Purple Hearts

by Michael Grant

  Ahead there is a low concrete seawall topped with barbed wire. Rio lands hard against the concrete and sand of the seawall, panting, her heart a mad thing trying to kick its way out of her rib cage.

  GIs are spread all up and down the seawall, wet, caked with sand, some bleeding, some shouting, some crying, some praying, most silently shivering. Dark shapes like piles of rags dot the sand. Soldiers lie floating facedown or faceup in shallow water, rising and falling sluggishly on the waves. The frantic, pitiful cries of “Medic! Medic!” come from every direction. Naval gunfire whistles overhead to land too far inland.

  The Higgins boats are pulling away now, churning water, heading back to sea.

  Leaving us, Rio thinks irrationally. Leaving us here to die!

  There is only one thing to do.

  “Geer! We gotta make a run for the base of the cliff.”

  “We’ll get hung up in the wire,” Geer yells. There are double coils of barbed wire ahead.

  Every communication now is a shout or a scream. The noise from mortars, artillery, bullets, and desperate soldiers is overwhelming. The air stinks of cordite and salt.

  “Who’s got wire cutters?” Rio yells.

  Jack curses under his breath, fumbles in his pack, produces the wire cutters, and starts to crawl up over the seawall.

  “Stafford!” Rio yells. She’d meant to cut the wire herself, but it’s too late and now the Englishman is on his back, under the wire, cutting one . . . two . . . crawl and reposition . . . three strands. The wire springs away in a coil.

  “When I yell go, we go!” Rio shouts.

  The soldiers looking to her are not all hers. Some are not even from the platoon. A bullet hits a man she doesn’t know in the face and explodes out of the back of his head, carrying his helmet away on a geyser of blood and brain matter.

  Rio yells, “Ready! Go!”

  10

  FRANGIE MARR—OMAHA BEACH, NAZI-OCCUPIED FRANCE

  The disembarkation plan calls for Frangie and the rest of the tank battalion medics to come last, once all the tanks and half-tracks are unloaded. Her jeep is on the upper deck and will have to be lowered by elevator to the tank deck once that space is clear of higher priority traffic.

  The beach is close, coming closer as the LST’s skipper brings the ship in. Frangie feels contact, a slight lurch, as the hull touches ground. She hears a sound of steel grinding on sand, followed immediately by the whir of electric motors winching open the great bow doors.

  From her high-up vantage point Frangie can see much of the beach. Even to a noncombatant the problem is clear: a narrow beach and a tall cliff. Machine gun fire from the top of the cliff is a symphony, with a loud zipper noise to the left answered by one from the right, volumes rising or falling on the breeze, sometimes five or six firing at once, their sounds joining and then separating.

  The artillery fire is more sporadic, with shells dropping on the sand and in the surf and out to sea, sending up pillars of sand and smoke here, water there, a half-track, a jeep, a boat, a body.

  The navy continues to launch its massive shells, but they cannot be used against the cliff, not at the distances involved, not without risking hitting the Americans on the beach.

  There are bodies. Bodies in the sand. Bodies floating in the water. And one man, quite near, near enough for Frangie to see the corporal’s stripes on his shoulder, lies in the surf, on his back, helpless to move as the waves crash and foam covers his mouth and nose and then retreats.

  “He’ll drown,” Frangie says to no one. Manning and Deacon are in the jeep, back toward the stern, patiently waiting to drive it onto the elevator.

  Frangie scans left and right, searching for medical teams. There’s a medic hunched over a man. Another crawling toward a woman with one leg blown off. Neither aware of, nor with time to do anything about, the man slowly drowning.

  The bow doors are open, the ramp sliding into place like an extended tongue. The first tanks will be rolling off soon. But it will be a long time yet before Frangie can disembark. Far too long for the corporal so close, so close, so doomed and yet so easily saved.

  Frangie does not decide to act, at least it doesn’t feel that way to her. It feels as if her body simply starts moving all on its own, running to the hatch leading down, piling down the stairs with her musette bags banging against the rails.

  On the tank deck it is a roar of engines, all the tanks and half-tracks revving as the ship’s loadmasters rush about loosening the straps that had anchored the tanks to the decks. The commanders of each tank are visible, black men, black women, helmeted, ready, maybe even eager despite being afraid.

  On a platform overlooking the scene Frangie hesitates for a second, just a second, to take it in. Colored soldiers from the north, east, west, and even the Deep South prepare to roll out and engage the white supremacist Nazis.

  Someday I’ll tell Obal all about this, she thinks. Then, Someday maybe my own children too.

  She spots Sergeant Moore. He’ll be the second tank off the boat. She weaves her way through preoccupied crew, jumping over a snaking hose being rapidly reeled in, and yells up at him.

  “Sergeant Moore!”

  He looks down in surprise. “Hey, Doc. I’m a bit busy here.”

  “Can I bum a ride?”

  The question is so preposterous that Moore laughs despite the tension that has turned his face rigid.

  “What the hell?”

  “There’s a man out there,” Frangie says. “He’s going to drown.”

  Moore shakes his head, but it’s not a no. “You can climb up on the side,” he says. His tone of voice carries an unspoken If you’re fool enough to do it.

  Easier said than done. She finds a steel handhold and plants her foot on a bogie wheel. She bangs her knee painfully on unforgiving armor plate, heaves herself up, and squats beside the turret.

  “You need to jump right off soon as we’re out,” Moore says. “We’ll be traversing the turret.”

  Frangie nods. Words feel hard now, like whatever part of her brain makes words has run out of gas.

  Before them the ramp completes its descent. The beach is there, right there! And the German gunners are already aiming at the LST’s opening. Bullets ricochet off the bow doors and rattle through the hold, striking sparks.

  The first tank revs its engines and clatters down the ramp. Moore’s tank lurches hard and rolls after it, and Frangie has to scramble to keep her perch. Out and through. Out and down, the treads splashing through the last inches of boiling surf, throwing up a sandstorm as the treads spin and then bite.

  “Thanks!” Frangie yells to Moore and leaps down to land hard on the sand. She stands up, immediately crouches, and searches for the drowning man. She spots him and dashes through the gap when the next tank rolls off. It’s like running across railroad tracks between speeding express trains.

  While being shot at.

  She runs toward the wounded man, but as she does she suddenly realizes she’s in a race. A Higgins boat is plowing toward the same spot. She trips, lands on hands and knees, and watches helplessly as the Higgins boat drops its heavy ramp, extinguishing whatever hope the injured soldier might have had.

  Soldiers burst from the Higgins boat, too busy staying alive to concern themselves with the dead man under their feet.

  The German gunners have loaded their armor-piercing rounds now and focus on the disembarking tanks. A shell bounces off one tank to explode inside the hold of the LST. A second round explodes in the very mouth of the ship, and when the smoke clears Frangie can see that the ramp is twisted wildly. Three tanks have made it ashore. The rest will not be coming any time soon.

  Neither will Frangie’s jeep.

  For a moment she dithers, confused, not knowing what to do. Her place is with the tankers, but they are buttoned up and are already firing up at the bluff and drawing intense, focused fire down on themselves.

  There are wounded everywhere, but the sand is almost alive with the tiny puffs of sand
from bullets. Any move in almost any direction could cause her to intersect with one of those bullets.

  There’s a sudden smack on the side of her helmet. She drops, rolls onto her belly, pulls her helmet off and looks at it. There is a brand-new, shiny, metallic crease running right across her red cross.

  A voice in the back of her mind yammers in panic that she should get back on the ship, get back on, she isn’t supposed to be here, she isn’t even responsible for these other wounded, she isn’t made of steel, she’s going to die, to die, to die.

  But again her body decides. She slaps her helmet back on and starts to half-crawl, half-run, like a four-legged animal, toward a woman moaning in pain.

  “I’m here, Soldier,” she says. “Where are you hit?”

  A thigh wound. Sulfa, compress, wrap, morphine.

  A man runs past; his legs buckle and he falls. She’s seen the bullet, a tracer round. It’s gone through his belly and come out the back. Stomach wound.

  “I’m here, Soldier. Lie down and don’t move.”

  She cuts open the uniform to expose the wound. It’s seeping not spurting. She rolls him partly over and removes his webbing belt to get at the exit wound. A round hits and makes the soldier jerk. Where? Where was he hit? A jet of blood from his shoulder, a lengthwise hit, the bullet digging a tunnel from his collarbone down into the meat of him, ripping arteries and tendons and organs.

  Beyond help.

  She stabs morphine into his neck, says, “You’ll be okay, just stay down.” He will not be okay, she knows it, he does not. She does her half-crawl, half-run toward a voice crying, “Medic! Medic!”

  She finds a sergeant sheltering a lieutenant with his body, his back to the gunners.

  “Get down, you fool!” she shouts and swarms over the lieutenant, searching for the wound. But then the lieutenant’s eyes flutter open. He looks around wildly, frowns up at Frangie, and begins to sit up. He’s only suffered a concussion. The sergeant who’d been sheltering him lurches forward, cursing a blue streak as his pants leg turns red.

  Expose the wound, apply a tourniquet to slow the bleeding, which is serious but not arterial, sulfa, bandage.

  “You want a shot, Sarge?”

  “Hell no,” he says. “I’m gonna go kill the sombitch who shot me!”

  Frangie crawls away toward a body like a pile of rags. She feels the neck. No pulse. Move on.

  A wounded man in the surf, like the man she’d jumped off the boat to save. This story ends more happily. He’s been shot in the back, legs paralyzed, but he’ll most likely live. Might not walk, but he should live, and at least he won’t drown. She lights him a cigarette and puts it between his lips.

  She finds a woman sitting hunched over, rocking back and forth. Not injured. Frangie pushes her onto her back.

  “Here, Soldier. Take these. They’ll give you courage.” She digs a half-dozen M&M’s from her pocket and places one in the panicked soldier’s mouth. Blank eyes come suddenly alive. Frangie pours a few more into the GI’s hands.

  A man wanders down the beach, his entire uniform below the chest is drenched with blood. She can do nothing for him; he’s moving too fast and there are nearer cases.

  A woman sergeant is dragging herself along, using the butt of her M1 as a stick, digging it in, dragging herself toward the too-near, too-distant bluff. As she advances at a snail’s pace she leaves one leg behind. Her thigh is tattered uniform, shredded flesh and blood.

  “I’m here, Soldier,” Frangie says, crawling to her.

  “Don’t need no help,” the woman says doggedly. Then she focuses on Frangie and says, “You’re a Nigra!”

  “I’m a medic,” Frangie snaps. “And if I don’t tie off that leg, you’ll bleed to death in two minutes!”

  The woman seems baffled by this. Then, like someone in a horror movie who slowly senses the presence of a vampire, she turns her head and sees. “My leg! Where’s my leg? Where’s my leg?”

  Frangie peels back the trouser leg, revealing a tangled mess of pulsing veins and whitish tendons and the mangled white bones of the knee. She whips a tourniquet around the stump and begins feeling through the bloody mess for arteries amid the veins. She finds one and with slippery fingers ties it off. The stump is still bleeding heavily, and Frangie cannot locate the artery.

  She needs plasma, but all of that is in her jeep. She wipes her brow, she’s sweating, and she goes back to the gruesome job of feeling for pulsing blood. She finds the artery, but it’s split lengthwise and too much of it is buried in muscle.

  The woman says, “Aw shit,” and dies.

  A machine gun bullet hits Frangie’s musette bag, blowing open packages of gauze. She glances left: more boats coming in, more soldiers running down ramps into water, too many disappearing below the churning surf. She glances right and sees the twinkle of a German machine gun firing, firing as if it is aiming right at Frangie Marr.

  “Who the fug are you?” It’s a white captain, running past with a half-dozen soldiers.

  “Sergeant Marr, sir!” she cries.

  “You a medic?”

  Frangie nods and taps her helmet with its red crosses.

  “Come with me!”

  “But . . .”

  “Get your lazy black ass up off the sand and come with me!”

  It’s an order from an officer, and she has no choice but to obey. She runs after the little squad as machine gun fire plucks at the sand and their uniforms.

  They run past a young lieutenant carrying a severed arm. “I found this,” the lieutenant yells. “I don’t know whose it is!”

  Suddenly they are at the seawall and they collapse against it, squeezing in between soldiers already huddled there. A metallic ping, and Frangie sees a neat hole in the helmet of the man to her right. Blood gushes down his face.

  “All right, you sons of whores,” the captain roars. “We’re going for the bluff!” He makes a chopping motion with his hand, then jumps up, but no one jumps with him. He stops, turns, and says, “Goddammit, get up! Get up! You want to stay here and die?”

  A handful of soldiers rise. One falls. The others go running after the captain, and Frangie finds herself running too, no longer crawling, no longer crouching, just running, running as if she can outrun the bullets.

  Boom!

  A mortar round lands a few feet away and knocks Frangie over. Her mind screams stay down, but her body is already up again, up and running, running until she stumbles right into a lump that trips her at the very base of the cliff.

  Soldiers on both sides, all white, all extra white with fear, clutch their rifles as if the M1 is salvation itself.

  A German potato masher grenade comes skittering down the cliff, bouncing, then is stopped by a tiny brush outcropping and explodes, showering dirt down on Frangie.

  “Anyone here hit?” Frangie yells. Yells left. Yells right. A voice answers, “Fug! I’m hit!”

  It turns out to be a grazing wound in the shoulder—lots of blood, but no danger. Sulfa and bandage.

  Frangie pushes her back against the cliff and closes her eyes, praying more fervently, and with more jumbled words than she has ever prayed before.

  When she opens her eyes she sees her LST, smoke billowing from the open bow doors. Hoses spray salt water on a raging fire, sending up clouds of steam to mingle with the oily black smoke.

  Only one of the battalion’s DD tanks made it to shore, and it is now running parallel with the beach, offering a rolling shelter to soldiers who run hunched over in its lee.

  Another tank still pumps rounds into the bluff, but it’s a losing proposition: the German gunners are in hardened emplacements or pillboxes, and from the angle the tank has its shells either slam into dirt or go skimming off into the air.

  The entire length of Omaha Beach seems to be burning vehicles and burning boats or ships, smoke and flame, soldiers facedown or on their backs, flailing weakly.

  “Marr?”

  Frangie twists and sees a familiar, freckled face. �
��Rio?”

  “Fancy meeting you here,” Rio says. Her friend Jenou is bleeding from a superficial wound.

  “It’s a popular beach,” Frangie says through chattering teeth. Then, “Castain, put a bandage on that. Get it from your med kit.” It’s not a wound that needs a medic.

  “Got any spare morphine?” Jenou asks. “I’ll take all you got, I want to just go to sleep!”

  “You got blood all over you,” Rio says to Frangie. “You sure you aren’t hit yourself?”

  Frangie shakes her head. “Not my blood.”

  In the space of a few very, very long minutes, Omaha Beach has become populated with a strange sort of beachgoer: bodies lie where sunbathers might have spread blankets.

  It is a disaster. A disaster. There is no way off this beach, and they are all going to die here.

  Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . .

  A man falls, a red flower blooming on his belly.

  “Take care of yourself, Rio,” Frangie says.

  And then she crawls out from the shelter of the bluff and, with machine guns chasing her, runs to the fallen soldier.

  “I’m here, Soldier.”

  11

  RIO RICHLIN—OMAHA BEACH, NAZI-OCCUPIED FRANCE

  Rio watches Frangie Marr running back out, leaving the relative safety of the cliff base, armed with nothing but gauze and morphine. She does not expect to see the medic alive again.

  “Little Nigra’s got balls,” Geer mutters.

  Rio looks around her. Jenou is alive and well and sporting a tan-and-red bandage peeking out from below the visor of her helmet. Jack Stafford is also alive and unhurt. She does not see Pang or Beebee. But two of the replacements, Jenny Dial and Rudy J. Chester, are within shouting range.

  Three dead. Two missing. Her squad is down to seven soldiers, including herself, and two of them are raw recruits. Then she sees Maria Molina running up from the beach. Bullets ping all around her, but at last she flops down atop Geer, who curses then shifts to make room for her.

  The situation on the beach is clear in only one respect: no one, but no one can climb the bluff in the face of deadly German fire. The only way up is through one of the several draws, like river channels, that cut into the cliff. The nearest one is just twenty yards to Rio’s left, where she sees Stick huddled with some of his soldiers as well as a number of men and women from other platoons who, like some of those around Rio, just sort of ended up here.