Schneider didn’t answer. He wondered if Marsh could actually put a sentence together without a “fuck” every fourth word?
Marsh went on, “Hey, it’s OK I call you Doc?…uh…Major…Sir.”
“Yeah. It’s OK.” Schneider said. Now he asks?
But anything, even this conversation about nothing, is better than thinking about what’s ahead.
Marsh kept looking through the pilot’s window. “I’m just trying to figure the odds of living through the war. Hell, I’m really wonderin’ if I’ll live through the night.”
The young man shook his head. “It’s going to be bad for us medics out there. That much I know. I just don’t know how bad. My older brother, Bill, enlisted on his eighteenth birthday. Right after Pearl Harbor. Wouldn’t listen to Mom or Dad. He was my big brother but…”
Schneider didn’t say anything. He just listened.
“Then one day, about three months later, I’m sitting on my front porch with my mom and dad, and a taxi pulls up. I’m studying geometry—not very easy for me—and Dad’s reading the paper. Mom is shelling peas. We watch an army officer in a uniform step out of the cab and pay the driver. I know now he was a captain, but I didn’t know it then. Mom buries her face in her hands and begins to sob even before the cab pulls away. I don’t know what’s going on, but Mom’s crying already, so I’m getting nervous. I look up at Dad, and I see, over his shoulder, the little flag hangin’ in the front window with the star. It looks like a frame around Dad’s head. Like a halo or somethin’. I can still hear Mom cryin’.” Marsh shook his head, “I’m so fucking dumb, I still didn’t get it.
“So the officer walks up and stands on the steps just below us. He was an older guy, maybe a few years younger than my dad. He took off his hat and spoke very quietly to us. He told us what happened.
“Billy was dead. Killed in action. He was a medic, and he was killed in the line of duty on some crappy Pacific island that none of us had ever heard of. I still don’t know where it is. The officer gave Mom a medal in a little box. Said Billy was a hero because he died trying to save a wounded soldier. It was Billy’s first action of the war. His first fuckin’ day, can you believe it?
“A few weeks later, my draft board sends me a letter exempting me from active duty as the sole-surviving son. The next morning, I go downtown to the recruiting station and sign up. I’m not eighteen yet, so I forged my parent’s signature and became a medic. Just like Billy.” Andy stopped there, and just stared at the floor boards in the aisle.
As Andy finished telling his story, Schneider wondered if Andy was going to do any better than his brother, Billy. Or would he, himself, for that matter?
Schneider started to sweat again. His distended bladder was now becoming painful. He really didn’t know if he could hold it.
Ah fuck, he said to himself. I had a deferment too. In writing, right in my hand. Everyone told me not to go. Everyone! So what do I do? I enlist. I fucking enlist! I can’t believe it. I’m in this shitty glider, gonna take shrapnel any minute now, piss in my pants and embarrass myself just before I get killed. And I could have just stayed home with my girls and…Susan. Ah, shit.
Chapter Two
10 September 1942
Nearly Two Years Earlier
Operating Room
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Schneider backed away from the operating table as Marie, the circulating nurse, untied the back of his gown. He pulled off his gown, tossed it into the hamper and removed his rubber gloves. Then he stretched them taut, aiming as if he were holding a pistol, then fired the gloves at the trash can, missing by almost a foot. Marie shook her head and picked them up off the floor, dropping them with some flourish into the can. She started to say something to Schneider but stopped and shook her head again.
Schneider pulled off his mask and carefully dropped it into the white laundry hamper along with his surgical cap. He smiled, and Marie nodded a thank you.
He walked to the scrub sink outside the door and gave his hands a quick rinse with soap and water just as his partner, Dr. John Hammer, pushed through the OR doors. Hammer, or Hamm, as he was most often called, was a tall man, over six foot two. He was thickset with wide shoulders and strong facial features, particularly his broad, slightly bulbous nose. On a slighter frame, his face might have been almost coarse, but on Hamm it came off as authoritative, if not downright handsome. He had dark brown hair, combed over his forehead, and a disarmingly ready smile for such a big man.
Right behind Hamm came a young orderly pulling at the foot end of the rolling gurney, while Dr. Ted McClintock, the anesthesiologist, pushed from the head of the gurney with one hand, bagging oxygen into the slowly awakening patient with the other. McClintock was a darker version of Hamm, also over six feet and heavily muscled. He had a thick neck that seemed to rise from the outer edges of his shoulders, recalling his college wrestling days at Duke. His dark hair and blue eyes made him a much sought after bachelor both inside the OR and out. He spoke with a disarmingly slow, North Carolina drawl. Beyond that outward persona, McClintock was an excellent doctor. He appeared to move more slowly than his colleagues from the North, but his precision and economy of motion were beautiful to watch. He wasted no effort. Lesser anesthesiologists were fooling around with IV lines and checking for correct placement of the endotracheal tube long after McClintock had the patient asleep and stable; ready to go.
Hamm held the patient’s chart under one arm while he rinsed his hands at the sink. Then, he followed in McClintock’s wake toward the recovery room.
“Nice one, Hamm. Very slick,” Schneider said, waiting at the recovery room door.
Hamm laughed. “Yeah, after the first thousand they get easier.”
Hamm had known Schneider all through their college and medical school years. They had been roommates freshman year and remained close ever since, graduating together and even working summer jobs together. Although they trained in different residency programs, they had come together again in Philadelphia when they began their practices and often assisted each other in surgery. Their families socialized only occasionally, but the two men played squash two nights a week on the way home from the hospital.
McClintock and the orderly pushed through the recovery room doors, wheeling the patient into an empty space as a recovery room nurse took over the job of administering oxygen. The patient coughed a few times as she emerged back into the real world from her ether induced sleep.
“Take some nice deep breaths, Mrs. Collins,” McClintock said, leaning over and talking right into her ear. “That’s it. Your operation’s over. You’re going to be fine,” he reassured her.
Schneider went over to the coffee pot and poured himself a cup, heaping in the sugar and cream. When he offered Hamm a cup, Hamm made a face and said, “Just black, thanks.”
Schneider shrugged, brought the chunky white ceramic cups to the long desk, and sat down beside Hamm.
While Hamm was writing his operative notes in the patient’s chart, Schneider took some order sheets from the stack on the table. He looked over Hamm’s shoulder and copied the woman’s name from the chart. He added the date and then began writing the post-op orders.
As the two surgeons wrote, McClintock saw to the now fully awake Mrs. Collins. He left instructions with the nurse. The recovery room nurse handed McClintock a mug of coffee. Black like Hamm’s. Then the three men rose together, taking their coffee with them, and walked back to the surgeons’ locker room to change.
Schneider glanced at himself in the locker room mirror, seeing how scrawny he was compared to the bulky muscular stature of Hamm and McClintock. Schneider was barely five foot ten and had never weighed more than one-sixty, and then only in college. Seeing the reflection of the three of them made Schneider wince as he remembered those college days with Hamm, when their wiseguy friends used to call the two of them Mutt and Jeff. Schneider was dark haired and dark skinned. He had brown eyes and chiseled cheeks. The girls used to call him
Frankie Boy after Sinatra, and except for the eye color, the name was fitting. He did look like Frankie.
Schneider and McClintock sat on a ratty couch with yellowed stuffing escaping its edges and coffee stains making a Rorschach-like pattern interspersed with small cigarette burns. Hamm sat directly across from them, perched precariously on a battered wooden spindle chair, a relic from another century.
“What’s up, Hamm?” Schneider asked. “You’ve been very quiet today. You barely said a word during surgery. What’s on your mind?”
Hamm stared off into space for a moment. “Actually, yes. I’m very preoccupied.”
“About what?”
“What else is there?” Hamm said, a hint of exasperation creeping into his usually placid voice. “The war. This goddamned war.”
“And?” Schneider asked, setting his coffee cup on the side table.
Hamm sighed. “I’ve decided to volunteer.”
“You’re going to volunteer?” Schneider and McClintock said almost in unison.
“Actually, I already have,” Hamm answered. “It’s taken us so long to get into this war that we’re taking a beating on both fronts now. We’re losing thousands of GIs. How can I stay here taking out gall bladders and fixing hernias while our guys are getting torn to pieces over there?”
A tense silence followed. Things were going very badly in both the European and the Pacific theaters. Casualties were high, and the end of the war was nowhere in sight, perhaps years away. Rumors of German and Japanese atrocities were in the papers and on the radio every day.
“You talked this over with Allison?” Schneider asked.
“Yes.”
“And?”
“And she cried. But she understood.”
“She understood what?”
“She understood that I can’t stay back here in safety when almost everybody I know is over there risking their lives. I’ve got neighbors with kids over there. Some of them are just out of high school. My uncle even signed up. He’s fifty-two! They turned him down for combat, but he insisted on joining up. They put him in the Quartermaster Corps manning a supply depot. He’ll let his wife run the business while he’s gone. And that’s not even unusual now.”
McClintock stood and paced the crowded room. He said nothing. Both Hamm and Schneider could see something was really bothering him.
“Big decision, Hamm,” Schneider said, turning from McClintock.
“Damn right it is,” Hamm said. “But it’s the right thing to do.”
“Jesus,” McClintock said.
“Allison is OK with this,” Hamm said. “She cried, and she’s scared. But she knows I have to do it. I really have no choice.”
“Who have you signed up with?” Schneider asked, still sounding doubtful. “The Army? The Navy? Marines?”
“Army. There’s a volunteer surgical group already mobilized. Mostly doctors and surgeons from the same hospitals or medical schools are joining up together to form their own groups. I’m joining one from here.”
“Jesus, Hamm!” Schneider said.
“Yup. I leave in three weeks. I’ve got a hell of a lot to do: shut down the office, transfer the care of the patients. Three weeks isn’t going to give me much time. Then a little basic training somewhere. Learn who I have to salute. Then I think we’re going to England. After that I have no idea.”
Schneider could hardly speak. His best friend was leaving and might never return; he might die some place no one had ever heard of. The radio and the newspapers reported terrible losses every day. Even the Movietone News showed scenes of carnage every weekend. Grainy footage of the real war came right into their neighborhood theaters, narrated in the deep, clear, familiar voice of Lowell Thomas.
It was crazy. Watching those grim awful newsreels, then going right into some Looney Tunes cartoon followed by Bambi or Bob Hope in The Road to Morocco. An all-afternoon show for twenty-five cents and five cents for candy. What a world!
“I’m going, too!”
Hamm and Schneider wheeled around, turning to McClintock, now perched uneasily on the windowsill.
“I am! Who the hell else will pass gas for Hamm? He can’t operate without me.”
Hamm said, “You better think this over, Ted. This isn’t like saying ‘Let’s go to a Phillies game.’”
“What’s there to think about? I’ve been thinking this over for three years. Three fucking years this war has been on—in Europe, anyway.” He stood and punched his locker just hard enough to momentarily buckle the metal, then added, “Besides, I only stayed here so I wouldn’t embarrass you guys.”
No one laughed. Hamm turned to him. “It’s a big decision, Ted.” He stared directly into McClintock’s eyes. “Please think this over before you jump in.”
“Nothing to think over, pal,” McClintock said. “You go, I go. I’ve got no wife or children. It’s easy for me. The Philadelphia ladies’ll get over it.”
Schneider stared at them both. “Damn,” he muttered.
Hamm turned from McClintock to Schneider. He said, “Steve, this has to be your decision. Yours alone. Don’t go trooping off after me just because I decided to go, or after Ted here. We still need surgeons at home. People still get sick on the home front. No one is going to think any less of you if you don’t sign up. You’ve got Susan and the girls to think of.”
“So? You’ve got Allison and the boys,” Schneider said.
Hamm didn’t answer. He bent and tied his shoes very slowly, barely aware of what he was doing. McClintock gathered his watch and wallet from his locker.
Schneider shook his head again, stared into space, but said nothing. Then he started to laugh. He laughed so hard he collapsed onto the couch, shaking his head and wiping tears from his eyes.
“What?” McClintock asked.
“I’ve already been drafted! I got a goddamned draft notice two weeks ago. ‘Greetings from you-know-who!’”
“Holy shit!” McClintock said. “Why didn’t you tell us?”
“I thought it was a mistake. I’m technically 4F because of my asthma, and with my doctor’s OK I can play that card. I can get a medical deferment.”
“Well, ‘technically’ doesn’t mean shit, Steve,” McClintock said.
“I know, I know,” Schneider said. “One of the Army docs told me if you’re fit for duty as a civilian doctor you’re fit as an Army doctor.”
“Yeah, as long as what you’ve got isn’t rapidly fatal,” Hamm added.
McClintock laughed. “War can be rapidly fatal, boy. I think you should take the 4F.”
“I’m damned if I know what to do. I’m not 4F. It’s asthma for Christ sake. If I really want to go I can get my own doctor to sign off on it. Crap!”
The three of them were quiet again. Schneider looked at his two strapping friends and thought, Jesus, these two really look like soldiers. They’ll fit right in. But how can I let them go without me, he thought?
“Alright, I’m with you. One for all, and all that shit.”
“Steve, slow down here. Take it easy,” Hamm said.
“No, I’m in. It’s done,” Steve replied.
Schneider put on his watch and wedding band. He started for the door, then turned to his friends and said, “Oh, shit. What am I going to say to Susan?”
Chapter Three
11 September 1942
Home of Steve and Susan Schneider
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
The next morning outside his home in the Elkins Park area of Philadelphia, Steve Schneider kissed his little girls good-bye at the curb. Emily was eight, and Anna was six. Emily looked like Steve, with a slightly prominent nose and dark features. She wore her black hair in bangs, and she was quite sure she was her father’s favorite. Anna had not grown out of her baby features yet. She had lighter hair and fair skin, more like her mother, though she didn’t really resemble either parent. Anna, too, knew without a doubt, that she was her father’s favorite. Neither of his girls gave much thought to their mother the
se days. Dad was the center of their young lives.
As the school bus idled next to the curb with its door open, the girls gave Schneider tremendous hugs, each trying to out-love the other. Then they laughed and scrambled aboard the waiting bus. Even before the door had closed, Emily ran to the nearest open window to wave, as if she were going away for years instead of just until three o’clock. Anna was already engrossed in animated conversation with her friends on the big back seat. Then, before the bus got too far away, she pressed her nose against the glass, spread her fingers wide on either side of her face and stuck out her tongue. Her image, except for her pink tongue, was quickly obscured by her warm breath clouding the cold glass window.
Schneider laughed, shook his head, and waved again as the yellow bus pulled off in a cloud of blue exhaust smoke. As he walked back to the house, he pulled a small bike and a homemade scooter from the dying grass and dragged them onto the wooden porch, tucking them in behind the low, gray clapboard wall.
It’s a good neighborhood, he thought as he hid the toys from sight, but still….
He walked across the wooden porch, noting a little dry rot along the wainscoting near the front door. Always one more thing that needed doing.
He opened the front door and went back inside, the joy of his little girls rapidly fading as he crossed the broad hallway and returned to the kitchen to thrash it out still one more time with Susan.
Schneider didn’t know what was going through Susan’s mind that morning. She was pacing the kitchen clutching a paper in her hand, wrinkling it, worrying it. He walked over to the kitchen table and pulled out his chair. Then he sat with a weariness that should have marked the end of a long day, not the beginning.
Susan was almost as tall as Schneider. And she was as fair as he was dark; her hair as straight as his was curly. Even their eyes were at the extremes of the genetic scale: his dark almost to black, and hers a pale blue.
Schneider watched his wife cross back and forth in front of him, moving her head from side to side in an unconscious gesture of No. Her lips were drawn tightly across her teeth, turning them into thin lines of flesh, lines of anger and frustration. By this point, Schneider could not tell if the look on her face were anger or fear or disgust. Most likely all of them.
None But The Brave: A Novel of the Surgeons of World War II Page 2