Before Their Time: A Memoir by Robert Kotlowitz

sense oforder and pride, and for Rocky most of us tried to keep our nests fastidious.
    Maybe it was a good thing that Bern had moved in with Roger Johnson, who now headed the BAR team, while I took on Fedderman shortly after we landed in Normandy. This was not done casually. It happened only after Bern and I shared a couple of serious, even mournful exchanges about how our individual failings seemed to feed the other’s, so that it would probably be a sound idea to separate, if only temporarily. The whole painful discussion was accompanied by a lot of symbolic bowing and scraping and calculated politesse on behalf of our tender feelings for each other. But it worked and the deal was set: Fedderman and Johnson did not object, neither did Rocky.
    At least with Fedderman I could complain as much as I wanted, berating him about his sloppiness and general disorder without feeling guilty. He was worse than sloppy: his side of the tent was a litter, far messier than anything Bern and I had ever produced in our time; mine of course was now perfect, for Rocky’s sake. Soon my complaints turned into the kind of relentless nagging that kills the spirit without fail. Then I discovered that I was actually beginning to enjoy it—the nagging, that is. Naturally, this disturbed my sense of myself.
    Sharing a pup tent could do that to you. It put you in someone else’s thrall. It forced you into someone else’s domestic embrace. Suddenly you turned over part of your world, perhaps the essential part, to a stranger, an intruder—in Fedderman’s case bulky, twitchy, high-strung, and incompetent—with noises, habits, and intimate smells of his own; and he returned the favor. (It was hard enough to get used to your own smells, much less someoneelse’s.) Men were not made to live together, I was learning for a second time. It created a false situation, bound by unyielding tension. I would not forget that lesson. It would last for years.
    So I nagged Fedderman, pressed him hard—too hard, perhaps—telling myself that I was protecting my identity by proclaiming my integrity. Nothing helped. I think Fedderman was probably too self-absorbed to care about my proclamations and maybe immune by then to such assaults, which had probably been going on since he was a child. He had certainly made sure to grow a very thick skin, or appear to.
    THEN, one day, some damn fool from A Company stepped out of line on a morning’s march, just a couple of yards onto the beach that ran alongside the road we were hiking on. Apparently he wanted to pee, despite all the signs that still littered the sand like tombstones:
“Minen,” “Achtung,” “Verboten,”
all illustrated with vivid pictures of skulls and crossbones. His misstep triggered a German mine that took off his foot. That misadventure caused a flurry of nervous daytime lectures on the dangers that still lay in wait in Normandy for unwary infantrymen. Antonovich lectured us, Gallagher, even Rocky. The war was still real. You could get killed in paradise, too. We never even bothered to learn the victim’s name.
    And the French, where were they? Out of bounds. Off-limits. Not to be spoken to, not to be approached or touched, as though they, and not the Germans, were the real enemy. This hurt. What were we doing in France if not to liberate the population from the shame of humiliatingdefeat and once again make the French-American alliance strong? But this was a question only I seemed to ask. No one else apparently gave it a thought. I was alone in the third platoon as a Francophile.
    We were bivouacked between two small towns that maintained a closely linked existence, and communication was brisk between them. A steady bicycle traffic, moving in both directions, rolled along the road that bordered our orchard. We could catch a glimpse over the tops of our hedgerow from time to time of farmers driving an occasional vehicle, probably burning black-market Yankee gasoline, carrying a load of skimpy