Shrapnel by William Wharton

Author:William Wharton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2012-08-28T04:00:00+00:00

MIKE HENNESSY

Not long after this, we go to relieve the Twenty-Eighth Division, The Yankee Division. They’ve just finished trying to charge up a hill on the old Maginot Line, now turned around to face the French. They had a really bad time, trying to retake the French forts in and around Metz. The Germans had turned the forts around against the French and improved the basically inept French design in many ways. One regiment of the Twenty-Eighth tried getting up the hill, which is, in reality, an underground fort. They slogged and crept through mine fields and past dug-in bunkers. It must have been frightening. Practically the whole regiment is wiped out. It’s like the charge of the Light Brigade in some kind of a stupid old time war.

Most people in our outfit are not too happy about charging up any hills. But I have a personal relationship with one member of this division.

When I was in elementary school, there was a young Irish boy named Mike Hennessy. He’d been left back a few times; he wasn’t much of a student. That’s putting it mildly, he was a Neanderthal. He had blue eyes, heavy black brows and black hair, he was somewhat stunted in growth, about the size all of us in the sixth grade were, when he should have been in the eighth. I was tenth, because I’d been double promoted once. He was fourteen and had to shave. The joy in his life seemed to be taking the joy out of my life. He was a real bully. I spent all of my recesses running around the school building trying to escape Mike Hennessy. One time he caught me, turned me upside down, pushed my head into the toilet and flushed it. I’ve never felt comfortable being in water since.

I hadn’t thought much about Mike Hennessy in almost ten years. He left that school or I moved away, I don’t know which. I didn’t care too much as long as he was gone. They might have thrown him out of school, or he ran away; maybe they put him in reform school, he was always stealing things, letting air out of tyres, breaking windows, general mischief. He definitely needed reforming. But just by accident, while I was in Fort Jackson, South Carolina, I met Mike Hennessy in the PX. He was easy for me to recognise. I’ll never forget that brutal low-browed, long lipped, Irish face. He was in the Twenty-Eighth Division.

We shook hands, and here we are, both grown up, more or less, and he’s two or three inches shorter than I am, and he actually even weighs less than I do. It doesn’t seem possible. Even though the relationship of elementary school is gone, we could never be friends because he’s as vulgar and stupid a man as he was a boy. He’s almost drunk when I meet him, on three point two beer, yet. He’s very definitely not the kind of person I can relate to.

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