“What do you think happened? I was elected Queen of the May, and I’m about to go into my dance,” Granville McDougald said before O’Doull could get a word out. Morphine might have dulled his pain, but not his sarcasm.
“Granny got his leg sliced when we were moving the wounded guy on account of the mortar fire,” O’Doull said. “Can you help me get him up and out so I can work on him?”
“Let me round up a couple more guys. It’ll go better if I do.” Eddie disappeared before O’Doull could say yes or no. Nobody’s paying any attention to me today, O’Doull thought aggrievedly. He hoped the Confederates wouldn’t get their mortars upright and shooting while Eddie was looking for help.
They didn’t. Maybe the U.S. artillery really had knocked out the enemy crews. Three more corpsmen jumped into the trench with O’Doull. They got the man with an amputated foot up onto a stretcher and then, grunting, lifted him out of the trench. “What’s going on?” he said vaguely-he was starting to come out from under the anesthesia. He wouldn’t feel pain for a while, though; O’Doull had shot him full of morphine while he was still out.
Once the corpsmen got him off the stretcher, it was Granville McDougald’s turn. “Take it easy, Granny,” Eddie said as they lifted him.
“Well, how else am I going to take it?” McDougald answered.
He rolled off the stretcher once they got it up to the level of the top of the trench. Morphine or not, that made him say several pungent things. They got out of the trench themselves, put him back on the stretcher, and carried him into the aid tent.
Sharp, jagged steel fragments had done a good job of ventilating the tent. A big one was stuck in one of the operating table’s front legs. It was only about a foot from the cylinder of ether and oxygen up there. If it had punched into that…O’Doull was just as glad it hadn’t. Maybe the tent would have gone up in flames, or maybe it would have just gone up-halfway to the moon.
“Well, Granny, I’m going to put you under so I can do a proper job on this,” O’Doull said, reaching for the mask connected to the cylinder.
“Sure, Doc. Do what you gotta do.” McDougald had anesthetized God only knew how many men himself. But when the mask came down over his nose and mouth, he tried to fight it, the way a lot of wounded soldiers did. It was reflex, nothing more; O’Doull knew as much. Eddie and another corpsman held McDougald’s hands till he went to sleep.
O’Doull cleaned the wound, closed off some more bleeders, and then sutured things firmly and neatly. He nodded to himself. “He’ll be all right, won’t he, Doc?” Eddie asked. “He’s a good guy.”
“You bet he is,” O’Doull answered. “And yes, he ought to do fine. But he’ll need at least a couple of months before he’s back on the job.”
“We’ll be getting a new number-one medic, then.” Above the mask he’d put on, Eddie blinked. “That’s gonna be weird.”
“Boy, no kidding.” O’Doull had come to take Granny McDougald’s unflustered competence very much for granted. Now he’d have to break in somebody else, somebody who’d probably be half his age and who wasn’t likely to know anywhere near as much as McDougald did. O’Doull muttered under his breath. He and McDougald had got on fine living in each other’s pockets for most of two years. It wasn’t a marriage, but it was intimate enough in its own way. Could he do the same with a new guy? He’d damn well have to.
They took McDougald away, still unconscious. O’Doull washed his hands and his instruments. He shook his head all the time he was doing it. He’d imagined himself getting hurt plenty of times. McDougald? He shook his head again. No, not a chance-he’d thought. The veteran noncom seemed enduring as the Rockies.
Which only went to show-you never could tell. O’Doull was still fine, not a scratch on him, and McDougald was lucky he hadn’t lost a leg. O’Doull thought about that, then shook his head. The medic was unlucky to have been wounded at all. But it could have been worse. With all O’Doull had seen himself, he knew how much worse it could have been.
U.S. fighter-bombers roared by overhead, flying south to pound the Confederate positions outside of Chattanooga. O’Doull didn’t look forward to that fight. He couldn’t imagine how taking the enemy bastion would be easy or cheap. More work for me, he thought. But he could do without more work. His ideal day was one where he sat outside the aid tent reading a book and smoking cigarettes. He hadn’t had an ideal day since putting the uniform back on. He didn’t expect to have one till the war finally ended. But every man, even a military doctor, deserved his dreams.
One way not to have to patch up wounded soldiers was to get hit himself. He looked down at his hands. He didn’t have Granville McDougald’s blood on them any more. He thought about the replacement medic or a surgeon farther behind the front trying to patch him up. He’d seen too many wounds. He didn’t want one of his own.
What he wanted might not have anything to do with the price of beer. Only fool luck Granny stopped that fragment and he didn’t. He wondered how-and whether-to tell Nicole that McDougald was injured. He talked about Granny in every letter he wrote. She would notice if he suddenly stopped. But she would flabble if he came right out and said his friend and colleague had got hurt. If it happened to Granville McDougald, she would say, it could happen to him, too.
And she would be right.
O’Doull knew he couldn’t admit that to her. He didn’t want to admit it to himself. The more you thought about things like that, the less you slept, the more likely you were to get an ulcer, the more likely your hand was to shake when it shouldn’t…
But how were you supposed to not think about something? If someone said, Don’t think about a blue rabbit, of course nothing else would fill your mind. “You just have to go on,” O’Doull murmured. “You just have to go on.”
On the bridge of the Josephus Daniels, Sam Carsten said, “I guess maybe we won that fight with the limeys and the frogs after all.”
Pat Cooley nodded. “Yes, sir. I guess maybe we did,” the exec said. “We wouldn’t be trying to take Bermuda back if we didn’t, would we?” He didn’t sound a hundred percent convinced-more as if he was trying to convince himself, and Sam, too.
“Well, I hope we wouldn’t, anyway.” Carsten had been aboard the Remembrance when a British attack on U.S. fishing boats lured the carrier north-and left Bermuda vulnerable to amphibious assault. Now the United States were trying to return the favor, if that was the word.
U.S. surface ships and airplanes and submersibles kept the British from reinforcing or resupplying the outpost in the western Atlantic. But the British garrison wasn’t ready to throw in the sponge. Lots of Royal Marines and soldiers were on the ground. The British had plenty of artillery-some of the heavy pieces big enough to damage a battleship or blow a destroyer escort like the Josephus Daniels clean out of the water. And they had fighters and dive bombers at least as good as the Americans could throw at them, and enough fuel to keep their airplanes flying at least for a while.
Along with carriers and battlewagons and smaller escort vessels like the Josephus Daniels, troopships and landing craft wallowed toward Bermuda. Sam watched them with a reminiscent smile on his face. “It looked like this in 1914,” he said, “when we landed on the Sandwich Islands.”
“You were there for that?” Cooley asked.
“You bet. I was still an able seaman in those days-hadn’t even made petty officer,” Sam answered. “I was on the Dakota. My battle station was at one of her five-inch guns.” He chuckled. “Secondary armament, right? Sure. Bigger guns than we’ve got on this tin can.”
“We can do what we need to do.” The exec patted the destroyer escort’s wheel, as if to say the ship shouldn’t listen to her skipper’s insults. But he couldn’t help adding, “You’ve seen a lot of action.”