by Dean Hughes
“We can’t take care of all these people.”
“I know. But we could help one.”
“What about tomorrow, when someone else comes to us?”
“I don’t know. He’s only two. His father cried.”
The barn was still dark. Peter could barely see Frau Schaller. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking. But from across the room, on the floor of the barn, Katrina spoke. “Ask Captain Stubbs. He’s the kindest of the men.”
“I can’t speak to him,” Peter said. “I don’t know enough English. Your mother needs to do it.”
Frau Schaller didn’t speak for some time, but finally she said, “I’ll ask him. But not yet. I won’t go in there until the men are out of bed.”
“The boy is dying.”
“I know. But if he’s that close to death, medicine won’t help him now. Wait a little.”
So Peter waited, and when the officers began to stir inside, Frau Schaller went in. She came back after a time, and she put a few tablets, eight or so, into Peter’s hand. “He made another officer give me these. Some men carry them to protect against venereal disease. He said this would be a better use.”
“Thank you.”
“A whole tablet is probably too much for a baby. I don’t know how much you should give him.”
“He’s dying. It’s worth a try.”
“I know.”
Peter walked down the road. He found the man sitting by the road holding the little boy. The child was too spent to cry. He wasn’t even coughing much. But Peter hadn’t thought to bring fresh water, and he realized these people didn’t even have that. The man told him they drank from rivers, from puddles, wherever they could find a little water. No wonder they were dying.
So Peter went back to the farm, and he brought back a bottle full of water from the well. He helped the man break the tablet and give it to the boy. When he drank the water, he seemed to revive a little. He was a little thing, bony and pale, with huge eyes, more gray than blue.
“I don’t know whether this will help him,” Peter said.
The woman finally sat up, and Peter saw why she hadn’t done so sooner. Death was in her face. “Thank you,” she said, and she reached for Peter’s hand. He didn’t worry about the diseases. He let her touch him. He knelt in front of her. “Have you eaten anything?”
“We try to feed our son,” she said.
“Wait here. I’ll get some more food. You must eat, too.”
Peter walked back to the house. He couldn’t help them all, he told himself again. But he would help this family.
Chapter 22
Bobbi Thomas had come out on deck for some air and for a moment of peace away from all the craziness in her ward. The Charity was waiting well off the Okinawa shore, but in the distance, closer to the island, she could see American battleships at anchor. Above the ships she could see airplanes—just little dots in the sky—with black puffs of flak bursting beneath them. She watched as one of the dots dropped out of the sky—with flak popping all around it. It disappeared, and for maybe a second, she thought it had been destroyed, but then a sharp, hard flash lit the sky in a half-circle over the ocean.
Bobbi was startled. She had seen damaged ships many times, but she had never seen one take a hit—had never seen a suicide attack. In a second or two, the sound of the explosion rolled across the sea, and then another flash followed, another roll of thunder. She knew that meant the airplane had penetrated deep and was setting off secondary explosions. She wondered how many sailors had died before her eyes, wondered whether any survivors would be brought to her ship. But it was all so unreal, like a scene in a newsreel. She looked up to the bridge of the ship and saw that the executive officer, Lieutenant Despain, was watching with his binoculars. She quickly climbed a ladder to the 02 deck, and then another to the bridge. “Did you see that?” she asked Despain. “Wasn’t that a kamikaze?”
Lieutenant Despain lowered his glasses and nodded. “It sure was,” he said. “It did some serious damage, too.”
“How can they do that?”
“You mean the Jap pilots?”
“Yes.”
“It’s some kind of religious thing. They think they’ll be honored forever if they die for the Empire.” But then he cursed them in language that Bobbi had grown accustomed to, here on the ship, but language that still bothered her.
“I can’t imagine our pilots ever doing something like that.”
Despain laughed. “Japs aren’t like us,” he said. “I’ve seen our boys risk their lives plenty—to save a friend, or something like that—but we care too much about living to go out and commit suicide. Japs don’t care about life the same way we do.”
But Bobbi didn’t believe that. She knew Ishi. And she was pretty sure she knew human beings. They weren’t that different from one country to another. She almost said that to Lieutenant Despain, but she had learned to keep her mouth shut about such things. She did borrow the field glasses for a minute and take a look across the sea. She could see smoke rolling from the ship, even flames. The sight of it made her sick. She could only imagine how awful it must be for the sailors who were trying to fight the fires—or were perhaps going overboard. She also knew she had to get back to her ward and get ready.
About an hour later the first casualties began to arrive from the Calhoun—the ship that had taken the kamikaze strike. Some of the sailors needed surgery, but most came straight to the burn ward on litters. One man had died on the LCM, and another didn’t last long after he reached the ward. The others were horribly burned over most of their bodies.
Bobbi had experienced all this so many times before—the disgusting smell of the burnt flesh, the anguish in the men’s eyes, and always the disappointing knowledge that there was so little she could do—but there was something different about it this time. She had seen the explosion, the attacking plane, and she felt a closer connection.
Bobbi worked late that evening, finally grabbed a little something to eat, and then headed to her stateroom. The ship had all its deck lights on, as it always did at night. Warships tried to hide themselves after dark and shut down their lights, but a hospital ship stayed lit up to identify itself and avoid attack. A wide green line ran around the white ship, and huge red crosses were painted on both sides of the ship and on all four sides of the main smokestack.
The night was hot and humid, so Bobbi didn’t bother to get into her bunk. She slipped on a cotton nightgown and then lay on top of the blanket; she slept instantly. She was still deep in sleep when a sudden jolt shook the ship, brought her awake. The sound and concussion of an explosion slammed through her passageway, shook her hatch. The ship was blowing up, she thought. Suddenly she was out of bed, looking about herself, trying to think what to do. Sirens had begun to howl, and she heard movement in the passageway outside her state room. Would the crew have to abandon the ship? Would other ships come to their aid?
She grabbed for her white dress, which she had dropped on a chair the night before. She had no idea how much time she had. The ship seemed to be listing a bit, but she had no sense that it was going down. Ideas flashed through her head: what could she, should she, take with her? Was there some way to get the wounded off the ship?
She had her dress on by then. Without putting on her shoes, she ran into the passageway, which was full of smoke. A young corpsman was hurrying toward her. “We’ve been hit,” he yelled. “We’re on fire.”
“What should we do?”
“I don’t know. Get off, somehow.”
But Bobbi was thinking better by now. “No! Go to your ward. Check on your patients.” And then she tried to follow her own advice. But the burn ward was aft of where her stateroom was, and she couldn’t go that way. Smoke was billowing toward her, getting thicker.
She climbed to the main deck and saw that sailors were already working hard, pulling hoses, carrying injured men away from the fire. A large section of the top two decks, right at midship, was blown away and billowing sm
oke. What sickened Bobbi, however, was the realization that the operating rooms had certainly been hit. Doctors and nurses had to have been in there. Surgery had been going on around the clock. She had no idea who might have been on duty, but her first thought was that Kate could have been, that she might be dead.
But Bobbi had no time to consider the possibilities. Men were carrying a screaming sailor toward her, and her instincts came alive. “Bring him this way,” she shouted. The ship wasn’t sinking—not yet, anyway—and no one was going overboard. The crew was getting after the fire, and her role was the one she knew. She had to save this life if she could.
She led the men toward the stern of the ship, had them put the sailor down on the deck, under a light. “Who can get morphine? And bandages?”
A young sailor, probably a corpsman, dressed only in his underwear, said, “I’ll try to get some.” He took off running.
Bobbi tore away the shreds of the injured man’s shirt. His chest and face were burned and black, and blood was pumping from a wound at the base of his neck. “Hold him,” she told the men around her. And then, in a gentler voice, she told the sailor, “You’re all right. We’ll give you something for the pain in just a minute or two. Hang on until then and you’ll be all right.”
“Mama! Help me!” the man screamed.
Bobbi had heard this many times before—men calling for their mothers—and it always broke her heart. “We need to stop this bleeding,” she said. “What can we use to—”
One of the men was already pulling his undershirt off. Bobbi took it and pressed it to the wound. She kept talking to the sailor, reassuring him, but he didn’t seem to hear. “Help me,” he kept yelling. “Do something. It burns!” He was fighting the men who were holding him down.
The corpsman returned rather quickly. He had a first-aid box. He set it down and tore through it quickly until he found morphine in a syrette. He broke the top off the little vial and jabbed the exposed needle into the man’s arm. In only seconds Bobbi saw the sailor begin to relax. She pulled the undershirt away from his wound and replaced it with a compress from the first-aid box. The bleeding had already slowed, and she wasn’t too worried about that now. She got out gauze and bandages and began to wrap him as best she could. That was all she could do for now.
Not far away another man was screaming, and no nurse, no doctor, was there to help, so she hurried to that sailor, and she repeated the process. This was different from what she was used to, seeing these men before they were out of pain, before the bleeding and burns had been treated once, and she felt the chaos and terror around her, so different from the control she usually had over circumstances in her ward.
“How’s the ship?” she kept asking, but no one seemed to know.
Finally one of the crew, an ensign, came by. “The fire is under control,” he said. “We’re all right. But for now we’ll have to keep the injured out here on the deck.”
“What happened?” Bobbi asked. “Was it a bomb?”
“No. A kamikaze.”
Suddenly Bobbi was enraged. It hadn’t registered with her until that moment that a pilot had purposefully flown his airplane into a hospital ship—an easy, defenseless target. All of the men around her were cursing, using vile language. She heard a sailor near her ask, “What’s wrong with these filthy Japs? Aren’t they human?” Bobbi felt the same rage, even some satisfaction that these men could say the things she could only feel. What if some fanatic Japanese pilot had killed Kate? He deserved to burn in some sort of hell forever if he had. “Who was in the OR?” Bobbi asked the corpsman by her side.
“I don’t know. I was off shift.”
“What about Dr. Calder? Have you seen her?”
“No. But she was cutting all afternoon. I doubt she was still in the OR.”
That didn’t prove anything. Bobbi had seen Kate work thirty-six hours with only an occasional nap. She could still have been there when the airplane struck.
But Bobbi had other things to think about. The deck was thick with sailors and patients, nurses and corpsmen. Many of the patients had been forced from their wards by the smoke. But Bobbi was able to work her way through the chaos and make it to her ward. She found it mostly empty, but not very smoky, and so she hurried back up to the deck and began finding burn victims who needed to return. Many who had left had been able to walk, and some of them didn’t want to return. Others had been carried out on litters by corpsmen. Bobbi talked most of those into going back. She also began to find new burn victims who needed to be brought to her ward. There was no organization to any of this, no one doing triage, so Bobbi did her best to bring a little order.
The new patients needed care. Bobbi worked hard with them the rest of the night. Most of her staff eventually showed up to help. By then rumors were spreading. All the doctors and nurses who had been in the operating rooms had apparently been killed. Other corpsmen and crew members had also died. No one really knew how many, but Bobbi heard numbers from twenty to fifty. And she kept asking, “Has anyone seen Dr. Calder?”
One of the corpsmen told her, “I think I saw her out on the main deck, not long after the plane hit.” But he didn’t sound very sure of himself, and Bobbi was left to wonder. At least no one had reported that she was one of the ones missing.
When Bobbi finally found her way out of the ward long enough for a break, she went to the officers’ ward room. There, in the back, she spotted a little cluster of officers—but no Kate. She walked to them and asked, hesitantly, “Has anyone seen Dr. Calder? Is she all right?”
A nurse, a young woman named Ilene Cowens, looked up from her coffee. “She wasn’t in the surgery,” she said. “She’s all right. She’s probably operating now—but I don’t know where they’ve set up to do that.”
“Who did die?” Bobbi asked.
One of the doctors, Glade Dunham, was also hunched over a cup of coffee. Without looking up, he said, “There are four doctors and six nurses unaccounted for—and certainly dead—and a bunch of corpsmen. Altogether, about thirty people dead, and maybe twice that many injured.” He named the four doctors. One of them was Dr. Jones, who had been so eager to celebrate the end of the war in Europe.
Ilene listed off the six nurses, reciting the names in her tired voice, the sound like the thudding of a mallet. Each name hurt Bobbi. She knew all of them well. She had eaten breakfast with some of them the previous morning. One of the women, Lois Sutterfield, had talked to Bobbi about her brother’s wedding. Lois had been feeling bad that she couldn’t be home for it. At breakfast she had joked about West Texas, where she was from. “It’s so flat out there,” she told Bobbi, “you can stand on a chair, look hard, and see the back of your own head.” But then she had said, with her Texan intonation, “But I’ll tell ya, I’d shore love to be back there rat now.”
“I’m sorry,” Bobbi told the group before her now. “I know you were close to all of them.”
“I keep thinking about Alice,” one of the nurses said, a woman named Eva Curley. “I’ve seen that picture of her family in her quarters, and I keep wondering how her parents are going to feel when they get the word.”
Bobbi had been thinking the same thing about Lois’s relatives, out in west Texas. What would this do to their wedding celebration?
When Bobbi finally located Kate, she was at a bedside in a temporary post-op area. “I’m glad to find you,” Bobbi told her. “I was afraid you were operating when that plane hit us.”
Kate was kneeling by a man who was lying on the deck, a pillow under his head. She glanced up. “Thanks,” she said. “I was pretty sure you weren’t in there, Bobbi, but it’s still good to see you with my own eyes.”
“Can you take a break?”
“If I do, I might fall asleep.”
“Walk out in the air with me for a minute.”
“All right.” Kate got up slowly, with obvious effort. The two climbed the stairs to the main deck and then walked toward the stern, where the air wasn’t full of smoke. The mo
rning was already hot, but the breeze off the water was rather pleasant.
Kate had taken off the apron she had been wearing in surgery, but Bobbi saw little spots of dried blood on her face and neck. “I’m so sick of this,” Kate said. “I don’t want to see any more.”
“Why would someone attack a hospital ship?” Bobbi asked.
And that seemed to release Kate’s anger. “Why not, Bobbi? If you shoot a man once and he doesn’t die, why not blow him up? It’s just as logical as anything else in this war.”
“Kate, we had all our lights on. The pilot knew we were a hospital ship. There has to be some line people don’t cross—even in a war.”
“Why?” Kate turned toward Bobbi, her eyes full of fury. “Is it civilized to burn people out of caves with flamethrowers but wrong to kill doctors and nurses? What’s the difference? Who makes up these rules? Emily Post? What’s the proper etiquette for killing your fellow man?”
“But we have to—”
“What we ought to do is kill off everyone and then let some civilized animal take over: rats or rattlesnakes or cockroaches. We’re really not worth the trouble to worry about, if you ask me.”
Bobbi nodded. The words seemed about right. But she was mostly feeling disgust with herself at the moment. She had always been able to watch this war as a spectator—and feel morally superior to someone like Lieutenant Despain, who despised his enemy. But tonight she had been in the war, and her very first response had been hatred—burning, fierce hatred. And the worst part was, she was in no mood to give it up, just yet. Kate could find her disgust with all humanity if she wanted, but Bobbi was still outraged with the Japanese.
***
Beverly was nervous. She had been wanting to meet Richard Hammond for such a long time, and now he was coming to the Thomas’s house for dinner. She had seen his picture, in his white uniform, looking handsome but serious, and she was a little worried that she wouldn’t like him. She was in the kitchen with her mother now, helping to prepare dinner. She had peeled and boiled potatoes and was getting ready to mash them. “Where’s your sister?” Mom asked her. “She promised to set the table.”
