Blame the Dead

by Ed Ruggero

  One of the enlisted MPs climbed up onto the back of the nearest truck and retrieved Lindner’s duffle, handed it down to him.

  “You’re going to want to hang on to this, Colonel,” the American said. “You might not be going anywhere after all.”

  “Thank you,” Lindner said. “Yes, you might be right.”

  * * *

  Colonel Walter Boone usually found surgery completely engrossing. When he opened up a human body, he lost his sense of time, frequently did not notice what was going on in the theater outside the circle of light and gloved hands that were there to help him work. He was consumed.

  That was not the case today.

  Boone was operating inside the only surgical tent that had not yet been broken down for the hospital’s move forward. He looked up every few seconds, expecting to see Harkins and that captain, the deputy provost. He had done everything he could think of to get Harkins off his trail, to the point of shipping out nurses and even getting the hospital moving for its jump. Harkins had been taken off the case by the provost himself, should be on his way back to his own MP unit by now.

  But the man didn’t know when to quit.

  It would take a day or so for Lindner to be off the island, and until then Boone could not rest.

  A voice at his elbow was talking to him. Boone looked over, nodded.

  “Ready, sir?”

  The orderlies put a patient on the table and Boone looked down, saw the shrapnel wounds to the face, neck, and shoulders. He suddenly pictured Stephenson, the terrible maw of his death wound, the blood-matted hair. Boone shook his head to clear it, looked up, scanned the room once again for Harkins, then looked back at his hands. He began to probe the wounds closest to the patient’s eyes.

  He heard someone saying, “Doctor, Doctor, Doctor.” One of the nurses was speaking to him.

  “What?”

  “We should check for other wounds.”

  “Yes. Right.”

  It was Donnelly, her eyes above the mask tired, deep blue. She stepped close, nudging him out of the way, then she and a nurse on the opposite side of the table reached under the patient with their hands, sweeping his torso, his legs, checking for other wounds. A patient could bleed out of a puncture in his back while a surgeon concentrated on an open chest.

  “Ready,” Donnelly said.

  Boone scanned the other people at the table. He could identify every person on the surgical team by looking at the eyes above the mask. Everyone here was supposed to be here. No Harkins.

  Boone nodded at a surgical orderly, who came closer. “Go find out if the German POWs are gone yet.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  A few of the people around the table exchanged looks. Why did Boone need this information at this particular moment?

  “Right,” Boone said again. He looked down at the GI before him, whose breath was rapid and shallow. Boone could see a gash that started just above the man’s collarbone and stretched up and back, an angry red crescent, toward the nape of his neck. Whatever hot metal had done that had just missed the jugular.

  “This one’s been lucky,” he said. “Let’s see if we can keep his streak going.”

  * * *

  Moira Ronan stepped up to the scrub station, sank her hands in the hot water bath, reached for the brush. On the other side of the washstand, an orderly she’d worked with for months, a Hispanic kid from Southern California, saw her and nodded. Everyone knew she’d been AWOL. Everyone probably knew about her and Colianno. In the gossip hothouse that was this small command, more than a few people probably knew that she’d accused Boone of shooting Drake, knew, even, the terrible secret she’d kept to herself. The whole mess exhausted her.

  “Lieutenant,” the orderly, a corporal named Alejo, said. “Good to see you. We really need you.”

  “Thanks,” Ronan said. She’d been right to come back.

  She scrubbed the backs of her hands, her fingernails sore where she’d gnawed them for days. Then her wrists and forearms, her skin going red from the hot water. She’d been a surgical nurse for three years, but had never wanted so badly to be clean.

  When she finished, Alejo handed her a towel.

  “There’s a couple of docs operating under a tent fly we set up on the duckboards where the mess tent used to be.”

  “How are we handling the rush?” Ronan asked.

  “Not good,” Alejo said. “Triage is overwhelmed, I think. We’re down a couple of surgeons and nurses, and this is the most we’ve seen at one time since the beaches.”

  “Where’s Nurse Donnelly?”

  “Assisting in Surgical One. Don’t go in there. She’s with the Old Man.”

  Boone.

  Ronan pulled on her gloves, then allowed Alejo to cover her hands with another sterile towel so she could walk the dusty few yards to where a surgical team was operating. The corporal followed her.

  “Have you seen … do you know who Lieutenant Harkins is?”

  “Yes, ma’am. And no, I haven’t seen him. We all thought he got chased out of here this morning. His driver even got arrested.”

  Ronan stopped. “What? Why?”

  “Don’t know. A bunch of officers went into Colonel Boone’s tent, then one of them came out and, next thing you know, an MP is disarming your friend … I mean the lieutenant’s driver. I heard they took him to Seventh Army stockade.”

  They walked up on a surgical team just as they were closing the patient’s chest. Doctor Trennely, the sweet, homely man the nurses called Good Guy, was the lead. He looked up, saw Ronan—who was not yet wearing a mask—and wiggled his eyebrows in a Groucho Marx imitation or something like Where the hell have you been?

  “Next patient,” Trennely said, turning so that a nurse could help him change gloves. The orderlies were ready with another GI on a stretcher, this one with his head wrapped in dirty bandages, just a tiny breathing hole where his nose should be.

  “You ready?” Trennely asked her.

  “Ready, Doctor,” she said. Back with her people, with her patients, in her element, Stephenson and Boone be damned.

  “Jump in here, then.”

  * * *

  Alice Haus, the former swimmer who daydreamed about bedding Doctor Lindner, tapped Donnelly on the shoulder.

  “Triage is falling apart,” Haus said. “You’d better go out and see what can be done.”

  “OK,” Donnelly said, stepping back and allowing Haus to take her place at Boone’s operating table. Then, lowering her voice and leaning close to her friend’s ear, “Boone is falling apart, too. Keep an eye on him so he doesn’t kill somebody.”

  The triage area was set up on the duckboards where the nurses’ sleeping tent had stood until that morning. The patients were in the sun, and several orderlies were hurrying to set up a screen, assisted by some of the walking wounded who could wait for treatment.

  A skinny kid in tanker’s overalls stood holding a tent pole while two orderlies staked guy lines. The GI, who had the single stripe of a private inked onto his right sleeve, wavered a bit on his feet and smiled at Donnelly.

  “Lieutenant,” he said. There was something wrong with his voice. Could he be drunk? His left arm was in a sling; bandages visible at the end.

  “How’s the arm?” Donnelly asked.

  Then she saw the morphine syrette dangling from his collar, a big numeral 1 written on his forehead in charcoal. A medic had given him an injection for pain. He was drugged, but on his feet.

  “The arm?” he asked, looking down, peering inside the sling. “Shorter.”

  He pulled the sling back to reveal the lower part of his left arm, where his hand was missing. The stump was neatly wrapped, though not by a surgeon, and tied off with a tourniquet.

  “Come with me, soldier,” she said.

  Donnelly walked the GI to a cluster of stretchers where two nurses, Melbourne and Savio, were checking wounds, filling out casualty tags, rebandaging. Donnelly could see right away that there was a massive backup. She sat
the wounded tanker down on an empty stretcher and told him to wait.

  “You’re swamped,” she said to her friends.

  “Swamped would be an improvement,” Melbourne said. “We’re way past that, now. Patients are sliding back to expectant.”

  This meant that the flow of casualties was overwhelming what the hospital could handle. Men who could survive if they got help soon were not going to make it. “Expectant” meant expected to die.

  Behind Melbourne, Donnelly saw a sergeant named Victor working to organize the efforts of the orderlies, hoping to keep the cases flowing smoothly to the operating theaters. Victor had inherited the job that would have belonged to Drake. But Drake was dead and Victor, try as he might, wasn’t up to the task, and now men who might be saved would probably die within a few feet of an operating table.

  “My friend here,” Donnelly said, pointing at the tanker. Savio stood and walked to the man.

  “I’m guessing traumatic amputation.”

  “I got it,” Savio said. She took the young soldier by his remaining hand and led him to a wooden pallet, had him sit. The private still had a dreamy, morphine look.

  Donnelly looked around. The triage area was set up in a sun-beaten rectangle of dirt created by the tents that were still standing. She did a quick inventory of the orderlies on hand: a handful of privates and not enough sergeants. Today everyone was going to have to do more.

  “Morrison, Elliott, Dabner,” she said, calling the three steadiest men to her. Morrison, pale and sweating, was probably fighting malaria.

  “We need a bigger footprint,” she said. “More space between the groups.”

  The three young men looked around, bone-tired and struggling to make sense of her directions.

  “Move the ambulatory over there,” Donnelly said, pointing.

  They hesitated, and she flashed to her first mass casualty: a year out of her starched white nursing school uniform and she’d been dropped on a beach that smelled of cordite and burned flesh, men screaming around her, pain and blood and shredded limbs. She had stumbled badly, had thought about it over many long nights since.

  The men looked at her, exhausted but eager to do something. She lowered her voice, though it was doubtful anyone could overhear her amid all the shouts and moans.

  “Look, we’re going to save as many as we can today, but that isn’t going to be everyone. You’re going to have to make decisions normally made by First Sergeant Drake or some more senior noncom, because we’re shorthanded. They’re not here, so I need you.”

  She paused, breathed, hands on her hips.

  “Do your best, and I’ll back up whatever call you make.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Elliott said.

  “Thank you, Lieutenant,” Morrison said.

  Forty-five minutes after her sorry excuse for a pep talk, Donnelly and the three orderlies had gotten a handle on the flow of wounded. The men had stepped up because she’d asked them to. They were magnificent, and what she felt for them could only be described as love.

  Donnelly was watching Morrison when she heard a man cry out. To her right a soldier had elbowed himself nearly upright on his stretcher, had pulled bandages off his lower abdomen, his groin. He was looking at the wound that might change his life.

  “Jesus Christ! No, fuck, no!”

  Donnelly stepped over two stretchers to move toward the GI, a second lieutenant. She was just about to call out when the wounded man pulled a pistol from a pile of gear beside him and put it to his head.

  “Stop!”

  He hesitated, just a heartbeat, his eyes clicking toward her, and Donnelly dove for him, knocked the pistol out of his hand, grabbed it from the dirt before he could pick it up again. She had landed on his lap, on the bloody bandages he’d opened.

  “That fucking hurts!” He pushed her away with one arm.

  “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

  Donnelly scrambled to all fours, lifted herself off the man, off his wounds. She stood up, dropped the magazine from the pistol and stuck it in her front trouser pocket, cleared the chamber and jammed the weapon into her belt at the small of her back.

  The GI fell back, moaning. “Why did you stop me?”

  Donnelly looked down at the man. He was young, twenty or twenty-one. His trousers were gone, most of his shirt and his GI shoes had been scorched off, and his feet looked like hamburger. Donnelly figured he’d stepped on a mine.

  His lower abdomen was wrapped and the bandages had bled through. Donnelly checked the stretcher; there was no pool of blood—a good sign—so the bleeding may have stopped. She knelt, lowered her voice to give the distraught soldier the only privacy he would get in this crowded circle of hell.

  “May I look?”

  The lieutenant was on his back, left arm over his eyes, which were closed. The grime on his face was streaked with sweat, maybe tears.

  He barely whispered, “Nothing left to see.”

  Donnelly gently lifted the layers of bandages. She pulled surgical scissors from a pocket on her sleeve, cut from his navel toward his groin, gingerly, careful not to disturb whatever horror lay beneath. The wounded man sucked his teeth.

  “What’s your name?” Donnelly asked.

  “Norenger. Jack Norenger.”

  “Have you had morphine?”

  “Just one syrette. Can you get me five or six more? That should do the trick.”

  An orderly whose name she forgot stepped up behind her, his shadow falling on the wounded man. Donnelly turned her body to shield the lieutenant from view.

  “Need help?” the orderly asked.

  “I’ll call you if I do, thanks.”

  She peeled back the bandages where she’d cut them.

  A medic, probably the first to treat Norenger, had poured sulfa powder on the wound, had stuffed rolled bandages into the space between the top of his left leg and his abdomen, the place where runners pack ice when they pull a groin muscle. Donnelly lifted the roll and looked below; there was a two-inch-deep cavity there.

  “Well?” Norenger asked.

  The unknown medic had covered Norenger’s penis and testicles with several layers of gauze.

  “Is it still there?”

  Donnelly looked at Norenger’s face, still covered with his arm. The man had just tried to shoot himself after looking at his wound. She wasn’t hopeful about what she’d find.

  She gently tugged the gauze, which stuck to the dried blood. The glans penis had flowered out, was much bigger than it should be and shot through with dirt, but it was still there.

  “Yes, it’s still there,” Donnelly said.

  “But it’s all fucked up.”

  Donnelly looked at Norenger’s legs. The energy from the mine he’d tripped had shot upward, blowing the muscle and flesh away from the long bones of the leg. The blast carried with it dirt and shrapnel and God knew what bacteria, which was then covered and encased when the muscle closed back over the bone. The same upward blast had ballooned the foreskin, which was pierced in several places.

  She’d learned about these effects while assisting Doctor Lindner, had seen him work for hours to clean these terrible wounds in the hopes of saving a future for—as he once put it—“some virginal teenager.”

  “I know who can help you,” Donnelly told Norenger. “I’ve seen worse, and we have a doc here who can help.”

  Norenger dropped his arm, lifted just his head so he could look directly at her. “You’re lying to me so I won’t shoot myself.”

  “No. There’s a doc here, a urologist, and I’ve worked with him. He’s a genius. I’ll go find him, but you’ve got to promise you won’t try anything stupid. I’m taking your pistol. No more morphine.”

  Donnelly replaced the bandages, covering the horror that, this time yesterday, had been part of a healthy young man.

  Donnelly sidled closer to the GI so that their faces were close. He smelled like a fire, like a chemical burn. “You married?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “Engag
ed. But we’ve never … I’ve never even…”

  “It’s OK,” she said, touching his arm, squeezing his hand. “You’ve got plenty to live for. You’re going to come through this.”

  “Everything intact?”

  “As good as new.”

  “OK,” the lieutenant said, leaning back again. “I won’t shoot myself. At least until you get back with this doctor.”

  Donnelly stood, spotted the orderly who’d offered to help her. Reister, she remembered.

  “Hey,” she called. “Reister. Over here.”

  The private threaded his way around some stretchers as Donnelly moved toward him.

  “I want you to keep an eye on that lieutenant, the one I was just examining, OK?”

  “Sure thing, Lieutenant.”

  “He just tried to shoot himself, but I took his gun and made him promise to wait until I got help.”

  “Holy shit,” Reister said. “I saw all the bandages across his groin.”

  “Yeah. Do you know where Doctor Lindner is? Have you seen him?”

  “I think I saw him with the rest of the POWs, marching out the front gate about an hour ago. They’re getting sent to the States, aren’t they?”

  “They were on foot?”

  “Maybe they were meeting some trucks outside the compound,” Reister said.

  “OK, OK.”

  Donnelly took a step toward the front gate, dodging a pile of bloody bandages. When she moved, Norenger’s pistol slipped out of her waistband and fell to the ground. She picked it up, stuck it in the front of her trousers, desperado style.

  “His name’s Norenger. Make sure he doesn’t have any other weapons.”

  Reister was looking at something over her shoulder, distracted. Donnelly popped him on the chest with the flat of her hand, leaned close and raised her voice. “He tried to kill himself. That’s not the business we’re in. Don’t let it happen, you hear me?”

  Reister, startled, said, “Yes, ma’am.”

  Donnelly turned and jogged toward the front gate, a mental picture of Norenger’s shattered penis hovering before her.

  “Poor bastard,” she said.