1
LUPÉ CAMACHO—CAMP WORTHING (SOUTH), HAMPSHIRE, UK
“Camacho comma Gooda . . . Goo-ada . . . Gooa-loopy?” Sergeant Fred “Bonemaker” Bonner does not speak Spanish.
Camacho comma Guadalupé, age nineteen, cringes and glances left and right down the line of soldiers as if one of them can tell her whether or not to attempt to correct the sergeant.
But there are no answers in the blank faces staring forward.
“It’s Guadalupé, Sergeant!” she blurts suddenly. “But you can . . .”
She had been about to say that he can call her Lupé. As in Loo-pay. And then it occurred to her that old, gray-haired, fat, bent, red-nosed sergeants with many stripes on their uniform sleeves do not always want to chat about nicknames with privates.
The Bonemaker turns his weary eyes on her and says, “This here is the American army, not the Messican army, honey. If I say it’s Gooa-loopy, it’s Gooa-loopy. Now, whatever the hell your name is, get on the truck and get the hell out of here.”
Guadalupé starts to go, but Bonemaker yells, “Take your paperwork. I didn’t fill these forms out for nothing!”
Lupé takes the papers—there are several carbon sheets stapled together—and rushes to the truck. Or at least rushes as fast as she can with her duffel over one shoulder, her rucksack on her back with the straps cutting into her shoulders, a webbing belt festooned with canteen and ammo pouches, and her M1 Garand rifle.
She heaves her gear over the tailgate of an open deuce-and-a-half truck and struggles to get up and over the side herself until one of the half-dozen soldiers already aboard offers her a hand.
She slumps heavily onto one of the two inward-facing benches. She nods politely and is met with faces that are not so much hostile as they are preoccupied by nervousness and uncertainty. That she understands perfectly.
She is only five foot five, tall enough, she figures. She has black hair cut very short, the sort of dark eyes that seem always to be squinting to look into the distance, a broad face that no one would describe as pretty, and dark, suntanned hands and forearms marked with lighter-toned old scars from barbed wire, branding irons, horse bites, and even a pair of tiny punctures from an irritable rattlesnake.
Guadalupé has had a mere thirteen weeks of basic tr
aining from an Arizonan sergeant who had precisely zero affection for “wetbacks,” and who, as far as Lupé could tell, had no direct experience of anything war-related. Just the same, she was not a standout at basic, and to Lupé that was a victory. Lupé does not want to be here at this replacement depot, or in any other army facility, especially not in England getting ready for the invasion everyone says is finally coming.
Her only outstanding quality at basic had been her endurance. She had grown up on a ranch in southern Utah, a family-worked ranch. She started riding horses at age three, learned to accurately throw a lasso by age five, and by age twelve was doing about 90 percent of a full-grown ranch hand’s work. Plus showing up for school most, if not all, of the time.
But Lupé has another talent that did not come out during training. She’d shot an eight-point mule deer buck right through the heart when she was nine at a distance of three hundred yards. She’d killed a cougar with a shot her father advised her not to take because it was near impossible.
Guadalupé Camacho could shoot.
In fact, she shot well enough to consistently fail to qualify with the M1 Garand rifle and the M1 carbine while making it look as if she were trying her best. She failed because she did not wish to go to war and shoot anyone, and she was worried that had she shown any ability she would be shipped off to the war. So on the firing range she amused herself by terrifying instructors with near misses and general but carefully played incompetence.
It turned out not to matter. The pressure was on to move as many recruits as possible to the war in Europe, so Lupé was marked qualified with the M1 Garand, the M1 carbine, the Thompson submachine gun, and the Browning Automatic Rifle—the light machine gun known as the BAR. She had in fact never even fired the Thompson, and with the BAR she legitimately could not hit much of anything—it was nothing like a hunting rifle—but various sergeants stamped various documents and thus she was qualified.
Stamp, stamp, staple, staple, and it was off to war for Guadalupé Camacho, private, US Army.
Lupé had been drafted very much against her will. She was not a coward, nor lacking in patriotism, but she was needed at home. She had already missed the spring roundup, and if she didn’t get out of the army and back to Utah she would miss the drive up to the Ogden railhead. It was to be an old-fashioned cattle drive this year—trucks, truck tires, truck spare parts, and most of all truck fuel were hard to come by. You could buy everything on the black market, but Lupé’s father simply did not do things like that. Besides, Lupé knew, he’d been pining for the days of his youth, when cowboys still occasionally ran cattle the old-fashioned way. So her father, looking younger than he had in twenty years, had decided to do it with horses and ropes and camping out under the stars, bringing some extra hands up from below the border—Mexican citizens not being subject to the rapacious needs of the US military.
Lupé felt she was missing the opportunity of a lifetime.
She looks around her now, trying not to be obvious, sizing up the others in the truck. Five men, one woman. The woman draws her eye: she is an elegant-looking white woman with blond hair and high cheekbones and an expression like a blank brick wall. Closed off. Shut up tight.
The only one who returns her gaze is a cheerful-looking man, or boy really, with red hair and a complexion that would have doomed him out under the pitiless sun of the prairie. He is gangly, with knees so knobby they look like softballs stuffed into his trousers. He has long, delicate fingers unmarked by scars or calluses.
Not the sort of man she’s been raised around. The men she knows are Mexican or colored or Indian for the most part, compact, quiet, leathery men who can go days without speaking more than six words. Cowboys. Men whose list of personal possessions started with a well-worn saddle and ended with a sweat-stained hat. Some also owned a Bible and/or a Book of Mormon, because Guadalupé’s father was a Latter-Day Saint, and he tended to hire fellow Mormons on the theory that they were less likely to get rip-roaring drunk. They were also less likely to get ideas about his young daughter.
Guadalupé’s mother had died of the fever shortly after her birth. Her father, Pedro, who everyone called either Pete or Boss or (behind his back) One-Eyed Pete, was determined to raise his daughter to be a proper lady.
A proper lady who could rope, throw, and tie a two-hundred-pound calf in thirteen seconds. Not exactly rodeo time, but quick just the same. A proper lady who could cook beans and rice for twenty men and laugh along as they farted. A proper lady who could string wire, castrate a bull calf, cut a horn, or lay on a branding iron.
Now instead of putting her skills and talents to work, Lupé sits in the back of a truck beneath a threatening British sky being eyeballed by a city boy with red hair and a happy grin.
The truck lurches off, rattling through the hectic camp, weaving through disorganized gaggles of soldiers and daredevil jeeps before heading out into the English countryside.