worse off than any of us out there on the line. I guess it was easy to forget that he was fighting too, since he didn't carry a gun, but he was fighting all the time. The next day is when I started to get that, when I found that place I miss now.

He fixed my hand up--fuck it hurt, the edges of the cut all dried up and chapped from the cold--and sat in that foxhole, not saying a whole hell of a lot but just being there, being warm, being solid. We were warm together, that's what I learned that day. Gene and I could keep each other from freezing over. I don't know what happened to him that night--like I said, he ain't a talker--but I know he needed warming as much as I did. Maybe more, 'cause I had the other guys, at least. He didn't. Didn't let himself, anyway, though any of us would've laid ourselves down for him if he'd asked. Thing with Gene, see, is that he'll never ask. I had the other guys, yeah, but they weren't like Gene. With him, I never felt like I had to keep up, be more than what I was.

It's a strange thing, losing someone like Bill. Christ that place was terrible, to take so many of our boys so fast. You could hardly keep up with it, keep track of who got hit when. One minute you're hollering your guts out because your foxhole had a tree dropped on it--I remember thinking that was it for me, trapped in there, pinned to the ground by branches that thank God have some give to them because they're filling up the entire fucking hole and how the hell am I gonna get out of here, shit I'm gonna freeze to death or starve or some shit--and not ten minutes later you get out to find that Bill and Joe...

So many gone, all run together--that day, before, after--dead, wounded. Some would come back. Some guys you thought were goners would pop up again a week later, just to get hit again. You got used to it. But seeing Bill and Joe like that, it was like having my own legs taken away, like losing everything that held me upright.

"He's tough," Gene said to me the night they got hit, warming me up in the hole we'd slipped into, "he'll make it." But all I could think was if Bill Guarnere and Joe Toye--the toughest guys ever to set foot on this continent--if they could be ripped up like that and hauled off groaning (but not crying, they would never cry, not like I was doing again, for Chrissake, suck it up, Babe) then what the fuck business did I have being here? How did I think I was gonna make it?

I don't know how much of that I said out loud, but I know Gene heard every word. He had his blanket around the back of us and mine over the front and he hooked his elbow around back of my neck and pulled so my head tucked under his chin and his hand was in my hair, petting it the way Doris used to when I worried too much, and that was the best, the warmest I felt in that fucking forest, in this whole fucking war.

A week we spent like that, before I decided I couldn't keep it up. Couldn't keep being Babe--this kid who needs looking after, who needs to be petted and given sweets when things go wrong. We weren't doing neither of us any good--not really. It felt good, yeah. It felt safe and warm, but it wasn't neither of those things. I was gonna get killed if I didn't toughen up. And even though I got the feeling Gene needed someone to take care of--someone who wasn't bleeding all over him--it was only gonna make it worse for him if my number did come up.

That was one of those things, see, that Gene never said out loud but that I learned to read real fast. I wasn't blind, or stupid neither. There was a reason he always sat off to the side, never joked around with us, why he stuck close to the other medics when he could. The rest of us, we saw each other die, and it ripped us apart. But Gene--it wasn't just watching for him. It was up close. It was him with his hands right in the messy business of us dying, talking to us, trying to calm us down, sticking his fingers down our throats so we wouldn't choke our tongues as we puked up blood. It was always carrying a stick in case someone's leg or arm got blown off and he needed a tourniquet. Gene stayed on the outside of us because he knew that, odds were, he was gonna see our insides spread all over--all over him--sometime real soon.

At least he used to stay on the outside. But now I could feel him watching me, looking for me when patrols came back. I could feel his arm around my neck tighter each night I hadn't gotten hit, and I knew Gene had to get back on the outside before I got it, and it was his buddy's blood he had to scrape out from under his fingernails. So one night a few days before we went into Foy, I pulled my scarf tighter around my neck and tried not to stumble under the weight of that frown on my back as I walked straight past our foxhole and caught up to One Lung and asked if there was room in with him and Ramirez. There was, and that was coldest night I ever spent.

We finally got out of there--put the Ardennes behind us--and we were glad. You can't not be glad to leave a place that took so many of us away, that left the rest of us looking and feeling like we'd had our insides carved out with a spoon and the hole filled with ice. I'd look around me as we drove away, thinking, Jesus God, how can Malark even be sitting up straight when he looks like he died three days ago. Or, fuck, Lieb is nothing but skin and bones and not a whole lot of either, not like he ever had much to go around anyhow. I'd look at these guys, what was left of them, and wonder what was left of me, what I looked like, whether I'd recognize myself if I looked in a mirror.

By the time we got to Haguenau, I'd gotten used to the cold again. Weird to be in a real bunk again, with a roof and walls, and room full of guys breathing and coughing in their sleep. Scary to realize that in the space of just a week--maybe less, I can't remember when the thought first came to me--that I'd gone from being sure I was going to get hit to thinking maybe, maybe I'd make it after all. I was a certified old guy now. Survived the Bulge when harder, smarter guys hadn't. I'd grown up, toughened up. I wasn't going to get cocky about it. I was still smart enough to be pissed off at getting tapped for that fucking patrol.

But I wasn't a new guy anymore. I knew what I was doing. Vest--he was my pick for getting it--or maybe the new louie. They were both way too eager to get into the thick of things, be heroes, do some good. No better way to get yourself killed than to go looking to be a hero. Or maybe Web, who was new again and twitchy, and never much of a shot. But it wasn't supposed to be Jackson. Jackson was practically me--I'd been with the company longer, maybe, but had seen my first action in Holland, just like him, made it in and out of those fucking woods, just like him. I knew better than to charge the door before the fucking grenade went off, didn't I. Why didn't he?

The basement's chaos, and I'm chaos right along with it. Jackson's screaming so loud it's like he's in my head, it's like he's me. Everyone's screaming and I don't even know how I got here, but someone--fuck, it's Jones--is pulling me off the prisoners, but I what am I doing in there with the Krauts when I'm screaming and dying on the table? I hear Web saying calming things to Jackson, to me, and then he's hollering, "Where the fuck is the medic?" and I drop my cap because all I can think is "Gene, Gene, where is Gene, come on, buddy, where is Gene?"

I'm at the door when he comes in--him and two other medics--and he hardly even looks at me when he pushes through but I don't care because the whole place changes with him there, as soon as he starts talking. He's talking to Jackson, but his voice works on all of us, telling us it's okay, calm down, you're going to be fine, you're not going to die. My brain hooks up with me again, and when someone says to help them move Jackson, I'm right there, right next to Gene, and I can talk again, saying what Gene was saying. "It's okay, it's okay. Take it easy," over and over and I'm holding his hand--God, it's so cold and sticky--but "It's okay, you're all right," even after the house starts shaking around us and I get pushed out of the way I'm telling him it's all right, it's okay until Gene stops pleading with Jackson. His head drops and it's so fucking quiet in there, and Gene looks right up at me--nowhere else but me--and I know it's not all right.

We all stand there like the useless lumps we are until Gene pulls out this little book and starts writing in it, taking Jackson's dog tags, writing down--what? That it could have been any of us. That maybe I wasn't nearly as smart as I thought and if I'd been on the assault team maybe it'd be me, my name, rank, serial number, date of death he's writing in that book?

I have to get out. Push out of that basement filled with guys who are all looking at Jackson under that blanket and thinking "Coulda been me, coulda been me, coulda been me."

There's an alley, two sharp right turns and you're in an alley, and I go there, throw myself against the wall, thumping my back hard so my gear jabs me and hurts and I don't care, I just keep thumping my shoulders against the side of that stone house, letting the hard cold bleed through my clothes, settling around my bones. I'm sunk down in the mud and rocks there, my ass and legs going numb, when I hear them coming out. The light from the door carries just enough that I can see the litter stretched between two guys, neither of who is Gene. They stop and turn their heads back toward the door, and I can hear him talking to them, the low rhythm of his voice rolling down the alley even though I can't understand the words. I put my head on my knees and miss Bastogne with all my heart.

Footsteps. They sound different on old cobblestone than on snow, but I still know them. He's sliding down next to me, hooking his elbow around my neck like he used to, and telling me I'm okay, it's okay, everything's gonna be fine and at first I just push my head against his neck and hang on and let myself warm up a little. But then I feel hot dampness on my face--it cools off so fast in the night air, almost freezes to my skin--and I realize Gene's trying to convince himself, not me. His hands are on my arms, feeling up and down, testing the bones there, sliding over my ribs, checking me out to make sure I'm okay. And he's crying, Gene is crying the way I did over Julian and Bill, and that scares me more than anything.

But it's like in that basement. I know if I just do what Gene does, it'll be okay. So I catch his hands and hold them still, press them up against my chest so he can feel that my heart's beating, put my other hand on his face the way he does to guys who are bad off, lean my forehead against his so we can feel each other's breath and know that we're both alive. I talk to him like he does to us, fast and steady and low, and it don't matter so much what you say as long as you sound like you believe it.

Gene's hands smell like blood. He hasn't washed them, and Jackson's blood is crusting off of him onto me. It makes Gene's hands rough against my neck where he's holding me and I know there's something funny happening here, but he needs me so bad, I never realized how much. I always thought he was doing it for me, warming me up, keeping me going because I needed looking after and he needed someone to look after. Thought I was doing him a favor by looking after myself instead of making him do it, but I didn't think about why he needed that, why he needed me.

"Babe," he says in his same careful way, like he thinks my name might break against his teeth if he says it too fast. And I'm thinking about names and what they mean but before I can get anywhere with that thought, Gene's hands are in my hair the way they used to be, but instead of petting, he's pulling, and then--Jesus! what the fuck? I jerk backwards but he's got me--he's kissing me, my eyes, over my forehead, dragging onto my cheek, three hot breaths in my ear and then his mouth is on my mouth, just for a second, before he pulls away and we're staring at each other and he looks as messed up as I feel.

He gets his feet under him and starts to stand up. "You be careful," he says, and his hands are shaking when he picks up his helmet and lopes off down the alley, leaving me slumped against the wall talking to myself. Telling myself I'm okay, everything is okay, take it easy buddy, until I believe it and can head back to barracks, where I smoke and stare at the underside of the mattress above me and hope everyone else believes I'm okay, too. I go through the rest of my smokes and four of Lieb's trying to warm myself up, thinking how fucked up it is to miss a place like Bastogne.