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Mercier went to him and held his hand. "That's O.K., buddy, that's O.K. You'll be all right."
Someone stuck a morphine Syrette in Jackson's arm. He was by then so crazed with pain he had to be held down on the bunk. Roe arrived with another medic and a stretcher. As they carried the patient back toward the aid station, Mercier walked beside the stretcher, holding Jackson's hand. Jackson died before reaching the aid station.
"He wasn't twenty years old," Webster wrote. "He hadn't begun to live. Shrieking and moaning, he gave up his life on a stretcher. Back in America the standard of living continued to rise. Back in America the race tracks were booming, the night clubs were making their greatest profits in history, Miami Beach was so crowded you couldn't get a room anywhere. Few people seemed to care. Hell, this was a boom, this was prosperity, this was the way to fight a war. We read of black-market restaurants, of a manufacturer's plea for gradual reconversion to peacetime goods, beginning immediately, and we wondered if the people would ever know what it cost the soldiers in terror, bloodshed, and hideous, agonizing deaths to win the war."
During a pause in the German barrage, guards escorted the prisoners back to Captain Winters at battalion HQ. Mercier was smiling from ear to ear as he handed over the two live prisoners. The buck sergeant talked a lot, the staff sergeant remained silent.
The night was no longer peaceful. Both sides fired everything they had. Fires blazed up and down the river. Tracers criss-crossed over the water.
Whenever there was a lull, the men at OP 2 could hear a wheezing, choking, gurgling sound from across the river. The wounded German soldier abandoned by the patrol had been shot in the lungs. Webster and his buddies debated what to do, kill him and put him out of his misery or let him die in peace. Webster favored killing him, because if he were left alone the Germans would send a patrol to fetch him, and he could report on all the activity around OP 1. "Then they will shell us even more," Webster predicted.
Webster decided to haul himself across the river, using the rope, and knife the man. McCreary vetoed the idea. He said the Germans would use the wounded man as bait for a trap. Webster decided that he was right. A hand grenade would be better.
Accompanied by Pvt. Bob Marsh, Webster moved cautiously down to the river bank. He could hear the German gasping and slobbering in ghastly wheezes. "I pitied him," Webster wrote, "dying all alone in a country far from home, dying slowly without hope or love on the bank of a dirty little river, helpless."
Marsh and Webster pulled the pins on their grenades and threw them beside the German. One exploded, the other was a dud. The wheezing continued. The Americans returned to their outpost, got more grenades, and tried again. The wheezing continued. They gave it up; let him die in his own time.
When the shelling finally ceased, just before dawn, the wheezing went on, getting on everyone's nerves. Cobb decided he could take it no more. He grabbed a grenade, went to the river bank, heaved it over, and finally killed the German.