The Right Fight Read online

  We’ve only heard the Tannoy a couple of times this year, once for the owner’s birthday and again when there was a fire under the grandstands, and this is a good reminder why. Sounds like somebody’s jamming a microphone through a sausage grinder and coughing through it at the same time.

  “It’s the mayor,” Hannah says excitedly. She’s a lifelong Shore girl and would know if the mayor came around for just any old thing. So I’d say this counts for something. I join her up out of the dugout and on the field.

  Through the crackle and over the band, we can just about make it all out.

  “… And while we all have high hopes for the resumption of Eastern Shore League baseball sometime in the future, there are far more serious matters in the world at the present time. So as we say farewell to the boys for now, could I ask the crowd to join me in saluting those brave men on the field today who have already enlisted in our armed services in anticipation …”

  The Centreville crowd is already way ahead of the mayor, which honestly isn’t a huge accomplishment but it’s nice. I clap right along with them, clapping for the idea itself rather than clapping for myself. Myself, I’m a little embarrassed and wanting this to be over —

  “Go!” Hannah says, shoving me hard in the middle of my back, toward the mound.

  “What?”

  The mayor is soldiering on, but I need Hannah’s translation.

  “They are calling you out to the mound. Go.”

  “Aww,” I say, looking at the ground, kicking the dirt like a surly kid. She shoves me again.

  I have my head down all the way out there, because this is embarrassing. The crowd goes thunderous, doing the work of a population a hundred times bigger.

  It’s all still too much and I still have not lifted my head by the time I reach the mound and walk, face-first, into Theo McCallum.

  He is enjoying it. Grinning slyly at me, waving at the fans. His brother is right next to him, doing likewise. I look at the group, a mix of both teams that would just about add up to one full squad. A pretty good squad, too, as it happens.

  “Hey, look at that pretty gal over there, unescorted,” says Nardini, brushing me aside to get a better look at my fiancée.

  “I’ll have you know, pal,” I say to him, gesturing with my thumb toward Hannah, “that’s what I’m fighting for. That, and baseball.”

  All three of them start laughing, climbing over each other to rib me.

  “From what I can tell,” Hank says, “that can take care of itself just fine.”

  “But if baseball is depending on you for survival, we’ve all played our last game.”

  That was my own left fielder. He comes up and gives me a hard backslapping hug, whispering deep in my ear, “Just kidding. Go get ’em, Captain.”

  I go around shaking hands with the other men who’ve joined up. Some of them marginal talents or worse, some of them mighty fine prospects who have every chance of making it to the bigs. I try not to wonder how many of them will never step on a baseball diamond again.

  The band plays on, and the crowd cheers on, as the benches of both clubs gradually start emptying away.

  “Hey,” Hank McCallum says, grabbing my hand and pumping hard, “that conference you called on the mound …”

  “Oh, yeah, about that …”

  “Personally, I thought it was about time.” He points a thumb at his brother. “I’d have dropped this scrub on the seat of his pants with the second pitch.”

  Theo barges in between us. “I wouldn’t even have waited that long. But that’s Red Sox for ya, not really famous for their bravery, right?”

  I shake, grin, grip his hand hard while he does the same.

  “What’s your branch?” I ask him.

  “Air Corps,” he says, puffing and pumping.

  “And yours?” I ask his brother.

  “Navy.”

  “Now it all makes sense,” I say, laughing. “Me, I’m Army. When war does break out, I’ll let you guys know how it was.”

  Nardini’s apparently feeling left out. “Isn’t anybody gonna ask me what —”

  “Marines!” we all shout at the same time.

  Nardini looks genuinely spooked. “How in the world did you all figure that out?”

  “Some things are just too right to be wrong,” I say.

  It has the feel of some kind of tribute now, some kind of major public reward for something we haven’t even done yet, and it’s great and all but it needs to be over. One by one, guys make their way down off the mound, across the field, toward their assignments. The band finally peters out. One guy, a talented pitcher for the A’s who everybody always seems to be talking about but nobody ever seems to be talking to, strays across the infield between us and the plate. He’s carrying a bag. He was not one of the enlistees.

  “Oh, look,” says Theo. “There goes the phenom. The healthy young man who’s planning to play our game while we do his fightin’.”

  “What’s your problem, anyway?” Hank McCallum shouts at his now-former teammate.

  The guy keeps his head down and tries to keep walking.

  “Hey!” Theo shouts, in the kind of tone you don’t ignore.

  “This could be my chance,” the kid says shyly. “It’s been my dream, always. And with the talk going around — big-time players like Hank Greenberg, the DiMaggios, talk of all those guys signing up … guys like me might have a chance they’ll never have again.”

  It is not an irrational thought. But it is a sickening one.

  Hank McCallum just manages to tackle his brother as Theo bullcharges in the kid’s direction, screaming seven kinds of hate and disgust as the kid turns scarlet and backs away.

  “Maybe there won’t be any more chances, ever again, for anybody,” Nardini calls after the kid. “Ever think of that?”

  He steps quicker and quicker to get away.

  “Nazis hate baseball!” I shout.

  The McCallums, still tangled on the ground, look up at me like I just came down from the mountaintop with The Word. They point at me, and nod agreement.

  “Nazis hate baseball,” Nardini says, punching my shoulder and marching away as if he just saw a squad of them turning the corner.

  “Nazis hate baseball,” Hank says, dragging his brother toward their side of the field and beyond.

  “Nazis hate baseball!” Theo shouts to the sky.

  “Where’d you get that information?”

  I turn to see Hannah on the mound next to me. The park is rushing to quiet as we stand face-to-face.

  “Oh, they came through here last year with a barnstorming team. You could tell they hated every minute of it. That’s when I realized there’s something wrong with those guys.”

  She smiles and touches both of my cheeks lightly with flat palms. “You coming?”

  She’s going home. Home, Maryland, the Shore. Home, right up the street, in fact. Myself, I go straight from here to the train station, ride back to Boston tonight. Pack up, eat a little, sleep even less, then get on with it.

  “Maybe we should leave it here for now, huh?” I say.

  “Sounds like exactly what we should do,” she says. “Right here. This field. For now.”

  “You go. I’m going to wait a little longer. Train’s not for a bit yet …”

  “And you want the park to yourself.”

  “Well, sorta.”

  “Last man standing,” she says, walking backward off the mound, letting her hands slip off my cheeks.

  “Last man standing,” I say.

  I watch Hannah walk across the park, out the gate, up the street. I watch her every step until she turns that corner where I can no longer see her.

  Then I turn in the other direction, survey all three hundred and sixty degrees of the old ballpark: empty, mine, cool, quiet. I look up into the dusking sky, raising my left hand straight up and my right hand out to my side as if I’m calling for a high, high fly ball. It’s mine. I got it.

  I’ve been in two war zones sinc
e the last time I stepped onto a baseball field. The only problem is, they weren’t in Europe or Asia, they were in the Carolinas and Louisiana. It sounds like the Civil War broke out again, but fortunately that’s not it. Though, unfortunately, it did consist of Americans fighting Americans. And not even fighting. Sort of fighting. Practice. Rehearsal. War games. Maneuvers is what they are officially known as, but it makes no difference what they’re called because they are all the same thing: the wrong conflict, in the wrong place, against the wrong guys.

  No Nazis. Not one, as far as I could tell.

  I did not come here to play fight. No, sir.

  That’s not entirely fair. But I’m not in a fair mood, to be honest, because I feel like I’m a hunting dog that’s been trained to the maximum of his abilities and then kept locked up while all the rabbits and foxes and pheasants are running circles around my cage.

  The maneuvers were fine, actually, even stunning in a way. Four hundred thousand soldiers, fifty thousand vehicles, a total maneuver area of over three thousand, four hundred square miles of river and plain and swamp and trail and muck and what I came to understand as Louisiana steam, all designed to test the physical and mental and spiritual endurance of any fighting man of any era. It was, we were told, the largest peacetime exercise in American history. We learned to coordinate infantry and airborne with armor in a way the Army had never done before. We learned our gear, our machines, the way an old cavalry guy — the guy who was basically losing his place in history to me — learned his horse. It was exciting and sweaty and demanding, and it did make you think things through and really learn the craft of mechanized warfare.

  But no Nazis.

  It was for the brass, the men at the top of the food chain, more than anything. They were just figuring this kind of warfare out. Guys like me would do whatever they told us, so these exercises were all about them figuring out what to tell us.

  I knew it was important, because of the stars involved. There were a lot of West Point types, brainy and gritty lieutenant colonels who were probably going to figure out the whole war in Europe right here in deepest-south USA, and then lead us over there to give the mongering maniacs all the what for they deserve.

  But still, no Nazis.

  And no real fighting. Blank shells and rounds replaced the real thing, smoke canisters were popped absolutely everywhere, and planes dropped bags of white sand in place of bombs. They even employed loudspeakers to blast battle sounds, presumably from real battles. Triumph was achieved by surrounding troops rather than attacking them, and my favorite element of all: Umpires told us what was what.

  Umpires decided who was a casualty, who was captured, who won the battle. The only element of baseball I ever hated, and the only one that followed me into the Army.

  I know I learned a lot. I know the Army learned a lot, since they seemed to have had very little idea before the Louisiana Maneuvers of how to integrate the awesome power and maneuverability of the perfect, perfect war machine into their game plan. The tank is war in its best, distilled form. War has been waiting for the tank, forever, since war was born. And since war was born essentially the moment Mr. Ug #1 encountered Mr. Ug #2 sniffing around his food and his Mrs. Ug #1, it is fair and logical to say that humanity has been waiting for the tank to come along since the beginning of thought, and suspicion, and anger, and violence. The tank is the solution to all that. The tank is the Jim Thorpe of mechanization. And Jim Thorpe, American Indian hero and the greatest athlete who ever lived, is pretty much what God would like to be when he grows up.

  I understood all along that the maneuvers were a necessary step on the way to what really mattered. But I was also aware, on a day the umpire informed me and the other four crew members of our tank that we had been disabled, that the Germans were in the process of disabling Leningrad beyond recognition. Blank ammo, at that moment, was a good idea, since me shooting an umpire would not have solved much of anything.

  By the time we got to the Carolina Maneuvers, you could feel the urgency of things, pushing us all to a greater understanding of tank and artillery warfare. Three hundred and fifty thousand troops mock-fought it out over ten thousand square miles between Fort Jackson and Fort Bragg. For me personally it meant a rapid uptick in my grasp of all the skills required on tank duty.

  My official assignment was assistant driver, and that was a comprehensive education all itself. I also did duty as a gunner and a loader as required, but Carolina was where I was given an opportunity to take over driver duties more and more, and it was where it became obvious to one and all that I belonged at the controls.

  It was still just war games, but when the moment came to show the horse — the tank — that I was a true cavalryman, even the boss had to take notice.

  “Bucyk!” yelled Sergeant Boyd, our tank commander.

  “Yes, sir?” I yelled back, louder, because I was still so shot through with excitement.

  “Where did you learn to do that?”

  “Don’t know, sergeant. Just seemed like the thing to do, I guess.”

  What I’d done was this: As we came over a hill and barreled down a ravine, we unexpectedly encountered one of the big beast M-6 heavy tanks of the other side, moving slowly across a stream. Without even thinking about it, I gambled that they hadn’t seen us and headed straight for them. My tank, the M-3 Lee, did not have the firepower to slug with those guys and the day would be over real quick if I didn’t get tricky.

  I hauled tail down there, angling to come right up to their flank as they made it to the other side of the stream where the beginnings of a wood appeared. They saw us just as they entered the first thicket of pines. The M-6 tried to maneuver, but it’s an unwieldy brute, and that’s the M-3’s one area of advantage. I stayed on their flank, making them turn all the way around to try and get a bead on me with the big gun, until I’d twisted them right up. They wound up pressed to a big ol’ spruce. The turret spun around after us, but I swung around the other way again, and the big gun banged right into that tree, unable to follow any further when we fronted them and did a full turn right in their face. They were ours. Umpire, please.

  “Great going, Bucyk,” the sergeant said. “I think you might have a future with this stuff.”

  “Thanks,” I said. And I had a pretty good feeling that my days as an assistant driver were not going to be long.

  “Outta my seat,” snapped Coulson, the driver.

  So, by Carolina, we had progressed a lot, as soldiers, as an army, as a nation. Tank warfare, which was just taking shape at the end of World War I, was obviously going to be front and center this time around. But as fast as we were evolving, it became clear during those three weeks that the mobile anti-tank artillery that the infantry was using were going to be huge problems for mechanized divisions like us. You’d have to say, even, that they got the better of us in this staged war and word was out that they were now figuring large in the upcoming real thing. Older generals and other brass from older wars were found to be a step slow and an idea short during this exercise. So, as November ended and December 1941 came up, all kinds of changes were happening, with the new regime being all about mobility; integrated units of infantry, artillery, and armor operating seamlessly; and above all, aggression.

  We were even in Life Magazine. All over it. The country was watching us, like we were actually doing something beyond pretend, and apparently the country was impressed.

  But I still couldn’t help feeling that, as much as we were learning in Louisiana and East Texas, in Kentucky and the Carolinas, it wasn’t nearly as much as the Nazis were learning in Poland and Czechoslovakia, in France, in Norway and Denmark, and the Soviet Union.

  Carolina Maneuvers ended on November 30. One week later, we arrived back at Fort Knox, on December 7. That same day, the world and its war got tired of waiting for us. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and the myth of American neutrality sank along with more than two thousand sailors.

  Thanks to the Japanese, I was going to get
my Nazis.

  Even with the official declaration of war, it somehow still takes an eternity to get into it.

  Four months after Pearl Harbor, we were ordered to Fort Dix, New Jersey. Still no Nazis, though there was one guy, a barber, whose behavior really had me wondering. Anyway, it felt a bit closer. Then, a month later, we got the call. We were shifted to New York’s Brooklyn Army Terminal. From there, we sailed for Europe.

  That’s how I find myself standing on the top level of probably the most famous and classy ship in the entire world.

  The Queen Mary.

  I never, ever, in any corner of my imagination would have put this vision together for myself.

  And at the same time, all things considered, it makes as much sense as anything else.

  So much has happened already since the last time I stepped off a baseball field, I feel like I should be seventy years old and telling it all to my grandkids. If I thought it was going to be a relatively straight line from off of that mound in Maryland to the Army to the inevitable war, then I thought altogether wrong. While I’ve been training, practicing, maneuvering for the better part of a year, the Nazis have been playing for real, dominating, spreading carnage, and rewriting maps, with what seems to be only feeble resistance along the way.

  Okay, maybe that’s unfair. But they need us over there. They need me. I feel that need, and it hurts to think of what help we could be, what our absence has cost already. And now we’re going, finally.

  I’m taking with me a few things I didn’t have before my induction and basic training and Fort Jackson and Fort Knox and the Queen Mary. I am bringing a surgically repaired ankle that needed a minor procedure after I took on an obstacle course with more gusto than sense. I’m taking a professional soldier’s understanding of the art of warfare, and a scientific assessment of my aptitude that indicated I am more suited to tank duty than I ever was to baseball or school or jumping jacks or tying my shoes or eating ice cream or anything else. I think they even took an X-ray of my skull and found that my brain was tank-shaped. Which means I am also bringing with me my assignment as driver on a five-member crew operating a Sherman M-4, which is waiting for me at the other end of this boat ride. And I am bringing with me something of a hobby in history and conflict that I got a taste for when laying up waiting for my ankle to heal. I believe I learned just enough to understand this war. And I believe I learned enough to expect I’ll understand nothing, once I’m in it.