Silver Stars. Майкл Грант

“Plane! Plane! Take cover!”

      They climb down quickly—much more quickly than they climbed up.

      “Under the track?” Rio wonders aloud, looking toward the nearest ditch, which is already filling up with scrambling GIs.

      “The Kraut will aim for the track!” Jenou yells.

      “He’ll see it’s one of his own and burned out besides,” Rio counters in a calmer tone. They crawl madly for the shelter of all that steel and lie facedown, breathing dust, almost grateful for the shade. Antiaircraft guns at the four corners of the camp open up, firing tracer rounds at the dots, which have now assumed the shape of Me 109 fighters with single bomb racks.

      Bap-bap-bap-bap-bap! The antiaircraft guns blaze, joined by small arms fire from various soldiers firing futilely with rifles and Thompsons.

      The Messerschmitts come in fast and low, and starbursts twinkle on their wings and cowling. Machine gun bullets and cannon shells rip lines across the road and into the tents. A voice yells, “Goddamn Kraut shot my goddamn coffee!”

      The planes release one bomb each, one a dud that plows into the dirt between two tents and sticks up like a fireplug, smoking a little. The second bomb is not a dud.

       Ka-BOOM!

      The front end of a deuce-and-a-half truck, clear at the far end of the camp, explodes upward, rises off the ground on a jet of flame before falling to earth, a smoking steel skeleton. The engine block, knocked free by the power of the bomb, twirls through the air, rising twenty feet before falling like an anvil out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon as GIs scurry out of the way. Rio does not see where it lands.

      The planes take a tight turn and come roaring back overhead, machine guns stitching the ground like some mad sewing machine.

      And then they head off, unscathed, racing away to the relative safety of their base in Sicily.

      Rio and Jenou crawl out from beneath the half-track and gaze, disgusted, at the caked-on dirt that covers their fronts from toes to knees to face.

      “They could have waited till we toweled off,” Jenou says.

      “We best go tell Sarge we’re still alive,” Rio says.

      The air raids are fewer lately, as the Royal Air Force planes with some help from the Americans have claimed control of the North African skies. But now Rio hears a distant shriek of pain and thinks what every soldier thinks: Thank God it isn’t me, followed by, At least some poor bastard is going home.

      A term has become common: million-dollar wound. The million-dollar wound is the one that doesn’t kill or completely cripple you but is enough to send you home to cold beer and cool sheets and hot showers.

      A team of medics, three of them, rush past, with only one taking the time to turn and run backward while yelling, “I have some training in gynecology; I am happy to do an examination!” as he grabs his crotch.

      He trips and falls on his back, and Rio and Jenou share a satisfied nod.

      The US Army, Tunisia, in the summer of 1943.

2

      FRANGIE MARR—CAMP MEMPHIS, TUNISIA, NORTH AFRICA

      Several miles away there is a different scream. This scream comes and goes, rises, falls, lapses into silence, then starts up again.

      It’s a battlefield sound, but they are not on the battlefield, they are in a camp very much like Rio’s. Tents stretch away toward the west in long green lines across the dried mud and gravel. Austere, lifeless hills rise in the far distance, like red waves rushing toward a shore, but frozen in time. The only immediately noticeable difference between this encampment and the one where Rio and Jenou sunbathe is that here all the soldiers—except for the officers—are black. It is a colored artillery battalion, its 105 and 155 howitzers parked in a well-spaced, random arrangement so as to make air attack a bit more difficult for the Krauts.

      There is a Sherman tank ahead. It weighs 66,800 pounds.

      Corporal Frangie Marr, army medic, does not know this fact, but it doesn’t matter much because she’s spent some time in close proximity to tanks and she does not need to be convinced that they are large and terrifying and very, very substantial.

      The Sherman, the 66,800-pound Sherman, is oddly perched with its nose pointed up at about a seventy-degree angle, which aims its 75-millimeter main gun almost straight up in the air, as if someone has decided to use the tank to shoot at airplanes.

      “Gotta help him, Doc, get him some happy juice. Poor bastard, he’s in a bad way!” The staff sergeant takes Frangie’s arm—not bullying, just urgent—as he pulls her along, practically lifting her off her feet as they leap over a half-dug latrine ditch.

      “What happened?” Frangie asks, panting a little. She is mentally inventorying the medical supplies she has in her bag and the extras stuffed into the ammo pouches in a belt hastily slung over her shoulder.

      “Green kid sacked out in a bomb crater beside the road, and the Sherman pulled off to check something, a bad bearing, or maybe the driver just needed a piss.” The sergeant takes a beat and says, “Sorry, I meant maybe he had to answer nature’s call. Anyway, side of the crater collapses, tank slips, and that’s all she wrote.”

      As they hustle along the scream grows louder and the tank larger. Several dozen men are gathered around, including the tankers, distinguished by their leather helmets and white faces. The tankers stand a little apart and smoke and ignore the angry muttering of the gathered troops, who naturally blame them for crashing their tank.

      “Make a hole, make a hole,” the sergeant says. He releases Frangie’s arm and uses both hands to pry men apart. At last Frangie—far and away the smallest person of either race—sees the tank up close and has the distinct impression that it is in a very precarious, certainly temporary, position. All 66,800 pounds of it is held in place only by the bite of the treads into soft, crumbling earth. With a good firm push it could even topple onto its back like an upended turtle. But the more likely scenario is that it will slide down onto the still-unseen screaming man.

      Frangie squats beneath the shade of the tank’s sky-tilted prow and tilts her head sideways, but she cannot see the man trapped beneath. She goes counterclockwise around the tank to the back, and the once-muffled moans of pain are now more clearly audible. She has to lower herself onto her belly and stick her head over the lip of the crater to see a man’s helmeted head a few feet away. He is facedown with his head and shoulders free but is pinned at the bottom of his shoulder blades by some—but surely not all—of that massive weight.

      The sergeant squats beside her and says, “Hang on, Williams, Doc’s here.” Then more quietly he says to Frangie, “We were going to dig him out, but we’re worried the damned thing could slip back farther. We called for a tractor but that could take a while, nearest engineers are twenty miles away.”

      “He could go into shock,” Frangie says through gritted teeth. “Hey, Williams, are you bleeding?”

      The answer is a scream of pain that rises, rises, and then stops. Followed by a twisted, barely comprehensible voice saying, “I don’t know. Give me a shot, Doc. I can’t . . . Oh, Jesus!”

      “I’m going to help you,” Frangie says, and twists her head sideways to see the sergeant looking at her skeptically. She understands his skepticism. In fact, she is pretty sure she has just told a lie.

      “Can’t you run chains or rope to the front of the tank and pull it forward?”

      “That could make it settle deeper.”

      “What am I supposed to do, crawl down there?” It’s a rhetorical question that the sergeant answers with a blank look.

       Why am I doing this? I could be killed.

      Several