Front Lines (Front Lines #1)(81)
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 says 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.
“Doc! Doc Marr!”
Frangie searches in the dark for the source of the shout, trying to place it. It’s from Doon’s gun, nearby. She grabs her bag and runs the fifty yards to the emplacement. One of the gunners has crushed a couple of fingers in the breech.
“I’ll put on a splint. But you won’t have much use of that hand for a while, Private.”
“That’s your jerking-off hand too,” another private says, laughing. Then he realizes what he’s said in front of a woman and hastily retreats. “I meant, um . . . Well . . .”
Doon comes around, gives the splint a critical eye, winks at Frangie, and says, “Likely to get noisy around here pretty soon, Frangie.”
“Any word on what’s happening?” she asks, tying off the gauze and ripping it with her teeth. She jerks her head toward the passing white soldiers and says, “That doesn’t look good.”
“Looks like getting our butts kicked is what’s happening,” Doon says. He seems cheerful despite that gloomy assessment. “But I guess we’ll see how much the Germans enjoy the mail we’re going to send them.”
One of the very few advantages to segregation is that despite being only recently attached to this unit, Frangie has already run into two people she knows: Doon Acey and Sergeant Green. Sergeant Walter Green of Iowa. Finding Doon with the big guns is not a surprise, but Green is infantry. She and Green managed only a brief surprised nod of recognition before Green’s platoon was dispatched up the looming hill to keep a lookout and presumably defend the vulnerable but valuable big guns.