Purple Hearts

by Michael Grant

  Flit! Flit! Thunk!

  The tree trunk nearest to Joe pops splinters from a bullet wound. Not all the German fire is stopped by the bulk of the tanks.

  Pang and Geer are already dozens of yards away, paying Joe no attention.

  Just say you’re a coward! They’ll let you go home!

  No, not that. Joe’s father was old, old enough to have fought with Teddy Roosevelt in Cuba. His grandfather had been a Union captain who’d fought at Antietam and had lost a leg to a Confederate minié ball.

  Joe Pastor moves. Stiff legged. A step. Another. A sudden, overpowering urge to be with Pang and Geer. He runs, runs down the side of the tanks, yelling as he goes, yelling to stop hearing the whiz of bullets past his ears.

  He reaches Pang and Geer and, panting, trots alongside them, keeping both of them, as well as the tank, between himself and the murdering German fire.

  Ka-BAM!

  A tank blows up.

  A jeep emblazoned with Red Cross brassards and driven by a tall colored woman—with a colored man and a colored girl so small Joe thinks that she might be a child—goes tearing past, seemingly indifferent to the danger.

  “If they’re not worried—”

  Something punches Joe in the arm, hard. He staggers but keeps his feet and keeps pace with Pang and Geer.

  “Hey,” Pang says, glancing back. “You’re hit!”

  Joe blinks. Is he? Is he hit?

  He takes a quick inventory and sees that the shoulder of his uniform jacket is saturated with blood.

  “Oh God!” Joe cries. He stops, tears off his jacket, and Pang yells, “Keep cover, you fugging—”

  Two machine gun rounds plow two holes through Joe’s chest. He falls.

  Geer yells, “Medic! Medic!” But he does not stop. No one stops.

  No one at all. They just keep moving, the tanks roaring and coughing, the soldiers tramping, and all the while the forest firebreak is a tornado of flying steel.

  Joe lies on his side, watching it all. When he breathes it is shallow. He can’t catch his breath. Each inhalation seems shallower than the one before it, and each breath makes a wet, gurgling sound.

  Joe feels no pain. He feels as if his entire body has been hit by an electric power line, and he is stunned, paralyzed, his brain moving through molasses, his hands not doing what he wants them to do.

  The tanks rattle on, and the last of the infantry goes with them. A relative quiet descends.

  I’m wounded. I’m hurt.

  But I’m okay. I’m okay. I’m hit, but I’m okay.

  The next inhalation is more wet than raspy. Through the fog of his shock Joe begins to feel something, something that is like pain, but like pain he’s watching someone else endure. He feels disconnected from the body gasping for air, the body with lungs flooded with his own blood.

  A face swims into sight, swirling and weird, like a hallucination.

  “I’m here, Soldier,” the black face says. “Deacon! Plasma!”

  “My name is Joe,” he tries to say, but it’s nothing but a grunt and a wet gargle. Incoherent.

  “Don’t talk, just lie back, Soldier,” the black face says—a woman too. Huh. She’s doing something fussy with her hands. He glimpses big steel scissors chopping through his uniform and thinks, What will I do now?

  He does not feel the needle prick in the crook of his elbow.

  “Pump it. He’s about drained out.”

  Then Deacon, holding the plasma high with one hand while feeling Joe’s neck with the other, says, “I’m not getting pulse. What’s his BP?”

  Frangie looks at the blood pressure cuff, knowing what she will see. The systolic pressure is seventy and dropping. She does not bother to tell Deacon.

  She stands up, and her knees crack. “Tag him.”

  21

  FRANGIE MARR—HÜRTGEN FOREST, NAZI GERMANY

  “I’m here, Soldier.”

  The soldier is nineteen years old. A piece of wood, fresh so it still oozes sap, a piece of a tree, a chunk of wood the size of a child’s forearm, protrudes from his belly. Deacon holds his flashlight beam on the injury with one hand and keeps a bag of plasma elevated with the other.

  A second, smaller splinter, this one the size of a man’s thumb, protrudes from the base of the injured soldier’s neck.

  A third splinter, this only the size of a pencil, protrudes from his left eye socket, just below the eyeball. The splinter forces the eye to bulge out.

  Blood seeps. Blood gushes.

  The soldier screams.

  Deacon’s light wavers, and for a moment the only thing Frangie can see is the soldier’s screaming mouth.

  BOOM!

  BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

  The barrage intensifies, shells going off so fast they almost sound like machine guns, exploding like flashbulbs illuminating a nightmare scene for milliseconds at a time. A terrified face; a soldier running; a big tree branch falling; a soldier writhing. Each highlighted for just the duration of an explosion.

  Hell by strobe light.

  German 88s screech into the trees, explode, and spray shattered wood in every direction. It’s a deliberate German tactic. Frangie has had to remove two splinters from herself, smaller thankfully, and in less vital locations, but exceedingly painful. The wood shrapnel lacerates flesh and shreds veins and arteries, leaving medics to try to find those bits of tattered, slimy tubes in the midst of raw hamburger.

  Months have passed. Spring has given way to summer and now a cold, drenching, muddy autumn. The skies darken too soon, and too often they never brighten as rain comes again and again, turning the earth to mud—mud over pine needles; mud beneath the slicked leaves of deciduous trees; mud caked on trucks and tanks and jeeps; mud permeating boots and uniforms. Mud in hair; mud in teeth; mud that at times seems like a living, malicious beast clawing at feet and legs, pulling on soldiers as if determined to drag them down to hell itself.

  Frangie feels the creeping need to itch. She, like almost everyone, has lice. Lice in the hair on her head, lice in her crotch, her armpits, lice making a home of her entire body.

  She has managed maybe two hot meals in the last week, otherwise reduced to C rations. It’s so cold at night that C rations freeze, but fires are an impossibility, so GIs thaw their C-rats over tin cans filled with gasoline-saturated sand and secreted at the bottom of water-sloshing foxholes.

  Frangie hates every iteration of C rations. She hates the original three varieties: Meat Stew with Beans, Meat with Vegetable Hash, and Meat Stew with Vegetables. She hates the newer meals: Meat and Spaghetti in Tomato Sauce, Chopped Ham, Egg, and Potato, Meat and Noodles, Pork and Rice, Frankfurters and Beans, Pork and Beans, and, above all, Ham and Lima Beans.

  The army has blessedly stopped sending the dreaded Meat Hash and the god-awful Mutton Stew with Vegetables meals. Unfortunately they have not sent Chicken and Vegetables, which Frangie is convinced will be bad, but will at least be a new kind of bad.

  This is the only joy in the Hürtgen Forest: daydreams of food.

  There are days when she is sure she would kill a German herself if she could just eat some of his rations. Everyone says the Krauts still get actual bread, bread that comes in loaves as opposed to the canned atrocity the US Army supplies.

  And God only knows what sins she might commit in exchange for a plate of catfish and fried okra, or even just good old red beans and rice with cornbread so hot from the oven that you couldn’t hold it.

  A fresh peach? Or a strawberry and rhubarb pie? Or a bowl of ice cream churned in the kitchen with fresh cream and ice and rock salt?

  Iced tea with a sprig of mint?

  Her aunt’s blackstrap pecan pie?

  Her other aunt’s Thanksgiving turkey?

  Don’t think about it. Tend to this poor man.

  How?

  He has a log in his belly, he’s a goner, done for, like so many others, like so, so many others. His blood loosens the consistency of the mud around him.

  Mud-blood s
oup. That’s the meal the Hürtgen serves.

  Frangie scratches furiously at her head. Her fingernails come away red from flea and lice bites. Some hair comes, too: her hair is falling out. Not all at once, just a little here, a little there, a generalized thinning so her scalp could be seen if the sun ever rose. Even at noon, even when it isn’t raining, the Hürtgen is always dark.

  In every direction are the trees. They are close-packed, and in better times they must have made for lovely, shaded walks beneath a canopy of leaves and needles.

  But there are no leaves on these trees. They look like fish bones picked clean, a stumpy trunk sprouting blackened branches that stick straight out, horizontal, and often almost to the ground so that in many places just walking ahead means bending or breaking branches. The Toothpick Forest, some called it now.

  D-day had been terrible, and the painfully slow and bloody slog through the bocage country was terrible as well. But that had been followed by the advance to Paris, which had been relatively easy for Frangie’s unit, and the drive from there to the German border had been hard but progress had been steady. People had started betting pools on when the war would end, with most folks guessing before Christmas.

  The Krauts were beaten, everyone said.

  The war would soon be over, everyone said.

  And then, the Hürtgen.

  “I’m here, Soldier.” She’s left the previous patient floating away on a morphine cloud. He will never come down off that cloud.

  “Doc. Doc. I . . .” He’s a midtwenties buck sergeant named Oglebee, one of the infantry detachment assigned to the battalion. He’s seated, leaning back against a tree trunk. His hands are open on the ground. His Thompson is on the ground beside him, raindrops making a dull musical note as they plop on the magazine.

  “Tell me where you’re hit,” Frangie says as she motions Deacon over with the flashlight; he’d been praying over the man with the splinters.

  “I’m not hit, Doc. I just gotta, it’s all, you know, I can’t, is it, I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.”

  “Come on, Sarge, screw your head back on.” It’s not her first case of combat fatigue, the favorite euphemism for complete mental breakdown.

  “I shit myself.” Oglebee starts to cry.

  “Yeah, I noticed,” Frangie says, straining for a note of humor in hopes he will respond.

  “I’m done. I’m done.”

  “Nah, you just need to—”

  He lunges for his Thompson, knocking her sprawling in the mud. It’s an awkward weapon for what he has in mind. A .45 slug makes a big hole.

  Deacon has come over. “Sarge, you don’t want to be doing that. You know you’ll get a general court. You’ll serve out the war in a military prison.”

  Oglebee looks at him and suddenly a great big grin splits his face. “That sounds pretty damn good to me,” he says. He flips the selector to single fire and upends the Thompson so it’s aimed straight down at his foot.

  Frangie grabs the barrel. She does not wrestle for control. In a soft voice she says, “Here, not there.” She guides the muzzle away from the top of Oglebee’s foot, where the bullet will smash through a hundred small, delicate bones, permanently crippling him. She positions it to one side, aimed at the meat of the side of his foot. It will hurt like hell, but he may walk again.

  “Thanks, Doc,” Oglebee whispers.

  Frangie tugs Deacon’s shirt, and they get up and walk away just as the barrage starts up again.

  Amid the earth-pounding explosions Frangie hears the single round and hears Oglebee’s cry of pain.

  “I got him,” Deacon says. “You get some sleep, Doc. You look like something that ought to be scraped up off the road.”

  The battalion’s tanks are all dug in now, meaning, as Frangie had learned, that tanks are driven into excavated trenches so only the turrets show. The accompanying infantry and support troops are in holes. And they are all wrapped up in, trapped in, buried alive in what the Germans called the Hürtgenwald, just over the border from Belgium and Luxembourg into Germany.

  No one in the Hürtgenwald, on either side, believes the war will be over by Christmas.

  In addition to being cold, wet, and claustrophobic, the terrain is also steep, sometimes so steep that a GI trying to ascend a hill has to pull himself hand over hand, using the trees as grips and footholds. Hand over hand up steeply canted ground that is all slick, wet pine needles and mud and branches as machine guns rattle and mortars fall.

  But it is the tree bursts of the 88s that are the special terror of the Hürtgen. The Germans have learned to set their fuses for air bursts, up in the treetops. That way the explosions shower wooden spears down on men and women cowering in watery foxholes, like an ancient barrage of arrows in some long-ago battle where soldiers had shields.

  Except these soldiers do not have shields, and their foxholes do not protect them from this injury and death from above. There is no cover in the Hürtgen. There is no hole you can hide in.

  You cannot see the enemy in the Hürtgen. You cannot see much of anything besides tree trunks, so visibility is measured in a few yards. Half the patrols that are sent out become lost, turned around and baffled by the mists, the fogs, the smoke, and the endless sameness of the trees.

  Just the day before, Frangie had treated a German soldier who had become so lost he lined up for chow at a US field kitchen before realizing he was in an American mess tent. One of the GIs had shot him, but only in the rear end. Frangie had bandaged and sent him on to battalion aid.

  “Hey, Morton,” Frangie says, crouching over a woman shivering like she’s in the worst of a plague fever.

  “D-D-D-Doc.”

  Frangie pulls out a cigarette, lights it, and places it in the wounded GI’s mouth. She sucks too hard, chokes, and blood comes faster from her neck wound.

  She will not survive. Frangie will not tell her this. She’s dead, but only Frangie knows it.

  The cigarette calms her, a little at least. She takes another drag and looks at Frangie through eyes that seem to be looking up from the bottom of a well.

  Ah, Frangie is wrong: she knows.

  “We’re getting you out to battalion aid as soon as Manning’s back with the jeep,” Frangie tells PFC Morton.

  “Okay, Doc.” She’s passive, docile. The fever ague has burned itself out. “I’m cold, is all.”

  “I’m going to give you a little happy juice, okay?”

  “Okay, Doc.”

  She stabs the needle into her exposed upper arm and squeezes morphine into her.

  “You rest easy, Private. We’re going to transport you in just a few minutes.”

  Frangie has stopped thinking of statements like that as lies. They are medicine, of a sort. Death might be inevitable, but hope is a gift she can give; though with each lie she feels a part of herself wither.

  The last word so many men and women in the Hürtgen hear is a lie. It feels wrong. It feels disrespectful. A person should know when they are soon to meet their maker.

  But no, that’s nonsense. Injured soldiers are problems to be managed, and a lie makes the managing easier.

  Suddenly the air is torn again by the shrieks of incoming artillery. Now, in a heartbeat, she must make the decision: stay with the doomed woman to the end and likely be killed herself? Or run for cover on the grounds that she is more useful to more people alive?

  “Hang tight,” Frangie says.

  Then she dives into the nearest hole along with Deacon. It turns out to be a foxhole inhabited by a pair of cousins from Annapolis, Maryland, named Jessie and James, Jessie being a rather chubby young woman while her male cousin, James, is so thin he’s invisible standing sideways.

  “Sorry!” Frangie cries as the treetops explode again.

  “Any time, Doc,” Jessie says.

  The four of them are so tight in the hole that none of them can really cower as effectively as they’d like. The cousins have made a sort of shelf that allows them to just barely squeeze beneath six
inches of dirt piled on a mat made of twigs and leaves. Useless except against the weakest of splinters, but a frightened soldier will take any small advantage.

  This is barrage number what? Frangie wonders. Fifteen? Twenty? One thousand? It’s been like this forever. Splinter wounds. Shrapnel wounds. Concussion. Battle fatigue. Trench foot. The eternal dysentery. She’s a doctor on rounds that never end. When she sleeps it’s in snatches of an hour. Or a standing nap, as she’s come to think of them, when she simply goes blank and weaves back and forth, eyes closed until someone or something snaps her out of it.

  Now, leaning against Jessie and James and Deacon, despite the mad destruction all around, she almost falls asleep again. Splinters patter on her helmet like deadly raindrops. Deacon yelps as a small shard stabs his shoulder.

  The barrage ends—for the moment. The Germans have developed the trick of pausing a barrage just long enough for GIs to start thinking it’s safe, and then dropping artillery on them as they emerge from their holes.

  The lieutenant is yelling just that. “Stay in your holes! Stay in your holes!”

  But that does not apply to medics. Frangie crawls to the man with the splinter wounds. He’s dead, finished off by a mercifully quick shard of steel shrapnel through his head.

  She listens for cries of pain. “Anyone hurt?” she yells.

  A voice calls back, “I pissed myself, does that count?”

  She goes back to the Jessie and James hole where James informs her that his feet are mostly all better now. James had suffered a very common injury: trench foot, the nasty result of feet too long in cold and wet.

  “Glad to hear it,” Frangie says. “In the future be careful to attend to your feet, I do not have time to be dealing with every—”

  “Medic! Medic! Doc!”

  Now the cry goes up, and again Jessie, James, and Deacon all unite to propel her up and out of the hole, with Deacon scrambling up after her. They run toward the cries and flop down beside a fighting hole in which a corporal is bellowing in pain. They make to pull him up, but he starts screaming that the pain is too great.

  So Frangie drops down beside him and quickly discovers that he has scalded his leg with spilled coffee.