A Fierce Radiance (40 page)

N
orth Africa. November 1942. The surgeon needed only to speak in code. “Iliac,” said Pete Mueller.

They saw the bleeding artery in the bloody mess of the wounded soldier’s abdomen, and Jamie clamped it while Mueller went to the next problem, the perforated intestine.

Jamie was in North Africa to conduct clinical trials on penicillin. Nick wasn’t with him: Nick was needed to monitor continuing research developments at home, and if Jamie were killed in the war zone, Nick would be able to carry the project forward.

Jamie wasn’t a surgeon, but a shortage of doctors on the North African front meant that whenever needed, a physician assisted at surgery. Their operating room was in the basement kitchen of a French colonial school turned hospital, somewhere in the province of Relizane, Algeria, Jamie didn’t know exactly where, and he was so tired he no longer cared. Officially the Allied invasion the week before had been met with only light resistance.
Light resistance
: that was no consolation for the patient on the table before them. Jamie hoped he never had to witness
heavy resistance
.

Now that the blood flow from the artery had been stopped, Jamie could examine the wound. Was there a gash in the stomach? Part of the liver gone? How had this poor kid lived long enough to get here? Well, he
was
here, and Mueller was sewing him up. The electricity started flickering on and off and then went off altogether. All in a day’s
work at the North African front. One of the orderlies held up a flashlight to light the incision. After an hour or two or three of surgery, the boy was still alive, his pulse and blood pressure approaching normal. He might survive after all.

Was it the middle of the night? The afternoon? Jamie had lost track. He worked when the patients came in. He felt as though he were sleepwalking. Sometimes he worked all night and all day, as time disappeared into endless action.

Jamie had the penicillin waiting: the soaked pads like the kind he’d worked with in New York, to place upon the sewn-up incision after surgery; the fluid for the injections. Back in Newport News, Virginia, the troop staging area, he’d been told to prepare for an invasion task force of nearly 40,000 men. He had penicillin stocks for maybe a hundred men, if he was lucky. Yes, progress was being made in mass production, but the demand for the medication remained far greater than the supply.

On the ship, he’d worked every day in the sick bay, because even among men being ferried to battle there were all the usual colds and influenzas, pneumonias and strep throats. Not to mention flare-ups of the ubiquitous syphilis and gonorrhea from congenial evenings in Newport News. But his penicillin was reserved for battle wounds.

Reserved for this poor boy before him: Matthew Johnston, Chicago, Illinois, eighteen years old. Nurse Nichols, standing next to Jamie and holding the suction, always asked the boys where they were from before they went under anesthesia.
Where are you from
,
I bet you’ve got a million girls chasing you there. You’ll be back up and at ’em before you know it.

Jamie felt two warring emotions inside himself: to remember this boy with massive abdominal wounds, and to
not
remember this boy, so that he could just do his job and take his notes, be a professional without emotional concerns distracting him.

The ground vibrated. That meant a bombing raid somewhere
nearby. Mueller paused in midstitch, waiting for the rumbling to pass. The Allied airfields were grass, and the grass had turned to mud in the horrendous rains that started a few days ago, preventing the Allied planes from taking off. By contrast the German airfields were paved, and so the German bombers were still able to strafe and destroy at will.

“Okay, let’s wrap this up,” Mueller said.

Nurse Nichols stepped forward to assist. When they were ready, Jamie placed the waiting penicillin pad over the closed incision.

Mueller and Jamie changed out of their bloodstained surgical gowns and gloves in a pantry.

“I’m going to take a nap.” Mueller was a Texan, with a big Texas boom of a voice. He was a terrific surgeon, and Jamie was filled with admiration for him. “Wake me if we’re under attack. I don’t want to sleep through my own demise.”

“Will do.” Jamie enjoyed Mueller’s gallows humor, the dash and devil-may-care attitude, an aspect of the military professionalism Jamie was still reaching for: joking about your own death.

Mueller wore a wedding ring. Advertised his marriage. He’d showed Jamie snapshots of his wife and three children. A family, a goal Jamie still hoped to attain.

Dodging the orderlies who mopped the floors, Jamie and Mueller walked up the wide staircase with its intricately carved stone banisters. Green and blue tiles with geometric designs covered the walls.

“Hey, doctor, how about a cup of coffee at the corner café?”

They turned. Nurse Nichols was coming up the stairs behind them. Everywhere Jamie went, nurses. Nothing shy about them. They were a self-selected group, these frontline nurses. You needed a lot of courage and a tough stomach. Nurse Nichols was in her late twenties and quite a bit more experienced in the ways of the world than he was, Jamie sensed. Even in her standard-issue uniform, she was the most attractive nurse he’d seen among the many nurses of the U.S. Army Central Task Force
fighting its way east across North Africa. She looked worthy of a pinup shot, the tossing mane of light brown hair, the wide face, the ample breasts pressing against her regulation shirt. He’d witnessed her walk through a ward and bring happiness to every wounded soldier simply by swaying her hips.

“I don’t think she’s talking to me,” Mueller said under his breath.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Let me know how the coffee is in this town.”

“Absolutely.” They shared a laugh. Mueller, whose billet was on the second floor, continued up another flight of steps while Jamie waited for Nurse Nichols. This school building was the height of nineteenth-century French colonial grandeur, with inlaid tiles, vaulted ceilings, the works. Jamie felt as if he’d entered an art history class, the foreignness of it all was so startling to him. The main entry gallery was wide and high, like the ceremonial entryway of a museum or a train station. The Central Task Force used the entry gallery as an open ward for the wounded. Not his wounded, though. The penicillin patients had their own ward, a cordoned-off portion of the gymnasium in the rear of the school.

“You ready to go?” Nurse Nichols asked, joining him. She was from Oklahoma, “never left till now, but for one trip to Austin, Texas,” she sometimes told the soldiers, in her lilting Oklahoma accent, while prepping them for surgery.

His watch said eleven. The rain had stopped, and sunlight was angling through the latticework over the windows. Therefore, it was morning. Time for a cup of coffee.

“Yes,” Jamie said.

They went through the monumental front doorway and into the town. Once again, the French colonial influence, brought onto Muslim North Africa. You had to admire it, the architecture of this town. The whitewashed buildings, the filigree decoration. Here in a war zone, with buildings bombed, kids running around wild, and orphanages overflowing, a café was up and running, tables outside, coffee
or at least imitation coffee being served, cigarettes smoked. The important things in life, taken care of: you could count on the French influence for that. A story was being circulated to much laughter in the mess hall about a unit of American troops who surrounded and conquered an enemy encampment, only to discover it was a café, filled with locals who welcomed the newcomers with wine and women. As Jamie glanced at a group of young American recruits unloading a supply truck, again he thought, It’s all so foreign; what are we doing here, so far from home?

At the café, Nurse Nichols sat across from him. They ordered coffee. It came with hard cookies.

“They call these biscotti,” Nurse Nichols said. She dunked one into her coffee with a flair that made her look as if she’d been dining in French cafés all her life instead of languishing in Oklahoma. “These cookies are Italian, but they serve them here anyway.”

“Ah.” Jamie imitated her. He tasted hazelnut. Where did the locals get these things, the rich coffee, the cream, the cookies, the china cups? But he said nothing. Snow-covered mountains rose in the distance. Normally Jamie would want to know the name of that mountain range, but at the moment, he couldn’t muster the energy to care.

“Doris—she’s one of my nurses—says this town has beautiful olive trees in the central square.”

Clearly Jamie was supposed to say, let’s go for a walk when we finish our coffee, let’s look at the olive trees. He didn’t feel like looking at olive trees.

“And there’s acres and acres of orange trees outside of town. Doris says it’s just gorgeous.”

He didn’t want to be rude, but he didn’t have the strength to discuss orange trees. The paradox was, he wasn’t tired when he was in surgery or doing rounds in the penicillin ward; then he was awake. When he wasn’t working, though, his energy drained away.

She must have understood this, because she lit a cigarette and
stared into the distance. Jamie watched her. Lipstick on the side of her coffee cup, lipstick on her cigarette. She wore a short-sleeved uniform blouse, her regulation jacket over her shoulders. Strong shoulders, an alluring hint of cleavage giving promise of more…there were rules about fraternization, although he couldn’t remember exactly what they were, and besides, he was navy, she was army, and as long as it was kept discreet, who’d be the wiser.

Really, he should say something. She didn’t deserve silence. “I’m tired,” he said.

She smiled in relief. “Me, too,” she said.

She was available to him, he knew. All he had to do was ask. No, he didn’t even have to ask. He simply had to nod his head. Touch one finger upon her hand. She shared a classroom with five other nurses, five cots in a row with sheets hung between them. But his cot was in the assistant principal’s office. He had the entire office to himself. They finished the coffee. He paid. The breeze picked up, bringing the smell of burned flesh and gunpowder.

She waited for him to give a sign. “I need to visit my patients,” he said.

“And I’ve got to supervise my nurses,” she replied, promptly covering any chagrin she might have felt while simultaneously reminding him that she, too, had power here. She was in charge of fifteen junior nurses. She had more power than he did. She’d chosen him, he realized. But he wasn’t prepared to accept. He pictured the cherished snapshot of Claire on his bedside table.

Back at the ward, Jamie went from patient to patient, giving injections, changing bandages, making detailed notes. To protect himself, he slipped into the usual physician’s shortcut of remembering them in terms of their ailments, not their names. The perforated stomach. The third-degree burns. The double amputee. The chest wounds. Matthew Johnston wasn’t here yet; he was probably still in the surgical recovery area.

After finding Johnston and confirming that he was stabilizing, Jamie returned to his assistant principal’s office on the first floor. He lay down on the cot and let himself fall into a chasm of sleep.

Banging on the door woke him, he didn’t know how much later. He opened his eyes. Raining again.

“Lieutenant, wounded in.” The voice of his medic, Harry Lofgren, from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Lofgren worked only with penicillin testing. He didn’t assist at surgery.

“I’ll be right there,” Jamie called. He sat up. He ran a hand through his hair.

He opened the door into chaos, stretchers covering the floors, medics and nurses hurrying from patient to patient. Where had these boys come from? A battle in the hills, who knew where, even forty or fifty miles away. They were patched up by medics at the front, then brought here by truck.

The men called to him as he walked among them. They were delirious with pain, most of them, calling to the shadow that was him as he moved through their line of vision. No, he couldn’t stop to help them. He walked right through the chaos and downstairs to the pantry to prepare for surgery, as he’d been doing day after day. He went through the rituals of sterilization, maintaining necessary standards.

Mueller was already there, changing. “Hey, Stanton,” he said, “enjoyable cup of coffee?”

“Just coffee, no more nor less. I guess it was espresso. Actually it was good. Cream, too. I don’t know how these French colonials do it.”

“Well, however they do it, we can count on them to keep doing it, so you’ll have plenty of time for more coffee later.”

“We’ll see. Anything interesting this evening?”

“Amputation. They’ve got him ready.”

“Ah.” Jamie hated amputations.

“Let’s at it, then.” Mueller’s mouth and nose were covered with a mask, as was Jamie’s. But the eyes showed. Professional. A busy eve
ning ahead. An amputation, he called it—he didn’t call it a boy from Iowa or Michigan or Colorado who might not see his family again.

Nurse Nichols was already there, standing beside the patient along with the requisite assistants. Everybody worked without talking, saving their energy. Except for Nurse Nichols.

“What’s your name, soldier?” she asked.

“Billy Baines, ma’am.”

“Where you from?”

“Kansas City, Missouri, ma’am.” He spoke boldly through what must have been excruciating pain. His left leg was mangled beyond repair, a black, bloody, filthy mess. His foot was already gone. He looked about fifteen. Jamie felt compelled to ponder: a good case for testing penicillin as a preventative for gangrene. “Not Kansas City, Kansas. Kansas City, Missouri.”

“That’s an important distinction and I’m glad you told me. I won’t forget. I bet you’ve got a million girls there, chasing you, soldier. We’re going to have you back at it in no time. Because this is your lucky day, Billy Baines: you’ve got the best surgeon in the United States Army right here with nothing else to do tonight but fix you up.”

But Billy was already under the anesthesia and couldn’t respond.

And there Billy was, the next day, as Jamie treated him in the penicillin ward. He was laughing at some wisecrack made by the boy in the bed on the opposite side, a boy with a chest wound, a perforated lung, and five broken ribs. Laughing was painful with five broken ribs, but he was joking around anyway.