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She painstakingly fills in the forms and arranges with the beach master to get her sick and wounded out to the ship designated for colored wounded.
Then she gets back to work filling out papers on the dead. There are three of those. They will be picked up by graves registration, who will keep the bodies until the powers that be figure out just what to do with them.
Not a job I would want to do, Frangie thinks. She’d rather be up on the line getting shot at than spend weeks, months, maybe even years trailing along behind the carnage identifying eviscerated, armless, or headless corpses.
I’d go stark raving mad.
Paperwork done, she returns to her ward to find the one nurse and Dr. Frame taking in a new patient. One glance tells her this will be another one for graves registration.
The nurse, a kindly older white woman from Arkansas, says, “We’ve got this, honey lamb, go find yourself a cup of coffee.”
“And bring one back for me,” the doctor mutters. “Two sugars.”
Frangie does not hesitate. There is one lesson the army teaches that it wishes it wasn’t teaching: never volunteer. If the doctor and the nurse want her to take a break, then she will sure take a break.
The beach is miles long, arcing toward the northeast and the town, and away to the south there is a long, low, stubby spit of land that Frangie vaguely believes marks a sort of rough boundary between the American sector and the Canadian and British areas.
The entire beach is like an upset ant mound, with soldiers, jeeps, half-tracks, trucks, cannon, tanks, impromptu fuel dumps where fifty-five-gallon drums are piled, and DUKWs (inevitably called Ducks) driving straight up out of the water onto the land.
“Wish I’d come ashore in one of those,” Frangie mutters.
Daddy D, a nice man, a family man, his face split open like a melon struck with a hammer. That image joins others, many others. They’re piling up in her brain, those images: a foot blown off by a mine; a gut wound oozing bile; a compression injury from a man crushed between two trucks; a man ripped in half a dozen places by wood splinters from a crate hit by a mortar round; a self-administered morphine overdose; broken eardrums; one self-inflicted gunshot wound where a soldier shot off his little toe for a ticket home. And even now, even with all that is here before her, the memory of that poor, doomed white officer all the way back at Kasserine.
All of that on top of the German typhus cases and gangrene and shrapnel injuries she had treated while being briefly held by the enemy. And all the mess that followed the battle in the Tunisian desert. And the usual maladies of garrison life: syphilis, gonorrhea, injuries related to drinking and fighting.
Her head is already stuffed to overflowing with blood, brains, marrow, and human shit. Tears and screams.
And the dead, of course. The dead.
Frangie shields her eyes from the sun and sees for really the first time the vastness of the fleet. There are ships as far as the eye can see. Away north a destroyer is methodically firing. Away to the south there’s an air raid, Heinkels and Junkers strafing and bombing. The explosions sound tiny and weak from here, but Frangie knows better, having been beneath similar air raids herself, and having had to cope with their effects. Above the fleet is a flight of two RAF Spitfires racing in from Malta eager to pick off the German bombers.
Frangie finds the mess tent and holds out her tin mess kit, which is then loaded with hot food—chicken-fried steak, green beans the color of her own uniform and even less fresh, mashed potatoes, a biscuit, and a lump of something gooey and red that is presumably cherry cobbler. She carries her food across the beach to a patch of sand partially shaded by a palm tree that leans precariously, having been knocked over by naval fire.
Until the moment the first bite reaches her lips she’s had no idea she was so hungry. Now she shovels the food into her mouth, moaning with pleasure and washing it down with warm, brackish water from her canteen.
She pulls paper and pen from her pocket and sets her pictures upright in the sand, like a small art gallery.
Dear Mom and Dad and you too, Obal,
She feels bad, as she always does, not addressing her big brother, Harder, as well. Harder has been exiled from the family for his membership in a youth group aligned with godless Communists. She hasn’t seen him in a long time since he’s living now in Chicago.
Well, I guess it’s all in the news now, so I suppose the censors will let me tell you that I am in Sicily. It’s all pretty exciting, I can tell you. There are air raids and such, but of course I am not in any danger but quite safe.
That last is a lie repeated in probably 90 percent of GI letters home. No one wants their loved ones to worry. Or maybe no one wants to admit even to themselves that they’re in real danger. But if it gives her mother a bit of relief, Frangie doesn’t mind the little white lie.
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.
