Swooning

by

tallsunshine12

A/N: Whumptober 2023; prompts in bold. Hope you enjoy it!

The pair of Willys jeeps drove on for about five miles, then came to a stop. As soon as the wheels stopped turning, Sgt. Sam Troy, leader of the Rat Patrol, fell out to the side of the jeep and lay facedown in the sand. In the fight with the Panzer II back at the wadi, on the near side of the explosion, he had caught most of the blast of its 20 mm gun.

Moffitt, his second-in-command, jumped out of the jeep he shared with his driver Tully and ran to Troy's side, turning him over and brushing the sand off his face. A nasty contusion on Troy's forehead was liberally bleeding.

"Troy! Troy!" he called, giving small slaps to Troy's cheek as he spoke. "Get the medi-kit, Hitch."

Hitch, Troy's driver, fetched the kit from Moffitt's jeep. Moffitt pulled out a roll of bandages big enough to not only staunch the bleeding, but to wrap Troy's head in what remained.

"We have to get him back to base," he said. "He probably got hit by a rock."

"That's over fifty miles away," said Hitch, rubbing his own head, which still hurt. After all, he had been almost as close to the violent upsurge of sand and rocks as Troy had when the tank fired. "Can Sarge last that long without medical care?"

"Do you see a hospital around here, Hitchcock?" asked Moffitt, a bit more sternly than he wanted to sound.

"There's an Italian field hospital, not too far from here," said Tully, chewing on his matchstick over by the other jeep. "I saw it on the map yesterday. I didn't think then we'd need it."

"That would mean we'd have to give ourselves up." Moffitt looked down at the unconscious man. "I don't think Troy would want us to do that."

Troy, as if answer, groaned and began to thrash around. He even tried to sit up. Moffitt helped support him around the back and placed him against the tire of the jeep.

"Troy, can you hear me?" he asked, raising two fingers. "How many fingers am I holding up?"

"Three," said Troy, rubbing his sore head. The bandage he could feel under his fingers baffled him, but he looked again at Moffitt's hand. "No, wait, only two. Don't fool me like that, Moffitt."

"We need to get you to a doctor," Moffitt said, raising his voice as if Troy was deaf, instead of hurt. "But there's a hitch."

"There always is with us," said Tully, rather fatalistically.

Moffitt looked rather icily up at him. "The only facility within fifty miles is an Italian field hospital. If I took you there, we'd end up as prisoners."

"Hey, you wouldn't go without us," said Hitch, and Tully concurred by nodding.

"I don't need a hospital," said Troy. "Help me up. If we can get back to base by nightfall, I'll check myself in to the hospital there. Pretty nurses." He slurred the last two words.

As he tried to rise, he swooned back. Moffitt caught him and held him down.

"There's one other place we can take you. It's a bit of a hike, but it's shady and can act as a hospital."

"Where is it?" asked Troy. "What is it?"

"An old ruin I know of."

"Yeah, Doc," said Hitch. "We have enough water for a couple of days."

"And rations," added Tully. "Let's go there."

"Troy will still need medical attention when we get back to base," said Moffitt, "but we might be able to let him rest up for a bit before we tackle the long ride."

"I'm all for it," said Troy. "Just get me out of the sun. My head's on fire."

While Tully kept watch for any enemy interlopers who might find them where they had stopped, Moffitt and Hitch lifted Troy up and helped him to climb into the back of the jeep he shared with Hitch. He fell in and curled up as best he could, putting his hand over his eyes.

Moffitt climbed back into his jeep with Tully and the pair of jeeps took off. Moffitt pulled out the map case, but couldn't find the oasis town he had remembered, so he put it back under his seat and tried to rely on memory alone. He had been there only once, when he was only fifteen, on one of his dad's archaeological digs.

His directions—pulled out of his misty teenage recollection—led them right to it. Helping Troy out of the jeep and into the shade, he and Hitch placed him on a soft sand hill under a palm and then went out to help Tully with the supplies they'd need, a jerrycan of water and a couple boxes of rations.

The old ruin had sat there for donkey's years, perhaps first as an Ottoman stronghold at the intersection of two trading routes, and now just a collection of enclosures, some missing more than half their roofs. Hitch took the supplies inside while Tully and Moffitt, each keeping an eye out for intruders, serviced the jeeps with water and petrol.

Once inside, Hitch checked around for sleeping snakes, finding a couple and using his rifle to hoist them out of the windows, then he spread out a blanket, making rather a cozy space for the injured sergeant. After that, feeling a mite dizzy himself, he sat down on the edge of it.

Tully and Moffitt brought Troy in, laying him down on Hitch's blanket. Tully went back outside, on watch. Noticing he was holding his head in his hands, Moffitt handed Hitch a canteen.

"Are you alright?" he asked the red kepi-wearing private.

"Just a bit of headache, Doc. Nothin' to worry about."

"Well, let us know if you get worse," said Moffitt. "I'm going out to do a bit of a recce."

"I will," Hitch said, smiling. As Moffitt went out to do his 'recce,' Hitch unscrewed the top of canteen, then put the canteen to Troy's lips. After the sergeant took a couple of sips, Hitch himself drank.

Bringing the canteen away from his mouth, he looked down at Troy. Rubbing his head again, he said, "I'm not feeling so well. I caught some of that explosion, I think." Troy was asleep. "Sarge?" he asked, then quieted, not wanting to wake him up.

Sprawled at his full length on the top of a dune, Moffitt scouted the surrounding desert plain with his binoculars, then he went back inside and there he found two patients instead of one. Hitch had slipped down to the ground next to Troy, the wall shading them from the fierce afternoon sun.

As Hitch was semi-awake, if drifting, Moffitt gave him more water. For Troy, who was still out, he daubed a clean handkerchief in water from the canteen and tapped his lips with it.

Moffitt had brought the radio with him. Finding the nearest Allied frequency, a battlefield unit, he radioed a message to be transmitted further along to the base at Tal Yata, informing HQ about the mishap with the Panzer tank.

Still speaking to the battlefield operator, he asked, "How did the battle go? Over," meaning that day's tank battle. The Rat Patrol's jeeps had been on recon throughout the battle, relaying enemy tank and infantry positions to the strike commanders.

"Allies 1, Germans 0," answered the radio operator at the other end. "We beat 'em back to the hills. Over."

"That's good to hear," Moffitt said. "Thanks for relaying my message that we're holing up for a few days, until Sgt. Troy is ready to travel, then we'll head back to Tal Yata. Over. Out."

The night was bitterly cold, so Moffitt, now seemingly in charge with Troy au de combat, allowed a small fire to be built up of old sticks of wood. He himself was restless and took a walk about the old ruin, reacquainting himself with some of the more interesting aspects of it.

When he was a boy, he'd been fascinated by the structure of one of the town's wells. The stones had been built up into an arch over the opening of the well, giving it the appearance of an old-fashioned wishing well. Begging his dad for a coin, he had thrown it in and made a wish for the dig to never end. It had ended for him, of course, with the summer, and he had gone back to school. Now here he was again, still wishing.

Moffitt fished a coin out of his pocket and just like that time before, he tossed it in, intoning, "Help, oh great well, to make Troy and Hitch whole again." He did not really believe it would work. He had long ago left off being that starry-eyed youngster he once was.

When he returned after his rather long stroll through the ruins, it was a great pleasure to warm his hands over the privates' carefully built up fire.

"What did you see out there?" asked Hitch, yawning, but sitting up and, like Troy, wrapped in a blanket. Troy was awake, too, blinking out of his woolen cocoon, though he wasn't up to talking just yet.

"I met a young lad," Moffitt said, smiling wistfully. "He was full of wishes and hopes and dreams. His one big wish was that he didn't have to go home again and go back to school. Being a mite thin, he was not the greatest cricket player, and the other boys teased him rather unmercifully. The great big desert was his school, he thought."

Tully and Hitch looked at each other across the fire, thinking, had Moffitt gone 'strange' on them?

"Where's the boy now?" asked Tully, beginning to catch the drift of what Moffitt was saying.

"He's still there, but after I had a little talk with him, he now wishes for something else. He wants to go home, and he hopes his two friends will soon be well again."

Knowing exactly what Moffitt meant, like Tully did, Troy laughed. Struggling against a certain deafness from the blast, he said, "We hope the kid gets his wish, too! Right, Hitch?"

Hitch yawned again, this time a much bigger one than before. His hands were trapped by the folds of the blanket, so he couldn't reach a hand up to his mouth to stifle it.

After he was quite through, he managed to say, "Ah, right, Sarge, whatever you said."

As he looked around at his favorite group in the world, Moffitt chuckled, commenting, "How profound."

After two days, the four friends and fellow Rats piled into the jeeps again and headed back to Tal Yata, their home base, more than fifty miles away.

In his jeep with the matchstick-chewing Tully, Moffitt spared one look back at the ruins, and saw an apparition of a thin, dark-haired lad whose clothes were always too big for him. With the widest grin, the youth stood there at the gate of the ruins and waved. Moffitt felt silly, but he waved back.

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