Michael Grant - Purple Hearts

Frangie Marr has seen many a combat wound in her time as an army medic, but even gut-shot GIs often looked better than a GI who’d been desperately seasick for forty-eight hours. Seasick without even leaving port, except for a false launch that had to be called back due to bad weather.

The air in the hold of the LST reeks of gasoline, engine fumes, human feces from a malfunctioning bathroom—called a “head” aboard ship—human sweat and human vomit, and it is so thick with cigarette smoke that Frangie doubts it contains enough oxygen to sustain human life. That is bad enough.

Worse, far worse, is the fact that no part of the big steel box designated Landing Ship Tank 86 is standing still. The flat-bottomed LST rises and falls on every swell, rocks and rolls on the wake of every passing ship. The floor is alive beneath her feet, a surging, heaving, sliding funhouse ride that has every single susceptible person aboard spewing seemingly endless buckets of vomit.

Some are blessedly immune, and are cordially hated by the sufferers. Some are in a sort of middle zone: queasy at times, maybe needing a relatively decorous and controlled vomit once or twice a day. Others . . . well, others lie prostrate in their own bodily fluids, weak, pathetic, fragrant, and a burden to themselves and everyone else.

“Did you take your pills?” Frangie demands in her Official Medical Voice.

“I did, Doc. You gotta get me a dose of that medical bourbon you got.”

“It’s rum, not bourbon, and—”

“Well, that’s just foolish,” Vanderbilt DeRay says, frowning and shaking his head. “You don’t want rum if you got decent corn whiskey. Maybe something with some age on it, to mellow the flavor . . .”

“Sergeant DeRay,” Frangie says sternly. “Alcohol is not a cure for seasickness. In fact, given your condition, and the fact that you stink of moonshine, I’d say you have been treating yourself with homemade hooch. And it does not seem to have worked, because you are the greenest black man I’ve ever seen.”

This brings laughter from soldiers bunked above, and to the left, and the right, and behind. Of course only the immune can laugh, and since Frangie herself is Category Two: queasy and barely maintaining, she is not fond of soldiers who can ride this sluggish roller coaster night and day and still laugh.

She snarls at them over her shoulder, but while Frangie commands respect for her skills, she is still the smallest person in the battalion, and known for being kind and easy-going besides, and her snarl scares no one.

Frangie has been assigned to an all-black tank battalion—all colored troops aside from some of the most senior officers. The battalion is comprised of seven Sherman M4 medium tanks, six Sherman DDs (the amphibious version of the Sherman fitted with a flotation skirt), five Stuart light tanks, an independent squad of assault guns (modified Shermans), four Tank Recovery Vehicles (Shermans with cranes welded on) and three half-tracks mounting 81-millimeter mortars and machine guns. In addition to all those killing tools, the battalion had a long trail of supply trucks and maintenance and repair squads with their own specialized gear, and a gaggle of jeeps, one of which will be Frangie’s.

And of course two extra-nice Sherman M4s for the battalion commander and his operations chief.

Frangie is a medic, not a nurse, and definitely not a doctor, and she is not in any way specially qualified to treat seasickness (no one really is) but what sick GIs want most—aside from medical booze—is attention from someone with at least some medical standing, and Frangie is happy to play the part. However powerless she might be.

Frangie leaves the sickly sergeant and winds her way up on deck into lashing rain and blustery wind. The upper deck is covered with trucks and jeeps, with the much heavier tanks down below on the tank deck. Canvas covers on the trucks snap in the wind. Sailors haul ropes and push with rough geniality through gaggles of time-killing soldiers.

Frangie checks the wind, walks over to the lee side, and carefully vomits up her dinner. The next LST is moored just a few feet away, and over there, on that LST, Frangie sees a white sailor doing exactly what she’s doing. They exchange grim nods.

LSTs are so thick in the harbor that Frangie could literally walk for half a mile just jumping from ship to ship. It’s as if a rolling gray steel blanket has been drawn over the water. LST 86 has an unenviable position on the outer edge of one long row of LSTs, exposing it more directly to the bumptious sea.

This is no way to go to war.

“So you got it too, huh, Doc?”

Frangie wipes her mouth and reflects on the fact that once upon a time she would have been mortified to vomit in front of another person, let alone a man. But it’s one of the funny things about war—it tends to force you to focus on what really matters: staying alive, doing your job, staying alive . . .

“Yes,” she says, gritting her teeth. “I’ve got it too, though not so bad as many do.”

“Reminds me of my wife when she was pregnant with our first.”

This is safer territory for conversation. Better than talking about sickness when Frangie’s stomach is still far from settled. But Frangie is not interested in conversation; she’d hoped to have a quick puke and then have time to reread a disturbing letter from home.

But politeness rules. “Boy or girl?”

“Boy,” he says proudly. “Thomas Moore the Third, me being Thomas Moore Jr. He was our first. Then we had Elizabeth and Franklin. For FDR.”

He’s a staff sergeant, one of the tank commanders in “her” squad, Sergeant Tommy Moore of Ft. Walton Beach, Florida. He’s in his mid-twenties, but looks older because his hairline is beating a fast and premature retreat. He’s smaller than average, like a lot of tankers—the interior of a Sherman not being congenial to large folks—a garrulous, opinionated father of three who volunteered after Pearl Harbor but had been assigned to a maintenance battalion to be permanently in the rear. It had taken a fight for him to be reassigned to the battalion.

Frangie respects that. But she does not like Moore, having been on the receiving end of one too many slights or insults directed at her sex. Two years into the big change and the overwhelming majority of male soldiers still resent the presence of women as anything other than nurses or what might euphemistically be called “dance partners.” And many of the women, some like Frangie with extensive combat experience, are becoming increasingly impatient with those attitudes. The pecking order is still painfully clear: white men, then colored men, who are more or less equal with white women, and at the very bottom, colored women.

Moore, despite never having fired a shot in anger or felt the concussion wave of a German 88, feels himself inherently superior to Sergeant Francine “Frangie” Marr, Purple Heart, Silver Star, campaign ribbons for North Africa, Sicily and Italy. And though Moore is a tank commander, a husband and father, and a man who fought for the right to fight, he is treated as inherently inferior to any random white draftee.

Overlaid on the structure of race and sex is the system of rank. A white draftee private with a sixth-grade education will salute a black lieutenant, but still consider that colored man his inferior, regardless of his accomplishments.

But there is also a deeper, less obvious dividing line. It runs between those who have been in ‘the shit’ and those who have not. Frangie Marr lives within a series of overlapping structures of race, sex, rank and the unnamable but undeniable awareness that marks those who have, from those who have not . . . yet.

“You reckon we’re ever going to go?” Moore asks. There has been more than one false alarm on that score, and the eternal scuttlebutt comes up with a different D-Day and landing area every five minutes.