Designated Targets

While Julia Duffy was growing up, having received a good deal of her education from popular media, she assumed that the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, or MASH, was born in the Korean War.

In fact, the idea of a self-contained medical unit, performing surgery and providing postoperative care immediately behind the front line, was a child of the Second World War. The first MASH units were established in August 1945. Or they would have been.

Duffy drove into the 8066th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in early October 1942, not in Korea, but about a hundred kilometers north of Brisbane, Australia. It looked just as she expected from all those years of watching syndicated reruns on TV: the khaki tents and ramshackle huts made of corrugated iron and ply board, the odd assortment of harried-looking medicos, the sense of barely controlled chaos as waves of casualties arrived on litters. It even boasted a helipad, on a hill cleared of vegetation, just up from a big open area that served as a triage point. The seasons were turning to summer in the southern hemisphere, drying everything out, so that some days she felt as if the air itself might just catch alight. The MASH unit was caked in a fine red dust, stirred up by passing choppers.

There were only nine dedicated medevac choppers in this theater, however, so they tended to fly in only the most critical cases. Marine Sergeant Arthur Snider definitely wasn’t critical. He might yet lose his leg, but his life wasn’t in grave danger.

His company CO had shoved him onto a Blackhawk that was dusting off five of his comrades who did need to get onto an operating table, and inside of fifteen minutes if they were going to pull through. Those who did survive would do so thanks to Snider, who was the toast of his unit for rallying the counterambush back on Hill 178.

Julia Duffy arrived about an hour and half after Snider, determined to get an interview. She had a shit-hot story to relay back to New York, via Rosanna in Hawaii, if she could just find this guy for an interview.

Her jeep slewed to a halt in a cloud of red dust in front of the hospital’s postop ward. She thanked the driver and hopped down, heaving her backpack, Sonycam rig, and machine pistol. She waved away an Australian nurse who came running at her with a horrified look on her lumpy 1940s face. Julia was still matted with gore and filth from the fight back on the line. Her reactive-matrix armor was so heavily caked with blood and mud that she could feel it stiffening up in the warm spring sunlight.

The nurse kept coming. “Are you okay, young man?” she cried out.

Julia eased off her helmet, shaking her hair free.

“Oh!” said the nurse. “I see. You’re one of them.”

The reporter couldn’t help but smile. It was a thin, wan shadow of a smile that peeked out from under the adrenaline backwash and deep body revulsion with which she was so familiar—but a smile nonetheless.

“That’s right,” she said. “My name’s Duffy. I’m looking for a marine corps sergeant, a ’temp, would have come in about ninety minutes ago. Leg wound. Got clipped up on One-seventy-eight in that big ambush this morning.”

The woman brightened up considerably. “Oh, you mean Sergeant Snider!” She beamed. “He’s still waiting to go into surgery. They say he saved his whole company. There’s a Movietone cameraman coming to film him tonight.”

“Is there?” Julia said. “Well, I was up on One-seventy-eight myself, this morning, Nurse . . . Halligan,” she continued, reading the woman’s name tag. “Do you think I could talk to him?”

Nurse Halligan seemed to consider Julia in a new light now. She took in the befouled armor and the futuristic machine gun; the fighting knife that was still covered in dried, blackened blood; the bandaged hand and the field sutures that had reattached a flap of bruised skin on her left cheek. “Are you one of those special soldiers, Miss Duffy?”

“Actually, I’m a reporter, ma’am. For the New York Times. Normally embedded with the Eighty-second MEU.” She hoisted the Sonycam. “But I was on assignment filming the sergeant’s platoon this morning. I’d very much like to talk to him now, if I could.”

Not for the first time was Julia interested to see the wonder, and even a touch of dread, that so often came over contemporary women when they met their counterparts from the next century. More important, this one displayed no hint of the guarded response that might have characterized a more media-aware individual from her own time.

“Well, it’s not usual, but I suppose, if you were with him this morning . . . of course, of course, just follow me.”