Purple Hearts (Front Lines 3)

The soldier screams.

Deacon’s light wavers, and for a moment the only thing Frangie can see is the soldier’s screaming mouth.

BOOM!

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

The barrage intensifies, shells going off so fast they almost sound like machine guns, exploding like flashbulbs illuminating a nightmare scene for milliseconds at a time. A terrified face; a soldier running; a big tree branch falling; a soldier writhing. Each highlighted for just the duration of an explosion.

Hell by strobe light.

German 88s screech into the trees, explode, and spray shattered wood in every direction. It’s a deliberate German tactic. Frangie has had to remove two splinters from herself, smaller thankfully, and in less vital locations, but exceedingly painful. The wood shrapnel lacerates flesh and shreds veins and arteries, leaving medics to try to find those bits of tattered, slimy tubes in the midst of raw hamburger.

Months have passed. Spring has given way to summer and now a cold, drenching, muddy autumn. The skies darken too soon, and too often they never brighten as rain comes again and again, turning the earth to mud—mud over pine needles; mud beneath the slicked leaves of deciduous trees; mud caked on trucks and tanks and jeeps; mud permeating boots and uniforms. Mud in hair; mud in teeth; mud that at times seems like a living, malicious beast clawing at feet and legs, pulling on soldiers as if determined to drag them down to hell itself.

Frangie feels the creeping need to itch. She, like almost everyone, has lice. Lice in the hair on her head, lice in her crotch, her armpits, lice making a home of her entire body.

She has managed maybe two hot meals in the last week, otherwise reduced to C rations. It’s so cold at night that C rations freeze, but fires are an impossibility, so GIs thaw their C-rats over tin cans filled with gasoline-saturated sand and secreted at the bottom of water-sloshing foxholes.

Frangie hates every iteration of C rations. She hates the original three varieties: Meat Stew with Beans, Meat with Vegetable Hash, and Meat Stew with Vegetables. She hates the newer meals: Meat and Spaghetti in Tomato Sauce, Chopped Ham, Egg, and Potato, Meat and Noodles, Pork and Rice, Frankfurters and Beans, Pork and Beans, and, above all, Ham and Lima Beans.

The army has blessedly stopped sending the dreaded Meat Hash and the god-awful Mutton Stew with Vegetables meals. Unfortunately they have not sent Chicken and Vegetables, which Frangie is convinced will be bad, but will at least be a new kind of bad.

This is the only joy in the Hürtgen Forest: daydreams of food.

There are days when she is sure she would kill a German herself if she could just eat some of his rations. Everyone says the Krauts still get actual bread, bread that comes in loaves as opposed to the canned atrocity the US Army supplies.

And God only knows what sins she might commit in exchange for a plate of catfish and fried okra, or even just good old red beans and rice with cornbread so hot from the oven that you couldn’t hold it.

A fresh peach? Or a strawberry and rhubarb pie? Or a bowl of ice cream churned in the kitchen with fresh cream and ice and rock salt?

Iced tea with a sprig of mint?

Her aunt’s blackstrap pecan pie?

Her other aunt’s Thanksgiving turkey?

Don’t think about it. Tend to this poor man.

How?

He has a log in his belly, he’s a goner, done for, like so many others, like so, so many others. His blood loosens the consistency of the mud around him.

Mud-blood s

oup. That’s the meal the Hürtgen serves.

Frangie scratches furiously at her head. Her fingernails come away red from flea and lice bites. Some hair comes, too: her hair is falling out. Not all at once, just a little here, a little there, a generalized thinning so her scalp could be seen if the sun ever rose. Even at noon, even when it isn’t raining, the Hürtgen is always dark.

In every direction are the trees. They are close-packed, and in better times they must have made for lovely, shaded walks beneath a canopy of leaves and needles.

But there are no leaves on these trees. They look like fish bones picked clean, a stumpy trunk sprouting blackened branches that stick straight out, horizontal, and often almost to the ground so that in many places just walking ahead means bending or breaking branches. The Toothpick Forest, some called it now.

D-day had been terrible, and the painfully slow and bloody slog through the bocage country was terrible as well. But that had been followed by the advance to Paris, which had been relatively easy for Frangie’s unit, and the drive from there to the German border had been hard but progress had been steady. People had started betting pools on when the war would end, with most folks guessing before Christmas.

The Krauts were beaten, everyone said.

The war would soon be over, everyone said.