Many men had died in Roe's hands before Bastogne. He could still hear the artillery at Carentan. He could still smell the gunpowder which, to be honest, had begun to blend in with the smell of iron and plasma, and Roe wasn't sure if he'd be able to distinguish all the smells when he got back home. If he got home. He still felt the breath from the private whose gaping wound he'd hunched over from dirt and debris. That one had ended up being okay, he thought.
But then there was Nuenen, where one of their fucking medics got shot trying to help that stupid shit that stood stark in the middle of the road. There was Nuenen, where a replacement lost half his face to a Kraut tank that some British officer had refused to bomb because of "civilian property." His last word had been "medic," before his voice and body caught up with his brain and shut down. Webster had insisted on staying behind that little wall, but Roe figured there would be other men getting blown to hell that would need him. Like that other replacement who hadn't been in Europe for more than a few days that got his brain split open all over his weapon, where it burned from the barrel heat, turning gray and charred.
So when they got to Bastogne, Roe expected what a medic is supposed to expect and kept his head down and mouth shut. He gave the comfort he never received and doled out as much care as he could without taking Lipton's coveted Mother Hen position. Roe got called out sometimes for not using nicknames or forgetting conversations. This didn't particularly bother him unless it was Babe, who always sounded actually hurt and actually irritated. Babe would explain later that it was half actual confusion as to why Roe refused to use nicknames, half frustration that no one else in the company did anything when Roe's mental health began to visibly crumble.
The superficial stuff cleared away pretty quickly when artillery started blowing the forest to pieces. And the men, too, but that was a given. Without any bandages or morphine, Roe had lost the one weapon he knew he could fight with and began spending a lot of time on the fringes of conversations or checking on Toye's trench foot, which quickly turned into everyone's trench foot (except for Winters, the only responsible adult in the company as far as Roe was concerned). Roe did have plenty of sulfa powder, though. Infection beware.
Roe wasn't there when Julian died. Even though Martin had kept him back, Roe knew in his gut he should've insisted, should've followed behind them. The virgin Julian would be alive and well and maybe even survive long enough to become the not-virgin Julian, and Babe wouldn't be in the medic foxhole drowning in guilt.
Then there was Muck and Penkala. Holy hell. And Roe was a smart, logical man. He knew there was absolutely nothing to be done for them. Even if Roe wasn't competent enough to know that, there wasn't anything left for Roe to try and save. He did keep Toye and Guarnere safe from infection and blood loss when their legs were ripped off. Yeah Gene, Babe insisted, it would've been a helluva lot worse without you there. The ones you couldn't save were unsaveable to begin with. Don't worry about it, or I'll worry about you.
It was almost always the ones that were goners long before Roe could get to them, if they even called medic, that got to him the most. Babe would remind him almost daily after the war that there wasn't anything Roe could've done. Which should've made him feel better, but it didn't, so he still woke up every once in awhile feeling cold to the bone and with the sensation of stickiness on his hands. The difference this time was that he was in a warm bed in warm Louisiana with one warm Babe next to him, who was a fairly light sleeper when it came to Roe. He'd learned to read him, too. There were nights where Roe couldn't be touched, needed to get up, walk around, be by himself. There were nights where he wanted to talk, not even about the war, just getting things out that were taking up space Roe didn't have; there were nights where he wanted Babe to play with his hair and tell him about Philadelphia and the stupid fights he got into in high school, or the ships he worked on in Jersey. Most nights, however, Roe would roll over and pretend to go back to sleep, which was Babe's cue to curl up around him and hold him tight enough to get the tremors to go away, and then loose enough to lull Roe back to sleep.
For Babe's sake more than his own, Roe tried not to think about the men who died in his hands, before or after or during Bastogne.