Thus in mid-February 1943, the Afrika Korps brushed aside the small American and French units and rumbled throu Gafsa toward Tebessa, which Rommel considered strategically vital. Between Gafsa and Tebessa lay the Kasserine Pass, which the Allied Command raced to defend. There the Afrika Korps savaged the green U.S. 1st and 34th Divisions. But it never quite reached Tebessa, because the fighting had taken a toll of Nazi men and armor, and Allied air forces had established dominance.
The 509th Parachute Infantry (nee 2nd Battalion, 503rd) played no part in any of this. The whole battalion was quartered in Boufarik. The Allied Command had decided that employing lightly armed parachute units in regular ground operations was to misuse a special tool.
Then, in early March, the battalion was put on trains and moved 380 miles west to Oujda, in French Morocco, where it was bivouacked outside the city. There it received replacements, and returned to intensive training.
But even in French Morocco, battles were fought. In early May, the new, highly trained but unblooded 82nd Airborne Division arrived, eager to prove itself, and was bivouacked near the 509th. Whose men took umbrage at the newcomers’ cockiness, particularly when, in early June, the Allied command attached the previously independent 509th to the green 82nd as just another constituent battalion.
It might not have been so bad, had living conditions not been so lousy, both for the old hands and the newcomers. The training was brutal and unrelenting, humping equipment up and down the rugged hills, running, and especially training at night: They were to become the masters of darkness.
Which meant sleep time was not only short, but often came during the day. And they slept in pup tents-crawl-in shelters that by day were like ovens.
Nor were there mess-halls, or even mess tents. They took their mess tins to the kitchen, got their food (which was poor and monotonous), and sat on the ground to fight for it with swarms of flies. They soon gave up trying to shoo them away, or even brush them off effectively. They simply cursed, chewed, and swallowed.
On the occasional day off, there was little to do except go into Oujda, where keepers of cheap bars dispensed bad whiskey. And arriving in a less than Christian mom the troopers were inclined to truculence. In fact, the battles of French Morocco were fought in the bars of Oujda, notably between troopers of the 509th and those of the 82nd. In these, any reluctance to trade blows tended to be lost.
Not all troopers took part, of course. Bar brawls are not vital experience for young warriors, but for many at that stage they were inevitable, indeed for many a joy.
Macurdy, however, preferred to avoid brawls, and found quieter, more out-of-the-way bars, frequented by those who preferred friendliness to fist fights. He’d learned to drink in Phenix City, Alabama, and did it more gracefully than most. Having a rare ability to control his physiological processes, and being neither obsessive nor addictive, he didn’t get drunk. Largely he drank wine-he hadn’t learned to like hard liquorallowing himself at most a certain mellowness. Of course, he’d recently had his 39th birthday, but he’d have handled his trips to Oujda more or less similarly had he been ten years younger. In fact, he would probably have come through his Oujda months unscathed, except for a two-and-a-half-ton truck. He was with Cavalieri and Luoma, headed back to camp, not drunk or even tight. Over-relaxed perhaps, and less alert than might be. The truck was heavily laden, hauling ordnance from the docks at Mellilla. The driver said he never saw them, that a donkey cart had turned in front of him, and he’d swerved. Also, he’d been continuously on duty for seventeen hours. At any rate he knocked down a G.I. and ran over him.
MPs appeared as if by magic, filling out forms, taking names, ranks, serial numbers, units…. The driver they hauled off in an MP jeep. The victim, who was taken away in an ambulance, was Staff Sergeant Curtis E. Macurdy, serial number 36 928 450.
Macurdy awoke in the base hospital, remembering nothing of the day. The heavy truck had run over his right leg, doing extreme soft tissue damage, breaking the femur, patella, tibia and fibula, but somehow missing foot, hip, and left leg. He didn’t know this, of course. All he knew, vaguely, was that his right leg was in a cast and elevated, its shrunken aura a chaotic mess, and that he was doped to the gills.