Allies

by Alan Gratz

  Officers like Lieutenant Richard Hoyte, the man who now lay groaning on Henry’s makeshift operating table on Omaha Beach.

  Seeing Hoyte’s face again made Henry remember that day one year ago when he and some of the other black soldiers had spent their day off from boot camp in downtown Richmond. It had been cold out—not Chicago cold, but there had been a bite in the air. The movie theater had been warm, at least, and there had been room in the colored section, which wasn’t always the case. Most theaters reserved the balcony for black patrons, and once it was sold out, it was sold out, and black folks weren’t allowed to sit downstairs with the white folks. The movie hadn’t been all that bad either: a Hitchcock picture called Saboteur, with Robert Cummings and Priscilla Lane.

  It was when Henry and the other black soldiers had tried to return to camp that things had gone wrong. Fort Eustis had buses that ran back and forth to town, and Henry and the others had arrived in plenty of time to catch the last bus back to base.

  The bus was full, and they were sitting in the back waiting for it to leave when Lieutenant Hoyte led a team of military police on board and told Henry and his friends that they had to get off.

  “Why?” Henry wanted to know.

  “Because I said so, boy!” Hoyte spat.

  Henry and the others hadn’t thought that was a good enough reason, and had stayed put. This was the last bus back to camp that night. If they missed it, they’d technically be AWOL—“Absent Without Leave.” Even if they caught the first bus back to camp the next morning, they would be in line for punishment for not returning to base on time.

  Hoyte left the bus and came back with the local police, who threatened to throw them all in jail.

  A jailhouse in Richmond, Virginia, was nowhere a black man wanted to be, even for one night, and Henry and the other black soldiers reluctantly got off the bus. They didn’t know why they’d been kicked off in the first place until they got outside. Eight white soldiers had gotten there late and needed seats. They filed past Henry and the others and took the eight seats the black soldiers had just been forced to give up.

  “That’s not fair,” Henry told Lieutenant Hoyte. “We were here first. Now we’re going to get in trouble.”

  “Welcome to the real world,” Hoyte had said with a grin.

  So Henry and the other black soldiers had to spend the night on benches at the Richmond bus station. When they were finally able to catch a bus back to base the next morning, Lieutenant Hoyte had docked them a day’s pay for being late.

  Hoyte didn’t seem to care what color Henry’s skin was now though. He clutched desperately at Henry’s arm.

  “Doc,” he rasped. “Doc, you gotta help me. My foot—”

  Henry thought about all the ways he could get back at Richard Hoyte now. Tell him he didn’t have any morphine left, and that the lieutenant was just going to have to tough it out. Tell him, “Sorry, eight other wounded soldiers are more important than you are, and I have to take care of them first,” or “Sorry, Lieutenant, we’re gonna have to wait for a white medic to take care of you.”

  But Henry knew he wasn’t going to do any of those things. He was a medic, and he hoped to be a proper doctor one day. And doctors didn’t let other people suffer, no matter how much they didn’t like them.

  Henry cut away what was left of Hoyte’s right boot. Hoyte had stepped on a mine, and his foot was shredded. There was no way it could be saved.

  “I can save your life but not your foot,” Henry told him. “It’s got to come off.” It was the truth, and Henry took no pleasure in the telling.

  Hoyte sobbed but nodded his understanding.

  “I can’t do it here,” Henry explained. “I don’t have a saw. But I’ll give you something for the pain, and a tourniquet so you won’t bleed to death first.”

  Henry dug out a morphine syringe, and Hoyte grabbed his arm again.

  “Thank you, Corporal,” Hoyte said, tears streaming down his face. “Thank you for coming to get me. I was sure I was going to die out there. You saved my life.”

  “Corporal,” Hoyte had called him. Not “boy,” not “spade,” not “coon,” nor any of the other horrible racist slurs Henry had heard from Hoyte and dozens of other white soldiers since he’d joined the army. When he’d needed to, Hoyte had seen Henry as a soldier, as a medic, as a human being.

  Maybe, just maybe, Henry thought, this was a beginning. Maybe serving together, fighting together, living and suffering together, would make white people see black people as equals. Maybe, one day, white Americans and black Americans would eat together in the same restaurants. Maybe one day Henry would sit anywhere he wanted to sit in a movie theater, next to a white person, maybe, on the first floor. And maybe someday, the film they watched together would be a screwball comedy or an action adventure or a creepy monster movie with a black man as the main character, not the main character’s servant or piano player.

  Maybe one day, the white people of America would judge Henry by something other than the color of his skin.

  A mortar exploded outside the tent, and Henry heard someone call for a medic.

  Henry sighed. First they fixed Nazi Germany, then they fixed the United States.

  No, Henry thought. First I fix this foot.

  Henry left Hoyte in better shape than he’d found him: leg tied up to stop the blood loss, morphine injected for the pain, and lying comfortably beside Henry’s other patients in the makeshift recovery ward along the shell line. Unless a mortar landed on top of Henry’s Omaha General Hospital, Lieutenant Hoyte would live to tell the tale of the black medic who saved his life.

  BOOM. Another mortar exploded nearby, and Henry closed his eyes and shook his head. He’d come to dread the sound of mortars. Not so much because he was afraid one would hit him, but because they were almost always followed by the inevitable cry of “Medic! Medic!”

  Out Henry went again, into the bullets and explosions, picking his way through the dead in search of that one man who was wounded but still alive. Henry’s training taught him that even a man who didn’t call out for him might still be alive, might need his help to survive. But there were enough men yelling “Medic! Medic!” that he didn’t have time to check on the ones who were silent. Not yet.

  Henry shook his head and sighed. He didn’t detest his job—he was glad to bring comfort when and where he could. He just hated what he saw when he got there.

  The worst was when he found men who were still alive but wouldn’t be for long. The ones he knew he could do nothing for. The ones who wouldn’t even have stood much of a chance in a fully stocked emergency room at a hospital back in the States. As much as Henry wanted to, he couldn’t give them morphine to make their last moments painless; he had to keep what painkillers he had on hand for the men he could save. All he could do for a mortally wounded man was put a hand to his chest, whisper “I’m sorry, pal,” and move on.

  “Medic! Medic!”

  Henry stayed low, making sure his red cross armband and helmet were still visible. The call this time came from two white soldiers huddled behind one of the big X-shaped Czech hedgehogs that still dotted the beach. Henry went to his knees in front of them and diagnosed them visually. One of the two soldiers had burns on his right arm and the right side of his face. The other one had no obvious injuries. The burn victim Henry could treat here on the spot without getting him back to his tent.

  “You’re a medic?” the one with the burns asked.

  “I’m not running around on Omaha without a weapon for fun,” Henry told him. “What’s your name, soldier?”

  “Bourke.”

  “All right, Private Bourke. I’m going to treat your burns with boric acid and wrap you up, and you should be good to go. What’s your favorite movie?” Henry asked as he started to work.

  “My favorite movie?” Bourke said. “I don’t know. Buck Privates?”

  Abbott and Costello join the army. “That’s a good one,” Henry said. “How about you?” he asked the other so
ldier.

  “Any Western with—with John Wayne in it,” he rasped.

  Henry instantly looked up from what he was doing. There was something awfully wrong with the other man’s breathing, but he didn’t have any visible wounds.

  “What’s wrong with you, friend?” Henry asked.

  “Nothing,” the other soldier wheezed. “I’m just—worn out from running up through the surf.”

  That was entirely possible, Henry thought, but the way the man’s fingers were turning blue said otherwise.

  “Our Higgins boat got hit by a mortar,” Bourke said. “Blew the whole thing apart. Robbins here was the lucky one. He got plastered right in the chest with a big piece of boat, but it didn’t do nothing to him but knock him into the water. I got torched when the gasoline tank exploded.”

  “I don’t think he was so lucky,” Henry said. He finished putting the boric acid on Bourke’s burns but didn’t wrap them up yet. He turned to Robbins instead, running his hands along the man’s tunic and underneath the webbing pouches on his chest to see if he could find any open wounds.

  “I told you, Robbins wasn’t hurt,” Bourke said.

  Robbins’s fingers were still blue, and his breath still came short. Henry frowned. Private Robbins was showing all the symptoms of a sucking chest wound, but Henry couldn’t find a chest wound.

  Sucking chest wounds on the battlefield were common enough. You got one when something punched a hole in your chest—something like, say, a bullet—making a new pathway for air to get into your chest cavity. It was your chest cavity that was supposed to expand, not your lungs. The chest cavity pulled the outside of your lungs with it, filling your lungs with air pulled down your throat. But if something punctured your chest cavity, it could break that vacuum seal between your chest cavity and your lungs. Your chest would still move up and down like you were breathing, but your lungs would stay put and you’d suffocate. Worse, that space could fill up with air and actually compress your lungs, like exhaling underwater.

  To fix a sucking chest wound, you slapped something airtight over the hole to plug it, like patching a tire. A piece of nylon cut from a GI’s standard-issue rain poncho would do in a pinch. Henry had that.

  What he didn’t have was a hole.

  “Hey,” Bourke said. “Are you gonna wrap me up here, or what?”

  Henry’s hands went to the sides of Robbins’s chest, and Robbins yelped.

  There it is, Henry thought. Not a hole in his chest—there was still no external wound. But what about internal? What was it Bourke had said? Robbins was hit by shrapnel in the explosion. Robbins’s pain was right where a rib might have broken, which could easily have punctured his chest cavity. Then the air from his lung would have filled his chest cavity instead.

  Robbins didn’t have a sucking chest wound—he had a collapsed lung.

  “You’re gonna have to wait,” Henry told Bourke. “I need to operate on your friend right now.”

  Henry took a green canvas kit from his web belt and unrolled it on the sand. Tucked into the kit were scissors and a scalpel.

  “Whoa whoa whoa!” Robbins wheezed, scooting back from the knives.

  “Hey! What the hell are you doing?” said Bourke, moving next to his friend.

  “You have a collapsed lung,” Henry told Robbins. “I need to cut a hole in your side to release the air that’s built up inside your chest cavity.”

  “Cut a hole in my side?” Robbins cried, then coughed.

  The hole will close on itself, Henry thought. What have I got that can keep it open and still let air out?

  Did he still have a glass syringe? The army had been taking them out of their medical kits in favor of much smaller, disposable plastic morphine syringes.

  Bourke shoved Henry’s shoulder, snapping him out of his reverie.

  “Hey,” said Bourke. “You ain’t sticking no knife in Robbins. He’s just exhausted. We all are! You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “And you do?” Henry said. “Where’d you go to medical school?”

  Henry would never have said that to a white man back home, but he didn’t have time to mess around. Robbins could barely draw a breath. Why wouldn’t they just let him do his damn job?

  “I’ll give you morphine,” Henry told Robbins. “You won’t feel a thing.”

  Robbins still shook his head.

  “Medic! Medic!” Bourke called.

  Henry turned and saw who Bourke was calling to. Another medic was working his way from body to body in the surf, checking to see who was alive and who was dead.

  A white medic.

  The man hurried over and dropped to his knees behind the hedgehog.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked Henry. “Need an assist?”

  “This fool wants to stick a knife in my buddy!” Bourke told the white medic.

  The white medic did a quick appraisal of Robbins. He apparently came to the same conclusion that Henry first had—sucking chest wound—and immediately began feeling Robbins’s chest for a wound.

  The white medic frowned. “There’s no wound.”

  “See?” said Bourke. “Tell him he’s crazy.”

  “Internal,” Henry said.

  The white medic’s eyes went wide. “Broken rib?”

  “I think so,” said Henry.

  “You’ll definitely have to make an incision,” the other medic said. “What are you going to use to keep the hole open?”

  Henry held up an empty syringe he’d found in his kit. He’d pulled out the plunger and removed the needle, leaving a four-inch glass tube with a small hole on one side and a larger hole on the other.

  “Smart,” the white medic said.

  “Wait, I didn’t call you over to agree with him,” Bourke said.

  Storm clouds gathered on the white medic’s face. “You called me over here?” he said to Bourke. His voice took on a hard edge. “Private, I want you to take a good look around this beach. Do you see the explosions? The bullets? The bodies? Do you see the boats that are dumping hundreds more soldiers into this meat grinder every minute? There’s maybe one medic for every fifty wounded soldiers on this beach, one for every hundred, and you call me over to get a second opinion? What makes you think this man knows anything more or less about what he’s talking about than I do?”

  Bourke didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. They all knew why.

  Because Henry was black.

  “Now let me get back to my job, and let this man do his and save your buddy’s life,” the white medic said. “You’re lucky he caught it. I don’t think I would have.” He turned to Henry. “You need any help?”

  Henry shook his head. “Private Bourke’s gonna help me. Right?”

  Bourke nodded sheepishly and looked away.

  “Good luck out here,” the white medic told Henry.

  “You too,” Henry said. “And thanks.”

  It was a tricky procedure in the best of conditions, let alone with bullets and mortars and explosions all around them, but Henry made his incision and inserted the modified syringe tube while Bourke held Robbins in place. As soon as the syringe tube was all the way in, there was an audible hiss of air escaping, and Robbins took his first full deep breath in fifteen minutes. There was still a pretty good risk of infection, but the private wouldn’t have lived long enough to get an infection if Henry hadn’t done what he did.

  “All right, Robbins,” Henry said. “Your D-Day is over. When those boats start taking people back out and aren’t just dumping new soldiers on shore, you call a medic over and get yourself back to a hospital ship. They’ll clean you up and send you back to England, where you’ll get some R & R and a pretty Purple Heart for your troubles.”

  Henry finally put the bandages over Bourke’s burns. “You,” Henry said to Bourke, “you’re not done yet. But you’ve got to leave your buddy behind. He’s gonna be okay.”

  “I hear ya,” Bourke said. “Thanks, Doc. I’m sorry.”

  Henry rolled up his inst
rument kit. “Just go take out one of those German bunkers up there on the cliffs so they stop shooting at me, and we’ll be even.”

  “Medic! Medic!” someone cried.

  Bourke nodded, and Henry stood to run back out into the fray.

  The man calling for help lay in the stretch of sand between the shell line where Henry had set up his station and the seawall farther up the beach. That patch was miles wide, but only about ten yards deep, and it was murder from the German machine guns.

  Bullets sank into the sand all around Henry as he charged into the deadly no-man’s-land. He dropped to his knees beside the white soldier.

  “Medic,” the boy mumbled. “Medic.”

  “Yeah, yeah, that’s me,” Henry said.

  This patient was a big guy—well over six feet tall and a couple hundred pounds. Long stubbly face, dark, curly hair, and shrapnel in his leg.

  “What’s your name, kid?” Henry asked.

  “Medic,” the soldier moaned.

  “No, I’m the medic,” Henry said. “I’m going to patch you up and get you back in the fight. And yes, I already noticed I’m black.”

  Dee watched as a bullet hit an American soldier not two yards away from him. The soldier twisted in the sand, still mid-run, and collapsed like a marionette. He wasn’t alive long enough to call for a medic.

  Dee didn’t even flinch. He didn’t cry. He didn’t yell. He had seen something very much like that over and over and over again for the past few … few what? Minutes? Hours? How long had he been sitting here with his back against the seawall, listlessly watching the living nightmare on Omaha Beach?

  He tried to think. He had left the British transport ship during night and fog. Arrived on the beach at dawn. A lifetime ago. The sun was high in the cloudy sky now.

  Hours, then. That meant Dee had been here, hugging his arms to his chest, shivering even though he wasn’t cold, for hours.