From the Angel

"In war, there are no unwounded soldiers." - José Narosky

The day he enters the army he's never been more than fifty miles away from Jersey in any direction and Italy is just a word in his parents' reminiscing, the reason he understands a second language.

Somewhere back in his memory he remembers a faded postcard of Salerno, a stretch of beach and nothing more. It's later when he runs onto that beach with a gun in his hands, bullets flying over his head, striking the men around him. He opens fire as another man shouts orders, and that day he kills his first enemy, a man that any other time he might be playing 21 with in a pool hall, a man who looks strangely like himself. Halfway through the battle the man giving orders falls dead, never even finishing the word he was saying, but the soldier keeps on firing until he doesn't see any more of the enemy. It isn't until they've pulled back from the beach that he realizes he doesn't know the officer's name anymore than he knows the men he shot.

The first Italian girl he kisses speaks no English and has never been outside her village. He treats her like glass, cupping her face lightly in calloused hands, brushing his lips to her's. She tastes of home and he spends the night telling her everything he remembers of Jersey, talking until he's hoarse to brand the fading memories into his mind. She listens quietly, and when morning comes she kisses his forehead and is gone as he slips back to rejoin his men. They bomb her village the next day and he wanders the rubble for hours but never finds her.

The day he holds a stranger in his arms it isn't a beautiful girl or a wounded soldier but a little child. They've bombed out her village, killed her friends. But while the adults of the town spit on his uniform, the child puts her arms around his neck and sings, in a clear, brave voice. He finds himself singing too, childish songs he'd thought long forgotten, and as they hold each other and the bombs fall he isn't sure who's comforting whom. When he leaves the town he promises to return but they don't go back that way again and he never knows if she survived the war.

The next soldier he shoots isn't the enemy but rather a man from his own squad, his best friend to be exact, and it's a fight over a girl who cares nothing for either of them. His friend isn't badly hurt and he says it's an accident but in the back of his mind he isn't sure. Two battles later his friend gets it and he sits in a foxhole holding his dead body for an hour before they tell him to let go. It isn't until he's scrawling his friend's name on a shell that he realizes he doesn't remember the girl's name or what she looked like.

The day he digs a grave it's for one of his friends, a man he won a month's pay from in last night's game. Its a muddy grave and the rain washes over the dead man's face as he lifts him into the hole. The soldier had a wife and kids back home and he wonders if his friend had lived if he'd have given the money back. He should say something over the grave but the words stick to the roof of his mouth and finally he turns and walks away.

The day he writes a letter home he fills it with everything he's seen, every man he's watched die, the bombs, the mines, the rubble, the destruction. Finally he re-reads it and it makes him sick. Sometime later he tears it up and writes another, a cheerful description of their card games that he always wins, and an acknowledgment that he still plays his music.

The day he steps inside a church it's been a month since he's been to confession. His face is reverent as he slides into the pew, bows his head and whispers his prayers, ready to cleanse his hands of some of the blood staining them. He's not even finished the "Our Father" when a German steps out of the shadows, firing and killing the man kneeling beside him, a man more devout than he. He grabs his gun and kills the German, watching in silence as the enemy tumbles across the altar and lies still. The next church he goes in he shoots into every corner, fires at the glass windows until they shatter. He doesn't pray, and it's only later that he realizes he forget to kneel as he passed the altar.

The day he's marked as wounded in action it isn't a clean bullet through him and waking up in a hospital surrounded by nurses like in the posters. Instead it's shrapnel that rips through his flesh as he shoves his Lieutenant out of the way and takes the full force of the grenade blast in his back. When he wakes up it's in a cold dark cell with a German doctor who pokes his wounds and twists the metal shards in deeper. Somewhere within the pain he drifts away, his last memory a naked lightbulb swinging from the ceiling like a broken star.

The day he finally wakes up he's wrapped in blankets and bandages, with tubes snaking in and out of his arms to feed him blood and liquid. His buddies come in to see him, to shake his hand. They call him "Pete" and it sounds strange to his ears. It's been so long since he's been anything but a single name, a last name that some of them can't even pronounce, or forget the spelling of.

The day he rejoins his group he finds his belongings marked with his full name and three letters: M. I. A. He scrubs the letters off but a trase of them stay. Everything is still there but his deck of cards is five short, all hearts. As he stuffs the stack back into the bag he faintly wonders if it's somehow symbolic.

The day he cries it's raining so hard that no one sees that it's tears running down his face, that he's blinded by them as he fires into the fading light, toward running men he can no longer identify as enemy or friend. He's lost no friend today, and the battle is a victory, so he doesn't know why he's crying. Somewhere within it all there must be a reason.

The day his guitar breaks he hasn't played it for three weeks, and he no longer remembers the words to the songs he sang. English and Italian are jumbled together into a single language in his head, words meaningless. He's reaching toward the man carrying the typewriter when the mine explodes, throwing him backwards against the trees. His first sight when the smoke clears is the twisted wood of his guitar mingled with the smashed typewriter, stained with blood he knows is not his own. This time he doesn't cry, doesn't make a sound. He gets up and walks past the bodies, to the living men still fighting, as the cries of the wounded and the shouts of the medics ring through ears long deafened by battle.

The day the war ends for him starts like any other day, rain and explosions. He feels himself running when the bullet rips through his chest, exiting his back in a spray of crimson that seeps into the mud around his boots as another tears through his left leg. He doesn't feel the pain until he's face down in the mud and blood, gasping for air. Somebody grabs him, drags him back off the front lines, towing him toward the medics. "Hang on, D'Angelo." He's tired, sick of war, sick of death. But the voice gives him an order and he obeys without questioning.

The day he gets his discharge he's on crutches and boarding a transport ship. All he owns in the world- a worn pack carrying half a deck of cards, a few rations, two months pay, and two purple hearts- is slung over his back. He's out of the war, one of the lucky ones they say. He survived, and he'll see home again.

It isn't until he's on the ship taking him to America that he realizes he doesn't remember what home looks like.