“Nate . . .” There was so much more I still wanted to say. I just couldn’t seem to find the words for it.
He wrapped his arms around my shoulders and drew me closer to the solidness and sureness of his frame. There was a faint smile in his voice when he said, “Hey, Cee—shut up and dance.”
Just two weeks later, Darlene sat near my bed on the day after my surgery. “Nate took a couple days off work. I’m sure he’ll be here soon.”
She nodded and hopped off her stool, moving to the window to lift the blinds. The sun was rising over Winfield. It tinged the treetops in the distance with hopeful hues.
“Congratulations,” Darlene said. “It’s a new day and you’re breathing.” There was something bracing in the words.
She stayed a few minutes longer, then sashayed out the door with a wiggle of her cubic zirconia–clad fingers and a pointed “Don’t borrow!” tossed in my direction.
I sank lower on my bed, adjusting my position for the least amount of discomfort, and watched the sky lighten as I waited for Nate to arrive.
Chapter 2
The English Channel
June 6, 1944
Cal closed his eyes and tried to picture home, but the images felt out of reach. The roar of the plane, the lurching and banking, the boom of anti-aircraft fire—it all felt overwhelming. He patted his flight jacket, unable to feel the papers he’d tucked into an inside pocket, but somehow calmed knowing they were there.
The jumpmaster, First Lieutenant Reid, a short, wiry man with a voice like a bullhorn, squinted into the chaotic night, then turned to take hold of the electronic communication receiver that hung on the fuselage wall next to the jump door. He yelled into it, addressing the flight crew in the cockpit, but Cal couldn’t hear him above the pummeling maelstrom of sound.
Whatever the flight crew said back to Reid didn’t ease the hard-edged concern on his face. He turned toward the stick of seventeen paratroopers perched nervously on their metallic bench and motioned to them that they were getting close.
Adrenaline and dread dueled in Cal’s mind. He had no idea what the hours ahead would hold, but he was certain they would change the world.
In the days preceding Operation Overlord, Cal’s squadron had tried to pass the rare free time they were given by playing cards in a large hangar filled with hundreds of cots, or by predicting which of the squad would be the first to earn a battle scar. It was a morbid form of bravado that served the dual purpose of acknowledging the danger ahead and feigning nonchalance. A fearless private first class by the name of Buck Mancuso, they’d decided, would be the most likely to ignore common sense and beat his comrades to a visit with the combat medic.
A preacher’s son from Mentor, Ohio, Buck had brought a reckless streak to the unit’s training and downtime, receiving more warnings and reprimands than anyone else in the platoon. He’d gotten his nickname from the pellets of buckshot lodged in his chest—one close to his heart—souvenirs from a childhood game of Cowboys and Indians that had nearly taken his life. He liked to point to his scars as proof that the “namby-pamby sissies” they’d be facing off with in France couldn’t possibly hurt him.
When the GIs had made their dire predictions about his early injury on the evening preceding the launch of the Normandy invasion, Buck had yelled, “Not if I see the lousy Krauts first!” Something manic had flickered in his eyes as he’d pretended to mow down a row of Germans with a machine gun, yelling obscenities.
He’d still been rattling off threats eight hours later, as the paratroopers made their way to the plane. Their briefing had been long and sobering, the meticulous outline of their mission riddled with the gaping holes of unpredictable factors—enemy preparedness, countermeasures, and unknown emplacements.
By the time the men had suited up and strapped on well over a hundred pounds of ammo, guns, demolition packs, and rations, most of them had needed help getting up the ladder to the troop carrier.
They took off from Upottery Airfield three planes at a time, then circled until all the C-47s in their series had assembled at five thousand feet into nine-ship formations. As they neared the coastline, they merged with planes flying in from other parts of southern England, then dropped to fifteen hundred feet to cross the Channel under cover of darkness—a wave of more than eight hundred thundering aircraft.
Cal’s pilot turned off the navigation lights as they left the coast. They’d be flying without radio contact too, to avoid detection from the Germans far below. This was a stealth operation of massive proportions, and the fate of Europe—possibly the world—depended on its success.
Cal breathed deeply and reviewed in his mind the dioramas of Normandy the paratroopers had memorized in the hours leading up to the invasion of France—the beaches along the northern edge of the Cotentin Peninsula, the landing zones they needed to reach, the Wehrmacht’s known anti-aircraft emplacements on the coast and inland, and the strategic supply routes they were tasked with clearing.
When thick clouds obliterated the horizon, Cal knew that the planes in his group, crippled by radio silence, would drift out of formation, each cockpit crew now flying blind on instruments alone. And when flak and tracers lit the sky around them, he assumed that the wild, evasive action the pilots had to take to protect their human cargo would further dismantle the planes’ configuration.
Down the bench from Cal, PFC Deering knelt and crossed himself three times before the plane lurched from a nearby flak explosion, sending him sprawling onto the floor. He struggled to get up again under the weight of his equipment, and Cal had to leave his seat to help the seventeen-year-old back to his. White-faced and wide-eyed, the young man clasped his knees with shaking hands, then leaned forward and threw up, his terror far stronger than the anti-nausea pills the troops had been given before boarding their planes.
The jump light turned from white to red. Every man onboard knew exactly what that meant. The lead C-47 in the formation had crossed the T that the Pathfinders, sent ahead of the invasion, had laid out far below in amber lights.
They’d be jumping in eight minutes.
The plane’s evasive maneuvers, the explosions of flak, and the scream of tracers were an assault on the paratroopers’ senses, but they were all business when First Lieutenant Reid held up his two thumbs, a cue that instantly brought them to their feet. When he gave them the bent-finger signal to hook up, the men clicked their static lines onto the anchor cable running the length of the fuselage.
Reid went to the front of the plane and tested the last troop’s line, then checked the rest of his equipment. One after the other, each man in the stick did the same for the paratrooper ahead of him.
Standing behind Cal, Buck gripped his shoulders with adrenaline-fueled zeal, screaming, “Here we go!” into his ear at the top of his lungs. “Hellfire and brimstone!”
At nineteen, Buck was two years younger than Cal, and his impetuous gusto was more coltish passion than measured force. He’d arrived at Fort Benning eager for battle and had quickly grown frustrated with the duration of the training that had preceded their deployment. One particularly intense fit of rage over latrine protocol had landed another trooper in the clinic and Buck in the slammer overnight.