Dog Tags

1. The Patrol

It never failed. Whenever the sergeant was looking for a chump—someone for a patrol or KP, someone to help dig a new latrine—he chose Silverman. It didn’t matter that PFC Leon Silverman, with red hair and blue eyes, didn’t look Jewish. Sergeant Fenton knew he was—there was no mistaking his last name—and that was enough. Fenton had made it clear from the time Silverman had joined the platoon three weeks earlier that he didn’t like Jews and didn’t want him in the platoon. But the platoon was short of men—the Division itself was still being filled out—and Fenton had to take what he could get. Still, he wouldn’t make it easy for Silverman.

The others in the platoon didn’t seem to care about Silverman’s religion, though they teased him that he must have gotten switched at birth. Actually, he was adopted, and his adoptive parents were non-practicing Jews, so questions about his identity never bothered him growing up. But the army was different. Besides Sergeant Fenton, the company clerk, Borowski, always made him aware of his Jewishness. As he read aloud rosters and work details, he would pause significantly at Silverman’s name, twist his mouth and say in a poor German accent: “Sil-ver-mann. Hmmm. You haf relatives in Shermany, perhaps?”

The new lieutenant, a Ninety-Day Wonder, was nervous. Even though this was a quiet front—the Ardennes was where they sent new units like the 106th to break in gradually (or old ones to recover from the mauling they’d received in...