Purple Hearts (Front Lines 3)

He sits back. He tries out a jaunty smile, which evaporates instantly. He fidgets with his glass. Then, in a rush, “I’m AWOL.”

AWOL. Absent without leave.

Rio waves a dismissive hand. “Half of Paris is AWOL,” she says. “The city is neck-deep in AWOLs and outright deserters. I had some fellow from New Jersey offer to sell me nylons and a Luger. Right on the street! Black marketeer, not that I’m saying you’re . . . I mean, AWOL is one thing, some company punishment, clean latrines for a day . . . deserters are a whole different thing.”

“Rio. I’m not going back.”

“Back where?”

“Back. I’m not going back to my unit. I’m done. I’m done with this war, I just want to go home. I want to go home with you.”

“I’m sorry, Strand, but I’m confused.”

He calls the waiter and motions for another beer. Rio orders more coffee. This is clearly a coffee situation.

“I can’t do it anymore,” Strand says. “Everyone’s getting killed. Our last raid we lost three planes! Thirty people. I watched them get hit, I watched them go down, and you know, you watch and you wait to count the chutes. And no one jumped, Rio. They all augered in.”

“We’ve lost some people too.”

“Of course you have. But you don’t understand. Eighth Air Force keeps increasing the number of missions we have to fly before rotating out. I mean, it’s math, Rio, it’s math! Of the guys I started out with, only one is alive. They just keep sending us out till we’re all dead!”

He has become worked up, voice rising in pitch, cheeks red.

Rio struggles to comprehend what Strand is saying. He’s gone AWOL? He’s deserted? Strand? Strand Braxton is a deserter?

“No one wants to die,” she says. It’s meaningless, really, but she feels the need to say something as her head keeps spinning around and around.

“I’m not a coward!” Strand says sharply, as though she had just accused him of it. She hadn’t. Hadn’t even formed the thought. But now . . . well now, there it is.

Is Strand a coward?

“You have to go back,” Rio says. “We get GIs walking off the line all the time. Sometimes it gets to be too much, and they need a few hours to—”

“Go back? You want me to go back?” He stares at her as if seeing her for the first time. “My God, Rio. I expected you to understand. I could die. Me! I could die. I will die if I go back, I know it. I feel it inside.”

“Strand, if you desert they’ll look for you. They’ll find you, eventually, and arrest you. Especially you being an officer!”

“I’ll change my name,” he says. “I’ve never liked my name that much, it’s strange and slightly pompous, I think. I could be a Tom or a George or a Jack.”

Instantly an unbidden thought: You are no Jack.

It’s an unworthy thought. Rio wishes it had never come up, because now she is thinking of them in contrast, Strand and Jack. Strand the dashing pilot, the boy next door, the good son, the one she’s supposed to marry. And Jack, who is less dashing than witty, from some town south of London, and was her subordinate.

A completely foolish comparison.

And foolish to compare their courage too. It is true, she does not know what a B-17 pilot endures on a bombing run over Germany. It had to be terrifying, holding the stick, working the pedals, struggling to keep your plane flying in a straight line as ack-ack exploded all

around and Luftwaffe fighters sprayed machine guns at you.

Of course it was no picnic advancing over an open field with mortars dropping all around you either, and Rio had seen Jack do just that many times.

“This is nuts,” Rio mutters to herself more than Strand.

“I know it would be hard being married to me under a different name, but you’d get—”

“Jesus, Strand!”

Her outburst makes him recoil. He drops her hands.