Front Lines (Front Lines 1)

“But surely you won’t be . . .”

“They’re actually sending women into combat?” her father demands angrily. “Teenage girls? On the front lines?”

“Yes, Father.”

A long silence follows her announcement. She can see that her father is suppressing a rising tide of anger that now is beginning to frighten her mother.

Suddenly her father slaps the table with the palm of his hand. Dishes jump and rattle. “It’s a damned dirty rotten trick!”

“Dad, the war could be over before—”

“Don’t feed me that line,” he snarls. “It’s too much like what your sister told me. ‘It’ll all be over soon,’ she said. ‘The Jap navy can’t touch us,’ she said. ‘Stop worrying.’ And now . . .” He looks at the empty place.

Rio’s mother reaches to take his hand, but he shakes her off brusquely. “You don’t know what you’re getting into, young lady. Neither of you does. I do.”

“Tam, there’s no point in frightening Rio.”

“The goddamned generals sit up there in their headquarters, and you’ll be nothing but a number to them. Some major will say, ‘We anticipate only ten percent casualties,’ and the general will say, ‘Jolly good, we can manage that,’ but the ten percent aren’t names or faces to them, just numbers. And the generals are fools, most of them. They send young men to . . . to have their legs and arms and faces . . .”

He grits his teeth, angry at himself for losing control, angry at himself for showing emotion.

Rio sees the ruined face of the Stamp Man in her memory. She doesn’t want to see it, has, in fact, pushed it to the far edges of her memory, but it is clear and vivid and real at this moment.

Rio wants to ask her father what it was like for him, his war. She wants to ask him whether he was brave—that question has begun to preoccupy her. And she wants to ask him what exactly happened with the Stamp Man on the terrible night of the fire. But she knows she mustn’t—Tam Richlin’s wartime experience is taboo in this house. It is not something the family is allowed to discuss, and a part of her doesn’t really want to know, because his war was his war. For better or worse, this war is hers. It is hers.

Hers and Rachel’s.

Hers and Jenou’s.

And Kerwin’s, and Jack’s and Cat’s and Stick’s and Tilo’s. It’s even Luther’s war. It does not belong to the men who fought that earlier war, that mockingly subtitled “war to end all wars.” Their war, their fate, will not be hers. She will not live out her days sucking air through an absent cheek. Not her, not Jenou, not Strand.

“Mother, I like your chicken much better than the chow hall’s chicken,” Rio says gamely, moving the conversation to safer ground. Rio can see her father making an effort to be kind, to be patient, but the fear is very specific and very real to him. His fear frightens her because she cannot dismiss it.

Her mother’s fear is no less real, but Millie Richlin’s concerns are somewhat different.

“Just don’t you forget all you learned in Sunday school,” Millie says. “Just because you’re in a uniform doesn’t mean you’re safe. It doesn’t mean boys don’t have certain urges. Secret urges.”

Rio manages—just barely—to avoid grinning at the notion of boys having secret urges. The males in her barracks have urges, all right, but they are definitely not secret. So do some of the females, including a certain Private Jenou Castain.

“Yes, Mother.”

“One mistake can ruin your life. Don’t forget: when this is over and you’re home safe, you still have to find a good man, get married, and make a life together.”

Mrs. Braxton. Mrs. Strand Braxton.

Mrs. Jack Stafford. Lady Stafford.

That’s ridiculous, Jack is not a lord, and anyway, Strand! She’ll be seeing him tomorrow.

“I worry about you.”

“So do I,” Rio mutters, before catching herself. “Don’t worry, Mother, my own sergeant told me the odds of getting hurt are pretty low. Really. And Sergeant Mackie is not what you’d call a ray of sunshine.”

“Is your sergeant going with you wherever you go?”

I wish she were.

“No, Mother, Sergeant Mackie already has another load of soft recruits to inflict pain on.”