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“I’m gonna go grab a Coke,” Joe said. He sauntered away, and I watched him light a cigarette and flirt with the two teenage girls at the concession stand while Frank regathered himself to tell his story.
“Jim and Mitch and I became friends in boot camp. We went through the Normandy invasion and the very worst that the enemy could throw at us as we pushed the Nazis back toward the Rhine. But Mitch was wounded during that long, terrible winter before the war ended, in what they’re calling the Battle of the Bulge.”
“I remember reading about that last winter in the newspapers—the freezing temperatures and all the snow. It was around Christmas, wasn’t it?”
Frank nodded. “The Nazis had been on the run, and the war seemed to be nearing the end. But then they turned around and made a deadly assault on the Allied forces in the Ardennes Forest. We were outnumbered, and the Nazis demanded that we surrender. The bad weather meant we couldn’t get ammunition or supplies or air support. Mitch was wounded in a mortar attack, and Jim and I carried him to the aid station in Bastogne. It was set up in a house in the middle of town and was jam-packed with casualties. Jim went back to check on Mitch whenever he could because he was worried about him. I mean, we’d gotten him to the aid station and he might have recovered if we’d been able to evacuate him to a field hospital for surgery. But Bastogne was surrounded by Nazi troops and under siege. The aid station wasn’t equipped to do surgery and they were running out of medical supplies. Then on Christmas Eve, the foul weather cleared and the Luftwaffe bombed Bastogne. The aid station took a direct hit. There were about thirty wounded men inside and all but two or three of them died, including Mitch. Jim took it very hard. We both did. Mitch had his whole life ahead of him, and it didn’t seem fair. I remember Jim crying his eyes out and shaking his fist at the sky and just raging.”
“At the Nazis? Or at God?”
“I don’t know. Maybe both.” Frank took a moment to collect himself. I could tell by his shaking voice and trembling hands how much it was costing him to remember. He drew a breath and let it out with a sigh. “Jim seemed to have it all together as far as his faith was concerned. He carried a little Bible in his pack and we’d see him reading it whenever he had free time. He was always willing to talk about God with anyone, anytime, but not in a pushy way, if you know what I mean. But he wasn’t the same after Mitch died.”
“Did he seem depressed?”
“Not exactly. Just quieter. More determined than ever to save every single wounded soldier. If there wasn’t any fighting, he would help out at the nearest aid station or field hospital. Wouldn’t take any time off. We were offered a leave after the siege was finally lifted and reinforcements came in, but Jim wouldn’t take it. He just kept working.”
“The doctor at the VA hospital told us that a lot of medics suffered from battle fatigue.”
Frank nodded absently as he stared at the rear of the bleachers. “From the time we landed in France until the war ended, Jim and I saw a lot of men blown to pieces. You can’t help thinking that it’s going to be you one of these days. We were both close to Mitch, and after he died, there were many times when Jim and I wondered why Mitch was gone and we were still alive. But the war doesn’t pause to give you time to grieve. You need to keep going, and so you learn to reach deep inside and find that steel. You close yourself off to what you see and just do your job. But no matter how tough you are, sooner or later, in one way or another, it’s going to get to you. Especially when the men who are wounded and dying are your friends.”
“Do you think that’s what happened to Jimmy?”
“Maybe. Who knows? He was tough when he needed to be. Being a medic means having to make split-second decisions, life-and-death choices, who can be saved and who can’t. You have to keep your head and try to calm the patients down, stop the bleeding, give them morphine, get them off the field to an aid station. If you know there’s no hope, you have to leave them behind and move on. That’s a tough decision to make. And in the last weeks that I worked with Jim, he was finding it harder and harder to do it. It was as if he didn’t want to give up on anyone, no matter how badly wounded they were. He’d say, ‘We have to try to save them,’ even when it was obvious from the severity of their wounds that they couldn’t live.”
Frank paused again and closed his eyes for a moment. Knowing Jimmy, I understood how impossible it must have been for him to leave anyone behind. I heard cheers from the ball game in the distance, along with more firecrackers. I waited until Frank opened his eyes again before asking, “When did you last see Jimmy?”
“As I say, they offered us leave later that winter, after reinforcements came and we were pushing back the Nazis again. I took the leave and Jim didn’t. I couldn’t talk him into going no matter how hard I tried. He said he hadn’t been able to save Mitch but maybe he could save someone else. It ended up that they shuffled men around in a couple of companies to make up for all the casualties, and Jim and I got separated for the remainder of the war. I think, in a way, it might have been easier for him to work with men he hadn’t known since boot camp.”
“So that was the last time you saw him?”
He started to nod, then said, “No, wait. I did see him one more time. After the Nazis surrendered, he came looking for me and the other guys from our old company. Wanted to see which ones of us made it, he said. He was working at a hospital near Weimar, I believe it was, taking care of patients from the concentration camps. He didn’t visit for very long.”
“Did he seem the same?”
“Hard to tell. We were all numb by then—giddy that the war in Europe was over but worried sick that we’d be sent to the Pacific to fight the Japanese and we’d have to go through that hell all over again. Jim and I talked, but...” He gave a shrug. “We weren’t the same idealistic guys we’d been in basic.”
“Jimmy had this photograph in his pack,” I said, reaching into my bag. “The name Gisela is written on the back. Do you know who she is?”
Frank took it from me and studied it. “She’s very pretty. Sorry, but I don’t think I’ve seen her before. Jim never showed this photograph to me, and the guys always showed pictures of their wives and girlfriends. She would have been someone to brag about for sure.”
“So Jimmy must have met her after Bastogne? Might she be an Army nurse?”
“Wait a minute. There were two nurses who worked in the aid station in Bastogne. They were both from Belgium. Civilians. Not part of the US Army, just volunteers. Jim spent more time there than I did, so he would have gotten to know the nurses better. The aid station was set up in a house in the center of town, and he’d go whenever things were quiet to check up on Mitch and the others.”
“Do you think she might have been one of those two nurses?”
“Well, maybe.” He gazed into the distance, concentrating. “One of the nurses had dark skin and hair, as I recall. I remember hearing a story about a couple of our wounded soldiers, obnoxious guys, who refused to let a colored nurse take care of them. The physician at the aid station just shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘Then die.’ They got the message pretty quickly. The other Belgian nurse... I can’t remember her name, but the men all loved her. They called her an angel. Jimmy told me the guys promised to bring her a parachute when the weather cleared and the airdrops began, to repay her for all her hard work and devotion to our soldiers. She had a fiancé, and she wanted to make a wedding dress from the silk. But she was killed inside the aid station when it was bombed. They had to use the parachute for her shroud.”
“What a heartbreaking story,” I murmured. If that nurse was Gisela, I was glad, now, that I hadn’t shown her picture to Jimmy. “Thank you for talking with me, Frank. I know how hard it must be to remember.”
“I’ll do anything I can to help Jim.”
“I think it would mean a lot to him if you paid him a visit. He may not remember you at first because the electrical shocks erase some of his memories. But he seemed to remember Joe. And we even managed to sneak my three-legged dog in for a visit. That really cheered Jimmy up.”
“What should I say to him?”
“I don’t know. Just let him know he has a good friend standing by him. Remind him of happier times in basic training. Tell him about your life now, how you’re coping. Give him hope that there can be a happy ending after the war. You don’t need to stay long.”
“I’ll be there. I promise.” Frank invited us to stay and join his family for a picnic, saying, “Ma always makes enough potato salad and baked beans to feed Patton’s Army.” But Joe shook his head. I snapped Frank’s photograph for Jimmy’s album and gave him directions to the VA hospital. “Jimmy is lucky to have you,” he said before we parted. “I can tell that you care about him a lot.”
