Purple Hearts. Майкл Грант

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      LSTs are so thick in the harbor that Frangie could literally walk for half a mile just jumping from ship to ship. It’s as if a rolling gray steel blanket has been drawn over the water. LST 86 has an unenviable position on the outer edge of one long row of LSTs, exposing it more directly to the bumptious sea.

       This is no way to go to war.

      “So you got it too, huh, Doc?”

      Frangie wipes her mouth and reflects on the fact that once upon a time she would have been mortified to vomit in front of another person, let alone a man. But it’s one of the funny things about war—it tends to force you to focus on what really matters: staying alive, doing your job, staying alive . . .

      “Yes,” she says, gritting her teeth. “I’ve got it too, though not so bad as many do.”

      “Reminds me of my wife when she was pregnant with our first.”

      This is safer territory for conversation. Better than talking about sickness when Frangie’s stomach is still far from settled. But Frangie is not interested in conversation; she’d hoped to have a quick puke and then have time to reread a disturbing letter from home.

      But politeness rules. “Boy or girl?”

      “Boy,” he says proudly. “Thomas Moore the Third, me being Thomas Moore Jr. He was our first. Then we had Elizabeth and Franklin. For FDR.”

      He’s a staff sergeant, one of the tank commanders in “her” squad, Sergeant Tommy Moore of Ft. Walton Beach, Florida. He’s in his mid-twenties, but looks older because his hairline is beating a fast and premature retreat. He’s smaller than average, like a lot of tankers—the interior of a Sherman not being congenial to large folks—a garrulous, opinionated father of three who volunteered after Pearl Harbor but had been assigned to a maintenance battalion to be permanently in the rear. It had taken a fight for him to be reassigned to the battalion.

      Frangie respects that. But she does not like Moore, having been on the receiving end of one too many slights or insults directed at her sex. Two years into the big change and the overwhelming majority of male soldiers still resent the presence of women as anything other than nurses or what might euphemistically be called “dance partners.” And many of the women, some like Frangie with extensive combat experience, are becoming increasingly impatient with those attitudes. The pecking order is still painfully clear: white men, then colored men, who are more or less equal with white women, and at the very bottom, colored women.

      Moore, despite never having fired a shot in anger or felt the concussion wave of a German 88, feels himself inherently superior to Sergeant Francine “Frangie” Marr, Purple Heart, Silver Star, campaign ribbons for North Africa, Sicily and Italy. And though Moore is a tank commander, a husband and father, and a man who fought for the right to fight, he is treated as inherently inferior to any random white draftee.

      Overlaid on the structure of race and sex is the system of rank. A white draftee private with a sixth-grade education will salute a black lieutenant, but still consider that colored man his inferior, regardless of his accomplishments.

      But there is also a deeper, less obvious dividing line. It runs between those who have been in ‘the shit’ and those who have not. Frangie Marr lives within a series of overlapping structures of race, sex, rank and the unnamable but undeniable awareness that marks those who have, from those who have not . . . yet.

      “You reckon we’re ever going to go?” Moore asks. There has been more than one false alarm on that score, and the eternal scuttlebutt comes up with a different D-Day and landing area every five minutes.

      Frangie shrugs. “Not in this weather, but I hear the same latrine rumors you do, Moore.” It’s perhaps more curt than she intends—she is feeling better . . . better, but not exactly fresh as a daisy. Her mouth tastes like a dead squirrel. And while the rain has slowed, the wind is still whipping water off the deck to sting Frangie’s cheeks.

      “Yeah.” Moore is silent for a long while. “Some of the boys are worried. Not scared, exactly, just worried. They’ve heard stories about panzers. How our 76s just bounce off their armor and their 88s go right through ours.”

      Frangie looks at him in surprise. Not because worry is unusual—a GI who doesn’t worry about going into battle should be Section Eight, mustered out as crazy. No, it’s the fact that he is confiding this to her. Is it because she’s a woman, or because she’s a medic?

      Then it dawns on her: despite carrying a medical bag rather than a rifle, Frangie is a veteran. And Moore is not. He’s seeking reassurance. And not just for “some of the boys.”

      “I suppose the air corps will have destroyed a lot of the panzers by the time we even get there,” Frangie says.

      Moore snorts derisively. “Air corps. We’ll be lucky if they don’t bomb us.” Another silence. “They’re just nervous is all. Some of the boys. They don’t know what it will be like.”

       Neither do you, Moore.

      “I guess it’s better to have all that armor plate around you than just be walking along like infantry,” Frangie suggests.

      Moore shakes his head. “Infantry can dig a hole. A tank? See, Doc, a tank is a big fat bull’s-eye. A prize! No Kraut tank driver goes around bragging about how many infantry he killed; he wants to kill tanks. Heck, I want to kill tanks! I want to go home someday, prop Tom Trey—that’s his nickname—up on my knee and tell him how Daddy wiped out all these panzers and saved the day! Problem is, old Fritz over in that panzer has better armor and a heavier gun than I do.”

      And more experience.

       And his own children to whom he too would like to brag.

      “They teach us that most wounds are superficial, and most fellows don’t get hurt at all,” Frangie says, squeegeeing rainwater from her eyes.

      She doesn’t know how to reassure Moore. In her first artillery barrage she had seen her friend, Doon Acey, a boy from back home, spill his intestines like fat sausages falling from a split grocery bag. She’s seen traumatic amputations, chest wounds, head wounds, and the bullet to the left foot that is the signature of a soldier looking to escape the war by any means available. She knows the statistics and they’re true enough, but she’s held the hands of the dying, and she is all out of optimism.

      “They say this new Tiger tank the Krauts have . . .” Moore makes a low whistle.

      “They say lots of things.”

      “Yeah. I guess that’s so. The only thing is, Doc, I’m . . . some of the boys are real scared of burning.”

      “Burning?”

      Moore shrugs. “You know what the Limeys say? They call it a ‘brew up.’”

      “That’s when they’re making tea,” Frangie says. “They call that a brew up.”

      Moore shakes his head. “Not when they’re talking about a tank battle. Your tank catches fire, that’s a brew up. Men trying to get out of the hatches. Maybe our own Willy Pete going off.”

      “Who’s Willy Pete?”

      “Willy Pete. WP. White phosphorous. СКАЧАТЬ