Purple Hearts Read online

  The possibility of drowning has clearly not occurred to most of the GIs. They exchange worried looks.

  “Get to dry sand as quick as you can. They say there’s a seawall, but it’s low and poor cover. And the Krauts will have that wall registered, zeroed-in six ways from Sunday. As soon as we’re ashore we go straight at the bluffs.”

  “The bluffs?” Camacho asks.

  “They’re fifty to a hundred feet high and the Kraut will be thick as sand fleas on top. But they can’t shoot straight down, not with MGs anyway, so you want to get out of the water, across that beach, to the base of the bluff as soon as your legs will carry you. If you freeze up or decide to take a break, you’ll die.”

  “Cheery prospect, what?” Jack Stafford says, exaggerating his British accent for comedic effect.

  Rio is the only one not to smile. She is being deliberately cool to Jack—any favoritism now, when she is in charge, would be disastrous. She will not play favorites, and more important, she will not be seen to play favorites. She is Jack’s sergeant as surely as she is Geer’s or Beebee’s sergeant, and she cannot start down the road of protecting one at the expense of the others.

  “You freshmen? You listen to the upperclassmen. If Geer, Pang, Stafford, Castain, or Beebee tells you to drop, drop. They tell you to run, run. They tell you to shoot, shoot. Now get squared away, they’ll be calling our number any minute.”

  “At least we’ll be off this vomit barge,” Geer says. This earns some nervous laughter, and Rio is glad to hear it. Glad that Stafford can still amuse, glad that Geer can still be sardonic. There is a fine line between realistic fear and paralyzed terror, and she wants her squad scared but not panicked.

  “One last thing,” Rio says. “Why are we here?”

  Silence. Then, one of the newest recruits, a woman, says, “To kill Germans?”

  “What’s your name again?”

  “Maria Molina, Sarge.”

  “Well, Molina, you are one hundred percent correct.” Rio lifts her own rifle and holds it to her chest. “We are here to use this to kill Germans. You will kill Germans. You will kill every Nazi son of a bitch on that beach, and you’ll keep on killing them till we get to the crazy bastard in Berlin and shoot him in his little mustache!”

  To her amazement, the squad cheers. Even Geer, who knows better than to think it will be that simple.

  To one side she hears Cat giving her own version of the same speech. All over the ship sergeants are preparing their soldiers to kill and not to be killed.

  Everyone is tense. Everyone is afraid, especially the ones who pretend not to be. But Rio sees some determination too. At least some of these men and women are itching to finally get into the war.

  Luther Geer. Jack Stafford. Jenou Castain. Hansu Pang. Beebee, who has an actual name that no one calls him and everyone (possibly including Beebee himself) has forgotten. Rudy J. “Private Sweetheart” Chester. Hank Hobart. Lupé Camacho. Jenny Dial. Dick Ostrowiz. Maria Molina. Four women, seven men: her squad. Her responsibility.

  My people. My lives.

  Rio recalls her father, the veteran of the Great War, telling her to find a sergeant she trusts and stick by him. That had turned out to be Sergeant Mackie during basic training, and then Jedron Cole.

  And now she is the sergeant. And these are the eleven men and women whose best bet is to stick close to her.

  Rio remembers Sergeant Cole talking to them as they landed on the beach in Tunisia as part of a doomed British commando raid. He’d offered stern, useful advice, but he had also worked to keep his squad loose. As loose as it could be. But that part does not come easily to Rio. She wants to reach these soldiers, especially the green ones, to impress on them all she knows, to imbue them with the fears that weigh so heavily on her. But the best she can manage is “You’ll all be fine if you do what you’re told.” It is almost certainly not true, but if there’s one thing a US Army private needs, it’s hope. Hope and trust in their sergeant.

  Which, God help us all, is me.

  8

  FRANGIE MARR—LST 86, OFF OMAHA BEACH, NORMANDY, FRANCE

  The LST powers on through the night.

  At sea the LST pumps water into its ballast tanks to stabilize it for the trip, which would be good news but for the fact that the waves in the Channel are quite a bit taller than they’d been in port.

  Keeping company to their left are two LCTs, like smaller versions of the LST but with an open hold and flat ramp at the front where the LST has swing-out gates. The LCTs carry the Sherman DDs, the Duplex Drives, the tanks with the bulky rings that, before inflation, make the tanks look like dainty ladies raising their skirts to step over mud.

  There is only filtered moonlight coming through the few breaks in the clouds, so the more distant LCTs are more felt than seen. The nearest keeps station close by, bobbing and skittering over the waves. Frangie can see the skirts beginning to inflate. Crewmen buzz around tightening this and loosening that, manhandling the skirts into place as they inflate like four great air mattresses.

  Frangie’s driver, Corporal Rosemary Manning, and another medic, an older man, a conscientious objector nicknamed Deacon for his presumed religiosity, stand on either side of her. It is still dark but not quite darkest night, still an hour from the first assault, scheduled for 6:30 a.m., half an hour after sunrise.

  “Think they’ll swim?” Manning asks.

  “What I know about tanks wouldn’t fill a matchbox,” Frangie says. “But I guess—”

  An explosion cuts her short, a muffled boom, somewhere between Frangie’s position and the still invisible coast of France.

  “That’s a ranging shot,” Frangie says, feeling terribly knowledgeable with her two green companions, having spent time with an artillery battalion in North Africa. “You fire one to see where it lands. Then you adjust your aim and cut loose.”

  The cutting loose starts right on cue. Straining to listen, Frangie hears the distant popping sounds of the shore guns firing. Seconds later come deeper, muffled explosions that send up pillars of water like something summoned by an angry Neptune.

  “Are they shooting at us?” Deacon asks.

  “Not yet,” Frangie says, glancing around to make sure no more experienced soldier is sneering at her presumed expertise. “Most likely we’re still too far out at sea.”

  From a mile or more behind the LSTs comes an eruption of noise and fire and smoke, as the navy’s big battleships and cruisers return fire, hurling far larger projectiles far further. The sound is like a loud belly flop, a violent sound that bounces off the water, followed instantly by a deeper boom that extends out into a rumbling bass note.

  The naval fire becomes general, fiery tulips wreathed in smoke, explosions that sometimes dwarf the ships themselves. It’s like a marching band made up of nothing but drummers, all pounding, pounding, firing ton after ton of high explosives toward shore. Lights like distant fireflies twinkle on the shore as the shells, each as heavy as a small automobile, land and blow apart men and machines.

  There is no question that what’s being thrown at France is greater than what the Germans are tossing back.

  “I suppose it’s wrong to think about the poor souls over there in France,” Deacon says.

  Manning snorts. “More the navy kills, the fewer left to shoot our boys. Or us. Fug the Krauts. They’re worse than our own white people. That’s a whole country full of KKK. Fug the Krauts.”

  Deacon shoots her a disapproving look but says nothing. He’s maybe as old as thirty, with hair already beating a retreat from his brow. Somewhat to her surprise, Deacon has given Frangie no trouble. He easily and automatically defers to her rank and title, works hard and conscientiously, and is good with the GIs. Frangie does not know either Manning or Deacon well, but she likes them both, though of course there’s no way to know how they will behave later.

  The naval shelling continues; endless explosions, endless bouts of fire, now joined by the destroyers so near that Frangie can smell the acr
id smoke of their violent discharges.

  Down in the LCT, the Sherman DDs are inflated and squared away.

  “They look like they’re ready to go,” Deacon points out.

  “We’re too far out, surely,” Frangie says. The sea is still agitated, endless marching ranks of white-topped waves slap the sides of the LST, sometimes with enough force to send jets of freezing water up and over the gunwale.

  “I suppose they know what’s best,” Manning says with a confidence Frangie does not share.

  The sky is no longer black but a gloomy steel gray, when the LCT slows and drifts away from the LST. The LCT’s ramp begins to wind down. There comes the sound of the Sherman engines gunning. Exhaust smoke drifts.

  Waves swarm over the lowered ramp of the LCT, surging up toward the tank deck. Cross seas roll the small ship with enough force to send one crewman staggering into a steel ladder.

  “Head wound,” Deacon mutters. “Sulfa, bandage, check his eyes to see if they’re both pointed the same direction.” He laughs.

  “If they don’t, send him to the aid station. If they do, send him back up,” Frangie says.

  Deacon sighs. “That’s the part I don’t like. I guess I feel like any GI that gets hurt should get a ticket home.”

  “Don’t ever say that where an officer can hear you,” Frangie says. “We aren’t here to send them home, we’re here to mend them just enough to get them back in the fight.”

  Deacon nods but without agreement.

  The first of the DD tanks rolls in ungainly, even rather comical, ponderousness down the ramp. The very unboatlike skirt rises at the water’s edge, coming up like a sleeve to all but conceal the tank, which wallows in a sort of cereal bowl. The Sherman weighs just short of 67,000 pounds, and the skirt does not look adequate to the job of keeping it afloat. The tank commander sits with his upper body out of the top hatch, leather tank helmet on his head, goggles down over his eyes to ward off the spray.

  “It floats!” Manning says.

  “Huh,” Frangie says.

  The amphibious tank churns slowly away, an overly heavy, awkward boat, still more than a mile from a shoreline that is only now becoming visible in growing light.

  A second DD tank clanks down the ramp and splashes heavily into the water, then, like the first, begins to push its way through the waves.

  At least, Frangie thinks, the rain has stopped. For now.

  The third tank rolls but as it enters the water a big swell shoves the LCT sideways. The ramp swings left like a karate chop and crumples the flotation skirt of the DD tank. Green water rushes over the side, like a bucket being held down in a stream.

  What happens next takes mere seconds.

  The skirt on one side collapses completely. Water floods, rises quickly above the treads as crewmen pop up out of various hatches, all yelling. And then the entire thing, tank and skirts, seems to fall through the water. In seconds it disappears from view, leaving a swirling ring behind.

  “Oh my God!” Frangie cries. Everyone on deck is yelling and pointing.

  Flotation rings are thrown, a voice is heard on the public address system ordering rescue boats to be veered toward the doomed tank, but there are no bodies to be seen. The five-person crew is already at the bottom of the English Channel.

  The deaths are too sudden. Five men dead without a shot coming close to them.

  Deacon is whispering a prayer, and Frangie joins silently.

  Those poor souls. How many will die with no one to send a prayer after them?

  Frangie wonders if Sergeant Moore is watching, and whether he is suddenly thinking that drowning might be as bad as burning. At least, she thinks, it was quick. But was it? Is one of those GIs in a tiny air pocket down there, straining to catch the last possible breath of air?

  Then the lead DD tank, already a quarter mile ahead, suddenly goes nose down. The back of the skirt lifts, hangs in the air for a moment while voices on the LST cry out in renewed terror, and it goes down, disappearing beneath the waves.

  Aboard the LCT, now some distance away, Frangie sees a pantomime of horror, crew and tankers watching, gesticulating, shouting inaudibly. The fourth and final Sherman DD does not move. Its commander sitting high in his hatch points with furious gestures toward the LCT’s bridge.

  “What kind of fool contraption are those things?” Manning demands, suddenly less sanguine about army planning.

  The second tank still powers gamely on toward shore as the commander of the last tank, the one still aboard the LCT, can be seen climbing down on the deck, arguing with an officer as the flotation skirts deflate and sag.

  But now, with light growing, Frangie looks away from the tragedy aboard the LCT, and for the first time sees—really sees—what she is part of.

  To left, to right, behind and ahead, the invasion fleet extends forever, literally beyond the range of her eyes. Great, smoke-wreathed battleships and swift, low-slung destroyers; corvettes practically like speedboats; mine sweepers, supply ships, and oilers; squat and unlovely LSTs and swarms of DUKWs and Higgins boats. Not dozens, not even hundreds, but thousands of ships and boats. Thousands.

  Now overhead Frangie sees hundreds of B-17s and B-24s drawing contrails like silk threads.

  It’s a giant hammer, an impossibly great sledgehammer ready to smash into France, ready to crush the Nazi Reich and roll it all the way back to Germany. Frangie’s throat swells. She hasn’t spent ten minutes really thinking about what is happening beyond her own duties. Her war has been saving lives and surviving; it has not been about great powers, great people, or great deeds.

  But now, for just a moment, she feels it, feels the hugeness of it, the superhuman effort it represents. The terrible danger, but more the astonishing courage of so many in such peril and yet so determined.

  “Well, I’ll be,” Manning says in a voice she might use to whisper in church.

  “There can’t be that many ships in the world,” Frangie says. “That’s not an invasion fleet, that’s a whole city floating on water.”

  Suddenly a voice is raised, a clear feminine voice.

  O beautiful for spacious skies,

  For amber waves of grain,

  For purple mountain majesties

  Above the fruited plain!

  America! America!

  God shed His grace on thee

  And crown thy good with brotherhood

  From sea to shining sea!

  No one speaks until the last note dies out. For the first time Frangie really notices the Stars and Stripes flapping high on a mast. And despite Tulsa, and despite Harder’s insistent voice in her memory, despite every injustice and horror that flag has so often meant to her race, her people, Frangie’s throat swells and her heart feels very big in her chest.

  “Maybe the Germans will just . . . give up,” Deacon says wistfully.

  “Double-check your supplies. You both have a pocketknife and scissors?”

  Deacon and Manning both nod yes. Manning, in addition to being Frangie’s driver, is a stretcher bearer and anything else Frangie needs her to be. Deacon is effectively her number two, a trained medic but with far less experience.

  Frangie realizes she’s been brusque, and says, “There’s this soldier I met, a woman. She’s G2.” Seeing their blank looks she adds, “That’s intelligence branch. Anyway, she was grabbed by the Gestapo in Italy. And she told us, me and the other girls with us, some of the things they did to her.” Frangie shakes her head at the memory of a very drunk Rainy Schulterman talking in a running monotone, no emotion at all in her voice. But in her eyes there had been a dangerous light. “And now those same people,” Frangie continues, “people like them anyway, the kind of people who torture and murder, they know we’re coming for them. The wrath of Almighty God is about to come down on their heads.”

  “I don’t know that God’s involved,” Manning says in her laconic way. “But sure as hell the wrath of the US of A is heading straight for them. They ought to give up if they had any sens
e.”

  “I imagine they’ll look out and see all this and be good and scared,” Frangie says. “But I don’t think they’ll quit. They’ve gone too far, done too much. So, like I said: quit gawping and check supplies.”

  She lets them go, and stays behind for just a moment, needing to compose herself. The sight of the tanks foundering unsettled her. The odd emotion of hearing the song, the sudden realization that she, Francine Marr, little Frangie, was part of a moment on which the whole course of human history turned. . . .

  Injury and death on the beach, yes, she had prepared her mind for that. But to see human beings suddenly plunged beneath the waves . . . and to feel for a moment anyway that their deaths, and her life—and yes, her death if it came to that—was the stuff of history. . . .

  She is afraid. She knows what bullets and shrapnel do to a human body. She knows what pain does to people. She has seen tough old sergeants cry for their mothers.

  But her job is not to show fear. Her job is not to cower. Her job is to run out into enemy fire, protected by nothing but some red-and-white paint on her helmet.

  Frangie takes several deep breaths. She has managed to fill her days with work that was not hers, tending to patients, getting to know the soldiers in the platoon, keeping busy. In her off time she’d written letters home. And she’d read and reread the various manuals. Anything not to think about what is coming. Coming now.

  Her hand goes to her stomach, feeling for the scar where the shrapnel went in and ripped through her intestines.

  She has tried not to think about that day on a cobblestone street in an Italian village whose name she never knew. She has tried not to think of Doon Acey, or the nameless white officer in Tunisia, or of her own wounds.