Front Lines (Front Lines #1)(74)
Strand is there, close to her heart.
Jack is there, close.
“Well, when I think about it, the army did fulfill my every wish,” Rio says, trying gamely not to sink into a funk. “But that’s because I wished to be cold and confused and surrounded by smelly, unwashed apes.”
People laugh. That’s good. Laughter fights worry.
“See, Private Richlin here has it figured out,” Stick says. Stick is still the closest thing to a real soldier in the squad, aside from the sergeant. “You just have to wish for something lousy and the army is sure to arrange it.” He shifts his big, heavy BAR from one sore shoulder to a slightly less sore shoulder.
The sky is losing the last of its gloomy, gray glow as night turns silver to slate. The desert around them begins to lose its form and color as shadow swallows it up. Ochre becomes gray, muted reds become gray, the world shifts from color to grayscale, a prelude to blackness.
“That’s a cheerful thought,” Rio mutters under her breath.
Rio carries a pack and gear that weighs thirty-five pounds all told, one-third her own weight. The pack contains one spare khaki uniform, four pairs of khaki socks, one khaki bra—not the sort of thing one finds in the average department store—one clean khaki undershirt and one that smells like an animal has crawled into it and died. There is a personal care kit, which is basically a comb, a few hairpins, a toothbrush and dental powder, lice-killer, a thinning bar of soap she’d had no chance to use recently, and a bottle of fingernail polish that she now regrets.
The heaviest thing in Private Richlin’s pack is three days’ worth of combat rations consisting of canned beef stew, canned corned beef hash, canned pork and beans, and canned cheese. The cans are olive drab, the food is not. The food is a sort of mealy tan hue unless it’s the cheese, and then it is bright yellow.
Other food items consist of dehydrated lemonade, dehydrated coffee, and dehydrated cocoa. There is also something called a Dration bar, which is alleged to be related to chocolate and has a tendency to break teeth and give soldiers the runs. GIs claim the D-bar is the enemy’s secret weapon.
Tied to the back of Rio’s pack is an entrenching tool, which a civilian might call a shovel. Rio’s experience of the war so far—at Camp Maron, at two separate training bases in Britain, and thus far in Tunisia—has involved extensive use of the entrenching tool and no use at all of her weapon outside of the firing range.
It is all, all of it, khaki or light-olive drab. Khaki and OD alike are liberally decorated with mud splatters from passing deuce-and-a-half trucks.
Her fingernails—what is left of them—are pink. She’s been unable to find fingernail polish remover, so the pink she applied seven days ago on the transport coming down from England is just slowly chipping away, another few flakes every time she digs a hole or cleans her rifle or unscrews the top of her tin canteen to take a swallow of brackish water.
The fingernail polish was a stupid decision. Rio was talked into it by Cat. Amazing what boredom will drive you to, Rio thinks.
Sergeant Cole, upon first seeing the nail polish just after they’d landed in Oran, stared at Rio with a look that reduced her height from five eight to just eight. He spoke not a word, just stared at her in disbelief and head-shaking disappointment.
The only reason Rio did not immediately toss the bottle of polish away is that she is saving it for a special occasion—like the end of this war, maybe. This will most likely be within a few months, because now that the Americans are in this fight, the Germans and Italians will give up pretty quick.
At least that’s the consensus among the eight men and four women of Second Squad, Fifth Platoon, Company A, 119th Division based on precisely zero actual combat experience.
Their British allies, with two years of hard experience of the war, do not share this high opinion of the Americans, a fact that has been conveyed at times forcefully, even obscenely, from passing British forces.
Yet Second Squad, Fifth Platoon has remained cocky. Wet, cold, dirty, sore, hungry, tired, and endlessly disgruntled, but cocky.
Except now they are marching away from their temporary camp into the African night, the full desert night under a dangerously clear sky still dominated by the German Luftwaffe.
I could die tonight.
Second Squad and the rest of Fifth Platoon march, grumbling all the while, through slow-to-dry mud to an assembly area where Third Platoon is already standing around looking scruffy and unhappy. There’s some sort of ongoing beef between Fifth and Third Platoons, dating back to the Tiburon. Rio doesn’t know what it is, nor does anyone else (though it may involve a missing case of fruit cocktail), but it is for certain that Fifth Platoon is in the right. All forty-five soldiers in Fifth Platoon, including the twelve in Second Squad, are pretty sure of that.
The assembly area is a field once sparsely covered with desiccated grass, now trampled into the mud with such thoroughness that it almost seems like deliberate vandalism. They are within sight of the beach, an endless and barely visible stretch of sand that would no doubt be a playground in better times.
Sunshine and lovely warmth is what they all expected when they were told they’d be fighting in North Africa. Wasn’t Africa all lions and elephants and jungles and sunshine? It seems not. This part of the continent is sand and rock and gloomy stone hills and squat, desperately poor villages that survive on date palms and an olive tree or two, with a fair number of mules and the occasional camel, but nary an elephant let alone a lion.