As much as he hated to relive the event that had led him to speak up at the previous week’s meeting, Charlie knew this was his moment. Looking at his cards, he began: “Ten days after we landed on Omaha Beach, on June seventeenth, our orders were to seize Isigny, the bridge over the Vire River, then recapture Saint-L?, La Madeleine, Pont Renard, La Heresneserie, on and on. Basically nonstop combat until we met up with the Soviets at the Elbe.”
The two men were listening intently as Charlie paused to sip his drink.
“Cards?” MacLachlan asked.
Charlie looked at his hand and threw down the two he didn’t want. MacLachlan tossed replacements in front of him. An eight of hearts and a nine of spades. A straight, almost a straight flush.
MacLachlan gave Strongfellow three cards and gave one to himself. They assessed their hands as Charlie continued.
“So we were in the midst of recapturing Le Meaune. We had Easy Company with us too. There were Jerries everywhere, and Vichy French. It was a mess. You could hardly tell who was on whose side.”
“Open with a dime,” said MacLachlan. Charlie moved a dime from his pile to the center of the table.
“I see you,” he said.
“See you and raise,” Strongfellow said, putting fifteen cents into the pot. He slid a cigar from his inside suit-jacket pocket and began lighting it, swirling the cigar, sucking in, and waving the lighter beneath it. Charlie was momentarily confused, since he’d thought Mormons didn’t smoke, but he let it pass. None of his business.
“We were in a farmhouse outside of town, me and my platoon,” Charlie continued. “Mortars were going off in the distance but nothing near us. This French family was being friendly. Mom, dad, four kids, a grandma. We were just talking, trying to communicate—none of us spoke French—trying to figure out which Germans were around. And suddenly, the older son, maybe sixteen, took out a knife and tried to stab me. He was scared sloppy, and the blade hit my helmet, which I was holding.”
Strongfellow leaned back on the couch. MacLachlan took a sip from his glass.
“So we restrained the kid and got concerned that something was going on, you know? We looked around the house, found nothing, then told the dad to show us the barn. He was nervous. He insisted on taking two of his kids with him, a boy and girl. Young. Under ten. I guess his thinking was that if they were with him, we’d be less inclined to kill him.
“It was me, Rodriguez, Hillman…” Charlie could name all his men in his sleep, but he realized it didn’t much matter to the other congressmen. “Anyway, most of my platoon went with me, and a couple stayed back in the house.” He vividly recalled the faces of the men in his platoon, a motley gang of teenagers and guys in their thirties, some educated and others street-smart.
“So we’re in the barn,” Charlie went on, “and Rodriguez, this skinny private first class from Spanish Harlem, he notices some crates in a stall. They don’t look like they belong there, so he goes to check it out, and right at that moment a mortar explodes outside. Parts of the barn are blown away, a support beam falls right on top of the French family, and some sort of gas starts seeping out of one of the crates.”
“Gas?” said Strongfellow. “Krauts didn’t use gas.”
“Not on soldiers, they didn’t,” MacLachlan corrected. “Jews were another story.”
“I don’t know that it was German gas. It might have been left over from the First World War. Who knows where it came from. Anyway, Hillman, our platoon sergeant, shouted for us to put on our gas masks, so we all fastened these cheap rubber things around our heads. Mortars are still going off outside the barn so no one runs out, but we all sprint to the other end of the barn. Except the family. And Rodriguez. Rodriguez’s pinned down under the beam too. And he can’t even reach his mask.
“Hillman had always thought the masks were pieces of garbage, so when he looked at me through the cheap plastic, I knew what he was thinking. I was the captain, though, and we had a man in trouble. I grabbed Corporal Miller’s mask, told the platoon sergeant to follow me, and we ran to Rodriguez. I put the mask over Rodriguez’s face while Hillman tried to move the beam off Rodriguez and the French family. More of my guys came over, with their masks on, and they all tried to move the beam. But then they started choking. With the masks on. Rodriguez, too, was choking. With his mask on. The French kids and the dad were choking without masks.”
“What about you?” MacLachlan asked.
“Mine worked,” Charlie said, wincing slightly. He took a sip from his glass and looked down, as if there were answers in the ice cubes.
“And then?” Strongfellow asked after the pause grew uncomfortable.
Charlie exhaled dramatically, as if he were exhausted. “The platoon sergeant and the other guys ran outside, vomiting. Their masks were worthless. If they’d stayed to save Rodriguez and the family, they would have died. The mortars started moving north. Somehow I managed to push the beam enough to wedge Rodriguez out and get him outside in the fresh air. But he was in bad shape. Foaming at the mouth. Eyes crossed. Skin turning green.”
“What was it?” Strongfellow asked. “Mustard?”
“Don’t know,” Charlie said. “We left the barn at once. Rodriguez was messed up. We had a few of the guys take him to an aid station a couple miles back. Toward the beach. He died before he got there, we later were told. My other two men also got wounded in the process. Shot. They survived, but we never saw them again either. Haber, Scully. Shipped back home. Whole thing was FUBAR.”
There was a pause as Strongfellow and MacLachlan collected their thoughts.
“The French family?” MacLachlan finally asked. “The dad and his two kids?”
Charlie shook his head.
“So this is why you want to block Goodstone?” MacLachlan continued. “They made the gas masks?”
“They did, sir,” Charlie said.
“Did you report it?” MacLachlan asked.
“Yes, sir,” Charlie said. “To my CO. And then later, with paperwork related to Rodriguez’s death.”
“Did they ever own up to it?” asked MacLachlan. “Issue any sort of report explaining what happened and why it will never happen again? Compensate the Rodriguez family?”
“You know, I wondered that as well,” Charlie said. “After the markup, I had an aide look into it. Best I can tell, Goodstone did nothing. Though the army did tell me they notified the company.”
“Good Lord,” MacLachlan said, shaking his head. “Wish I could say I was surprised.”
“You going to keep pushing it?” Strongfellow asked. “Carlin seemed pretty PO’ed.”
Before they could continue the conversation, there was a knock at the door and a black man in his thirties wearing a gray flannel suit poked his head into the room.
“Is this the card game?” he asked.
There was an uncomfortable silence as the roomful of white veterans decided what to do. Washington, DC, like much of the nation, remained segregated in almost every way.
“You sure you’re in the right place?” one of the congressmen in the back of the room asked.
“This is the card game for veterans, unless I am mistaken,” the man said. He thrust a hand into his baggy trouser pocket, then slowly began to extricate it. He raised his hand; between his fingers dangled a blue-and-white-striped ribbon with one strip of red in the middle. Attached to the ribbon swung a small bronze replica of a propeller laid upon a cross pattée.
A Distinguished Flying Cross.
Charlie realized the man with the medal was Isaiah Street, a former Tuskegee Airman, one of the elite flying aces in segregated units of the U.S. Army Air Forces and a particularly decorated one at that. He and Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of New York were the only black men in Congress.
“I got a Purple Heart, too, in my other jacket,” Street said. “But all I did to earn that one was not die.”
“We need a fourth over here, Congressman,” Charlie said, glancing at Strongfellow and MacLachlan, who nodded to affirm the invitation. The rest of the room turned back to their card games.
“Thank you, gentlemen,” Street said, taking off his jacket as the other three finished up their hand. MacLachlan won with a full house.
“My deal,” said Strongfellow. “Texas hold ’em okay?”