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“I’m here, Soldier,” Frangie says, crawling to her.
“Don’t need no help,” the woman says doggedly. Then she focuses on Frangie and says, “You’re a Nigra!”
“I’m a medic,” Frangie snaps. “And if I don’t tie off that leg, you’ll bleed to death in two minutes!”
The woman seems baffled by this. Then, like someone in a horror movie who slowly senses the presence of a vampire, she turns her head and sees. “My leg! Where’s my leg? Where’s my leg?”
Frangie peels back the trouser leg, revealing a tangled mess of pulsing veins and whitish tendons and the mangled white bones of the knee. She whips a tourniquet around the stump and begins feeling through the bloody mess for arteries amid the veins. She finds one and with slippery fingers ties it off. The stump is still bleeding heavily, and Frangie cannot locate the artery.
She needs plasma, but all of that is in her jeep. She wipes her brow, she’s sweating, and she goes back to the gruesome job of feeling for pulsing blood. She finds the artery, but it’s split lengthwise and too much of it is buried in muscle.
The woman says, “Aw shit,” and dies.
A machine gun bullet hits Frangie’s musette bag, blowing open packages of gauze. She glances left: more boats coming in, more soldiers running down ramps into water, too many disappearing below the churning surf. She glances right and sees the twinkle of a German machine gun firing, firing as if it is aiming right at Frangie Marr.
“Who the fug are you?” It’s a white captain, running past with a half-dozen soldiers.
“Sergeant Marr, sir!” she cries.
“You a medic?”
Frangie nods and taps her helmet with its red crosses.
“Come with me!”
“But . . .”
“Get your lazy black ass up off the sand and come with me!”
It’s an order from an officer, and she has no choice but to obey. She runs after the little squad as machine gun fire plucks at the sand and their uniforms.
They run past a young lieutenant carrying a severed arm. “I found this,” the lieutenant yells. “I don’t know whose it is!”
Suddenly they are at the seawall and they collapse against it, squeezing in between soldiers already huddled there. A metallic ping, and Frangie sees a neat hole in the helmet of the man to her right. Blood gushes down his face.
“All right, you sons of whores,” the captain roars. “We’re going for the bluff!” He makes a chopping motion with his hand, then jumps up, but no one jumps with him. He stops, turns, and says, “Goddammit, get up! Get up! You want to stay here and die?”
A handful of soldiers rise. One falls. The others go running after the captain, and Frangie finds herself running too, no longer crawling, no longer crouching, just running, running as if she can outrun the bullets.
Boom!
A mortar round lands a few feet away and knocks Frangie over. Her mind screams stay down, but her body is already up again, up and running, running until she stumbles right into a lump that trips her at the very base of the cliff.
Soldiers on both sides, all white, all extra white with fear, clutch their rifles as if the M1 is salvation itself.
A German potato masher grenade comes skittering down the cliff, bouncing, then is stopped by a tiny brush outcropping and explodes, showering dirt down on Frangie.
“Anyone here hit?” Frangie yells. Yells left. Yells right. A voice answers, “Fug! I’m hit!”
It turns out to be a grazing wound in the shoulder—lots of blood, but no danger. Sulfa and bandage.
Frangie pushes her back against the cliff and closes her eyes, praying more fervently, and with more jumbled words than she has ever prayed before.
When she opens her eyes she sees her LST, smoke billowing from the open bow doors. Hoses spray salt water on a raging fire, sending up clouds of steam to mingle with the oily black smoke.
Only one of the battalion’s DD tanks made it to shore, and it is now running parallel with the beach, offering a rolling shelter to soldiers who run hunched over in its lee.
Another tank still pumps rounds into the bluff, but it’s a losing proposition: the German gunners are in hardened emplacements or pillboxes, and from the angle the tank has its shells either slam into dirt or go skimming off into the air.
