Front Lines

by Michael Grant

  Rio looks around at her companions, her squad. Reliable Stick; obnoxious Luther; the funny and pugnacious Cat; big, friendly Kerwin; Tilo, looking startlingly young despite his tough city-boy airs; sullen, standoffish, and barely known Jillion Magraff; jaunty Jack. Hark Millican, looking sick and sad, as if he’s already been shot and he’s just waiting for someone to tell him to die; and the most recent addition, the presumed Japanese American Hansu Pang.

  Jenou catches Rio’s eye and winks.

  Jack catches her eye and just holds her gaze, sharing some emotion that neither of them can hope to name.

  Rio breaks eye contact to look at Sergeant Cole. He’s showing nothing. He does his three-stage move where he shifts his cold cigar from side to middle to the other side of his mouth. It reminds Rio of a horse chewing on its bit.

  Rio wants to hide behind Cole. She wants to grab Jenou and say, “This is all a stupid mistake; we have to go home now.”

  She wants to be with Stafford.

  No, far better, she wants to be with Strand, because he’s not here in this boat. She never should have spent time with Stafford.

  Jack. His name is Jack, and you know it.

  Those emotions—shameful, lustful, conflicted, unfaithful emotions—just add to the weight that bears down on her soul. She feels it that way, as a weight. A heaviness that crushes her heart and extends, leaden, to her limbs.

  The flotilla has turned toward a shore invisible in the darkness. No one has to tell them they’re going in, they can all feel it in the air. The heaviness in Rio’s soul grows more oppressive. She closes her eyes and prays.

  The prospect of imminent combat should erase all other concerns, it should leave Rio free of all doubts, all second-guessing, but of course it doesn’t. She will carry all of it with her. The picture of Strand in her pocket, the image of Jack belting out “Rule, Britannia,” the imagined images of Rachel, her lungs filling with salt water. The Stamp Man.

  The sea grows more agitated; short, steep waves that slap loudly at the sides and fire fountains of spray into the air. The boat rolls, side to side, triggering a new wave of nausea. The latest card game folds up, and now, as they near the target, the coxswain calls for all cigarettes to be put out.

  “Fugging German gunners see that light, and we all get blowed to hell.”

  Rio has been cold, miserable, sick, and scared for twenty-four hours now, and is in no way prepared to fight. She hasn’t even started, and she’s already exhausted. She has an overpowering desire to check her rifle to make sure, doubly sure, triply sure, that it works, and she repeatedly touches the pockets of her ammo belt, reassuring herself that she has a full load. Despite the wet everywhere else, her mouth is dry.

  She does a deep-knee bend then stands up, shakes out her hands, stamps her feet to get some feeling back in her numb toes. The other boats are strung out ahead and behind, all running along in almost total darkness now under a sky playing peek-a-boo with patches of cloud beneath a jeweler’s display case of diamonds. There is a single bunkered light on the stern of the lead boat with all the others following it.

  The sea itself is almost as bright as the sky, with phosphorescence sparkling green from the wave tops, but these hints of color only make the underlying sea seem blacker.

  The Mediterranean Sea, cradle of human civilization. All the ancient empires have fought their wars here; Rio’s heard Stick talking about it.

  “The bottom of the Mediterranean is piled deep with bones and weapons and lost gold from long-ago wars between countries and empires that no longer exist,” Stick once told Rio. Rio hoped then, and hopes even more fervently now, that her bones will not be joining that vast collection.

  The lead boat turns sharply to the right—starboard, as the navy boys say—toward the still-invisible shore. This brings the wind and spray around to almost directly in Rio’s face, so she shivers and drops back down behind cover. The boat is heaving and bucking, hitting wave tops and falling into troughs.

  Sergeant Cole, speaking calmly, without inflection, and as usual somewhat muffled by his unlit cigar, says, “Okay, ladies and gentlemen, we are heading in. Anyone wants to throw up one last time, get it over with.”

  Kerwin does exactly that, leaping to his feet in a vain attempt to project his vomit away from the boat. The wind blows it right back in his face, but the spray soon washes it away.

  “No one smokes, no one talks, and sure as hell no one shoots unless I say so. You all got me?”

  Cole’s probably done this before.

  “Yes, Sergeant,” came the rattling-teeth responses.

  Rio licks her lips, tasting salt water.

  “Let’s go over the call sign. The challenge is mustard. And the response is ketchup. Do it with me.”

  “Mustard.”

  “Ketchup.”

  “Mustard.”

  “Ketchup.”

  “You see or hear something that looks like a person, you call out mustard. If that person does not give back ketchup, you shoot him. But let me repeat: we are not looking for a fight. We have an objective.”

  Cole always pronounces it “OB-jective,” which usually makes Rio smile, but not now, this is not a time for smiles, this is a time for clenched fists and gritted teeth.

  “We want to get to the objective without the enemy spotting us. So quiet it is. Like a mouse sneaking past a cat, right?”

  “Right, Sarge.”

  Cole then looks around at his squad, eyes just faint glitters in the dark as he tries to assess each of his charges. “If you all remember your training and don’t lose your heads, you’ll likely be okay.”

  Likely. How likely?

  A navy crewman comes forward, walking with an ease the land-loving GIs could never master aboard a wet, rolling matchbox. He says, “All right, five minutes to the beach. God be with you, Army.”

  “Thanks for the ride, Sailor,” Cole says.

  “Next time I want a first-class berth,” Rio says through a tight-clenched jaw, just to show she’s not afraid, not so afraid she can’t speak, anyway. The words chatter and break up a bit on the way out of her mouth, and the laughter that follows is strained and nervous, but laughter just the same.

  Don’t screw up, Rio, that’s all.

  Sergeant Garaman fires up the jeep’s engine, making everyone jump.

  “Load your weapons. Safeties on!” Cole says. “Let’s not shoot ourselves getting off the boat.”

  Rio draws a clip from her belt. Her fingers are numb with cold, and she almost drops it. Jenou does drop hers, but no one is in the mood just now to tease her about it.

  Rio racks back the slide and thumbs in the clip, pushes it all the way down and yanks her hand back quick. She extends her index finger, touches the safety, assuring herself that it’s on.

  “Hey, Richlin,” Kerwin says. “You think there’ll be any angry pigs on that beach?”

  “As long as there’s a tree for us to climb, it’ll be okay,” Rio says.

  “Okay, Second Squad, brace!”

  They brace, hands grabbing anything solid, knees tense, heads low, insides quivering.

  “Soon as the ramp drops, go. Stay low, stay quiet. Run fifty yards up, split left and right, keeping the egress clear for the jeep. Then drop and wait.”

  Just don’t screw up, Rio, just don’t screw up.

  Now she sees a snaking line of phosphorescence marking the crashing surf, shockingly near. The engine changes tone and the vibration increases as the coxswain slows for impact.

  Rio has to pee badly.

  Her breath comes short and fast. Her chest pounds out a panicky, irregular drumbeat. Her hands clutch her rifle, left hand gripping the forward stock, right hand wrapped around the neck, index finger lying on the safety, just like she’s been taught.

  Lord, make me brave.

  And then she glances at Jack, not wanting that thought to enter her head right now, not right now, because right now she’s about to hit the beach and she wants moral clarity, she wants to
be the good girl who will deserve the protection of an approving God.

  “I guess it’ll all be nothing,” Jenou says.

  “Right.”

  Rio feels Jenou’s hand fumbling for hers. She releases her trigger finger and takes her friend’s cold fingers. They squeeze hard, reminding each other that they were still here, together, alive.

  The surf seizes the small boat and hurls it forward. The bottom of the boat scrapes suddenly, and immediately the ramp rattles down.

  “Go, go, go!” Cole says in an urgent whisper.

  The first row leaps forward, Corporal Millican taking the lead, with Tilo and Jillion flanking him. Rio is in the second row with Jenou and Stick, and the three of them surge behind the leaders.

  There comes a shout from the darkness ahead, barely audible above the vehement throat-clearing sound of the engines and the shushing of the waves. A distinctly non-American shout.

  Rio lands waist deep in a retreating wave. The water is like molasses, grabbing at her uniform, tugging her back toward the sea with disturbing force. It nearly unbalances her, and if she falls she’ll drown because the weight of the pack and the weight of the ammo have suddenly been doubled by the water. But Cole’s hand shoves her upright and she slogs forward, forward and up an incline, and now the water pushes with her as the wave rolls in, lets her move, lets her run up onto sand, rifle at the ready.

  A noise like a very big zipper being yanked down hard and streams of tracer fire arc from the darkness, a bright line of death.

  “Down! Down!” Cole yells.

  “Clear the egress!” Liefer is yelling in her shrill alto, because they have to get the jeep off the boat and she doesn’t want to drive over her own soldiers.

  “Go, go, go!”

  “Look out!”

  “Get the fug—”

  “They’re shooting!”

  Rio lurches to her right, three steps, four, five, ten, fifteen, counting them off, drops to her knees, plants the butt of her rifle, and lies facedown on her belly with her weapon pointing toward where she thinks the machine gunner might be.

  Fifteen hundred rounds per minute. The standard German machine gun fires fifteen hundred rounds per minute.

  The machine gun opens up again, loud but distant, followed by softer but way-too-near Pfft! Pfft! sounds as the bullets hit sand. Soft whimpering noises are coming from her throat, unlike any sound she’s ever made before.

  A split second slower than Rio to hit the ground, Kerwin cries out. He says, “Oh!”

  Just that. Oh.

  Rio sees him fall backward. His head lands in the edge of the retreating foam, legs folded beneath him.

  “Cassel! You hit?”

  No answer.

  God no, God no, God no.

  The jeep roars and splashes out of the landing craft and instantly draws the fire of the enemy machine gun.

  “Are you hit? Cassel! Are you hit?”

  “Doc! Doc!” someone yells.

  The jeep swerves left and goes nose-down in a hole, rear wheels spinning and throwing up a plume of sand.

  “Richlin! Give Doc a hand with Cassel!” Cole yells. “Stick, get that BAR onto that dune there and put some fire on that machine gun, take Geer with you. Castain, Pang, Suarez, stay low and follow me!”

  Rio crawls toward her stricken comrade, elbows digging, knees pushing, heart gone mad. The doc, who came ashore with Fourth Squad, is hunched over Cassel. He grabs at something in his medical kit, and now Rio sees that Cassel is flailing spasmodically, arms and legs jerking, torso heaving. An advancing wave covers his face in foam.

  “Pull him back, pull him back, goddammit, he’ll drown!” the medic shouts.

  Rio grabs Cassel’s legs and has to rise to her own knees in order to get leverage. She is acutely aware of her exposed back but hauls him out of the surf.

  “Hold him down,” the medic says through gritted teeth as he tears open a bandage. “Gotta stop the bleeding. His neck.”

  “Take it easy, Cassel, take it easy,” Rio says.

  Blood pulses from Cassel’s throat, like a garden hose that someone is kinking and releasing, kinking and releasing. The blood looks like chocolate syrup in the darkness.

  Kerwin is making guttural sounds, words full of urgency with no vowels.

  Rio rises again, just high enough to place her hands on Kerwin’s chest and hold him down, but as she does this she feels slippery warmth and realizes that large quantities of blood are gushing from his upper chest. He’s been hit twice, not once.

  “Gotta take it easy, Cassel, let Doc work.”

  Would sound better if my teeth weren’t chattering.

  But Kerwin isn’t hearing her. He jerks wildly, tries to say something that comes out as a plaintive grunt, then lays back down, quieting. Doc slaps a pressure bandage on, but the artery in Cassel’s neck is barely slowed.

  Like trying to block a fire hydrant with your fingers.

  Doc rips Cassel’s uniform shirt open and there’s the second hole near, far too near, to his heart.

  The medic curses and then covers for that by telling Cassel, “It’s okay, it’s okay, soldier, you’ll be okay, going home is all, going home.” It’s a lie, but Kerwin never hears it anyway.

  Rio feels his heart stop. One second there’s a wild beating thing in his chest and then nothing.

  Kerwin’s last breath is a slow wet wheeze of exhalation, as if he’s sinking back into an easy chair after a long day.

  The machine gun chatters and digs divots Pfft! Pfft! Pfft! in the sand near Rio, so she has to roll away, clutching her rifle to her chest with blood-slicked hands.

  Kerwin is dead without even getting a chance to speak. His final intelligible word just that single syllable, “Oh.”

  24

  FRANGIE MARR—TUNISIAN DESERT, NORTH AFRICA

  The same northern African night that envelops Second Squad on its beach covers Frangie Marr and the colored 403rd Artillery Battalion. They are not on a beach but in the shadow of a stark, bare hill with just a number for a name.

  Frangie hears the sounds and sees the flash of artillery fire in the distance. That would be a white battalion sending 105 and 155 shells toward the Germans, who Frangie has neither seen nor heard. Something is up, she can feel it. The pace of firing—at night, no less—is too great for it to be a minor fire mission.

  Doon Acey—Buck Sergeant Acey now—is already busy about the sights of his 105, carefully wiping the glass in the eyepiece, checking the set screws with a flashlight, fussing like a backyard mechanic working on a jalopy.

  Rough wooden boxes of shells are eagerly manhandled down from the trucks, which go roaring off the instant they are empty, spraying mud from their fat, heavily treaded tires. More trucks come carrying more ammo, water, tents, chow, all the paraphernalia of an army as the 403rd races to get set up.

  There are six guns in this battery, four batteries in the battalion, twenty-four tubes in all, served by a total of just under five hundred men, of which ten are white officers and the rest black privates and NCOs.

  There should be at least a half-dozen medics throughout the battalion, but there are just three—trained medics are in short supply, especially black ones.

  Frangie mentally goes over the contents of her medical bag. Plenty of bandages and tape. Enough sulfa powder, hopefully. Sutures? Probably, and if not she has a sewing kit her mother insisted on sending with her. Morphine? Someone has stolen some of her stock, but there is enough, most likely. She sees the water truck with its oval seven-hundred-fifty-gallon tank. Water is as important as any medicine; she’s been taught that, and here in the desert with nary a brook or stream, she feels it.

  An instructor, an old sergeant from the last war, had told the medics-in-training, “When they’re injured they’ll ask for water. When it’s bad they’ll pray to Jesus. When it’s over they’ll ask for their mother.”

  Medicine she has. Water she has. She can do nothing about anyone’s mother.

  Everyone say
s the artillery doesn’t get shot at. Much. So maybe she won’t need anything. But she does the mental checklist anyway, a result of training plus a desire to not screw up. To be ready. Always ready. Because this is it. This is the war.

  Already tired but keyed up by the atmosphere of controlled panic, Frangie watches the jiggly dance of flashlights as the crews set up the firing stakes and square the 105s and 155s, digging in the split trails that will absorb some of the shock of firing. Men and some women stack shells, dig foxholes, rig shaggy fishnet camouflage, position defensive machine guns, and set up a small command post.

  They are in hill country, desert hill country, with hills that are little more than bare rock and low, scruffy bushes. The air smells of dust, diesel fuel, bug spray, and Cosmoline, the thick petroleum jelly used to keep metal gun parts away from salt spray and other corrosive things. The wind is cold, the particularly cutting cold of the desert at night. Frangie has located her little aid station near the narrow, paved road behind them, and in just the last hour American soldiers have appeared on that road, walking toward the rear. Some are bandaged. Some of the wounded are on stretchers atop jeeps that honk their horns carelessly to clear a path.

  But most of the soldiers who pass by are not wounded. Some have lost or thrown away their weapons. Many look abashed or even frankly scared—it is not hard to guess that something out there in the desert went poorly.

  A dusty, dirty-looking buck sergeant comes toward Frangie’s station calling out, “You boys got any water you can spare?”

  “You can have a swig off my canteen, Sergeant,” Frangie says, “and there’s a tanker truck just over behind the command tent.”

  Only when he’s a few feet away does the sergeant focus and notice that Frangie is black and female.

  “I ain’t drinking water out of no coon’s canteen,” he says, and rejoins the jittery, mournful parade. He’s not alone in his hostility. Some of the passing soldiers take the time to stare at the all-black artillery and some take the time to marvel loudly at, “All them Nigras with big old guns.”

  “No wonder we couldn’t get no arty support, it’s nothing but jigs and jugs,” a phrase Frangie hears for the first but not the last time.