Silver Stars

by Michael Grant

  15

  FRANGIE MARR—GELA BEACH, SICILY

  Most of Walter Green’s platoon is scattered, wounded, or dead, and since they will not immediately rush into battle, Frangie is loaned to the colored aid station, where she has worked feverishly since coming ashore.

  The doctor, when he finally arrives, is harried, annoyed, and imperious. He’s one of the few black doctors Frangie has ever seen, and she is drawn to the mystical power conferred by the letters “MD” that follow his name. He’s also a captain, but that doesn’t matter so much in a frontline aid station.

  “Gunshot, through and through, perforated intestine. We cleaned and bandaged, morphine,” Frangie says, nodding at an unconscious soldier lying on a stretcher on the ground. Moving on to a female corporal, Frangie says, “Broken tibia, simple fracture, we’ve splinted. This fellow here is, well, battle fatigue, I suppose. He almost drowned coming ashore, and his buddy took one in the chest. So . . . And over here we have multiple shrapnel fragments in his calves, morphine. That fellow’s lost two fingers loading a howitzer, he’s bandaged.”

  She goes on through her two dozen patients, calmly updating the doctor.

  Finally, the doctor says, “Good.” Just that. Just “Good.”

  His name is John Frame, Captain John Frame, US Army Reserves, now returned to extremely active duty through no fault of his own. Frangie would give her next meal to be able to sit down and throw questions at him for an hour, but he does not seem to be that sort of captain or doctor or person.

  “Okay,” Dr. Frame says brusquely. “Transport him, him, him, her, and those two. The rest we’ll keep for a while.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  There is paperwork to be done—this may be war, and this may be a combat zone, but the army is still the army and there are forms to be filled out. Outside the tent, out in the sunshine, Frangie finds a seat on an overturned food crate and props a clipboard on her knee.

  She painstakingly fills in the forms and arranges with the beach master to get her sick and wounded out to the ship designated for colored wounded.

  Then she gets back to work filling out papers on the dead. There are three of those. They will be picked up by graves registration, who will keep the bodies until the powers that be figure out just what to do with them.

  Not a job I would want to do, Frangie thinks. She’d rather be up on the line getting shot at than spend weeks, months, maybe even years trailing along behind the carnage identifying eviscerated, armless, or headless corpses.

  I’d go stark raving mad.

  Paperwork done, she returns to her ward to find the one nurse and Dr. Frame taking in a new patient. One glance tells her this will be another one for graves registration.

  The nurse, a kindly older white woman from Arkansas, says, “We’ve got this, honey lamb, go find yourself a cup of coffee.”

  “And bring one back for me,” the doctor mutters. “Two sugars.”

  Frangie does not hesitate. There is one lesson the army teaches that it wishes it wasn’t teaching: never volunteer. If the doctor and the nurse want her to take a break, then she will sure take a break.

  The beach is miles long, arcing toward the northeast and the town, and away to the south there is a long, low, stubby spit of land that Frangie vaguely believes marks a sort of rough boundary between the American sector and the Canadian and British areas.

  The entire beach is like an upset ant mound, with soldiers, jeeps, half-tracks, trucks, cannon, tanks, impromptu fuel dumps where fifty-five-gallon drums are piled, and DUKWs (inevitably called Ducks) driving straight up out of the water onto the land.

  “Wish I’d come ashore in one of those,” Frangie mutters.

  Daddy D, a nice man, a family man, his face split open like a melon struck with a hammer. That image joins others, many others. They’re piling up in her brain, those images: a foot blown off by a mine; a gut wound oozing bile; a compression injury from a man crushed between two trucks; a man ripped in half a dozen places by wood splinters from a crate hit by a mortar round; a self-administered morphine overdose; broken eardrums; one self-inflicted gunshot wound where a soldier shot off his little toe for a ticket home. And even now, even with all that is here before her, the memory of that poor, doomed white officer all the way back at Kasserine.

  All of that on top of the German typhus cases and gangrene and shrapnel injuries she had treated while being briefly held by the enemy. And all the mess that followed the battle in the Tunisian desert. And the usual maladies of garrison life: syphilis, gonorrhea, injuries related to drinking and fighting.

  Her head is already stuffed to overflowing with blood, brains, marrow, and human shit. Tears and screams.

  And the dead, of course. The dead.

  Frangie shields her eyes from the sun and sees for really the first time the vastness of the fleet. There are ships as far as the eye can see. Away north a destroyer is methodically firing. Away to the south there’s an air raid, Heinkels and Junkers strafing and bombing. The explosions sound tiny and weak from here, but Frangie knows better, having been beneath similar air raids herself, and having had to cope with their effects. Above the fleet is a flight of two RAF Spitfires racing in from Malta eager to pick off the German bombers.

  Frangie finds the mess tent and holds out her tin mess kit, which is then loaded with hot food—chicken-fried steak, green beans the color of her own uniform and even less fresh, mashed potatoes, a biscuit, and a lump of something gooey and red that is presumably cherry cobbler. She carries her food across the beach to a patch of sand partially shaded by a palm tree that leans precariously, having been knocked over by naval fire.

  Until the moment the first bite reaches her lips she’s had no idea she was so hungry. Now she shovels the food into her mouth, moaning with pleasure and washing it down with warm, brackish water from her canteen.

  She pulls paper and pen from her pocket and sets her pictures upright in the sand, like a small art gallery.

  Dear Mom and Dad and you too, Obal,

  She feels bad, as she always does, not addressing her big brother, Harder, as well. Harder has been exiled from the family for his membership in a youth group aligned with godless Communists. She hasn’t seen him in a long time since he’s living now in Chicago.

  Well, I guess it’s all in the news now, so I suppose the censors will let me tell you that I am in Sicily. It’s all pretty exciting, I can tell you. There are air raids and such, but of course I am not in any danger but quite safe.

  That last is a lie repeated in probably 90 percent of GI letters home. No one wants their loved ones to worry. Or maybe no one wants to admit even to themselves that they’re in real danger. But if it gives her mother a bit of relief, Frangie doesn’t mind the little white lie.

  I am helping boys who get hurt and learning a lot about doing that. I don’t even have a gun—sorry, Obal. My most dangerous weapon is probably the morphine I give to the wounded. I see tanks and cannon and so on, but all of that is sort of apart. Like when little kids are playing in a sandbox and they don’t really play together, just kind of play next to each other? Well, this is one big sandbox and the navy does what it has to do, and the army does what it has to do, and the medics and nurses and doctors, we do our duty too.

  That sounds a bit high and mighty somehow, but it’s too late to change it. And anyway, she is doing her duty, isn’t she? She’s saving boys’ and girls’ lives sometimes, though mostly she’s patching folks up to send them back into the fighting where they might get hurt worse the next time.

  They say the whole thing is going pretty well with—

  The sound of planes is familiar, so she doesn’t immediately dive for cover, not until she looks up and sees the familiar two-engine silhouette of a Heinkel, a dark cross against the sky.

  She gathers her things and scoots to the base of the palm tree, where the shallow, torn-up roots have left a slight depression. She hopes the tree won’t fall on her.

  The Heinkel comes in low,
met by a hail of small arms fire from the ground and chased by the antiaircraft guns of the navy. It drops two bombs, one of which falls near the aid station, sending up a cloud of yellow sand.

  Frangie tosses the food tray aside, scoops up her pictures and unfinished letter, and races back toward the aid station tent. It’s still standing, though it is coated with sand. A jeep being used to transport wounded men has been blown up pretty well.

  There will be wounded.

  “Sorry, Doctor,” she says, rushing breathlessly into the tent where soldiers are now hauling their wounded buddies. “I didn’t get coffee.”

  “Triage the incoming,” Dr. Frame snaps.

  Triage is the process of deciding who gets treated first. There are three categories. The “walking wounded” are low priority and will be patched up and sent back up to the line. The “hopeless” cases will be shot full of morphine and left to die.

  The category of focus is on those hurt too bad for a patch-and-release but who may just live if given prompt treatment. Over the next hour Frangie makes swift, terrible decisions, choosing those who will be treated and those who . . . who will be given morphine to ease their passage to the afterlife.

  Fortunately, only one soldier falls into this last category. His shirt has been torn open, revealing a mess of gray-blue intestines hanging from a jagged tear in his stomach. Red muscle, a layer of white fat, veins sticking out, arteries pumping weakly, skin ashen, draining the last of his blood away.

  He’s like one of the corpses she saw during training, one of the corpses after the medical students had been at it. The wounded soldier is a gruesome display of internal organs.

  “What’s your name, Sergeant?”

  “It’s me, Ma. It’s me, help me, Ma, help me, I got hurt . . .” His voice belongs to a little boy.

  She draws his dog tags out. Gordon, William T. Blood Type A.

  “You’re going to be okay, Gordon.”

  “Billy,” he gasps. He blinks at her, seems to realize that she is not his mother, but then a wave of agony rolls through him, twisting his face into a fright mask, tensing his limbs. He cries out, a weak sound.

  The smell of human feces billows up, and she sees the shit oozing from a tear in his pulsating colon.

  “You’re going to be okay, Billy,” she lies, and lays a wet cloth on his forehead. “The pain will stop soon. Shh. Shh.”

  “Ma? Ma? Mommy?”

  “It’s okay, Billy, it’s just a scratch, a million-dollar wound, you’re going home.”

  “Mommy? Mommy?”

  “Please, Jesus, help this boy!” Frangie cries out in frustration.

  “Mommy?” Softer this time as the morphine penetrates his consciousness, bringing a false peace.

  The white nurse, Lieutenant Tremayne, is at Frangie’s side. She takes Frangie’s arm and leads her away just a few feet and forces Frangie to look at her. “Listen, you,” Tremayne says, “you mustn’t do that. You understand? We’re here to help these boys, and if they hear you talking to Jesus they know they’re done for.”

  The tension in Billy T. Gordon’s body relaxes. Urine adds new stains to his trousers. There comes a long, slow, final, rattling exhalation.

  “He was done for when he came in,” Frangie says in monotone.

  “Listen to me. Hey! You’re a good medic, but you need to protect yourself, you hear me? I used to work the emergency room at Saint Vincent’s, and I’ve had people die in my arms. You have to show them love and care, but you can’t feel it. You’ll go crazy otherwise.”

  “A handsome, healthy young boy . . . ,” Frangie says. “Dies stinking like a sewer.”

  “And your tears don’t change that,” Tremayne says, and walks away.

  Frangie stands by the dead man, refusing to be disgusted by the smell, refusing to move away. Her eyes fill with tears, and she knows she can’t cry because she needs to be able to see clearly.

  This is all we are. A bag of guts that can be ripped open as easily as cutting into a sausage.

  There will be more. More and more, stretching away into her future.

  The tears spill down her cheeks, so it is through bleary eyes that Frangie sees Rio Richlin, her leg red from mid-thigh down to her boot, walking nonchalantly down the beach with another GI and half a dozen prisoners.

  16

  FRANGIE MARR AND RIO RICHLIN—GELA BEACH, SICILY

  “That should hold,” Frangie says, tying the last of her new stitches in Rio’s thigh.

  Rio sits with one pants leg rolled up above the wound. She and Frangie are on folding chairs, squashed down into the sand just outside the aid station. It’s fine for the diminutive medic, but not so comfortable for Rio, who has to sit splayed out with one leg propped on Frangie’s lap.

  “Now sit still and I’ll get a decent bandage on there.”

  “Thanks,” Rio says. “So. How’s the war treating you?”

  “Fine.”

  Rio says, “Yeah. Me too.”

  Both start laughing.

  Frangie worries that her laughter is somehow a betrayal of the wounded soldiers she’s treated. “I suppose it’s okay to laugh.”

  “I think it might be required,” Rio says darkly.

  “Just had a bad . . .” Frangie glances unconsciously at the cot, empty now. She’s fallen silent too long and tries to pass it off with a wave. “Nice kid. Bad death.”

  “If I get it, I want it to be pow, right through the head,” Rio says, and mimes the action of a bullet hitting her square in the forehead.

  “Well, that makes a lot less work for us,” Frangie says. She covers her mouth, shocked by her own callous-sounding reply.

  Rio’s face breaks open into a huge grin that starts off small and slow and turns into sunshine. Laughing, she says, “I wouldn’t want to put you to any trouble.”

  Frangie picks up the bantering tone. “You shouldn’t even be here, white girl, your aid station’s up the beach.”

  “Well . . . I reckon I could walk on up the beach, but if I do I’m sure to run into some noncom or officer who wants to give me some work to do.” Then, in a different tone she says, “I don’t suppose you’ve heard of any mail coming ashore?”

  “Nope. We only just got here.” She winds gauze around Rio’s leg. “You expecting something particular?”

  “Maybe.” Rio shrugs and her hand goes to the oilcloth packet in her pocket. She pulls it out, unfolds it, and takes out a photo, somewhat bent and ragged.

  Frangie leans around to take a look. “My, my, isn’t he handsome? You know . . . he looks a bit like Leslie Howard, but with less forehead.”

  Rio frowns and looks closely at the picture. “I can see that.”

  “Are you two—”

  “Just once,” Rio blurts guiltily. This causes Frangie to clarify that she was asking whether they were engaged, to which Rio says yes, of course, she knew that and they aren’t engaged, probably, she isn’t quite sure because the last time they were together they were interrupted by the need to hop on ships and sail to Sicily.

  Finally when the stammering dies down, Frangie says, “You know I’m a bit like a doctor—you can tell me anything and my mouth is a locked vault.”

  Rio nods distractedly, clearly flustered, embarrassed, and anxious to get away. But her leg is not quite done, and as she finishes the work, Frangie says, “He looks like a good sort of fellow.”

  “He is,” Rio says automatically. “He’s a pilot. He flies B-17s. He was able to get away and come for a quick visit and . . .”

  Frangie suppresses a smile, but also stifles a murmur of disapproval. “Yes. I got that.” The disapproval leaks out in her tone.

  “I’m barely eighteen and I’m already a fallen woman.”

  “I took a drink a while back,” Frangie confesses. Then adds, “We don’t believe in alcohol.”

  “Coloreds don’t drink?”

  “Baptists. Baptists don’t drink.”

  “Ah.” Rio looks deflated. “You’re the first person I’ve
told.”

  “Not your friend with the unusual name?”

  “Jenou? No, I . . .” Rio sighs and begins to roll her trouser leg down over the new bandage. “I feel like . . . Never mind. Thanks for the—”

  “I’ve noticed the men never want to talk about it. About the war, you know, not fornication, they’ll talk about fornication any day. But ask them about the war and they’ll flirt or talk about baseball. Everyone complains, of course—”

  “Of course,” Rio interjects, nodding.

  “But they never talk about what it was like before they managed to get hurt and end up here with me.”

  “My father is the same way. Even after he knew I was joining up he never talked about his war, not really. He just said to find a good sergeant and stick close, which was good advice, but I don’t really know what it was like for him in the first war.”

  “Men,” Frangie says.

  “Soldiers,” Rio counters.

  “Just because men clam up that doesn’t make it right or smart, does it?”

  Rio frowns. “I don’t know. I just know . . .” She’s silent for a long time, and Frangie waits, putting her gear away. “When someone asks me about it, I guess I just don’t want to talk about it.”

  “You admit to being seduced, but you can’t talk about the war?”

  “I guess that doesn’t make sense, does it? Maybe I’m not as ashamed as I should be of having . . . you know. I mean, I’m hardly the first girl to lose her virginity before marriage. But at the time . . .” She trails off.

  “Does that mean you are ashamed of what you do as a soldier?”

  “No! No, it’s just that I’ve always known I would . . . you know . . . have s-e-x. I pictured it happening after I was married, and in some place more romantic than a cheap hotel room in Tunis . . . I pictured it being more . . . important . . . than it felt.”

  “The war makes other things seem small.”

  “Oh, fug the war!” Rio says with sudden anger. Then, abashed, “Look at my language! I never, ever even thought that word before.”