Silver Stars (Front Lines #2)(2)

I hope the medals give that Kraut some comfort because he was missing both legs above the knee and his right hand was gone as well. I saw his face. He was a handsome fellow, movie star handsome, I thought, with a wide mouth and perfectly straight Aryan nose and dark, sunken eyes. I knew the eyes. I didn’t know the Kraut, but yeah, I sure knew that look. I see it when I look in the mirror, even now. If you stay too long in the war, it’s like your eyes try to get away, like they’re sinking down, trying to hide, wary little animals crawling into the cave of your eye sockets.

No, not like animals, like GIs. There’s nothing a soldier knows better than squatting in the bottom of a hole. Cat Preeling wrote a poem about it, which I’ll probably mangle, but here’s what I recall:

Dig it deep and in you creep,



While all around there’s the boom-boom sound.



Mud to your knees while your buddy pees.



Another hole, like the hole before . . .



Yeah, that’s all I remember. It goes on for a couple dozen verses.

Anyway, I still type away at this battered old typewriter, and some of the girls come by and take a few pages to read when they’re tired of the magazines the USO gets us. They seldom talk to me about it; mostly they just read, and after a while they bring the pages back and maybe give me a nod. That’s my proof that I’m writing the truth because sure as hell I’d hear about it if I started writing nonsense. We soldier girls—sorry, I mean Warrior Women or American Amazons or whatever the hell the newspapers are calling us now—we’ve had about enough of people lying about us. The folks who hate the idea of women soldiers tell one set of lies, the people who like the notion of women at war tell a different set of lies. If you believe the one side, we’re nothing but a drag on the men, and the other side acts like we won the war all by ourselves.

We could probably get a pretty good debate going here on the women’s ward over the question of which set of lies we hate more—the one denies what we’ve done; the other belittles what our brothers have done.

We won’t have either.

We women are a red flag to the traditionalists—which is to say 90 percent of the military. But as much as we don’t want to be, the truth is we’re a symbol to people who think it’s about time for women and coloreds too to stand equal. Woody Guthrie wrote that song about us. Count yourself lucky you can’t hear me singing it under my breath as I type.

Our boys are all a-fightin’ on land, sea, and air,



But say, some of them boys ain’t boys at all,



Why, some of those boys got pretty long hair.



It may surprise, but I can tell you all,



When it comes to killin’ Nazis, our girls stand tall,



And Fascist supermen die every bit as fast,



From bullets fired by a tough little lass.



For our part, we sure as hell did not want to be a symbol of anything, though we did sort of like Woody’s song. We wanted exactly what every soldier who has ever fought a war in foreign lands wants: we wanted to go home. And if we couldn’t go home, then by God we wanted hot food, hot showers, cold beer, and to sleep in an actual bed for about a week solid.

But we’re just GIs, and no one gives a damn what a GI wants, male or female.

Tunisia, Sicily, Italy, France, Belgium, Germany. Vicious little firefights you’ve never heard of and great battles whose names will echo down through history: Kasserine. Salerno. Monte Cassino. Anzio. D-Day. The Bulge. About all I missed was Anzio, and thank whatever mad god rules the lives of soldiers for keeping us out of that particular hell. There’s a woman here, a patient on the ward, who was a nurse at Anzio. All she ever does is stare at her hands and cry. Though the funny thing is, she can still play a pretty good game of gin rummy. Go figure.

Whatever the newspapers tell you, we women are neither weak sisters nor invincible Amazons. We’re just GIs doing our job, which after Kasserine we’d begun to figure out meant a single thing: killing Germans.

So, Gentle Reader, we come now to a period of time after Kasserine, when those truths were percolating inside us. We were coming to grips with what we were meant to do, what we were meant to be, what we had no choice but to become. We were girls, you see, not even women, just girls, most of us when we started. And the boys were just boys, not men, most of them. We’d only just begun to live life, we knew little and understood less. We were unformed, incomplete. It’s funny how easy it is to see that now. If you’d called me a child three years ago when this started I’d have been furious. But looking back? We were children just getting ready to figure out what adulthood was all about.

It’s a hell of a thing when a person in that wonderful, trembling moment of readiness is suddenly yanked sharply away from everything they’ve ever known and is handed over to drill sergeants and platoon sergeants and officers.

“Ah, good, the youngster is learning that her purpose is to kill.”

Yeah, we figured that out, and we knew by then how to be good army privates. We could dig nice deep holes; we could follow orders. We knew how to unjam an M1, we knew to take care of our feet, we knew how to walk point on patrol. Mostly we knew what smart privates always figure out: stick close to your sergeant, because that’s your mama, your daddy, and your big brother all rolled into one.