GARRET, 505th Paratrooper

Canicatti, Sicily | July 9th, 1943 | 3:45A.M

The belly of the C-47 aircraft was deathly quiet, save for the numbing droning of the duel 1,200 horsepower radial engines. The paratroopers, mostly pale-faced teenagers, stared across the aisle into each other’s blood-shot eyes as they roared over the boiling Mediterranean.

During the late hours of the previous night, the young GI’s were instructed by their commanding officers to get as much rest as possible, because in the morning, they would be embarking upon the greatest crusade of their time.

First Sergeant Garret McLaughlin, a twenty-one year old G.I from Boston, attached to the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, which was assigned to the 82nd Airborne division five months prior, peered out of a cracked window as green tracer rounds criss-crossed in the night sky, illuminating their path into enemy territory. The mission was to drop into Sicily, as part of Operation Husky, beginning the crucial Italian campaign.

Three months ago, on May 10th, his platoon landed in Casablanca, North Africa, then three days later, in Tunisia, the Axis powers surrendered their African occupation. That was Sgt. McLaughlin’s first glimpse of real-life warfare. He was ready for more.

Their current drop zone was the town of Gela, which quietly resided along the southern tip of Sicily. Operation Husky had many moving pieces, which all needed to be placed with lethal precision. The 82nd airborne were spearheading the attack from above, while a simultaneous amphibious attack by American, and British Navies moved onto the southern beaches of the island. It was a bold plan forged by bold minds. The allied Generals sought to aggressively eradicate the ruthless evil spreading across Europe, and they needed all of their best men to get the job done. Sergeant McLaughlin was one of those men, and he knew it.

A sonorous voice suddenly exploded from the aircraft’s intercom, “ETA to drop zone, five minutes.”

Garret digested those words with pride. He came from a long line of military service members, stretching all of the way back to the Revolutionary War. His family helped shape the course of history, and now it was his turn. The young men around him remained quiet, highly focused on the task at hand. A few of them were tightly clutching gold, wood, and stainless steel crucifixes, praying to their lord for protection and lethal accuracy. One of them was kissing a Star of David pendant while muttering a long prayer for luck. The man across from Garret, Corporal Murray, was staring out of the cracked glass windows into the bloody abyss of war, while the two men beside him were throwing up piles of yellow bile.

Garret also had his crucifix clenched tightly in his hand, but he had it more for show than for faith. He had lost his trust in God when he was eleven years old, after his mother was brutally murdered by her alcoholic boyfriend in a drunken rage. The boyfriend also had a military background, serving as an infantry man in the first world war. He suffered from severe PTSD, which drove him down a violent path of abusing alcohol, cocaine and an endless combination of other illegal substances.

Garret’s father also fought in the first world war, alongside the Brits, on the front lines in France. He fought hard and valiantly, earning a Purple Heart, but in the end, the violence required him to pay the ultimate price.

The intercom crackled again, stealing Garret’s attention, and the same sonorous voice made another announcement.

“ETA to drop zone, two minutes. Prepare to jump.”

A firm palm clasped onto his left shoulder, and he craned his neck around as far as his helmet, and gear would allow. A soothing voice then spoke lightly into his ear.

“We’re almost there, Garret. Now it’s our turn to save the world.”

It was Timothy Hale. Another Boston native, and one of Garret’s best friends. He was a private, which meant he took his orders from Garret. That was something they had always joked about after they completed boot camp, considering that Timothy was two years older than Garret.

“I’ll see you on the ground,” Timothy said.

The Co-pilot’s voice boomed over the aircraft’s intercom for the final time, disrupting their conversation.

“Thirty seconds to drop zone. Descending to drop height.”

Garret’s heart began to pound in his chest so loud, he could hear the pulsing deep inside of his eardrums — overpowering the sounds of the chugging diesel engines, cracking flak fire, and the constant mechanical rumbling of soaring at fifteen-hundred feet in the air.

Garret, as well as Timothy, and the other twenty-eight young men in the cabin, began their pre-jump gear check. Helmets clicked into locked positions, crucifixes, and photographs of loved ones were safely tucked back inside of their chest pockets, M1 Garand rifles, Thompson machine guns, and B.A.R’s were loaded, and tightly secured to their abdomens. Each man checked the static line, parachute straps, and reserve chutes of the soldier in front of them, making sure they were snugly fastened to their shoulders so they would be ready to be yanked open with ease once they reached the appropriate altitude.

Garret received a double-palmed whack from Timothy between his shoulder blades, indicating that his parachutes were good to go. He then gave the same whack to the young corporal standing in front of him. He didn’t know the corporal well, but last night, his platoon had a small party with a few cases of smuggled Budweiser beers to celebrate his nineteenth birthday. His name was Lucas Gonzales, and he was a skinny, five-foot-five rifleman from Los Angeles California.

They were a team. A deadly team, and they all needed to have each other’s back.

A sliding steel door opened at the front of the aircraft, sending raging fists of hot air throughout the cabin, relentlessly punching each of the men in the face, and chest.

Garret’s ribs rattled beneath the sudden introduction of high altitude pressured wind, and his heart began to beat faster from the oncoming anxiety of jumping out of an airplane. He had made the jump ten times in preparation for the mission, but there was no flak fire in training. This was for real, and death lingered in the air around them.

There were two men positioned in front of corporal Gonzales, which meant that Garret would be the fourth man to jump.

Their platoon leader, Lieutenant Sinclair, stood at the entrance of the opened door nearest the cockpit, and briefly addressed the platoon.

“Today, you boys become men. Today, we begin the fight that will change the course of history. Today, you will eradicate evil, or die trying. Today, you save —”

A barrage of flak rounds ripped two massive holes in each end of the C-47. The sudden burst of incredible suction yanked all twenty-eight paratroopers from their standing positions. Garret, as well as private Hale, and corporal Gonzales, were the only paratroopers who’s static lines weren’t ripped from the ceiling. Everyone else was immediately sucked out of the aircraft.

Garret’s eardrums pulsed with shattering pain, and his eyes fought back the intense heat from the raging flames in the cockpit. The pilots were dead, and the plane was falling out of the sky faster than he could think. His chest collapsed inward from shock, making breathing nearly impossible to do.

Garret’s eyes finally allowed his vision a moment to survey the interior of the C-47. He looked down briefly, and noticed that corporal Gonzales was laying flat on his chest at the base of his feet. A dark pool of blood surrounded his body, and was slowly increasing in volume with every passing second.

Private Hale screamed into Garret’s ears, and the words hit home, hard.

“He’s dead, Garret! We have to jump!”

Garret had trained his heart, body, and mind to submerge his fear, but his current situation made him forget all of his mental fortitude. Tears began to stream down his face, as they continued their plummet into European soil.

Private Hale leaned in close, latched his palms firmly onto Garret’s shoulders, and screamed again.

“We need to jump!”

Garret remained silent, but he knew Timothy was right. If they had any chance of surviving, they needed to jump. Garret sunk his palms into Timothy’s chest, and barked out his orders.

“Good to go private. Get to the door, and jump. I will be right behind you.”

Private Hale turned on a dime, and with three quick steps, he and Garret, were standing side-by-side at the jump door. Hale looked to Garret, and they exchanged nods of encouragement, and bravery.

“I’ll see you on the ground,” Garret hollered.

“Roger that, sir.”

Private Hale leaped from the aircraft, yanked the ripcord, and disappeared into the chaotic flak firework display. Garret was about to jump, when another flak round collided with the rear end of the aircraft, severing it in half. Garret’s static line finally broke away from its rail mount, and he fell onto his side, cracking his ribs against a shifting ammo crate. He tried to brace his body from ricocheting but the force was too strong, and he quickly found himself tumbling head over heel, bouncing from wall to wall as his body was sucked towards the rear end of the C-47.

Just as the skytrain was about to make its final, fatal, and vertical nose dive, which would have made it impossible for him to escape — becoming his tomb as it crashed into the earth, Garret was finally forced out. Deafening flak rounds exploded all around him as he continued to twist in the air. Falling at a speed of one-hundred miles per hour, the pressure of gravity made it nearly impossible for him to focus on getting his fingers wrapped around his parachute’s ripcord, which he now had to manually engage because of his disconnection to the static line — which was supposed to pull the cover of his backpack when he jumped, releasing the parachute. The voice of his late mother somehow found its way into his ears, and she spoke softly, telling him that today was not his day to die. The voice told him to remember his training, remember his duty, and remember his promise, because his men, his country, the European people, and the entire world were counting on him.

His mother’s voice faded, his heart pounded, and he was finally able to stop his body from spinning uncontrollably. Leveling out, he latched his right hand onto the rip chord, and yanked it as hard as he could. For a long moment, he thought it had failed because the parachute did not immediately open. He was about to pull the red rip chord on the reserve chute when the main, round parachute exploded from his backpack, opening wide above his head. His momentum was instantly broken, and he felt his body begin to ascend before slowly descending back down the ground.

Slowing to a descent speed of around fifty miles per hour, Garret craned his neck and studied the aerial desolation around him. Every C-47 he could see was engulfed in ravenous flames, and plummeting to the earth. Clouds of black smoke from the anti-aircraft flak rounds blotted out the stars, and bright red tracer rounds ripped through countless limp, and living bodies of both American, and British paratroopers.

Garret tried to spot private Hale’s silhouette amid the horror of the vast quantity of silently falling bodies. The effort was hopeless. He could do nothing from the air except focus on avoiding the tracer rounds while simultaneously combating the strong wind gusts from the dog-fighting aircraft.

If he was lucky enough to survive the bullet-weaving landing without severely injuring either of his legs, he could regroup with another platoon, and find Hale.

The rough and rolling terrain, as well as hundreds of two-toned cork oak tree branches, rose to meet him with dangerous speed. He tugged on his parachute’s steering lines, decreasing his rate of descent, and banked left to right in a tricky attempt to avoid crashing into the thick canopies.

With one hard yank to the left line, Garret miraculously swung out of the way of a pair of leafless, jagged tree branches. The maneuver saved him from impalement, but it forced him to pummel through a fortunate cluster of adolescent olive trees. The young olive tree branches were softer than their neighboring oaks, cushioning his fall, and snapping under the pressure of Garret’s one-hundred and eighty pound paratrooper frame.

Tumbling through the belly of the tree, one of the thicker branches collided with his right cheek, knocking him momentarily unconscious. His parachute caught the top of the olive tree’s canopy, violently halting his momentum before he was able to touch down on the dirt.

As the fogginess wore off, the muffled sounds of gunfire, explosions, and human screaming grew in clarity, reminding Garret of his reality. Blood, mixed with the resin of crushed olives dripped from his facial wounds, as well as both of his hands, and neck, and his left knee burned with a tremendous pain. Both sleeves of his olive field jacket were torn, but the Airborne, and American flag shoulder patches were still intact. His M1 rifle was no longer draped across his chest, but his MK 2 grenade was still pinned to his chest, and his service pistol, and dagger were still both in their sheaths.

He craned his neck in a three-hundred and sixty degree motion, and quickly realized that his brown combat boots were dangling seven feet above the grass. The tangled parachute straps made it impossible for him to reach his machete, which would easily free him from his nylon prison. So he had to figure out another way. All paratroopers also carried a long length of rope in case they landed in trees, but his particular angle made retrieving it impossible.

Studying his position in the olive tree, and flashing back to his tree climbing adventures when he was a child, Garret spotted the branch he needed to break that would allow the nylon knots to unravel, tumbling him to the earth. Luckily, the tree branch was close enough for him to use his feet to stomp on.

After five heavy heaves of his boots, the old branch snapped away from the thick, twisting trunk, allowing gravity to pull Garret down to the ground.

His stomach hit first, punching the air out of his lungs with a hard gasp. He struggled for a moment, wiping away crisp strands of cold grass, and moist dirt from his face, nostrils, and mouth. He quickly removed his army issued machete from its sheath, and sliced through all of the tangled nylon straps.

He was finally free from the T-5 parachute.

Standing was harder than he anticipated. The burning sensation in his left knee increased tenfold, shooting up and down his entire leg, and up his spine, tickling the stubbly hairs at the base of his left jaw line. The bones in his face throbbed, and his cheeks dripped with blood from the deep gashes inflicted by the jagged tree branches. His chest stung with a searing vengeance from a couple of severely bruised ribs, and his vertebrates were riddled with stiff knots, and pinched nerves.

Unfortunately, he had no time to nurse his injuries. He needed to gather himself quickly before he could begin searching for other surviving paratroopers, as well as his best friend, Private Hale. He took a moment to survey his surroundings, searching for enemy troop movement, or foreign voices among the trees, yet saw or heard nothing. Knowing he was momentarily alone, he slipped his backpack from his shoulders, and inventoried his seventy extra pounds of gear, ammunition, weapons, and food rations. He was dangerously low on everything.

Out of the three grenades he had jumped with, he was down to one. His M1 rifle was missing, but he still had six cartridges of ammunition, as well as his .45 caliber Colt automatic pistol. His net-lined helmet was deeply scarred, and dented, and the chin strap was broken, but it’s integrity was still solid. His flares, and message book were missing, and his compass was broken beyond repair. Luckily, the map of Sicily which his commanding officer gave to each man in the platoon before take off was still folded up in one of his jump suit pockets, unscathed. The medical kit was in good shape, save for a few crushed syrettes of morphine. He shook the water canteen, which was fortunately still attached to his belt, and miraculously heard the sound of sloshing liquid. Somehow it had received no damage or punctures. This life saving revelation helped ease Garret’s anxiety.

His food rations took the biggest loss. The pouches were torn, and were nearly empty. He emptied their contents onto the soil, and began counting. Two pieces of chewing gum, one bouillon cube, one packet of instant coffee, and one Hershey bar. Luckily, the bottle of Halazone water purification tablets was still full. Garret could deal with starvation, but he could not hope to survive without clean water. His pouch of pipe tobacco, matches, and two packs of cigarettes were also unscathed. Garret wasn’t a smoker, in fact he loathed the habit, and the smell, but surviving the perilous fall to earth from his shot down C-47 changed his morals.

He sat down into a cool patch of grass, removed one of the unfiltered cigarettes from the pack, struck a match, and brought the flickering flame to the exposed tobacco. He inhaled hard, filling his lungs with the soothing smoke, then exhaled the silver haze up into the night sky, contemplating what he had just gone through, and what he was going to do next.

The night had become still, and the ominous sounds of roaring, diesel engines, and the heavy thumping of firing flak cannons fell silent. He lit up another cigarette, and listened as the world around him started to come back to life. The chirping songs of crickets, and other insects he could not identify, mixed with the humming hoots of night birds, the strange howling of foxes, and the grunting of boars invaded his ears with a soothing cacophony of relaxation.

While allowing the tobacco, and wildlife to calm his nerves, a new sound cut through the serenity, shifting his brain back into reality. He snuffed out the remaining portion of his cigarette beneath his boot, and focused in on the moaning. As the groaning increased in volume, and frequency, Garret instantly knew the source. It was a human, whimpering in tremendous pain, most likely another paratrooper.

Before setting out to find the source of the voice, Garret opened the map of Sicily, and studied it. Their drop zone was supposed to be the coastal town of Gela, but judging by his current woodland position, their initial trajectory, and the fact that he saw no coastline nor ocean as he descended from the fiery skytrain, he was able to conclude that he had landed many miles off course, and he was most likely somewhere in the town of Castrofilippo, Canicatti, or Naro. As his mind raced to figure out where the hell he was, the wailing voice pierced his eardrums again.

He judged by the clarity of the voice, that the soldier was not far from his position. He removed his jumper vest from his chest, and stuffed the medical kit, map of Sicily, the remaining rations, cigarettes, and matches into his jacket pockets. He attached his canteen back to his waist, and removed the automatic Colt pistol from its holster. He donned his helmet, sheathed the machete, and slowly began to follow the trail of the wounded soldier into the thick woods of olive, cedar, oak, and chestnut trees.

He hobbled from tree trunk to tree trunk, keeping the barrel of his Colt pointed out in front of him. Based on the tone of the thumping, he knew that he was far from the flak gunner positions, but he had no idea if any lingering German, or Italian Fascist patrols were combing the nearby woods for surviving paratroopers. Garret knew that the Germans would not hesitate to kill any survivors, but was unsure if the Fascist Italian regimes shared the same ruthless desires. It was a risk he was not willing to take lightly, so he kept his finger tightly pressed against the trigger, ready to squeeze it at anyone who was not dressed in an American or British paratrooper uniform.

Weaving through the thick brush, and twisting trunks, the voice grew, and he could hear an American voice cursing the Germans, while simultaneously crying out for help. He approached a massive cedar, and concealed himself behind it. He poked his head around the side of it, and saw the US paratrooper laying on the ground in a tangled, and mangled mess of blood, nylon chords and exposed bones. He also saw the pistol in the man’s hands, clearly ready to shoot at any approaching threat.

Garret remained silent, and surveyed the trees around the downed soldier, paying close attention to the shadowy spaces in between the trunks for any signs of movement which could indicate approaching enemy soldiers, or other paratroopers who had also heard the cries, and sought to offer help.

He saw nothing. No movement. So he broke from his cover, and called out to his fellow soldier, encouraging the man not to shoot at him.

“Do not fire your weapon, trooper. I am First Sergeant Garret McLaughlin. I’m here to get you out of here, soldier.”

“What took you so damn long, Sergeant! Get over here and get this fucking branch out of my gut,” Lieutenant Sinclair grunted.

Garret hustled over to the Lieutenant’s side, and quickly evaluated the man. His right shinbone had punctured through his skin, and glistened in the moonlight, and his right ankle was twisted in an unnatural position. His face was covered in gashes and dried blood, his neck was severely burned, and his uniform was riddled with shrapnel holes. The most horrifying injury was the two-foot long jagged tree branch sticking out of the man’s lower stomach.

“Lieutenant? Is that you?”

“Of course it’s me, Sergeant. Were you expecting someone else?”

“I saw you get sucked out of the skytrain. I didn’t expect to find you alive,” Garret said.

“I’ve been doing this a long time, Sergeant. I am a hard man to kill.”

This made Garret smile. Garret also knew that without immediate medevac, and surgery, this man was going to die, but he was not about to preach his bleak evaluation to the man who had just told him how hard he was to kill. He knelt down beside his superior, then gently grasped the protruding end of the jagged branch impaling the man’s stomach. An agonizing scream stopped Garret from pulling any further.

“Do you have any morphine in your med kit, Sergeant?”

“My syrettes were all crushed when I landed.”

“Check the med kit in my pack. Hopefully a few of them are still usable.”

Garret carefully lifted the Lieutenant’s upper body from the ground, and slid the backpack from his shoulders. He opened it, and rifled through the contents. He pulled out the well-stocked med kit, wire cutters, radio batteries, spare 9mm ammunition, two primed hand grenades, two full belts of Vickers, a usable compass, two bouillon cubes, three packs of instant coffee, two Hershey bars, two packs of cigarettes, a gold Zippo lighter, Halazone tablets, two sticks of chewing gum, and a six-inch knife. He opened the medical kit, and found that all three syrettes of morphine were undamaged. He removed two of them, then returned to the Lieutenant’s side.

Garret prepared the first syrette. He placed one hand on the man’s chest, then used his other hand to jab the needle into Sinclair’s thigh, administering the narcotic into his bloodstream. Garret could instantly feel the pressure, and tightness of the Lieutenant’s body relieve itself from the introduction of the morphine.

“Lieutenant,” Garret said softly, “Where is your Thompson, and radio? Where did we drop into? Do you know what town we are in?”

Fighting off the haziness from the drug, the Lieutenant gave an answer Garret didn’t want nor hope to hear.

“I lost my gun when I was sucked out of the plane. All I have is my pistol. The radio was destroyed on impact. We were initially struck by flak rounds over the town of Canicatti. If we landed in Canicatti, then that places us at least seventy kilometers north west of Gela. Now, pull that damned piece of wood out of my stomach, Sergeant. That’s an order.”

Garret had no time to dwell on the news of the busted radio, and missing machine gun, so he followed the orders of his superior. He latched both of his palms to the end of the branch, then yanked it free with one strong tug. The Lieutenant hollered out in agony, and dark streams of blood rushed from the gaping wound. His body began to writhe in pain, and his skin began to turn yellow. To stop the bleeding, Garret found the field brown dressing, and shoved it into the wound, then covered it with adhesive bandages. The bleeding ceased temporarily, but the wound was so great, the dressing and bandages were quickly overwhelmed with blood, and he was forced to repeat the process two more times with fresh dressings, and bandages.

Garret rapidly found himself at the end of the dressing roll, and the last pair of bandages. He knew that there was no way to fully stop the bleeding, and that the Lieutenant was surely going to bleed out, so there was no reason to waste the last pair of bandages. He did the only thing he could to help ease the man’s suffering. He prepared the second syrette of morphine, then jabbed it into his thigh. The man’s chest decompressed, and his eyes rolled back into his skull until his sockets were filled with the whites of his eyeballs.

Garret knew that with this amount of morphine flowing through his veins, combined with the loss of blood, and other bodily injuries, it would only be a matter of minutes until the man’s heart gave out, and stopped beating. He pressed his index, and middle finger beneath the Lieutenant’s chin, and waited as the pulse slowed to a deathly crawl, then completely ceased.

It only took a couple of minutes.

Garret did a quick sign of the cross for the dead Lieutenant, then began to fill his jacket pockets with the last remaining morphine syrette, extra ammunition, the grenades, wire cutters, radio batteries, compass, food rations, water purification tablets, cigarettes, Zippo lighter and the knife. He also removed the 9mm pistol and clipped it to his waist. It was no machine gun, but it offered him extra firepower, and he needed all the help he could get his hands on. He continued to search the man’s pack, as well as his person, and found a message book, and a black and white photograph of a beautiful woman, with the words, “My darling husband. You are my world, my hero, and my heart. I am counting the days until I can once again hold you in my arms. I love you. Be safe. Come back to me. Come home,” written on the back.

The photograph made Garret think about Boston, and his family. So he safely placed it back between the pages of the message book, and shoved it deep into his jacket pocket with a promise to return both to the Lieutenant’s wife, along with a detailed description of her husband’s bravery, and courage.

He knew he could not take the body with him, so he took a few moments to gather as many sticks, and other pieces of thick brush to cover the body from the elements. It wasn’t exactly a proper funeral, or burial, but it was the best he could offer. Once he regrouped with a larger platoon, he could inform them of the body’s location so it could be retrieved, and shipped back to the states.

Once the body was covered, and all of his gear packed inside his pockets, he opened the brass compass, as well as the map of Sicily, and pinpointed Gela's location. If the Lieutenant was correct, and they were in fact somewhere near the town of Canicatti, then he was around seventy, to ninety kilometers away, which would take him at least a few hours to travel on foot — longer with the injury to his knee.

Garret turned his left wrist over, and peered down at the ticking hands of his watch. It was a quarter past four in the morning. He knew that every second was crucial, and that if he had any hope of finding Private Hale alive, he needed to move. He slowly shifted his body until the compass needle faced south-east.

Honed in with the correct direction, he tucked the compass back into his pocket, removed his Colt Pistol from its holster, keeping it firmly gripped to his right palm, then once again set out into the unknown terrain of Sicily’s countryside...