Front Lines (13 page)

“Yes, we are important,” Tilo says, holding up a spoon like a mirror to preen.

“Oh, I can shoot you, Suarez,” Jenou jokes. “No problem there.”

Tilo throws up his hands. “What is it with girls threatening to shoot me today?”

“I suppose it's usually their fathers threatening to shoot you,” Stick says, and winks at Cat. Tilo kind of likes this; it feeds the myth of his sexual prowess he's been laboring to construct.

Jack catches Jenou's seriousness. “It must be a hell of a thing.”

“What?” Rio asks between mouthfuls of the pasty gray substance on her tray.

“Killing a man.”

“Not a man, an enemy.” Luther Geer has invited himself to join the conversation though he's at another table, his back just behind Rio's.

When no one responds, Luther turns around, lifts his leg over his bench and then over their bench, thus transferring himself to their table. For some reason no one understands, Luther has taken to keeping a calico kitten with him, despite the fact that he runs the risk of being
disciplined. The kitten, peeking out from Geer's collar, has a belligerent look that mirrors its owner's. “Why the hell do you think we're here? The army isn't paying us to do push-ups and learn the obstacle course, they're making us over as killers. Look at me. I sell shoes back in civilian life, I don't go around killing people. But you show me some yellow Jap monkey and I'll damned sure shoot him and smile while I'm doing it.”

“Crudely put,” Jack says, “but I suppose I agree. That is what we're being trained to do.”

Rio shrugs. “I enjoyed shooting at targets. I didn't think I would, but I did. At targets.”

“Deadeye Richlin,” Jenou teases.

“I'll shoot a Jap or a German,” Tilo says. “I hope I don't have to shoot any Italians. My mother's Italian. She hates that Mussolini and his crowd, but regular old Italians aren't all big fans of his either. Not like it is with the Germans. You ever see them in those rallies? They love Hitler. They want to take over the world. Italians don't want to take over a damned thing. They want to eat some noodles and drink some wine and make love to a beautiful, blond-haired private.”

He bats his long-lashed eyes at Jenou, and she is not entirely dismissive.

“Best if we get sent to kill Japs,” Luther says. “That's like shooting a dog.”

“Forgive me, but is shooting dogs a form of sport in America?” Jack, of course.

Kerwin says, “Naw, not sport. Geer shoots dogs for dinner.”

That earns enough laughter that Luther switches back to his own table, taking his kitten with him.

“I don't know,” Rio says. “I don't know if I can do it. I don't want to do it, I know that much. I just want to drive a truck or maybe a jeep.”

“She's a surprisingly good driver,” Jenou confirms. “I don't believe she's killed more than three, maybe four garbage cans with her driving. And a few mailboxes. But no people. So far.”

“Stop picking on me or I'll eat your creamed crap on toast.”

Jenou shoves her tray toward Rio. “That's not so much a threat as it is a kind offer.”

Rio casts her mind back to the day's training. In her mind's eye she tries to envision the paper target as a man. Tries to imagine herself actually taking aim and killing an actual man. Tries to imagine what the bullet would . . . and then she stops herself and her thoughts swerve elsewhere, to Strand, who seems with each passing day to become more distant, more of an old photograph in her mind instead of the boy who had held her hand in the movie theater.

Rio goes blank and daydreamy and only after a while realizes that in her funk she has let her gaze settle on Jack Stafford.

She blinks and looks away, feeling warmth rise up her neck and into her cheeks.

Conversation turns to other things, but while Rio laughs and jokes, she can still feel the wooden stock in her hands, the butt plate kicking against her shoulder, and the thrill of seeing that little hole drilled in the distant target.

She does not want to shoot at a human being, not even a Jap, not even as payback for what they had done to Rachel. But she is disciplined when it came to firing position, she has twenty-twenty vision and a steady hand, she hits what she shoots at, and the simple truth is, that feels good.

Before she is done with Camp Maron she will earn a Marksman rating with the M1 rifle, and then a Sharpshooter rating, only falling short of the coveted Expert rank.

She is a decent driver, despite Jenou's teasing. A
decent
driver.

But a hell of a shot.

“Some of you actually volunteered to join this great patriotic endeavor to kill the Japanese and the Italian and the German for Uncle Sam.” Sergeant Morton Kirkland is a man who does not share the common taste for derogatory nicknames for enemies. Frangie has never heard him refer to a Jap or a Kraut. “But most of you are draftees, here against your will. Many of you would like to go home.”

Some of those who enlisted would like to go home, too, Frangie thinks. But neither she nor any of the several dozen men and half-dozen women speaks up to say so. Sergeant Kirkland isn't a bad fellow, but he's a yeller, an old-school drill instructor, complete with an inventive list of insults and insulting nicknames for various recruits: Flounder, Cheesedick, Pustule, Stumbles, and for Frangie, Okaninny, a word combining her home state, Oklahoma, with either “ninny” or “pickaninny”—he hasn't made that clear.

While Sergeant Kirkland won't refer to the enemy as Japs, he will refer to recruits as bedbugs.

They are in a field of red Georgia clay, a large swath of which is garlanded with barbed wire. The wire is stretched across wooden stakes set about eighteen inches above the ground. It looks like a crude device meant to trip an enemy, like something left over from the last war. In places the carefully stretched wire is crossed by random snakes of coiled wire, so the whole thing taken together is nearly impenetrable. The course is the better part of an acre, bounded on one side by a log-and-dirt berm that rises about two feet high.

Frangie's company has not been told what they are to do here—Sergeant Kirkland plays things close to the vest and has a flair for the dramatic. But Frangie cannot help but notice a corporal and a PFC unloading boxes of what looks like ammunition from a wagon-wheeled caisson.

“Well, you bedbugs, those of you who want out of the army, today is the day!”

The closest thing Frangie has to a friend in the company is Clara Moore, a stooped and rather dull girl from Enid, Oklahoma, and thus a fellow Okie. Sergeant Kirkland calls her Moo Cow. It's not the nicest name, but it's not the most insulting either. Clara raises her hand, which causes the sergeant to freeze in midword and stare at her with a look that could melt a tank.

Clara slowly lowers her hand.

“What is it, Private Cow?” Kirkland demands.

“Nothing, Sergeant.”

“Then I'd like to go on explaining, if that's all right with you.” It is. “As I was saying, for those of you who want out of the army, this is your lucky day. Because all it will take . . . is standing up.” He grins, apparently believing he's made a joke. “In fact, all you gotta do is raise your head up. Just a few inches. Just a little bit.” He's still grinning, but now his voice turns flinty. “Because today is live fire, bedbugs, live fire.
Bang, bang, bang!
”

Frangie puts it all together in a flash of insight: the barbed wire, the berm, and, now that she looks more closely at the field beyond her amused sergeant, the machine guns placed along that berm.

“Raise your heads even an inch above that wire, and a thirty-caliber machine gun round will drill a hole through your helmet, through your skull, through your brain, and then blast its way right on out the other side. Those machine guns are locked in so they fire just an inch or two above the wire. The bullets are real.” He's not joking, teasing, or even insulting now. “You've been trained in how to advance on elbows and knees keeping your rifle clear. Elbows and knees and keep your heads down below the wire. Failing that you may choose to roll over on your back and kick your way along. Are you hearing me, men? And women?”

“Yes, Sergeant!”

The sergeant sounds concerned for their safety, even their lives. This is very different from the way he's sounded when they were practicing hand-to-hand combat (at which Frangie performed pitifully), and bayonet practice (also pitiful), and the regular obstacle course (where she did surprisingly well, being fast on her feet and having a slight frame that is easier to haul over a wooden wall).

They are lined up in rows of twelve. Sixty seconds will be counted off between each group. Frangie is in the third row.

“All right, test fire!” a noncom over behind the machine guns yells. There is the sinister metallic throat-clearing of six machine guns being cocked, and then . . .

It is the loudest thing Frangie has ever heard. These are not the machine gun sound effects she's heard in movies; these are the real thing—six bulky, water-cooled models from the last war. They fire 450 rounds a minute, and each round is like a ball peen hammer against Frangie's eardrums.

The test burst is just a few rounds, but it is more than enough to wipe away the last grin on the last face.

“First row. Go!” Sergeant Kirkland yells.

The machine guns fire, not all at once, but a couple at a time, firing two-second bursts, which is approximately fifteen rounds each.

The first row drops down into the mud. They cradle their rifles by resting them in the crooks of their elbows and crawl like scared babies. The barbed wire plucks at their backs and scrapes along their helmets. The machine guns open up, two-second bursts with a few seconds between.

“Second row, go!”

From the far end of the course a corporal is yelling encouragement. “Move it, you slugs! Keep your damned head down, Matthews! Jesus H.! My baby sister is faster than you people!”

It doesn't look hard. It really doesn't. Until Kirkland yells, “Row three, go!”

Frangie drops quickly to her stomach, cradles her carbine—she's too small to manage the rifle that is both longer and heavier—and slips her head beneath the first row of barbed wire.

She quickly realizes that there is no dignified way to do this. To stay below the stream of bullets she has to press her entire body right down on the mud, splay her knees out, and push with feet and knees while pulling with elbows. But the drag of her body on the mud makes forward movement nearly impossible. Clods of moist clay push their way into her shirt and accumulate on her belt. The urge to rise just enough to gain some leverage is strong, but not strong enough to make her forget the
bullets. She has never been close to a bullet in flight before and had not realized that they make a sound that is distinct from the shattering noise of exploding powder. It's a
flit-flit-flit
sound, with the pitch subtly different depending on how close they fly. She is convinced she can tell when they are a safe eight inches away or a terrifying two inches.

She digs her elbows into the mud, keeping her carbine clear of the ground, which forces her facedown practically onto the bolt. Each spasmodic movement threatens to knock her front teeth into steel. Still, she's doing it. She's doing it! From time to time the wire will scrape the top of her helmet, but her back is clear and at least she's not falling behind.

Sometimes, Frangie reflects, being small is a good thing.

She glances left and spots Clara lying still, unmoving. The voice of the corporal can be heard in snatches between eruptions from the guns. It reminds her of listening to the radio during a thunderstorm when the lightning static would punctuate and interrupt the music.

BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM!

Flit! Flit! FLIT!

“Move your—”

BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM!

Flit! Flit!

“Damn your bones, you—”

BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM!

Frangie looks again and sees that now Clara is definitely falling behind. She can see the other girl's face from this angle. Clara is sweating. Her mouth is gulping for air, like a trout just landed in the bottom of the fisherman's boat. Squinting to see better, Frangie sees that Clara's hands are trembling. In fact, her whole body is shaking.

“Come on, Clara, you can do this!”

The sergeant and the corporal are both yelling now, and the machine guns seem to be firing even more steadily. Clara is doing worse than trembling now; her whole body is quivering like a cornered animal about to make a desperate run for it.

Frangie has a terrible feeling, a sinking in her stomach, a knowledge born of small clues that add up to an awful certainty: Clara is on the edge of panic.

There's a soldier behind Clara, trying now to get past her, and hesitation has let someone from the fourth row close in on Frangie as well.

“Clara! No!” Frangie yells, but if Clara hears, it does not stop her. She pushes up off the ground.

“Stop shooting!” Frangie yells. “Stop shooting!” She shoves her carbine aside and tries to scramble to Clara. “Get down, Clara, get—”

Clara is looking in Frangie's direction when the bullet
hits Clara's helmet with a dull metallic
clang
, spinning Clara's head, and spraying blood and sharp little shards of metal onto Frangie's face.

“Man down! Man down! Cease fire! Cease fire!” the sergeant shouts, and the firing stops. Frangie fights her way to her feet, pushing through the wire, tangling in a coil that won't let go of her boot, and stumbling to drop beside Clara. She tosses Clara's helmet aside and at first sees only a smear of blood covering the side of Clara's face.

Clara says, “What happened? What happened?”

“Let me look at it, don't move!” Frangie yells.

Clara's fighting her, limbs thrashing, so Frangie straddles her, using her small weight to hold the panicky girl down, twisting her head to see the injury.

“It's just your ear,” Frangie says. “It's nothing.”

It's not nothing. Clara's ear is almost entirely gone, and what's left is hamburger that will have to be cut away. But Frangie does not see any deeper damage. Clara will not die. She'll want to wear her hair long for the rest of her life, but she will not die.

It is no easy task for Frangie and Sergeant Kirkland to extricate Clara from the barbed wire and then manhandle her back to the starting line where they drop her, none too gently, on the ground. Frangie kneels beside her and, in an unusually authoritative voice, demands water.
She is handed a canteen, which she pours over the wound.

“Yeah, it's just your ear, Clara. Another inch and it would have been curtains. Anyone got a handkerchief?”

No one has a handkerchief, but someone produces a clean OD T-shirt that Frangie folds quickly and presses down over the wound. The shirt turns red, but the blood is only seeping, not pumping.

It takes half an hour for an ambulance to arrive with two stretcher bearers to take Clara away to the surgery that will leave her disfigured—but in no danger—and out of the army.

“Like I said, that's one way to get out of the army,” Sergeant Kirkland says. “You handled that well, Private Marr.”

It is almost the first time he has referred to her by name rather than as Okaninny.

That evening, after chow, Sergeant Kirkland calls her from the barracks. “Captain wants to see you.”

This is not happy news. Privates are not called to see the captain. Ever. She searches the sergeant's face for a clue, but he's already done an about-face and Frangie rushes to catch up to him.

“What's up, Sarge?”

“Captain wants to see you.”

“I know, but why?”

“The ways of officers are not for mere enlisted men to
question,” Sergeant Kirkland says, then in a less pompous voice adds, “and sure as hell the orders of a white West Point captain are not for colored noncoms to question.”

Captain Dan Oberdorfer is in his forties, with crew-cut red hair and a fireplug build that causes his uniform to fit like a sausage casing. Many rumors surround Oberdorfer: that he had carnal knowledge of a general's daughter, that he once punched a visiting foreign observer, that he is a drunk or a homosexual or even an escaped lunatic. The rumors are all by way of explaining how a seemingly competent white officer ended up training colored troops.

The sergeant and Frangie snap salutes as they enter his office and stand five feet from the front edge of his battered old gray steel desk. The captain returns the salute properly, then says, “What the hell are you here for, Kirkland?”

“Sir, you ordered me to present Private Marr.”

“Ah. So I did. At ease.” He has a heavy accent of a type that Frangie cannot identify. He looks at Frangie and lifts a folder from his desk. “I see here, Private Marr, that you are the worst goddamn soldier on this post.”

“Sir?”

“You can't shoot, you can't throw a grenade far enough to avoid blowing yourself up, you can't manage five miles in a pack without falling out from heat exhaustion, you got marked down on the last inspection for your bunk,
your foot locker, your uniform, and your weapon. In short, you are one piss-poor soldier, even for a coon. Even for a woman coon. What are you, four feet tall? You're a goddamn midget with not enough strength to level a goddamned rifle, and yet it says here you enlisted.”

“Yes, sir.” The words are automatic. She feels as if she's falling, as if she just stepped off the edge of a cliff. Sergeant Kirkland has yelled at her, as have other sergeants, but this attack is categorical and brutal.

She feels Sergeant Kirkland stiffen beside her. “Captain, Private Marr is—”

“Do not interrupt me, boy. Don't let those goddamned stripes fool you, Sergeant. You are still just a Nigra talking to a white man!” The captain has gone from placid to red-faced furious in about ten seconds.

The sergeant's “Yes, sir” takes several long and tense moments to arrive.

“Now, let me make one thing perfectly clear. I am attempting to follow orders here and turn a bunch of ‘yassuh, nosuh,' toe-pickin' field Nigras into soldiers, but Jesus H., this is bullshit. Not just Nigras, women Nigras, and now this little pickaninny, goddamn, that's three strikes right there.”

“Captain, I am raising a formal objection to your—”

“Shut the fug up, Kirkland.”