Purple Hearts (Front Lines 3)

Sorry for the interruption, Gentle Reader, but Rio just showed up here with orders for me not to go back with the other evacuees from the hospital, but to travel back with the 119th! I’ve got to be ready in twenty minutes, so I am going to quickly wrap this up and pack my bag. I am going back with Rio and Geer and Beebee and the other slobs I’ve spent almost three years with. Not Jack, though. Jack—or “Gimpy Jack,” as we now call him just to irritate him—is already on his way home, back in Britain.

I’ll miss that man. Rio will miss him more, but despite my prodding she never did get to the point of telling Jack she’s crazy for him. She’s his sergeant, and from Rio’s point of view, that’s the end of the story. Stubborn girl.

But like I said, I’ll miss him too. Him and Cat Preeling, who is already back in the States having been discharged with the classic million-dollar wound. And Geer and Beebee and Milkmaid and Sweetheart and Sergeant Cole and Mackie. And the ones who didn’t make it. I’ll miss t

hem all, even the ones I hated half the time. Personal dislikes don’t mean much stacked against the fact that the fellow you think you can’t put up with is standing right next to you in a freezing wet hole waiting for the next 88. If you wore the uniform, you are my brother or sister. And that is forever.

Hey! I just looked at my orders. They seem to have originated with a certain Captain Elisheva Schulterman, approved by some brigadier general, no less, named Herkemeier.

Well, Rainy’s another one I will have to find a way to keep track of. In fact—

All right, all right, Rio is nagging me.

I was going to say that in fact, while the war may be over, it won’t quite be over for us. And I guess that means this story isn’t over. Maybe down the road . . .

But hell, Gentle Reader, for now at least I must end this. Rio will be threatening me with that damned knife of hers if I don’t get moving.

So here are my final words of wisdom. This has been the greatest thing I have ever done or will ever do. I suppose society will try hard to put all us uppity soldier girls back in a box with a nice pink bow on it. And I don’t know what happens next. I don’t know what the world is going to think of me. I don’t know what I’m going to do. And that really should scare me.

But, Gentle Reader, we soldier girls have been to Kasserine, to Sicily, to Salerno, to the river and Monte Cassino. We’ve been to Omaha Beach and the bocage, to the Hürtgen and the Bulge. We’ve been to the camps.

Try putting us in a box. Try.

We won’t scare so easy. Right now, getting ready to leave this hospital, this continent, this war, I’m not feeling afraid for the future. Hell, I am now Sergeant Jenou Castain: so of course, I fear nothing.

Except when Rio shoots me that look and starts loosening her koummya in its scabbard.

PART VII

AFTER

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.

—Ernest Hemingway

34

FRANGIE MARR, RIO RICHLIN, JENOU CASTAIN, AND RAINY SCHULTERMAN—WAR’S END

“Frangie? Frangie?”

Frangie hears the voice and recognizes it immediately. It’s the voice she’s heard since she was a baby in her mother’s womb.

Dorothy Marr looks older, wearier, worn down, but nevertheless radiant. She runs through the crowd of people getting off the bus. Frangie drops her duffel bag and throws her arms around her mother.

Obal, who has grown at least two feet so he now towers over Frangie, stands awkwardly trying to disguise the tears. Frangie frees a hand and draws him into the embrace.

It goes on for a while. It’s an embrace full of pain and sadness, of things learned and regretted. But above all it is relief. Frangie is alive and Obal, their mother, and Frangie herself now drain away three years of fear and worry with a hug.

The white passengers got off first, and are greeting their own families. The colored families are on one side of the terminal, the white on the other. The bathrooms are clearly marked for white men, white women, colored men, colored women.

It’s a long walk from the bus terminal to home—not for Frangie who is used to very long walks, but for her mother who seems to tire easily.

The first part of the walk is through a white neighborhood. American flags fly from porch flagpoles. Patriotic bunting can be seen here and there. Weeks have gone by since the war ended in Europe—it’s just as complicated a task getting millions of soldiers home as it was getting them to Europe in the first place. Although now there is a definite lack of shooting, and the troop ship had plowed straight across the Atlantic with never an evasive maneuver to avoid mines or torpedoes.

“How have you been, Obal?” Frangie asks.

“Me? I’m fine aside from missing the whole war!”