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The last thing she’s interested in right now is men. At least not men as boyfriends. Men and women as patients are her focus. Anyway, what kind of kids would they have? A beanpole and a midget? They would make a ridiculous-looking couple.

This is what I’m thinking of?

Better than so many other things . . .

She gratefully accepts Ja

sper’s help as he reaches to guide her feet into the last couple of holes and then holds her steady as she jumps down into the rising boat.

“All set, Doc?”

“All set, Jasper. Thanks.”

“Anything for you, Doc.”

Of course he’s doing the same service for all the GIs. Climbing down a net is hard; climbing down a net in full gear from a heaving ship onto a boat that is doing an impersonation of a crazy elevator is a whole lot harder.

Once the boat is loaded it veers away from the side of the ship and begins turning a big circle, waiting until more boats are loaded. The sea is rough, and once again seasickness threatens. Cold, salty spray lashes them.

“You scared, Doc?” Jasper asks.

“I am. Aren’t you?”

Jasper laughs. “Me? Nah. The bullet with my name on it hasn’t been made yet.”

Another private shakes his head sadly. This is Paul Dixon, called Daddy D on account of his age, which may be as old as thirty. “You’re a young fool, Jasper Jones, that’s why you’re not afraid,” Daddy D says. “You are a young, know-nothing, been-nothing, done-nothing infant dressed up in a uniform that looks like it was a hand-me-down from some shorter cousin.”

Jasper could take offense, but he recognizes the bantering tone. “Me young? Maybe to an old, old granddad like you. Weren’t you in the Spanish-American War, pops? See the thing is, you being all old and dried up and wrinkled—”

“I do not have one single damn wrinkle—”

“You get closer to death, you get so you can see it through the mist, and that mist? That mist is starting to clear now . . .” There is some hand-waving here to simulate pushing through a fog. Jasper switches to an old man’s reedy quaver. “And you’re thinking time is short, time is short, it’s all gonna end!”

Daddy D makes a wry smile at Frangie. “I am twenty-nine years old. Only in the damn army does that make me old.” Turning back to Jasper, Daddy D says, “Difference between us isn’t age, it’s experience. I am a man. You are a boy. I have known the love of a good woman who knows how to be a bad woman; and I’ve known the love of bad women who know how to be worse women; and I have known the love of the worst women in Tuskegee, Alabama, and, son, those are some very bad, very, very bad women, women who used me up till I was a shambling wreck, a husk of a man . . .”

Laughter is spreading, even to Walter, a welcome, calming sound, though it sometimes comes through chattering teeth.

“. . . staggering around the streets in my underwear calling on Jesus to take me home. You, on the other hand—” He’s about to say something even more explicitly ribald, but he glances at Frangie and stops himself, finishing lamely with, “You, young Jasper, have experienced nothing.”

Frangie wants to ask Daddy D what he knows about the Tuskegee base where she’s heard they may be training colored pilots. But the back-and-forth is drawing the attention of other scared soldiers, giving them a few minutes of amusement in the midst of this mad circling and circling, so she makes a mental note to ask later.

“As much as I love to hear your Granddaddy Remus tales of the old days, the long, long ago when you could still interest a woman in your now withered-up—”

And on it goes until there’s a whistle blast and the boat finishes its rotation and heads toward shore. The conversation dies.

The sea is still up, not the gale they sailed through to get here but still agitated enough that boats ahead and behind can completely disappear from view in the troughs between waves. The landing craft skids down the back of one wave, settles a beat, then powers up the slope of the next one. There’s nothing but walls of black water to be seen at the bottom of the trough, and not much more at the top. Dawn has still not come, but the black of night is losing its absoluteness and there is the promise of dawn in the east.

Suddenly a nearby cruiser opens fire with its big guns, ejecting six-inch shells in volcanic eruptions of fire and smoke. They fly for long seconds . . . one . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . before blossoming as they strike a distant hill. In the dark where the hills are only shadows, the shells seem to be exploding in midair. Other shells from other ships blow up behind the small town of Gela, and sometimes land in the town itself.

“Eye-ties are catching hell,” a soldier remarks.

“More hell they catch, the less we do,” another soldier says.

Should I pray for the shells to strike true? Shall I pray for my enemy’s death? Blasphemy, surely. But I do want them to die if it means I won’t.

Now the guns of the fleet are firing with some steadiness, ship after ship enveloped in flame and smoke of its own making. Explosions that seem small compared to the moment of their eruption on the invisible hills, on the barely visible towns to the north and dead ahead. The noise rumbles across the water joining the roar of boat engines and slapping waves. The flashes illuminate faces for snapshots of expression, here an open mouth, there wide eyes, a head lowered to kiss a rosary.

With all the noise, at first no one hears the Heinkels coming in out of the northwest until the antiaircraft batteries on the ships open up too late, chattering madly and sending thousands of red tracer rounds of small-bore cannon and large-bore machine gun fire to lacerate the sky.