It all turned out to be moot.
At 0700, Confederate guns in Chattanooga, on Lookout Mountain, and on Missionary Ridge were banging away at the Yankee bridgehead. Potter looked at his watch. One more hour, and then they would see what they would see.
But then a rumble that wasn’t gunfire filled the sky. Potter peered up with trepidation and then with something approaching awe. What looked like every U.S. transport airplane in the world was overhead. Some flew by themselves, while others towed gliders: they were so low, he could see the lines connecting airplane and glider.
One stream made for Missionary Ridge, while the other flew right over Chattanooga toward Lookout Mountain. “Oh, my God!” Potter said, afraid he knew what he would see next.
And he did. String after string of paratroopers leaped from the transports. Their chutes filled the sky like toadstool tops. Confederate soldiers on the high ground started shooting at them while they were still in the air. Some of them fired back as they descended. By the sound of their weapons, they carried captured C.S. automatic rifles and submachine guns. The damnyankees had seized plenty, and the ammo to go with them, in their drive through Kentucky and Tennessee. Now they were using them to best advantage.
As the paratroopers landed atop Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, a captain near Potter said, “They can’t do that. They can’t get away with it.”
“Why not?” Potter answered. “What happens if they seize the guns up there? What happens if they turn ’em on us?”
The captain thought about it, but not for long. “If they do that, we’re fucked.”
“I couldn’t have put it better myself-or worse, depending on your point of view,” Potter said. The racket of gunfire from the high ground got louder. The USA had dropped a lot of men up there. They weren’t likely to carry anything heavier than mortars-though God only knew what all the gliders held-but they had the advantage of surprise, and probably the advantage of numbers.
They caught Patton with his pants down, Potter thought, and then, Hell, they caught me with my pants down, too. They caught all of us.
“We’re not going to go forward at 0800 now, are we, sir?” the captain asked.
“Sweet Jesus Christ, no!” Potter exclaimed. “We-our side-we’ve got to get those Yankees off the high ground. That comes ahead of this counterattack.” If Patton didn’t like it, too bad.
But no sooner were the words out of his mouth than a wireless operator rushed up to him. “Sir, we’re ordered to hold in place with two regiments, and to bring the third back, fast as we can, to use against Lookout Mountain.”
“Hold with two, move the third back,” Potter echoed. “All right. I’ll issue the orders.” He wondered if he could hold with two-thirds of his brigade. If U.S. forces tried to break out of the bridgehead now, at the same time as they were seizing the high ground and guns in the C.S. flank and rear, couldn’t they just barge into Chattanooga and straight on past it? He hoped they wouldn’t try. Maybe their right hand and left didn’t have even a nodding acquaintance with each other. It had happened before.
Not this time. Twenty minutes later, as his rearmost regiment started south toward Lookout Mountain, U.S. artillery north of the Tennessee awakened with a roar. Green-gray barrels surged forward. It was only August, but winter came to live in Clarence Potter’s heart.
Dr. Leonard O’Doull worked like a man possessed. In part, that was because the new senior medic working with him, Sergeant Vince Donofrio, couldn’t do as much as Granville McDougald had. Donofrio wasn’t bad, and he worked like a draft horse himself. But Granny had been a doctor without the M.D., and Donofrio wasn’t. That made O’Doull work harder to pick up the slack.
He would have been madly busy even with McDougald at his side. The United States hadn’t quite brought off what they most wanted to do: close off the Confederates’ line of retreat from Chattanooga with paratroops, surround their army inside the city, and destroy it. Featherston’s men managed to keep a line of retreat open to the south. They got a lot of their soldiers and some of their armor and other vehicles out through it. Down in northern Georgia, Patton’s army remained a force in being. But the Stars and Stripes floated over Chattanooga, over Lookout Mountain, over Missionary Ridge. The aid station was near the center of town.
Up in the USA, newspapers were bound to be singing hosannas. They had the right-this was the biggest victory the United States had won since Pittsburgh. It was much more elegant than that bloody slugging match, too.
Which didn’t mean it came without cost. O’Doull knew too well it didn’t. He paused in the middle of repairing a wound to a soldier’s left buttock to raise his mask and swig from an autoclaved coffee mug. His gloved hands left bloody prints on the china. He set the mug down and went back to work.
“Poor bastard lost enough meat to make a rump roast, didn’t he, Doc?” Donofrio said.
“Damn near. He’ll sit sideways from now on, that’s for sure,” O’Doull replied. “Like the old lady in Candide.”
He knew what he meant. He’d read it in English in college, and in French after he moved up to the Republic of Quebec. But Sergeant Donofrio just said, “Huh?” O’Doull didn’t try to explain. Jokes you explained stopped being funny. But he was willing to bet Granny would have got it.
He finished sewing up the fellow’s left cheek. The stitches looked like railroad lines. It was a nasty wound. You made jokes that didn’t need explaining when somebody got hit there, but it was no joke to the guy it happened to. This fellow would spend a lot of time on his belly and his right side. O’Doull didn’t think he would ever come back to the front line.
After the stretcher-bearers carried the anesthetized soldier away, they brought in a paratrooper who’d got hurt up on Lookout Mountain. He had a splint and a sling on his right arm and a disgusted expression on his face. “What happened to you?” O’Doull asked him.
“I broke the son of a bitch, sure as hell,” the injured man replied. “Looked like I was gonna get swept right into a tree, so I stuck out my arm to fend it off, like. Yeah, I know they teach you not to do that. So I was a dumb asshole, and I got hurt without even getting shot.”
“Believe me, Corporal, you didn’t miss a thing,” O’Doull said.
“But I let my buddies down,” the paratrooper said. “Some of them might’ve bought a plot ’cause I fucked up. I shot myself full of morphine and took a pistol off a dead Confederate, but even so… I wasn’t doing everything I should have, dammit.”
“What did you do when the morphine wore off?” Donofrio asked.
“Gave myself more shots. That’s wonderful stuff. Killed the pain and kept me going just like coffee would. I’ve been running on it two days straight,” the corporal said.
Sergeant Donofrio looked at O’Doull. “There’s one you don’t see every day, Doc.”
“Yeah,” O’Doull said. Morphine made most people sleepy. A few, though, it energized. “You’ve got an unusual metabolism, Corporal.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“Neither, I don’t think. It’s just different. Why don’t you get up on the table? We’ll put you under and make sure your arm’s set properly and get it in a cast. That’ll hold things together better than your arrangement there.”
“How long will I take to heal up?” the soldier asked as he obeyed.
“A couple of months, probably, and you’ll need some more time to build up the arm once you can use it again,” O’Doull said. The paratrooper swore resignedly. He wasn’t angry at being away from the fighting so much as for letting his friends down.
O’Doull gave him ether. After the soldier went under, the doctor waved for Vince Donofrio to do the honors. Setting a broken bone and putting a cast on it were things the medic could do. He took care of them as well as O’Doull might have.
They fixed several more fractures: arms, ankles, legs. Paratroopers didn’t have an easy time of it. Coming down somewhere rugged like the top of Lookout Mountain was dangerous in itself. Add
in the casualties the desperate Confederates dealt out and the U.S. parachute troops suffered badly.
But they did what they were supposed to do. They silenced the enemy guns on the high ground. They turned some of those guns against the Confederates in and in front of Chattanooga. And they made Featherston’s men fear for their flank and rear as well as their own front. If not for the paratroopers, the Stars and Bars would probably still fly above Chattanooga.
The wounded men seemed sure the price they’d paid was worth it. One of them said, “My captain got hit when we were rushing a battery. ‘Make it count,’ he told us. He didn’t make it, but by God we did like he said.” He’d had two fingers shot off his left hand, and couldn’t have been prouder.
“Only thing worse than getting hurt when you win is getting hurt when you lose,” Donofrio remarked after they anesthetized the paratrooper. “Then you know your country got screwed along with you.” Maybe sergeants thought alike; Granny’d said the same thing.
They treated wounded Confederates who went a long way toward proving the point. “You bastards win, you’re gonna screw us to the wall,” said a glum PFC with a bullet through his foot. “I gave it my best shot, but what the hell can you do when you stop one?” He seemed sunk in gloom.
“You came through alive,” O’Doull said. “Whatever happens, you’re here to see it.”
“Hot damn,” the Confederate answered. Donofrio put him under. O’Doull did what he could to patch up the damage from the bullet. He didn’t know if the wounded man would ever walk without a limp, but he was pretty sure he saved the foot.
Away went the wounded PFC. Next up on the table was a much more badly hurt Confederate, with an entry wound in the right side of his chest and a far bigger exit wound in the right side of his back. Bloody foam came from his mouth and nostrils. He wasn’t complaining about how the war was going. He was gray and barely breathing.
Sergeant Donofrio got a plasma line into him before O’Doull could even ask for it. O’Doull wished he could transfuse whole blood. They were supposed to be working the bugs out of that, but whatever they were doing hadn’t got to the field yet. This guy needed red cells to carry oxygen, but he would have to use his own.
That means I’ve got to keep him from bleeding to death in there, O’Doull thought unhappily. He opened the Confederate’s chest even as Donofrio stuck the ether cone over the man’s face. The wounded soldier was too far gone to care.
The bullet had torn hell out of his right lung. O’Doull hadn’t expected anything different. He cut away the bottom half of the organ, tying off bleeders as fast as he could.
“Make it snappy, Doc,” Donofrio said. “His BP’s dropping.”
“I’m doing everything I can,” O’Doull answered. “Keep that plasma coming.”
“I gave him the biggest-gauge needle we have,” the medic answered. “Only way to get it in there faster is with a fuckin’ funnel.”
“All right,” O’Doull said, but it wasn’t-not even close. Too much blood loss, too long trying to breathe with that ruined lung…He knew exactly when the wounded man died, because he felt his heart stop. He swore and tried open-chest massage. He won a couple of feeble contractions, but then the heart quivered toward eternal silence. O’Doull looked up and shook his head. “Shit. Close the line, Vince. He’s gone.”
“Oh, well. You tried, Doc. Don’t feel bad about it.” Every time they lost somebody, O’Doull heard the same thing. There wasn’t much else to say. Donofrio went on, “Not like he was one of ours, anyway.”
“I work just as hard on them,” O’Doull said. “That way, I can stay honest when I hope they work just as hard on our guys.”
“Well, yeah,” Donofrio said. “But even so…You know what I mean.”
O’Doull nodded. He knew exactly what the younger man meant. He worked as hard as he did on enemy wounded not least because he knew. As long as he was honest about that, losing Confederate casualties bothered him as little as possible. If he only went through the motions, if he lost men he might have saved by working harder…Well, how could he shave in the morning without wanting to slice the razor blade across his throat?
Corpsmen lifted the dead Confederate off the operating table and carried him away. O’Doull peeled off his gloves. He threw them into a trash can. He had blood on his arms up past the gloves; he’d been deep inside the soldier’s chest. He scrubbed with strong soap that smelled of carbolic acid, then went to get a towel with his wrists bent up so the water would run away from his fingers. Hands dried, he took a deep breath. “Whew!” he said. “Feels like I’m coming up for air.”
“Enjoy it while you can,” Vince Donofrio said. “Chances are it won’t last long.” He stretched and twisted his back. Something in there crackled. He was grinning as he took off his mask. “That’s better. Wonder what Chattanooga’s like. Haven’t hardly had a chance to look around.”
“Chattanooga’s a mess,” O’Doull said, which was true in the same sense that Jake Featherston was not a nice person. Chattanooga was bombed and shelled and shot up. But that wasn’t all of what Donofrio meant. O’Doull went on, “Probably not all the women refugeed out.”
“Sure as hell hope not.” Chasing skirt was Donofrio’s hobby, the way fishing was for some men and carpentry for others.
“Be careful what you catch. After you’ve got it for a little while, you’ll decide you don’t want it any more.” O’Doull knew a lot of skirt-chasers, and didn’t understand any of them. He was happy enough with one woman. Oh, he looked at others, but he didn’t touch. Plenty of men did.
“Yeah, yeah. I’m a big boy, Doc,” Donofrio told him impatiently. The medic was ready-eager-to comb through the ruins of Chattanooga for anything that didn’t take a leak standing up.
“Just remember your initials,” O’Doull warned.
“Funny. Fun-ny,” Vince Donofrio said. “Har-de-har-har. See? I’m busting up.”
“Yeah, well, use a pro station when you’re done laughing,” O’Doull said. “Sulfa’s pretty good for the clap, but it doesn’t do anything about syphilis.”
“I know, I know. I’ll be careful,” Donofrio said. “Is that other new stuff coming out of the labs-that peni-whatever-the-hell-is that as good as everybody says it is?”
“Haven’t got my hands on any, so I don’t know for sure,” O’Doull answered. “The literature sure makes it sound like the Second Coming, though, doesn’t it?” He’d seen plenty of literature like that for one patent medicine or another, and that always turned out to be less than met the eye. But people raved about penicillin in professional journals. That was different. He hoped it was, anyway. Drugs that killed germs without poisoning patients gave doctors an edge they’d sorely missed in the Great War.
“I’m gonna slide outa here if I get a chance,” Donofrio said. He didn’t; not even a minute later, corpsmen brought in a Confederate groaning with a shattered shoulder. The medic went to work without complaint. If he was thinking about women while he did, well, wasn’t that better than brooding about blood and bullets and broken bones?
Armstrong Grimes was new to the rituals of the repple-depple. He’d stayed with the same unit from Ohio to Utah to Canada. Now he didn’t belong to anybody or anything. He’d been dissolved away from everything that went before, and was floating free. He was a-what the hell did they call them in chemistry? He muttered to himself, flogging his memory. An ion, that was it. He was an ion.
The replacement depot had been a high school somewhere in the middle of Tennessee. He didn’t know exactly where, or care very much. All he knew was that it was a hell of a lot hotter and muggier than Manitoba. And he knew the locals here, like the ones up there and the ones in Utah, didn’t like U.S. soldiers worth a damn. A barbed-wire perimeter with sandbagged machine-gun nests around the depot rubbed that in.
He lit a cigarette. Confederate tobacco was easy to come by around here, anyway. He sucked in smoke, held it, and blew it out. The kid in the seat next to his said, “Bum a butt off y
ou, Sergeant?”
“Sure.” Armstrong held out the pack.
“Thanks.” The kid took one, pulled a lighter out of his pocket, and got the Duke going. He smoked it halfway down, then said, “You rather go to the front, or do you want occupation duty?”
“Christ! The front!” Armstrong said. “I’ve done occupation duty. You can have it. I want to get some licks in at the real enemy for a change. What about you?”
“I got wounded when we were outflanking Nashville,” the kid answered. “If I could find a nice, quiet spot where nothing much happens…”
“You’re an honest goldbrick, anyway,” Armstrong said, laughing.
“I’d have to smoke funny cigarettes to really believe it, not nice ones like these,” the young private said. “The only guys who draw duty like that are Congressmen’s kids.”
“Not even them. There was one in my outfit-well, a nephew, but close enough,” Armstrong said. “He was a regular joe, Yossel was. Did the same shit everybody else did, took the same chances when the shooting started. He had balls, too-sheenies must be tougher’n I figured.”
Up at the front of the repple-depple, where the principal would have given the students what-for, a personnel sergeant sat reading a paperback with a nearly naked girl on the cover. A young officer came up and spoke to him. He nodded, put down the book, and picked up a clipboard. He read off several names and pay numbers. Men grabbed their gear and went out with the shavetail.
A few more soldiers came in and found seats. The personnel sergeant called other names and numbers. Men slung duffel bags or shouldered packs and found themselves part of the war again. A poker game started. Armstrong stayed away. He’d played a lot of poker in the hospital, and had less money than he wished he did because of it.
Another lieutenant talked with the personnel sergeant. The sergeant looked at his clipboard. Among the names he read was, “Henderson, Calvin.” The kid next to Armstrong got up and walked to the front of the room. Then the noncom said, “Grimes, Armstrong,” and rattled off his pay number.
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