Front Lines (20 page)

“I have to . . . um, better get to chow,” Rio says, unconsciously pushing her hair back in place and fumbling around for her cap. “They, you know . . . check on us.”

“Ri-i-ight,” Lefty says.

“Okay, so. It was good catching up, Strand.”

“Yes, it was,” he says stiffly.

They shake hands, a move so patently false that Lefty guffaws loudly.

Rio climbs out, helped down by Strand's two other friends, armed now with a small canned ham they must have “liberated” from the mess kitchen.

Rio heads toward her berth, ignoring the usual male catcalls, ignoring even the outstretched hands, the kissy-faces, and all the rest. She finds Jenou in her bunk.

Jenou takes one look at her and says, “You've got a little slobber on your cheek.”

Rio climbs up and slides into Jenou's bunk beside her. There's very little room as they lie on their sides, face to face, like the old days.

“We kissed,” Rio confides.

“No kidding.”

“I've never done it that way before.”

This brightens Jenou's eyes. She's like a hungry cat being presented with a dish of milk. “You mean . . . tongue?”

“Eww! Do you have to be so disgusting?” Then, in a whisper, “Yes!”

“Did you like it?”

Rio hesitates. She's not uncertain as to whether she liked it; she's searching for the right way to put it. “Better than ice cream.”

“Better than—”

“Better than chocolate.”

“Wow.”

“You know how you told me that girls can have those feelings too?”

“Those feelings?” Jenou repeats, being deliberately obtuse to provoke her friend. “Which feelings are you talking about exactly?”

Rio swallows. She bites her lips. Then, “I wanted him to kiss me. In fact, I think I almost forced him to. Poor Strand.”

“Yes,” Jenou drawls with heavy sarcasm. “Poor Strand.”

“I've just never . . . and it was all of a sudden. It was like, well, there he was, and he was right there.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And he just kept talking. And I wanted to say ‘Shut up and kiss me.'”

“My little Rio,” Jenou says proudly. “You're growing up.”

“And now . . .”

“And now you're tingling all over.”

Rio nods vigorously and rolls onto her back, leaving Jenou even less room and pressing her against the steel bulkhead.

“I think I'm rambunctious,” Rio says.

“Did he try to . . . you know.”

“No! Of course not. He's a gentleman. He would never.”

“Never? I hope that's not true. I'm still hoping to be Auntie Jenou to your children.”

“You'll have children of your own; you won't need to be Auntie Jenou to mine. Ours.”

“Oh my goodness, whatever happened to my favorite naive farm girl? You just talked about sex without blushing.”

“No I did not!” Rio said hotly. “Take that back!”

“Sweetie, when you start daydreaming about children,
you're daydreaming about ‘s-e-x.' You do know the two things are connected, right?”

“I may be naive, but I know how a cow and a bull come to have calves.”

For some reason this causes Jenou to sputter in amazement and then start to giggle. Soon Rio is giggling as well.

Cat pokes her head up. There's a strange look when she sees the two of them lying side by side. She seems almost jealous, or maybe just left out, but she quickly conceals it with a request to borrow some boot polish.

The PA crackles to life, announcing chow time for their company, and there is no dawdling when meals are announced—the navy serves good chow, and eating is about the only thing that punctuates the long days of doing nothing.

They file out to stand in a long, slow line for dinner, where Rio eats her fried chicken and mashed potatoes with unusual energy and enjoyment. And that night she lies in the dark after lights-out, staring up at the steel pipe over her head, and recalls every detail, every single detail, savoring, wondering, replaying.

But she replays, too, Strand's insinuation that she is merely playing soldier. She'll have to have a talk with him about that someday.

First another kiss, then a conversation, because
somewhere along the line, Rio has ceased to see this as any sort of game. She never wanted to really go to war, but now it seems she is, and a part of her, a small but growing part of her, is almost looking forward to it.

The Nazis and their collaborators control all of Europe except for a handful of neutral countries. Italy's buffoonish dictator, Benito Mussolini, has suffered one humiliation after another, and now the remains of his army in North Africa are increasingly dependent on the Germans. The French Vichy regime, Nazi collaborators allowed to control the southern parts of France and French overseas colonies, have begun shipping French Jews to the extermination camps. The German army, the Wehrmacht, has been stopped by the Soviets at Stalingrad, with staggering casualties on both sides.

A direct attack on Germany is not yet possible, but the Americans are anxious to strike a blow. The target is the Mediterranean, where the tiny British-held island of Malta has held out against impossible odds, keeping Allied air power alive. The Royal Navy, strengthened by the output of American factories, now dominates the
western Mediterranean. The British fortress of Gibraltar, the gateway to the Mediterranean, remains firmly in Allied hands.

In Egypt the great British general Bernard Law Montgomery, known as Monty, has turned the tide against the equally skilled German general Erwin Rommel. Monty drives the Afrika Korps and what's left of the Italian army from the east across Libya. The Americans have arrived in Morocco and Algeria and lie in wait. The trap is set.

The Allies are sure that the Germans, Italians, and a handful of remaining Vichy will have no choice but to surrender or be wiped out.

The Germans have a different view.

In her first entry for 1943, Anne Frank writes, “All we can do is wait, as calmly as possible, for it to end. Jews and Christians alike are waiting, the whole world is waiting, and many are waiting for death.”

But the US Army is not waiting. It goes looking for death and finds it at a place called Kasserine, Tunisia.

“I want to impose on everyone that the bad times are over, they are finished! Our mandate from the Prime Minister is to destroy the Axis forces in North Africa. . . . It can be done, and it will be done!”

—General Bernard Law Montgomery, British Eighth Army

“We have come into North Africa shoulder to shoulder with our American friends and allies for one purpose and one purpose only. Namely, to gain a vantage ground from which to open a new front against Hitler and Hitlerism, to cleanse the shores of Africa from the stain of Nazi and Fascist tyranny, to open the Mediterranean to Allied sea power and air power, and thus effect the liberation of the peoples of Europe from the pit of misery into which they have been passed by their own improvidence and by the brutal violence of the enemy.”

—British Prime Minister Winston Churchill

Thus do our young heroines train and prepare and ship off for war, Gentle Reader. Enfilade, defilade, bandaging, and spy craft, but the war is not yet real to them. It is out there, waiting for them, but they have no sense of what it is, really. It is vague. Indistinct. It's something concealed from view by fog so thick that even the sound of cannon would still easily be mistaken for thunder.

What do you think of my soldier girls, Gentle Reader? Aimless, naive Rio and sexy Jenou; smart, determined Rainy; and gentle, conflicted Frangie.

Could you see yourself sitting down to tea with these girls? Will it surprise you to learn that one of them went on to gun down three unarmed German prisoners? Will it shock you to learn that one lit her cigarette from the flames of a burning German SS officer?

We understood nothing, you see. We thought we were soldiers, but we were still civilians dressed in khaki and
OD. None of us had yet felt the fear so overpowering that you shake all the way down to your bones and your bladder empties into your pants and you can't speak for the chattering of your teeth. None of us had yet seen the red pulsating insides of another human being. We had not yet killed, and that, Gentle Reader, that is what we had been trained to do.

We had made friends among our fellow soldiers, male and female, but we as yet had no idea what those men and women could do, for we had as yet no idea what would be required of us.

It seems impossible to me now as I sit here deciding whether to bully an orderly into bringing me coffee, scratching the itch beneath my bandage, typing away in this dark and gloomy place and . . . dammit, the screaming again, someone trapped in a nightmare or in some more present physical agony.

I was attempting eloquence, Gentle Reader, and was interrupted by the raw urgency of another woman's pain. It serves me right, I suppose.

My own leg hurts, my breast hurts, but I'm not that poor woman screaming in the night, am I? Will you understand if I tell you that there are times when it is better to feel the pain yourself than to see it and hear it in another?

Helplessness is a big part of war, helplessness and
confusion and boredom, too, so that at times you tell the woman or man beside you that you'd rather be getting shot at. But that's always a lie, something you say to . . .

I'm getting ahead of myself. I am not here to ruminate and philosophize, or to attempt eloquence, I am here to tell the story, our story. Much of the time my fingers fairly dance over the keys and the sheets of paper go flying in and out. But right now as I write this, each letter is a struggle. For now our story leaves behind the sweet before and enters the darker after.

Where is this war, you wonder? Enough of the familiar; show me the blood and guts. When do we get to the killing and the dying?

Well, it is very near now, Gentle Reader, for we are going to North Africa, to the deserts where the Brits have the famed German Afrika Korps on the run after many battles. The Americans have landed against some resistance from the Vichy French, most of which crumbled soon enough.

It was supposed to be a pincer movement; Brits to the east in Egypt and Libya, Americans to the west in Morocco and Algeria, with the Germans, a few Italians, and a sprinkling of unrepentant French collaborators—running out of fuel, tanks, and ammo—trapped helplessly between the two.

We had yet to learn war, and we had yet to learn that
the Kraut was never helpless.

One more boat ride and we will arrive at the front lines in Tunisia. And there, Gentle Reader, you'll get your blood and guts.

Dear Pastor M'Dale,

I hope you won't mind me writing to you. I am writing to my parents and brothers as well, but I can't worry them. I suppose I shouldn't be worrying you either, but I need to do this, I need to write to someone. I talk to the other folks in my unit, but none of them has become really close. The men don't talk to us women, and the women mostly want to talk about what dress they'll get for the big victory party we all keep saying we'll throw someday. Or else they talk about boys, and that's not on the top of my mind. I guess you'll be relieved to hear that.

After an uneventful sea voyage, I'm in
XXXXXX
. I think I can say that without getting censored. They put me on a ward for badly injured English soldiers as practical training. The Tommies aren't as concerned about black folk tending their white wounded since
a lot of their nurses are already from colonies where folks are mostly brown or black. It's not like the white boys treat us as equals, but they seem happy to have any soft hand regardless of color to apply a salve or inject morphine.

I saw some bad things, sir. I don't really know how to explain without making you see what I don't suppose you want to see. But I think if I don't tell someone I'll crack up.

There was this one white boy. I can't tell you his name so I'll make one up: Errol. I've always liked that name.

Anyway, Errol had got hit by a passing 88 shell. It didn't explode because it was fused for armor not flesh, but it took off a chunk of his face, including his nose and part of a cheek. His buddies had found the missing flesh and bandaged it back on and sent him off to their field hospital and they had tried to sew it back on. And when he got evacuated here to
XXXXXX
the doctors thought maybe . . . But it didn't take, so the sewed-on part grew septic and morbid.

Pastor, they had to cut that boy's face back off. They were trying to keep the infection from spreading, but now it's all down his neck and his hair is falling out and when I saw him again he was raving. The infection was in his brain. He kept screaming
and trying to tear the bandage off. Finally he died. Maybe it was one of the doctors deliberately
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
, and maybe that's wrong according to the Bible, but now Errol can be in heaven where he will not have to scream.

I know you said helping keep these soldiers alive means they can go back to killing, but lots of these boys will be lucky to have any kind of life, let alone go back to war.

I guess I wanted to tell you that. And I wanted to ask you how God lets this happen. I was angry with God over that. I blasphemed. I repented as best I could, but in my heart I'm still angry.

I can't tell my folks that or they'll worry, so I'm telling you.

Keep praying for me, Pastor. Don't forget me.

Frangie

Dear Father,

I am well, though somewhat damp and oppressed by gray weather in a place I shall not name but which you may reasonably deduce. You'd think given my name I'd be better at enduring rain. I don't believe we shall be here for long, though I have no idea where the army may send me next.

I have to tell you some things that may disturb
you. Let me start by saying I know about the numbers running—they found out during an investigation of my background. I was surprised and disappointed, I guess, but I'm not upset now. You've always been a good father, and you did what you had to do to keep us all fed and together during the Depression and since then too. The commandments say we should honor our parents, and I do honor you, and I don't think I have anything to forgive.

But I'm going to tell you something now that you need to know in case something happens to Aryeh. You have a grandchild on the way. (No, not mine!) Aryeh fell in love and one thing led to another.

And, Father, the girl, his wife, is not a Jew. Her name is Jane Meehan. I've arranged to give her some of my pay and so has Aryeh, of course, but who knows what may happen in a war.

Next letter I promise will have fewer surprises.

Love,

Rainy

Dear Strand,

It was wonderful being able to spend some time with you on the
XXXXX
. I so wish it had been more. I suppose there are good things about a fast ship, but the time did fly by.

We spent
XXXXX
in
XXXXX
doing more tedious training, and I had hoped to see you there and be able to spend time with you in
Jolly Old
XXXXXX
. But I'm afraid I'm off yet again to parts unknown and the rumor is that
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX
. So this may be
XXXXXXXXXXX
.

I don't mean to seem contrary or argumentative, but I suppose it got under my skin a little when you said I was “playing” soldier. Maybe I was a little, in the beginning, but I think now it won't be any kind of play. I'm not sure I'm ready for what lies ahead, but I mean to do my best. I want you to understand that, and I hope you'll be proud of me. Even when I'm a grizzled old veteran. Funny, huh?

I keep your picture with me and look at it often. I will think of you up there in the sky, somewhere, being very brave and dashing. I will think of you every day.

Maybe this is silly and too sentimental, but I hope the day will come when we can find ourselves back at the Jubilee, sharing popcorn and watching a movie. Would you like that? I would.

Please take care of yourself, Strand. Please.

Your girl,

Rio