“Steady hands,” Tilly said.
“Bring me back a cute one,” Char yelled as Paulette waved on her way out the door. “Preferable single too!”
New Year’s came and went, nineteen forty-four blowing in with another storm that rocked our tented home but did less damage than the one that had whisked our last one away.
Injured men came and went, and we worked tirelessly to keep them alive as we flew them out of war-battered islands back to our own tiny island in the Pacific, praying daily we made the trip back and forth safely.
But war took as it pleased, and more often than not one of us returned having lost someone along the way.
“You did all you could do,” we’d tell one another.
Or “There was nothing more you could do.”
“He did his duty. It was just his time.”
“It’s the nature of war...”
The words that tumbled from our mouths didn’t make any of us feel better. The cruelty of war had left its mark on us. It had stripped us of an innocence. A belief that at their core, all men were good. We knew better now. We’d seen firsthand the atrocities one human could inflict on another, and we were changed forever. While we were proud of our countrymen for standing up for what was right, for sacrificing their lives for the survival of a community, we couldn’t help but wonder—wasn’t there another way? But as Germany marched on, we knew in our hearts there was not.
“How was it?” Tilly asked one evening as I came in from a flight.
I sighed and shook my head, my shoulders hunched from exhaustion.
“They all made it,” I said. “But it was terrifying for a while up there.”
My hands were stained red, even though I’d spent a long time in the restroom scrubbing at them with soap and a rough rag. A patient had woken midflight, delirious from pain, from medication, from whatever images haunted him, and thrashed, ripping stitches from a head wound and bloodying not only me, but the soldier in the bunk below him and another to his side. By the time we landed, it looked like someone had gone on a rampage.
“Holy shit. What happened back here?” the pilot, a wiry man called AJ, had asked.
I could only look at him. Through him. My body weary from the fight I’d just fought and barely won.
I didn’t bother with dinner that night. I stripped out of my bloody clothes, shoved them in my laundry bag to be dealt with tomorrow, put on my pajamas, and went to sleep, the sound of the young soldier’s screams following me into slumber.
6
“We might runinto a little trouble today,” Mac said as I approached him and the plane that would fly us out today.
“What kind of trouble?” I asked, glancing at the sky.
“The front’s been pushed back.”
“How far back?”
“We might need to make a run for it as soon as we land.”
I sucked in a breath, held it, let it out.
“Thanks for the warning,” I said, and climbed aboard the transport.
“You secure back there?” Mac shouted a few minutes later over the sound of the engines starting up.
I gave my straps a last tightening and glanced around the body of the plane, making sure one last time that everything was in its place and tied down.
“All secure!”
I watched out the window beside me as he swung the plane around and we bumped slowly toward the runway, kicking up dust as we went, palm trees swaying in the distance. After a moment’s hesitation and a little back-and-forth with the tower, we were off. As this was probably the only moment I’d have time to rest today, I tried to put Mac’s warning out of my head, crossed my arms over my chest, tipped my head back, and fell asleep.
“Kate!”
