Once there was a war

“Do you suppose we’ll ever be let to go to London?” he asks.

“Sure. When you get a pass.”

“Well, that’s a long way off, isn’t it?”

“Not so far. You could make it on a forty-eight hour pass easy and have lots of time.”

“Well. Are there lots of girls there?”

“Sure. Plenty.”

“And will they, will they talk to a guy?”

“Sure they will.”

“Hot damn!” says the boy. “Oh, hot damn!”

“Fall in,” the stout, worried captain shouts, and, “Fall in,” the sergeants shout. The blond boy gets in line, still holding his cup. The big girl yells at him over the music, “Hey, sonny. We need those cups.”

She rushes fiercely up to him and grabs the cup and then quickly pats him once on the shoulder. The men on both sides of him laugh loudly, as if it were very funny.

A HAND

LONDON, July 29, 1943—The soldier wears a maroon bathrobe and pajamas and slippers, the uniform of the Army hospital. He is a little pale and shaky, the way convalescents are. His left arm he carries crooked and high, and the fingers of his left hand hook over helplessly. In front of him on a table is a half-built model of a Liberator. Not covered yet, but a mass of tiny struts and ribs and braces. And he has a sheet of balsa wood, stamped with the patterns, and he has a razor blade and a little bowl of glue, with a match sticking out of it.

“I got hurt in Africa,” he says. “Got hit in the stomach, but they fixed that up pretty good.” He holds up his left arm. “This is what bothers me,” he says. “That was broke awful bad. I haven’t been out of a cast long.” He moves the fingers slightly. “Not much feeling in them,” he says. “I can’t make a fist. I can’t grab hold of anything. At least, I couldn’t. It’s kind of numb.

“I got hold of this model,” he says. “I can hold things down with my hand, like this.” He puts the side of his hand down on the sheet of balsa. “I did all of that with my right hand. I guess it’s lucky I’m right-handed.” He regards his left hand and moves the fingers. “The doctor says I’ll be able to use it to grab hold of things if I just exercise it. But it’s hard to exercise it when you can just barely feel it’s there.

“A funny thing happened yesterday,” he says. “Here, I’ll show you the exact place.” He takes a pencil and sticks it into the maze of tiny braces. “There, you see that piece in there? The one with the little pencil mark on it? I marked it so I’d remember which one it was.

“Yesterday I was trying to get that set in right, and you can see it’s a hard place to get at. You’ve got to hold it here and work it up under. Well, I didn’t even know I was doing it. I came to, and I was holding that little piece in my left hand.” He regards the wizened finger with amazement. “I told the doctor about it and he said that was all right and I should try to use it every bit I could. Well, sir, when I think about it I can’t do it. Not yet, anyway. Maybe I can later, a little bit at a time. I roll a pencil under my fingers. They say that’s a good thing to do. I can feel it some, too.”

He holds a sheet of balsa pattern down with the side of his left hand and with a razor blade carefully cuts out the tiny curved piece he is going to use next. It is an intricate piece, and his hand shakes a little, but the razor blade runs through on the black line, and he lifts the little piece free and puts it down on the table to apply a spot of glue to each end of it. Then carefully, with his right hand, he sets the piece in its place. “I let my nails grow long,” he says. “I can use my fingernails for lots of things.” With the long fingernail of his right forefinger he scrapes off a little drop of glue that is squeezed out of the joint and wipes it on a piece of paper.

“I’m worried about this hand,” he says. “Of course, I guess I can get a job. I’m not worried about that so much. I can always get a job. But I’ve got to get this hand into shape so that it will grab ahold of things.” He turns the model plane over and then studies the pattern sheet for the next piece. He is silent for a long time. “My wife knows I was hurt. She doesn’t know how bad. She knows I’m going to get well all right and come home, but—she must be thinking pretty hard. I got to get that hand working. She wouldn’t like a cripple with a hand that wouldn’t work.”

His eyes are a little feverish. “Well, how would you like a cripple to come home? What would you think about that?