They had some Filipina nurses with them, nurses who had served with them at Clark and, before that, alongside them in Hawaii. Now one of the majors was telling them to go, that they were no longer needed, to try to make their own way back to whatever island they came from, thanking them coldly for their service. The nurses cried, begging the men not to leave them. They wanted to come with them to Corregidor, not be left to be raped and tortured by the Japanese. They pleaded that they were Americans too, that they couldn’t be abandoned like this. But the major was adamant—for him, America had suddenly shrunk to forty-eight contiguous states. He was not responsible for them, he declared; they were not “real” Americans, after all, they would have to make do.
Then the nurses from Kentucky, from Texas, from Louisiana and Maine had sat down and refused to move. Take us all or leave us all, they had said. Kay had done it too; she’d put down the suturing kit she was taking into surgery and sat down on the muddy ground with her fellow nurses, crossing her arms. She had seen Aaron looking at her when she glanced up defiantly for a second, and for that second he seemed to smile at her with his eyes, to love her even more than he already did. But in another second, the look was gone, he was one of the officers again, mad at the obstinate women—or pretending to be mad at any rate. The major had yelled at the girls, kicking down a lean-to in his anger, but in the end he had had to take them all, had to load all the “god-damned” women back onto the trucks and move them all out, turning from this minor defeat to the major ones that loomed ahead of him in Bataan. The small Filipina nurse next to Kay in the truck had taken her hand in hers and kissed it.
But that had marked the beginning of the end. Shells had rained down on them nearly every day after that, often several times a day. They had lost a lot of vehicles; many of them were walking the long way south to the peninsula. The injured cried out as the remaining trucks and jeeps hit potholes, jarred them, shook them, reawakening their pain, reopening their wounds.
Then Aaron had been hit by shrapnel—not killed, only a minor wound, really, but in this jungle of dirt and sweat and infection it hadn’t taken long before he couldn’t walk without her help. Then until he couldn’t walk at all.
Kay had gotten him onto a truck, changed his dressings more often than they needed to be changed, poured sulfa onto them; but she watched as the raw, pink edges of his injury turned red, then purple, spreading out over his abdomen. His color was all wrong too, he was all over sweat from the heat and humidity and his fever.
“We’re almost there, sweetheart,” she would say, smiling a little too brightly, walking alongside the ambulance, easily keeping up with its turtle pace. “Nearly to Bataan. They’ll have a real hospital set up for us by then, nothing to worry about, dear, nothing at all. They’ll have everything ready.”
What would they have ready? They could clean the wound there, surely; could give him fresh water to drink and she could sit by his side and fan him to keep him cool. But what could they really do for this? What could anyone do for an infection once it took hold of a man? This is 1941 and dear God, we still don’t have anything for this, nothing in the whole wide world for this. The nurse in her thought Aaron would die, and the woman carrying his child (she hadn’t bled now for three months) knew he would never die, that he could not die, not before their son was born, not before their dozen sons were born, and grew up, and stood around their father, still handsome with his white hair, each boy half a foot taller than his dad.
Kay looked around her, and all of a sudden she was back on earth. From the moment she had stepped off the gangplank at Pearl Harbor—back when that name had just been a port of call—she had lived with her feet off the ground, in a world set apart. That dream world was now shattered. She found herself dirty, disheveled, dripping with sweat. She was hungry and thirsty and so tired that she wanted to lie down in the dirt road and sleep and sleep and never wake up. And with a revelation that was startling in its suddenness, she realized that everyone around her felt the same way, had felt the same way for weeks, for months now, as they tramped through this jungle toward death. She hadn’t realized it before because she had been special, she had been safe, she was in love, and nothing could ever separate two people who loved each other as much as she and Aaron did. Nothing, that is, except death. Now she knew that death could do that, that death had separated millions of lovers before her, would separate millions more long after she and Aaron were gone and forgotten. She was nothing special after all. She had loved a man for a few months only, and now he might be dying, and there was nothing she could do but walk beside him, staying with him to the end. At least she had that—she would hold on to that. She would stay with him to the end.
THE KAY STARVING to death in Manila pulled herself painfully down the dark stairwell. Something was in front of her, blocking her way. She nudged at the heavy mass, and it moved only slightly; she put both feet to it, groaning and pushing with all her might, and the bloated corpse fell away from her, down the stair, into darkness.
THEY HAD MADE it to Hospital No. 2 in their southward retreat, but when they got there the hospital was out of supplies and they told Kay to try farther on, at Little Baguio—they might still have something there. Little Baguio was on their way anyway, everyone was heading south. Corregidor was the last hope; the Japanese were only five miles behind them—well armed, rationed, and equipped, a quarter-million strong, pushing quickly down from the north. Kay looked around her at the stretchers and litters lined up and ready for transport—four thousand were waiting here, she estimated, probably at least as many were waiting ahead of them at Little Baguio, the last outpost before the tunnel. How would they manage to bring them all? How could they all fit? Well, what did it matter as long as there was room for Aaron? She’d get him something—What, exactly? her mind asked her, and was silenced—and then get him on a transport, get him to this Corregidor everyone kept talking about, some kind of stronghold. She’d get him there and then everything would be okay. Somehow. It had to be okay.
At Little Baguio she got some fresh bandages (washed and dried out on a line in the sun, but better than nothing), the last of the powdered sulfa, and a canteen of potable water, but that was it. They were out of everything, they were mobilizing, they had their own wounded to deal with plus the wounded the retreating forces had just dumped on them. America was pulling out, dragged down by eight thousand bloodied soldiers pulling at her pant cuffs, slowing down her retreat. The buses never stopped honking, even though traffic south was at a standstill. Refugees pounded on the sides of the vehicles and climbed onto the roofs, everyone was screaming, everyone was crying, Please, GI lady, take my child, take my baby. Kay looked around her and knew that this was hell. No need to die first in order to see it—man had created it right here, for himself, for the living. God have mercy.
She had fought for a spot under a gran’folia tree, and now Aaron lay there in its shade. He had a fever, but she wished it was something acute, hot and fiery, something to make him call out, something to fight against, even if only in a delirium. Instead, he just grew weaker and weaker, “sleepier and sleepier,” he called it, trying to smile. He wanted to rest, to lie down, to sleep—Kay, dear, lie down with me, let me sleep, darling. But Kay looked into his sunken face and knew that if he gave in he would never wake up. She had to get him to Corregidor. She couldn’t lose him yet.
Bud, the ranking medical officer, walked over to her, to the rest of the nurses straddling the wounded, tying off bandages, splinting broken limbs.
“Hey,” one of the girls called, but he didn’t respond with his usual wisecrack and bucktoothed smile; instead, he looked sheepishly at the ground, then at the hat in his hands. He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing awkwardly; Kay was amazed it could squeeze past his tightly buttoned collar.
“General King just surrendered Bataan.”
The ground they were standing on. Bataan.
“Officially, it goes into effect at midnight tonight.” Here he swallowed painfu
lly again. “Practically speaking, girls, it goes into effect the moment the Japanese get here.”
Kay looked around her, at the nurses from Little Baguio who were strangers to her, at the nurses who had disembarked with her that very first day when their ship had dropped anchor in paradise. Each woman, in her own way, was steeling herself for what would come next; she could see it in a hundred tiny gestures. One redhead bit her lower lip and inhaled sharply. A chubby brunette straightened up, sore after hunching over the wounded for hours, her freckled hand rubbing resolutely at the small of her back. An older woman nodded her head sagely, as if she had known this was going to happen all along, as if the worst finally happening was a kind of relief, in itself. Several women folded their arms across their chests or raised hands protectively to their throats.
“Ready or not, here they come,” one of the girls quipped. Everyone tried to laugh.
“The orders are for you to move out, immediately,” the officer continued, stiffly, the toe of his boot digging absently into the dirt. Kay wondered why he was making such a formality of all this—Yeah, sure, move out, we know the drill by now, Bud. One of the head nurses started calling out orders: “Triage the new patients, load them onto the buses. Ambulatory patients will be assigned a green tag, those needing surgeries upon reaching Corregidor will get—”
Bud cut her off. “No, not the patients. You are to move out immediately.”
“What?” the nurses laughed, derisively. “Yeah, right.”
When they still didn’t take him seriously, when they turned back toward the stretchers instead, toward their patients, the young medical officer raised his voice to them for the first and last time (he would die just two hours later).
“This is a direct order from headquarters. Refusal to do so will be punishable by court-martial.”
They turned and stared at him, incredulous. Then, in a smaller voice, an apologetic voice, the voice of an older brother saying good-bye to his kid sister for the last time, “The Japanese are fucking three miles behind us, girls. Don’t die right here, in front of us. Please, get in the buses.”
People were arguing. A big-boned, short-haired nurse was yelling at Bud, and then more officers walked over and repeated what he had said, but now the Japs were closer, only two miles off. Buses were at the bottom of the hill, waiting for them, they’d have an escort to board, to get through the crowd. Someone was saying she wouldn’t go; another had her head in her hands and was crying in the middle of the road, her elbows propped up on her knees. Kay heard someone ask if she had time to go get her underwear off the line, and when they said she didn’t, Kay sank to her knees and held on to Aaron’s hand until his fingers turned white.
“Easy there, baby,” he mumbled groggily, looking up at her. She loosened her grip slightly. He hadn’t heard what the commotion was about. Weak as he was, everything other than Kay was extraneous, was just random light and noise. She was all that remained. He smiled the shadow of a smile, and his watery eyes looked adoringly at her.
“I won’t leave you, Aaron, I won’t ever leave you.”
His dazed eyes looked around him, looked past her for the first time in a long time. It took him a while to focus. “What’s happening? Are we moving out?”
“I won’t leave. They’re sending the nurses away without the wounded. It’s not right, I won’t do it, I won’t leave you.”
Aaron wrinkled his brow as if trying to take it all in; for a second, Kay saw what he would have looked like as an old man, rubbing his cleft chin thoughtfully, his pale stubble making a homey, bristling sound.
“They’re sending off the nurses,” he repeated, slowly. “That must mean we’re surrendering soon—”
“They just did. I mean, we just did. Surrender. Bataan anyway.”
Aaron sat up, or tried to sit up. He made a violent lurch forward, then fell back.
“And you’re still here? Bud, Bud,” he was yelling, and his weak voice forced into a yell was throaty and broken and hoarse. “Bud, get my wife on a truck.” Bud was still in a confrontation with the raging nurse, who was gesticulating wildly, but Kay noticed lines of women officers already starting downhill, getting onto the buses.
“No, Aaron, I won’t leave you. Not ever.”
“Listen,” Aaron began. She was ready to resist him, to resist the whole U.S. Army, to cut and claw and scratch for the right to stay by Aaron’s side. No one could force her, no one could make her leave with threats of court-martial or imprisonment or even death.
But she was not ready for—
“Listen,” Aaron began again, quietly. “Look at me for a minute, baby.”
And he smiled.
It was his peace that undid her completely. He looked at her and the nightmare around them disappeared, and he smiled like a holy mystic who had just figured out the secret of the universe and it was all some wonderful joke only he knew the punch line to.
“We found each other, babe.”
“No, Aaron, no—”
“We found each other and we had each other, if only for a little while.”
“Stop it, Aaron—”
There was an explosion and the women refugees screamed, but it wasn’t the Japanese, not yet—just the American GIs blowing up their ammunition dumps.
“I won’t listen to this, Aaron, I won’t,” and she pulled off his old dressings crawling with ants, dumping sulfa powder onto the oozing, blackening sore, crying and gulping air now tinged with gunpowder, wrapping and rewrapping the new bandages, tying them off, undoing the knots, retying them.
“I’ve got them too tight, let me try it again—”
He grabbed her wrists and held them firmly.
“Kay.” He said it with such force—she knew in an instant what this man was made of. She had sold him short. She had not guessed at the strength and the steel inside of him; she knew, given a chance to live, he would have made an honest worker, a strong father, a faithful lover.
“Kay.” He said it with such gentleness, thinking only of her, of her safety, of his life meaning nothing as long as she made it out safe.
“But—but the Japanese don’t take . . .”
She was stammering now and shaking her head; this couldn’t be happening, this couldn’t be real. “They don’t take injured . . .” She couldn’t finish—her breath was already coming out in queer little bursts, like a child holding her breath until she couldn’t hold it any longer, breathing out and in quickly, holding her breath again.
“Kay.” The world fell away and she was melting into his eyes and they were on the beach again and making love and the harbor in front of them was silver in the moonlight.
“Go, Kay.”
The buses were loaded, even the angry head nurse had made her slow way down the steep hill. They were honking their horn for her. They were leaving.
“Go.”
Her breath was coming in shrieks now as she unshouldered her musette bag, stuffing his hands with the sulfa bottle, with the last of the food, with her canteen.
His blue eyes lit up one last time, and he smiled again and said, “I had you. I’m the luckiest guy in the world.”
She was halfway down the hill when the main ammunition dump ignited; its concussion knocked her off her feet, but she was up again in a moment. The inside of her lip was bleeding from kissing him so hard, she could taste the salt, and then she was running again, running down the hill, she had always been running, she had to go faster, she could never go fast enough.
9
Jo McMahon
Spring 1945, The Western Front
They could use some Italians. Italians were fun. To Jo, they had never seemed to take the war very seriously. Sure, they could shoot and fight and bleed to death as well as anyone else. Back home in their sleepy, medieval villages, the Fascists had probably whipped them up into a frenzy that was patriotic enough at the time, abetted by the liberal application of liquor and women willing to send them off to war in truly traditional fashion. But by the time J
o’s medical corps encountered them, the Italians’ hearts had gone clean out of the thing. They were not opposed to violence, of course—in fact, memories of knife fights, of family vendettas, of watching their fathers’ blood trickle into the gutter after a duel fought over a wayward sister, held for them the same golden glow of nostalgia that a turkey dinner with all the trimmings would bring their New England counterparts in the U.S. Army. But those acts of violence had been understandable to them, had been facts of life. They had been swift—vengeful, passionate, brutal, yes, but swift, the work of a moment, a blind rage, a burning and a fire, an explosion in your head and then a release. But war—prolonged, calculated war—had not been to their liking. North Africa had been hell. Retreating through their homeland—watching it be ruthlessly destroyed by ally and enemy alike—had been hell. And the Germans had been hell to work with. Germans might think themselves half-gods, divinely appointed to disseminate their Aryan seed, the free world might think them usurpers and butchers, rallying around a fanatical leader, but the Germans just bored the Italians to tears.
The Germans were no fun, they found no joy in life—they were all for rules, for order, for method. They looked down upon the Italians as inferior, as barbarous; the Germans never got their crude jokes, even those who spoke Italian. Listening to their ideology, it seemed the Germans wanted to rid the world of everything the Italians thought worthwhile—corruption and easy living, theatrical flourish and wanton revelry, lying back in bed with your best friend’s wife, drinking his wine, watching his vineyards ripen in the sun, watching your son ripen in the soft, supple bump of her belly. The German officers’ talk of eugenics and genocide fell on deaf ears; besides, the Italians were homesick, they were hungry, they wanted to go home. When the Americans finally caught up with them, they were throwing down their weapons and throwing up their arms just as soon as they could be sure the GIs had the Germans covered.
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