Purple Hearts

by Michael Grant

  She is in that terrible street in Italy, looking down at the body of Tilo Suarez.

  She is watching Camacho suddenly stop running.

  She is hearing those terrible words announcing the death of Dain Sticklin: Sergeant Richlin! You’re in charge.

  How many? It is her job to keep them alive, and yet . . .

  Jack’s smile now is hazy and his eyes are veiled as the morphine courses through his veins. “Hey . . . tears?”

  Rio brushes them away. “I got some dust in my eye.”

  He winks in slow motion. “Uh-huh.”

  Stretcher bearers are coming and Rio makes eye contact with the medic who, out of Jack’s sight, makes a back-and-forth hand gesture meant to convey that it could go either way.

  BAM!

  A muted explosion from inside the hotel.

  Rio lays a hand on Jack’s cheek. “I have to . . .”

  “Mmm,” he says, and drifts off to sleep.

  Rio swallows hard and starts toward the hotel, following half a dozen of her people, all rushing pell-mell.

  Jenou is behind the hotel’s polished wood front desk. An explosion has occurred. Molina is wincing and holding her arm, cursing freely as blood seeps between her fingers.

  Jenou is on the floor.

  For a time Rio ceases to exist. Her lean, strong, scarred body still breathes, but her thoughts have stopped. She does not know where she is. Does not wonder. Does nothing. But breathe.

  She has no control over her body but slumps on cobblestones, arms limp, palms upturned.

  Geer wraps a blanket over her shoulders, but her gaze never flickers to awareness. Beebee brings her a canteen cup of hot tea and presses it to her lips. She is a person in a coma. Gone. No longer there.

  Only slowly, gradually, does the girl from Gedwell Falls return to her body.

  Only slowly, gradually, does she remember where she is.

  And why.

  But after a time that seems forever to her, but is only hours to the world around her, Sergeant Rio Richlin stands up.

  Interstitial

  107TH EVAC HOSPITAL, WÜRZBURG, GERMANY—APRIL 1945

  Oh my goodness, did Jenou Castain die? Did our reluctant warrior with the perfect figure and the gorgeous blond hair die?

  No, Gentle Reader, I did not die.

  But given my stupidity, I probably deserved to. I can only say I was somewhat keyed up, having just managed to kill the sniper, and in my exuberance I did the stupid thing. Like an idiot greenhorn I reached for a souvenir in that hotel—the brass bell they used to summon bellboys—and I even had a split second to see the wire before the booby trap went off.

  Thank God Kraut grenades are lousy. A decent American grenade would have killed me for sure.

  Anyway, that ended my war with a bang. They got the medics and the stretcher bearers to me pretty quick. I never did lose consciousness, not then at least, and I seem to recall doing some impressive caterwauling and cursing and flailing around like a great baby.

  Rio lost her mind for a while, poor kid, thinking she’d gotten me and Jack both killed. Way, way back when we began this journey I told you, Gentle Reader, that sooner or later, man or woman, veteran or greenhorn, we all cry. Well, I was starting to think Rio was the exception, that she had no breaking point. It was almost reassuring to see that she did. Tough, scary, knife-toting, Kraut-killing Rio Richlin: human.

  And after a while Rio was beside me.

  She caught up to us on the way to the field hospital. Me on one side of the ambulance, Jack on the other side blessedly unconscious. Both of us with swaying bags of plasma suspended over our heads. Rio in between, getting in the way of the docs.

  Of course she blamed herself. Rio does that. If she were writing this tale instead of me it would be titled “Things I Screwed Up” by Rio Richlin.

  Anyway, I took shrapnel of both the metal and the wooden variety. I lost most of one breast. I’ll have a nice scar on one side of my face. Maybe I’ll lose the limp over time. And I’ll get a Purple Heart. Yippee.

  A few days after I blew myself up, Hitler shot himself in the head in Berlin, the smoking, ruined capital of the Third Reich.

  The Thousand-Year Reich, old Adolf called it. Well, Adolf: not quite a thousand years. More like twelve.

  Burn in hell, Adolf. Burn forever in hell.

  VE Day—Victory in Europe—came, and I guess, Gentle Reader, you might think we all had a big party. I suppose some GIs did celebrate, but no one I knew did. Here at the hospital we pulled out our smuggled booze and drank quiet toasts. But they were not toasts to victory. We drank to our friends and comrades-in-arms, the men and women who would never go home. And by the end of that we were pretty damned drunk.

  And that’s my war, Gentle Reader. My war and Rio’s and Frangie’s and Rainy’s and all the others who I’ve written about here in these feverish scrawlings.

  It only remains to go home. I only wish I had one.

  I don’t exactly know what I’ll do with all these typed pages. Maybe I’ll see if someone wants to publish them. And maybe I’ll tell more of the story, because the damned thing about wars is they don’t just end with a snap of the fingers, or even a bullet in the head.

  This war has killed . . . who even knows? Millions. Isn’t that enough? Do we need to know just how many millions? Millions dead. Millions wounded. Millions without homes, sick and starved and cold and alone, being eaten from within by grief and guilt and fear.

  I somehow thought if I wrote it all down it would be out of my head and on paper. I felt maybe I could capture it all, make it into something I could hold and move and stick in a box like Sergeant Cole used to tell us. But that’s not going to be how it works. My body will carry scars. And my mind will carry memories burned deeper than scars.

  But after what Rainy told me about Oradour, and after Malmédy, and especially after what I saw at Buchenwald and what Frangie told me about Dachau, I know I won’t feel guilty about killing Krauts. If ever anyone needed to be killed, it’s those Nazi bastards.

  I hear stories here in the hospital, from GIs who’ve been in places I have not. They talk in hushed tones of German cities turned into little more than stone quarries, with desperate Germans—old men and children—sifting through the wreckage. German women selling their bodies for a candy bar. German mothers selling their daughters for a loaf of bread.

  How many of those women were at Nazi rallies screaming their lungs out, yelling, “Heil Hitler”? How many husbands and fathers cheered as the mad bastard in Berlin ranted about Jews and Slavs and homosexuals and Gypsies and all his other scapegoats?

  If you don’t want your cities burned down around your ears and your daughters whoring for GIs, don’t start wars.

  Already I see articles in the Stars and Stripes and in magazines about the possibility of war starting between us and the Soviets. I guess all good things come in threes, right? World War I, World War II, hey, we can’t stop there, can we?

  Well, not me. This soldier girl has had all the . . .

  Sorry for the interruption, Gentle Reader, but Rio just showed up here with orders for me not to go back with the other evacuees from the hospital, but to travel back with the 119th! I’ve got to be ready in twenty minutes, so I am going to quickly wrap this up and pack my bag. I am going back with Rio and Geer and Beebee and the other slobs I’ve spent almost three years with. Not Jack, though. Jack—or “Gimpy Jack,” as we now call him just to irritate him—is already on his way home, back in Britain.

  I’ll miss that man. Rio will miss him more, but despite my prodding she never did get to the point of telling Jack she’s crazy for him. She’s his sergeant, and from Rio’s point of view, that’s the end of the story. Stubborn girl.

  But like I said, I’ll miss him too. Him and Cat Preeling, who is already back in the States having been discharged with the classic million-dollar wound. And Geer and Beebee and Milkmaid and Sweetheart and Sergeant Cole and Mackie. And the ones who didn’t make it. I’ll miss t
hem all, even the ones I hated half the time. Personal dislikes don’t mean much stacked against the fact that the fellow you think you can’t put up with is standing right next to you in a freezing wet hole waiting for the next 88. If you wore the uniform, you are my brother or sister. And that is forever.

  Hey! I just looked at my orders. They seem to have originated with a certain Captain Elisheva Schulterman, approved by some brigadier general, no less, named Herkemeier.

  Well, Rainy’s another one I will have to find a way to keep track of. In fact—

  All right, all right, Rio is nagging me.

  I was going to say that in fact, while the war may be over, it won’t quite be over for us. And I guess that means this story isn’t over. Maybe down the road . . .

  But hell, Gentle Reader, for now at least I must end this. Rio will be threatening me with that damned knife of hers if I don’t get moving.

  So here are my final words of wisdom. This has been the greatest thing I have ever done or will ever do. I suppose society will try hard to put all us uppity soldier girls back in a box with a nice pink bow on it. And I don’t know what happens next. I don’t know what the world is going to think of me. I don’t know what I’m going to do. And that really should scare me.

  But, Gentle Reader, we soldier girls have been to Kasserine, to Sicily, to Salerno, to the river and Monte Cassino. We’ve been to Omaha Beach and the bocage, to the Hürtgen and the Bulge. We’ve been to the camps.

  Try putting us in a box. Try.

  We won’t scare so easy. Right now, getting ready to leave this hospital, this continent, this war, I’m not feeling afraid for the future. Hell, I am now Sergeant Jenou Castain: so of course, I fear nothing.

  Except when Rio shoots me that look and starts loosening her koummya in its scabbard.

  PART VII

  AFTER

  The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.

  —Ernest Hemingway

  34

  FRANGIE MARR, RIO RICHLIN, JENOU CASTAIN, AND RAINY SCHULTERMAN—WAR’S END

  “Frangie? Frangie?”

  Frangie hears the voice and recognizes it immediately. It’s the voice she’s heard since she was a baby in her mother’s womb.

  Dorothy Marr looks older, wearier, worn down, but nevertheless radiant. She runs through the crowd of people getting off the bus. Frangie drops her duffel bag and throws her arms around her mother.

  Obal, who has grown at least two feet so he now towers over Frangie, stands awkwardly trying to disguise the tears. Frangie frees a hand and draws him into the embrace.

  It goes on for a while. It’s an embrace full of pain and sadness, of things learned and regretted. But above all it is relief. Frangie is alive and Obal, their mother, and Frangie herself now drain away three years of fear and worry with a hug.

  The white passengers got off first, and are greeting their own families. The colored families are on one side of the terminal, the white on the other. The bathrooms are clearly marked for white men, white women, colored men, colored women.

  It’s a long walk from the bus terminal to home—not for Frangie who is used to very long walks, but for her mother who seems to tire easily.

  The first part of the walk is through a white neighborhood. American flags fly from porch flagpoles. Patriotic bunting can be seen here and there. Weeks have gone by since the war ended in Europe—it’s just as complicated a task getting millions of soldiers home as it was getting them to Europe in the first place. Although now there is a definite lack of shooting, and the troop ship had plowed straight across the Atlantic with never an evasive maneuver to avoid mines or torpedoes.

  “How have you been, Obal?” Frangie asks.

  “Me? I’m fine aside from missing the whole war!”

  Frangie smiles tolerantly. “You didn’t miss much.”

  “You have to tell me everything!” he enthuses.

  And Frangie thinks, No, Obal, I don’t have to. And anyway, I couldn’t. What words would I use to tell you about soldiers torn and burned? How would I describe the stink of Dachau?

  “I’ll tell you the important stuff, how about that?”

  Obal snorts dismissively, and Frangie smiles at their mother. “Not everything has to be told all at once.”

  They walk down the sidewalk, arm in arm, until a white man comes the opposite direction. Then they part to make way, but the white man snorts. “I ain’t walking between you Nigras! Get out of the way!”

  So Frangie steps down into the gutter to let him pass.

  “Do you mind very much if I make a stop on the way home?” Frangie asks her mother and Obal.

  “Stop?”

  “I want to see Daddy’s grave.”

  Her mother nods and her brother looks away to conceal emotions he doesn’t think are manly.

  “Of course, baby.”

  “And then,” Frangie announces, “we are going to write to Harder and tell him that this is his home and his family.”

  That night as she lies in her own bed with actual sheets and not even a few lice, it occurs to Frangie that she did not ask, or beg, or even suggest that Harder is now to be welcomed back: she ordered it.

  She holds that thought in one hand.

  In the other hand she holds the recent memory of her mother and brother and herself stepping into the gutter.

  She recalls the faces—the black faces—of men and women with bodies torn apart in defense of America. Some she lost. Some she saved. And not one of those black men and women should ever have to step into a gutter for anyone.

  A different fight is coming.

  “We’ll win this one too,” she whispers just before sleep—sleep without reveille, without artillery, without desperate cries of pain—takes her.

  Rio Richlin, wearing a new uniform with her brand-new, bright, golden staff sergeant’s stripes on the shoulder, pushes the wheelchair down the familiar street.

  “You shoulda warned them,” Jenou says.

  “When? Transport opens up, you grab it,” Rio says. “I just hope we don’t give anyone a heart attack.”

  They’d made it as far as Monterey, California, before being told there was nothing available to take them north. But Rio had managed to convince a civilian truck driver who said he was going within a mile or so of Gedwell Falls and would be happy . . . honored . . . and so on.

  Rio and Jenou’s return to Gedwell Falls is in the back of a pickup truck, with Jenou’s wheelchair wedged in by sacks of fertilizer.

  “Hail the conquering heroes!” Jenou cries, following it with a sardonic grin as the truck rattles up the highway and passing motorists stare.

  They spend the time remembering truck rides past. So many, many rides in the backs of deuce-and-a-halfs.

  They cover the last few blocks on foot (and wheel), passing places they’d both known all their lives. Very little has changed. Even the cars are the same—Detroit is shifting back from tanks to cars, but it will take a while for new models to appear.

  They walk and roll through the town square. Rio looks too long at the bandstand where Strand first asked her out. She doesn’t know what has become of him, and she fears running into his family or friends. What can she say? That Strand broke?

  Civilians will never understand. To them, a young man who flew mission after brutal, deadly mission over Italy and Germany and broke in the end is a coward.

  But everyone breaks. Rio herself had finally broken when she saw Jack and then Jenou. Everyone, sooner or later, snaps. What matters is what happens next. Had Strand found his courage and returned to his unit?

  But then they are on her block. And Rio sees her house. The gold star for her sister, Rachel, still hangs with sad pride in the window. A gold star for Rachel, and a blue one for Rio.

  “I’ll just go knock,” Rio says, heart in her throat. She climbs the porch stairs, leaving Jenou on the walkway. She starts to knock, but that seems crazy: this is home. This is her home.

  She opens
the door and yells, “Anybody home?”

  “So, Captain, what the hell are you going to do now?” Newly minted Brigadier General Herkemeier is grinning—not something he typically does much of. And instead of his habit of obsessively straightening his trouser creases he now obsessively touches the star on his shoulder.

  Rainy smiles back at him. She has not gone home, she is still in Germany, wrapping up prisoner interrogations and filing reports. VE Day has come and gone, and she’s been waiting on orders to take transport for the Pacific. She’s fantasized about walking in unannounced on Aryeh somewhere out in the Pacific and acting like it’s no big deal.

  Plus, if she’s in uniform she can make him salute her. She loves her big brother. She idolizes her big brother. But over the years he has at times behaved like . . . a big brother. So just a teensy, tiny bit of revenge . . .

  “I assumed I’d be taking a crash course in Japanese,” Rainy says.

  Herkemeier sits forward suddenly. “Good God, you don’t know! Where have you been all morning?”

  “Sleeping after staying up half the night going over—”

  “Rainy. The air corps has dropped some kind of new bomb on a Japanese city called Hiroshima. It’s called an atom bomb. One bomb annihilated the entire city.”

  “Good lord!”

  “Even the Japs can’t take that kind of punishment. It’s a matter of weeks, maybe even days.”

  “Huh.” Rainy frowns and sinks back into her seat. This leaves her with no idea at all what comes next.

  “Listen, Rainy,” Herkemeier says, tugging at the crease in his trousers. “You know the army will be drawn down fast. I will happily move heaven and earth to keep you, but the truth is we are shifting to an army of occupation. And the word is that army intelligence will be cut way back.”

  “But we’ll still need intel!”

  “Oh, spies are always with us. There were spies in the Old Testament. Joshua had spies! But the whole spying business is going to be turned over to a civilian agency built on the OSS—the Office of Strategic Services. Bill Donovan’s outfit.”