Jenou rolls her eyes. “My public demands I stay. You two go catch up. Hey, wait!”
Strand and Rio turn back to see Jenou snapping a salute.
“Oh, Lord, I—” Rio says, blushing, and then salutes Strand, who now wears lieutenant’s bars.
“Yeah, that’s enough of that,” Strand says, returning the salutes. He taps his insignia of rank. “All this means is I’ve got a high school diploma. We have enlisted pilots, but they’re stuck flying transport, and well . . . the pay’s better.”
Strand guides Rio through the mass of men, up a set of steel steps and another to the lifeboat deck. Here the big lifeboats—enough for less than half the men aboard—hang on davits. The boats are covered with canvas tarps drawn tight with ropes passed through brass grommets. But the boat farthest aft has had its canvas covering loosened.
Strand shows her how to climb up and into the boat. Inside, four men, all flyers like Strand, lounge in the shade playing a desultory game of cards. There are cans of beer and a half-empty bottle of whiskey and makeshift ashtrays piled to overflowing with cigarette butts.
“Hey, guys, meet my girl. Rio, these are some of the boys. Lefty, Choke, Bandito. Not their real names, of course. We use nicknames so when we’re talking on radio we don’t confuse ourselves; we’ve already got two Smiths.”
“Hello,” Rio says uneasily. They’re all officers, but she’s pretty sure an officer lying shirtless with a bottle of beer in one hand and cards in the other does not require or want a salute.
“How come you get a girl and all I’ve got is a bottle?” Lefty demands.
“That’s not true,” the one named Bandito says. “You got your hand.”
“Hey, hey, come on,” Strand says sharply. “There’s a lady present.”
“Looks like a GI,” Bandito says, but adds, “Sorry, miss.”
“Bunch of savages,” Strand says, disapproving but not angry. He leads Rio to a plank seat as far from the game as they can get. It’s not privacy, but it’s the closest thing available on the ship.
“I was just going to write you tonight,” Rio says.
“How have you been?”
“About as well as can be expected,” Rio says, but then flashes a smile. “We were supposed to ship out weeks ago. The usual hurry up and wait. But I’m a whole lot better now.”
He reaches for her hand, and she takes his.
“Isn’t that cute?” Lefty says.
“Shut up, you apes. This is my girl. From back home. We grew up together.”
Bandito is on the verge of letting go with a crude line but thinks better of it and contents himself with looking at the gambling stakes, saying, “Okay, who hasn’t anted up?”
There’s “a girl,” and then there’s “a girl from back home,” a much more revered status.
Bandito says, “So is it true that Fish is captain of the football team, homecoming king, and all-around hero back in, where is it, Fish? Getwell Flails?”
“Gedwell Falls, smart-ass,” Strand says tolerantly. “Fish. That’s my call sign.”
When Rio looks baffled, Choke, the oldest of the men at twenty-six, says, “He dived into the river to . . . um . . . Anyway, we call him Fish. Miss.”
Rio is pretty sure there’s an off-color story behind the dive into a river.
“I fold. Come on, guys, let’s take a walk,” Lefty says. “Give Fish some privacy.” In a few seconds they are alone in a lifeboat beneath a canvas tarp, sitting on hard wooden planks.
“So. How’s air corps life, Lieutenant?” Rio asks.
“It’s fine,” he says. “How’s army life, Private?”
“Cramped and smelly,” Rio says.
“Couple more days until we get to England. Then we’ll have room.”
“Do you know where you’ll be stationed?”
He shakes his head. “Just somewhere in England. Then it’s more training while we wait for our planes to catch up. Then I suppose we’ll be escorting bombers over Hitlerville. You?”
She shrugs. “They don’t tell us much. But more training in England, for certain. Then who knows? I guess we’re not going to liberate France right away. Some people say we’ll head to Italy, others say no, we’re going to North Africa. Some think it’s all a clever ruse and we’re really going straight on around the bottom of Africa to kill Japs.”
He looks troubled. “So you’re going through with this?”
“Going through with what?”
“With playing soldier.”
Rio is struck dumb for a long minute. “I . . . I don’t think I’m playing, Strand.”
He leans toward her and now gathers both her hands in his. “Of course you’re not, you know what I mean. Come on, you must have noticed by now that this is not a game for girls.”
Her hands are limp and unresponsive in his. “Well, actually, I haven’t noticed that, no. At basic we had a lot of girls wash out as physically unfit, but I didn’t wash out and neither did Jenou or Cat.”
Strand releases his grip only to wave off her reply. “Rio, is this really what you want? I heard those GIs up there talking to you and Jenou.”
“Is that what they were doing? Talking?”
“Well, what do you expect? You’re a beautiful girl on a ship full of . . . of . . . rambunctious”—he sighs in relief at having found a safe word—“men and barely men.”
Rio does not overlook the use of the word beautiful. She files it away for later enjoyment.
“Strand, even if I wanted out, that’s not the way it works.” She waves her hands down her front to indicate her uniform. “I’m in the army. I would go to prison if I tried to leave. You must know that.”
He starts to argue, realizes she’s right, and settles for a lame, “I just don’t want you to be hurt.”
“I don’t want you to be hurt either.”
He shakes his head ruefully. “This stupid war. FUBAR.”
On that they agree. Rio moves the conversation to safer topics, but as they talk of home and mutual acquaintances they are moving, by incremental shifts of weight, ever closer. Neither acknowledges it when their knees come to touch, but they chat on, though with voices newly weighed down by feelings that rise from within. Surprising feelings, to Rio, unsettling feelings. She wants to touch his face. She wants to push her fingers through his hair and . . .
It’s the suddenness of desire that unnerves her. She’s thought about him often during the long weeks of training. Being around loud, unruly men has not soured her on men, at least not on this one. But every part of her relationship with Strand has been like this: sudden. And now she wants him to stop talking and saying stupid things and kiss her.
She wants him to kiss her, and now as he goes on and on, she’s thinking more and more about just doing it herself. She could, couldn’t she? No. No, no, that isn’t done. Girls do not make the first move.
But why? Surely he wants to kiss her and is just being a gentleman. Surely he’ll enjoy it. After all, he must be . . . rambunctious . . . too.
Her fingers twitch, her hands move, but she stops herself. He’ll be shocked. He’ll think all this army stuff has changed her.
Maybe it has.
“Do you think your friends will be back soon?” she asks, interrupting him in midsentence.
“What? Oh, um . . . I suppose so.”
“Mmm. It’s nice having a little privacy, even if it won’t last long.” This is not subtle. It takes him a while to figure it out, and when he does she sees that slight shock, that slight note of disapproval on his face. But she doesn’t care.
“Are you . . . Do you . . . ?” Strand asks.
At that she loses patience, leans into him, tilts her head, and leaves him with no practical choice but to kiss her. She doesn’t make the first contact, so she has deniability; she hasn’t quite become a hussy, but she has at last made her desires clear.
It is a very nice kiss. It lasts several seconds, and then Strand pulls back. But Rio is not done. She does not pull away. S
he remains so close that he cannot possibly mistake her intentions. This time when their lips meet it is with open mouths, and her hand does push through his hair. He knocks the service cap from her head and she puts her other hand behind his neck and he covers her cheek with his hand. He slides over to sit beside her, never breaking contact, eyes closed. His tongue is in her mouth and a sound like an animal growl somehow comes from her, a sound she has never even imagined making before, and an answering sound in a deeper register comes from him, and now hands are going to places only Rio has ever touched and—
“Knock, knock.” It’s Lefty’s voice. To drive home the point he raps his knuckles on the side of the boat. “Permission to come aboard.”
“Oh sure, of course, um—” Strand says.
“Yes, we aren’t . . . yes,” Rio manages.
Lefty’s face appears above the gunwale. “I see you’re discussing war strategy,” he says flatly.
“I have to . . . um, better get to chow,” Rio says, unconsciously pushing her hair back in place and fumbling around for her cap. “They, you know . . . check on us.”
“Ri-i-ight,” Lefty says.
“Okay, so. It was good catching up, Strand.”
“Yes, it was,” he says stiffly.
They shake hands, a move so patently false that Lefty guffaws loudly.
Rio climbs out, helped down by Strand’s two other friends, armed now with a small canned ham they must have “liberated” from the mess kitchen.
Rio heads toward her berth, ignoring the usual male catcalls, ignoring even the outstretched hands, the kissy-faces, and all the rest. She finds Jenou in her bunk.
Jenou takes one look at her and says, “You’ve got a little slobber on your cheek.”
Rio climbs up and slides into Jenou’s bunk beside her. There’s very little room as they lie on their sides, face to face, like the old days.
“We kissed,” Rio confides.
“No kidding.”
“I’ve never done it that way before.”
This brightens Jenou’s eyes. She’s like a hungry cat being presented with a dish of milk. “You mean . . . tongue?”
“Eww! Do you have to be so disgusting?” Then, in a whisper, “Yes!”
“Did you like it?”
Rio hesitates. She’s not uncertain as to whether she liked it; she’s searching for the right way to put it. “Better than ice cream.”
“Better than—”
“Better than chocolate.”
“Wow.”
“You know how you told me that girls can have those feelings too?”
“Those feelings?” Jenou repeats, being deliberately obtuse to provoke her friend. “Which feelings are you talking about exactly?”
Rio swallows. She bites her lips. Then, “I wanted him to kiss me. In fact, I think I almost forced him to. Poor Strand.”
“Yes,” Jenou drawls with heavy sarcasm. “Poor Strand.”
“I’ve just never . . . and it was all of a sudden. It was like, well, there he was, and he was right there.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And he just kept talking. And I wanted to say ‘Shut up and kiss me.’”
“My little Rio,” Jenou says proudly. “You’re growing up.”
“And now . . .”
“And now you’re tingling all over.”
Rio nods vigorously and rolls onto her back, leaving Jenou even less room and pressing her against the steel bulkhead.
“I think I’m rambunctious,” Rio says.
“Did he try to . . . you know.”
“No! Of course not. He’s a gentleman. He would never.”
“Never? I hope that’s not true. I’m still hoping to be Auntie Jenou to your children.”
“You’ll have children of your own; you won’t need to be Auntie Jenou to mine. Ours.”
“Oh my goodness, whatever happened to my favorite naive farm girl? You just talked about sex without blushing.”
“No I did not!” Rio said hotly. “Take that back!”
“Sweetie, when you start daydreaming about children, you’re daydreaming about ‘s-e-x.’ You do know the two things are connected, right?”
“I may be naive, but I know how a cow and a bull come to have calves.”
For some reason this causes Jenou to sputter in amazement and then start to giggle. Soon Rio is giggling as well.
Cat pokes her head up. There’s a strange look when she sees the two of them lying side by side. She seems almost jealous, or maybe just left out, but she quickly conceals it with a request to borrow some boot polish.
The PA crackles to life, announcing chow time for their company, and there is no dawdling when meals are announced—the navy serves good chow, and eating is about the only thing that punctuates the long days of doing nothing.
They file out to stand in a long, slow line for dinner, where Rio eats her fried chicken and mashed potatoes with unusual energy and enjoyment. And that night she lies in the dark after lights-out, staring up at the steel pipe over her head, and recalls every detail, every single detail, savoring, wondering, replaying.
But she replays, too, Strand’s insinuation that she is merely playing soldier. She’ll have to have a talk with him about that someday.
First another kiss, then a conversation, because somewhere along the line, Rio has ceased to see this as any sort of game. She never wanted to really go to war, but now it seems she is, and a part of her, a small but growing part of her, is almost looking forward to it.
PART II
WAR
THE OPENING DAYS OF 1943
The Nazis and their collaborators control all of Europe except for a handful of neutral countries. Italy’s buffoonish dictator, Benito Mussolini, has suffered one humiliation after another, and now the remains of his army in North Africa are increasingly dependent on the Germans. The French Vichy regime, Nazi collaborators allowed to control the southern parts of France and French overseas colonies, have begun shipping French Jews to the extermination camps. The German army, the Wehrmacht, has been stopped by the Soviets at Stalingrad, with staggering casualties on both sides.
A direct attack on Germany is not yet possible, but the Americans are anxious to strike a blow. The target is the Mediterranean, where the tiny British-held island of Malta has held out against impossible odds, keeping Allied air power alive. The Royal Navy, strengthened by the output of American factories, now dominates the western Mediterranean. The British fortress of Gibraltar, the gateway to the Mediterranean, remains firmly in Allied hands.
In Egypt the great British general Bernard Law Montgomery, known as Monty, has turned the tide against the equally skilled German general Erwin Rommel. Monty drives the Afrika Korps and what’s left of the Italian army from the east across Libya. The Americans have arrived in Morocco and Algeria and lie in wait. The trap is set.
The Allies are sure that the Germans, Italians, and a handful of remaining Vichy will have no choice but to surrender or be wiped out.
The Germans have a different view.
In her first entry for 1943, Anne Frank writes, “All we can do is wait, as calmly as possible, for it to end. Jews and Christians alike are waiting, the whole world is waiting, and many are waiting for death.”
But the US Army is not waiting. It goes looking for death and finds it at a place called Kasserine, Tunisia.
“I want to impose on everyone that the bad times are over, they are finished! Our mandate from the Prime Minister is to destroy the Axis forces in North Africa. . . . It can be done, and it will be done!”
—General Bernard Law Montgomery, British Eighth Army
“We have come into North Africa shoulder to shoulder with our American friends and allies for one purpose and one purpose only. Namely, to gain a vantage ground from which to open a new front against Hitler and Hitlerism, to cleanse the shores of Africa from the stain of Nazi and Fascist tyranny, to open the Mediterranean to Allied sea power and air power, and thus ef
fect the liberation of the peoples of Europe from the pit of misery into which they have been passed by their own improvidence and by the brutal violence of the enemy.”
—British Prime Minister Winston Churchill
Interstitial
107TH EVAC HOSPITAL, WÜRZBURG, GERMANY—APRIL 1945
Thus do our young heroines train and prepare and ship off for war, Gentle Reader. Enfilade, defilade, bandaging, and spy craft, but the war is not yet real to them. It is out there, waiting for them, but they have no sense of what it is, really. It is vague. Indistinct. It’s something concealed from view by fog so thick that even the sound of cannon would still easily be mistaken for thunder.
What do you think of my soldier girls, Gentle Reader? Aimless, naive Rio and sexy Jenou; smart, determined Rainy; and gentle, conflicted Frangie.
Could you see yourself sitting down to tea with these girls? Will it surprise you to learn that one of them went on to gun down three unarmed German prisoners? Will it shock you to learn that one lit her cigarette from the flames of a burning German SS officer?
We understood nothing, you see. We thought we were soldiers, but we were still civilians dressed in khaki and OD. None of us had yet felt the fear so overpowering that you shake all the way down to your bones and your bladder empties into your pants and you can’t speak for the chattering of your teeth. None of us had yet seen the red pulsating insides of another human being. We had not yet killed, and that, Gentle Reader, that is what we had been trained to do.
We had made friends among our fellow soldiers, male and female, but we as yet had no idea what those men and women could do, for we had as yet no idea what would be required of us.
It seems impossible to me now as I sit here deciding whether to bully an orderly into bringing me coffee, scratching the itch beneath my bandage, typing away in this dark and gloomy place and . . . dammit, the screaming again, someone trapped in a nightmare or in some more present physical agony.
I was attempting eloquence, Gentle Reader, and was interrupted by the raw urgency of another woman’s pain. It serves me right, I suppose.