Silver Stars (Front Lines 2)

“Really?” Rainy asks her, peering with the special intensity of the inebriated. “That doesn’t bother you?”

“Maybe a little,” Frangie mutters. “You get used to it.”

“You shouldn’t,” Rio says. “You shouldn’t get used to it.”

“You sound like my brother,” Frangie says, feeling extremely uncomfortable.

And yet, isn’t she right?

Isn’t Harder right too?

Rio raises her glass. “Here’s to not getting used to bullshit.”

For the first time Rainy smiles. It’s a wry, mocking smile, but it’s her happiest expression yet. “Well, Corporal Richlin, you may just be in the wrong organization if you don’t like bullshit, because as far as I can tell the US Army runs on a full tank of bullshit.”

Rio reveals her slow-building but still sweet and rather amazing smile, clinks her glass against Rainy’s, and says, “I do believe you are correct.”

“Although,” Rainy says in a more somber tone, “that doesn’t apply to the GIs.” She takes several quick breaths, steadying herself. “Saved my life, GIs, and I will never—” She can’t go on. Rainy shakes her head, dashes away tears, and says, “I best hit the sack. Alcohol makes me weepy.”

They let her go, secretly relieved to let her carry her pain and rage off to bed.

“Just let me find one of those Gestapo bastards in my sights someday,” Rio says with a controlled anger and a deadly eagerness that scare Frangie. Then, switching gears entirely, Rio says, “But she’s not wrong, is she? About what they’ll have me doing, I mean. Giving speeches in high heels. Pity. Jenou—you met her—Jenou would probably love it.”

“Jenou. She’s the blonde with the . . . the figure?”

That gets a laugh. “The figure. I’m going to tell her you said that, she’ll love it. Yeah, that’s Jenou. Although . . .” Rio frowns. “I guess the truth is, she’s pretty much a GI now, herself. She’s changed a lot.”

“And you haven’t?”

They stay in the pub until closing time, finally abandoning war talk and army talk in favor of talking about mothers and fathers and siblings; about school and teachers and principals; about church socials, Fourth of July fireworks, jazz, boyfriends, real or potential, about Rio’s cows and Frangie’s menagerie of injured creatures.

Home, always home.

A million miles away, Frangie thinks. And can any of us ever really go back?

A car collects them the next morning after a night in which Frangie and Rio ended up squeezed together in one bed, with Rainy in the other and no one on the floor.

They are driven—frowzy, tired, somewhat hungover, and a little embarrassed by their soul-baring—to an RAF airfield that’s been turned over to the American Air Corps. The base is chosen because it affords ample open space and can produce a band to play various martial and patriotic tunes, one of which strikes Rio as oddly familiar as they march out onto the field to take their places.

“Did some Scots come into the pub last night?” she whispers to Frangie.

“With a bagpipe,” Frangie whispers back.

“Did we sing with them?”

“Yes,” Rainy interjects from behind the other two. “I was woken up by the sound of a cat being strangled, a bunch of Gaelic, and two out-of-tune sopranos singing about Scotland the Brave.”

It is chilly and damp. The grass is wet beneath their polished shoes. There is a reviewing stand with a few dozen civilians, no one that any of them knew. There is a color detail holding the flags of the United States and Great Britain, as well as the flag bearing the insignia of the First US Army Group.

The band is to the side of the reviewing stand, playing their trumpets and tubas and banging their drums, none of which helps Rio’s head.

And penned in together by a rope, a dozen or more men and some women, with cameras flashing and newsreel cameras turning and stubs of pencil scratching away at notepads.

They follow an officious sergeant who marches them out into position, facing the reviewing stand. And they stand there for twenty minutes at ease, which is only slightly less relaxed than being at attention—waiting, waiting, ignoring shouted questions from the reporters while the band plays on.

Did you kill many Germans?

How’s it feel being a woman soldier?