Purple Hearts (Front Lines 3)

And then, the Hürtgen.

“I’m here, Soldier.” She’s left the previous patient floating away on a morphine cloud. He will never come down off that cloud.

“Doc. Doc. I . . .” He’s a midtwenties buck sergeant named Oglebee, one of the infantry detachment assigned to the battalion. He’s seated, leaning back against a tree trunk. His hands are open on the ground. His Thompson is on the ground beside him, raindrops making a dull musical note as they plop on the magazine.

“Tell me where you’re hit,” Frangie says as she motions Deacon over with the flashlight; he’d been praying over the man with the splinters.

“I’m not hit, Doc. I just gotta, it’s all, you know, I can’t, is it, I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.”

“Come on, Sarge, screw your head back on.” It’s not her first case of combat fatigue, the favorite euphemism for complete mental breakdown.

“I shit myself.” Oglebee starts to cry.

“Yeah, I noticed,” Frangie says, straining for a note of humor in hopes he will respond.

“I’m done. I’m done.”

“Nah, you just need to—”

He lunges for his Thompson, knocking her sprawling in the mud. It’s an awkward weapon for what he has in mind. A .45 slug makes a big hole.

Deacon has come over. “Sarge, you don’t want to be doing that. You know you’ll get a general court. You’ll serve out the war in a military prison.”

Oglebee looks at him and suddenly a great big grin splits his face. “That sounds pretty damn good to me,” he says. He flips the selector to single fire and upends the Thompson so it’s aimed straight down at his foot.

Frangie grabs the barrel. She does not wrestle for control. In a soft voice she says, “Here, not there.” She guides the muzzle away from the top of Oglebee’s foot, where the bullet will smash through a hundred small, delicate bones, permanently crippling him. She positions it to one side, aimed at the meat of the side of his foot. It will hurt like hell, but he may walk again.

“Thanks, Doc,” Oglebee whispers.

Frangie tugs Deacon’s shirt, and they get up and walk away just as the barrage starts up again.

Amid the earth-pounding explosions Frangie hears the single round and hears Oglebee’s cry of pain.

“I got him,” Deacon says. “You get some sleep, Doc. You look like something that ought to be scraped up off the road.”

The battalion’s tanks are all dug in now, meaning, as Frangie had learned, that tanks are driven into excavated trenches so only the turrets show. The accompanying infantry and support troops are in holes. And they are all wrapped up in, trapped in, buried alive in what the Germans called the Hürtgenwald, just over the border from Belgium and Luxembourg into Germany.

No one in the Hürtgenwald, on either side, believes the war will be over by Christmas.

In addition to being cold, wet, and claustrophobic, the terrain is also steep, sometimes so steep that a GI trying to ascend a hill has to pull himself hand over hand, using the trees as grips and footholds. Hand over hand up steeply canted ground that is all slick, wet pine needles and mud and branches as machine guns rattle and mortars fall.

But it is the tree bursts of the 88s that are the special terror of the Hürtgen. The Germans have learned to set their fuses for air bursts, up in the treetops. That way the explosions shower wooden spears down on men and women cowering in watery foxholes, like an ancient barrage of arrows in some long-ago battle where soldiers had shields.

Except these soldiers do not have shields, and their foxholes do not protect them from this injury and death from above. There is no cover in the Hürtgen. There is no hole you can hide in.

You cannot see the enemy in the Hürtgen. You cannot see much of anything besides tree trunks, so visibility is measured in a few yards. Half the patrols that are sent out become lost, turned around and baffled by the mists, the fogs, the smoke, and the endless sameness of the trees.

Just the day before, Frangie had treated a German soldier who had become so lost he lined up for chow at a US field kitchen before realizing he was in an American mess tent. One of the GIs had shot him, but only in the rear end. Frangie had bandaged and sent him on to battalion aid.

“Hey, Morton,” Frangie says, crouching over a woman shivering like she’s in the worst of a plague fever.

“D-D-D-Doc.”

Frangie pulls out a cigarette, lights it, and places it in the wounded GI’s mouth. She sucks too hard, chokes, and blood comes faster from her neck wound.

She will not survive. Frangie will not tell her this. She’s dead, but only Frangie knows it.

The cigarette calms her, a little at least. She takes another drag and looks at Frangie through eyes that seem to be looking up from the bottom of a well.