by Dean Hughes
Bobbi wished she had Kate’s confidence. Dr. Calder had graduated from Radcliffe and Johns Hopkins Medical School. She was a tall woman with a presence about her. When she walked into a room, people turned toward her. Some of that came from the self-assurance in her voice, but it also had to do with the way she moved. She took direct paths, stood straight, stepped forward like a commander. She had told Bobbi right after they first met, “Don’t let these male officers scare you. They’ll run right over you if they think you’re a shrinking violet.”
Kate was a pretty woman, too, though she did little to enhance her appearance. Her light hair had a lovely texture and pretty tones, but she cut it short and didn’t curl it. She had wonderful eyes, very brown for her light complexion, but she wore little wire-rim glasses that weren’t very flattering.
Bobbi looked across the ward room. Four male doctors were sitting at a table. They were laughing rather boisterously, as they often did. This was a strange world Bobbi had entered. She hated the confinement, the gray paint everywhere, the closed society. She could never get away from the military atmosphere the way she had in Honolulu—didn’t have her civilian friends in the Church. There were three corpsmen on board from Utah and Idaho who were LDS. One of them seemed to be running from the Church, but Bobbi and the other two had held a little service, of sorts, on Sunday. Still, there was no chance to meet people she could relax with. The officers were mostly older and more experienced. Their talk, their lifestyles, their drinking, their attitudes—everything about them—made her uncomfortable. The rest of the ship was filled with young men she couldn’t “fraternize” with. She liked a couple of the nurses, and Kate, but she felt alone most of the time.
Kate was bent forward with her elbows on the table. She was eating, with seeming satisfaction, a meatloaf that Bobbi had found barely tolerable. “Have you ever thought about medical school, Bobbi?”
Bobbi had finished all she wanted to eat; she pushed her tray back. “No. Not at all,” she said. “My father pushed me into nursing school. I was an English major my first two years of college. Dad thought I needed a degree in something ‘useful.’”
Kate laughed. “That’s interesting. Literature is my other great love. I had to make the same choice. But at least I made it myself. What about when you get married? Are you going to let this Richard fellow you’re engaged to decide what you do with your life?”
It was the same question David had asked. “I don’t think he’s that way, Kate. But the thing is, I’m not sure I know what I want to do anyway. I’m not much of a cook, and I can’t sew a stitch, but I suspect I’ll end up being a mom, and doing it pretty much the way my own mother did.”
“That seems sad to me.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. If it’s what you want, it’s fine, I guess, but women are going to have a lot more choices from now on. It seems like someone with your talent ought to make a mark in the world.”
“Raising kids is making a mark.”
“Sure. One kind. But there’s no reason we can’t do everything men do. Women will come out of this war with some confidence and experience, and with some new doors open. More med schools are opening up to women every year. Even Harvard has started admitting women now. When I came up, it was tough enough to get in, but then, when I said I wanted to be a surgeon, I heard nothing but ‘you can’t do that.’ And that just made me all the more sure that I not only could but would.”
“I will say this,” Bobbi admitted, “I’ve always felt that I had a pretty good brain, and maybe some ability to do something special with my life. I’ve just never been very sure what it should be, or whether I was arrogant to think so. I—”
“See, that’s exactly what we have to get past. What man ever thinks it’s arrogant to go after his dreams? ‘You stay home and feed the kids, and support me,’ they tell us, and then they go out to slay the dragons while we wipe runny noses and feed the chickens. The truth is, there’s too much testosterone and stupidity in this world. Women need to step forward and have their say.”
Bobbi laughed. She liked Kate’s ideas, even if they seemed a little dangerous to her. Still, she didn’t think she could be, or even wanted to be, quite like Kate.
In the middle of February Bobbi’s ship anchored a considerable distance off the shore of a small island. For the first time in her life she heard the pounding of artillery shells, could even see the distant flash of muzzle fire from the big navy battleships. She saw, too, flights of bombers, just tiny spots in the air, the flicker of explosions, and then, after a delay, the subtle rumble that rolled across the sea.
There was something strangely pretty about the little fireworks show, but the idea of it was horrifying. Bobbi watched the bombs detonate, saw the smoke drift off in the tradewinds, and she wondered how many people would die. Who were they? What made this little spot in the open sea worth fighting over?
Later that day, one of the ship’s officers told her that the island was called Iwo Jima. It was one of the Volcano Islands, and a Japanese possession. “It’s halfway between Guam and Japan,” the officer told her. “My guess is, we need it for a B-29 base, so we don’t have to fly so far to bomb Japan.”
That made sense—the kind of sense a newspaper report might make—and Bobbi had always followed the war closely in the newspapers. But what she could see was a dark spot, like a gray stain on the water, and all around it the vast green Pacific. It was so hard to imagine why humans would need to kill each other for such a tiny dot on the planet. She could see the endless armada of American ships between her and the island, and she knew that any time now young men would be clambering onto that little chunk of land, and the killing and maiming would accelerate. Then she would have to see these boys. They wouldn’t be names in a newspaper this time, but real men with real wounds. One of them could even be David.
Again the next day the shelling and bombing continued until a long plume of dust and smoke was steadily floating from the island out to sea. And then, on the next morning, February 19, word spread throughout the ship that the landing had begun. Bobbi walked out and watched the distant wave of little specks—landing craft, moving toward the beach. And she saw that in spite of the tremendous barrage of fire that had been directed at the island, the Japanese gunners had survived, and their own barrage was lighting the horizon now.
The next couple of hours were frantic and yet slow. Bobbi kept trying to think of last things: preparing instruments, gathering bandages and medicines, placing everything where it could be reached quickly. She knew that the burn ward would be crucial for some of the patients. Burns had a way of taking their victims slowly. A badly burned man would sometimes suffer for two or three days, seem to be doing better, and then suddenly die of the shock and loss of skin. Often it was the action in the first few minutes or hours that saved lives during the following days.
Eventually, she felt the ship’s big engines start, and then the Charity steamed closer to the island and anchored again. Shortly after, someone shouted, “We’ve got a landing craft on its way, and it’s loaded down.”
Bobbi prayed, and then she waited. It was some time before the first patient was processed through triage and sent down, but he was a battered young sailor. He had come off a ship, not the beach, and he had been far too close to some sort of explosion. The problem was, he was pierced with shrapnel, and his whole upper body and face were covered with bandages and blood. A corpsman carrying one end of the litter shouted, “The doc said the burns are worse than the wounds. But we have to hold the bleeding while we start the debriding.”
The corpsmen set the young sailor on a table, and two doctors went to work immediately removing the bandages, looking to see what they were dealing with. Bobbi stayed close. She had seen a lot of boys brought in off hospital ships after days or weeks of care, but never anyone still this bloody and black with burns. The tag on his foot said that he’d had a shot of morphine, but the boy was moaning, low and anguished.
His fa
ce and hands were burned worse than his chest. When the doctors pulled the bandages loose, the boy’s fingers were bent and bloody, like claws. There seemed no flesh left on the bones. But another patient was coming, and she needed to help him. And then everything started to mushroom. For the rest of the day patients came in bunches, the flow never exactly letting up. Bobbi worked with the corpsmen, debriding skin, applying bandages that were embedded with Vasoline and salves, guiding the doctors to the men who were in the worst shape.
Soon blood was everywhere. Sometimes the triage doctors and nurses had to make fast choices, and they sent down men who needed surgery more than care for their burns, but in many cases, Bobbi knew, the patient was not going to live, no matter what. When Bobbi could see that there was no hope, she would tell the corpsmen to give the patient plenty of morphine and to provide what comfort they could. Then she would have to walk away.
A priest kept returning to the ward. He gave last rites to men who looked at him, wide eyed, perhaps realizing for the first time that they were not going to live. Or he prayed over men who were, in truth, already dead. But he also spoke to the living, and Bobbi saw how desperately some of them clung to him for solace.
Early in the afternoon a Marine was carried into the ward. He was wrapped in bandages from his chest to his thighs, and his face was black with burns and glistening with a salve that the corpsmen at the front had applied. He seemed older than most, but certainly not more than twenty-three or four. His eyes were darting about as though he were frantic under the haze of all the morphine he must have in him.
Bobbi looked at his tag and noticed he was an officer. At the same moment, she heard Dr. Spencer, the youngest of the burn ward doctors, curse in language that surprised her. She looked up to see that the doctor had cut away and folded back the bandages over the man’s middle. She caught a disgusting smell—feces, perhaps, and something else, sour and putrid. The man’s abdomen was wide open, and his insides were exposed. One hip was torn up so badly that the bone was showing. “What’s this man doing down here?” Doctor Spencer shouted.
By then Bobbi was spinning away. She was going to run, but it was too late. She lurched forward and vomited on the floor. She stayed bent for a moment, and she took a long breath, but she knew she couldn’t do this. She just couldn’t. She was the head nurse in this ward. But already she was retching again, and another splat hit the floor. She wiped her mouth with her hand, spat, and then she looked up, expecting everyone to be staring at her. But most were too busy, and no one seemed to pay much attention. A corpsman was mopping, had never really stopped all day, and he came quickly. The vomit was only one more fluid on the floor, and he wiped it away quickly.
Bobbi ran to the women’s head, washed her face and hands, rinsed out her mouth, and then hurried back. She went to the officer and took hold of his hand. Doctor Spencer had moved on, but he glanced over his shoulder from the next table and said, “There’s nothing to do for him. I don’t know how he ever got this far.”
Bobbi saw in the man’s eyes that he had heard, that he understood. His body had been blown up some way. Something had torn away at him, opened him up, and still his heart was trying to live. She looked into the man’s eyes, nodded to him. “Are you in pain?” she asked.
He stared at her for some time, and then he whispered, “Please.”
That was all he said, and she didn’t ever find out what he had meant. Please make the pain stop? Please save me somehow? Please let me die?
In any case, he did die—later. For now, Bobbi gave him another shot of morphine, and then she had to move on.
For two days the pressure rarely let up. That first night Bobbi took two little naps, maybe half an hour each time, and the second night she finally slept for about three hours. But the casualties kept coming, and eventually the doctors in the burn ward were doing surgeries, removing limbs, extracting shrapnel, sewing up wounds. They left the belly and chest wounds to the surgeons, but they handled almost everything else. On the third morning the ship’s captain got approval to move out. The vessel was loaded to the brim, and the doctors couldn’t handle any more patients. They would carry these men to the hospital in Saipan and then perhaps return for more, depending on how long this battle lasted.
There was no real letup, and with so many burn victims needing continued attention, Bobbi had hardly eaten for two days. She wasn’t hungry, but she was weak, and Doctor Mickelson, the senior medical officer in the burn ward, told her to eat something and then rest for a little while.
Bobbi trudged to the mess hall, rejected the sausage and scrambled eggs she couldn’t bear to look at, and took instead only some slices of toast and a glass of milk. She found a table away from the few other officers who had found time for breakfast, and she sat before the toast, taking a bite once in a while, but hardly finding the energy or interest to do more than that.
Kate was across the room with some of the other doctors. When she got up from the table to leave, she spotted Bobbi and came over. “How are you doing?” she asked. “You look beat.”
“I’m tired. Who isn’t?”
Kate sat down. “The first time is the worst,” she said. “From now on, at least you know what to expect.”
Bobbi nodded, but all she could think was that experience wouldn’t really help in this case. If anything, she dreaded the next go-round more than she had the first.
“We could save more of these boys if we had the time.”
“It’s so crazy, Kate. We watched those poor kids head for that island, and then we sat here and waited because we knew exactly what would happen to them. What kind of sense does that make?”
Kate reached across the table and touched Bobbi’s shoulder. “Back home,” she said, “the parents get the body, all cleaned up. They bury it, and they talk about honor and glory. We don’t hear military bands over here. We see these kids when they’re quivering and begging for help.”
“Kate, I vomited—in front of my nurses and all the corpsmen.”
“I’ve never been through one of these evacuations without seeing someone do that. I’ve seen doctors with lots of experience lose everything, right next to the table where they were operating, and never stop. I’ve been lucky enough to make it to a head whenever it’s happened to me, but a couple of times just barely.”
“I’m used to burns, but not . . . all this.”
“It adds up, Bobbi. All the smells and the blood and the images just keep accumulating. I can promise you that you won’t sleep well for a while, no matter how tired you are.”
Bobbi hadn’t noticed that Dr. Spencer had walked in. When she glanced up, she saw him standing behind Kate. He had washed and changed, but there were little dots of blood on his glasses that he apparently hadn’t noticed. “How are you holding up?” he asked, but he didn’t wait for an answer. “Wait just a second. Let me get a cup of coffee, and then I want to tell you something.”
Dr. Spencer walked to the big coffee urn. He was a tall man, big in the shoulders and even in the hands. At times he could be rather gruff with a nurse or corpsman who didn’t respond the way he wanted, but there was also an obliging, docile side to him. Bobbi had seen him put those big hands on a suffering patient and calm the man.
When Dr. Spencer came back to the table, he sat down next to Kate and took a sip of his coffee. He shuddered and said, “Ugh. Nasty stuff.” But then he said, “I talked to a young Marine just a few minutes ago. The boy had some minor burns, and he had taken a bullet in his thigh. I told him he was lucky, that he had gotten off pretty easy. Now he could rest in a hospital for a while. You know what the kid told me?”
He looked at Bobbi and then Kate. They both shook their heads.
“He called me a filthy name. He told me his buddies were dying out there, and he wanted to be with them.”
“Really?” Kate said.
“He said some Marines had made it to the top of that volcanic mountain, down at the end of the island, and they had put up an American flag. Th
en he said, ‘You guys out here, you’ve got no idea what that means. A lot of hard-nosed old Marines broke down and cried when they saw that flag up there.’”
“Wow,” Kate said. “I don’t know how he can see all this and still feel that way.”
Dr. Spencer took another sip of his coffee, set it down, and looked away, across the room. “We see the gore. But these guys put their lives on the line, and they have to believe it’s worth it or they couldn’t keep up the fight. What we can’t forget, in the middle of all this mess, is that it is worth it.”
A few days later, Bobbi’s ship docked near the hospital in Saipan. She looked out across the beach and knew that somewhere on that island—on a beach like this one—Gene had been shot. Maybe he had died on the beach; maybe he had made it to a hospital ship like hers. She didn’t know. What she did hope was that someone like her had been there and given him comfort in his last moments of life. And she hoped Doctor Spencer was right—that the loss of her brother had been worth it.
Chapter 8
“Sign this, both of you, and then you can get out of here.”
Wally Thomas took the sheet of paper from the Japanese interpreter—Mister Okuda, he liked to be called—and read what it said: “I, the undersigned, under the peril of death, agree never again to attempt to overthrow the Imperial Japanese Government.”
Wally looked at Chuck, who had just read the same statement. Chuck shook his head and smiled. “What’s this?” Wally said, looking back at Okuda. “We were both sick. We rested for a few seconds. That’s the only thing we can be accused of.”