And If I Perish by Evelyn Monahan

Author:Evelyn Monahan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307424785
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

Pvt. Berchard L. Glant (Courtesy of Berchard L. Glant)

Junior was sharing his foxhole that night with a buddy, Private First Class Billie L. Stone. Stone was a native of Arab, Alabama; he’d come to the 39th Combat Engineers as a replacement before the outfit left Sicily for Salerno in September 1943. Since Sicily, Junior and Billie had become fast friends, and had shared many foxholes together before occupying their current hole near the town of Littoria, in the Pontine Marshes.

The total blackness was an excellent backdrop for the tracer bullets, artillery shells, and exploding bombs that continuously lit the night sky, filling it with red, yellow, and white bursts of light. “Look at that, Billie!” Glant remembered saying, as he nudged Stone in the ribs to get his attention. “It’s just like the Fourth of July back home.” Stone did not move or even open his eyes. “Shut up and go to sleep!” was his only response to Glant’s words.12

The first day of February was cold and sunny, a relief from days of rain, and the Germans wasted no time in using the new daylight to zero in on American positions. Stone and Glant returned fire with the 30-caliber air-cooled machine gun that the two manned in combat situations on the front lines. Glant aimed and fired while Stone fed ammunition belts into the weapon. A lull occurred in the fighting around 1700. After a half hour of silence, Stone and Glant climbed out of their hole in the canal bank to stretch their legs before the next exchange began. They were standing below the level of the canal bank. “We were both just standing there by our hole when a mortar came over the bank and exploded in front of us,” Stone recalled. “The concussion knocked me to the ground and knocked several of my teeth out. When I looked over at Junior, I saw that his right arm was almost off, and blood was gushing from both of his legs. I knew that if I didn’t stop the bleeding, he’d die.”13

Stone yelled for a medic and scrambled to his knees at his friend’s side. He removed his own belt and used it as a tourniquet above the wounds on Glant’s left leg that were bleeding profusely. Billie “talked to Junior the entire time,” telling him, “ ‘You’re going to be all right.’ ” He unbuckled Glant’s belt, pulled it free of the belt loops, and fastened it as a tourniquet on his friend’s right leg. Next, Stone fumbled in the first-aid kit on his ammunition belt, found the sulfa, placed two tablets in Glant’s mouth, and washed them down with a swallow of water from his own canteen. For a split second, he was aware that help had not arrived yet, and he shouted again for a medic. Without waiting, Stone found the packets of sulfa in his first-aid kit and poured the powder into his friend’s wounds. As he finished this task, a medic slid to his knees beside the two young soldiers.

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