The Steel Wave - Jeff Shaara [70]
Ekman stepped down from the makeshift platform, seemed to vanish behind a flock of officers. The hum began now, the inevitable questions, and Adams moved away from the crowd, staring out toward the distant rows of C-47s. He felt a strange coldness and clenched his fists, a chill in his hands. We’re really going. Again. Son of a bitch.
The others were moving past him, the entire regiment pouring out of the hangar, the voices coming, loud calls, a few whoops, the sounds digging into him. He wanted silence, but there was nowhere to find it now, nowhere to go to escape the idiotic loudmouths, the men who truly had no idea what was about to happen. The veterans streamed past him as well, silent and subdued. Most of them were familiar to him, the faces if not the names. He had learned, they had all learned, that names didn’t matter. Even the men in his own platoon could be no more to him than a rifle or a submachine gun, a grenade, a radio, and those precious few, a Browning Automatic Rifle, what everyone knew as simply the BAR. No matter the weapon, if one went down, another would follow, and every step they took along the way was one step closer to the unthinkable.
He thought of walking out, far into the field, but aircraft were in motion. Keep your ass inside, he thought. Nothing for you to do out there but get in the way. He glanced up at the thick gray sky, the inevitable rain. Too damned cold for this. No need to stick my boots into some muddy hole.
He had feared his ribs had been broken, the pain more severe than any injury he had suffered before. The lieutenant had ordered him to report to the doctor, an older grouch of a man, whose name seemed only to be Doc. Adams had been surprised by his own reaction to the examination, pure panic that a busted rib might actually send him home, take him right out of the war. But the doctor had dismissed him with a casual wave, said it was nothing more than a heavy bruise, had even complimented Adams on the exceptionally colorful results, a saucer-shaped patch of blue below his heart. The bruise was nearly gone now, a faint yellow stain, and he ignored it. Dammit, he thought, if I’m going to get hurt, it’s not going to be from some useless practice jump. The voices were still swarming all around him, and he tried to avoid them, so many of the men spilling out their stupidity or their fear. Adams couldn’t help his anger; he had felt this way with every wave of replacements. He hated them for their inexperience.
Over the past few weeks, the Eighty-second had made several practice jumps, good weather and bad, more screwups, more injuries. With every jump, he had grown more impatient, every hard landing reminding him that this was just play, artificial, meaningless. The men didn’t need more lessons. They had all become proficient at packing their chutes, and they didn’t need him to shove them out the gaping door of the C-47. The shirkers and malcontents were long gone. It was the same throughout the army. Every unit that had seen combat had the old and the new, and the untested would always harass the veterans for pieces of wisdom, what it was like, what the enemy would do, how it felt. It was happening again, all through the hangar, the new men jabbering nervously, responding to the hints of urgency from Colonel Ekman.
“Sergeant Adams!”
He knew the voice and turned, his hand twitching from instinct, prepared to raise the salute. There was a cluster of officers; Scofield, with more of the company commanders. He saw Lieutenant Pullman moving through them, and now the tall thin man, no smile, the man pointing his finger toward Adams. It was Gavin.
“Over here, Sergeant,” Pullman said.
Adams moved that way, the