The Day Private Parker Died

Hordes of shattered mortar shells ripped through the roof of Private Sullivan Parker’s hastily constructed burrow. The morning ambush had decimated Parker’s platoon. They had learned of it only an hour before. Parker had taken his combat shovel and a few precious belongings and stuffed them underneath the burrow for survivors to discover long after the war’s conclusion. He had stuffed sandbags on top of the precious hole to prevent anyone from stumbling upon it. He needn’t worry about that now. Everyone was dead.

Parker had been sent sprawling when the first mortar had struck their hut. He landed near the hole, so amidst the ruinous haze, he had removed the sandbags and dived in, burying himself. Dirt from above trickled into his nostrils with each new rupture in the Earth. He could hear his comrade’s screams from the hut. Footsteps pancaked the dirt against his body. He couldn’t tell which way they were going.

German war cries were shaking the Earth like thunder. “Yaaaahhhhhhh!!!!” Once every few words he would hear an unmistakable, “Die!” and from the U.S. side, “Run!”.

Every breath he drew brought a new pebble to store inside his chalky mouth. Hours passed above in the omniscient sky. There was no room for time in Parker’s burrow.

Silence at last. He felt the locket in his pocket with an intrepid finger. The picture inside of it floated around in the darkness. Perhaps, it glows. He pressed his elbow upward enough to glimpse down at where the light would be.

A large mound of dirt trickled down from the hole his elbow had created. “Shit,” he whispered. He noticed there was no light when the dirt crumbled down. Night had fallen. His head was locked at an angle parallel to his shoulder blades which allowed him to peer out the hole he had created. The moon was regal in the way that it glanced down at him. A servant. Jester, perhaps. Together, they acknowledged his crumbling existence. Don’t give me up, he prayed.

Parker waited a while longer, listening for whispers or footsteps. He looked at the moon once again. What do you see? Finally, he slowly began to break through the brittle layer of dirt, which caused the roof to collapse. He suppressed a cough and freed his head to survey the graveyard from which he had emerged. The uniforms each fallen man was wearing could do little to hide the flicker of youth still left in their cheeks.

Not much was left of the encampment but a few sandbags and burnt wood.

Parker crawled into the hut. A few dead boys laid against walls like they were relaxing. Some were kissing the dirt. A first kiss for many. Corporal Sal. Private Gregory. Private Johnson. He crawled through the room and out the other side. A single man laid in the field. Corporal Kirk.

Parker could see his muscular torso pressing up toward the starry expanse. The way the corporal’s angled jaw pointed away from Parker made him look alive. Corporal Kirk had been their platoon leader.

When Parker reached the corporal, he immediately noticed that the corporal’s rifle was gone and his pistol was holstered. Parker turned the corporal’s head toward him. As Parker grasped the corporal’s cheek to pull, he felt the full weight of his lifeless head. The buzzcut atop it stood like a field of dry, dying grass.

Parker gasped and scrambled backward when he saw the massive crater in the corporal’s forehead. Gunpowder and blood lined the perimeter. Point blank. Who would shoot the corporal like this? How did they get so close without any fight?

Parker had been collecting dog tags as he crawled to each man. He pulled the corporal’s from underneath his base layer and as he did so, felt a small book inside his breast pocket. Bible? Maybe it has sentimental value. Most men carried a Bible in front of their hearts, religious or not, because of the stories passed around of men surviving sniper shots by the grace of the Bible’s divine pages.

However, Parker quickly realized the book was far too small to be a Bible. He pulled out a small black journal instead. The pages were blank. About three-quarters of the way through, he found a page that had a few words on it. “Your money is in the Hamburg Bank. Say “freundlicher ami” if anyone asks. Say code 110511. We will be there by morning.”

Corporal Kirk had betrayed them. But, why is he here? Executed? Parker stuffed the book into his back pocket and crawled back to the hut. The field outside was boundless and glowing. Shadowed trees watched his every move from the field’s edge. Parker stared at the moon in what felt like his final moments on Earth. Parker knew he had died with his platoon. The only difference was that he was still breathing.

The promise of wealth in his hand whispered from the pitch-black notebook. “Code 110511”. Parker’s daughter and wife walked across the field toward him, blissfully unaware of the massive craters and mangled men. “Check this out,” he showed them the book. They smiled, blinking. He glanced at the boys around him, waiting for them to wake up.

Parker soon fell asleep. The next day, a chill was suspended in the morning air but the sun warmed him enough. Soon after waking, he began to walk toward the German treeline.

Along the way, he met a few troops, held up his hands, and said, “Freundlicher ami”. Each time they would give him refreshments and nurse his wounds. No one would say much. The Germans would only stare and occasionally smile and he would do the same. A few encampments became excited at his arrival, thanking him and slapping him on the back. They would shout, “Held!”, which Parker later found out meant “hero”.

Before he left, he would ask “Hamburg?” and they would point. Sometimes, they would take him part of the way. These men laugh and joke just like we did. Like humans. By the time he reached Hamburg, the air had become intolerably dry. A drought had fallen over the region.

He reached the bank in no time after asking a few people, “Bank?” Bank must be the same in German?

He walked in and said, “I have a code.”

“Code?”

“Yes, 110511.”

The teller went to a back room and emerged with a large sum of American dollars. He placed the pile on the counter between them and exclaimed, “Du bist es! Herzliche Glückwünsche! Ein wahrer held!” He reached out his hand to shake Parker’s. Parker shook the man’s hand but couldn’t look into his eyes.

“How much?” Parker asked, pointing to the money.

“Zwanzigtaugsend.”

“Here.” He gave the teller the notebook and a pencil. He had been writing in it daily. Only a few pages remained blank.

The German teller wrote the number, “20,000”. He smiled when he saw how large Parker’s eyes got. Parker stuffed the money into his satchel and hoisted the bag over his shoulder. It’s heavy. Before he left, he looked at the teller and down at the money. The bag was too dark to see inside of. His family walked by a window in front of him. They waved and smiled. He left the bank.

Now to get home. “You! You’re American right? What are you doing here? You need to leave.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Our boys are going to bomb this place to high hell. Hamburg will be Hellburg by tomorrow night.”

“How do you know this, and why are you telling me?”

“Well, I assumed you were here for the same reason I am. Especially after you just picked up your pay in there.” The man was a spy. Parker had no choice but to lie.

“Uh, yeah of course.”

“What have you been up to?”

“Well, I actually just got into Hamburg. I, uh, I figured out a way to fool them, a certain phrase that will make them trust you.”

“Is that right? We’ll have to talk about that later. Don’t tell me it’s “freundlicher ami.” I’ve heard that’s the phrase they tell U.S. traitors to use so they know who to torture. They’ve gotten a few of our boys that way. You stay with me tonight. I’ve got a boat for us at the harbor tonight. I can’t believe they sent you here without a word. Let’s go.”

They arrived at the spy’s apartment and laid down on some cots. “ I’m Dan by the way.”

“Sullivan.”

“Alright, good enough Sully. See you tonight. We’re gonna need sleep, my friend.” Friend?

Parker laid down and fell asleep fast. Germans shouts and his friends’ dying words were suspended in the air.

“Hey! Hey! Listen, Sully was it? We’re getting shot at! Wakey wakey! They found us! If I don’t make it outta here, you go to the harbor and go to slip 73A. There’s a little sub there for you with some boys on it. They’ll get you outta here safely. You’re too young to die here. Me, I’m a hundred years old. Give or take.” He spoke in between gunshots. “We gotta get out of here. They’re gonna come up the building.”

They ran down the apartment and out a backdoor. Parker sprinted behind Dan until he stopped and said, “Go without me. It’s just around the corner. I can hear the Orpo blowing their whistles now. It’s about to get out of control. Run to slip 73A and wait two minutes for me. If I don’t show up just get the hell out of here.”

Parker ran to the slip and saw two U.S. soldiers. “Come on in brother. Where’s Dan?”

“He uh, he said give him two minutes and leave without him if he’s not here.”

“Jesus, what happened?” Parker explained. He didn’t explain that he had surely been followed after the bank transaction.

They waited two minutes. Dan never came. The ride back was long and silent.

Parker was promptly returned home and welcomed for his heroics. The praise and excitement beat against him like the mortar strikes.

He watched his daughter play outside with her friends and heard his wife cooking in her new kitchen. “How did you afford this?” I can’t tell you that dear. He would smile to reassure her. Then she said, “Well, who am I to question it?”

He sat in a rocking chair alone, watching them prosper. He eventually stood up after reading his journal again. Still, no one knew. But the tainted money dripped from every smile that had never been there before. It growled from inside every shiny new object his wife purchased.

He opened a drawer. Once, it had been full of dog tags. Now, he only had one left. He had taken the tags from the boy in the burrow.

Private Parker walked to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. He stared into his eyes to try to identify the stranger whose face he saw. Some days Parker wanted to go back for the men he left behind. He thought about the man in the moonlit burrow most of all.

Held. He walked upstairs into his bedroom. A Colt pistol waited under the mattress. Heroes never die?

Some nights Parker’s daughter, Angela, could still hear the gunshot and the empty silence that followed. Years later, Angela finally dared read the notebook he had left behind. Her mother never had been able to.

She finished and set the journal down. Her husband was cooking dinner downstairs and her two kids were screaming about toys. She looked downstairs and saw them. Trails of corruption trickled from their toy train. Inside, she thought she saw one of the dead soldiers operating it. The sizzling of bacon on a frying pan became a violent hiss, threatening deadly uncertainty.

But she, unlike her father, could see the beautiful consequence of greed. She had to.