They did roll on after an hour or so, and took a would-be Confederate ambush from behind. The enemy soldiers seemed highly offended at that-those who lived through the encounter, anyhow. U.S. soldiers took prisoners, as much to keep their intelligence officers happy as because they really wanted to. One of the men in butternut complained, "Y'all weren't suppose to come where you did."
"That's what she said," Chester answered, which left his buddies laughing and the POW shaking his head.
Home guards and Mexicans tried to make a fight in Stephens and Hutchings, two little towns in front of Lexington. They got blasted out of the way in short order in both places. They were brave, but bravery and small arms and a few mines didn't go very far against halftracks and barrels. The two villages went up in flames.
Lexington was a tougher nut to crack. The defenders had a couple of quick-firing three-inch guns, leftovers from a generation earlier. For all Chester knew, they'd been sitting on the courthouse lawn ever since. If they had, somebody'd kept them well greased. And some old-timer-probably a guy a lot like me, Chester thought-knew what to do with them. Shells rained down on the advancing U.S. soldiers.
But the Confederates didn't seem to have any armor-piercing ammunition. Those three-inchers weren't made for barrel busting, anyway. They did hurt some men on foot and in soft-skinned vehicles, but that was enough to make the soldiers in green-gray angry without being enough to stop them. As the December sun went down, Lexington got the same treatment as the two smaller towns in front of it.
The U.S. soldiers camped in the ruins. "See?" Lieutenant Lavochkin said. "Piece of cake."
"Expensive piece of cake…sir," Chester said woodenly.
Lavochkin shrugged. "They paid more than we did. And we can afford it better than they can."
Both those things were probably true. In the cold calculus of war, they were also probably the only things that mattered. A guy who'd just stopped shrapnel with his belly cared about none of that. Chester lit a Raleigh and thanked God he hadn't.
O ne of the first things Dr. Leonard O'Doull found out about Sergeant Goodson Lord was that he hated his name. "My mother's maiden name, and I've got it for my first one," the new medic said. "If I had a dime for every time I got called Good Lord, I'd be a goddamn millionaire."
"I believe it," O'Doull said. "Didn't your folks realize what they were doing?"
"I doubt it," Lord replied. "Neither one of 'em's got much of a sense of humor, I'm afraid."
"How about you?" O'Doull asked.
"Me, sir?" Sergeant Lord gave him a wry grin. "I earned mine the hard way. It was either laugh or murder some yokking asshole before I was twelve years old."
"Well, I spent a couple of years working with a guy who answered to Granny," O'Doull said. "If I say Good Lord every once in a while, I may not be talking to you."
"Can't ask for more," Lord said.
"And I'll tell you one more time-careful about the women around here."
"Hey, I like screwing-who doesn't?" the noncom said. "I hope I'm not too dumb about going after it."
He didn't seem to swish now, even if O'Doull had wondered before. He was on the young side of thirty. Most guys his age would have said the same thing-unless they came out and admitted that they thought with their dick. "Try not to get murdered," O'Doull said earnestly. "I hate breaking in a new guy every couple of months, you know what I mean?"
"Sir, I will do my best," Sergeant Lord said.
He did his best with the wounded, too. He was at least as good as Vince Donofrio had been, and he was plainly a better anesthetist. O'Doull still missed Granville McDougald, but Lord would definitely do.
And the wounded kept coming in as U.S. forces cut off one road into and out of Atlanta after another. O'Doull worked like a maniac to keep the hurt men from dying or getting worse right away, then sent them off to field hospitals farther back of the line.
He spent quite a bit of time patching up a sergeant's left hand, which had taken a bullet through the palm. "I think he'll have pretty good function there," he said when the surgery was done. "Hope so, anyway."
"I bet he will, Doc," Goodson Lord said. "You really do pay attention to the little stuff, and it matters. I've seen some guys just stitch up a wound like that and let it go. They figure the doctor in the rear'll take care of it, and sometimes they're right and sometimes they're wrong. Myself, I always thought it was a lazy, shitty thing to do."
"I'm with you. The more you do right the first time, as soon as you can, the less you have to be sorry for later," O'Doull said.
Sometimes you couldn't do much. The corpsmen brought in a soldier in the mottled camouflage uniform of a Freedom Party Guard; he'd been shot through the head. "Why did you bother?" Lord said after one look at the wound.
"Well, you never can tell," Eddie answered.
That was true. Every once in a while, O'Doull got a surprise. But he didn't think he would this time. The wounded man was barely breathing. His pupils were of different sizes and unresponsive to light, his pulse reedy and fading. Brains and blood and bits of bone dribbled out of a hole the size of O'Doull's fist.
"I can clean things up a little, but that's it," O'Doull said. "He's in God's hands, not mine." He didn't think God would hang on tight, either.
The Confederate died halfway through the cleanup. He gave a couple of hitching last breaths and then just-stopped. "That's a mercy," Sergeant Lord said. "Other mercy is, he never knew what hit him. How many bad burns have you seen, Doc?"
"One is a million too many," O'Doull answered, and the senior medic nodded. When O'Doull thought of those, he didn't think of seeing them, though. The smell, like pork left too long in the oven, rose up in his mind as vividly as if a burned barrelman lay on the table in front of him.
And they got themselves a different kind of casualty, one brought in not by the medics but by an irate platoon commander. "Sir, this sorry son of a bitch has the clap," the lieutenant said in a voice that seemed barely done changing. "Isn't that right, Donnelly?"
"'Fraid so," Donnelly said. "Hurts like hell when I piss."
"Well, we can do something about that," O'Doull said; guys with VD were just as much out of the fight as if Jake Featherston's men had plugged them. "Drop your pants, Donnelly, and turn the other cheek."
"You gonna give me a shot?" the soldier asked apprehensively.
"Yup." O'Doull readied the needle-a big one.
"I thought you got pills for the clap." Donnelly might well be fearless in the field, but he sure wasn't here.
"You used to. This penicillin clears it up faster and better, though," O'Doull said. "Now bend over."
"You fuck around, Donnelly, I'll have you bend over and I'll kick your sorry ass-I won't stick it," the kid lieutenant said.
By the expression on Donnelly's face, he would rather have got a kicking than a shot. But he saw he had no choice. He yelped when the needle went home. O'Doull pushed in the plunger with a certain malicious glee. "For Chrissake, wear a rubber next time," he said.
"It's like screwing in socks," Donnelly whined.
"Well, your sweetheart sure gave you something to remember her by," O'Doull said. "What did you give her?"
"Four cans of deviled ham. She was skinny as all get-out. How was I supposed to know she'd give me a drippy faucet?"
"You're supposed to think about shit like that," his platoon commander snapped before O'Doull could say anything. "How many times did you hear about it in basic?"