Purple Hearts (Front Lines 3)

“I can’t dig,” Rudy J. Chester says. “I am all worn out.”

Normally this kind of statement would earn sneers and taunts from the others, but the truth is Rudy J. speaks for all of them.

“Let me ask you something,” Rio says. “If the Krauts suddenly opened up on us, would you have the energy to dig then? Yeah? Then get up off the ground and dig!”

For emphasis she kicks the sole of Rudy J.’s boot. He looks as if he’s about to argue, but in the end he rises ponderously and unlimbers his entrenching tool.

“Geer!”

“Yeah?”

“I’m going to reconnoiter.”

“You want company?”

Rio shakes her head. “Make sure they dig in. I’ll get . . .” Her eye stops at Jack Stafford. Jack is a cheerful fellow normally, but he looks now to have had all the cheer drained out of him.

If anyone has to get shot . . . well, Jack is a veteran. Jack kills Germans. Whereas Molina has potential that might benefit from experience.

“Molina, you’re with me. Leave your pack. Dial and Chester will dig for you.”

Molina stands up, using her carbine as a stick. She wobbles a bit but does not complain.

“We’re going to recon that hedgerow,” Rio explains. “No talking, no bumbling around making noise. And don’t fire unless I tell you to.”

“Right, Sarge.”

They walk down the length of the platoon, passing Cat Preeling, who looks up and says, “Off to find another medal, Richlin?”

“Going for a little stroll, see what’s in that hedgerow.”

“Want company?”

“Nah, Cat, you rest up, you look like crap warmed over.”

That earns a genial raised middle finger from Cat, and Rio laughs. For the benefit of any watching Germans she makes as if she’s leaving the field, but instead she creeps along in the deep shadow of the right-hand hedge, the one separating the field from the road.

“Safety off,” Rio whispers to Molina. “But do not shoot me in the back. I will resent it.”

That last comment brings a smile to Rio’s lips. It is one of Sergeant Cole’s phrases. I will resent it. It occurs to her, not for the first time, just how much her job as sergeant involves mimicking Cole or Mackie. Perhaps that’s the way it always goes, she thinks. The art of war is learned in the doing, and the new and the untested learn from those who’ve gone before.

Just as Molina is now copying her moves.

Well . . . good. Molina had a bad start, but she recovered, and now she’s showing a willingness to learn. Probably because she embarrassed herself so badly on the beach.

They creep along, stopping to listen every few seconds when Rio raises a fist. There is distant artillery banging away somewhere. Bombers way, way up in the sky, a barely audible buzz. Is that Strand up there? She can’t help but wonder, though she is not sure she should care anymore.

Mrs. Strand Braxton, cooking and cleaning house and making sure the children wash behind their ears.

Is that even possible? Even if he still wants her?

Two pictures: Herself here, now, with her Thompson at the ready, sneaking around in the dark night of Normandy; and herself in some future life, apron around her waist, face and hair made up, pulling cookies from the oven.

Her father had gone to the Great War while her mother stayed home.

I’ve become my father rather than my mother.

No wonder Strand is troubled. What man would want to marry a woman who had cut nine notches into the stock of her now-lost rifle? What kind of housewife walked around with a koummya strapped to her leg? Was she going to have children and tell them bedtime stories of the time she spent the night shivering in a minefield with Jack Stafford? Would she tell them about Kerwin Cassel and how she had tried to hold the blood inside him and his last word was a simple “Oh?”