by Dean Hughes
“I’ll get you another chair,” Brother Nuanunu said. And he hurried back to the house.
Bobbi let Hazel take her into her arms. “His ship went down,” she said. “Maybe he’s dead.”
Hazel gripped her tighter, patted her back. “Oh, sweetheart,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
But the pity was not what Bobbi had expected, and it stabbed at her. It seemed to say that he was gone already, that Hazel found no hope within herself. Somewhere in the confused logic of the moment, Bobbi had actually thought Hazel would know one way or the other. She was closer to God than anyone Bobbi knew; wouldn’t he tell her?
Brother Nuanunu was back with a chair, and Bobbi let herself sink into it. Hazel sat again, facing Bobbi, and she took hold of her hands. Brother Nuanunu knew enough to leave.
“It was a kamikaze,” Bobbi told Hazel. “I called Richard’s mother, and she said some men got off, but no one knows how many, or what happened to them.”
“And now you don’t know. And that’s the worst.”
“I might not ever know what happened to him.”
“Can you put it in God’s hands? Can you trust him, and wait?”
It was the last thing Bobbi wanted to hear–the very thing she was angry about. “It’s not God doing this, Hazel. It’s the Japanese. It’s us. It’s Germans and Italians and Englishmen and Australians. We’re all killing each other–and what’s God supposed to do about that?”
Hazel patted Bobbi on the shoulder. “Yes, I know. We’re making a mess of things. But God can protect Brother Hammond, if that’s what is best.”
“He didn’t protect my brother.” Bobbi pulled her hands away. She didn’t want Hazel’s answers. She had only come for her love.
“God knows what’s best. That’s what we have to accept.”
But Bobbi wasn’t buying that. There was too much that was random in this war. She had read about two paratroopers who had died in Holland on the same jump her brother had made. They had been floating down, seemingly safe, when one of their own airplanes had been struck by flak and gone down. The falling airplane had struck them in the air, chopped them up in its propellers. Had that been God’s plan, to let them die in some freakish accident? Or had God shed tears of pain for his children who had ended their mortality in such a senseless way?
“Hazel, I don’t think God is in control of our lives. He doesn’t make everything happen.”
“I didn’t say that, Bobbi. I just said we have to trust him.”
“I do trust God. I don’t trust man.” But that wasn’t really true, because in the back of Bobbi’s mind was still the idea that God could make this right if he wanted to. He could pluck Richard from the ocean. He could put him in a safe place. He could preserve him for Bobbi. And if he didn’t, then why not? Was he unconcerned about such trivial matters?
Hazel took Bobbi’s hands again. There were tears in the creases under her eyes, and one tear had made its way down her plump cheek, but she was smiling. “Bobbi, what do you want from God?” she asked.
Bobbi didn’t know. She only knew she wanted Richard to come back.
“You need to decide. Do you believe God cares about you or don’t you?”
Bobbi knew the correct answer, the one she had learned in church. But she didn’t feel it right now–didn’t sense the slightest crack in God’s armor. If he didn’t choose to save Richard, there wasn’t one thing she could do or say that would make a difference.
“Bobbi, you need God. He’s the only one who can give you peace at a time like this.”
Bobbi was furious and chastened at the same time. She hated what Hazel was saying, and she knew that she was probably right. “Hazel, Richard’s dead, isn’t he?”
“I don’t know.”
“If he were alive, he would let his family know.”
“The navy said he was missing. That’s all you know for sure.”
“But missing means dead. Almost always. I’ve seen it happen to other girls. After a while they get a telegram. Or they hear nothing, and that says the same thing.”
“Sometimes the news is good.”
“But how do I go on with my life, not knowing? How can I get up every morning and go to the hospital? If I have to deal with death, at least I want to get started.”
Bobbi dropped off her chair and onto her knees. She rested her head in Hazel’s lap. Hazel stroked her hair, patted her back, and that loosened the emotion in Bobbi again. She was admitting something to herself that had scared her all along. Maybe Richard had had premonitions that he wouldn’t make it back, and that’s why he had resisted making commitments to her. She had forced herself on him, and she never should have done that.
“It’s the war I hate the most,” Bobbi eventually managed to say. “I still have two brothers in danger. Who else am I going to lose?”
“Bobbi, that’s not the question I asked you. The question is, do you believe God loves you, or don’t you? You need to know.”
But Bobbi felt nothing from God–no love, no spirit, nothing but abandonment.
She stayed with Hazel for a time after that, but there was nothing more to say. And the reality was, Bobbi knew she had no choices. When morning came, she would have to get up and go to the hospital, the same as she did other days. She had to start summoning the power at least to do that.
She also knew that Afton would be worried about her, and she did need to start thinking of someone besides herself. So Bobbi left Hazel, and she took the bus back to the base. When she stepped into her room, she found Afton there, looking tired and worried. And so she took Afton into her arms and whispered, “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. I would have acted a lot worse.”
“I feel like I’m never going to have anyone now,” Bobbi said. “It seems like that’s always what’s been meant for me.” She was crying again, and she didn’t want to. She pulled away and walked to her bed, lay down.
“Bobbi, that’s what I was saying not long ago. But at least now I know that a man can love me. Something will work out for you, too.”
“If I were you, Afton, I would hold on to Sam. I wouldn’t let anyone else make that decision.” She looked up at Afton, who was sitting primly, her hands in her lap, her dark hair and eyes so pretty.
“I don’t know, Bobbi. I wish I had stayed home. I wish I had found someone back there. Then I wouldn’t have to make a choice like this.”
“Maybe so, Afton. I don’t know. But I’m glad you’re here right now. I don’t know what I’d do without you–even if I didn’t act like it earlier.”
“We’ll have to get through this together.”
Bobbi rolled over onto her back. She looked at the cheap light fixture, the one Afton had cracked one night when she threw a pillow, trying to chase a gecko off their ceiling. For just a moment Bobbi sensed some value in all this, in the experience itself. She knew that to pass through a time, any time, had some inherent value. But she only felt that for a moment, and then the logic carried her thoughts forward. This next experience, the one that lay ahead, was surely also of value, no matter how awful it looked. But she didn’t want to admit that, or at least didn’t want to face it.
“I have to go to work in the morning,” Bobbi said. “I have to get up at five o’clock and get myself ready. I have to walk to the hospital and work my shift.”
“Maybe that’s good. It will keep your mind busy.”
“And not thinking so much about myself, I guess.”
“Well, yes.”
“But Afton, I feel like I’m not in here–like my body is empty. I don’t want to do anything. I hardly had the strength to walk back from the bus.”
“Bobbi, have you made up your mind that he’s . . . you know . . . gone?”
“No. But I wish I could. That would be easier.”
“But that’s not right. Maybe I was silly to say that he’s alive. But it’s just as wrong to say that he’s dead.”
“When Wally was taken prisoner, there were lots of reaso
ns to think he was probably still alive. But mostly I just felt that he was. And my mom was certain of it. But this time I don’t feel anything like that. I just feel all empty inside.”
“It’s because of Gene. It’s because of all the things we see here. But Bobbi, lots of MIAs turn out to be alive. In the first few days after a ship sinks, the navy doesn’t know much, but they have to say something to the families.”
Bobbi nodded. She knew Afton was right. Hope wasn’t wrong, even if it seemed to hurt so much more than hopelessness. But when she tried it, tested it a little in her head–and in her chest–it didn’t work. What she felt was a sense of terrible loss, and that seemed to mean he was dead.
Chapter 16
Alex and the men in his company were occupying a stretch of lowland between the Lower Rhine and the Waal River, not far from Arnhem in Holland. The Germans were dug in across the Lower Rhine to the north, and also in the lowlands to the west, but the truth was, Americans were clinging to land that no longer had much meaning. The American and British forces had overreached, and they had failed. British paratroopers had held the bridge at Arnhem for a few days, but in the end they were decimated. Ten thousand had made the drop; just over two thousand got out. Many were now held captive by the Germans, and many were also dead.
Alex and his squad were dug in near the dikes along the river. This was land that was actually below sea level, and dikes twenty feet high had been built to hold back floods when the river ran high. The 506th–a single regiment–was occupying an area that had previously been held by an entire British division. Troops were spread thin, and patrols, especially at night, had to move along the perimeter to guard against sneak attacks through the many breaks in the MLR–the Main Line of Resistance. Across the river the German troops had their own nation at their backs, with ready supplies, and so they could keep up a steady barrage of 88- and 105-millimeter artillery fire. From an area south of the Americans, British artillery regiments returned the fire, but the Germans were on higher ground and were better supplied. Fire was not constant, but it was frequent, with no particular pattern. So the men spent most of their time in foxholes and trenches, just as troops in the first world war had done.
The fall rains had begun, and the lives of all the soldiers were made tedious and difficult by the ubiquitous mud. The men slept in mud, wore it, trudged through it to get to slit-trench latrines, and ended up eating it with their rations, however hard they tried not to. It took continual work to keep their weapons functional. Supply trucks spun in to their axles. Artillery was sometimes impossible to move. And for Alex the worst was that he was never clean or dry. The rains came and went, but the mud never dried out, and there was nothing–not a towel or even a rag–that was dry enough to wipe his hands on. There was no tent, no shower, no respite from the constant misery, except of course, that several times a day artillery shells would crash among the foxholes, and then the mud didn’t matter.
Supplies were coming from the Brits, and so that meant bully beef, which Alex hated. Even worse was the ox-tail soup that seemed only a mass of grease with floating bones. Alex’s only joy was receiving letters, but that was a sporadic, unpredictable occurrence, and writing a letter in a mud-filled foxhole required all the effort he could muster.
In quieter times the men scavenged the countryside for stray milk cows they could relieve of their burden. Or they searched for abandoned German rations, which all in all, the Americans liked better than the British stuff. But the soldiers also raided empty houses, and they looted anything they could find of value: jewelry, clocks, watches, cameras, money, and always, all the liquor they could find. Alex often remembered the way the Dutch had welcomed the troops as saviors. He wondered how these same people would feel when they returned to their farms and found them ransacked, not by the enemy but by their heroes.
When Alex heard the men speak of the vicious Germans and all their depredations, he would think of the German brothers and sisters in the Church he had known. By contrast, he wondered at the men around him, who used war as an excuse to forget all the values they had been raised with. And yet the normal rules of civilization hardly seemed to matter now, and it was hard to work up much indignation. There was a coarseness, more unfeeling than sinister, that seemed to fill everyone’s soul. Part of the problem was that every guy out there was beginning to feel that the odds were against him. After all, shells landed close by every day, and men kept dying. How bright did a soldier have to be to recognize that his day was probably coming?
But Alex didn’t tell Anna that. In one letter, written on a day in early November when the rain had let up, he told her:
Sometimes I feel like a drowning man, pulled under by the power of so much ugliness. I hardly think about the enemy anymore. There are guns across the river, and there are mines for a man to step on, if he wanders into the wrong place, but it’s the weapons themselves that seem the threat, along with the absence of everything clean and good. I try to remember what we’re fighting for–freedom, and all those other abstractions–but the mud I live in is much more real.
Still, don’t worry about me. I’m resilient. I promise I’ll be myself again someday. And however far away you seem to me right now, you are no abstraction. You are the only real thing in my life. I’m glad we got married. I’m glad we had a little time together. It’s remembering that, and looking forward to having it again, that keeps me going.
A few days later Alex got several letters from Anna. In one of them she said:
I worry about you every moment, Alex. When I wake up in the night, I wonder if you are warm. I wonder if you can sleep. If I could take half the hard things for myself, half the cold and half the sadness, I would do it. I stay busy here, and I sleep in a warm bed. So I am fine. But nothing feels the way it should. I can’t breathe the way I want, not eat or laugh or work. I need you to make everything right. I am well, but everything for me is waiting, not living.
I’m sorry. I won’t be so negative. What if I didn’t have you to wait for? What would my life mean then? I am very blessed, and I promise not to complain.
After reading the letters, Alex pulled his picture of Anna from his wallet. He studied her face. So often, especially in the dark that filled so much of his life now, he tried to envision Anna, fill his head with her, but there were times when he couldn’t do it, and the harder he tried, the more vague her image became. So he took some extra seconds to imprint her face in his mind, but as he put the picture away he tried quite purposefully not to think of her. He was on the edge–after reading her letters–of feeling too much.
A few days after that, Alex’s squad got pulled off the MLR. They went into reserve, which meant they were able to live and sleep in a barn near the farmhouse that Captain Summers was using as his company command post. Alex and his men were finally away from the shelling and the night patrols, and even though all that would return soon, soldiers had a way of living in the present. They were able to wash themselves and their clothes, scrape the mud from their equipment, and clean their weapons. And they could sleep a few nights on cots, without the constant fear of artillery or enemy attacks. It was luxury almost too wonderful to imagine.
Then one morning, before five o’clock, Captain Summers rushed into the barn and shouted, “Get up! Everybody out. The Krauts have broken through!”
Alex was on his feet immediately, automatically. He grabbed for his rifle and shouted to his men to get moving. In only a few minutes they were all running for the command post nearby. There another reserve squad, from a different company, was also gathering. “We’ve got trouble up at the dikes,” Summers told the men, forcefully but with no panic. “One of our patrols ran into a German unit–probably a company. We’ve got to get up there and see what’s happening. I’m going to go hard. Stay with me.”
Captain Summers moved out, and the men followed in single file. The trouble was, neither squad was at full strength. Having lost Withers, Alex only had nine men, counting himself, and in the dark Ale
x thought he saw about the same number under Sergeant Pearce, the other squad leader. The two squads could be facing a much bigger unit. Alex knew this was only a patrol, which would make contact and then call in help, but he wasn’t sure how much help was available in the sector.
Summers double-timed most of the distance–a kilometer or so–but he slowed as he drew near the dike. Then he turned and whispered, “Sergeants, hold your men here for a couple of minutes. I’m going to take a look.”
The high earthen dike sloped outward from the wide crest. Summers clambered up to the top. “Stay down,” Thomas whispered to his men, and they hunkered down in the soggy field.
Summers wasn’t gone long. When he climbed down, he said, “Sergeant Thomas, leave a couple of your men here to watch our rear. The rest of us are going to cross over this dike. There’s a ditch on the other side, and we can use it to get to the road up ahead. It’s just a little road that leads on a right angle from the dike to a ferry dock on the river, but that’s where the Germans were spotted–on the other side of that road.”
Alex, in a hushed voice, said, “Sabin, stay put. Ernst, move up this side of the dike a little to the west, and then wait. Keep an eye out. Don’t start shooting, but if you spot enemy coming in behind us, get to us quick.”
Alex hated to leave these two young guys by themselves, but he hated even more to march them into the teeth of a battle, if that’s what was coming. He had thought, briefly, of leaving Howie, but he preferred to keep him close by.
“Let’s go,” Summers said, and the men followed him over the top of the dike. Once on the north side, he told them, “We need to locate the Germans before first light. We’ve got to move fast–but silent–so watch your step.”