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Title: A Triumph of Courage
Author: heartofslash
Fandom: BHD/Band of Brothers
Rating: PG
Warning: War is sad. And there is no actual sex in the fic. Sorry.
Disclaimer: This is not about on any real people or characters from BOB or BHD, it’s only based on them and it’s all made up in my head. I make no claims about the sexuality, sexual longings or experiences of anyone but myself, and I proudly admit to being a total soldier perv, which is why I write things like this.
Note: An old soldier comforts a young soldier.
A Triumph of Courage
Valley Forge Military Academy, Wayne PA
July 3, 1995
It was a compulsion, a sudden-onset compulsion. It had not been planned, this visiting of war memorials. The plan had been to travel around, visit cities across the country, find a place he might like to settle. But he’d started visiting a war memorial everywhere he traveled, as soon as he arrived. This was the eighteenth one.
It commemorated The Battle of the Bulge, and he sat quietly on the white stone bench and read the title. ‘A Triumph of Courage,’ it said.
It was doing him not good at all, this quest for peace. He kept roaming from town to town, city to city, no place to call home, no reason to stop moving, except to sit and stare for hours at monuments built to men with whom he’d never served, battles he’d never fought, wars that took place before he was ever born.
Almost every town had something – a marble pillar, a bronze statue, a garden, a plaque – commemorating war, remembering the sacrifices made. None brought him peace.
“Doesn’t do a thing to help, does it?” a soft voice asked.
He turned to look at a man dressed in civilian clothes sit next to him. He was an older man. Not just older – he was an old man, but not so old you wouldn’t see what he might have looked like when he was younger. He had a finely-shaped face, almost pretty, with remarkably soft dark eyes surrounded by deep wrinkles. He could tell it had once been the sort of face that would have made him grow tongue-tied.
“You can look at it all day, but it won’t take away the loss.”
The accent was lovely. Southern and French at the same time.
He cleared his throat. “Loss?” He tried sound as if he had no idea what the man was talking about.
His efforts were rewarded with a gentle smile. “Yes, the loss. It’s obvious. Where did you fight?”
“I’m not a soldier.”
“Not anymore. I can see your hair is grown long, and most of your clothes are civilian, but those boots…”
He looked down. He’d kept the boots for some reason. He’d got used to them, he supposed. And they were good for hiking. Hitch hiking. Rambling. “I didn’t fight,” he insisted.
The old man smiled again. “Neither did I. But I was there. Bastogne. ” He pointed to the angled slab of stone. “My not firing a weapon didn’t make me any less cold, or any less scared.”
How could someone survive that without firing his weapon? Same way he could, he supposed. “Somalia. Battle of Mogadishu,” he admitted.
“Medic,” the man said.
“How did you know?” He was shocked.
“I didn’t. I was a medic. They called me Doc.”
“Me too.”
“Doc Roe. Eugene Roe.” The man held out a slightly shaky hand.
“Schmid… Doc Schmid,” he said, taking the hand in his. “Kurt, actually.”
Roe nodded. “Was it a friend you lost, or more?”
Kurt did not want to talk about it. Especially not to someone who’d been at Bastogne. The one night he’d been trapped in the Mog had been horrifying, but he was sure it was nothing compared to what this man had been through.
“Look, I was just passing through town and thought I’d take a look. It has nothing to do with what happened in…” But he couldn’t even finish the sentence.
“You can’t save them all,” Roe said firmly. “God knows I tried. I learned early on that you can’t control anything in war. You do your best, you save some, you lose some, but you keep going, doing your best.”
That was a reasonable philosophy, and Kurt wished he could feel it as effectively as he could think it, but he couldn’t. “Friend,” he said after a few seconds more of thought. “A close friend. If we hadn’t been trapped, if I’d had better supplies, I could have saved his life.”
Roe looked inexpressibly sad for a moment, then his face softened at some memory and he looked Kurt in the eye. “No, you couldn’t have. You have to accept it and move on. If you torment yourself with ‘what ifs’, you’ll drive yourself mad. ‘What if I’d got to him one minute earlier?’ ‘What if I’d been able to give him the morphine?’ ‘What if the mortar had landed on me instead of him?’ You could come up with enough ‘ifs’ to last a lifetime, and it won’t bring your friend back.”
Kurt nodded.
“No, don’t humour an old man. I have no time for being humoured. I don’t think I have that much time left, to tell you the truth. But I’ve had a lot more than the men I watched die back at Bastogne, so I consider myself blessed, as you should. You’re here, aren’t you?”
“But he isn’t.” It felt good to say it out loud. He’d never told anyone how much Smith’s death affected him. He was sure everyone knew, but he’d never expressed it aloud.
“So, he was more than a friend, then?” A sly look flicker across Roe’s face. “It’s especially hard when you loose someone that close to you.”
Kurt was too stunned to speak.
“Didn’t think an old man would know about things like that?”
Kurt still couldn’t answer. It wasn’t that he was naïve, that he didn’t think an old man would know about such things. He had simply never connected the men who’d fought in World War II, the men he grew up hearing heroic stories about and watching in movies, having those sorts of feelings for each other. “Uh, no,” he finally said. “He wasn’t… it wasn’t like that between us at all.”
“Forgive me,” Roe said. “You had such a look of pain on your face. Raw pain. I made a hasty assumption.” The old man looked embarrassed.
“No, not at all. I mean, he wasn’t but…” Could he admit this to a stranger? Could he admit it to himself? “There’s more than one way of losing someone.”
“Ah,” Roe said knowingly. “Yes, I know of that. There was someone, someone I cared for very deeply. I never told him, of course. It wouldn’t have been accepted. I was overjoyed that he survived.”
Kurt looked away from Roe, unwilling to face the loss. “And that’s enough for you?”
“Heavens, no. Never.”
They sat, side by side, on the stone bench, for some time before Kurt spoke again.
“What was his name?” Kurt asked.
Roe squinted at the blindingly white monument.
“Sorry,” Kurt said. “It’s none of my business.”
Roe shrugged. “And it was not my business to make an assumption about you.”
“It wasn’t an assumption. I mean, it’s true. He survived and I’m happy he did, but it’s not enough. Not for me.”
“You should call him,” Roe said quietly. “Tell him how you feel before it’s too late.”
Kurt couldn’t do such a thing. He fiddled with the strap of his back pack and watched Roe get up stiffly from the bench. The old man patted him on the shoulder.
“Babe,” Roe said quietly. “His name was Babe.”
Kurt watched Roe walk away from the memorial.
The sun was setting when he walked out of the student hostel, having dropped his gear in a locker, and headed for the bar across the street. In the sickly neon light of the barroom he surveyed the press of sweaty, hot flesh. Young people, mostly young people, having a good time at a bar. They had no worries, or if they did they weren’t thinking about them. Out for a good time. No reason to think about lost chances – they had all the chances in the world.
Kurt turned around and headed back to the hostel. He had no desire to watch people who had nothing to forget as they pretended to forget everything as an excuse to cut loose and connect with each other. They shouldn’t need the excuse.
He slid his hand into his pocket and felt the frail piece of paper, edges worn, creases spread across it like wrinkles on an old man’s face. He’d been carrying it since he left the army.
He crossed the lobby and picked up the payphone, dropping all the change he had into the slot. There was a throb of anticipation as he listened to the phone ring on the other end, two, three, four times. He held his breath.
“Hello?”
Kurt breathed out slowly. It wasn’t too late. “Dale,” he began…
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