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Rio says, “It’s not a question of what you call yourself, Strand, it’s . . . I mean, it’s just not possible. What do we tell my parents? Or your parents?”
“I don’t know,” Strand says, suddenly savage. “But at least whatever it is, I’ll be alive to tell them. I guess I was a fool to think you’d understand.”
“Understand? That you’re a deserter? A deserter? Every day I’m on the line I have to send someone out on patrol, or tell them to run straight at a machine gun, and they don’t desert.”
“You think I’m a coward.”
“No, Strand, I—”
“You think I am a coward. Admit it!”
“Strand, I’m—”
“Admit it!”
“Yes, you’re being a coward! Yes! You have to go back, Strand, right away, before it gets worse.”
He sits all the way back now, hands dropped to his sides. He looks smaller, narrower, as if his shoulders have shrunk. “You’d rather I die.” He shakes his head bitterly. “You’re not a woman anymore, Rio, not a woman or a girl. No woman sends her man to die. A sergeant does that, not a woman. You’re unnatural, you know that? You’re a freak in a freak show! Gaze upon the warrior woman with her bloody fugging knife and her Silver fugging Star!”
The switch from pleading to hectoring is sudden and shocks Rio. Strand isn’t just angry at her for doubting his plan or even for doubting his courage. This goes deeper. This has been festering for a while.
Since I rescued him in Sicily.
He has no doubt taken a lot of ribbing over that. He’d been saved by his girlfriend, and his girlfriend had won a medal for saving him. But so what? Military life came with a heaping helping of teasing, challenging, ridiculing, but if you delivered, if you came through in the crunch, all of that faded away.
Anyway, does Strand imagine that life as a woman in the army had been easy?
He had lost friends? So had she. He’d been scared? So had she. His life was at risk? So was hers.
My God, I’m stronger than he is.
The thought is so unexpected that it elicits a short laugh, which Strand takes as ridicule.
“I tell you you’re no woman and you laugh at me,” Strand says, dripping bitterness from each word. “I guess that proves my point.”
Rio sits, silent, head down, slowly metabolizing this new and startling information. Big, tall Strand Braxton has found his limit. His courage is used up. His self-respect is shattered. And even if she could help him, any help would be rejected and seen as still more proof that she was “no woman.”
She is now quite sober. Quite completely sober.
Rio stands up. “I’m still a woman,” she says coldly. “It’s just that I’m a better woman than you are a man.”
She turns and walks away, pursued by a wave of conflicting emotions. Sadness. Anger. Self-pity. But most revealing of all to her is one single dominant emotion.
Relief.
PART III
HÜRTGEN FOREST
In the Hürtgen forest proper, our gains came inch by inch and foot by foot, delivered by men with rifles—bayonets on one end and grim, resolute courage on the other. There was no battle of Europe more devastating, frustrating, or gory.
—Major General William G. Weaver, Commanding General, Eighth Infantry Division
We are taking three trees a day, yet they cost a hundred men apiece.
—Anonymous army captain
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