THE TURK
The funny thing about war is, even though you’re in it, half the time you don’t know where you are. It’s a foreign land with strange names. Anyone involved in intelligence or strategy knew, but the GI had no idea. You don’t try to remember where you are during the war. You have no reason to remember. You try to survive and live day to day.
In the six months since Normandy, Private First-Class Anthony DelRossi had developed a new nickname and reputation. The 629th Army Combat Engineers called him “The Turk.” Without a shower and proper shaving supplies in months, Del had grown a thick, pointed black beard like the sultans of the cinema. For a laugh, he might toss a German concussion grenade over his shoulder, which could knock a man unconscious or burst his eardrum. Never injured anyone, just liked the loud crack in the open air. Pull the pin and pop. The robin’s egg-shaped grenade could slide into a foxhole practically unnoticed. “They didn’t want it to kill you. The thing was, if a man was injured from the grenade, it took six other guys to help him. That’s seven men not holding the line. Less people you gotta deal with.”
The landscapes of France, Belgium, and Luxembourg had revealed all sorts of German devices. “When you tripped the S-mine, you had three seconds. It would pop up a couple feet then blow up, taking a limb or two. And the Castrator, well, if you stepped on the cartridge, it shot an explosion upward into the upper thigh or groin and could castrate a man. The Germans were pretty clever. Even I could never have thought that up.”
Del indeed found ways to match Axis technology. That was his talent after all: explosives. When GIs made rounds through abandoned villages, some engineers placed a pressure explosion on the front doorstep of a home, knowing the Wehrmacht was in the vicinity. One step on the porch would kill a German or two—but Del didn’t do that. He felt they figured it out anyway. Instead, he would find the one portrait of Hitler displayed in almost every occupied house. He placed electrical contacts behind the frame, tilted it sideways, and wired the rest of the house. If Waffen-SS searched the place, “nine times out of ten” they would straighten the portrait. “They were too anal to let it go.” When they fixed the frame, the whole house would blow. No man could ever get wise to his design because no man ever made it out alive.
That was The Turk.
***
“Spotting a damn SS Trooper was easy.” They were too young and had no business being there. Most were “blonde hair, blue eyed, just out of school.” Some as young as fifteen, recruited to fight and hate until a “bullet to the head.” No surrender. Del sometimes wondered if they realized what they were getting into, but that didn’t matter now.
Del crouched in the flurries to give the body a once over, make sure the German was gone. The frost made it tough to tell how long someone’s been dead. Looked like a hole, clean through the skull, frozen crisps of dried blood at the entry point.
“He’s spent,” Del called out.
“Come on,” said the Lt. “Grab his tags!”
Standard protocol. Grab the dog tags and go, turn them into the CO, tally another dead German. But sometimes, they didn’t turn them in. “It depended. If the guy was noncompliant, or your buddy just got killed, or you’re just fucking freezing and had enough, then you wanted the guy to disappear.” He’d be forever lost to his country, his family, MIA. They would never have confirmation of death, and that was enough to make some GIs feel better.
Del felt around his neck. Nothing. Checking through stiff fatigues, there was no identification on his person. This nameless kid was vanishing into the snow. Del patted the body and found a hard patch worked into the coat seam. He pulled out a black, leather-bound book imprinted with the two lightning bolts: an SS diary. “He must have broken all military protocol carrying this thing around,” Del thought.
He flipped through the pages for a name, but it was all in German. Del only made out bits of an anthem and supply list. Finally, a name, scratched out on the entry page with another name written over it. He couldn’t read the handwriting.
The whole thing seemed useless until out fell a black and white. Full uniform, blonde hair, but the soldier looked older in the picture than the cold body on the ground. Perhaps it was the tired eyes. He is posing with a round faced girl, dark hair done up in wavy curls. A deployment photo. The couple is half-smiling.
“What you got, Turk? Time to move.”
He shoved the SS diary and photograph into his jacket; he wasn’t sure why. Del usually didn’t hunt for souvenirs like other GIs, but this he confiscated. He should have turned it into his CO for information, but no one was looking, so he broke code.
“I got nothin’!”
He glanced down at the deceased. “Sorry, pal,” he whispered.
Del caught up to the others, and they trudged together through the miserable winter. He wanted to keep moving, and for damn sure, stop thinking.
The kid was just another SS trooper.
