"Hasn't he?" Strange said. "I thought he said he was coming in to see you."
Prell's obsidian eyes looked up into his rearview mirror a moment, scanning the hall behind him. "Landers has been in to see me six times."
"He has? I haven't even seen Landers since we got on board. I ought to look him up."
Prell ignored that. "You've been in to see me seventeen times."
"I have? What are you, keeping some kind of a scoreboard or something?"
"I sure am. Sure, I am. I aint got anything much else to do," Prell said authoritatively.
"How's your crossword book coming?"
"I finished it."
"I'll have to rummage around, see if I can't find you another one."
Prell pressed his elbows into the bed, and moved himself an infinitesimal inch. "I'd appreciate it. It sounds kind of empty in here, doesn't it?"
"Yes," Strange said. "It does. I was just going to say the same thing." He raised himself up and looked around the lounge, again. There weren't all that many empty beds.
"They took out a little less than one-third. But it makes an awful difference with the acoustics," Prell said, watching him look. His voice got more casual, a little hollower. "Where do you think they're going to send us?"
"Got no idea," Strange said, squatting again, then sitting down. On the bare floor. "And nobody seems to know. Doesn't seem to be any system to it. They say they're supposed to send you to the hospital nearest your home. In principle. But that's only if you can get the medical service you need, there. If you can't, they send you where you can get the medical attention."
"That means they'll be splitting us all up," Prell said.
"Yeah. I suppose so."
"I don't like that. You'd think they'd know enough to send all the guys from one outfit someplace where they're together. At least until we all get used to it."
"I guess they aint got time to be worrying about shit like that," Strange said lightly.
"It's funny, you know," Prell said after a moment. "We never really knew what happens to them, after they get hit and leave the outfit. And now we're doing it ourselves. They get hit and they walk off the field, or get carried off, and that's just sort of the last we ever see of them. Some go to Efate, some to New Zealand, some to New Caledonia. And then they get flown or shipped back to the States and they-just sort of disappear into thin air. And we never know. And now it's happening to us."
"Some of the guys got a couple of post cards," Strange said.
"I know. Yeah. I ran into so-and-so at such-and-such. And such-and-so lost his arm. But we never knew what it was really like."
"Well, now we'll know, I guess."
"You'll probably go somewhere in Texas," Prell said. "I don't know where I'll go. Where will I go? I'm from down on the Big Sandy on the Kentucky border. But I aint been back there in twelve years. Wheeling? Washington? Baltimore? I don't even know where all the general hospitals are."
"You and me might wind up together after all," Strange grinned. "I won't go to Texas, I don't think. My wife's family all moved back to Kentucky, to work in the defense plants in Cincinnati. And she moved with them. I aint got any family left in Texas."
"I haven't any either in West Virginia," Prell said.
"You and me may wind up in Cincinnati."
"Where's Winch from?" Prell asked.
"Somewhere in New England, I think."
"That's good, anyway," Prell said. He settled himself in the bed with his elbows. "I think they're about to turn the lights out."
"Yes," Strange said. "I think so. I better get to going. It feels to me like maybe we're under way again. I'll stop in tomorrow."
"Don't do it if you don't feel like it," Prell said, stiffly.
Strange gave him a grin. "Okay. I won't. If I don't." He was already back on his feet. Down the way some of the medical personnel were stripping some of the emptied beds. The sight gave him a sudden lonely feeling. He waved his hand and walked away. At the big double swing doors he stopped and looked back.
A little over halfway down, Prell was watching him in his rear-view mirror, and stuck his arm up in the air. Strange realized that if he had not looked back, Prell would probably have held that against him. He raised his arm in a wave and went outside onto the deck's promenade. As he walked, he clenched and unclenched his crippled hand, although it hurt to do it.
Something about Prell had the ability to make Strange feel guilty whenever he was around him. It certainly wasn't anything Prell did. But he always came away from Prell's bedside with an elevated sense of his own inadequacy. It was a rare feeling for Strange.
It was very similar to the feeling he had had when he looked at Linda back in Wahoo, after the war had started.
The glass windows of the deck's promenade were lined two deep with men watching the American shoreline in the night light. Strange stopped and watched them a long moment, still clenching and unclenching his bad hand, then walked on down the passageway.
Of all the woundings Strange knew about, Prell's was the best and the most enviable. The most warrior-like. The most soldierly, in any serious, valuable way. Leading his squad on a long jungle patrol he had not volunteered them for (Prell never volunteered his men for anything), and still a half a mile inside Jap territory on the way back, Prell had stumbled onto a troop concentration in a valley. The Japanese were in the middle of preparing an unsuspected attack, and with them was General Sasaki.
Sasaki was the Jap New Georgia commander, and his picture had been circulated around the Division with a bounty placed on him. So Prell had sent his squad back along the trail and crawled in to try and get a shot at him. He hadn't. They had been discovered, and in the firefight and the run out he had been hit, and had lost two of his men killed and two others wounded. Bleeding badly and unable to walk at all, he nevertheless had organized the escape from the Jap search parties and the walk back, and had brought all fourteen men out including the two dead. He had delivered the intelligence report about the attack himself, before passing out.
It was for this patrol that the Division commander was reputedly recommending him for the Congressional Medal. And it was this patrol that Winch was down on him for.
Compared to that, Strange felt his own wounding had been little more than a dirty cosmic joke.
His had happened back on Guadalcanal. Way back. In January. It was just at the time when the company had successfully terminated its first big combat and first big attack against the Japs. Strange and a couple of his cook force had walked up with a resupply to visit the company. They were bivouacked on top of a hill they had taken two days before. Some staff colonel had named it the Sea Horse. They sat around on the slope talking, the guys filling Strange and his cooks in on all that had happened, and Strange had noticed how they were all somehow changed. He did not know exactly how they were changed. They just were different. Then suddenly there was the soft, almost soundless shu-shu-shu of mortars coming in, and someone squawked, and everyone hit the dirt. Strange threw himself flat. There was a yell from somewhere, during the explosions. When he sat back up, he noticed the palm of his hand was burning hot. A sharp, hot, toothy little piece of fragment half the size of your little fingernail had hit him in his palm between the knuckles of his middle fingers but hadn't come out the other side. There it was, sticking in his palm, just above the center. While the wounded man who had yelled was being taken care of, Strange started showing his hand around. He had been briefly terrified, his heart somewhere up between his ears, but when he found himself to be all right, and the man who was wounded was found to be okay, neither maimed nor killed, he began to laugh. And soon they were all laughing. It was a great joke, his hand. Mother Strange had come up to visit the company and had got himself a Purple Heart. There was no blood on his hand. The hot metal apparently had itself cauterized the wound. Carefully they pulled the piece of fragment out, and Strange put it in his pocket. No blood followed it out. There was only this longitudinal little blue slit. Like a miniature pussy, someone said. They took him around to the command post, everybody laughing, and showed it to the company commander to make sure of the Purple Heart and then a medic put a Band-Aid on it. A little later, still laughing, he and his two cooks left and walked back with another, returning resupply.
Later on, though, he hadn't laughed. When he thought about it, it was with a sense of irritated anger. What he remembered was the sense of fear, and the momentary feeling of total helplessness. He hadn't liked either worth a damn.
Along the ship's promenade, Strange spotted a window that was empty and went over and stood and watched the American coastline himself for a while.
It was summer here back home, mid-August, and the glass was open. He pulled up the sleeves of his bathrobe and leaned on the glass and let the light breeze of passage along the glass riffle the hairs on his forearms.
It was enough to bring the fear back to him, just for him to think that if it had been a little harder, it would have gone right on through his hand; and if it had hit hard enough to do that, and had hit him in the head, he would be dead. And none of it meant a damn thing. Not to anyone but Johnny Stranger. It just hadn't happened to hit him in a vital spot, and that was all it meant. It was at that point that the irritated anger always rose up on him.
Each time he clenched and unclenched the hand it hurt him and inside his head he could hear it grate. The doc had said there was still a tiny piece of metal in it. And that a tendon was rolling over the piece of metal, or over a bone growth. But getting the metal out was the least of it. The trauma and continued use had caused a degenerative arthritis to set in in the hand, in the six months since he got it.
Studying the black, hilly shore, Strange drew a deep breath of the sea air, and then blew it back out into the sea airspace, through which the ship was again moving steadily now, across the flat uninhabited wastes of moving salt water. Strange was not at all averse to being home.
In the clear, calm, moonless night the shore and the sea seemed to be illumined by a lemon-pink night light that did not come from anywhere. Behind both the mountains made a black presence, visible only in silhouette, by the stars they blocked. Once, the lights of a city made a dull glow on the shore. And Strange thought of all the blackouts he had seen, as far south as New Caledonia.
After six months, he had let one of his cooks talk him into going on sick call with his hand. They had immediately clapped him in the hospital for evacuation, and had flown him out. In Efate they had said they would not even attempt to operate on it there. So they would have to send him home. The doc there said there were only a few men in the States who could do the operations. He would need more than one. It would be a long painful process, but he ought to have an 80 to 90 percent recovery, when it was finished. The whole thing was the result of his not having come in with it when it first occurred. He should have reported it when it happened. The doc went on to say that, fortunately, the Army would still do all this for him. And the government would pay for it all. But if he had been an industrial worker, his negligence would have cost him the insurance. Strange could not tell him he had been ashamed to report it, embarrassed to go to the hospital, where so many badly mangled men were lying stretched out moaning and would see him. He had only nodded, repeatedly, and said nothing.
Nor could he claim to anybody, even to himself, that he was miserable and unhappy when he heard all this terrible news about his hand.
Way back on the Canal, in the very beginning, Strange had decided early that he was not going to get his ass shot off unless it was absolutely necessary.
When the company went up into its first combat on Guadalcanal's Hill 52, everybody who could had grabbed his rifle and wanted to go along. Cooks and bakers, supplyroom men, drivers, clerks, and Strange and his kitchen force. Everybody wanted to be in combat. Two days of it was enough for Strange. Nobody but a nut would get himself shot at when he didn't have to. And when Strange left and went back down, most of his cooks and the supplyroom men went with him. The rest came down the next day. They were under no orders to stay up there. Their orders were to stay back in the rear and guard the company baggage and try to get hot food up to the men, and Strange saw to it that they did just that. They didn't have much luck with the hot food part. But they did keep the company's "A" and "B" bags from being rifled by a new outfit who had just arrived. And when the battalion moved up to New Georgia for the invasion, Strange had held himself to the same principle. He would follow his orders, and follow them to the letter. But no more. And he would see that everybody under him did the same. If their orders required them to go on up on the line in the New Georgia jungle, they would go. But not unless.
You could always get yourself knocked off in one of the air raids that came over every day. Without going up on the line to the company. But the percentages were minuscule, compared to what could happen to you up there with the company.
And Strange, like most intelligent men trained in the various logistics disciplines, had realized right away that the wins and losses of this war were going to be governed by industrial percentages and numerical averages, not by acts of individual heroism. And that included survival.
And yet he stayed. When at any moment he could have turned himself in with his bad hand and been evacuated, he had stayed. And even now he felt terrible about leaving. Strange was perceptive enough to understand the paradox of that.
At the window, Strange straightened up from watching the night sea and the dark coastline, and looked around. Most of the men were beginning to drift away, bored as the newness wore off of watching the homeland coast. He leaned down on his elbows again.
His move with Winch from Fort Kam to Schofield back there in Wahoo, and his subsequent marriage, had changed more than Strange's life. It had changed his ambitions. Strange spit out the window into the sea's airspace, and watched the breeze grab it. Or at least it had changed Linda Sue's ambitions. As Linda liked to say, she wasn't always going to be married to an Army staff/sgt. The two thousand dollars savings they had collected was going to be stashed away until after the war and then it was going to go into a restaurant and Strange, who up until two years before had always considered himself a thirty-year man in the Army, was going to become a restaurateur.
Linda had bought a car with the first of the money and taken a job downtown in Honolulu as cashier in a big restaurant, and started taking courses in restaurant management. As much of their joint savings had come from her salary as from Strange's pay. By the end of the fall of 1941 Strange was calculating that one more three-year hitch would do it for them. They'd be able to leave the Army, and give Linda Sue her restaurant.
Then the Japs had arrived in December, with their sneak attack. But the two thousand bucks was safe at home with Linda. And Linda was working and adding to it. She was also getting the biggest pay allotment Strange was allowed to send her, to add to the rest.
Strange had never told anybody in the company about the restaurant. Something about leaving the Army, and particularly about leaving the company, made him too uncomfortable. A couple of times he almost had told Winch. But Winch's reaction to the earlier news that he was getting married stopped him. Winch had hooted and howled and pranced around the orderly room, and roared with laughter and sneered at him with insulting contempt. It was the nearest he ever came to an open falling out with Winch.
He knew of course that Winch was married and had a wife somewhere. Or was divorced. Although apparently nobody else knew it. But back at Fort Riley Strange had seen the tall, long-necked, broad-hipped woman, Winch's wife, walking around the post. And the fact that Winch had not brought her to Wahoo with him indicated that something had happened to them. So once again he had given Winch the benefit of the doubt and made allowances for him.
Strange was aware that his reluctance to mention the restaurant was unusual. That the idea of quitting the Army for good embarrassed him and left him feeling uncomfortable. Sighing, he stood up straight again from the open window-port, his hand hurting. Most of the coast watchers were gone now. The ship was moving farther out from shore, and soon even the high mountains behind the coast would be unnoticeable.
The constant clenching and unclenching of his hand had caused a dull, deep ache in his palm, which had spread all across the hand, then up into his wrist and on up through the wrist into his forearm. He would have to ask the medic for a pill to sleep tonight.
In six months he could be out of the Army, if he played his cards right. This war was going to last a lot longer than that. Six months in the hospital, an operation or two, wasn't so very long. With his mustering-out pay, plus all his back pay and allowances, plus all the money Linda had been making working in the defense plants around Cincinnati, they could open the restaurant right there as soon as he got discharged. And get in on the wartime boom with it.
But the thought depressed him. At the same time that it made him both happy and glad, it depressed him.
And it hurt him physically, in his gut, to see Prell all trussed up that way. Prell was one of the people who should never be laid up like that. And yet Prell was one of the ones who would always get hurt the worst, and the most often, in his life. He was too young to know that, yet. Or maybe he was just learning it, now.
How old was Prell? Twenty-three or -four. Strange was twenty-seven.
Getting hit wasn't so bad. As long as you didn't get killed. It only took a second, and you didn't really feel anything. It was all that time afterward, that it took you to get over it, that really did you in.
After a last look out the window-port, Strange turned away and headed toward the iron stairs, thinking he ought to get to sleep, if he wanted to get up early and go see if there was anything he could do for Prell.
CHAPTER 5.
THEY CAME IN JUST AT six o'clock. Behind them the sun was lowering in the west. It turned everything in front of them a reddish gold. The great red bridge with its great bellying bight of cable and flimsy-looking roadbed suspended under it, visible from miles away out at sea, was golden in the sun. So were the hills at both ends of it. It was indeed a golden gateway into America, its twin supports towering up. Time seemed to hang as the ship slid along, homing to it. Facing it, tough grizzled old troopers with years of service broke down. Restrictions limiting the open upper decks to officers had been removed and everyone who could hobble or crawl was up there on them. In the channel, the great stately bridge moved slowly, majestically toward them. As the ship passed under it, hooting its arrival blasts on the ship's horn, the heads of the men craned back to look straight up at it and a ragged cheer went up. Inside the bridge was home ground, and they had finally reached it. Inside the channel, first Alcatraz and then beyond it Angel Island and Fort McDowell, the place where most of them had started their Pacific voyaging, separated themselves from the bay coast behind. Along the starboard the Embarcadero glittered. The ship curved, then turned in slowly toward it. Behind the docks Telegraph Hill and Nob Hill made rising curves. Hungry eyes studied every detail. This scene was about all of San Francisco and the bay area that any of them, almost without exception, would get to see. If the owners of the eyes had known that, they would have studied each detail even more closely. At the docks Army and civilian ambulances were waiting for them, and continued to roll in in a long line. As the ship nosed in, ship's medical personnel began to move through the crowds of bathrobed men on the open upper decks, telling them to get below.
The main impression they got was one of enormous growth. Urban, industrial, maritime, civic. Even men who had only been gone six months, like Landers, thought they could see a difference. Whole new forests of smokestacks seemed to have sprouted. Industrial smoke seemed to have doubled. Shipping had tripled. Truck traffic had at least doubled. There were many more installations, and many more people, everywhere. To men who had been away one year, or two, or more, like Strange, it did not even seem the same city. Then they were whisked below, bundled ashore and hustled into the ambulances. From which they could see next to nothing. They were being moved around with all the ceremony of a stockyard delivery. Then, in a long string, aided by policemen and stopped traffic lights which halted all cross traffic, the ambulances headed for the Army's Letterman General. They traveled in convoys of twenty and thirty, with sufficient distance between to let the backed-up cross traffic through. Some of them made four and five trips. A few of the men, seated by the ambulance rear windows, caught glimpses of a city.
Forty-eight hours later the vast majority of them were on their way east, or south, the bulk of them by train, a few, like the Air Force boy with dry gangrene, by plane.
One of the men the reprocessing was hardest on was Bobby Prell. Although he said next to nothing about it, Prell was in constant pain from his legs. The pull of the traction he was in assured that. In addition, the slightest movement of the ship transmitted itself through the weights on his feet up his legs to his shattered thighs. During the voyage, he had lived in mortal terror of a storm at sea. Fortunately, the weather had stayed fine.
From the moment the ship nosed into the dock, Prell feeling each particular bump in a series of shocks through his broken bones, to the moment he was laid out in a hospital car berth on the train east, Prell and his legs were taken out of traction twice, carted ashore, jounced across Frisco in a seemingly springless damned ambulance, moved twice in a rolling bed to different wards, rattled to the train station in another springless ambulance, hoisted through a hospital car window to his berth. Only sheer stubbornness had kept him from crying out a dozen times. But he had made up his mind he was not going to let anybody see him blubbering.
He had seen nothing of San Francisco, and he had had no desire to.
From the time he had been wounded and had got his squad back inside the lines, he had been carded, tagged and stamped, indexed and inspected, numbered and catalogued increasingly the closer he got to home and any kind of civilization. In certain of his worst moments, it seemed to him it was more important to them that they keep track of him and not lose him than that they keep him alive. It seemed to Prell there ought to be a better way to treat men who had given their life and limb for their country, but there didn't seem to be any better way of handling it. If there was, nobody had figured it out. He had come almost to feel that he was actually a piece of that "living meat" the casualties on the ship jokingly so liked to refer to themselves as. But so far he had managed to keep his mouth shut about it.
He had already gone through two major operations, and been wired and screwed back together. And would apparently have to go through another, to get the wires and screws out of him. When the first group of doctors at Letterman examined him, one of the younger surgeons studied his file and whistled, then smiled with admiring disbelief the way a man might over a piece of brass sculpture hammered out by another. It gave Prell a certain thrill of pride.
Because Prell wasn't fighting only to save his legs; he was fighting to save his life. He had already made up his mind that if they took off his legs, he was going to kill himself. He would shoot himself in the head. Or perhaps in the heart. He hadn't decided which yet. But he certainly wasn't going to go on living around the clock in a Veterans' Hospital without any legs. Even if they took off only one of his legs, it would not be enough. He wouldn't live with one leg, either. He didn't have to do it, and he wasn't going to. So the way Prell figured it, he wasn't saving only just his legs. He was saving his whole life. And he wasn't particularly ready to die yet.
So at Letterman the young surgeon's reaction was a shot in the arm. It meant at the very least that there was still some hope. There was an indifferent impersonality in the admiring smile but that didn't matter to Prell since he knew the surgeon was looking at him as a job of work. He had no way of knowing how hard Prell had fought, and how many times, to keep them from amputating. Prell did not tell him. He compressed his lips and kept his mouth shut again. Nor did he mention all the incredible, unbelievable pain all the moving around had caused him. Prell was playing his cards, the bad hand he had been dealt, as tight and as close to his shirt as he could, and was taking no chances. The enormity of the pain might be a point in favor of amputation. The surgeon, however, seemed to know. All Prell had in front of him now, he said, was the three-day train trip, and then soon they would begin to be able to tell. Only three days on the train, then he could rest. The reason they were sending him so far, to Luxor, Tennessee, was because not only did they have one of the best orthopedics leg surgery teams there, they also had about the best postoperative team in the country.
"I can do it standing on my head, sir," Prell said cheerfully. But he was already sweating from the pushing and probing.
The doctor gave him back a funny, arrogant smile. "Let us hope you don't have to," he said, in a snobby superior way. Apparently he didn't like brash confidence in potential amputees. Prell didn't care, or even get angry, since this one wasn't going to be making any of the crucial decisions. Through the sweat on his upper lip and forehead, he made himself grin.
It was, however, a lot easier to talk about the train trip than to do it. High physical pain that did not cease could over a long enough period be supremely tiring. To both the body and the spirit. It could drain the will away like an open sewer vent. The two days of movement from the ship to Letterman to the train had taken an enormous toll from him, more than he had guessed, and by the time he was finally deposited, weak and sweating, in his berth in the hospital car at the station, Prell could only look ahead with a kind of stunned unbelief to the idea of three whole days in a jouncing, swaying train.
When you were very sick or very bad hurt, your very consciousness seemed to withdraw into the deep inside of you, until you were no longer aware, except vaguely, of any life outside of you. Bit by bit you were pushed further back into yourself by pain until your will was reduced to one simpleminded, singleminded, dedicated thought, which in Prell's case was that he would not cry out. He would not make a sound. He knew if he did, he would begin to holler "Mama!" Or start begging them to take him off before the train started, back to Letterman and amputate the goddamned legs. It was like those slugs in the jungle that pulled in their eyestalks and shrank when you stepped near them or touched them with a cigarette. Prell had not had a mama since he was eleven. And he did not intend to give up the only pair of legs he'd ever had.
Then, finally, even that thought left him. He simply lay, silent, waiting for them to start, driven back to his uttermost, most basic, bedrock consciousness of existence.
It was almost like a-a religious experience. That was the only word Prell could think of to use. He might as easily have said mystical, but mystical was not a word Prell used except in crossword puzzles. So instead he used religious, lamely. It was as though the pain alone by itself had made him drunk. As though the pain, by slowly but effectively sealing him off from other awareness, had turned him inward in a total, uninterruptible concentration as if he had passed through the outer yellow flame of a candle into its center, which was not hot but purple and cool. And in there with him in that cool center was an awareness of another presence. Somebody or some thing was in there with him. It, or she, or he (it was not a personality) did not do anything. It was not an added strength. It was not an aid. Nor was it a detriment. It was just there. Prell realized that what he missed most was Strange. Strange, or somebody from the company. And it made him angry. Angry that they were not with him, and angry that he needed them to be.
The medics had filled him with as much dope as they safely could before bringing him down, and Prell lay in a kind of delirious euphoria, more pain-induced than dope-induced, waiting for the jolt in his legs of the train starting, and thought about the company. And about his squad. And about their last patrol.
There were many ramifications. The patrol itself was the patrol. But everything after it had been added on to compound and complexify it. Prell imagined, in his rapturous state, that he could see through it all clearly now.
The patrol was the least part. Prell had no scruples or misgivings about the patrol. He had handled everything the best way he could. And no matter what anybody said, he had made no mistakes. The retreat with the dead and the wounded after they had been hit he had handled superbly. Just getting the dead out was a feat. Not many could have done it. And he had made fucking damn sure he got the intelligence message back accurately. He had given it himself. It had saved the Division a lot of men two days later.
The squad he felt less good about. But any qualms he had were not qualms of conscience. Nobody liked to see their buddies they had lived with get killed and shot up in front of them. Nobody liked to command, then. But in a firefight men got wounded, and they got killed. It was enough testimony and evidence about his squad, to see how they had all made a special trip to come down and say good-by to him before he was flown out. He had got out of it with two dead and two wounded out of fourteen men, not including himself. Not many noncoms could have done as well.
All the rest of it had started afterward. With Winch. Or if not with Winch, with somebody else and Winch had picked up on it. Simple jealousy. As far as Prell was concerned that was what it was, jealousy. Although how anybody could be jealous of a poor son of a bitch about to lose both legs, Prell could not figure.
It had really started with the battalion colonel. He too had made a special trip down to see him before he was flown out. And it was squatting beside Prell's cot in the big tent, with his aide and a couple of other men standing there to listen, that he had said he wanted Prell to know that he was going to recommend him for something. He didn't know what yet, but something. Prell had been in too much pain and too worried about whether he was going to lose his legs to give it much attention. He had said he didn't want any medal. But it had given him a certain thrill. He had thought, then, maybe a "V" Bronze Star, or maybe even a Silver Star.
Then it had been the regimental commander, at the New Hebrides Base Hospital. The Jap attack his patrol had forewarned them of, and the resulting battle, had brought enough casualties in the regiment that the regimental commander had decided to make a quick flying trip down to the New Hebrides to visit them. Beside Prell's bed in the big ward he had said his own office was recommending Prell for the Distinguished Service Cross. He would, he said, have liked to have a celebration, but since that was impossible with Prell in bed he had brought along an Australian imperial quart of Scotch whiskey as a present. Since Prell couldn't drink it, the American Naval nurse had taken it and kept it for him until after his second operation, when he could drink it. Or at least a part of it. After that he had become the prize pet pig of the hospital staff, the nurses, the ward boys, the doctors. And it was after that that the rumors went around the hospital that the Division was recommending him for the Congressional Medal. One of the nurses had told Prell. It could well have been that the regimental commander's visit, and the Distinguished Service Cross recommendation, had helped him a lot with the doctors in his fight to keep his legs. Prell had certainly used his new notoriety to aid him when he could.
A DSC was not something to snort at. Prell did not honestly think he deserved a DSC. He had told the regimental commander he didn't think he deserved it. Still, it would, as the regimental commander said, jokingly, look good up there on his chest alongside his two Purple Hearts. And Prell knew a Regular Army thirty-year soldier with a DSC could pretty much write his own ticket in any outfit he went to, after the war. As for the Congressional Medal, that was something in an entirely different category, and he simply put the rumor out of his mind. Prell was a conservative about decorations, and believed with the old-timers that if you were alive and there to receive it, you did not deserve any Medal of Honor. If he did not deserve a DSC, he certainly did not deserve any Medal of Honor. Besides, he was much too busy fighting with the doctors, and everybody, about his legs. The whole tiling had faded away, and had been forgotten. Until Winch appeared.
Prell had already heard that Winch was calling him a glory-hunter. Somebody had brought it down from New Georgia. Then Winch had appeared in Efate, not wounded, not even looking especially sick. And had started saying the same thing there. People were always quick to bring you that kind of news; they loved it. Winch was saying Prell had lost two of his squad killed, and two others badly wounded, because he was trying to earn himself a medal for killing General Sasaki. Fortunately, Johnny Stranger had arrived a week before Winch.
There was little Prell could do. About anything. Lying there trussed up like a chicken, in his plaster casts and ropes and weights. He certainly couldn't get around much. Winch had come in to see him, once, just after he arrived. Winch almost had to. It was almost a necessity, if he didn't want to create a serious scandal. They had just looked at each other. Then Winch had given his sneering smile, and sort of contemptuously offered his hand. Prell had had to decide whether to take it. All his instincts told him to say, "Go fuck yourself." But he had to decide whether it would look better to take it, or look worse. If he did not take it, he was afraid it would look as if Winch's gossip and accusations were upsetting him. In the end he had taken it, shaken it once, and let go of it. After a just barely decent interval, and one question about his legs, Winch had left. Later, Prell wished he hadn't taken the hand.
If there was anybody around anywhere who knew whether the Division was recommending Prell for the Congressional Medal, it would be Prell's company commander up in New Georgia, and if the company commander knew, his 1st/sgt would certainly know, too. Prell literally would rather have died than ask Winch. Prell would not even mention it to Strange. Winch, if he knew, was not mentioning it to anyone in the Efate hospital.