Loot

In Tuscany, at Palaia, on a July morning in 1944, I entered a shelled, roofless, and deserted church and looted the poor box of three crumpled bills and a handful of change. It was the first time I had ever visited a church without saying a prayer.

A year after leaving college, I had joined a machine gun squad in Italy as a replacement for an ammunition handler named Joey Hudon, who had had a hole blown in his head two days earlier during a mortar barrage. As he had been, I was responsible for a box of belted 30-caliber ammunition and a spare gun barrel. I wore a .45 pistol on my belt, a uniquely unreliable weapon.

On the morning of June 4 we entered Rome. From Bassanello a week later we moved out of the line and were trucked south to a rest area at Albano. There we set up tents within sight of Castel Gandolfo, the pope's summer residence, sharing the ground with a battalion of Moroccon tribesmen, the "Goums" of the French Expeditionary Corps.

I never summoned the energy to walk to the castle, and before long we moved to the front again and I had lost the opportunity. My partner in our two-man tent went into Albano, broke into a house, and came back with a pilfered stamp collection. (After the war I called him in Rhode Island and he said he had never heard of me.)

At Palaia we went out in the late afternoon to set up a roadblock, to dig foxholes and a gun emplacement, and site a bazooka. A listening post had already been established farther out with two men and a radio. If we had to converse, we whispered. I lay breathing in the sounds and smells of night. A truck far off. Sporadic fire somewhere to the front. A dog barking, then abruptly silenced. An accordion player playing softly on the German side. Once in a while a man got up to relieve himself. I knew that in the morning I would have to return the money to the church. My feet hurt. The bridge of my glasses, broken in a fall, had been repaired with adhesive tape. I was a miserable and unlikely soldier and I had disgraced myself as a GI and a Catholic.

Returning at dawn I slipped into the church and stuffed the stolen money back into the poor box. I knelt on the floor amid the debris of stone and wood and glass and the roof's broken red tiles. On my knees I crawled toward the ruined altar. Shards of glass pierced my trousers and I knelt on them to feel the small sharp pain. Standing up clumsily, I stumbled back to the door, picked up my ammunition and gun barrel, glanced at the poor box fastened precariously to the wall, and went out.

We fought to San Miniato, west of Florence and the Arno. The division regrouped, lines were straightened, replacements were brought up and integrated, patrols went out at night.

By September, the Fifth Army had crossed the Arno, but by then the Germans had tightened up their final high mountain positions before the Po River valley. Bunkers were more numerous, pillboxes more artfully concealed, the fought-over ground was laced with snipers. The wounded were increasing in number and more litter bearers were needed to carry them down.

When we came off the front for two days I was given leadership of a fourman litter squad. It was not the job I would have chosen. I reluctantly turned over my pistol, my ammunition and spare barrel, and took up a bloody stretcher. I didn't smoke but I brought cigarettes for the wounded.

It rained and streams swelled, mud washed out trails, mules and jeeps fell into rivers, trucks churned the mud deeper. We slept in mangers, in huts, in caves, in ditches. We came into an isolated barn one day and members of my former platoon were there, the teacher from Illinois, the herder from Montana, the stamp collector. They had discarded one machine gun.

At a medical aid station on October 18, I ducked into the doorway to pick up a couple of replacements who could serve as litter bearers. I had just sat down against a far wall, my legs drawn up, when a shell hit the door jamb and exploded into the room. Shrapnel broke my left leg, fragmenting the femur. The metal passed within an inch of my chest. Had I been leaning forward it certainly would have torn out my heart. Later that day, my leg bloody and splinted, I was flown with others out of the mountains from a hidden airstrip.

By a simple deflection of millimeters through the atmosphere, through sun and cloud and wind above the landscape, out of an arc of miles, God in his wisdom and mercy had granted me an additional fifty-nine years in which to reflect, as I have every day, on the looting of the poor box and the violation of the church at Palaia.

John A. Lynch, a frequent contributor, lives in Framingham, Massachusetts.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Commonweal Foundation
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