by Dean Hughes
Bobbi paid special attention to Private Carpenter. Verl. She felt a kinship with him and maybe some extra responsibility. She took the time to sit by him and feed him. He was working through some pain now, and he wasn’t joking, not even talking very much. Nor did he want to eat. Bobbi stayed after him, however, and got some applesauce and some liquids into him.
When she was about to leave, he said, “Can you stay here for a minute?”
“Not long, Verl. We’re really busy this morning.”
“Am I going to be able to see?”
“I don’t know. In Guam, they’ll unwrap your eyes and take a good look at you. You’ll have a better idea then.”
“Okay.”
Bobbi tried to think of something to say, some hope to give him, but she didn’t know his prognosis, and she didn’t want to mislead him. He might have to get used to the idea that he wouldn’t see again. She had watched dozens of boys make that adjustment in the past two years. It was always difficult, but she had learned that people have a way of going on, of doing what they have to do.
“Are you as pretty as you sound?”
“I look like your drill sergeant. I’m big and I’m mean.”
“No you’re not. Your hands are small—and soft as calfskin. Have you got a guy back home—or in the war somewhere?”
She looked down at the bandages that covered Verl’s face, the clump of short brown hair showing at the top. She knew he was searching for something good to come out of this. She had seen it so many times, the way the injured boys liked to cling to a certain nurse for comfort and hope. “Verl, I’m engaged, but my fiancé is going through the same thing you are. He got his hands burned. He’s had some surgery, and he’s going to have some more. At least the war is over for him.”
“But it didn’t get his face?”
“No. Just a little.”
“He’s lucky.”
“Yeah. But some get hurt a lot worse than you, Verl.”
“Oh, sure. I know. I’m not whining.”
“Do you have a girl back home?”
“Well, yes. I do. The only trouble is, she married a guy from down in Montpelier, Idaho, and I don’t think he would like it if I came home to her.” He tried to laugh, but his voice was turning to gravel. Bobbi knew she needed to end the conversation.
“That’s rough, Verl. I’m sorry.”
“Well . . . that’s not too important. She’s better off, as it turns out. I don’t know anything but farming, so I’m not sure I could support a family now. What am I supposed to do if I can’t see?”
“Verl, you’re worrying about things you don’t know yet. Find out what you really have to deal with before you start jumping to conclusions. You’re man enough to do that.”
“Touch my arm, Bobbi. Above where I’m bandaged.”
“Verl, I—”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to embarrass you. I wasn’t trying to—”
And so she put her hand on his arm, rubbed her palm along his elbow and up toward his shoulder.
He didn’t say a word, but she knew he was crying in his soul, whether his tear ducts still worked or not.
Later that day Bobbi had a few minutes to talk to her friend Kate. They walked out on the main deck, and they breathed a little, looked out across the water. The ocean was quiet.
“I talked to the radio man this morning,” Kate said. “He says the word coming out of Europe is that Germany could surrender any day now.” She was wearing a surgical cap, but she took it off and shook her head. Her short hair ruffled in the breeze.
“I’ll believe that when I see it,” Bobbi said. “I don’t think the war will end over there until they get Hitler himself.”
“Maybe. But the Russians are close to Berlin, they say, and now that we’ve broken across the Rhine, our troops are moving fast. The radio man said we’ll have Germany cut in half any time now. He says there’s no way Germany will be able to keep fighting much longer.”
“I hope that’s right. If I knew Alex had made it through, that would be a big load off my mind.”
“Do you know where he is now?”
“No. My mom wrote and said he had been pulled out of France, but he couldn’t say where he was. Instead of thinking that the war is ending over there, I always think, ‘What if something happens now, so close to the end?’”
“To us, it seems like everyone is bleeding.”
“Or burned.”
“Or both.” Kate didn’t smoke very often, but she lit a cigarette now. She rolled it around in her fingers and looked at it. “Are you holding up okay?” she asked.
“Sure,” Bobbi said. “This go-round hasn’t been quite so intense. I do have a bit of a problem, though.”
“Problem?”
“There’s a boy from my part of the country. A Mormon fellow. He’s kind of latched onto me.”
“Bobbi, let me tell you something. You know it, but I’ll say it anyway.” She took a draw on her cigarette.
“Yes, doctor.”
Kate smiled. “Bobbi, you can’t let this stuff get inside you too much. I know it’s hard, but you just can’t. When I was in med school, we used to work on cadavers. They weren’t people to me. They were just ‘things.’ Sometimes, now, when I’m up to my elbows in blood, I have to think about these bodies that come across my table exactly the same way. There’s a hole in some guy’s belly, and that means a repair job I have to do. I sew up the holes, just like darning a sock, and then I see what’s wrong with the next body they put on my table. As long as I handle it that way, I do a whole lot better.”
“What about when you walk around and see these guys after the surgery? When they’re awake and talking—and in pain?”
“I try to do the same thing. I find out where it hurts and decide whether there’s anything I can do about it. Half the time I can’t. But I’ve sewn up the hole, and they’re alive. If I lie in bed at night and think about their pain, I can’t stand it.”
“It’s not the pain that I struggle with, Kate. It’s their stories. They all want to tell me their stories. You don’t get as much of that.”
“They may not tell me as much, but it’s not hard to figure out what their stories are. Just before we left Okinawa, we got a boy in who was all blown apart. If we tried to do everything he needed, he was going to die on us. So we got his insides fixed up, and we let his limbs go. Finally, we had to take off both his legs, one above the knee and the other just below. Then we took one of his arms, above the elbow. When we did it, it was simply what we had to do. If we’d had a lot of time, and some specialists, we might have saved his arm, maybe even one of his legs. But we had no choice in those circumstances.” She tossed the cigarette away, half smoked. “But then, this morning, I talked to him. He was realizing what was going on and starting to ask questions. I didn’t know . . .” Kate’s voice pinched off. Bobbi saw her brown eyes fill with tears, saw
her distress magnified by her thick eyeglasses. “What was I supposed to say to him?” she asked, and she choked as she tried not to cry.
Bobbi put her arm around Kate’s shoulder, and they both cried. It was a relief. Bobbi wished she could go to her stateroom, lie down, and let it all come out. But not a minute had gone by before Kate said, “I can’t do this, Bobbi. I have too much to do. We can’t let it inside us. We just can’t.”
“I’ve been trying to think about Easter,” Bobbi said. “That helps me some.”
But Kate looked surprised. “All I saw was irony in that. It made me furious that we started the battle that day.”
But Bobbi was thinking the opposite. What if they had fought this battle without an Easter, without any promise at all?
***
Alex was back in Dijon. At the front, once he had finally talked to the Intelligence people and found someone who knew his password, he had been treated well. A driver had taken him to the Rhine in a Jeep. It had taken awhile to cross, going against the stream of traffic into Germany, but he had begged his way onto a
returning rubber boat, one that had been used to bring supplies across, and then he had found a truck heading into Luxembourg. From Luxembourg City, his CIC unit had made arrangements to have him flown to Dijon. His commander, Major Grow, had given him a night to sleep, and then he and Alex had spent a full morning together going over everything that had happened on his mission. Afterward, Alex had spent the afternoon writing everything down, documenting what he had seen of Operation Varsity, but also the actions of the resistance, Otto’s death, and all the rest.
It was difficult for Alex. He had learned in the past year to deal with things by not looking back. But now, having to write his report, he had to consider what had happened. He thought of Otto, of Werner, the image of all those parachutes amid the smoke of AA guns. He couldn’t think what he might have
done to protect Otto. Should he have waited longer, taken a different route, sought another roadblock? It had all looked so simple, and actually it had been. But someone had pulled a trigger, and that was Otto’s life. As Alex described the scene, on paper, he found that he was shaking. He wasn’t breaking down, wasn’t going to pieces, but the reality of what he had passed through had gotten inside him now, and the trembling in his hands, his stomach, wouldn’t stop.
Alex took his report to Major Grow’s office the next morning. The sergeant at the desk saluted, and for a moment Alex was surprised. He still didn’t think of himself as an officer. As he returned the salute, the sergeant said, “Colonel DeSantos wants to see you. Report to him at 0900.”
Alex was actually happy to hear that. He was at a loss right now, not knowing what was going to happen next in his life. So at 0900 he was waiting at the headquarters building, and soon after he was called into the colonel’s office. When he entered, DeSantos stood up. Alex saluted him, and the colonel returned the salute, but then he came around his desk and shook hands with Alex. “I’m telling you,” he said, “I’m sure happy to see you. When you send a man out on a mission, you never know whether he’ll come back or not.” Then he seemed to catch himself. “I felt terrible to hear about Lang,” he said. “I guess someone got a little trigger happy.”
“Yes, sir.”
“It happens, Lieutenant. The hardest thing in the world is to tell a soldier not to shoot. I never blame a guy too much who makes that mistake. It’s the ones who don’t shoot I have a quarrel with.”
Alex thought of Howie, who hadn’t wanted to shoot. But he merely said, “Yes, sir,” once again.
“Sit down.” The colonel went back around his desk. Alex sat across from him. “Lieutenant Thomas, you’re going to get a medal for this. I understand you received a DSM in Normandy. I’m not sure what to put you in for this time. But you’ll get something.”
“Won’t this mission be classified?”
“Normally, it would be. And we won’t tell the whole story. But there’s always a balance. We need to let the folks back home know some of what’s happening out here. They need heroes back in the states. That’s what sells bonds, keeps people feeling like they can live with rationing tires and sugar a little longer.”
“Sir, I don’t want that. Choose someone else. I’m not a hero.”
“Listen, I know what you’re saying. We all feel that way. We’re just doing our job, and we don’t want to blow our own horns, but the decorations aren’t up to you. I say you deserve one, and I’m putting you in for it.”
“It’s not that, sir. Nothing went right over there. Otto is dead, and Werner probably is too. And when the troops dropped, the sky was absolutely full of flak. I don’t know that I accomplished a single thing.”
“Thomas, when you walk out of here, you’re never going to say that again. It’s important. People die on dangerous missions. That wasn’t your fault. You gave us key data about the landing zones. It made all the difference. The Germans knew we were coming. They saw our troop movements, and they knew where we were lined up. They rushed a lot of artillery in at the last minute, and some of it was so well hidden we couldn’t see it from the air. But what we needed was a go-ahead on the drop zones and landing zones. In Normandy we came in over hedgerows twice as high as we expected, and we ran into poles that Rommel had put out there to stop gliders. But we knew what was going on this time. This landing wasn’t easy, but what could we expect? We were landing in Germany—across the Rhine. No army has ever accomplished that before.” He swore and slapped his hand on his desk. But then he softened his voice. “Thomas, you are a hero. A genuine hero. That’s something you should never deny, not out of humility or any other reason.”
Alex was actually touched by that. He wanted so much to believe that what he had done had had some worth. But he wasn’t a hero; he knew he would never think of himself that way. “Sir, could I at least ask this much?”
“What’s that?”
“Otto didn’t have to go over there, sir. But he was the one who made most of the smart decisions. He kept us alive about four different times. I’d feel a lot better if you gave him the credit somehow. He’s really the one who pulled it off.”
“He was a German, Thomas. I don’t know all the reasons he did what he did, but I wouldn’t want to trust some guy who turned against us. I’m not going to say much about him when I write up my report. You’re the American. You’re our guy.”
“It sounds like advertising, Colonel—like we’ve got something we think we have to sell.”
“Look, Thomas, you’ve been around this mess for a long time. Don’t talk to me like some Boy Scout. War is profane. But if you want to win, you don’t say that to the people who pay the bills back home. You wave the flag. You put a few tears in their eyes. It’s always been that way.”
Alex had no idea how to respond to that. “Is there any chance, sir, that I could return to my unit? I’m not really—”
“Of course not. We don’t do that. Germany is going to be finished in a few more weeks. You’re in the CIC now. We’re going to need every German-speaking soldier we can find. When we take over Germany, there’s going to be more to do than you can believe. For us, in Intelligence, one of the biggest things is to catch as many of the high-ranking Nazis as we can. We need to make them pay for what they’ve done before they find some way to hide out.”
“Why? Once the war is over, what difference will it make?”
The colonel stared at Alex for several seconds. “Lieutenant, I think you’re worn out. I think you’re still in shock from what you’ve been through. But you know as well as anyone that Germans have to pay for what they’ve done. These men have caused the death of millions of people. Have you seen the pictures coming out of Ordruff?”
Alex had seen them. A camp had been discovered, and in it were vast piles of corpses—along with living, walking skeletons. The Nazis had been working and starving people to death, killing them systematically. Word was coming from Poland that the Germans had been gassing Jews and then burning them—perhaps millions of them—in special ovens. However terrible Alex had known Hitler and the Gestapo to be, this was beyond his imagination. He had known of camps, had heard about killings, but he had never suspected anything on this scale. But revenge was the last thing he needed personally. He just wanted the atrocities to end. And above all, he didn’t want to be involved in continuing the killing when the cease-fire finally came.
“Listen, Thomas, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to make arrangements for you to receive a thirty-day leave. I’m not sure how soon I can push this through, but you get some rest in the meantime. The truth is, I don’t know quite what to do with you right now—until Hitler tosses in the towel. Your wife is in London, isn’t she?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, good. I want to give you some time with her.”
“She’s going to have a baby in June.”
“I can only get you thirty days, Thomas. And the way things are going, I’ll need you back by then. But it would be nice to get over there for a while, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes, sir. Of course.”
Alex couldn’t believe it. It was what he wanted, of course, but the idea was also frightening. He wasn’t sure he was ready to see Anna. He wanted to be more whole, more under control, not quivering inside, when he finally took her in his arms.
Chapter 17
Bea Thomas was sitting at her desk when her husband walked in. “Come here a second,” he said. “I have something to show you.”
“Just a minute. I—”
“No. Come right now. This is exciting.” So she walked into his office, which was the largest office in the back—even though President Thomas now spent much less time at the plant than Bea did.
When President Thomas reached his office, he picked up a thick document and handed it to his wife. But he didn’t let her look through it to see what it was. “It’s a contract,” he said. “A big one.”
“For what?”
“Washing-machine parts. Bendix. We’re not going to miss a beat, Bea. Just as fast as we can do it, they want us to start switching over. In five years we could be twice the size we are now. Everyone in America is just waiting to start buying appliances. The old ones are worn out, and people haven’t been able to replace them. The other thing everyone wants is a new car. I’m going to be ready for that, too.”
