Front Lines (Front Lines #1)(24)
“Well,” the doctor says, “at least you two are big, strapping country girls.”
“Excuse me?” Jenou demands archly.
“The Depression took a toll on the size and health of recruits. If this were 1922 instead of 1942, there wouldn’t be many females up to par. But a lot of males are undersized and understrength. If you only knew how many young men I have to reject for lack of sufficient teeth, or bowed legs, or . . .” He realizes he’s complaining to a pair of recruits, stops himself, and quickly stamps their papers.
Then it’s time to retrieve their boxes of clothing, dress, and proceed through one more door, where they merge again with the men and boys.
And there a final corporal stands waiting. As soon as twenty recruits have filled the room, he yells, “Attention!”
All twenty people in the room execute something that vaguely resembles the sort of attention they’ve seen in movies.
An officer strides into the room, barely glances up, and reads from a wrinkled and coffee-stained piece of paper.
“I, state your name.”
“I, Rio Richlin” melts into a sea of voices pronouncing names.
The oath is dry and formal but has the effect of silencing the last whispers and titters in the room.
It’s happening. Right now, it’s happening.
“Do solemnly swear or affirm that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.”
The captain shoves the paper back into his shirt pocket and says, “Congratulations. You are all now members of the US Army.”
Rio turns slowly to meet Jenou’s unusually serious face.
“Just like that,” Jenou says. “We’re soldiers now.”
Rio looks past her friend and finds an even more serious expression on Strand’s face. He is at the far end of the room and has forgotten to lower his hand after taking the oath.
Then he spots her, realizes his hand is still up, lowers it, and smiles a sheepish smile.
Rio thinks, We’re soldiers now.
8
RAINY SCHULTERMAN—NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK, USA
“Women soldiers are an abomination!”
Rainy turns to look at the source. There is a group of perhaps twenty people, mostly women, holding signs reading Eve is not Adam!!! and 1 Timothy 2:12. Suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence!!!
She doubts even the Christian Bible comes with that many exclamation points, and she toys with the idea of offering her own favorite verse from the Torah, Judges 4:21: “But Jael the wife of Heber took a tent peg, and took a hammer in her hand, and went softly to him and drove the peg into his temple, till it went down into the ground . . .” But she thinks better of it. A future in military intelligence does not begin with picking fights in train stations.
On the platform she tries to hear the garbled announcements from the public address, but it’s as noisy as a fair, with farewells all around her and the hissing of steam engines and the shouts of false gaiety from nervous and excited soldiers.
She can hardly bear to look around her. So much sadness and worry from so many little family groups, so many mothers with tears, and so many fathers struggling not to reveal any emotion at all. It’s a sea of olive drab and khaki, white handkerchiefs held to red noses, pink ribbons tied around newspaper-wrapped food parcels, coral lipstick on the lips of girlfriends; but these sprinkles of color only seem to accentuate the grayness of it all, the gray coats and shabby graying dresses, and gray-green fedoras pulled low, and gray abashed faces of men who are seeing off girlfriends for the first time in history.
Girl and women soldiers are going off to war, wearing pants and boots, shouldering heavy packs and duffels. Some are at the end of their leave after basic training, heading off to deployments in places whose names will be excised from their letters home by the censors. Some are home on leave from Britain or Australia.
It can’t ever have been easy, Rainy thinks, not any war. But the rituals are different now. It has always been that the men went off and the women wept and waved. There is no blueprint for what is happening now. There is no easy reference point. People don’t know quite how to behave, and it’s worse for the men in the station who are staying behind and feel conspicuous and ashamed.
She sees belligerent, defensive looks even as men hug their uniformed sweethearts. She sees looks of dark suspicion aimed at male soldiers when they acknowledge their fellow female soldiers with a grin or a handshake or a clap on the back.
It is all worth noticing, worth considering, Rainy believes. It is all a part of this war. It’s all a small part of something unimaginably huge. Millions are dead already, millions more will die; she is grimly certain of that. She has never really accepted the notion that the arrival of the Americans will end things in a few months. Rainy can read a map, and she has seen how much of the world now lies beneath the flag with the swastika.
Rainy has insisted on coming alone to the station, fearing the flood of parental emotion that would weaken her determination. She’d already been through that when she first enlisted, and when she went off to basic training, and now she’s heading to this intelligence school for still more training, after which . . .