LITMIR.BIZ

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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.

      Frangie shrugs. “Not in this weather, but I hear the same latrine rumors you do, Moore.” It’s perhaps more curt than she intends—she is feeling better . . . better, but not exactly fresh as a daisy. Her mouth tastes like a dead squirrel. And while the rain has slowed, the wind is still whipping water off the deck to sting Frangie’s cheeks.

      “Yeah.” Moore is silent for a long while. “Some of the boys are worried. Not scared, exactly, just worried. They’ve heard stories about panzers. How our 76s just bounce off their armor and their 88s go right through ours.”

      Frangie looks at him in surprise. Not because worry is unusual—a GI who doesn’t worry about going into battle should be Section Eight, mustered out as crazy. No, it’s the fact that he is confiding this to her. Is it because she’s a woman, or because she’s a medic?

      Then it dawns on her: despite carrying a medical bag rather than a rifle, Frangie is a veteran. And Moore is not. He’s seeking reassurance. And not just for “some of the boys.”

      “I suppose the air corps will have destroyed a lot of the panzers by the time we even get there,” Frangie says.

      Moore snorts derisively. “Air corps. We’ll be lucky if they don’t bomb us.” Another silence. “They’re just nervous is all. Some of the boys. They don’t know what it will be like.”

       Neither do you, Moore.

      “I guess it’s better to have all that armor plate around you than just be walking along like infantry,” Frangie suggests.

      Moore shakes his head. “Infantry can dig a hole. A tank? See, Doc, a tank is a big fat bull’s-eye. A prize! No Kraut tank driver goes around bragging about how many infantry he killed; he wants to kill tanks. Heck, I want to kill tanks! I want to go home someday, prop Tom Trey—that’s his nickname—up on my knee and tell him how Daddy wiped out all these panzers and saved the day! Problem is, old Fritz over in that panzer has better armor and a heavier gun than I do.”

      And more experience.

       And his own children to whom he too would like to brag.

      “They teach us that most wounds are superficial, and most fellows don’t get hurt at all,” Frangie says, squeegeeing rainwater from her eyes.

      She doesn’t know how to reassure Moore. In her first artillery barrage she had seen her friend, Doon Acey, a boy from back home, spill his intestines like fat sausages falling from a split grocery bag. She’s seen traumatic amputations, chest wounds, head wounds, and the bullet to the left foot that is the signature of a soldier looking to escape the war by any means available. She knows the statistics and they’re true enough, but she’s held the hands of the dying, and she is all out of optimism.

      “They say this new Tiger tank the Krauts have . . .” Moore makes a low whistle.

      “They say lots of things.”

      “Yeah. I guess that’s so. The only thing is, Doc, I’m . . . some of the boys are real scared of burning.”

      “Burning?”

      Moore shrugs. “You know what the Limeys say? They call it a ‘brew up.’”

      “That’s when they’re making tea,” Frangie says. “They call that a brew up.”

      Moore shakes his head. “Not when they’re talking about a tank battle. Your tank catches fire, that’s a brew up. Men trying to get out of the hatches. Maybe our own Willy Pete going off.”

      “Who’s Willy Pete?”

      “Willy Pete. WP. White phosphorous. We carry some white phosphorous rounds, you know, to make smoke. But if the Willy Pete gets on you, you can’t put it out, see. It’s like glue that just burns and burns and burns, all the way down to the bone.”

      Now Frangie definitely wants out of this conversation. She cannot reassure him because of all wounds it is burning that frightens her the most as well. The very thought of it makes her heart race with fear. She glances around, hoping for an easy escape.

      “I wouldn’t want to live if I got burned bad,” Moore says.

      And suddenly Frangie has the feeling the floor is slipping away for a whole different reason.

      “We give you morphine and—”

      “I don’t want to burn in a tank, Doc. None of the boys do. I mean, if you find me in that, you know, condition, I wouldn’t mind at all if maybe I got too much morphine. If you understand me.” He laughs insincerely as if it’s a joke.

      “Sergeant Moore,” Frangie says firmly, “I’m just a bedpan commando, I’m not God. My job is to keep you alive, not to kill you.”

      Moore stiffens and tilts his head back to look down his nose at her. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand. You’re a woman.”

      “Right. Goodbye, Moore,” Frangie says and walks away.

      The conversation is disturbing, but what strikes her now is how she had the nerve to just turn her back and walk away. That is definitely not typical of Frangie Marr. All her life she has been soft-spoken, kind to animals, deferential to older people, deferential to men, and above all, deferential to white folks. That’s just common sense and decency, with that last bit being simple self-preservation—no colored girl growing up in Tulsa, Oklahoma talks back to a white person, not if she wants to reach old age.

      Deference has in many ways defined Frangie’s life. She has ambitions, but can’t speak about them because it isn’t her place to have high and mighty aspirations. All her life Frangie has given way to her parents, her pastor, her elders, her teachers, men and white people.

      Moore is a colored

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