I miss you. I miss home. I even miss the cows. But hopefully we’ll get this war over quick and I’ll be back there with you.
Your loving daughter,
Rio
10
FRANGIE MARR—OFF GELA BEACH, SICILY
First wave.
First wave.
The words won’t stop torturing her. She will be landing with the first wave.
She is shaking, shaking down to bone and sinew, shaking down to the molecular level, one big tremble. Her teeth chatter in a dust-dry mouth. Her heart fades in and out, almost seeming to stop at times before pounding back like a panicked horse. Her breathing is a series of gulps and snorts, forcing air in and out of lungs that feel paralyzed.
“Lord Jesus, keep me safe,” she prays.
According to her watch, a secondhand Timex, it is early morning, but it looks a lot like night. There are stars winking through gaps in high clouds. No moon, not that she can see anyway. From the railing of the transport ship she can make out nothing of the island itself, just a sort of looming darkness within darkness that suggests mountains. But off to the left, the west, beyond the town of Licata, yellow and orange explosions mark the places where paratroopers are already engaged in battle. And something like a distant storm in the east marks the naval artillery covering the landing of the British and Canadian forces.
There are ships spread far behind hers, hundreds of them, a huge gray armada, only visible because of the phosphorescence of the water. The vast fleet should be reassuring, but ships stop at the water’s edge while soldiers must go on.
Why am I so afraid?
It’s the landing, she realizes, the absurdity of it. Madness! Little men and women on little boats trying to attack the massive, mountainous island. It seems ridiculous. It seems impossible. Surely the Italians and Germans are ready and waiting. They must have known this day was coming, and if they didn’t guess it earlier, they must know it by now.
“Searchlights!” someone hisses.
Spears of white light stab at the ships from the beach, the circles of illumination crawling across wave tops before picking out a transport here, a destroyer there. In the light Frangie sees the nearest destroyer’s guns swivel toward the beam. Everyone expects the shells to start flying from the shore. But nothing. The searchlights sweep and illuminate, like stage lights looking for the star of the show. But then, one by one, the searchlights go dark. And there is no distant sound of the big shore batteries firing.
From overhead Frangie hears the wind in the wires that hold a barrage balloon floating high to complicate life for German planes. No planes, not yet.
There is a small New Testament in her inner pocket where she also keeps her photos of her parents and her brothers. She touches it with cold fingers. She searches for a verse.
The Lord is my shepherd . . .
No, she’s never liked that psalm. She’s never liked picturing herself as a sheep.
Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong.
She glances at the men nearest. Some smoke at a frantic pace. One chews gum loudly, snapping it. Others move their mouths silently in prayer. Most stare stonily into the dark.
The men are afraid too. And these are green troops who have not yet seen what a high-powered rifle round does to a human body. Their fear is of something they cannot fully imagine. They don’t yet know how easily bones break and flesh melts and organs spill from . . .
She squeezes her eyes shut, tighter, tighter till stars and pinwheels are all she sees. She opens them to see Walter Green looking at her through wire-frame spectacles.
Is he afraid? Or are sergeants not allowed to fear?
Walter Green tosses his cigarette aside and comes over.
“Hey,” he says. “You okay?”
She nods too fast, not trusting her voice.
He says, “‘Fear thou not, for I am with thee. Be not dismayed, for I am thy God. I will strengthen thee.’” Seeing her surprise, he adds, “Isaiah. If I’m not mistaken, he lived through a war with the Assyrians. Very bad fellows, those Assyrians. What are you scared of most?”
“Most?” She runs through a gallery of gruesome injuries. But in her imagination she is both the wounded and the medic. The medic whose fingers fumble and who can’t remember what she’s supposed to do. “I could make you a list,” she says with an effort at lightness.
He lays a hand on her arm, looks her in the eye, and says, “You’ll do fine.” Then he leaves to deal with a shoving match between two of his higher-strung charges.
That’s it, isn’t it, Frangie thinks. That’s what I’m most afraid of. It’s not just being hurt, though that’s real enough. I’m afraid I’ll fail these GIs. I’m afraid I won’t be smart enough, brave enough . . .
The announcement comes, and Frangie jerks out of her reverie and moves along with the men and the few women of her new platoon. She shuffles along till she comes to where Walter is checking men’s gear.
“You okay now, Doc?”
She nods. “I want it to be over.”
“Come on now, it hasn’t even started.” He winks, and she can’t help but smile a little.
“Can’t fight no war without Albert Huntington gets into it,” a private says—presumably Albert Huntington, though Frangie doesn’t know him or many of the men yet. She’s new to this unit, having spent the last few months attached to a clinic where the work was largely the treatment of venereal diseases and injuries from bar fights and training accidents.
“I suppose it would be wrong to pray that all the Krauts just die,” Frangie says, sort of joking, but also not.
“It’s not wrong to pray for it to be over sooner rather than later,” Green says, seeing that she is serious.
She nods and swallows hard and prays for just that. Lord Jesus, bring this battle to a swift conclusion. And if it’s Your will, take care of Your Frangie.
The loudspeaker crackles to life. The final order is given. The mass of men and women murmurs and moves. Sailors and sergeants stand at the top of the boarding nets, which are slung over the side, hurrying and cajoling the clumsy soldiers.
“Come on, boys, it’s just a net, you’ve practiced it before.”
But Frangie has not practiced it before, and neither have the rest of them. Green troops, the greenest. Sergeant Green’s green platoon. She climbs awkwardly over the railing, feeling helping hands steady the weight of the pack on her back and guide her feet.
Hands on the slick, wet rail.
“Don’t look down, miss,” a sailor says. “Climb down, but don’t look.”
She looks.
The landing craft below her is rolling in the agitated sea, banging against the side of the ship, rolling away to expose dark water, rising, falling. She is climbing down onto a moving target. The seasickness that has dogged her during the storm-tossed trip from Tunisia comes swarming back in the guise of vertigo.
Her boots catch on every rope. Her hands are sticky with tar from the nets but so cold she doesn’t at first notice the wire-brush harshness that tears tiny slices from her palms and the meaty pads of her fingers.
Down and down, how can it be this far? She looks down as the boat rushes up, up, up as though to meet her before falling away again.
“Come on, Doc, you don’t want to swim.” It’s a private named Jasper Jones who has occasionally helped Frangie out by letting her use him as a medical practice dummy. He’s a gangly six-footer with big ears that won’t look right until his face takes on some weight with age. Frangie likes him, but she’s avoided him since it became apparent that he was thinking of her in romantic terms.
The last thing she’s interested in right now is men. At least not men as boyfriends. Men and women as patients are her focus. Anyway, what kind of kids would they have? A beanpole and a midget? They would make a ridiculous-looking couple.
This is what I’m thinking of?
Better than so many other things . . .
She gratefully accepts Ja
sper’s help as he reaches to guide her feet into the last couple of holes and then holds her steady as she jumps down into the rising boat.
“All set, Doc?”
“All set, Jasper. Thanks.”
“Anything for you, Doc.”
Of course he’s doing the same service for all the GIs. Climbing down a net is hard; climbing down a net in full gear from a heaving ship onto a boat that is doing an impersonation of a crazy elevator is a whole lot harder.
Once the boat is loaded it veers away from the side of the ship and begins turning a big circle, waiting until more boats are loaded. The sea is rough, and once again seasickness threatens. Cold, salty spray lashes them.
“You scared, Doc?” Jasper asks.
“I am. Aren’t you?”
Jasper laughs. “Me? Nah. The bullet with my name on it hasn’t been made yet.”
Another private shakes his head sadly. This is Paul Dixon, called Daddy D on account of his age, which may be as old as thirty. “You’re a young fool, Jasper Jones, that’s why you’re not afraid,” Daddy D says. “You are a young, know-nothing, been-nothing, done-nothing infant dressed up in a uniform that looks like it was a hand-me-down from some shorter cousin.”
Jasper could take offense, but he recognizes the bantering tone. “Me young? Maybe to an old, old granddad like you. Weren’t you in the Spanish-American War, pops? See the thing is, you being all old and dried up and wrinkled—”
“I do not have one single damn wrinkle—”
“You get closer to death, you get so you can see it through the mist, and that mist? That mist is starting to clear now . . .” There is some hand-waving here to simulate pushing through a fog. Jasper switches to an old man’s reedy quaver. “And you’re thinking time is short, time is short, it’s all gonna end!”
Daddy D makes a wry smile at Frangie. “I am twenty-nine years old. Only in the damn army does that make me old.” Turning back to Jasper, Daddy D says, “Difference between us isn’t age, it’s experience. I am a man. You are a boy. I have known the love of a good woman who knows how to be a bad woman; and I’ve known the love of bad women who know how to be worse women; and I have known the love of the worst women in Tuskegee, Alabama, and, son, those are some very bad, very, very bad women, women who used me up till I was a shambling wreck, a husk of a man . . .”
Laughter is spreading, even to Walter, a welcome, calming sound, though it sometimes comes through chattering teeth.
“. . . staggering around the streets in my underwear calling on Jesus to take me home. You, on the other hand—” He’s about to say something even more explicitly ribald, but he glances at Frangie and stops himself, finishing lamely with, “You, young Jasper, have experienced nothing.”
Frangie wants to ask Daddy D what he knows about the Tuskegee base where she’s heard they may be training colored pilots. But the back-and-forth is drawing the attention of other scared soldiers, giving them a few minutes of amusement in the midst of this mad circling and circling, so she makes a mental note to ask later.
“As much as I love to hear your Granddaddy Remus tales of the old days, the long, long ago when you could still interest a woman in your now withered-up—”
And on it goes until there’s a whistle blast and the boat finishes its rotation and heads toward shore. The conversation dies.
The sea is still up, not the gale they sailed through to get here but still agitated enough that boats ahead and behind can completely disappear from view in the troughs between waves. The landing craft skids down the back of one wave, settles a beat, then powers up the slope of the next one. There’s nothing but walls of black water to be seen at the bottom of the trough, and not much more at the top. Dawn has still not come, but the black of night is losing its absoluteness and there is the promise of dawn in the east.
Suddenly a nearby cruiser opens fire with its big guns, ejecting six-inch shells in volcanic eruptions of fire and smoke. They fly for long seconds . . . one . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . before blossoming as they strike a distant hill. In the dark where the hills are only shadows, the shells seem to be exploding in midair. Other shells from other ships blow up behind the small town of Gela, and sometimes land in the town itself.
“Eye-ties are catching hell,” a soldier remarks.
“More hell they catch, the less we do,” another soldier says.
Should I pray for the shells to strike true? Shall I pray for my enemy’s death? Blasphemy, surely. But I do want them to die if it means I won’t.
Now the guns of the fleet are firing with some steadiness, ship after ship enveloped in flame and smoke of its own making. Explosions that seem small compared to the moment of their eruption on the invisible hills, on the barely visible towns to the north and dead ahead. The noise rumbles across the water joining the roar of boat engines and slapping waves. The flashes illuminate faces for snapshots of expression, here an open mouth, there wide eyes, a head lowered to kiss a rosary.
With all the noise, at first no one hears the Heinkels coming in out of the northwest until the antiaircraft batteries on the ships open up too late, chattering madly and sending thousands of red tracer rounds of small-bore cannon and large-bore machine gun fire to lacerate the sky.
“Planes!” Jasper yells.
“They aren’t after us, we’re small fry,” Daddy D says. “We got other problems.” He jerks his thumb toward the beach, a line of shimmering surf now, like someone had trailed a dripping can of silver paint through the night.
As if to make his point, a battery on shore seems at last to notice the tiny landing craft and begins lobbing big shells that come screeching overhead with a wind like a passing freight train before ripping up acres of seawater.
“There!” a soldier yells, pointing. “Dammit! They got one of our boats!”
Frangie sees the explosion that bursts from beneath the landing craft. The boat lifts clear out of the water before its back breaks and the boat falls in two pieces, splash, all revealed in the dramatic staccato lighting of outgoing artillery.
The Heinkels roar overhead, and a ship half a mile away blows up.
Jesus, make me strong. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, make me strong.
Frangie is far from being the only one praying. She hears two voices reciting the Lord’s Prayer.
Our Father which art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done . . .
That’s fine, Frangie thinks, so long as the Lord’s will is to keep me alive and let me do what I am here to do. The navy’s chaplain, back aboard the transport, gave confession to the Roman Catholics and a few Protestants who felt it best to cover every base. And Frangie has taken communion, so she does not fear dying outside of God’s grace. But she does fear.
It is coming. It is coming. Death, riding a pale horse, death, death . . .
You’ll do fine.
She begins running through her medical supplies, performing a mental inventory, a reassuring ritual, focusing on anything but her own fear. So many of this bandage, so many of that. So many pouches of sulfa, so many ampoules of morphine, so many splints. She has the full recommended ration of everything, plus all the extras she has stuffed into ammo pouches and pockets. Extra scissors? First pouch, left side. Extra sulfa? Both pockets of her jacket.
“Get ready!” the coxswain yells in a voice that sounds like it’s coming from a twelve-year-old, but just then the boat comes to a sudden, shuddering halt, making a sound like a chalkboard being dragged over a hundred fingernails. Men fall forward and then back, staggering, grabbing for handholds. The engine dies, the coxswain curses and comes running down to look over the side.
“Goddamn sandbar!”
They are still a quarter of a mile from the beach. There are no life rafts, and there is no chance of swimming in the dark waves with their gear.
The engine is restarted and with lots of frightened cursing from the coxswain, the boat attempts to pull itself off the sandb
ar.
No dice. The water churns, the boards screech, but the boat does not move. Half a dozen soldiers strip off their gear and jump into the seething, waist-deep water and try to push the boat off, but the sand beneath their boots gives them no purchase and they are hauled back aboard, soaking and shivering.
They are a small boat, utterly helpless, a perfect target with the dawn now just beginning to paint the sky a soft and hazy navy blue.
The first shell lands fifty feet astern.
11
RAINY SCHULTERMAN—ABOARD HMS TOPAZ, NORTH ATLANTIC
“Wha . . . wha . . . where am I?” Cisco is suddenly awake.
He thrashes in his hammock and realizes he has been lashed into it with ropes, trussed up with all the knot-bending skill of a military service that has been tying nautical knots since the days of Sir Francis Drake and the Spanish Armada. Cisco is held in place by a virtual illustrated encyclopedia of knots.
Cisco’s hammock is in the torpedo room, all the way at the front of the boat. It’s a cramped, greasy space smelling of industrial solvents, unwashed bodies, stale tobacco, fresh tobacco smoke, farts, cheese, and oil. There appears to be a thin sheen of oil on virtually every surface, including on the tan canvas of the hammock.
The crew are dressed in a sort of liberal approach to uniforms, some of the men wearing neatly belted dungarees with shirttails tucked in, while others wear bulky fisherman’s sweaters or stained shirts open at the neck with sleeves rolled up. The officers are only marginally more formal.
The submarine has refueled and provisioned in the Azores, and throughout the entire boat every nook and cranny is stuffed with powdery loaves of fresh Portuguese bread, pineapples, cabbages, bananas, onions, butter, and wheels of pale-yellow Azorean cow’s milk cheese. They have also replenished their store of torpedoes, which lie sinister in steel racks just astern of the tubes, ready to be fed in. The torpedoes surprised Rainy on first sight, being much bigger than she expected, each just over 21 feet long, weighing 3,452 pounds, 750 pounds of which is the TNT warhead.