all around there’s the boom-boom sound.
Mud to your knees while your buddy pees.
Another hole, like the hole before . . .
Yeah, that’s all I remember. It goes on for a couple dozen verses.
Anyway, I still type away at this battered old typewriter, and some of the girls come by and take a few pages to read when they’re tired of the magazines the USO gets us. They seldom talk to me about it; mostly they just read, and after a while they bring the pages back and maybe give me a nod. That’s my proof that I’m writing the truth because sure as hell I’d hear about it if I started writing nonsense. We soldier girls—sorry, I mean Warrior Women or American Amazons or whatever the hell the newspapers are calling us now—we’ve had about enough of people lying about us. The folks who hate the idea of women soldiers tell one set of lies, the people who like the notion of women at war tell a different set of lies. If you believe the one side, we’re nothing but a drag on the men, and the other side acts like we won the war all by ourselves.
We could probably get a pretty good debate going here on the women’s ward over the question of which set of lies we hate more—the one denies what we’ve done; the other belittles what our brothers have done.
We won’t have either.
We women are a red flag to the traditionalists—which is to say 90 percent of the military. But as much as we don’t want to be, the truth is we’re a symbol to people who think it’s about time for women and coloreds too to stand equal. Woody Guthrie wrote that song about us. Count yourself lucky you can’t hear me singing it under my breath as I type.
Our boys are all a-fightin’ on land, sea, and air,
But say, some of them boys ain’t boys at all,
Why, some of those boys got pretty long hair.
It may surprise, but I can tell you all,
When it comes killin’ Nazis, our girls stand tall,
And Fascist supermen die every bit as fast,
From bullets fired by a tough little lass.
For our part, we sure as hell did not want to be a symbol of anything, though we did sort of like Woody’s song. We wanted exactly what every soldier who has ever fought a war in foreign lands wants: we wanted to go home. And if we couldn’t go home, then by God we wanted hot food, hot showers, cold beer, and to sleep in an actual bed for about a week solid.
But we’re just GIs, and no one gives a damn what a GI wants, male or female.
Tunisia, Sicily, Italy, France, Belgium, Germany. Vicious little firefights you’ve never heard of and great battles whose names will echo down through history: Kasserine. Salerno. Monte Cassino. Anzio. D-Day. The Bulge. About all I missed was Anzio, and thank whatever mad god rules the lives of soldiers for keeping us out of that particular hell. There’s a woman here, a patient on the ward, who was a nurse at Anzio. All she ever does is stare at her hands and cry. Though the funny thing is, she can still play a pretty good game of gin rummy. Go figure.
Whatever the newspapers tell you, we women are neither weak sisters nor invincible Amazons. We’re just GIs doing our job, which after Kasserine we’d begun to figure out meant a single thing: killing Germans.
So, Gentle Reader, we come now to a period of time after Kasserine, when those truths were percolating inside us. We were coming to grips with what we were meant to do, what we were meant to be, what we had no choice but to become. We were girls, you see, not even women, just girls, most of us when we started. And the boys were just boys, not men, most of them. We’d only just begun to live life, we knew little and understood less. We were unformed, incomplete. It’s funny how easy it is to see that now. If you’d called me a child three years ago when this started I’d have been furious. But looking back? We were children just getting ready to figure out what adulthood was all about.
It’s a hell of a thing when a person in that wonderful, trembling moment of readiness is suddenly yanked sharply away from everything they’ve ever known and is handed over to drill sergeants and platoon sergeants and officers.
“Ah, good, the youngster is learning that her purpose is to kill.”
Yeah, we figured that out, and we knew by then how to be good army privates. We could dig nice deep holes; we could follow orders. We knew how to unjam an M1, we knew to take care of our feet, we knew how to walk point on patrol. Mostly we knew what smart privates always figure out: stick close to your sergeant, because that’s your mama, your daddy, and your big brother all rolled into one.
But here’s one of the nasty little twists that come in war: if you don’t manage to get wounded or dead, they’ll promote you. And then, before you’re even close to ready, you are the sergeant. You’re the one the green kids are sticking to, and you’re the only thing keeping those fools alive. Right when you start to get good at following, they want you to lead.
Some of us made that leap, some didn’t. Not every good private makes a good sergeant.
But enough of all that; what about the war itself ? Shall I remind you where we were in the narrative, Gentle Reader?
After Kasserine, the army in its wisdom got General Frendendall the hell away from the shooting war, and it turned the mess over to General George Patton, “Old Blood-and-Guts.” He and his British counterpart, General Montgomery, finished off the exhausted remains of the German Afrika Korps and their Italian buddies and sent General Rommel back to Hitler to explain his failure.
Everyone knew North Africa had just been the first round; we knew we were moving on, but we didn’t know where to. Back to Britain to prepare for the final invasion? To Sardinia? Greece? The South of France? Being soldiers, we lived on scuttlebutt, none of it accurate.
Turned out the first answer was Sicily.
Sicily is a big, hot, dusty, stony, hard-hearted island that’s been conquered by just about every empire in the history of the Mediterranean: Athenians, Carthaginians, Phoenicians, Romans, Normans, you name it, and now it was our turn to conquer it. And damned if we didn’t just do it.
This is the story of three young women who fought in the greatest war in human history: Frangie Marr, an undersized colored girl from Tulsa, Oklahoma who loved animals; time after time she ran into the thick of the fight, not to kill but to save lives. Rainy Schulterman, a Jewish girl from New York City with a gift for languages and a ruthless determination to destroy Nazis. And Rio Richlin, an underage white farm girl from Northern California who could not manage her love life and never was quite sure why she was in this war, not until we reached the camps anyway, but she could sure kill the hell out of Krauts.
They didn’t win the war alone, those three, nor did the rest of us, but we all did our part and we didn’t disgrace ourselves or let our brothers and sisters down, which is all any soldier can aspire to.
That and getting home alive.
RIO RICHLIN—CAMP ZIGZAG, TUNISIA, NORTH AFRICA
“What was it like?” Jenou asks. “That first time? What did you feel?”
Rio Richlin sighs wearily.
Rio and Jenou Castain, best friends for almost their entire lives, lie face up on a moth-eaten green blanket spread over the hood of a burned-out German half-track, heads propped up against the slit windows, legs dangling down in front of the armor-covered radiator. The track is sleeker than the American version, lower in profile, normally a very useful vehicle. But this particular German half-track had been hit by a passing Spitfire some weeks earlier, so it is riddled with holes you could stick a thumb into. The bogie wheels driving the track are splayed out, and both tracks have been dragged off and are now in use as a relatively clean “sidewalk”