Armageddon Read Free

civilian population and execute them at his discretion until his will is enforced.’ ” Hansen closed the report and snatched off his specs. “That’s a hell of a thing for an American boy to write.”
    “I didn’t know our function is to spread Americanism in Germany.”
    “Nor is it to continue Nazism. Now by hostages, Captain O’Sullivan, I take it you mean to define between Nazis and non-Nazis.”
    “If the General will tell me if the bullet that killed my brother came from a Nazi rifle or a non-Nazi rifle.”
    “So in judging all Germans as being the same, you mean to take hostages who are two, three, or four years old.”
    Sean balked. “Well ... perhaps we should limit hostages to Nazis.”
    “There are fifteen million Nazis in Germany,” Hansen pressed.
    “We’ll have room for them when we open their concentration camps!”
    “Sit down, lad, and don’t get your Irish up on me. I want the explanation of the hostage paragraph.”
    Sean unclenched his fists and sunk into his seat once again. Eric the Red meant business. “In my following comment I said it would never be necessary to use hostages because the Germans are orderly people and will respond to whoever represents authority. You know damned well, General, I’ve said over and over they won’t conduct guerrilla resistance. Quote Churchill. The Germans are at your throat or your feet. They’ll be at our feet when we finish with them.”
    “Then why did you find it necessary to put this hostage thing in?”
    “Because they’ve got their own little special missions sitting in Berlin writing their version of the same manual. You know their versions? All Germans, get under American protection at all costs where kindly GI’s will supply you with cigarettes, chocolate, and short memories. We have to put that hostage rule into the record just to let them know it’s there.”
    Hansen grunted. He opened the bottom drawer of his desk. His stubby fingers produced a bottle of rye whiskey and a pair of glasses. He poured two oversized drinks and shoved one of them to Sean. He knew again why he had picked O’Sullivan for the Special Mission.
    “I lost a brother too. Mark Twain Hansen. First World War. Belleau Wood. We can’t go through this with those people again. They’re sick. They have to be healed. Becoming Nazis ourselves isn’t the way.”
    “It always comes back to the same damned confusion,” General. What are we going to do with them?”
    “Know the facts and believe in your country. You are here on this mission because our war begins when the shooting stops. Our bullets are ideas ... your folks are immigrants, aren’t they?”
    Sean nodded.
    “So are mine. My father, God rest his soul, came over by steerage after the Civil War and walked from New York to Iowa in the dead of winter.” The general took a swallow of whiskey and allowed himself the rare pleasure of a moment of nostalgia. “Black Hawk County, Iowa. We homesteaded a section of land. My father’s name was Hans Christian Hansen, after the Danish national hero. All of us were named after American heroes ... except my sister. She died from diphtheria in one of those damned Iowa winters. God almighty ... I’ll see my father to my dying day looking over the newly cut corn fields, standing there like a statue ... smoke coming from his pipe. He’d look at the leaves turning and put those two big leather hands on my shoulders and wouldn’t say much. At Thanksgiving he’d give a toast after he read the Bible and his eyes would fill with tears when he said ... God bless America.”
    The tension between the men had passed. Sean thought of his own father and smiled. “My Dad would say, where else in the world could a shanty Irishman put three sons through the university?”
    Andrew Jackson Hansen hit his hand on the desk. “That’s what I mean!” his gruff voice filled with enthusiasm. “We have to love America the way our parents did ... naive, sentimental, unsophisticated.