“What did you do when the morphine wore off?” Donofrio asked.
“Gave myself more shots. That’s wonderful stuff. Killed the pain and kept me going just like coffee would. I’ve been running on it two days straight,” the corporal said.
Sergeant Donofrio looked at O’Doull. “There’s one you don’t see every day, Doc.”
“Yeah,” O’Doull said. Morphine made most people sleepy. A few, though, it energized. “You’ve got an unusual metabolism, Corporal.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“Neither, I don’t think. It’s just different. Why don’t you get up on the table? We’ll put you under and make sure your arm’s set properly and get it in a cast. That’ll hold things together better than your arrangement there.”
“How long will I take to heal up?” the soldier asked as he obeyed.
“A couple of months, probably, and you’ll need some more time to build up the arm once you can use it again,” O’Doull said. The paratrooper swore resignedly. He wasn’t angry at being away from the fighting so much as for letting his friends down.
O’Doull gave him ether. After the soldier went under, the doctor waved for Vince Donofrio to do the honors. Setting a broken bone and putting a cast on it were things the medic could do. He took care of them as well as O’Doull might have.
They fixed several more fractures: arms, ankles, legs. Paratroopers didn’t have an easy time of it. Coming down somewhere rugged like the top of Lookout Mountain was dangerous in itself. Add in the casualties the desperate Confederates dealt out and the U.S. parachute troops suffered badly.
But they did what they were supposed to do. They silenced the enemy guns on the high ground. They turned some of those guns against the Confederates in and in front of Chattanooga. And they made Featherston’s men fear for their flank and rear as well as their own front. If not for the paratroopers, the Stars and Bars would probably still fly above Chattanooga.
The wounded men seemed sure the price they’d paid was worth it. One of them said, “My captain got hit when we were rushing a battery. ‘Make it count,’ he told us. He didn’t make it, but by God we did like he said.” He’d had two fingers shot off his left hand, and couldn’t have been prouder.
“Only thing worse than getting hurt when you win is getting hurt when you lose,” Donofrio remarked after they anesthetized the paratrooper. “Then you know your country got screwed along with you.” Maybe sergeants thought alike; Granny’d said the same thing.
They treated wounded Confederates who went a long way toward proving the point. “You bastards win, you’re gonna screw us to the wall,” said a glum PFC with a bullet through his foot. “I gave it my best shot, but what the hell can you do when you stop one?” He seemed sunk in gloom.
“You came through alive,” O’Doull said. “Whatever happens, you’re here to see it.”
“Hot damn,” the Confederate answered. Donofrio put him under. O’Doull did what he could to patch up the damage from the bullet. He didn’t know if the wounded man would ever walk without a limp, but he was pretty sure he saved the foot.
Away went the wounded PFC. Next up on the table was a much more badly hurt Confederate, with an entry wound in the right side of his chest and a far bigger exit wound in the right side of his back. Bloody foam came from his mouth and nostrils. He wasn’t complaining about how the war was going. He was gray and barely breathing.
Sergeant Donofrio got a plasma line into him before O’Doull could even ask for it. O’Doull wished he could transfuse whole blood. They were supposed to be working the bugs out of that, but whatever they were doing hadn’t got to the field yet. This guy needed red cells to carry oxygen, but he would have to use his own.
That means I’ve got to keep him from bleeding to death in there, O’Doull thought unhappily. He opened the Confederate’s chest even as Donofrio stuck the ether cone over the man’s face. The wounded soldier was too far gone to care.
The bullet had torn hell out of his right lung. O’Doull hadn’t expected anything different. He cut away the bottom half of the organ, tying off bleeders as fast as he could.
“Make it snappy, Doc,” Donofrio said. “His BP’s dropping.”
“I’m doing everything I can,” O’Doull answered. “Keep that plasma coming.”
“I gave him the biggest-gauge needle we have,” the medic answered. “Only way to get it in there faster is with a fuckin’ funnel.”
“All right,” O’Doull said, but it wasn’t-not even close. Too much blood loss, too long trying to breathe with that ruined lung…He knew exactly when the wounded man died, because he felt his heart stop. He swore and tried open-chest massage. He won a couple of feeble contractions, but then the heart quivered toward eternal silence. O’Doull looked up and shook his head. “Shit. Close the line, Vince. He’s gone.”
“Oh, well. You tried, Doc. Don’t feel bad about it.” Every time they lost somebody, O’Doull heard the same thing. There wasn’t much else to say. Donofrio went on, “Not like he was one of ours, anyway.”
“I work just as hard on them,” O’Doull said. “That way, I can stay honest when I hope they work just as hard on our guys.”
“Well, yeah,” Donofrio said. “But even so…You know what I mean.”
O’Doull nodded. He knew exactly what the younger man meant. He worked as hard as he did on enemy wounded not least because he knew. As long as he was honest about that, losing Confederate casualties bothered him as little as possible. If he only went through the motions, if he lost men he might have saved by working harder…Well, how could he shave in the morning without wanting to slice the razor blade across his throat?
Corpsmen lifted the dead Confederate off the operating table and carried him away. O’Doull peeled off his gloves. He threw them into a trash can. He had blood on his arms up past the gloves; he’d been deep inside the soldier’s chest. He scrubbed with strong soap that smelled of carbolic acid, then went to get a towel with his wrists bent up so the water would run away from his fingers. Hands dried, he took a deep breath. “Whew!” he said. “Feels like I’m coming up for air.”
“Enjoy it while you can,” Vince Donofrio said. “Chances are it won’t last long.” He stretched and twisted his back. Something in there crackled. He was grinning as he took off his mask. “That’s better. Wonder what Chattanooga’s like. Haven’t hardly had a chance to look around.”
“Chattanooga’s a mess,” O’Doull said, which was true in the same sense that Jake Featherston was not a nice person. Chattanooga was bombed and shelled and shot up. But that wasn’t all of what Donofrio meant. O’Doull went on, “Probably not all the women refugeed out.”
“Sure as hell hope not.” Chasing skirt was Donofrio’s hobby, the way fishing was for some men and carpentry for others.
“Be careful what you catch. After you’ve got it for a little while, you’ll decide you don’t want it any more.” O’Doull knew a lot of skirt-chasers, and didn’t understand any of them. He was happy enough with one woman. Oh, he looked at others, but he didn’t touch. Plenty of men did.
“Yeah, yeah. I’m a big boy, Doc,” Donofrio told him impatiently. The medic was ready-eager-to comb through the ruins of Chattanooga for anything that didn’t take a leak standing up.
“Just remember your initials,” O’Doull warned.
“Funny. Fun-ny,” Vince Donofrio said. “Har-de-har-har. See? I’m busting up.”
“Yeah, well, use a pro station when you’re done laughing,” O’Doull said. “Sulfa’s pretty good for the clap, but it doesn’t do anything about syphilis.”
“I know, I know. I’ll be careful,” Donofrio said. “Is that other new stuff coming out of the labs-that peni-whatever-the-hell-is that as good as everybody says it is?”