Page 136

Only slowly, gradually, does she remember where she is.

And why.

But after a time that seems forever to her, but is only hours to the world around her, Sergeant Rio Richlin stands up.

Interstitial

107TH EVAC HOSPITAL, WÜRZBURG, GERMANY—APRIL 1945

Oh my goodness, did Jenou Castain die? Did our reluctant warrior with the perfect figure and the gorgeous blond hair die?

No, Gentle Reader, I did not die.

But given my stupidity, I probably deserved to. I can only say I was somewhat keyed up, having just managed to kill the sniper, and in my exuberance I did the stupid thing. Like an idiot greenhorn I reached for a souvenir in that hotel—the brass bell they used to summon bellboys—and I even had a split second to see the wire before the booby trap went off.

Thank God Kraut grenades are lousy. A decent American grenade would have killed me for sure.

Anyway, that ended my war with a bang. They got the medics and the stretcher bearers to me pretty quick. I never did lose consciousness, not then at least, and I seem to recall doing some impressive caterwauling and cursing and flailing around like a great baby.

Rio lost her mind for a while, poor kid, thinking she’d gotten me and Jack both killed. Way, way back when we began this journey I told you, Gentle Reader, that sooner or later, man or woman, veteran or greenhorn, we all cry. Well, I was starting to think Rio was the exception, that she had no breaking point. It was almost reassuring to see that she did. Tough, scary, knife-toting, Kraut-killing Rio Richlin: human.

And after a while Rio was beside me.

She caught up to us on the way to the field hospital. Me on one side of the ambulance, Jack on the other side blessedly unconscious. Both of us with swaying bags of plasma suspended over our heads. Rio in between, getting in the way of the docs.

Of course she blamed herself. Rio does that. If she were writing this tale instead of me it would be titled “Things I Screwed Up” by Rio Richlin.

Anyway, I took shrapnel of both the metal and the wooden variety. I lost most of one breast. I’ll have a nice scar on one side of my face. Maybe I’ll lose the limp over time. And I’ll get a Purple Heart. Yippee.

A few days after I blew myself up, Hitler shot himself in the head in Berlin, the smoking, ruined capital of the Third Reich.

The Thousand-Year Reich, old Adolf called it. Well, Adolf: not quite a thousand years. More like twelve.

Burn in hell, Adolf. Burn forever in hell.

VE Day—Victory in Europe—came, and I guess, Gentle Reader, you might think we all had a big party. I suppose some GIs did celebrate, but no one I knew did. Here at the hospital we pulled out our smuggled booze and drank quiet toasts. But they were not toasts to victory. We drank to our friends and comrades-in-arms, the men and women who would never go home. And by the end of that we were pretty damned drunk.

And that’s my war, Gentle Reader. My war and Rio’s and Frangie’s and Rainy’s and all the others who I’ve written about here in these feverish scrawlings.

It only remains to go home. I only wish I had one.

I don’t exactly know what I’ll do with all these typed pages. Maybe I’ll see if someone wants to publish them. And maybe I’ll tell more of the story, because the damned thing about wars is they don’t just end with a snap of the fingers, or even a bullet in the head.

This war has killed . . . who even knows? Millions. Isn’t that enough? Do we need to know just how many millions? Millions dead. Millions wounded. Millions without homes, sick and starved and cold and alone, being eaten from within by grief and guilt and fear.

I somehow thought if I wrote it all down it would be out of my head and on paper. I felt maybe I could capture it all, make it into something I could hold and move and stick in a box like Sergeant Cole used to tell us. But that’s not going to be how it works. My body will carry scars. And my mind will carry memories burned deeper than scars.

But after what Rainy told me about Oradour, and after Malmédy, and especially after what I saw at Buchenwald and what Frangie told me about Dachau, I know I won’t feel guilty about killing Krauts. If ever anyone needed to be killed, it’s those Nazi bastards.

I hear stories here in the hospital, from GIs who’ve been in places I have not. They talk in hushed tones of German cities turned into little more than stone quarries, with desperate Germans—old men and children—sifting through the wreckage. German women selling their bodies for a candy bar. German mothers selling their daughters for a loaf of bread.

How many of those women were at Nazi rallies screaming their lungs out, yelling, “Heil Hitler”? How many husbands and fathers cheered as the mad bastard in Berlin ranted about Jews and Slavs and homosexuals and Gypsies and all his other scapegoats?

If you don’t want your cities burned down around your ears and your daughters whoring for GIs, don’t start wars.

Already I see articles in the Stars and Stripes and in magazines about the possibility of war starting between us and the Soviets. I guess all good things come in threes, right? World War I, World War II, hey, we can’t stop there, can we?

Well, not me. This soldier girl has had all the . . .