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Battle Casualty
Blue: Sure will. The only solid footing in the area is the road itself. [pause] Say, if
you don't mind our crowding the boundary a little, I'm tempted to narrow down the front
to one man wide. Just send 'em in single file down our shoulder of the road. Of course we
can deploy into a line when we hit resistance."
White: Jesus Christ! Why didn't I think of that first? Here the 2nd Battalion will
be plowing through snow up to their ass, while the 3rd is strolling along on a blacktop
road! Blue: Not necessarily. The road has two shoulders.
White: Right again! Route column, right down the road. It just might work, but
you don't suppose my Old Man and your Old Man will both buy it, do you?
Blue: I don't know. But if they don't, let 'em come up with something better.
And now we come back to our vigil in the 915th FDC. The primary reason for a
night attack is to surprise the enemy, and since artillery fire tends to wake people up and
make them alert, you generally don't fire until after the enemy infantry is already awake
and starting to resist. So we did not fire a preparation that night, but waited to hear from
our observers. The atmosphere was tense.
At midnight we had heard nothing. We began to yawn. I refilled my canteen cup
from the stock-pot of coffee. A couple of the computors started playing tic-tac-toe,
passing a clip-board back and forth.
Don Thomson said, "I wonder why we don't hear anything." "They're keeping
radio silence until they make contact," I said. "I'd still like to know."
"So would I," I told him. "But our observers probably had to break down their
radios to carry them by hand. And even if the radios are operating, I don't feel like
sending them a message. You know how loud the speaker is on a radio, especially at
night, and they sure as hell don't want their position given away."
Thomson sighed. "Yeah, sure. But I still would like to know. The doughfoots just
kind of disappeared into the night. And here we are."
I told him to phone the radio control set to see if any of the LnOs or FOs had
checked in. They hadn't.
One of our forward observers, Lt Seymour Landay, was up there just behind the
lead scouts of the 2nd Battalion. He would probably have gone in front of them had they
allowed it.
Landay was rapidly becoming a legend. Nineteen years old, he had come to us
some time before the Moselle crossing and seemed bent on winning the war
singlehanded. Like Bill Beck, he thrived on danger. At one time he thought the infantry
platoon leader he was with was too cautious in approaching a village to capture it, so he,
Landay, called out "Follow me!” and led the platoon in a successful assault.
Surely Landay was now in a position to know and report if contact had been made
with the enemy.
Unless, of course, he and his crew had been killed or captured before they could
get the radio set up.
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