The Grapple (64 page)

“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?”

“Haven’t got my hands on any, so I don’t know for sure,” O’Doull answered. “The literature sure makes it sound like the Second Coming, though, doesn’t it?” He’d seen plenty of literature like that for one patent medicine or another, and that always turned out to be less than met the eye. But people raved about penicillin in professional journals. That was different. He hoped it was, anyway. Drugs that killed germs without poisoning patients gave doctors an edge they’d sorely missed in the Great War.

“I’m gonna slide outa here if I get a chance,” Donofrio said. He didn’t; not even a minute later, corpsmen brought in a Confederate groaning with a shattered shoulder. The medic went to work without complaint. If he was thinking about women while he did, well, wasn’t that better than brooding about blood and bullets and broken bones?

A
rmstrong Grimes was new to the rituals of the repple-depple. He’d stayed with the same unit from Ohio to Utah to Canada. Now he didn’t belong to anybody or anything. He’d been dissolved away from everything that went before, and was floating free. He was a—what the hell did they call them in chemistry? He muttered to himself, flogging his memory. An ion, that was it. He was an ion.

The replacement depot had been a high school somewhere in the middle of Tennessee. He didn’t know exactly where, or care very much. All he knew was that it was a hell of a lot hotter and muggier than Manitoba. And he knew the locals here, like the ones up there and the ones in Utah, didn’t like U.S. soldiers worth a damn. A barbed-wire perimeter with sandbagged machine-gun nests around the depot rubbed that in.

He lit a cigarette. Confederate tobacco was easy to come by around here, anyway. He sucked in smoke, held it, and blew it out. The kid in the seat next to his said, “Bum a butt off you, Sergeant?”

“Sure.” Armstrong held out the pack.

“Thanks.” The kid took one, pulled a lighter out of his pocket, and got the Duke going. He smoked it halfway down, then said, “You rather go to the front, or do you want occupation duty?”

“Christ! The front!” Armstrong said. “I’ve done occupation duty. You can have it. I want to get some licks in at the real enemy for a change. What about you?”

“I got wounded when we were outflanking Nashville,” the kid answered. “If I could find a nice, quiet spot where nothing much happens…”

“You’re an honest goldbrick, anyway,” Armstrong said, laughing.

“I’d have to smoke funny cigarettes to really believe it, not nice ones like these,” the young private said. “The only guys who draw duty like that are Congressmen’s kids.”

“Not even them. There was one in my outfit—well, a nephew, but close enough,” Armstrong said. “He was a regular joe, Yossel was. Did the same shit everybody else did, took the same chances when the shooting started. He had balls, too—sheenies must be tougher’n I figured.”

Up at the front of the repple-depple, where the principal would have given the students what-for, a personnel sergeant sat reading a paperback with a nearly naked girl on the cover. A young officer came up and spoke to him. He nodded, put down the book, and picked up a clipboard. He read off several names and pay numbers. Men grabbed their gear and went out with the shavetail.

A few more soldiers came in and found seats. The personnel sergeant called other names and numbers. Men slung duffel bags or shouldered packs and found themselves part of the war again. A poker game started. Armstrong stayed away. He’d played a lot of poker in the hospital, and had less money than he wished he did because of it.

Another lieutenant talked with the personnel sergeant. The sergeant looked at his clipboard. Among the names he read was, “Henderson, Calvin.” The kid next to Armstrong got up and walked to the front of the room. Then the noncom said, “Grimes, Armstrong,” and rattled off his pay number.

He got up, too. His leg hurt a little, but he got around all right. He went up and said, “I’m Armstrong Grimes.”

“Hello, Sergeant. I’m Lieutenant Bassler,” the officer said. “I’ve got a squad for you. You’ve led a squad before?”

“I’ve led a platoon, sir,” Armstrong answered.

Lieutenant Bassler took it in stride. “Good. You’ll know what you’re doing, then. Where was that?”

“In Utah, sir, and up in Canada.”

“All right. And you’re in the repple-depple because…?”

Did you foul up? Did they take your platoon away from you?
Armstrong could read between the lines. “I got wounded, sir.” He touched his leg. “I can use it pretty well now.”

“Ah. I caught one about there myself last year,” Bassler said. “Gives us something in common, even if we don’t much want it.”

“Hell of a lot better to shoot the other guy,” Armstrong agreed.

“Well, you’ll get your chance. Come on,” Bassler said.

“Hold it.” The personnel sergeant held up a hand. “I gotta sign these guys out.” Armstrong and Cal Henderson and the other men signed on their lines on the clipboard. Now the military bureaucrat nodded approval. He reminded Armstrong of his own father. He wanted all the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed, and he didn’t think anything was official till they were.

When the soldiers got outside, Armstrong said, “Sir, you mind if I load my weapon? Never can tell what’s waiting out here.”

The question wasn’t just practical, though it was that. It would also show him something about how Lieutenant Bassler thought. The officer nodded right away. “You’d all better do that,” he said, and pulled his own .45 from its holster.

Armstrong put a clip in his Springfield and chambered a round. All but one of the other men also had Springfields. The odd man out—his name, Armstrong remembered, was Kurowski—carried a submachine gun: not a Confederate model, but a big, brutal Thompson, made in the USA.

The lieutenant had a couple of command cars waiting to take his new men down to the front. He said, “I’ll handle the machine gun on one of these. Who wants to take the other one?”

“I’ll do it, sir,” Cal Henderson said. “I’ve used a .30-caliber gun before. Haven’t fired one of these big mothers, but they work the same way, right?”

“Near enough,” Lieutenant Bassler said. “A .50-caliber gun shoots farther and flatter and harder, that’s all.”

“Sounds good to me,” Henderson said. It sounded good to Armstrong, too.

But Lieutenant Bassler didn’t put him in with the kid. The officer stuck Armstrong in his own command car, and grilled him as they thumped down the battered road. He got more out of Armstrong about where he’d fought and what he’d done. He probably also learned a bit about how Armstrong thought, but that didn’t occur to Armstrong till later.

When they came into Chattanooga—luckily, without needing to use the machine guns on the way—Bassler said, “Ever see anything this torn up?”

“Sir, this isn’t a patch on Ogden and Salt Lake City,” Armstrong answered. “The Mormons hung on till they couldn’t hang on any more. Then they pulled back a block and did it again.”

An old man picking through ruins with a stick glared at the command cars as they went by. If he had a rifle…But he didn’t—not here, anyway—so he could only hate.

“What do we do with them—what do we do to them—once we lick them?” Bassler said. “How do we keep from fighting another round twenty, twenty-five, thirty years from now? How do we keep them from putting bombs under their shirts and blowing themselves up when they walk into a crowd of our soldiers?”

Armstrong remembered that woman in Utah, when he was heading for R and R. He shivered despite the humid heat. “Sir, I wish to hell I knew,” he said. “I’m just a dumbass sergeant. What do
you
think? How do we do it?”

“Either we make them like us—”

“Good luck!” Armstrong broke in. “Uh, sir.”

“Yeah. I know.” Bassler wasn’t more than a few years older than Armstrong. When he grinned, the difference hardly showed. “Fat chance. But if we could do that, it would sure save us a lot of trouble down the road. If we can’t, maybe we can make them too scared of us to turn terrorist very often.”

“That’s what they tried in Utah,” Armstrong said. “It sort of worked, but only sort of. You start shooting hostages and stuff, you just make people hate you worse.”

“I’m afraid you’re right,” Bassler said sourly. “And the Confederate States are a lot bigger than Utah. We occupy them all, there are bound to be lots of places where we’re too thin on the ground to do it right. And those are the places where trouble starts.”

“I know one thing we could do,” Armstrong said. Bassler raised a questioning eyebrow. Armstrong went on, “We could give what’s left of the nigger’s guns. If half the shit they say about what Featherston’s fuckers are doing to them is true, they’ll want payback like you wouldn’t believe. They may not love us, but they sure as hell have to hate the bastards who’ve been screwing ’em over for so long.”