A/N: Another update, as promised! I think I'm starting to get to know my character a little better. She's revealing her personality to me slowly. So far, this is only a small development in the story. I'll delve more into action and boot camp in the next chapter. I know there's not much dialogue and too much description/inner dialogue, but I promise there will be more interaction with the other characters as I go along! Thanks for reading, by the way, and I appreciate your feedback! I'll reply to your reviews as soon as I can. :) Enjoy!
Disclaimer - I don't own Band of Brothers. It belongs to Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg. Story based off TV Series, not the IRL!men themselves.
*Formerly entitled The Medicine Man.
Time is starting to dig into the slow, aching sprawl of summer.
Already, we've made progress. Compared to when we first started - chests heaving and feet beating out of time against the earth and everyone gasping for each breath and clutching for each heartbeat – well, we might as well be championship athletes. Still can't shake Sobel, though. Still can't prove to him we're worthy.
Speaking of Sobel. I can say very little about the man as I know so little about him in turn. He's earned himself the title of cruelest son of a bitch that ever walked these parts and that's all that can be decidedly said for him. Most of us are convinced, still to this day, that he's got the devil hidden in him somewhere and that's why his eyes are so dark and his temper so much like fire. He drives us up Currahee mountain and works our legs and arms to the bone until we're sure they'll fall clean off.
Exercise after exercise, course after course – we've lost count of how many pigs that died to have their guts slathered over the ground. The conservative farm girl in me loathed to see such waste. It could've fed my family for a week, if we ate sparingly and salted the rest and stored it for later in jars of vinegar and more salt.
If anything can be else could be said for Sobel, in his favor, if there is any such favor to be salvaged for the hateful brute, it is that he picks on the majority of us equally. From the tallest to the smallest of us, we're all created equal under the eyes of our vindictive and sadistic CO. None of us are spared, not even 2nd Lieutenant Winters, who, as time goes on, I'm beginning to see bears the brunt of Sobel's unbridled fury.
Life, for the most part, is hapless routine. Wake before dawn; run until the marrow of our bones begin to throb, perform calisthenics until our arms turn to rubber,; training exercises that challenged every physical border that we were forced to cross until there seemed none left to overcome. This takes up the majority of our existence. There is little else for us to look forward to but the gradual moving forward of conditioning. Coming closer to the end of the tunnel, looking for the relieving light. In the meantime, steadily, we grow stronger - in body and in mind.
Weekends are a rare commodity. More often than we should like, our passes are revoked for small offenses, such as scuffs on our shoes and creases in our fatigue trousers. Sundays, some of us attend church, and often I see the black-haired angel from the station among the masses, his eyes staring straight ahead at the crucifix that stands before the congregation. Never sightlessly, though. I've come to decide that he never looks on anything without seeing it, without knowing its face and giving it the comfort of knowing it is real. Even when he is thinking, when it seems he's away from his own body, wandering the twisted labyrinth of thought, he is rooted to reality by what he sees.
Sometimes, I watch him from afar, this quiet soul, considering the possibility of his not being human. It's a lunatic ideal, to be sure, but if one was to truly perceive him, not just the superficial coat of silence he wears as a protective sheen or the air of distance that he keeps over him like a shroud – well, then, perhaps they would not feel so strange to consider him a messenger of Heaven.
I've always believed in angels, even so far as to believe that they walk the earth in clothes of skin and eyes bright with human soul. But the prospect of immortalizing such a perfect faith is so daunting, even with the face of truth staring straight back at me from the black pits of doubt. It's why I attend mass so consistently, listen to every word, and whisper into my pillow my pleas to God to forgive me – the more I watch him, the higher the pedestal I've put him upon begins to grow.
Eugene Roe. That's the name he was born with and the name he will eventually die with too. Gene, some call him, the ones assured enough in self to brave the otherworld of intimacy with such a white silence being. In passing, I've heard his Christian name very sparingly - much less the shortened version of it - and only in the form of Winters' mellow voice. Mostly, he's kept at a distance by the others, arm's length, included in no jokes and no laughter is shared with him. They call him Roe to solidify the certainty of their lack of relationship with him. The others, I think, respect him as a figure, but to consider him a shy, lonely man is out of the question – as there is no logical answer to base this inference on in the first place.
But Eugene Roe, he works his way with softness into the hearts of the men. He hardly cracks a smile, but when he does, it's a celebrated affair, one that moves too quickly into passing for much of anyone's taste. He never stays too closely by to let any moments of humanity be enjoyed by the lot of us.
More often than not, he can be found keeping to himself, shining his boots with only a cigarette and a brush for company or writing a letter home. On the weekends that we are actually given weekend passes, which, as I have said, are few and far between, he's been seen walking on the beach, digging his bare feet into the gray sand, tilting his face toward the sun as if in worship. I can picture the soggy gray waters lapping at his pale skin, drifting over his liberated feet and then receding, like bowing before a celestial force, as it bows to the moon and the hands of God.
My father would disapprove of such nonsensical, idolatrous thinking, though he would tell me so in wisdom and patience. He might not be perfect, but he knows the intricacies of faith and its set of rules. And I would tell him everything so that he could lead me away from my own disastrous conception of what is, and will always be, a mortal man.
But anyone who has seen the boy work his healing hands over a wounded spirit might not think me so crazy in the end.
My reverence for Eugene Roe, I think, stems from a brief moment between the two of us. It happened about two weeks into boot camp. And my idolatry, as I've so properly deemed it, flourished from there.
Chow is, without a doubt, the most anticipated event of the day. It's a time when a man can escape the ridicule, the demands and the persecution of training with Sobel. Eating is a favorite pastime of most men, but it's more than that. It's solitude. It's companionship with the people you've grown close to, forged bonds with in the midst of suffering (arguably, they are the strongest of bonds as they have seen the worst together and, in turn, know the worst in each other in witnessing the fact of it). It's having time to mull over your thoughts and be selfish for a little while, to indulge in the creative influence of the individual. We've been taught to act as a whole for only two weeks at that point and after living as singular human beings for the duration of our lives, permitted to exercise every will, every whim and every desire, answering mostly to ourselves and our own decisions, the reconditioning to think as a unit had been hard on us all. Already, we'd begun to crave time to ourselves or with our friends.
I forced myself to stay far away from any roaring laughter, any gathering of crowds, though I craved interaction with other human beings. I remember glancing over at them in the middle of their clapping and trading of cigarettes and wide pumpkin grins, wishing I could be with them, talk to them, be like them.
It's a sort of rule. An unspoken law, but nonetheless enforced by even the greenest of recruits. If you don't make an effort to belong ,then they don't make effort to include you. From the beginning, I made no attempt to accept their offers of cigarette olive branches and bits and pieces of conversation. It was my own fault that I couldn't be with them; I reasoned with myself, reminding the bitterness inside of me that it was safer this way. It's safer.
Sitting next to a window had its benefits. Outside, the sun shone, letting the camp catch a sort of appealing light, making it lovely somehow. I could look out there and deter the effects of my loneliness somehow. The light streamed in here, squares of it breaking off into shadows as the table stretched inward toward the middle of the room, but I was situated in such a place that I could sit in its warm illumination. A piece of paper was sprawled out before me, empty of any thought or salutation, and I was beginning to be frustrated with my own fear of my father discovering my whereabouts. I wanted to let them know I was safe, but what if they found me? What if, somehow, they traced me back here and made a fool of me? It was selfish, thinking such things, but I was too invested in my travesty now to go back to the way it was.
With a most uncertain determination, I pressed the pen to the paper. Dear father. And then stopped.
The sound of a delicate tread came toward me and I covered my letter with my tray. Even if there weren't any details worth knowing on it, I still didn't want to be caught in a moment of weakness, when anything could be read in my features, anything at all if they looked hard enough. At once, as I glanced up to receive the visitor, my heart leapt. I didn't know who it was, but I had been so starved of attention those first few weeks that I'd be happy to hear anyone's voice, even the slightly buck wild Liebgott who was famous for his fits of temper and his right hook, equally famous for his left. Stories circulated about the units telling of his infamous brawls, though they were kept secret from the officers (part of me wondered if Winters knew, as Winters seemed to know everything). Nonetheless, interaction with a warm, breathing being was welcomed, and even more so was the face of the man that approached me.
I hardly had time to process who it was before a piece of bread was put on my tray, the pale hand flashing before my eyes like a blinding white wraith. The voice is what got me to realize who the donor was. "You best keep eatin' there, Jonas. Too thin. You best keep some meat on you with all that trainin' we gotta do. You're too thin. Keep eating. Go on now, eat."
The Cajun lilt had moved onward with the body of its owner. I watched as the dark head and the warm dark eyes disappeared from my view as quickly as they had come.
My entire body seemed to swell with hope and, for a moment, I forgot the troubles I'd inflicted on myself and watched him slide into an empty slot at a table nearby. He was unaware of the way things moved on about him, without him, paying no mind to anything but solitude and the warmth of food rising before him. Like everyone, he had his rituals, his preferences concerning how he spent his free time, and he attended to them with grace and expertly contained satisfaction. I'd never in my life eaten a piece of bread with such gratitude, not even when I was starving.
I don't think he remembered me from the station.
Or, if he did, like with everything else – he went about knowing it quietly.
After allowing some time for deliberation on behalf of our superiors, the 'upstairs men' as some called them, we were assigned a specialty. Some of us were allowed to choose, if space was available after the priority men, those with talents pertaining to the specialty, were all given assignments.
Most of us, as my father once put it so eloquently, had to 'eat shit and die' and try to make the best of our chosen obligations. Some got mortars, other machine gunner posts. Some were simply given the position of rifleman, a less desirable task as they were said to be thrown into the shit core, the frying pan, the eye of the storm. Another undesirable position was that of medic, perhaps the least understood and yet one with much responsibility as the lives of the company depended upon them.
I've been chosen for this position.
As word has it, Eugene Roe has been picked for the job. Ralph Spina is also said to have been selected.
We're told that we'll still participate in combat training in basic, though, to my ignorance, it seems a waste since we'll never hold a weapon, let alone fire one. Regardless, we'll learn everything the infantry boys learn and every once in a while be reserved for sick call, where we will be expected to complete a shift in the clinic treating any and all military personnel in need of medical treatment. After the conclusion of boot camp, we'll be transferred into a separate medical attachment and train apart from the rest of the boys. We'll be sorted down into companies, batallions and platoons upon receiving our wings.
If you get your wings, you'll get your assignments. Work hard, pay attention and you'll all have a place in no time. You'll all belong somewhere. I promise you that. But it will be hard. To the rest of the unit, we're pill pushers. Morphine jockeys. Prove to them you're not just an empty arm band.
The explanation is brief and to the point, allowing no room for questions. It's not our place to question. If we pause to entertain doubt, suspicion, any sort of uncertainty, it could jeopardize the chances of survival for our men. It's our place to run, to never look back; to throw ourselves into the thick redness of battle without weapons, without means of self-defense but our hands against the bullets and the bombs and the exploding shrapnel. We run for not our own lives, but the lives of others.
The boys take to calling Eugene Roe by a new name. They call him Doc – never Gene, never Eugene, not even Roe anymore. Simply Doc, as if he slips further and further out of the circlet of their simple understanding. They are all smart, the lot of them, but perhaps Eugene Roe is too far away for them to comprehend. Like a lighthouse on the horizon, amongst the jagged cliffs that swallow up all hope of easy entrance, and all he is to them is a blur of black and white and warm blue darkness. Maybe someday he'll come to them and explain it all. Maybe he won't. There's just no knowing him without his translation, his help.
That night, at the end of the day in which I find out I've been chosen as a medic, I write without a return address to my father. An anonymous note with only my name to reveal to him its author.
I tell him how scared I am, what selfishness drove me out of his protection...and in but a few words, I convey to him how I miss them so. I never sent it; I hadn't the courage.
I tore it up the night I'd decided to keep it here with me.