Purple Hearts (Front Lines 3)

Something punches Joe in the arm, hard. He staggers but keeps his feet and keeps pace with Pang and Geer.

“Hey,” Pang says, glancing back. “You’re hit!”

Joe blinks. Is he? Is he hit?

He takes a quick inventory and sees that the shoulder of his uniform jacket is saturated with blood.

“Oh God!” Joe cries. He stops, tears off his jacket, and Pang yells, “Keep cover, you fugging—”

Two machine gun rounds plow two holes through Joe’s chest. He falls.

Geer yells, “Medic! Medic!” But he does not stop. No one stops.

No one at all. They just keep moving, the tanks roaring and coughing, the soldiers tramping, and all the while the forest firebreak is a tornado of flying steel.

Joe lies on his side, watching it all. When he breathes it is shallow. He can’t catch his breath. Each inhalation seems shallower than the one before it, and each breath makes a wet, gurgling sound.

Joe feels no pain. He feels as if his entire body has been hit by an electric power line, and he is stunned, paralyzed, his brain moving through molasses, his hands not doing what he wants them to do.

The tanks rattle on, and the last of the infantry goes with them. A relative quiet descends.

I’m wounded. I’m hurt.

But I’m okay. I’m okay. I’m hit, but I’m okay.

The next inhalation is more wet than raspy. Through the fog of his shock Joe begins to feel something, something that is like pain, but like pain he’s watching someone else endure. He feels disconnected from the body gasping for air, the body with lungs flooded with his own blood.

A face swims into sight, swirling and weird, like a hallucination.

“I’m here, Soldier,” the black face says. “Deacon! Plasma!”

“My name is Joe,” he tries to say, but it’s nothing but a grunt and a wet gargle. Incoherent.

“Don’t talk, just lie back, Soldier,” the black face says—a woman too. Huh. She’s doing something fussy with her hands. He glimpses big steel scissors chopping through his uniform and thinks, What will I do now?

He does not feel the needle prick in the crook of his elbow.

“Pump it. He’s about drained out.”

Then Deacon, holding the plasma high with one hand while feeling Joe’s neck with the other, says, “I’m not getting pulse. What’s his BP?”

Frangie looks at the blood pressure cuff, knowing what she will see. The systolic pressure is seventy and dropping. She does not bother to tell Deacon.

She stands up, and her knees crack. “Tag him.”

21

FRANGIE MARR—HÜRTGEN FOREST, NAZI GERMANY

“I’m here, Soldier.”

The soldier is nineteen years old. A piece of wood, fresh so it still oozes sap, a piece of a tree, a chunk of wood the size of a child’s forearm, protrudes from his belly. Deacon holds his flashlight beam on the injury with one hand and keeps a bag of plasma elevated with the other.

A second, smaller splinter, this one the size of a man’s thumb, protrudes from the base of the injured soldier’s neck.

A third splinter, this only the size of a pencil, protrudes from his left eye socket, just below the eyeball. The splinter forces the eye to bulge out.

Blood seeps. Blood gushes.