Because I’d been a sergeant and an old member of the company, the Commander of K Company, Captain Wall, kind of takes me under his wing. He moves me up pretty fast. Not as fast as they moved Sergeant Hunt, the trigamist, but fast enough. I find out Captain Wall is the fifth K Company Commander, the other four were killed. And Captain Wall looks as if he might have already been killed and doesn’t know it.
That bad patrol I took out and lost left me on the edge of sanity, if there’d been any left. I can’t work at anything consistently. I just spend my time constantly thinking, ‘How can I get out of this, how can I manage to stay alive and not kill any more people?’
In March, I’m saved from going psycho by being wounded. It’s a minor wound, a piece of shrapnel in my wrist and another lodged in my groin, but the fascinating thing is after they’ve repaired the shrapnel wounds, I spend my time wandering all around the hospital having a hard time standing up.
At night, I can’t even make it to the john in the dark, and no one knows what’s wrong. I buy a flashlight for nights. I think I might finally be going psycho but they think I’m goofing off. It turns out that in the powerful one hundred and fifty five mm explosion of an American artillery shell right next to me, the one that gave me the shrapnel wounds, I seem to have lost the vestibular and semicircular canals in my ears. I don’t know this yet, and the doctors don’t either. Also, the repair they did in my groin at the field hospital, taking out some shrapnel and stitching the muscles together, didn’t work right. I need to have it redone later.
However, it’s slowly coming toward the end of the war. For reasons I still don’t understand, when we cross the Rhine, they round up all the walking wounded, including me. I’m considered walking, although wobbly. I walk rather peculiarly because if you don’t have any vestibular canals you don’t have much in the way of balance. I’m walking around like a drunken sailor, complaining of being dizzy all the time, not knowing what the matter is, and everybody’s telling me the American one five five shells went off to close to me and my brains were shaken up a bit but it will be all right. I’m something like a punch drunk fighter.
Everything now is rough and ready. The doctors are suspecting everyone of trying to get out of combat for medical reasons. They are. However, at the same time, I have something seriously wrong and they won’t listen. It’s a bit like ‘cry wolf’; when it comes to the real thing, they won’t believe me. They send me back to my outfit, to K Company. We cross the Rhine River in little boats with the help, of all things, of the US Navy. American troops have already crossed the river up north of us, over the Remagen railroad bridge, so this crossing is totally unnecessary. It’s probably because they’ve got all this equipment ready to do a water crossing; they’re going to do it anyway, practising for the next war maybe, who knows. Anyway, we bounce across, and I’m miserable. I can hardly hold a rifle, one arm is completely bandaged and I have a sling. I don’t need to keep my arm in the sling, so I have it slung around my neck, sort of for decoration and maybe to ring up a note of pity. I’m like something out of a French Revolutionary War painting by Delacroix.
We get on the other side and charge up the slippery slope of the Rhine River bank. We have had little trouble crossing, no heavy fire at us or anything, just some random small arms stuff. Probably civilians defending their home turf from the marauding Americans. The Germans know we crossed at Remagen, a bridge someone forgot to blow up, and so they’ve generally pulled back. They’re just a bit smarter than our officers. It’s a challenge, climbing and scrambling through grapevines on the steep bank, but we finally get to the town of Koblenz.
Well, there are enough German soldiers left in the town to make it tough. It’s the only street fighting, house to house, operation I’m involved in during the entire war. We’re going along, block by block, trying to capture and hold high points, flushing out snipers. We’d think we have them all, when some other fanatic would start picking us off. Usually three or four GIs will be down before we can figure out where the sniper is. Then we’ll toss a grenade, or lob in some mortars, whatever it takes.
I decide to retire from this war for a little while. The whole affair’s getting to be like something straight out of a grade C movie and I don’t want to be involved. I duck down in a cellar and hang out there until I stop hearing rifle fire, grenade bangs and mortar thumps.
I don’t think any prisoners are taken and I don’t care much. In the wine cellar where I’m hiding, I discover racks and racks of champagne! This isn’t champagne country, so it must be stuff the Germans confiscated in France. I’m down there and I don’t know how to open a champagne bottle, especially with my hand still bandaged. The wire wrappings are hard to get off.
Finally, I get the wire off, and it pops, so I lose most of the champagne because it isn’t cold enough. I’ve never been a big drinker, but I’m dying of thirst because there isn’t any water, so I drink champagne.
When everything has settled down and the guys come back, I tell them what I’ve found. I should have known better. They come charging down to my cellar. Everybody takes a bottle, figures out how to open it and we’re all down there drinking champagne, bubbles flowing out our mouths and over everything.
Then someone has the idea it would be fun to take a champagne bath like one of those naked movie stars. We’re all filthy and sweaty anyway. We form long lines like a fireman’s bucket brigade and pass the bottles up two floors to the bathtub. We fill the bathtub with this bubbly wine. Unfortunately, the guys at the tub don’t know the first thing about how to get the corks out either, so they’re just knocking the necks against the wall and pouring what’s left into the tub. It’s a real bash, like the celebration of a winning team after a football game. We take turns in the tub. As soon as the champagne gets so we can’t see the bottom of the tub we pull the plug, let it drain out, and start the bucket brigade coming up from the cellar again.
Then, of course, we can’t find anything to dry ourselves with and we’re all sticky. It’s something we didn’t think of. So, we rip down the drapes in this handsome house. The windows are about two storeys high. We dry ourselves off on the drapes and then dress again. Our pants, even our underwear, are sticking to us. And we’re still drinking champagne. People are passing out dead drunk or throwing up all over the place. The last thing I remember is standing in a doorway, slipping to the floor and thinking if the Germans counterattack it’s all over. At that point, I couldn’t care less.
Of course, when the Quartermaster supply does get water to us in Jerry cans we all pass out again on water.
I’m sent back to the hospital, thank goodness. Someone figures out how dumb this is, having a guy with a sling, drunk and with a bandaged hand and hernia operation walking around. So they put me in a truck, drive me to the river and put me on a boat to cross it. They’re ferrying equipment and stuff back and forth, now. They ship me back like a sack of beans, put me on another truck, still no ambulance, and drive me to a hospital.