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“Take it easy, Cassel, take it easy,” Rio says.

Blood pulses from Cassel’s throat, like a garden hose that someone is kinking and releasing, kinking and releasing. The blood looks like chocolate syrup in the darkness.

Kerwin is making guttural sounds, words full of urgency with no vowels.

Rio rises again, just high enough to place her hands on Kerwin’s chest and hold him down, but as she does this she feels slippery warmth and realizes that large quantities of blood are gushing from his upper chest. He’s been hit twice, not once.

“Gotta take it easy, Cassel, let Doc work.”

Would sound better if my teeth weren’t chattering.

But Kerwin isn’t hearing her. He jerks wildly, tries to say something that comes out as a plaintive grunt, then lays back down, quieting. Doc slaps a pressure bandage on, but the artery in Cassel’s neck is barely slowed.

Like trying to block a fire hydrant with your fingers.

Doc rips Cassel’s uniform shirt open and there’s the second hole near, far too near, to his heart.

The medic curses and then covers for that by telling Cassel, “It’s okay, it’s okay, soldier, you’ll be okay, going home is all, going home.” It’s a lie, but Kerwin never hears it anyway.

Rio feels his heart stop. One second there’s a wild beating thing in his chest and then nothing.

Kerwin’s last breath is a slow wet wheeze of exhalation, as if he’s sinking back into an easy chair after a long day.

The machine gun chatters and digs divots Pfft! Pfft! Pfft! in the sand near Rio, so she has to roll away, clutching her rifle to her chest with blood-slicked hands.

Kerwin is dead without even getting a chance to speak. His final intelligible word just that single syllable, “Oh.”

24

FRANGIE MARR—TUNISIAN DESERT, NORTH AFRICA

The same northern African night that envelops Second Squad on its beach covers Frangie Marr and the colored 403rd Artillery Battalion. They are not on a beach but in the shadow of a stark, bare hill with just a number for a name.

Frangie hears the sounds and sees the flash of artillery fire in the distance. That would be a white battalion sending 105 and 155 shells toward the Germans, who Frangie has neither seen nor heard. Something is up, she can feel it. The pace of firing—at night, no less—is too great for it to be a minor fire mission.

Doon Acey—Buck Sergeant Acey now—is already busy about the sights of his 105, carefully wiping the glass in the eyepiece, checking the set screws with a flashlight, fussing like a backyard mechanic working on a jalopy.

Rough wooden boxes of shells are eagerly manhandled down from the trucks, which go roaring off the instant they are empty, spraying mud from their fat, heavily treaded tires. More trucks come carrying more ammo, water, tents, chow, all the paraphernalia of an army as the 403rd races to get set up.

There are six guns in this battery, four batteries in the battalion, twenty-four tubes in all, served by a total of just under five hundred men, of which ten are white officers and the rest black privates and NCOs.

There should be at least a half-dozen medics throughout the battalion, but there are just three—trained medics are in short supply, especially black ones.

Frangie mentally goes over the contents of her medical bag. Plenty of bandages and tape. Enough sulfa powder, hopefully. Sutures? Probably, and if not she has a sewing kit her mother insisted on sending with her. Morphine? Someone has stolen some of her stock, but there is enough, most likely. She sees the water truck with its oval seven-hundred-fifty-gallon tank. Water is as important as any medicine; she’s been taught that, and here in the desert with nary a brook or stream, she feels it.

An instructor, an old sergeant from the last war, had told the medics-in-training, “When they’re injured they’ll ask for water. When it’s bad they’ll pray to Jesus. When it’s over they’ll ask for their mother.”

Medicine she has. Water she has. She can do nothing about anyone’s mother.

Everyone say

s the artillery doesn’t get shot at. Much. So maybe she won’t need anything. But she does the mental checklist anyway, a result of training plus a desire to not screw up. To be ready. Always ready. Because this is it. This is the war.

Already tired but keyed up by the atmosphere of controlled panic, Frangie watches the jiggly dance of flashlights as the crews set up the firing stakes and square the 105s and 155s, digging in the split trails that will absorb some of the shock of firing. Men and some women stack shells, dig foxholes, rig shaggy fishnet camouflage, position defensive machine guns, and set up a small command post.

They are in hill country, desert hill country, with hills that are little more than bare rock and low, scruffy bushes. The air smells of dust, diesel fuel, bug spray, and Cosmoline, the thick petroleum jelly used to keep metal gun parts away from salt spray and other corrosive things. The wind is cold, the particularly cutting cold of the desert at night. Frangie has located her little aid station near the narrow, paved road behind them, and in just the last hour American soldiers have appeared on that road, walking toward the rear. Some are bandaged. Some of the wounded are on stretchers atop jeeps that honk their horns carelessly to clear a path.

But most of the soldiers who pass by are not wounded. Some have lost or thrown away their weapons. Many look abashed or even frankly scared—it is not hard to guess that something out there in the desert went poorly.