For Love and Country

by Candace Waters

  “Lottie!” she heard a voice calling. “Lottie!”

  The sound gave her a strange feeling.

  She had just managed to pull free from the knot of men and had taken a few steps down the dim path toward the women’s barracks.

  But somehow the sound of her own name, said that way, made her feel as if she were suddenly back in Michigan, feeling the evening settle in around her on the shores of a lake, instead of on the cusp of one of the world’s great oceans.

  And it made her feel as if she were a different, younger woman.

  For an instant, it froze her in place.

  Then, before she had a chance to even see who had spoken, she was enveloped in a bear hug.

  As soon as the arms closed around her, she knew whose they were.

  Eugene had picked her up off her feet and was laughing joyfully.

  When he put her back down, she looked at him, dazed.

  “Oh, I can’t believe it. Your mother said you were stationed at Pearl Harbor,” he said, his breath short. “But when I checked into it, I heard the place was huge. I’m only here for a few hours before they ship us out. I never dreamed I’d actually get to see you.”

  Lottie was overwhelmed by a rush of warmth at seeing the man she’d cared about for so long.

  Here, in uniform, he suddenly looked different. She realized how tall he was compared to the men around him, and how handsome, with his dark hair and dark eyes. And there was something new about him, too. Although she couldn’t put her finger on exactly what it was, he reminded her of Robert, who had come to their engagement party in uniform so long ago. There was some new intention in the way Eugene carried himself. Some seriousness now, where before there had only been joking. She took a step forward, drawn to him.

  And then she remembered.

  The last time she’d seen him had been the night before their wedding. The wedding she’d run away from, without ever telling him goodbye to his face. And the Eugene standing before her was not the one she had always known. She’d made him a stranger, by leaving him.

  Who was he now? she wondered with alarm. Was he angry at her? Still hurting from what she’d done? Was there any chance at all that he might be as happy to see her as she was to see him?

  As all of these thoughts collided in her mind, Eugene pulled her away from the crowd, over to a low stone wall, about the right size to sit on, overlooking the water of the bay.

  “You’ll have to tell me everything,” he said. Then, as he looked over her greasy dungarees, his brow knit in confusion. “What have they done to you?” he asked.

  “They made me a mechanic,” Lottie said.

  Eugene threw back his head and laughed heartily. Then he spread his hands in surrender. “I guess you were right all along. Who am I to argue with the US government?”

  “I’m second-in-command of my shop,” Lottie said. “Since the captain shipped out.”

  “Of course you are,” Eugene said. “I wouldn’t expect anything less.”

  He stared at her fondly.

  “Eugene,” Lottie began. “I’m sorry. I—”

  Eugene gave his head a firm shake. “You don’t have anything to be sorry for,” he said. “You were right. I did some long, hard thinking after you left. My calendar had been cleared for a few weeks, for some reason,” he added with a grin. “So I had a lot of time to think.

  “And what you did inspired me to join up,” he went on. “I realized that I didn’t want to sit this war out, either. Part of me knew I was hiding behind Dad. I never asked him to get an exemption for me. But I never told him no, either. And I never felt quite right about that. I think some part of me always wanted to do something more, but I’d ignored it. Until you made that impossible.”

  He reached for her hand and squeezed it.

  It felt so familiar, so warm and tender, that tears sprang to Lottie’s eyes.

  “Hey,” Eugene said. “This is good news. It’s not supposed to make you cry.”

  Lottie took a deep breath.

  “I’m just so glad to see you,” Lottie said.

  “Me too,” Eugene told her. He glanced at the sky. “Maybe someone arranged it for us, better than we could have ourselves.”

  “Maybe,” Lottie said with a smile.

  “I wanted to tell you what it had all meant to me, before we shipped out,” Eugene said. “What you mean to me. No matter what happens, you helped me see what I really wanted in life.”

  Lottie didn’t know what to say. But before she needed to say anything, Eugene drew her into another hug. For the first time since she’d joined the Navy, Lottie felt as if she were back home, safe and known.

  But as they drew apart, someone shouted his name. “Grantham,” a voice bellowed in the darkness. “Where’d you go?”

  “Duty calls,” Eugene said.

  Lottie gave him one last squeeze. “You be careful,” she said.

  Eugene grinned at her. “Always,” he told her, and jogged up into the darkness to meet the men he’d trained with.

  Lottie sat on the stone wall, reeling.

  It had been a wonderful surprise to see Eugene. A weight she hadn’t even known she was carrying, of sorrow and guilt over their wedding, seemed to have slipped from her shoulders.

  But in its place was a new, nagging anxiety. It was one thing to risk her own life. It was another thing to know that Eugene—someone who had always been so precious to her—was now also at risk in the war.

  As she stood to walk back, finally, to her own barracks, she felt as if the ground had shifted in some permanent way beneath her feet.

  The words he’d used to thank her—you helped me see what I really wanted in life—also echoed in her mind.

  And as they did, they raised questions as well.

  That was why she had left their wedding behind. To look for something more than the life she’d known. And she’d definitely found something different.

  But was it what she wanted? she wondered, looking down at her grease-stained dungarees and thinking ahead to the next day, when she’d have to put on a brave front to the men in her own shop again.

  She felt a profound sense of purpose. She was doing her duty to her country. She was doing what was right. But what was waiting for her after the war—if this war ever ended? Lottie suddenly realized that she’d never thought about what came after.

  What, she wondered, walking down the dark trail, did she really want in life?

  Twenty-Three

  “LOOK AT THAT!” ONE of the men said, stabbing a grubby finger at the crumpled map that someone had spread out among the tools on a worktable in the hangar.

  The spot he was pointing at was Iwo Jima, a volcanic island surrounded by the sea of blue off Japan.

  Luke, Eugene, and thousands of other men on the base had already been gone for well over a week, headed toward the battle that was brewing there.

  Luke’s ship had steamed out of Pearl Harbor heading for Operation Detachment, a plan to capture the volcanic island and use it as a staging ground to invade Japan’s main islands. It would be a bit of payback for the damage the Japanese inflicted on Pearl Harbor.

  And according to the chatter that Lottie heard echoing through the women’s barracks, from the women who were privy to the communications channels, the US military was hoping a conquest in Japan would turn the tide of the war.

  In the shop, the men worked harder than Lottie had ever seen them work before, as if they were fighting some kind of battle themselves. Because they didn’t have the kind of volume they’d been working under in the days leading up to the deployment, they’d put the entire shop into spic-and-span shape—although Lottie dared anyone in the shop to make a joke about how cleaning up was women’s work.

  But they weren’t just putting things in order. They were getting things done. In a single day, earlier that week, they’d put three planes into fighting shape.

  “I think you broke a record today,” Cunningham had told her as the men filed out of the hangar th
at night.

  “No,” Lottie had said instantly, “we sent out seven in one day when Captain Woodward was here.”

  “When Captain Woodward was here,” Cunningham had said, raising an eyebrow, “we had five times as many men.”

  “The Japanese ain’t gonna give that up without a fight,” one of the other men said now, looking grimly down at the map.

  “You think any of those little islands are gonna take a crack at a dozen Allied battleships?” someone asked.

  “You never know,” Pickman said. “The Japanese are tough.”

  On any other American base, he might have been called unpatriotic. But this was Pearl Harbor. The statement brought a moment of sober silence.

  But the news of the morning was so exciting that nobody could stay quiet for long. According to the radio report, the Pacific fleet had finally launched their campaign. And they’d already swept onto Iwo Jima, where they were sealing their victory on land, as the men at Pearl Harbor spoke, a thousand miles away.

  “But look at this,” Hanson said, pointing his finger at another spot on the map.

  The eyes of all the men in the shop followed his grease-stained finger as it landed on the Japanese mainland. It was across an expanse of water. But not an uncrossable expanse.

  “How far does that put us from Japan?” someone asked.

  “Close enough,” Hanson answered.

  Around the circle, smiles broke out and heads began to shake.

  “We can do that,” someone said. “Easy.”

  Hanson grinned. “I think you and the big brass been doing some of the same math,” he said.

  “And it’ll be planes we put in shape,” Lottie said, “that make those runs.”

  A round of cheering broke out among the men. Several of them actually clapped Lottie on the back with so much enthusiasm that she had to steady herself against the impact.

  Except for Cunningham.

  He stood to the side, watching the excitement with a mild smile. But he made no move to celebrate himself.

  “You know something we don’t?” Lottie asked him.

  Cunningham gave his head a decisive shake no. “I just know war,” he said.

  “All right,” Lottie called. “Back to work. Back to work.”

  “What are you talking about?” Hanson said. “They won’t even have any firepower to throw at us. There won’t be any more planes to fix.”

  “Well,” Lottie said, “we’ve got planes now. And until we hear otherwise, we’re gonna fix them.”

  Hanson headed off to his station with a nod and a grin.

  The mood stayed buoyant all day in the shop, and even Lottie’s thoughts began to wander toward what had seemed unthinkable even a few days before—the idea that the war might be over one day soon.

  What would it mean to return to real life, after all this was over?

  What would her real life look like, without this war?

  What would Luke be like when he returned? Would he have shed some of the weight he always seemed to carry on his shoulders? Or would it be even heavier, with everything else he’d seen?

  Would the changes she saw in Eugene last—or would it be nothing more than jokes and games with him again?

  And what about her? This life she’d carved out for herself, bossing around a group of male mechanics on an island on the edge of the world—was it really anything more than a passing dream?

  Was there anywhere for her to go, after this great crisis of the war was over, other than back to exactly where she’d come from? She’d never fit there in the first place, trying to make small talk at garden parties and care about the pattern of the most recent dress. And with everything she’d seen and done now, it would be even more impossible.

  But what other kind of life could she build for herself?

  She walked back to the women’s barracks, lost in thought, wondering what Maggie’s take on today’s victory would be.

  But when she slipped in the door and began to make her way through the rows of bunks to her own, she realized quickly that the mood among the WAVES was surprisingly somber.

  All over the place, girls were standing around whispering in hushed voices. Lottie saw one who was actually crying, tears streaming down her cheeks, and not making any effort to wipe them away or dry them.

  She went right past her own bunk, heading for Maggie’s, a sick knot forming in her gut. Maggie’s work in the offices meant that she often knew more about what was going on in the rest of the world than most. She wasn’t in the habit of shooting off her mouth about any sensitive secrets. But it sure looked to Lottie like whatever was going on now wasn’t much of a secret anymore.

  She found Maggie sitting on her own bunk, hands on her knees, staring off into space. Maggie’s eyes were suspiciously bright—and she didn’t immediately greet Lottie with one of her trademark jokes. Something was wrong.

  Lottie sank down on the bed across from Maggie.

  “Maggie,” she said. “What’s going on?”

  “It looked good,” Maggie said, staring at something beyond Lottie, over her shoulder. “This morning. It looked like we won.”

  “Did we lose the battle?” Lottie asked.

  As Maggie processed the question, her face contorted as if she couldn’t get the answer to add up, no matter how hard she tried.

  Then she gave a smile that was so strange it was by far the most disturbing thing Lottie had seen all day, on any of the distressed faces of all the women she had passed on her way to Maggie.

  “We can’t lose now,” Maggie said. “We sank three of their battleships. Hundreds of planes. We landed more than seventy thousand men on that old rock.”

  “So it’s over,” Lottie said, breathing a sigh of relief.

  Maggie shook her head. “The Japanese don’t think so,” she said. “They’re falling back to caves from the volcano. It could take us weeks to clear them.”

  “But we can do it,” Lottie said.

  Maggie raised her hand and let it fall, as if that were the last thing in the world that mattered to her right now.

  Even though all the news she’d heard so far only seemed to be good, Lottie’s heart felt even more dread than it had when she first walked in.

  “Maggie,” she said, and reached for her friend’s hand.

  At the human touch, Maggie’s eyes finally met Lottie’s. When they did, tears began to slide down both of Maggie’s cheeks.

  “Maggie,” Lottie said, her voice low. “What did we lose?”

  “The men,” Maggie said, her voice dissolving into tears. “Our men.”

  Twenty-Four

  “NURSE,” THE MAN SAID again. “Nurse.”

  He’d called it out the last time Lottie walked past, carrying a wad of bandages down to the other end of the overflowing hospital ward. And now that she was returning, coming back down the seemingly endless rows of wounded men, in bed after bed, he called it again—even though she wasn’t a nurse. But she, like many of the women on the island, was spending all her spare time trying to ease the burden of caring for the huge number of wounded who continued to pour into the base.

  Lottie had thought that there wasn’t much that could tug at her heart anymore these days. Not because she didn’t care, but because her heart was so tired. She’d seen men crying out in pain and men missing limbs, men with their eyes bandaged who might never see again, men crying out for their mothers or wives or girlfriends, men who just sat and stared, men who cried in silence, over wounds that were all too obvious, or perhaps others that not even a doctor would be able to see.

  Lottie, like most of the women on the base, had been there for all of it—after working all day in the repair shop, which was overflowing now with planes that had been battered to bits in the fighting.

  Putting the planes back in action took up her days. But for all the other waking hours she still had between eating and sleeping, she volunteered what time she had in the wards with the wounded, just like many of the other WAVES. Hawaii was t
he closest US holding to the fighting in Japan, so a great portion of the wounded had been landed there.

  And the number of wounded was huge.

  The Allies had won the battle of Iwo Jima. But the Japanese, as Pickman had observed, were tough fighters. It had taken the Allies several weeks to declare victory. And in the meantime, the losses had been terrible.

  Over seventy thousand men had landed. Almost seven thousand of them had been killed in fighting. Over twenty-five thousand more were wounded.

  And to Lottie, it sometimes felt like every single one of them had landed here, back in Pearl Harbor.

  It was hard to feel anything, when there was so much suffering.

  But what struck her about this man was that he didn’t seem to really expect that anyone would answer him. He kept saying “Nurse,” again and again. But his eyes didn’t fix on anything as they roved the ward. And he didn’t say it as a command, or even a plea. It was almost a childlike tone, as if he were a boy who had just learned the word and was repeating it to himself, half wondering what it meant.

  Over the past few days, the women working in the wards had realized that if they stopped to talk to everyone, they’d never be able to help the ones in the most distress. And this man didn’t look to be in any kind of immediate danger. So under normal circumstances, Lottie would probably have walked on herself.

  But something in his tone made her stop. Maybe because the exhaustion and the loss of hope she could hear in his voice reminded her of something in herself.

  “Yes,” she said, going over to his bed.

  She hadn’t looked closely at the man before she stopped. You couldn’t afford to, not if you wanted to get anything done. And so much of what you saw when you looked closely, either at the men’s wounds or at their faces, was unbearable. So she’d gotten in the habit of keeping her eyes forward, on where she was going, not all the suffering around her.

  But now that she looked at the man, she could see that he wasn’t much more than a boy. Maybe not even as old as she was, with freckles on his pale face and a mop of straight brown hair over brown eyes.