Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [53]
“I’m OK,” Frank said after a few hours of rest. “I’m ready to go back.”
“It’ll be night soon,” a corporal told him. “I think it’s OK if you stay here with us.”
He thought perhaps someone would want to talk to him, to file a report or something. But there was a war, a real war, going on, and after he asked one lieutenant why this tragic mistake had happened, he was told this happens in war all the time. “You just have to move on and win.” After that, Frank never asked about it again.
The following day, he got word that Captain Moyer and the five men with him had all been killed on their recon mission. He could see that this was the way it was going to be. Death, then more death. Soon another captain from the front line appeared with two privates who had “cracked” under duress.
“These guys are my wiremen,” he told the officer in charge. “They’re no good to me now. Trade me these for one of your guys.”
The lieutenant looked at Frank.
“This guy’s a machine gunner. I’ll trade you him.”
“Don’t need a gunner, need a wireman. Someone who can carry spools of radio wire, run fast, and duck.”
“This guy knows how to duck. Believe me.”
“A wireman?” Frank asked. “Carry and run the radio wire from the front lines back to the command post?”
“Yup.”
“No more firing a gun?”
“Nope. You can’t fire a gun and carry wire at the same time. But they will fire at you. They go after the radio guys first so we can’t talk to HQ. You take this job, you better have some guts and know some fancy dance moves to dodge those Japs.”
Guts? Dance moves? Why didn’t he say that in the first place?
“I was a wireman for the rest of the war,” my dad said as he finished his story. “I would never carry a machine gun again. I would be shot at over and over, but I couldn’t shoot back because I had to carry the spool of wire. It was kind of a crazy decision.”
I thanked him for telling me all this, but I was thirteen and, by the end of it, I was fidgeting around and checking the clock. I wanted to go outside and hang with the guys. My dad noticed none of that, as his mind was still back in 1943.
“Every Christmas I think about that day. I got to live, somehow… lucky, I guess… ,” he said, his voice trailing off.
“Dad, um, can I go, now? Maybe you can tell me another war story later?”
It would be years before I heard one again.
A Holy Thursday
“DON’T JUST STAND THERE, the niggers are comin’!”
Walter was twelve, and he was only trying to be helpful.
“Whaddaya mean?” I asked while standing in his driveway with my baseball glove and a bat, hoping to get a game going before sundown.
“The niggers in Detroit are rioting! My dad says they’re on their way here right now! We’re headin’ up north!”
And sure enough they were. They were wasting no time hurriedly jamming their station wagon full of food and supplies and shotguns. Walter’s mother, Dorothy, was shouting orders to her six boys about what to load and what to leave behind. I stood there in awe of the precisionlike nature of this operation. It was as if they had run this drill many times before. A few doors down, I noticed another family doing the same thing. I started to get scared.
“Walter, I don’t understand. Why are you guys doing this? Are you going to come back?”
“Don’t know. Just gotta git. Dad says the niggers from Detroit are on their way here and will be here any minute!”
On their way to where? Here? They’re coming to Hill Street?
“Walter, I think Detroit’s a long way away from here.”
“Nope, no, no, it’s not! Dad says they could be here just like that!” Walter snapped his fingers, as if by doing so he could magically make a Negro appear to prove his point to me. “They’re going to get together with the niggers in Flint and then come ’n’ kill us all!”
Although I had never heard anything this fantastical before, I was not unfamiliar with the attitudes in the town of Davison when it came to the issue of the Colored