For God and Country. Mark Bowlin

and the amazing Bailey Bridges.

      When they reached the coastal highway, traffic slowed again. Kulis, after being tidied up, fell asleep once more. Perkin looked at his cousin, who seemed deep in thought.

      “Somethin’ on your mind? You ain’t said much this morning.”

      Sam looked around to see if Kulis was asleep, and then nodded. “After you and the boys turned in last night, I got around to reading Maggie’s letter. It’d been burning a hole in my pocket since mail call yesterday morning, but I wanted to, you know, read it in private.”

      “Is there somethin’ goin’ on back home?”

      Sam sighed, “I don’t belong here, Perk. I should be at home. With Maggie. It’s unfair to ask her to run that big ranch by herself. Unfair to wait for me all these years—we might not get home until ’47 or ’48, and we ain’t hardly doin’ anything here on the continent. We’re just now gettin’ started, and look how long the Great War took.” He looked hard off into the distance at a pasture that was bereft of animals.

      Perkin felt his cousin’s mood shift from self-pity to anger. “I don’t believe that, Sam. Once the second front’s begun in earnest, we’ll be home before you know it. I heard there’s more than a million dogfaces headed to England for the cross-channel landing. As soon as we get ’em across, the war’s as good as over. Hell, you’ve seen how well we’ve done here, and it ain’t like Italy’s made for modern warfare. I’m telling ya, we’ll meet the Soviets in Warsaw and have a hell of a party, and I promise it’ll be long before ’48.”

      “It don’t matter if we’re home by Christmas. This goddamned war is taking too long. It’s unfair for her to put up with all that crap.”

      “Bear, what did Maggie say to set you off so?”

      Sam hesitated, then said, “She was at our bank in Corpus to settle on a parcel of land that she bought over by Gum Hollow—”

      “That’s a bit from the ranch, ain’t it?”

      “Yeah, that’s OK. It’s some pretty property that abuts the back bay—we can go giggin’ for flounder there when we’re home.”

      “Oh Lord, I can’t think of anything I’d rather do,” Perkin said sincerely. “Except maybe trout fishin’ in the front bay. So what’s the problem at the bank?”

      “Well, she was waitin’ for her appointment, and she overheard two men talking. She looks over and one of ’em was old man Ebbins. Ronald’s dad.”

      “Uh-oh.”

      “Yeah, and he started to braggin’ to this other fella about how much money he’s made off the war—”

      “He didn’t!”

      “He did, and it gets worse. He keeps braggin’ and then tells this other man that he hopes the war goes on forever.”

      Perkin was disgusted. It was not that he didn’t know some people back home were profiting from the war, it was the unforgivable thought that a man with a son in a fighting unit in a theater of the war would voice such a sentiment.

      “I hope Maggie gave him a piece of her mind.”

      Sam’s frown disappeared and a proud grin spread slowly across his face. He reached over and slapped Perkin’s thigh with the back of his hand. “My girl did better than that. First she punched him in the face and knocked the old man down. Then she sat on his chest and slapped the hell outta him until the bank guard came and pulled her off. When Ebbins got to his feet, you know what that son-of-a-bitch did? He told the guard to hold her so he could hit her back. The guard wasn’t gonna do that, of course, but he was gonna have her arrested, until it came out what Ebbins said. Turns out the guard’s an old Marine and lost a son at Guadalcanal and has another boy missing in action from Makin Island. So the guard hollers out, ‘What the hell?’—although Maggie wrote ‘heck’—and he draws his nightstick and breaks old Ebbins’s collarbone faster than you can snap your fingers. I guess he was fixin’ to kill the old man, but the bank president stopped him first.”

      “By God, that woman’s got some starch!” Perkin slapped his hand down on the steering wheel. “It does my heart good to hear stories like that!”

      “Yeah, and believe me, that’s just her gentle side. But you know the Ebbins family ain’t likely to let that pass. I think that he would’ve pressed charges against her, except he’d either get laughed outta Texas for gettin’ beat up by a girl, or rode out on a rail for what he said. He tried to press charges against the guard, but the guard claimed he was defendin’ Maggie, so I suspect that’s that. Maggie says it likely won’t go nowhere. But all of that aside, I’m still worried about what Ebbins might try. Maggie wrote that she thinks some Mexican fella’s taken to followin’ her, and someone put sugar in her gas tank one day in town. My gas tank—it was my pickup, goddamn it! She made it to Gregory before it died on her, and she had to have the engine stripped completely down and cleaned—I don’t doubt that old Ebbins is up it to all.”

      “Oh, Sam.” Perkin looked at his cousin with concern. “You gotta be just sick. You want me to write Pop?”

      “He already knows. I am worried, but . . . well, Ebbins also got that guard fired from his job at the bank. So it looks like I now got a new employee—a former Marine who knows nothing about cattle, but always carries a Colt .45 that he brought home from Belleau Wood. Between her sharp tongue and that old Marine Gunny, I guess it’s Ebbins that ought to watch out!”

      1645 Hours

      Eighth Army Headquarters, Vasto, Italy

      “Good afternoon, gentlemen. I’m Captain Perkin Berger, the intelligence officer of the 1st Battalion, 141st Infantry, 36th Division. The classification of this briefing is secret. I would like to state up front that this is the work of Lieutenant Commander Jimmy Cardosi of the United States Navy. Commander Cardosi was, until about an hour ago, serving as the naval intelligence liaison to the Fifth Army. When we arrived this afternoon, he found a set of orders awaiting him, and he’s now rejoining the combined fleet.”

      Perkin kept his thoughts about Cardosi’s orders to himself, but they could only mean one thing: the Allied Command was preparing for another amphibious landing in Italy. That was Cardosi’s specialty—intelligence collection prior to a landing. Maybe a shot at Rome is in the works, he thought. Or perhaps even a landing in northern Italy to cut Kesselring’s supply lines.

      Cardosi had been apologetic, but Perkin could see the excitement in his face. As he made his good-byes, he pulled Perkin aside and said, “I know that if you get the chance, you’ll deal with this son-of-a-bitch. All I’m asking is to make one round from me.” Cardosi had looked around, and then lowered his voice. “I shouldn’t say anything, but based on what we talked about last night, I’m not so sure that Fifth Army’s thought through the next step for you guys. I hope I misunderstood the planners, but I think they’ve got you rednecks slated for the river. You keep your head down, Perkin, and I’ll look you up in Rome.”

      He handed over his briefcase with photos and notes, shook Perkin’s hand and returned his salute. An awaiting navy jeep whisked Cardosi away. The total elapsed time from when they checked in with the US Navy liaison officer at Eighth Army to Cardosi’s departure back to the fleet was less than ten minutes.

      Private Kulis and Perkin were in a darkened room in front of several officers, British and American, assigned to the Eighth Army staff. When they had arrived at the briefing room, Kulis had a crash course from a British NCO on how to work a slide projector while Perkin prepared his thoughts. The senior officer present was a British colonel from the Eighth Army staff named Scrope—an intelligence officer who looked younger than Perkin. As the briefing went on, essentially a recitation of Cardosi’s update from two days before, the British officer took copious notes. He nodded frequently, but swore intensely when Grossmann’s culpability in the Bari bombing was brought up.

      “Damn him, and damn that fool colonel of yours!