第166页
Had Reese been a Soviet, German, or Japanese soldier, this little nonincident probably would have turned out differently.
The company moved by truck from Mourmelon to the Ruhr pocket. The 101st took up positions on the west bank of the Rhine, facing D眉sseldorf. The 2nd Battalion's sector was from Sturzelberg on the north to Worringen on the south, with the 82nd Airborne on the battalion's right flank. The 82nd faced Cologne.
It was more an occupation position than front line. The platoons kept outposts down on the river bank, while the men stayed in homes in various small villages. There was some artillery shelling, back and forth, but not much. There was no small arms fire.
The men were on outpost each night. Here Private O'Keefe got his initiation. One night he was on outpost with Pvt. Harry Lager, who had also just joined the company at Mourmelon, in a ready-made foxhole beside the dike. They heard a thump, thump, thump. O'Keefe whispered to Lager, "Stay in the hole but make room for me to drop in a hurry. I'm going up on that dike to see if I can make out what that is approaching."
Up on the dike, O'Keefe recalled, "I couldn't see a damn thing but the noise was almost on top of me. Suddenly the nose of a small tank stuck out through the fog. I yelled, 'Halt, who goes there?' and ready to dive off that dike into the hole with Lager."
A voice came out of the tank: "It's just a couple of Limeys, and we're lost." O'Keefe ordered the man to come down to be inspected. A British sergeant did so, saying, "By God, Yank, are we glad to see you! We started out on that bloody dike at midnight, and we can't find our way off."
"What's making that noise?" O'Keefe asked.
"Oh, that," the Brit replied. "It's one of our treads. It broke. We can only travel about two miles an hour. The tread goes around but hits the ground on each rotation." O'Keefe suggested that the sergeant put his crew mate out in front, walking ahead, else they might get plastered at the next check point. The sergeant said he would. O'Keefe rejoined Lager, glad to note that Lager had them covered with his M-l the whole time. The little incident gave Lager and O'Keefe confidence in themselves and one another. They decided they had the hang of it.
Another night, at another place along the river, O'Keefe was on outpost with a recent recruit, Pvt. James Welling. From West Virginia, Welling was thirty years old, making him just about the oldest man in the company. O'Keefe was the youngest. Although Welling had just joined the company, he was a combat veteran who had been wounded in the Battle of the Bulge, volunteered for paratroopers after discharge from hospital in England, made all five qualifying jumps in one day, and was now a member of the 101st.
On the outpost, they were standing in a waist-deep foxhole when a ten-ton truck came barreling along the road. "Halt," O'Keefe yelled, three times. No one heard him. A convoy of nine trucks, bumper to bumper, passed him by, engines roaring.
"What do you do when you yell 'Halt!' and you realize that they'll never hear you?" O'Keefe asked Welling.