Silver Stars (Front Lines #2)(52)

I am helping boys who get hurt and learning a lot about doing that. I don’t even have a gun—sorry, Obal. My most dangerous weapon is probably the morphine I give to the wounded. I see tanks and cannon and so on, but all of that is sort of apart. Like when little kids are playing in a sandbox and they don’t really play together, just kind of play next to each other? Well, this is one big sandbox and the navy does what it has to do, and the army does what it has to do, and the medics and nurses and doctors, we do our duty too.

That sounds a bit high and mighty somehow, but it’s too late to change it. And anyway, she is doing her duty, isn’t she? She’s saving boys’ and girls’ lives sometimes, though mostly she’s patching folks up to send them back into the fighting where they might get hurt worse the next time.

They say the whole thing is going pretty well with—

The sound of planes is familiar, so she doesn’t immediately dive for cover, not until she looks up and sees the familiar two-engine silhouette of a Heinkel, a dark cross against the sky.

She gathers her things and scoots to the base of the palm tree, where the shallow, torn-up roots have left a slight depression. She hopes the tree won’t fall on her.

The Heinkel comes in low, met by a hail of small arms fire from the ground and chased by the antiaircraft guns of the navy. It drops two bombs, one of which falls near the aid station, sending up a cloud of yellow sand.

Frangie tosses the food tray aside, scoops up her pictures and unfinished letter, and races back toward the aid station tent. It’s still standing, though it is coated with sand. A jeep being used to transport wounded men has been blown up pretty well.

There will be wounded.

“Sorry, Doctor,” she says, rushing breathlessly into the tent where soldiers are now hauling their wounded buddies. “I didn’t get coffee.”

“Triage the incoming,” Dr. Frame snaps.

Triage is the process of deciding who gets treated first. There are three categories. The “walking wounded” are low priority and will be patched up and sent back up to the line. The “hopeless” cases will be shot full of morphine and left to die.

The category of focus is on those hurt too bad for a patch-and-release but who may just live if given prompt treatment. Over the next hour Frangie makes swift, terrible decisions, choosing those who will be treated and those who . . . who will be given morphine to ease their passage to the afterlife.

Fortunately, only one soldier falls into this last category. His shirt has been torn open, revealing a mess of gray-blue intestines hanging from a jagged tear in his stomach. Red muscle, a layer of white fat, veins sticking out, arteries pumping weakly, skin ashen, draining the last of his blood away.

He’s like one of the corpses she saw during training, one of the corpses after the medical students had been at it. The wounded soldier is a gruesome display of internal organs.

“What’s your name, Sergeant?”

“It’s me, Ma. It’s me, help me, Ma, help me, I got hurt . . .” His voice belongs to a little boy.

She draws his dog tags out. Gordon, William T. Blood Type A.

“You’re going to be okay, Gordon.”

“Billy,” he gasps. He blinks at her, seems to realize that she is not his mother, but then a wave of agony rolls through him, twisting his face into a fright mask, tensing his limbs. He cries out, a weak sound.

The smell of human feces billows up, and she sees the shit oozing from a tear in his pulsating colon.

“You’re going to be okay, Billy,” she lies, and lays a wet cloth on his forehead. “The pain will stop soon. Shh. Shh.”

“Ma? Ma? Mommy?”

“It’s okay, Billy, it’s just a scratch, a million-dollar wound, you’re going home.”

“Mommy? Mommy?”

“Please, Jesus, help this boy!” Frangie cries out in frustration.

“Mommy?” Softer this time as the morphine penetrates his consciousness, bringing a false peace.

The white nurse, Lieutenant Tremayne, is at Frangie’s side. She takes Frangie’s arm and leads her away just a few feet and forces Frangie to look at her. “Listen, you,” Tremayne says, “you mustn’t do that. You understand? We’re here to help these boys, and if they hear you talking to Jesus they know they’re done for.”

The tension in Billy T. Gordon’s body relaxes. Urine adds new stains to his trousers. There comes a long, slow, final, rattling exhalation.

“He was done for when he came in,” Frangie says in monotone.

“Listen to me. Hey! You’re a good medic, but you need to protect yourself, you hear me? I used to work the emergency room at Saint Vincent’s, and I’ve had people die in my arms. You have to show them love and care, but you can’t feel it. You’ll go crazy otherwise.”

“A handsome, healthy young boy . . . ,” Frangie says. “Dies stinking like a sewer.”

“And your tears don’t change that,” Tremayne says, and walks away.

Frangie stands by the dead man, refusing to be disgusted by the smell, refusing to move away. Her eyes fill with tears, and she knows she can’t cry because she needs to be able to see clearly.

This is all we are. A bag of guts that can be ripped open as easily as cutting into a sausage.

There will be more. More and more, stretching away into her future.