Purple Hearts Page 10

  After she won the Silver Star she could have gone home to tour Negro churches and theaters to sell war bonds. But she had chosen this, because this is what you were supposed to do if you are a Silver Star recipient.

  Frangie’s mouth makes a wry smile. No, she’s being dishonest. She wasn’t roped into this by the Star. She was roped in by thinking about colored boys and girls lying on beaches and in ditches, terrified, alone, and in pain.

  You’re doing the right thing for the right reason, Frangie, she chides herself. It’s not the sin of pride to give yourself some credit!

  That and a nickel will buy me a cup of coffee.

  Thin porridge, good intentions are. So much less compelling than what she knows is coming, what is already making her heart race, her throat clench, her mouth go dry as dust: fear.

  Fear is back.

  She pictures a Sherman DD plunging down and down through the dark water. It would sink all the way to the bottom, fast, like a cinder block. You sit cramped inside that metal shell, and suddenly green seawater pours in. . . . She imagines their panic, their frenzy, their despair. . . . Would they still be alive when the tank landed on the seabed, disturbing the crabs and the fishes?

  Would their bodies . . .

  Fear is back.

  She closes her eyes and prays for the fear to be replaced by faith. The Lord is her shepherd. He counts the sparrows that fall. He sees her. He hears her. He will watch over her.

  But when she opens her eyes, the fear is back.

  9

  RIO RICHLIN AND JENOU CASTAIN—OMAHA BEACH, NAZI-OCCUPIED FRANCE

  The ride to shore is much longer than Lupé Camacho expects. The Higgins boat turns tight circles for half an hour, breasting waves that rain chilly spray on the men and women of the platoon.

  On and on and on, as seasickness claims one person after another.

  Around and around in the dark, around and around while the assault forces form up. Hundreds of landing craft must all reach the beach at the same time, so around and around they go, a not-so-merry go-round.

  People try to smoke, but it’s too wet. A couple of GIs try to get a dice game going, but no one wants to use up their luck on dice.

  Some pray or count the rosary, but time wears them down, and most stop and just stare.

  There is a brief distraction when hundreds of American bombers release their loads and massive columns of smoke rise from the direction of the beach. Some cheer and shout, “Get ’em, fly-boys! Plaster ’em!”

  Lupé watches Richlin as Richlin watches the bombing. When it is over she sees a look of disgust on her sergeant’s face, quickly concealed.

  Soldiers are telling each other it’ll be easy after what the air corps has done, but Richlin and Preeling must have seen something much less cheering. Glances between them reveal disappointment.

  Lupé clutches her M1 to her chest, smoothing the stock down as if to quiet her heart and slow her breathing. Sergeant Richlin’s instructions echo in her mind. Save your rifle. Abandon anything else but not your rifle. Keep it dry. Keep it clean. Be ready.

  Kill Germans.

  Earlier the navy had served up an extra-generous breakfast of ham and eggs, biscuits and gravy, toast and flapjacks and coffee. The swabbie cooks had gone all in. But most of that food had been hurled over the side by now, or else was sloshing in the chilly bilgewater that seeps into her boots and numbs her toes.

  She tells herself not to be afraid. She looks at Richlin. The sergeant’s no older than she is, no bigger really, no stronger. But Rio Richlin stands there, leaning against the hull like she’s waiting for a bus. She looks almost bored.

  Across the water comes a sound of whistles, like a football coach summoning players. The public address speaker on the looming ship crackles to life, wishing them “Godspeed.”

  The first part of the wait is over: the boats finish their final circuit, then form into a rough line and go straight for the beach, hundreds of Higgins boats and DUKWs, as the big naval guns fire over their heads.

  There is no visible sun, but she knows that above the clouds it is rising. She sees pearly light silhouetting a town. The church steeple is a spike, an aiming point, a goal.

  Between here and there is a mile of agitated water lacerated by fire from shore. The coxswain and his crew are on the lookout for mines, one crewman leaning out over the bow and peering forward. The hedgehogs are just coming visible, looking like broken children’s toys tossed by a giant into the surf.

  “Okay, people,” Richlin says in a voice pitched for her squad, the squad at the very front of the boat. “Remember what I told you. If they put us on dry land, grab your gear. If they land us in water, drop everything but your weapons. If you sink, do not panic.”

  Lupé glances back and sees Lieutenant Horne talking to Cat Preeling. Preeling, like Richlin, seems relaxed, as if this is a Sunday outing on a lake. Horne is far less calm. His face is frozen. Whatever he’s saying to Preeling, it seems to be just monosyllables.

  Lupé turns to the remaining sergeant, Dain Sticklin. Stick is chewing gum. As she watches, he blows a pink bubble, then sucks it back in.

  It’s an act, Lupé realizes. The sergeants, the veterans, they’re putting on an act. Pretending nonchalance.

  The waves nearer to shore are taller, and the Higgins boat is bucking, smacking waves that smack back, sending shockwaves up through Lupé’s boots. Standing in the stubby superstructure at the back, the coxswain frowns intently at the sea before him. To the left a long line of boats, all bouncing along and—

  Bah-whoosh!

  An artillery shell lands near enough to spray Lupé. Fifty feet one way or the other and a boat would have gone up in—

  Ba-whoosh!

  A boat no more than two hundred yards down the line explodes. Lupé sees a body twirling in the air, rising, arms flailing, and for a frozen moment Lupé has the mad thought that the soldier is flying away, escaping the war. But then gravity reasserts control, and he falls back down into fire and smoke.

  Lupé feels the coxswain back off on the engine, slowing momentarily, a reflex, then accelerating again.

  Lupé is near the front with Rudy J. Chester and Hank Hobart and Dick Ostrowiz. There are six new members of Richlin’s squad, and she has put them all at the front.

  Is this so the veterans can push them off if they freeze up?

  Maybe, Lupé thinks. But she knows there’s a harsher logic to it as well: they are untested. The veterans, Pang and Geer, Castain and Stafford and Beebee, they have all proven their value, and she and the other new additions have not. Her life is worth less to Rio Richlin than theirs.

  Lupé’s stomach rises in her throat, and she has to swallow bile.

  Nearer now, the beach. Nearer. Lupé’s jaw aches from clenching. Her knees tremble.

  The hedgehogs come thicker, closer together, steel beams welded together to form jagged steel pyramids, obstacles meant to tear the bottom out of any boat. Farther in is a different sort of obstacle, wooden logs like telephone poles propped on triangular bases and pointed like pretend cannon, meant to stop any ship that gets past the hedgehogs.

  Smoke rises behind the bluff, and with a sinking feeling Lupé now sees what Richlin and the others saw: the bombs all fell behind the bluff. They have not wiped out the Kraut positions, they have not even created craters on the beach.

  Massive concrete pillboxes line the top of the cliff, especially around cuts in the cliff face, the draws, up which the Americans must necessarily go. Some of the pillboxes are so massive it seems they would collapse the cliff with their sheer weight. From within the pillboxes German machine guns and light artillery fire with impunity. German mortars are positioned behind the pillboxes, heavy artillery farther back still.

  Lupé glances at the gear at her feet. In addition to her usual load, there’s a musette bag filled with grenades. And a can of .30 caliber. Rudy J. Chester has been saddled with an additional BAR as well as his M1, either because he’s big and capable of carrying
the sixteen-pound hunk of steel and wood or because Richlin doesn’t like him.

  The other BAR leans against the gunwale, Luther Geer’s hand steadying the barrel. With Pang and one of the newest squad members, Jenny Dial, they are the ones assigned the management of the light machine gun.

  “Five minutes!” the coxswain yells over the thrum of the engines.

  “Five minutes,” Lieutenant Horne calls out. “Grab your gear!” He sounds like a scared child, his voice wobbly.

  Lupé lifts the musette bag full of grenades, resting the strap on her shoulder where she can easily shrug it off.

  Lieutenant Horne decides it’s time for inspiration. “Remember, men, the American army has never been defeated. And we won’t be today! This is when you prove your worth. This is the day you’ll tell your children about!”

  “Drop dead,” Geer mutters under his breath.

  Lupé catches sight of Cat Preeling making a wry, upside-down smile at Horne’s exclusion of females.

  The Higgins boat surges between hedgehogs, and suddenly, without warning, the ramp drops.

  Just as suddenly Lupé can now see the beach itself as well as the bluff. And she sees at least a hundred feet of water between her and the sand. She sloughs off the musette bag.

  “Go, go, go!” Horne yells.

  Hank Hobart and Dick Ostrowiz are first off the boat. Both plunge into the water and disappear from view.

  A machine gun veers its fire toward them, ping, ping all around, holes appearing in the side of the boat, puckered like popped blisters. A soldier yells and falls down. Another seems surprised and says, “Hey, I think they shot me!” and plucks at her uniform trying to see the wound that spreads red across her chest.

  Rudy J. Chester heaves the BAR in the general direction of the beach and it, too, sinks from view as Chester turns and tries to push back against the surge of soldiers as if his job is done now and he is quitting for the day.

  Lupé pushes past, heart in her throat, breath coming in gasps that sound like sobs. She reaches the end of the ramp and—

  Rio Richlin sees two of her soldiers, Hobart and Ostrowiz, disappear beneath the waves.

  Rio sees Camacho stop like she’s hit a brick wall, and fall, twisting to the side. The side of her throat is gone, a mass of blood and tattered flesh, draining blood like a cut water balloon.

  “Geer! Keep ’em moving!” Rio yells.

  “Go, goddammit!” Geer roars.

  Rio strips off her gear, tosses her rifle to Jenou, and jumps into the water.

  It’s dark under the surface, darker still in the shadow of the Higgins boat, with swirling sand everywhere and machine gun bullets punching spirals in the water. She doesn’t see either of her soldiers.

  Then, a shape, a writhing form. She kicks herself toward it as the cold stuns her muscles. She grabs a handful of uniform shirt and pushes hard upward, forcing Hank Hobart into the air.

  With her own lungs screaming, Rio fights through Hobart’s panicked flailing, finds Hobart’s belt buckle, drops the weight, and then releases Hobart so she can surface and suck a lungful of air. She dives again and finds Hobart floating, face turned toward her, blood billowing from his back.

  Machine gun bullets tear holes in the water all around, and Rio half swims, half walks up the shale incline, feet slipping and sliding, feeling as if with each step she’s dragging the whole weight of the English Channel behind her.

  Hobart. Camacho. Ostrowiz.

  Three!

  Rio’s lungs find air and she pushes on, kicks something hard, takes a deep breath, and plunges down to find the BAR where it sank. She lifts it, pushes it ahead of her, trips, swallows seawater, rises to one knee, and the retreating wave offers her the gift of oxygen once more.

  Up and up, one foot after the other, she hauls herself and the BAR onto the sand, where she drops the machine gun, sits down behind the uncertain shelter of a hedgehog, and looks back toward the boat.

  The Higgins boat is riddled with holes. Bodies lie on the tilted ramp. Bodies float facedown. Bodies surge and retreat in the breaking surf.

  Tsip, tsip, tsip!

  Machine gun rounds strike water all around. An explosion up the beach. Someone yelling in pain.

  Ping! Ping! as bullets ricochet off the hedgehog.

  “Medic! Medic!”

  “Help me!”

  Bullets ricochet off the hedgehog, and now two soldiers are crowding Rio, desperate for cover, one screaming, “It’s not fair! It’s not fair!” until a round catches him in the stomach and he slides away, eyes staring until the light behind them goes out.

  Rio spots Pang, walking bent and backward, hauling Jenou up the beach.

  Is she hit? Is Jenou hit?

  Jack Stafford is facedown on the beach, but she can see him crawling. He’s alive.

  Thank God!

  One of the latest replacements, Maria Molina, is farther out. She’s got her arms around one of the hedgehogs, weapon gone. Beebee is with her, also scared to death, pale and shaking, but with his M1 still in one hand.

  “Come on, Second Squad! Beebee! Molina! Move your asses!” Rio shouts.

  Organize. She has to organize and move! This is her squad, these are her soldiers.

  She hears Captain Passey’s voice. “Get going! Get going! Stick, get these people moving!”

  She has to get her people out of the surf, over the shale, and over the sand to the seawall.

  Mortar rounds fall, quieter than artillery, sometimes preceded by a half-second’s whistle, then . . .

  Boom!

  Sand showers down on Rio. Something soft bounces off her shoulder. She does not look, does not want to see what it is.

  Pang falls on his behind as Jenou suddenly starts yelling and stands up.

  “Get down, Jenou!” Rio shouts.

  Jenou looks stunned, and there’s a bloody gash on her forehead dribbling blood into her eye, but she reacts by stooping low and running.

  Beebee is wading ashore now, heavy with water and an overstuffed pack. Maria Molina still clings to the hedgehog like it’s her only salvation.

  Down the beach one of the hedgehogs explodes. The engineers are—somehow in the midst of chaos—going about the work of blowing up Rommel’s fortifications, wading through the water with TNT and Primacord.

  “Geer! Get Molina ashore!”

  Geer doesn’t look as if he thinks that’s a good idea at all, but he runs, crouched low, back into the surf.

  Jack Stafford lands beside Rio, grabbing his helmet as it rolls away, thrusting it back on his head with seawater rushing down his face.

  “You okay?” Rio asks him.

  He has no time for a smart-aleck remark, just nods. He’s so pale she can almost see his bones.

  Geer reaches Molina and pries her hands from the steel even as a combat engineer begins placing packs of TNT. Geer half carries, half kicks Molina ashore, with machine gun bullets making the water jump.

  Lieutenant Horne is crawling across the sand, face red with effort.

  “Richlin! Richlin!” he shouts, but seems to have nothing else to say.

  Stick runs over and lands next to Horne. “Captain says we gotta get going, sir!” he yells.

  But Horne has stopped and is now using his arms to scoop sand, like a turtle making a nest, perhaps imagining that six inches of loose dirt will stop a German machine gun round.

  Boom! Boom! Boom!

  Mortars again, and one lands close enough to temporarily deafen Rio in one ear.

  Rudy J. Chester, who Rio had begun to write off as dead, suddenly rises from the surf, and walks down the beach, fully upright, yelling “No! No! No!” and waving his hands like a teacher trying to quiet a rowdy class of children.

  “Chester! Get down!” Rio yells, but Rudy J. is beyond hearing.

  She glances around, taking quick stock. Jack with her. Geer and Molina now crawling toward her. Jenou, face a streaked mess of bloody rivulets, is near and moving in the right direction. Beebee just a few yar
ds away, hand holding his helmet down hard. Pang gasping for breath on his back, but unhurt. Jenny Dial shivering and cursing a blue streak facedown at Rio’s other side.

  “If we sit here, we die,” Rio yells, voice breaking. “Get to the seawall! Second Squad, let’s go!”

  She rises, stays bent low, and starts to run toward the seawall. She glances back and sees that only Jenou and Beebee are with her.

  “Goddammit!” Rio cries. “Go, go, go!” she says to Jenou and Beebee. Then she runs back. She grabs Pang’s collar and yanks hard. “Damn it, Pang, move!”

  Geer grabs Molina and propels her to her feet and shoves her hard. She stumbles, hesitates, but then begins to run, shrieking wildly as she goes.

  “Come back, come back, you’ll all get killed!” It’s Lieutenant Horne. Stick grabs the rim of his helmet and yanks the lieutenant sideways, shouting in his face, “Get hold of yourself, sir!”

  Jenny Dial is yelling “Fug, fug, fug!” and cursing like a drunk longshoreman, but she’s running the right direction, unlike Rudy J. Chester, who is now walking along the beach like a demented holiday beachcomber.

  Rio jumps to her feet and with machine gun rounds flit, flit, flitting inches behind her heels she tackles Chester like a fullback, knocking him down.

  He’s still babbling, a mix of “no, no, no” and “let me go, let me go!” He writhes and kicks, hysterical. Rio lies on top of him, pulls out her koummya and holds the point an inch from his nose. “Get your shit together, Private Sweetheart, right the fug now!”

  Whether it’s the knife or Rio’s snarling face that does it, Chester suddenly stops talking and stops writhing. And then he says, “Here I go!”

  Rio rolls away. Chester stands up and with a trailing scream, runs toward the seawall.

  Rio, like a sheepdog, follows as her squad runs and staggers, weeping and cursing over the shale and sand.

  BLAM!

  A cannon round lands and tosses two soldiers from Cat’s squad in the air. One is still alive when he lands, raising one hand to ward off further blows, but a machine gunner finds him and the hand falls.

  Camacho. Hobart. Ostrowiz.

  Rio’s squad is already down from twelve to nine. Cat’s is in the same shape.