[IC] Noms de Guerre

[HeySeuss]

French Field Hospital, Hanoi, French Indochina, June, 1949

Doctor Molineaux was one of the best surgeons in Indochina, and like many doctors of his age, a man that had seen far too much trauma surgery in his time. But it was that experience that took a country doctor that was mostly delivering the children of farmwives in Normandy and turned him into a tireless machine of a surgeon, gifted with the deft touch that saved so many lives-- like this one, an all too-young legionnaire who took a pair of shots that were lodged entirely too close to his heart; getting the rounds out had taken every scrap of skill he could muster, but he felt obligated to this legionnaire. His surgical orderly, a man named Marcel, was good enough to substitute for a nurse, and they had a rapport, so they were able to chatter, as other doctors did, over the shattered, maimed bodies of the young men they tried to save. It was a way to keep the enormity of what they did and the odds they faced at bay, the idle chatter to distract the mind while muscle memory worked, while trained skill guided the hand.

The doctor learned, through painful experience, to ideally look at his patients as muscle and organs, as the parts rather than the person, but his sense of detachment was jarred by the sight of a familiar sight on the man's right arm; Bellophoron astride Pegasus. It caused him to look closer; the lad was young, in his 20's still, with brown hair cut brutally short in the Legion's way. Strong features, tanned and a bit lined, a straight nose, with a good jaw and a brow, with deep set eyes. Then he saw the telltale scars; jagged, uneven things from hot metal fragments, on the tanned, wiry muscle of the young man.

"See that tattoo? You'd expect to see a damned SS lightning bolt tattoo on most of these boys, but this one..." The doctor glanced down to indicate where to look, while working under the harsh light of the surgical lamp.

"I hadn't noticed it. What's so different about this one?" The orderly had seen a number of military tattoos in his time, many of them German. It was hard to track them all.

"Not German. British Para. Clamp," he broke the conversation for a moment to communicate the needs of the operation, before returning to the idle chatter, "I've seen it before, in St. Lo, they..."

"Funny, because when we were stripping him down for the operation, we had to take a star of David off with his dogtags. He doesn't really look like one a Jew, does he? I thought they all had dark hair and big noses, hein? Funny that a Jew would be in among all these Boche killers. But this one, he is up for the Croix de Guerre, they say. Tough one. His convoy came under ambush on Rt. Coloniale 4, and it was his assault on a communist machinegun that allowed the men that escaped to escape. Fucking slants."

"Brave man. Strange coincidence," The doctor reflected, even as he finished the operation, and indicated for an actual nurse to close the man up, getting ready to move to the next patient, "I'm not sure what brought him to the Legion of all places, but this is one I can be proud of saving. Legionnaire..." he checked the chart for a name, "Fabian," he mused; it was obviously a nom de guerre, the false identities that most legionnaires had these days. Well, it was a strange place, the Legion, they all had their reasons to hide in France's expendable army.

"Well," the doctor ordered, snapping back to business, "Make sure he's ready for transportation to Bach Mai in Hanoi, antibiotics and rest. They'll need to watch him for a post-op infection."

Bach Mai, days later

The escape from Poland in a false compartment of a truck bed...Chelsea barracks, the walnut of his rifle's stock cool against his cheek as he lined up his shot...the shock of the parachute opening over Sicily...Wally dying in his arms in the night in Oosterbeek...the emaciated skeletons of Belsen...the first site of the shores of Palestine from Haifa...Sidi bel Abbes...

He'd never been put under before, but when he could clear his head enough to figure out where and when he was, he knew that his condition was serious by the dull throb of pain that radiated in his abdomen and torso, along with the feeling of binding from the bandages. His own perception was blurry as he came awake to consciousness bit by bit, the entire world fuzzed around him; he didn't realize he was speaking aloud, but in Polish interlaced with Yiddish, though as his head cleared, he realized that he was using profanity and buttoned it up; no one around here would likely recognize the words in Polska, though they might well note the language.

It came back to him, of course, how he'd arrived here. He could remember the crackle of a Soviet-made submachinegun and the explosion of pain ripping through him; he remembered the smell of the burning gasoline from the convoy truck that'd been blown up and caught on fire, and the smell of the blood and singed flesh and hair of the machinegun crew he'd just managed to kill with a grenade, an attempt to save his comrades. It wasn't that he'd done it out of a sense of heroism or glory as much as that those men would have probably died under the fire of that weapon and he'd had the opportunity to kill the men trying to kill his kameraden. It was ironic, he realized, that he thought of them in the German term. In the legion of 1949, German thinking prevailed. German terms were used in the ranks and German songs, like "Ich hatte einen Kameraden" were sung over the graves of the fallen.

He had no relatives left to sit shiva over his corpse if he went here. He'd just have a Boche military funeral song sung over his grave by some of the men that tried to exterminate his entire people. And in a strange way, it was fitting; Legio Patria Nostra; they were all countrymen in the Legion.

Laying on his bed in a strange room that he found himself alone in, a thing of whitewashed walls and a whining ceiling fan, with a shuttered window letting in some of the sunlight, he tried to call out for someone, anyone, but the sound that issued from the throat was in no way words; it was a rasp, but it wasn't hard to figure out that he probably was calling out for the morphine...

@DotCom

[DotCom]

It was always jarring to catch sight of her own reflection in the curve of a bedpan or a dirty window, let alone a real mirror. The basement underneath the doctor's office where she had spent the majority of the last nine years hadn't had one. She'd asked for it to be removed after the doctor had taken her first child from her, and when little Chloè had complained, she'd shattered it instead. Strangely, the guilt from one incident - intentionally taking from her sister that small comfort - far outweighed what little she had allowed herself to feel over the child. It had been the worst that first time. Each time after that she felt less and less.

There was no help for any of it now, though, not the dark memories from the occupation, nor the dark nights that had proceeded it. Least of all the harshness of her own reflection staring at her from a different plane. Most of her flame red hair was tucked carefully beneath her stark white nurse's cap, though of course there was that ever present rebellious coil that dangled into hard green eyes. Everything about her screamed no-nonsense, the sort of cool professionalism that came of having grown up first beneath a doctor's office, then any number of hospital rooms. She had been head nurse now for only a few short months, but the assignment had felt more natural to her than anything had since the night her parents had died.

Turning now away from the mirror, the young nurse tucked that single wisp of whimsy back behind her ear and made her way down the hall to begin her rounds. Two girls had reported in sick again this evening, and she herself was now beginning her third shift, putting her at eighteen hours on her feet and nearly twenty-four without sleep, though simple matters of fatigue had ceased to bother her long ago. At some point, she would have to take responsibility for her own exhaustion, but in her mind, her duty to the men under her purview far outweighed the mere necessity of rest.

She had made it past just two rooms, one empty (and unmade - she would have to tell the new girl, Renée, she needed to keep up with her empty beds just as much as her full ones), the other dark and silent, when a quiet moan issued from the third. The nurse stopped short, green eyes flitting down to the clipboard in her unscarred hand, but the young man's name was not there. She had the doctor's notes, of course, and while they provided her with enough information to spark her own nurse's intuition as to what the moan meant, she'd long since discovered soldiers as young as these liked to hear their own names, or at least their own language first.

She scanned the list again, looking for the nurse assigned to him, knowing she needed to finish her own rounds, and came up empty. It was late, and most of the men were sleeping. She could not imagine there would be any great emergency if the others were made to wait. In the meantime, this young man was alone and in pain, and she had never been the type to let things lie when she knew there were things she could do.

She disappeared briefly back down the hall and returned a moment later with a silver tray - this own obscuring her own reflection with a syringe and a small, dark bottle. Her ministrations were quick and clean and it was only when she finished that she was able to offer a smile that was surprisingly sincere for a woman with eyes as hard as hers.

"Hello," she said quietly. "Do you know where you are?"