Silver Stars (Front Lines 2)

She advances to an imaginary line on the floor before the colonel’s desk and salutes.

The colonel looks at her with what feels to Frangie like naked hostility.

“So you’re the little Nigra who crawled under a tank?”

He has not returned her salute, which leaves her standing at attention, right index finger on her right eyebrow, waiting.

“Sir?”

“I don’t suppose we need to ask how it happens that some coon gets himself trapped under a tank.”

“I . . . Sir, they told me he—”

“Goldbricking, if I know my Nigras. Avoiding work. Is that it, Marr? Was he shirking?”

“I don’t believe so, sir. I think he was green and didn’t—”

“Are you contradicting me?” He finally tosses her an indifferent salute.

“I only know what they told me, sir,” she says, lowering her hand at last.

“Well, I’m telling you: he was shirking, like you people do. Isn’t that right, Marr?”

He is directly challenging her to contradict him. Frangie feels herself melting into her boots, withering beneath his hard glare. “If you say so, sir.”

“You’re goddamned right about that: if I say so. And I do say so, and do you know how I know? Because I know the Nigra, that’s how. I grew up on a large farm in Mississippi, and we . . . employed . . . your kind to pick cotton and never once did I see a Nigra really work hard.”

It was not a question. No answer is possible. So she stands at attention feeling small and helpless and bewildered.

“Now this,” the colonel says. He holds up a piece of paper. “Goddamn insult to the white boys out there giving their lives for freedom. They won’t be getting a medal, you can be damn sure of that, because they don’t have the president’s wife nagging and bullying for them.”

Now Frangie is left to pick out words and phrases and try to piece them together, make some kind of sense of them. But her mind is at sea, lost and confused.

“You have anything to say other than yassuh, nosuh?”

“No, sir,” she says.

“At ease.” He twirls the paper toward her. She makes a grab at it but misses and has to stoop to pick it up off the floor.

“Take that and get your black ass off my base. Dismissed.”

Frangie flees the room, and the building, and finding no transportation waiting, begins the long, chilly walk back to the hospital on her aching leg. She waits until she is well clear of the HQ estate, clear off the manicured grounds, out onto the hedge-lined road with the sun dropping fast and the shadows lengthening before she tries, at last, to read the paper.

It is a set of orders for her.

It takes her several tries, starting, stopping, and restarting, to make sense of the official language.

She is to take the earliest available transportation to HQ First US Army Group (FUSAG) at Dover, United Kingdom. There is some detail—a unit, an officer she’s to report to—but still Frangie can make no sense of it until she sees two words:

Silver Star.

She stops walking. Stops breathing, as she reads:

The President of the United States, authorized by act of Congress, has awarded the Silver Star to:

And then, centered on the page, her name and her rank.

And below that, what is labeled as the citation, which begins: