Page 56 (1/2)
She painstakingly fills in the foret her sick and wounded out to the ship designated for colored wounded
Then she gets back to work filling out papers on the dead There are three of those They will be picked up by graves registration, ill keep the bodies until the powers that be figure out just what to do with them
Not a job I would want to do, Frangie thinks She’d rather be up on the line getting shot at than spend weeks, e identifying eviscerated, armless, or headless corpses
I’d go stark raving mad
Paperwork done, she returns to her ward to find the one nurse and Dr Fralance tells her this will be another one for graves registration
The nurse, a kindly older white woo find yourself a cup of coffee”
“And bring one back for ars”
Frangie does not hesitate There is one lesson the ar: never volunteer If the doctor and the nurse want her to take a break, then she will sure take a break
The beach istoward the northeast and the town, and away to the south there is a long, low, stubby spit of land that Frangie vaguely believes h boundary between the American sector and the Canadian and British areas
The entire beach is like an upset ant mound, with soldiers, jeeps, half-tracks, trucks, cannon, tanks, iallon dru straight up out of the water onto the land
“Wish I’d coie mutters
Daddy D, a nice man, a family man, his face split open like a e joins others, es: a foot blown off by abile; a compression injury from a man crushed between two trucks; a man ripped in half a dozen places by wood splinters from a crate hit by a mortar round; a self-administered unshot wound where a soldier shot off his little toe for a ticket home And even now, even with all that is here before her, the memory of that poor, doomed white officer all the way back at Kasserine
All of that on top of the Gerrene and shrapnel injuries she had treated while being briefly held by the enemy And all the mess that followed the battle in the Tunisian desert And the usual onorrhea, injuries related to drinking and fighting
Her head is already stuffed to overfloith blood, brains, marrow, and human shit Tears and screams
And the dead, of course The dead