by Dean Hughes
Maybe half an hour passed, and the room was silent, but Alex heard very little of the snoring and deep breathing he had usually known in this room. He was confident he wasn’t waking the men when he finally said, “Okay, Ernst, go throw a grenade. Put the poor guy out of his misery.”
Ernst got up without saying a word, and he thumped down the stairs. It was a couple of minutes before the grenade exploded. After, no one in the room moved. But the desperate breathing continued. Ernst had obviously waited and listened, even though he was in a dangerous spot. Moments later, another explosion sounded, and this time Alex waited, his own breath holding. And he heard nothing.
“That did it,” Curtis whispered.
Ernst returned before long, and he lay down. “I’d want someone to do that for me,” he said, and Alex was struck by the kindness in the boy’s voice.
But Alex still lay awake. Every time he shut his eyes, he saw the same image: Hartley, his face full of agony, that thick sliver of steel sticking out of his forehead, blood pumping from around it. And he kept hearing the thud, the sound when Pugmire had taken that bullet in the back. There were other pictures too: his friend Duncan, with that jagged cut across his throat; Howie, face down in the snow.
Alex didn’t sleep much all night. And he didn’t feel like eating in the morning. It was almost 0900 when Captain Summers drove up to the OP in a jeep. He came inside and said, “Thomas, I need to talk to you. Step outside with me.”
And then, once outside, Summers said, “Great job on that patrol last night. That younger German talked a blue streak. We know what they’ve got over there now—troops, guns, tanks, everything—and we learned a lot about the fortifications in the Siegfried Line along this sector. When we cross the Moder and attack that line, we’re going to be a lot better off.”
“We lost two men,” Alex said.
“I know that. But we saved a whole lot more. We can’t go on the attack without that kind of information.”
Alex nodded. He hoped that was true. “Can I tell the men that? Some of them are pretty upset.”
“Of course you can tell them. But Thomas, we’re pulling you out of here.”
“Where are we going?”
“Not your squad. Just you.”
“What do you mean?”
“The army is looking for German speakers. All kinds of intelligence information is being gathered from inside Germany now, and it all has to be interpreted. I don’t know what you’ll be doing exactly, but you’ll get some training, and then an assignment.”
“I’d rather stay, Captain. I don’t want to leave my men.”
Summers laughed. “I remember back in the states, about a hundred years ago, you told me that you didn’t want to be a squad leader. You wanted to get into Intelligence so you wouldn’t have to kill anyone.”
Alex knew that, but he also knew how he felt now. “I want to stay with these men. The young guys need someone experienced to get them through.”
“Bentley knows the ropes. So does Pozernac.”
“Neither one is quite right to lead the squad, Captain. I want to stay. I’m serious.”
“I know that. But it’s not your choice. You’re being promoted to second lieutenant—effective immediately. That’s a battlefield commission, one of the greatest honors that can come to a soldier.”
“Please don’t do this.”
“Get your gear.”
Alex stood his ground, silent for a time. But there was nothing he could do. He walked inside, and he found Curtis. “They’re pulling me out,” he said. “Sending me to some kind of Intelligence school.”
Curtis stared at Alex as though he hadn’t understood.
“I’m sorry. They won’t give me a choice.”
Curtis was one guy who never seemed to change, never seemed to look any older. But when tears began to drop onto his cheeks, he looked like a little boy.
Chapter 7
David Stinson called Bobbi on a Saturday afternoon. An hour later they were sitting next to one another on a bus, on their way to Honolulu, and Bobbi was feeling guilty every time his elbow touched hers. She didn’t think Richard would mind her spending this bit of time with David. What troubled her was the turmoil she was feeling, the excitement she kept trying not to show. She didn’t want to give David the wrong idea.
She walked with him in town and took him to the Iolani Palace. Then they caught another bus to the beach at Waikiki. David took off his shoes, rolled up his uniform trousers, and waded into the water. Bobbi thought that surely must be “against regulations” or “out of uniform,” but David didn’t care. And when he strolled too deep and got caught in a wave, he didn’t seem to mind that he got wet all the way to the waist. “Come on in!” he kept shouting back to Bobbi, and finally she took off her sandals and let the water run over her feet a little, but she was wearing a pretty white skirt and didn’t want to get it wet. Still, she laughed at David as he splashed about, daring the waves, and then running from them.
“This is great,” he said, when he finally walked out of the water. “I haven’t played in the ocean since I was a little kid.”
He was pulling his stockings from his pockets, so Bobbi handed him his shoes. “We should have planned better,” she said. “We could have brought our swim suits.” But she had thought of that earlier and decided not to suggest it. The last time she had gone swimming, she had been with Richard.
“Naw. That was enough. I’ll be back in the water again before long. Only next time I’ll be charging onto some beach—with bullets flying past my ear. Now that’s what I call excitement.”
“Is that really what you’re headed for?” Bobbi asked.
“Sure. That’s what we heroes do. And it doesn’t scare us, either. We whistle ‘The Marine’s Hymn’ the whole time.”
“Keep your head down while you’re whistling. Okay?” Without exactly meaning to, she had touched his arm, and she saw him react, take her in with his eyes the way he had always done back when she was his student. She had always loved that, the longing for her she felt from him. Richard had told her that he wanted her, but never with the passion she felt from David.
She turned away. “Should we go get something to eat?” she asked.
But he was looking down the beach, toward Diamond Head. He suddenly threw his arms out, as if to reach wide enough to grasp it all. “At least I got to see this. The Marine Corps gave me that much. It’s almost worth the price.” Bobbi thought his voice was a little loud. People on the beach were turning to look at him, smiling. “I want to eat some poi and roast pig and—hey, where can we find a luau?”
“I know a restaurant that serves real Hawaiian food, but you can’t go there with your pants all wet. It’s a fancy place.”
“Okay. Then I’ll dry off. Let’s sit down somewhere.”
Bobbi knew a bench near the beach. It was a place where she had often sat with Richard, but she took David there now, and the two sat where they could look out over the ocean, see the swimmers and watch the sailboats on the water.
David was still taking it all in. “Look at the color of the ocean out there,” he said. “The Atlantic is never blue-green like that, at least not where I used to see it.”
“I’ve been here so long that I forget how beautiful it is,” Bobbi said. “You make me see it all over again.”
He turned to her, rested his hand on her shoulder. “When I found out I was coming here, I decided it was fate—that the cosmos wanted me to see you again.”
“Another few days and I would have been gone.”
“I know. It is fate.”
She could see in his face, in those fervent green eyes, that he was serious, at least to some degree, and she worried about the conversation that would follow.
“Bobbi, I made a big mistake. I can’t find anyone else like you, and I want someone to share my life with. I’m not happy. I haven’t been happy since that day you got on the train in Chicago.”
“It was the right thing, David.”
“I’m not so sure about that anymore. And I’m not entirely convinced that you are either.”
“David, don’t do this. I need to make up my own mind.”
“Are you saying that your mind isn’t made up?”
“No. It is. I’m just not quite sure about the future, the way things are right now. Richard is so hard to read sometimes.”
“Okay. I’m just going to say this, and then I’ll slip out of your life again.” He took hold of her hand. “If you go home and he turns out to be something less than you think he is—and if you’re still single when I come home—will you think about our giving it one more try?”
“David, our problem hasn’t gone away. You told me that my church was the center of who I am—that you would rob me of that if we got married. That’s still true, however much it hurt me at the time to hear it.”
“Maybe I’ll become a believer after all. You know what they say about atheists in foxholes.” He tried to laugh.
“I wish you could believe, David.”
“Do you mean that?”
“I only mean that it’s what you need. It would make you so much happier.”
“Okay, here’s the truth. I have been praying. I don’t believe in it, but I want to believe in something—just because I’ve felt so empty lately. I’m a skeptic at heart, and I can hardly keep a straight face when I pray, but something sent me here before you left. Believing in fate is something like believing in God, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know. You used to tell me you believed in God in your own way.”
“Sure. But that’s like saying I believe sap rises in the trees each spring. Call it Mother Nature, or whatever you will, I only believe some force is at work in the world. I also know what will happen if a Japanese gentleman, of the Shinto faith, shoots his rifle at me, a man of Christian upbringing. If his aim is good—no matter who is praying for what—I’m going to die.”
“I’ve had some experiences in the last year that make me more sure than ever that prayer works, David.”
“Well . . . maybe I could live on your faith—as long as I got the rest of you to go with it.”
Tears were suddenly on his cheeks, and Bobbi hadn’t expected that. She gripped his hand tighter. “I’ll pray for you,” she said.
“Please do,” he told her. “I can almost believe that might make a difference.”
“You shouldn’t be a soldier, David. You’re the last person I know who should shoot at anyone.”
“No. I can do it. You don’t know all the sides of me.” He looked back out toward the ocean. “I’m not asking anything of you, Bobbi. That wouldn’t be fair. But I’m pretty scared. Maybe I’m just trying to cling to something. I want to go into battle with a fantasy in my head. You know, that I’ll come marching home, and you’ll still be there—and we can work something out.”
“David, I am planning to marry Richard. You have to know that.”
“I do know it.” He turned back toward her and gave her a little slap on the back—like a buddy. “But it’s my fantasy—so I can dream up anything I want. Hey, let’s get a hamburger. I don’t want to wait to dry.”
So that’s what they did. And after, they walked again before they took the bus back to the base. Then he left. He didn’t try to take her in his arms. He merely bent toward her and kissed her on the cheek, and then he walked away. Bobbi, by then, was wishing that he had never come. She didn’t need this confusion, and she feared she had only opened an old wound for David.
On Sunday Bobbi spoke in sacrament meeting. She thanked the members of her ward for her experience in Hawaii. “I have learned so much from you,” she told them. “You may not see a great change in me outwardly, but I feel different. I would like to find joy in life and not worry about the things I can’t control—as Sister Nuanunu has tried to teach me. I’m not good at that, but at least I know it’s the better way.”
After the meeting, virtually everyone took turns hugging her—men and women and all the kids. She not only accepted the embraces, but she also enjoyed them, hugged the people back, and she wept with all these dear friends who told her how much they loved her.
When Bobbi finally left, she took the bus to Ishi’s house, along with Ishi and her children and Afton and Sam. It was not an easy time for any of them. They ate dinner together and tried to laugh, but after, when Bobbi was getting ready to go, Ishi clung to her and said, “You’ve gotten me through this terrible time. I don’t know how I’ll get by without you now.”
“Oh, Ishi, the war in Europe can’t last much longer. Daniel will come home before long, and then you’ll have your life back.”
“We’ve said that for such a long time. It’s hard for me to believe it really will happen.”
“I know. But let’s not worry so much. I mean it when I say I’m going to try to be better about that.”
Ishi laughed, with tears still in her eyes. And Bobbi cried all the more when she hugged and kissed Lily and David. And they cried too. Little Lily clung to Bobbi and kept saying, “You’re my best friend, my very best friend.”
Bobbi knelt and told her, “We’ll still be friends. We always will be.” But it was a weak truth, if true at all, and certainly Lily knew it.
Sam and Afton drove Bobbi back to the base and dropped her off. Bobbi did her final packing, but it all went much faster than she expected, and suddenly, when she had nothing else to do, her loneliness struck her full force. She had been so homesick when she had first come here, and now she was hardly sure where home was. She wished she could finish out the war in this little cubicle of a room with Afton and the things she knew.
Bobbi walked outside into the soft, moist warmth of the Hawaiian evening. She knew the time she had spent here, even with the war and the worry, was a lovely addition to her life. She felt, a little to her own surprise, that almost everything she knew, she had learned here.
She walked around the base, collecting images she wanted to store in her mind and take with her, even stopped by the hospital to say good-bye to the nurses on duty and a few patients she had grown close to. When she returned to her room, Afton was there. The two sat on their beds, across from one another. “They’re going to put another girl in here, Bobbi,” Afton said. “Golly, I just can’t stand to think of it.”
“You’ll get to know her. You’ll like her.”
“It won’t be the same. She’ll never understand me the way you do.”
“At least she won’t try to mother you.”
“I could use a mom right now.”
Bobbi knew what she meant. Afton had finally written to her parents that she was serious about her relationship with Sam. She had gotten back a frantic letter from her father. It was full of warnings about interracial marriage. “Come home first,” he had pleaded. “You’ve lost touch with how things are here. Don’t do anything until you’ve had some time back here with us.”
“What are you going to do, Afton?”
“We’re going to get married.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. I want to write my parents again and tell them what this means to me. I’d like to have their blessing, but if they won’t give it, I’m going to marry him anyway.”
“I think Sam might make a better roommate than I’ve been.”
Afton smiled. “I doubt it. You keep everything in its proper place. He’s pretty messy.”
“He still might be better to wake up to in the morning.”
“Right now, I’m thinking more about going to bed with him at night.” She giggled.
“Where are you going to live, once you get out of the navy?”
“In Honolulu, I guess.”
“Will you miss the mainland?”
“Sure. But I don’t know what else to do. No one gets everything, Bobbi—not exactly the way we want. But I’d rather give up Arizona, and even my home, than give up Sam. He means too much to me now. And it’s not just that he’s handsome. He’s exactly what my parents want, if they
only knew.”
“Well, you won’t miss me, once you have that big lug around your house.”
“When the war is over, you and Richard can come here on vacations—and we’ll have some great times together.”
Bobbi nodded. Afton knew that David had been to see her, but Bobbi had reassured her that she was still committed to Richard. It was Richard’s commitment to her that she had been wondering about. And maybe David’s notion about fate—although she didn’t tell Afton that.
“‘When the war is over.’ Isn’t that what we always say?”
“What will we have to dream about when it really is over?”
“I don’t want to think about that, Bobbi. I don’t want to be realistic. I just want to believe that everything will be better.”
“I can’t imagine that other times will be as hard as this has been. But I think this time will always be a good memory for me in most ways—and that’s, as much anything, because of you, Afton.”
“I’m closer to you than anyone else in the world, Bobbi. Even Sam doesn’t know me as well—not yet, anyway. We can’t lose each other. Okay?”
“Okay.”
But that was another half truth, at best, and Bobbi knew it. Life was changing again. And there would be no going back.
A week later the Charity docked in Guam, with Bobbi on board. Then it joined a large task force and shipped out again. No one on the medical staff knew where the task force was headed. Bobbi spent her time getting ready—training staff, organizing medical supplies, thinking of things to worry about. On the third day out she had almost finished her lunch in the officer’s ward room when Dr. Kate Calder, her new friend, approached the table. “May I join you?” she asked.
“Sure. But I’ve got to head back to the ward before long.”
“No you don’t. Take a few minutes. You’re pushing yourself too hard.”
Bobbi laughed. “I’ve never been in charge of anything before. I’m worried all the time that things won’t be organized right when the action starts.”
So far, Bobbi had no patients aboard, so life might have been easy, but she had a big staff of corpsmen, many of whom were young and new, and she had very few nurses to help her train them. She knew that when the wounded began arriving, all these young men would be tested to the limit. The task force was certainly headed into battle, and since the troop ships were stacked deep with Marines, it was obvious that a beach landing was going to take place. That meant casualties, and lots of them—or at least that’s what all the experienced personnel told Bobbi.
