Purple Hearts (Front Lines 3)

Those poor souls. How many will die with no one to send a prayer after them?

Frangie wonders if Sergeant Moore is watching, and whether he is suddenly thinking that drowning might be as bad as burning. At least, she thinks, it was quick. But was it? Is one of those GIs in a tiny air pocket down there, straining to catch the last possible breath of air?

Then the lead DD tank, already a quarter mile ahead, suddenly goes nose down. The back of the skirt lifts, hangs in the air for a moment while voices on the LST cry out in renewed terror, and it goes down, disappearing beneath the waves.

Aboard the LCT, now some distance away, Frangie sees a pantomime of horror, crew and tankers watching, gesticulating, shouting inaudibly. The fourth and final Sherman DD does not move. Its commander sitting high in his hatch points with furious gestures toward the LCT’s bridge.

“What kind of fool contraption are those things?” Manning demands, suddenly less sanguine about army planning.

The second tank still powers gamely on toward shore as the commander of the last tank, the one still aboard the LCT, can be seen climbing down on the deck, arguing with an officer as the flotation skirts deflate and sag.

But now, with light growing, Frangie looks away from the tragedy aboard the LCT, and for the first time sees—really sees—what she is part of.

To left, to right, behind and ahead, the invasion fleet extends forever, literally beyond the range of her eyes. Great, smoke-wreathed battleships and swift, low-slung destroyers; corvettes practically like speedboats; mine sweepers, supply ships, and oilers; squat and unlovely LSTs and swarms of DUKWs and Higgins boats. Not dozens, not even hundreds, but thousands of ships and boats. Thousands.

Now overhead Frangie sees hundreds of B-17s and B-24s drawing contrails like silk threads.

It’s a giant hammer, an impossibly great sledgehammer ready to smash into France, ready to crush the Nazi Reich and roll it all the way back to Germany. Frangie’s throat swells. She hasn’t spent ten minutes really thinking about what is happening beyond her own duties. Her war has been saving lives and surviving; it has not been about great powers, great people, or great deeds.

But now, for just a moment, she feels it, feels the hugeness of it, the superhuman effort it represents. The terrible danger, but more the astonishing courage of so many in such peril and yet so determined.

“Well, I’ll be,” Manning says in a voice she might use to whisper in church.

“There can’t be that many ships in the world,” Frangie says. “That’s not an invasion fleet, that’s a whole city floating on water.”

Suddenly a voice is raised, a clear feminine voice.

O beautiful for spacious skies,

For amber waves of grain,

For purple mountain majesties

Above the fruited plain!

America! America!

God shed His grace on thee

And crown thy good with brotherhood

From sea to shining sea!

No one speaks until the last note dies out. For the first time Frangie really notices the Stars and Stripes flapping high on a mast. And despite Tulsa, and despite Harder’s insistent voice in her memory, despite every injustice and horror that flag has so often meant to her race, her people, Frangie’s throat swells and her heart feels very big in her chest.

“Maybe the Germans will just . . . give up,” Deacon says wistfully.

“Double-check your supplies. You both have a pocketknife and scissors?”

Deacon and Manning both nod yes. Manning, in addition to being Frangie’s driver, is a stretcher bearer and anything else Frangie needs her to be. Deacon is effectively her number two, a trained medic but with far less experience.

Frangie realizes she’s been brusque, and says, “There’s this soldier I met, a woman. She’s G2.” Seeing their blank looks she adds, “That’s intelligence branch. Anyway, she was grabbed by the Gestapo in Italy. And she told us, me and the other girls with us, some of the things they did to her.” Frangie shakes her head at the memory of a very drunk Rainy Schulterman talking in a running monotone, no emotion at all in her voice. But in her eyes there had been a dangerous light. “And now those same people,” Frangie continues, “people like them anyway, the kind of people who torture and murder, they know we’re coming for them. The wrath of Almighty God is about to come down on their heads.”

“I don’t know that God’s involved,” Manning says in her laconic way. “But sure as hell the wrath of the US of A is heading straight for them. They ought to give up if they had any sens

e.”

“I imagine they’ll look out and see all this and be good and scared,” Frangie says. “But I don’t think they’ll quit. They’ve gone too far, done too much. So, like I said: quit gawping and check supplies.”