That first place, the more time passed, the harder it became to believe we ever would get patients. It rained. The latrine trench filled with water. You had to brace yourself very carefully not to slip in the mud. Ants crawled into our bedrolls. All night long we heard shelling in the distance. A whistle. A distant boom. We got up out of bed and brushed off the ants. I tried not to watch Kay for signs of her back injury, because she was alert to the slightest hint that I might be doing so. She snapped, “What?” at me more than a few times when she caught me looking at her. She always said she was fine. But then we’d be walking somewhere, and suddenly her breathing would quicken, and I’d glance over to find her staring straight ahead with a startled, almost panicked look, her mouth slack and her face pale. “I just got a little twinge, that’s all,” she’d say, when she was able to look round and smile and talk normally again. I’d promised to protect her, and I was itchy with the fear that I wouldn’t be able to, with the fear and the boredom and the anticipation.
A few times each day I went and wandered through the tents, as if I were checking on things, though I wasn’t really. There was nothing to check on. Everything was at the ready. In the shock ward and the OR, the sawhorses were lined up just so, awaiting stretchers. Two-foot locker boxes with shelves inside held the supplies. In the empty post-op tent there was one GI blanket folded neatly at the foot of each canvas cot. I wasn’t the only one engaged in this pointless roaming. I saw the other nurses, the doctors—we nodded at each other, pretending that we had some purpose. It wasn’t that we wanted them hurt, the injured and the dying. If we’d had any say in the matter we’d have kept them whole and far from the battlefield. It was just that it was hard living like this, clenched like a fist, listening to the shelling all night long and waiting to see if it, if the war, would have anything to do with us. Already we’d learned to tell from the sound how far away the shells were hitting, how close. It is hard waiting, Jennifer, when you’re waiting for something terrible to arrive. After a while you just want it to go ahead and come.
On the third day, they came, just as I’d begun to think they never would, that this whole thing was some strange, airless vacation on the outskirts of battle. It was lunchtime. Lunch was K rations—ham and cheese mixed up in a can, and cigarettes, of course, maybe some candy. I’d choked down about half the food and moved on to a cigarette. It was very hot. Kay and I were talking to one of the doctors, Captain Richard Steigler, a kind but excitable man. I remember him saying, “I’d just like to get a little blood on my hands,” and then laughing, and we laughed, too, though we weren’t quite sure it was funny, or even if it was a joke.
“You could just kill somebody,” Kay said. “A murder mystery would liven things up around here.”
“True, true,” he said. “But I—” Whatever he was going to say was lost in a sudden commotion. Wounded. We had incoming wounded. “My God,” the doctor said. He looked like somebody had slapped him, and maybe he was thinking about that blood-on-his-hands line, and whether he regretted saying it I don’t know.
I got up to run, realized after a few steps that I still had that cigarette in my hand, and stopped to drop it and rub it out. I remember being very careful about it, making extra sure the spark was gone, because I had a vision of the whole shebang—field, tents, everything—going up in flames, all because of me. In those few seconds Kay got way ahead of me, and I ran even faster to catch up.
It was so unreal, Jennifer. It’s hard to explain how unreal. There I was, running, and certainly that was real, the slap of my feet against ground, the sound of my own breathing in my ears. But what I was running toward, that I could no more imagine than I’d been able to when we were waiting in England, punting down the river with the tips of our fingers trailing in the cool water, watching the blur of green along the shore. I was on central supply and operating room, so I went to my station in the OR, just like I was supposed to. There was this excitement—that seems like the wrong word but I don’t know what else to call it—and we all felt it. We looked at each other and knew that we all felt it. Like we were all chanting, silently but somehow in unison: Here we go. Here we go. Here we go.
Outside there was quite a commotion, the roar of vehicles pulling into the compound, male voices shouting, and one—I thought I heard one, at least—letting out a quickly stifled cry of pain. Well, I had to go see what was happening, and as I ran outside I realized everyone else was doing the same thing. When had we all begun to share a mind? Outside the tent I climbed up on a crate so I could see. Three jeeps. Eight or ten stretchers. And on them men—boys. The wounded. I was looking at them, watching as the corpsmen carried them into the triage area, and still I could hardly believe they existed. When would reality kick back in? I couldn’t get over the fact that just moments before I’d been smoking a cigarette, feeling disgusted by my paltry lunch, that Kay had just made a joke about murder and I’d been on the verge of a laugh. That was my life, not this.