The Ten Thousand (80 page)

Roused from a fitful sleep at 3:05 A.M., Jan Fields-Dixon was” not prepared to greet her unexpected visitor. Her mind was so clouded with sleep that she didn’t even make any effort to consider who would be disturbing her at this hour. Not that this was an unusual occurrence. After working for an outfit like World News Network for as long as she had, Jan had learned that nothing, not even her home life, was ordinary. Just about everything that could have happened had happened to her, sometimes more than once, in her years as a correspondent. Still there were times when even a hardened news veteran like Jan could be caught by surprise. Reaching the doorknob, Jan stopped, swept back the stray hairs that had cascaded lazily across her eyes, and opened the door.

In her worst nightmare, Jan couldn’t have imagined a sight more frightening, more terrible, than the image of the Army colonel standing before her in the open doorway. For a moment the two of them stood there staring at each other. Jan in an old white terry-cloth bathrobe faced the colonel, standing erect and alert in his overcoat topped with a green scarf that covered his neck and a hat pulled down so low that it hid his eyes in the shadow of its brim.

Slowly, ever so slowly, Jan could feel her knees begin to tremble. Grasping the doorknob with her left hand, Jan almost fell over as she reached out with her right to steady herself on the door frame. Though her mouth fell open and she wanted so to scream, she couldn’t. Nothing, not even a wisp of air, came out. It was as if her entire being, everything that she was, had suddenly locked up and come to a sudden, terrible dead stop. Without having to be told, without having to hear it, she knew that Scott was dead.

The one man who had touched her heart and soul as no one ever had was gone.

After an embarrassingly awkward moment, the Army colonel reached out ready to catch Jan but did not touch her. Finally with great trepidation the colonel leaned down and spoke. “Mrs. Dixon, are you going to be all right?”

Responding to the words, Jan looked up at the eyes under the highly polished hat brim, nodded, and even managed a weak, stoic “Yes.”

Taking her word for it, the colonel took a deep breath and prepared to carry out his orders. But before he could, Jan spoke first. “How, how did it? ” Then she stopped. How stupid. What difference did that make now? Why in the hell was it so important to know how? Wasn’t it bad enough that it had?

Confused, the colonel looked at Jan, who was obviously having a problem with his being there, and started again. Though he thought it probably would have been better to go inside, and he wondered why this woman in front of him didn’t invite him in, the colonel decided to go ahead and just blurt it out. “Mrs.

Dixon, I’m here on behalf of President Wilson. She sent me to personally inform you that your husband reached Bremerhaven.”

There was silence as Jan’s expression quickly changed from pain to confusion, and finally to wonder, all of them reflecting the jumble of thoughts that raced through her mind. When Jan looked up at the colonel, he wasn’t ready for her next question. “Then,” she said with great trepidation, still struggling to keep her knees from buckling, “his body has just been recovered?”

Now it was the colonel’s turn to be confused. Cocking his head to the side, the colonel asked quite innocently, “Excuse me, ma’am, what body?”

Looking up with wide eyes at being asked such an extraordinarily dumb question, Jan shouted,

“Scott’s! My husband’s body.”

Finally it became clear to the colonel. With a quick shake of the head, as if to clear it, he almost laughed. “Oh! Oh, my God, no, Mrs. Dixon, you don’t understand. Your husband isn’t dead. He’s alive.

He made it back with the last of his brigade. When I said that he had returned to friendly lines, I meant that? ”

Jan didn’t let him finish. In a flash her near paralysis caused by the grief she felt over Scott’s death turned to anger. “
YOU
BASTARD! [_ You rotten bastard! _] How dare you wake me in the middle of the night, scare the living shit out of me, and then stand there and laugh at me?” Without waiting for a response, Jan slammed the door in the colonel’s face and fled to her bedroom. There she threw herself on her bed and let go with a flood of tears brought on by an avalanche of emotions that she had up until that moment held in check.

Back at Jan’s front door, the Army colonel stood motionless for several seconds in front of the closed door, not quite sure what he had done or what to do now. Finally, satisfied that he had accomplished his assigned mission and not wishing to disturb the crazy woman inside the house again, the colonel slowly pivoted about and headed back to the sedan that was waiting to take him back to the White House. As the driver pulled out of the driveway, the colonel looked back at the house one more time and wondered what he was going to say when he got back. Finally he decided that in this case the truth was the safest bet. With that decided, he pulled the brim of his hat down over his eyes, folded his arms across his chest, slumped down in the passenger seat, and went to sleep.

Though the Thirteenth Corps had assumed control over all tactical operations in northern Germany and relieved the battered and exhausted Tenth Corps staff of that responsibility, the press corps continued to hover about the final command post site of the Tenth Corps like a pack of wolves waiting for food. Located only a few kilometers from the flat sandy beaches that bordered the North Sea, the staff throughout the Tenth Corps command post waited for the same thing that the media did? the appearance of Lieutenant General Alvin Malin, the renegade general. The correspondents, like the rest of the world, waited to see if Big Al, the most controversial American military figure since MacArthur, would stay true to his word and surrender himself to American authorities.

Though rumor abounded that Malin had in fact returned to American lines the day before, no one outside the staff of the Tenth Corps knew where he was. This failure to report immediately as he had promised was causing problems for the President in Washington and delaying the scheduling of her talks with representatives of the German Parliament. Though both were anxious to put a quick end to what both sides were now referring to as a regrettable affair, the issue of General Malin had to be cleared up before anything on the diplomatic level could go forward. The silence surrounding the whereabouts of the man who had led the Tenth Corps in the dead of winter from the mountains of the Czech Republic to the North Sea seemed to weigh heavily on everyone’s mind.

It was in the late afternoon, just as the pale winter sun was preparing to fade off in the distant southwest, that the reporters and camera crews of the media pool, camped out across the road from where the Tenth Corps main command post sat, noticed a stirring throughout that headquarters. Alone and in pairs, the officers and the noncommissioned officers of the Tenth Corps staff emerged from their expandable vans and tents and began to line the road in front of the headquarters main entrance across from where the newsmen sat waiting. As the newsmen watched, the officers and NCOs gathered around the corps chief of staff, who was standing at parade rest, legs slightly spread apart and hands held together loosely in the small of his back. The look on his face, one of great sorrow, was no different than that of other staff officers and NCOs as they lined the road to either side and assumed a similar stance.

Not knowing what was going to happen next but sensing that something was amiss, newsmen and camera crews began to record their observations with words and images.

Critics would later claim that the grim procession was staged for the eye of the camera that caught every moment, every participant. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Even if someone had thought of doing so, neither the corps staff nor the soldiers who made up General Malin’s escort would have agreed to such a cynical plan.

As the sound of an armored vehicle moving north along the road became audible, the chief of staff of the Tenth Corps, in his best parade-ground voice, shouted out his commands. “
CORPS
STAFF
, ATTEN-TION!” With that, every man across from the newspeople came to a rigid position of attention with a snap. When the armored vehicle that had caused the chief of staff to call his staff to attention came into sight just down the road, he shouted out his next order. “
PRE-SENT
ARMS
.” As before, the response was immediate and snappy.

Only the soft hum of generators in the background, the muted comments of correspondents talking into tape recorders, and the wail of the mournful winter wind blowing in off the North Sea disturbed the silence of the headquarters that had been the eye of an international storm for so long.

In the lead was a young female captain riding low in the open hatch of her M-2 Bradley fighting vehicle. The haggard expression on her face made Nancy Kozak look ten years older than she was.

Next to her, Sergeant Wolf, her gunner, grimly looked ahead with eyes that didn’t seem to blink at all.

-As Kozak’s Bradley came abreast of the corps chief of staff, Kozak turned her head slightly, saluted the chief for a moment, then, after dropping her salute, she turned her attention back to the front without changing expression. Immediately behind Kozak’s Bradley came a second Bradley, the only other combat vehicle of her company that had survived the long trek north. The other eleven Bradleys and four tanks, as well as far too many of their crews, littered their route of march that started in Bavaria and ended here. Though the abandoned hulks of her vehicles were only metal, rubber, and plastic, each stood as a temporary headstone that marked where an American had fallen and where a little more of Captain Nancy Kozak’s heart had died.

Next came the battalion commander’s Bradley. No one on the ground realized that the young major riding high in the hatch had not started out in that position. Not that Major Harold Cerro’s story was any different than that of hundreds of other officers and sergeants in the Tenth Corps. Military necessity, a term often applied to something that was often unpleasant, had resulted in the sudden shifting of officers and NCOs into positions vacated by those who had fallen in battle, collapsed due to stress and strain, or proved incapable of dealing with the responsibilities of the position. In peacetime, Cerro, like many of his fellow officers, had joked about the wonderful opportunities that war offered a professional soldier. The reality of how such opportunities came about, coupled with the grim realization that a friend or peer had to fall in order to advance in such a manner, made such a promotion a thing to dread. For Cerro, because he lived, there was no escaping the price that others had paid so that he could be where he was.

When his Bradley slowly trundled by the corps chief of staff, he like Kozak saluted him. After passing, Cerro looked to the north, toward the sea, and returned to his own grim thoughts and memories.

Next came an ancient M-113 armored personnel carrier with a Russian colonel standing upright in the open cargo hatch. With his field cap pulled down low over his eyes, Colonel Vorishnov looked neither left nor right until his vehicle came abreast of the corps chief of staff. He too saluted and then looked back to the front, his gaze, unblinking like Sergeant Wolf’s, fixed straight ahead at nothing in particular.

Finally came the tank. As it came up even with the corps chief of staff, the chief seemed to stiffen his already rigid position of attention just as every officer and
NCO
gathered about him did. There was no loader in the hatch of this tank. Only Colonel Scott Dixon, commander of the 1st Brigade, 4th Armored Division. Dixon stood in the commander’s hatch of the tank, exposed from his hips up. Holding on to the open hatch with his left hand and the machine gun with his right, Dixon never altered his expressionless stare from a fixed point on the distant horizon to the north. He did not salute the corps chief, for the salute that the corps chief and his staff were waiting for from this vehicle could not be returned. For Lieutenant General Alvin Malin, whose body lay wrapped in a poncho and strapped over the loader’s hatch next to Scott Dixon, had been killed in action on the morning of the 25th, just as his greatest military feat was coming to an end.

Only after the procession had passed did anyone take the time to tell the press what had happened.

When they found out, there was an immediate rush north to follow the procession. This rush, much to their anger, was stopped short of the coastline. Only the five vehicles of General Malin’s funeral procession were allowed onto the flat windswept expanses of the desolate cold beach. There, the deputy corps commander and the corps sergeant major waited to receive the body of their former commander.

Behind them stood a small honor guard with the corps flag and the national colors. Behind them, in an extended line that stretched out to either side, stood representatives from all the units of the Tenth Corps, each with its own unit flags, flags that represented all of the units that had made the long march north. As before with the corps staff, when the procession had passed the main command post, the party assembled on the beach saluted the arrival of their commanding officer.

Slowly and in turn, the lead vehicles of the procession moved to one side to make way for Dixon’s tank. When they were all clear, Dixon ordered his driver forward until, finally, the treads of his tank were only meters away from the edge of the North Sea. By the time Dixon had stopped his tank and climbed out of his hatch, Cerro and Kozak had come up to his tank and climbed aboard. Together they undid the straps that held Malin’s body securely to the top of the turret. Dixon, dismounting, was joined by Vorishnov, the deputy corps commander, and the corps sergeant major on the left side of Dixon’s tank.

When these four men were ready, Cerro and Kozak slowly, carefully passed Malin’s body down to them.

Hoisting the general’s body aloft on their shoulders, with the deputy corps commander on the front right, Dixon to his left, and Vorishnov and the sergeant major in the rear, this party carried Big Al’s body the few feet that separated them from the sea. When they reached the surf, the party in unison lowered Big Al’s body down until it rested on the beach so that the waves rushed about his lifeless body. Having completed their last duty to General Malin, the four men took several steps back, lined up, and, without any order being necessary, saluted their former commander.