O’Doull had his own fair share of the cynicism so many medical men wear. When you spend your days looking at the way the human body can go wrong-or, in war, can be made to go wrong-you are unlikely to believe, as Candide did, that this is the best of all possible worlds. But Granny McDougald had his fair share and what seemed like two or three other people’s besides.
“You know what we really need?” McDougald went on as O’Doull put in suture after suture.
“Tell me. I’m all ears,” O’Doull replied.
“Must make sewing up that poor bastard kind of clumsy, but all right,” the senior medic said. “What we really need is a bomb so big and juicy, they won’t waste it on the battlefield. They’ll drop it on New York City or New Orleans, and boom!-it’ll blow the whole place right off the map like that.” He snapped his fingers.
“Calisse!” O’Doull said, and then, “Son of a bitch! Why would you want a bomb like that?”
“Because it’s the only thing I can think of that’s so awful that after you use it a few times and everybody sees how awful it is, it’ll scare the shit out of people and they won’t want to use it any more. If we had bombs like that and the CSA did and England and France and Germany and Austria-Hungary and Russia and the Japs, how the hell could you fight a war?”
“Carefully,” O’Doull answered. He set down his scalpel as Granville McDougald laughed. “I’ve got this guy stabilized, or as stabilized as I can get him. If his lungs aren’t wrecked and if the tissue the blast tore up doesn’t go gangrenous on him, chances are he’ll pull through.”
“Good job, Doc. I wouldn’t have given more than about four bits for his chances when the corpsmen hauled him in,” McDougald said.
A couple of minutes later, at Leonard O’Doull’s direction, the corpsmen sent the wounded man back to a real hospital several miles to the rear. He might finish his recovery there, or he might go farther back still. O’Doull would have bet on the latter-this guy would live, he thought, but wasn’t likely to put on a helmet and pick up a Springfield again any time soon.
O’Doull shed his mask and tossed it in a trash can. He washed the soldier’s blood off his hands and chucked his surgical instruments into a tub of alcohol. If he had time, he’d autoclave them before he used them again. If he didn’t…Well, alcohol made a good disinfectant.
“I’m going outside for a smoke before they bring in the next poor miserable so-and-so,” he said. “Come with me?”
“You bet,” McDougald said. “Grab all the chances to loaf you can-they may not come your way again.”
With ether and alcohol and other inflammables inside the aid station, lighting up in there was severely discouraged-with a blunt instrument, if necessary. Once O’Doull had stepped away from the green-gray tent, he took out a pack of Niagara Falls.
“Oh, come on, Doc.” McDougald pulled a horrible face. “Haven’t you got anything better than those barge scrapings?”
“’Fraid not,” O’Doull admitted. “Smoked my last Confederate cigarette a couple of hours ago. U.S. tobacco won’t kill me, and it’s like coffee-bad is better than none at all.”
“Like booze, too,” the medic said, and the doctor didn’t deny it. McDougald reached into his pocket and extracted a pack of Dukes. “Here. Bad is better than none, but good is better than bad.”
“Thanks, Granny. I owe you,” O’Doull said. The noncom was a better scrounger than he was. Some headline that made. O’Doull took a cigarette and stuck it in his mouth. McDougald gave him a light. He inhaled, then smiled. “My hat’s off to the Dukes.”
“I ought to make you put up your dukes for one that bad.” Granville McDougald paused. “Except mine was even worse, wasn’t it?”
“Sure wasn’t any better,” O’Doull allowed. “But this tobacco is, and I thank you for it.”
“Any time,” McDougald said. “Not like I haven’t mooched butts from you a time or three.”
The roar of artillery from behind them drowned his last couple of words. The fire from the big and medium guns went on and on and on. Some of the shells flying west gurgled as they spun through the air. Leonard O’Doull winced at that sound: gas rounds. He tried to look on the bright side of things: “Sounds like we’re finally going over the river.”
“And through the woods, yeah, but where’s Grandmother’s house?” McDougald said. While O’Doull was still digesting that, the medic went on, “About time we got across the damn Scioto, don’t you think? Hanging on to Chillicothe like they have, the Confederates must have pulled God only knows how many men and how much materiel out of northern Ohio.”
“You sure you don’t belong back at corps HQ or something?” O’Doull said. McDougald laughed at him.
They had time to finish their cigarettes, and that was about it. Then the familiar and hated shout of, “Doc! Hey, Doc!” rang out again.
“I’m here!” O’Doull yelled. More quietly, he added, “Well, let’s see what we’ve got this time.”
They had a corporal with a bullet through his calf. He was cussing a blue streak. “Hey, keep your shirt on, pal,” Granville McDougald said. “If that’s not a hometowner, there’s no such animal.”
“Fuck hometowners,” the corporal snarled. “And fuck you, too, Jack. For one thing, it hurts like shit. And besides, I don’t want any goddamn hometowners. I want to blow the balls off some more of Featherston’s fuckers.”
A man of strong opinions, O’Doull thought. His voice dry, he said, “It’s not usually smart to swear at the guy who’s going to help fix you up. You might find out it hurts even more than you expected. And before you tell me where to head in, you need to know I’m a major.” Cussing out an officer was a good way for an enlisted man to run into more trouble than he ever wanted to find.
The noncom opened his mouth to draw in a breath. About then, though, the novocaine O’Doull injected by the wound took effect. What came out was, “Oh, yeah. That’s not so fucking bad now. You can go ahead and sew me up.” He caught himself. “You can go ahead and sew me up, sir.”
O’Doull decided he’d been given the glove. By Granny McDougald’s barely smothered snort, he thought the same thing. But the corporal scrupulously stayed within regulations. O’Doull cleaned out the wound and sewed it up. “Like it or not, pal, you’ve got a hometowner,” he said. “I know you’d be happier if you didn’t get shot, but you could have stopped it with your face or your chest, too.”
“Oh, yeah. I know. I’ve seen-” He broke off, then shook his head. “I started to say, I’ve seen as much of that shit as you have, but I probably haven’t.”
“Depends,” O’Doull answered. “We see plenty of nasty wounds, but the poor guys who get killed on the spot don’t make it back to us. Maybe it evens out.”
“Hot damn,” the corporal said. “Tell you one thing, though-it’s a bunch of fucked-up shit any which way.”
“Buddy, you are preaching to the choir,” Granville McDougald said solemnly. O’Doull decided he couldn’t have put it better himself.
From the deck of the USS Townsend, George Enos watched two new escort carriers come into Pearl Harbor. Like the pair that had previously sailed from the West Coast down to the Sandwich Islands, the Tripoli and the Yorktown were as ugly as a mud fence. They were built on freighter hulls, with a flight deck and a little island slapped on topside. They had a freighter’s machinery, too, and couldn’t make better than eighteen knots unless they fell off a cliff.
But each one of them had thirty airplanes: fighters, dive bombers, and torpedo-carriers. They weren’t fleet carriers; since the loss of the Remembrance more than a year earlier, the USA had no fleet carriers operating in the Pacific. Still, they were ever so much better than no carriers at all, which was what the United States had had in these waters for most of the time since the Remembrance went to the bottom.