1944: Normandy, France
Flynn scrambled down the rope ladder faster than he would have thought possible. Men went before him and right behind him, filling up the landing craft. A nearby explosion shook the craft, forcing them to grip the sides as waves tipped it on one side. Thankfully, it didn’t capsize.
Moving through water already littered with the olive drab uniforms of dead servicemen, the Graves Registration men kept their heads low, helmets clanking against the steel walls. The Allied troops had taken advantage of the high tide for their invasion, but the water was pulling back now, revealing the dark, humped shapes of sunken DD tanks, specially designed for the Normandy invasion. Flynn swallowed. How many casualties were there for each sunken vessel? There was no point wondering. He would find out soon enough.
He kept his eyes on the bottom of the boat. The sea was rough, tossing him from one side to the other, and his stomach turned with every wave, but he couldn’t look up towards the beach. He didn’t want to face what lay ahead of them until absolutely necessary.
‘Something’s slowing us down,’ their commanding officer called out.
‘It’s a body, Captain. Caught up in the propeller,’ said Sergeant Sanders. His face was green, but Flynn couldn’t tell if it was from seasickness or what he’d seen.
‘Cut him free then, and bring him aboard. This is what we’re here to do, boys.’
But before they could free the propeller, there was a jolt and scrape as the landing craft ran aground on a sandbank. Their commanding officer shouted instructions to get out and wade to shore.
Flynn dropped into water that was neck-deep; it weighed down his limbs and made his movements slow, his boots pulling through the sludge of wet sand. He could hear his own breath rough in his ears.
Something bumped into him. He turned his head to see a body, clad in a lifejacket, floating face-down. Flynn took hold of the man and turned him onto his back, although there was no point. He was long since dead. He hooked his fingers into the lifejacket, trying not to notice the dark freckle near the man’s eye or the tattoo just visible on his wrist; trying not to see any detail that marked him as a man and not just a body. Flynn would give him every respect due when they identified and buried him, but he couldn’t afford to lose his head at the senseless loss before then.
He kept his gaze forward, on the stippled surface of the water, as he pulled his heavy burden to shore. He saw the eruption of sand before he heard it—a spray against the pale afternoon sky, the result of a hidden mine. It would mean more bodies for them to identify and bury.
Finally, the water began to drop away from him. As his own body got lighter, that which he was pulling alongside him only got heavier. Flynn grunted as he dragged the serviceman onto the damp shingle. Later, he would sift through his personal effects, piling them together to send back to his family. He hoped the man still had his dog tags on him so he’d be easy to identify. Otherwise, Flynn would have to look for a name on his belongings, or note the partial serial number in the laundry marks on his uniform, or take a description of his tattoo. Failing that, the man’s fingertips would be injected with liquid if the body had dried too much to get fingerprints by then—a task Flynn had hated learning—and a dental chart would be taken.
Flynn’s eyes raked the length of Omaha Beach, unable to comprehend what he was seeing. It seemed there were as many bodies as there were grains of sand. Some were caught up in barbed wire; others had been hit mid-run by enemy gunfire; others were lying in scattered pieces because of land mines. The sand was stained wine-dark, the air a mixed metallic smell of fired ammunition, salt and blood. And the noise—shouting voices, the continuous rush of the waves, guttural cries of pain, the ear-splitting boom of the occasional explosion. But amid it all, the silence of the dead was deafening. How could they possibly gather and identify every single one of them?
Bile surged in Flynn’s stomach, up into his throat, but he swallowed it back. Now was not the time to be sick. Now was the time to get to work. The men still alive to fight couldn’t have their morale diminished by the sight of all the dead comrades they were leaving behind.
It took the Graves Registration companies four days to clear the Normandy beaches. During that time, Flynn saw Alvin, the man who had lifted him out of the bombing debris in Portsmouth, on a litter team. He hadn’t realised he was also a Graves Registration man.
When their eyes met Flynn thought he saw a flicker of surprise run over the other man’s features, and his chest tightened. Of course he’d be wondering why Flynn, whose legs didn’t work the last time they met, was here. Heaviness seeped through him, as though his veins were filling with cement, and he turned his face away. The answer to that question wasn’t something he wanted to share.
Digging the graves in the temporary cemetery they’d created for the identified men was back-breaking work. When they couldn’t give the job to German prisoners of war, or pay locals in the newly minted invasion currency to do it, the officers delegated it to the black troops. Flynn saw Alvin working by himself, shovel disappearing into the earth, shoulders straining against his uniform. Sweat dotted his forehead but he never stopped.
Flynn was pinning the parachutes they’d pulled from hedges, trees and crashed gliders into shrouds for the bodies. As he worked it was impossible not to think of all the items he’d retrieved from these bodies: the letters to sweethearts and mothers, the wedding rings and photos, inscribed bibles and pay books—all helping to identify the men, but also serving as a reminder of the full lives they would never return to. It made him remember the boys in Pearl Harbor who had come to his bar every night, and finally he had to take a break. He pulled off the mask covering his face, but left the cotton stuffed in his nose. The smell of decaying flesh too often infested his dreams.
Finding an unused shovel, Flynn began to work alongside Alvin. The other man glanced at him, but didn’t say anything, simply allowing their shovels to find a common rhythm. Flynn knew Alvin must be curious to know the truth of what had happened to him back in Portsmouth, and was glad he didn’t ask. The man had tact.
They stopped when the grave reached its needed depth, and wiped their sleeves across their faces. One more grave completed out of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, that were needed. Soon the military chaplain would arrive to give the dead an all-faith burial, but it never seemed enough to Flynn. These men deserved more than hastily built crosses or Stars of David with their second dog tag hung over them.
‘How do you keep yourself from losing your mind out here?’ Flynn asked Alvin.
It was a question they all wanted the answer to, but so far no one Flynn knew had found it.
‘I think about the life I had before this, the life I’ll be returning to,’ Alvin said.
‘What life was that?’
‘I’m a performer.’
‘Like in a theatre?’
‘Something like that. I breathe fire.’
‘No.’ Flynn didn’t think he had the capacity to be surprised by anything after all he’d seen and done, but this statement did the trick. He wondered if Alvin was having him on. ‘Really? How’d you get into that?’
‘Saw it once as a kid and was never able to forget it. Finally got someone to teach me the ways, and I took to it better than I ever did singing or dancing. Made it my life when I was old enough, and it meant I spent my days bringing joy to people. I have to believe I can go back to that world.’
‘Sounds like heaven.’
‘No, but it’s a good life.’ There was a slight twitch at the corner of Alvin’s mouth, and that partial smile in the midst of all this horror told Flynn so much more about Alvin’s previous life than any words could.
Flynn pulled out a packet of cigarettes and offered it to Alvin, who accepted. Along with rations and ammunition, cigarettes were the only items from the bodies they recovered that weren’t sent back to family.
‘There was nothing wrong with my legs,’ Flynn said suddenly, taking a cigarette for himself. He felt Alvin’s eyes on him but couldn’t meet them. ‘I wasn’t faking or lying though. Doctors said it was an effect of shock. Unusual, but not unheard of. Apparently. Only took a few hours before I could move them again.’
Alvin nodded, releasing a lungful of smoke. There was no judgement in his face, which wasn’t what Flynn had expected.
‘We found her, you know,’ he said, his eyes taking in the landscape around them; they both knew that at any time they could be picked off by snipers, who wouldn’t achieve anything by the kill but couldn’t resist a cheap shot. ‘The kid.’
‘She didn’t make it, did she?’
Alvin shook his head.
Flynn closed his eyes for a brief second. He felt a warm hand close around his upper arm.
‘It wouldn’t have made any difference if you were there,’ Alvin said. ‘She was too … too broken.’
Were the words merely to alleviate what would now be futile guilt? Flynn didn’t know. And he was too much of a coward to ask.
That cigarette break became the first of many, a matter which caused unrest among their respective units for daring to cross colour lines. Neither Flynn nor Alvin cared. Their shared experiences had created a sense of camaraderie which lifted the heavy weight of their job.
Eventually their units were separated, Flynn’s platoon crossing into Belgium where they buried both their own men and the enemy, Alvin’s working in Malmedy where the dead soldiers had frozen so fast that when the Graves Registration men thawed them for a proper burial their wounds ran afresh and their eyes leaked tears. When they met again at the Henri-Chapelle Cemetery, they could both tell it was as changed men.
If Flynn had had any energy left for anger, he would have felt it. He’d gone to war thinking he could put things right after what had happened in Honolulu. Instead, all he’d done—all they’d all done—was become part of it.
‘How much longer do you think we’ll have to do this?’ Flynn asked his friend as he tried to light a cigarette with trembling fingers. They often trembled these days. If the work hadn’t been enough to set him on edge, the fact the Germans had taken to boobytrapping US bodies—laying mines beneath them that would explode the moment they were disturbed—ensured he was. ‘There’s talk that we’ll have to stay even if the war ends, searching for the bodies of all the fallen Americans.’
‘At some point they’ll have to face facts that not everyone can be found and identified. Some of our boys are nothing more than a toe among a vast landscape. It’d be like scouring all of Europe for one specific flower.’
The corner of Flynn’s mouth twitched. ‘We’re looking for a pe-toe-nia, you think?’
‘I’d say more of a toe-lip.’
‘How about a toe-ger lily?’
It wasn’t terribly funny, but both guffawed as though it were the finest joke they’d ever heard. Dark humour was the only thing getting Flynn through his work without losing his mind. Humour, and the stories Alvin wove of a life of cheering audiences, bright lights and cheerful music, exposed flesh and columns of fire. He promised himself that should the war ever end, should he find himself free of this task of packaging up tattered lives and sending them back in little parcels of grief, he would find such a life. He would drink and dance and delight in the company of women, and the smell of death would recede from his memory, chasing his nightmares away.
Flynn had to believe it was possible.