Dane smiled, “Totally, Amanda. However, you may call me the Great Dane if you wish and I won’t object at all.”
Nurse Mallard blinked and then smiled engagingly. “That, Lieutenant, remains to be seen. Also, and in case you haven’t noticed, I’m a civilian nurse, which means I’m not all that impressed by anyone’s rank, especially a mere lieutenant’s,” she said as she checked him over, verifying that his heart was working and that he was still breathing. He noticed that both had picked up the pace as she touched him.
“I’m still a civilian at heart myself,” Tim said as she worked. He quickly explained that before being recalled to the navy, he’d been employed as an assistant principal at a junior high school where he also coached basketball and track. “Right now I’d very much like to be disciplining kids who talked in class or got caught necking in the park next to the school instead of worrying about Japanese trying to kill me.”
Nurse Mallard told him to stand up and he did, wobbling just a bit. “I understand your thoughts,” she said. “So how did you wind up in the navy in the first place? I’m from the Annapolis area and noticed that you do not have an academy ring.”
She steadied him and handed him his crutches. Dane was six feet tall and one hundred and eighty pounds and she moved him effortlessly. His leg wasn’t broken; his heavily taped knee had been severely sprained and was massively bruised. He grimaced. He hadn’t spent that much time on his feet and he felt stiff as a board.
“I had good grades, so I was admitted to Northwestern. They had a naval ROTC program. It looked interesting, and it helped pay the tuition. I wound up serving my active duty in Chicago of all places, but the navy had another series of budget cuts and I was cut loose until Roosevelt decided we needed a bigger navy. I got recalled and sent to Hawaii.”
“So you’re not a career type?” she asked as she guided him around the ward, ignoring the stares from the men in their beds along with their comments that they, too, would like Nurse Mallard to assist them.
“That may depend on the length of the war, but no. If the war lasts until 1980 like they say, then I’ll be a careerist by default and probably still be a junior officer. Like you said, I didn’t go to the Naval Academy, which might hold me back forever. Now, how did you become a nurse?”
Nurse Amanda Mallard wasn’t beautiful. She was, instead, perky and cute, and when she smiled she exposed two upper front teeth that overlapped slightly. Dane thought it was charming. She had light brown hair that was cut short. He’d seen her walking around before, and some of the other guys in the ward thought she was too skinny and flat-chested, even bookish looking when she put on her glasses. Dane disagreed. He thought she was pretty and seemed very pleasant even though she hadn’t spoken to him before now. He’d always thought that the old saying that men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses was nonsense.
“I became a nurse because, even though this is the twentieth century, there aren’t all that many occupations where a woman is welcome. Nursing is one, and I do enjoy helping people, so I studied at the University of Maryland. I’m a Terrapin, and I’m okay with a nursing career.”
“Going to be a nurse forever?”
“Unless I marry some rich guy, and schoolteachers don’t qualify.”
He laughed. “If my father’s real estate schemes work out, maybe I’ll join him and get rich and look you up.” His leg stiffened and he winced.
“Don’t complain about the pain, Lieutenant,” she said as he bit back a groan, “it’ll go away if you work at it and, besides, you don’t want to be left behind, do you?”
“What are you talking about and why don’t you call me by my first name?”
“You’ll be Tim when you’re out of here; until then, we keep it formal and militarily correct, even though I am a mere civilian.”
“All right, but what do you mean about being left behind?”
“You’re still on Spruance’s staff, aren’t you?”
“What’s left of it,” he said grimly, recalling their two days in the sub and subsequently being picked up by a flying boat and taken to Pearl Harbor.
Spruance was recovering well and already out of the hospital. He was dealing with the terrible fact that, along with the two carriers under his command and most of their crews, almost all of his staff had been killed in the disastrous Battle of Midway, which was commonly being referred to as the Midway Massacre. After destroying Spruance’s force, the Japanese had found the remaining third carrier, the Yorktown, near Midway and sunk it as well, along with two cruisers and six destroyers. TF 17’s commander, Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher, had gone down with his ship.
Thus, all three invaluable and, for the moment at least, irreplaceable carriers had been lost. Japanese casualties had been one damaged carrier, one submarine sunk, and a handful of airplanes shot down.
Midway was the latest in a long litany of defeats in the Pacific that had begun with Pearl Harbor and ran on through Wake Island, Guam, the Philippines, Java Sea, Coral Sea, and now Midway. Some argued that the battle of the Coral Sea was at worst a draw, but Tim thought that it was a loss even though a likely attack on Australia had been blunted. He expected the Japs would be back attacking Australia soon enough since the defeat at Midway. Jimmy Doolittle’s bombing attack on Tokyo had momentarily buoyed spirits but had accomplished nothing in the way of a military objective.
Amanda took his arm and steered him down another hallway that led outdoors and he walked gingerly down a street. It felt good to be in the fresh, flower-scented warm air of Hawaii. He could almost forget about the war. Almost, since just about every male was in uniform. He felt his strength returning and could walk fairly steadily now, but he liked the feel of Amanda’s hand on his arm. She came a little above his shoulder.
“Lieutenant, assuming you’re correct that you are still on Spruance’s staff, you are all going back to California. Same with Nimitz’s people. Rumor has it the navy feels that Hawaii is a lost cause since there aren’t very many major American ships remaining in the Pacific to protect it.”
Tom thought it made a hard and painful kind of sense. He’d seen the admiral once since their rescue when he’d visited Tim. He’d thanked Tim for saving his life—and for not killing him. Spruance had smiled when he said it, but Dane saw the agony in his eyes. All those men, all those ships now resting on the bottom of the ocean, had been his.
Amanda continued. “As I understand it, the rules for evacuation are simple. If you can walk, you’ll be evacuated by submarine; otherwise, you’ll have to wait for a destroyer or a transport, or even a hospital ship.”
“I’ll take my chances on the sub,” he said grimly.
Tim had hated his first trip in the claustrophobic submarine, but quickly decided a second trip would be better than waiting in Hawaii for the world to end. There had been too many attacks on transports to make them viable alternatives. As for hospital ships, the Japanese record for atrocities included attacks on those unarmed and helpless vessels as well. He handed Amanda his crutches and walked unsteadily but unaided. He was determined to be ready to walk onto a sub.
Amanda was about to comment when air raid sirens went off. This was the first time it had happened since Dane had arrived in Hawaii and he was momentarily perplexed.
“Maybe the Japs are back,” she said and grabbed his arm, “There were a lot of false alarms after December seventh, with a lot of Nervous Nellies seeing Japanese bogeymen in their flower gardens, but who knows.” She grabbed his arm more tightly and pushed him. “Let’s see how fast you can limp to a shelter.”
Shelter was a cement block building that quickly filled with people and Tim moved a lot quicker than he thought he could. Fear was a great motivator, he decided.