Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

A man of strong opinions but limited vocabulary, O’Doull thought. He nodded to McDougald: “Pass gas for me, Granny.” Before the corporal could editorialize about that, McDougald stuck an ether cone over his face. He got out another couple of blurry four-letter words, then went limp.

“Watch what the fuck you’re doin’ with the fuckin’ scalpel, Doc,” Eddie said.

“Everybody’s a funny man,” O’Doull said mournfully. Eddie wasn’t half so impassioned as the corporal. Of course, he hadn’t just stopped a bullet, either. O’Doull cut away still more of the trouser leg and the wound dressing, too. Had the corporal stopped the bullet, or had it just taken a bite out of him and kept on going? O’Doull would have bet the round was long gone, but he did some probing all the same. You never could tell.

“Anything?” McDougald asked.

“Doesn’t look like it,” O’Doull answered. “They can X-ray him when they get him back to the division hospital, but it sure as hell looks like a hometowner to me. I’m going to try to spread his skin over as much of the wound as it’ll cover, tie off some of the bigger bleeders, dust him with sulfa and bandage him up, and then send him on his merry way.”

“Make sure you don’t tie off the artery when you’re fooling around in there,” McDougald warned.

“I’ll be careful.” O’Doull knew some doctors would have got their noses out of joint at a warning from a mere medic. You wouldn’t make a mistake like that if you were paying attention to what you were doing. But you could if you got careless. Granny helped make sure O’Doull didn’t.

The wound wasn’t pretty after he got done with it, but he thought the corporal had a good prognosis. Whether the noncom’s wife had a good prognosis might be a different story. When O’Doull said as much, McDougald said, “This guy won’t enter the hundred-yard dash in the Olympics any time soon. Maybe she can outrun him.”

“Olympics. Right.” O’Doull turned to Eddie and Sam. “Take him back to division. Tell ’em to keep an eye on his blood pressure, give him plasma if it falls. I don’t think it will-he looks pretty good-but they should monitor it.”

“Right, Doc,” Eddie said. Sam nodded-a paragraph from him.

O’Doull let out a sigh after they carried the wounded corporal away. “Another miracle of modern medicine,” he said.

McDougald clucked at his sarcastic tone. “Hey, you did good, Doc. I think that guy’ll be fine, and he lost a lot of meat off the bone.”

“Only thing I did that a surgeon in the War of Secession couldn’t have was put sulfa powder on the wound,” O’Doull said. “That doesn’t make me feel special, believe me.”

“Leg wounds are what they are,” McDougald answered with a shrug. “Nobody in the War of Secession knew anything about X-rays or plasma, I’ll tell you that. And the old-timers couldn’t do anything about chest or belly wounds-they had to watch people die of shock and blood poisoning. We’ve got a real chance against them-well, some, anyhow.”

“Hot damn.” But O’Doull shook his head. “Sorry, Granny. I’m tired as hell.” He didn’t see that changing any time soon, either.

Honolulu was a nervous town these days. With the Japanese holding Midway and with their airplane carrier probing down from the northwest, all of the main Sandwich Islands were nervous these days. The United States had taken them from Britain at the start of the Great War, and it looked altogether too possible that they might change hands again in the not very indefinite future.

George Enos, Jr., understood exactly why the Sandwich Islands were nervous. His destroyer, the USS Townsend, was in dry dock at Pearl Harbor. Japanese carrier aircraft had pummeled her when she poked her nose up too close to Midway. There were no U.S. airplane carriers in the Pacific right now. Sending ships around the Horn wasn’t easy, fast, or efficient-and the fight in the North Atlantic was right at the USA’s front door. U.S. warships and what chunks of the German High Seas Fleet that could get out of the North Sea squared off there against the British, Confederate, and French Navies. The Sandwich Islands? The Sandwich Islands were a long way from anywhere.

The chief of George’s twin 40mm antiaircraft gun owned the rock-ribbed Republican name of Fremont Blaine Dalby. His politics matched his name, which made him a queer bird. The Republicans, to the left of the Democrats and the right of the Socialists, had won few elections since the 1880s.

“You coming into town with us, George?” he asked. The gun crew had got a twenty-four-hour liberty. The whole ship’s crew was getting liberty in rotation while repair teams set the destroyer to rights again.

“I dunno,” George said uncomfortably.

“I dunno.” Dalby mocked not only his indecision but his flat Boston accent, which sounded especially absurd in the petty officer’s falsetto. “Well, you better make up your mind pretty damn quick.”

“Yeah.” George didn’t mind going into Honolulu with his buddies. He didn’t mind drinking with them, even if he got blind drunk. Part of him, though, did mind the idea of standing in line at one of Honolulu’s countless brothels for a quick piece of ass. He was married and had a couple of boys, and he’d never fooled around on Connie. Of course, he’d never been so far from her, either, or had so little chance of seeing her any time soon. When he was out on a fishing run, he made up for lost time as soon as his boat got back to T Wharf. He wasn’t coming back to T Wharf, or even to Boston, maybe for years.

And Fremont Dalby knew exactly what ailed him. The gun-crew chief gave him an elbow in the ribs. “What she don’t know won’t hurt her,” he said.

“Yeah,” George said again. Connie was a long way away. His pals, the men he ate and slept with, the men he fought beside, were right here. He didn’t want them to think he was a wet blanket. And I don’t have to stand in line at a whorehouse, he told himself. That helped salve his conscience. He nodded. “Sure, I’ll come.”

“Oh, boy.” Dalby made as if to bow. “Thank you so much. Well, come on, then, if you’re coming.”

Along with the other ratings given liberty, the gun crew showed their paperwork before leaving the barracks and then headed for the nearest trolley stop. From the Pearl City stop, they rode east past Custer Field, one of the many airstrips on Oahu. Even as they passed, Wright fighters were landing and taking off. An air umbrella floated over Oahu at all times.

“I wish we’d had some of those guys up over our heads when the Japs jumped us,” George said.

“Would’ve been nice,” agreed Fritz Gustafson, the loader on the twin 40mm cannon. The rest of the men from the gun crew nodded.

“Technically, we were under air cover,” Dalby said. Several people, George Enos, Jr., among them, let out snorts, guffaws, hoots, and other expressions of derision and disbelief. Dalby held up his right hand, as if taking oath in court. “So help me, we were. Fighters could have flown up from here to the ship and got back.”

“Big fucking deal,” George said. Others expressed similar opinions, some even more colorfully.

“Yeah, I know,” Dalby said. “It would’ve taken ’em most of an hour to get there, the fight would’ve been over by the time they did, and they couldn’t’ve hung around anyway, not if they did want to get back. But we were under air cover, by God. That’s how the brass sees it.”

The way George saw it, the brass was full of idiots. He would have found formidable support for that view among ratings-and probably more than he would have imagined among officers as well. Flabbling about it would just have ruined the day, so he made himself keep quiet. The Sandwich Islands were too nice a place to waste time getting upset and fussing for no good reason.