The Wrong Beach

The beach was not where the maps had said it would be.

Eli did not know that yet. He knew only that the dunes looked wrong. The church steeple they had been told to use as a landmark was missing. The channel markers stood at an angle unfamiliar from the briefings. Men were moving inland in scattered knots, some toward a gap in the obstacles, some toward the dunes, some simply away from the water.

“Harper!” Dugan waved him on. “Get the squad together!”

Eli turned. Private Mullen had fallen to one knee, struggling with a pack strap. Eli caught him by the collar and hauled him upright.

“Leave it,” Eli said.

“It’s got my ammunition.”

“Then carry it.”

Mullen stared at him, shocked by the answer, and ran.

They reached the sand. Eli dropped behind a low rise where the beach sloped toward the dunes. Bullets snapped overhead, sparse but sharp. One struck the sand in front of him and kicked grit into his mouth. He spat and looked back.

The men were there. Mullen. Peters with the radio case pressed against his ribs. Keene, pale and breathing through his teeth. Four others he knew by face more than by voice. No one was missing.

For the moment.

Dugan crouched beside him. Water ran from the sergeant’s helmet netting.

“Where are we?” Eli asked.

“Utah.”

“I know that. Which sector?”

Dugan looked inland. “The wrong one.”

A shell burst somewhere beyond the dunes. The concussion rolled across the beach, softer than Eli expected, almost dull. A flock of seabirds rose from the sand and vanished into the smoke.

Dugan pointed toward a break between two dunes. “We get off this beach. That’s the job.”

“The route?”

“The route is inland.”

“That isn’t what they briefed us.”

“No,” Dugan said. “It isn’t.”

Eli had imagined the landing as a violent door that would open and close behind them. Cross the beach. Find the road. Move toward the assigned objective. The instructors had spoken of timing and lanes, of colored markers and compass bearings. None of them had mentioned a beach that failed to resemble itself.

A lieutenant appeared through the smoke, bent low as he ran. His trousers were soaked to the thigh, and his face was streaked with black powder.

“Eight’s moving!” he shouted. “Get those men off the waterline!”

Dugan rose. “You heard him!”

Eli gathered the squad with a sweep of his arm. They moved in short bursts, stopping behind obstacles, then running again. The sand sucked at their boots. Every few yards the beach changed: flat and open, then cut by a shallow channel, then crowded with wreckage. A dead soldier lay face down near a stake, one hand still closed around a coil of signal tape.

At the base of the dunes they found a narrow path worn through the grass.

“Up,” Dugan said.

The climb was steeper than it looked. Eli crawled the last few feet, dragging his rifle behind him. At the crest he turned and saw the beach spread beneath him, broad and pale beneath the smoke. Landing craft came and went in the surf. Men streamed from the water, tiny figures bent beneath their loads.

The view should have made him feel safe.

Instead, it showed him how far they had come without cover.

“Harper!” Dugan’s voice came from below. “Stop sightseeing.”

Eli slid down the inland side. Beyond the dunes lay flooded fields, hedgerows, and narrow roads running nowhere he recognized. The country was green and wet, broken by farm buildings and church towers. It looked like a place where a boy might lose a bicycle, not where an army had come to kill people.

A burst of machine-gun fire cracked from the left.

Peters dropped flat. Mullen threw himself into the grass. Eli felt the air jump beside his ear.

“Down!” Dugan shouted.

The firing stopped. For several seconds there was only the ticking of cooling metal and the heavy breathing of men pressed into the wet ground.

“Where are they?” Keene whispered.

Eli searched the hedgerow. He saw nothing but leaves trembling in the wind.

Dugan crawled forward and peered over the rise. “Small position. Maybe two guns.”

“Can we go around?” Eli asked.

“Which way?”

Eli looked toward the road. It divided near a farmhouse, one branch bending east, another disappearing behind the hedges. No signs. No markers. The terrain had swallowed the plan.

A jeep came bumping along the road from the beach. In it stood a broad-shouldered officer with a riding crop or cane in one hand. He wore a helmet instead of a cap, and his uniform was wet and dirty like everyone else’s. The jeep stopped near the dune.

“Where’s the regiment moving?” the officer called.

A lieutenant ran to him. They spoke briefly, words lost in the gunfire and wind. The officer looked inland, then toward the beach. He did not appear confused. He appeared tired.

Dugan recognized him first.

“Roosevelt,” he said.

Eli had seen the photograph. Theodore Roosevelt Jr., son of the president, a general who walked with a cane and had insisted on coming ashore with the first wave. The man in the jeep was older than the photograph, his face drawn tight, but there was no mistaking the bearing.

Theodore Roosevelt Jr. climbed down and walked toward the gathered officers. His cane sank into the wet soil.

“We’re landing in the wrong place,” one lieutenant said.

Roosevelt looked toward the distant smoke, then at the road and the fields beyond it.

“Then we’ll start the war from right here,” he said.

The words moved through the men in pieces. Eli heard them from Dugan, who heard them from the lieutenant, who had heard them directly. They were not spoken loudly. They did not need to be.

Roosevelt pointed with the cane. “Get the units moving inland. Use what roads you have. Don’t wait for the original route.”

The lieutenant nodded.

Dugan glanced at Eli. “There’s your route.”

The machine gun opened again.

This time Eli saw the muzzle flashes in the hedge, three quick sparks. Peters flinched as rounds cut through the grass above him.

“Harper,” Dugan said. “Take the right.”

Eli crawled to the nearest ditch. Mud soaked through his sleeve. He signaled Keene and Mullen to follow. The ditch ran toward the farmhouse, deep enough to conceal a man if he kept low. At its end stood a wooden gate. Beyond it, the hedge thickened into a wall of branches and thorns.

Eli heard Dugan shouting on the other side. Rifle fire answered.

He reached the gate and found it locked.

“Over,” he said.

Mullen stared at the wire threaded through the hinges. “Sergeant said right.”

“Then we go right.”

Eli pulled his entrenching tool from his pack and struck the post. Once. Twice. The wood gave a little. A round punched through the gate, close enough to raise splinters against his cheek.

Mullen swore.

“Help me.”

They struck together. The post cracked. Eli kicked the gate open and ran through the gap, the others behind him. The farmhouse wall rose ahead, white plaster stained with rain. A German soldier appeared at a window with a rifle.

Eli fired.

The soldier vanished. The shot seemed louder than the machine gun. For a moment Eli stood frozen, rifle shouldered, staring at the empty window.

“Keep moving!” Dugan roared.

The squad crossed the yard. A burst came from the hedge, and Keene spun backward. His rifle fell into the mud.

Eli caught him before he hit the ground.

“Where?”

Keene’s hand pressed his upper arm. Blood slipped between his fingers.

“It’s nothing,” Keene said.

“It’s not nothing.”

“Can walk.”

Dugan reached them, looked once at the wound, and pointed toward a sunken lane. “Get him there. We hold the lane.”

Eli hooked Keene’s good arm over his shoulder. Keene was heavier than he looked. Together they stumbled down the slope while bullets struck the farmhouse wall behind them.

The lane ended at a culvert beneath the road. They crowded into it, breathing hard. Peters tore open a field dressing with his teeth and wrapped Keene’s arm. The bandage reddened almost at once.

“Still with us?” Eli asked.

Keene nodded. His face had gone gray.

From the road came the clatter of boots and shouted orders. American voices. More men were moving inland, finding their own way through the wrong country. No one had stopped. No one had turned back.

Eli pressed his palm against the wet earth. It trembled beneath distant artillery.

On the beach, the first wave had been scattered. The maps were useless. The route was gone. Yet the division was moving, not along the plan but through the opening that existed.

Dugan crouched at the mouth of the culvert. “We stay here until the company comes up.”

Eli looked at Keene’s bandaged arm, then toward the fields beyond the road. The green country seemed wider now, less welcoming. Somewhere ahead waited the objectives they had been promised, but the place itself had become the first enemy: dunes without names, roads without signs, hedges hiding guns.

A column of men passed overhead. One of them called down, “Which way?”

Dugan answered without hesitation.

“Inland.”

The column moved on.

Eli tightened his grip on Keene’s shoulder and listened to the boots fading toward the fields. They had reached defensible ground. They had not lost anyone. Not entirely.

But the bandage was darkening, and the morning was only beginning.

End of chapter one. 7 more chapters and about 18,226 words in the full book.