The Girl in the Blue Beret - By Bobbie Ann Mason Page 0,16

of lads.

Twenty-five missions was the goal. And his score turned out to be only ten. Plain statistics were shit, he thought as he flipped through the pages. Sixty Forts hadn’t returned from a raid to Schweinfurt one bleak October day, a few weeks before Marshall arrived at Molesworth.

Bob Hadley came in from a mission the other day and had a fever and a bad cold. He reported to the Dispensary and was sent up to the General Hospital. The rest of us here in our pneumonia hole are in pretty good shape—with this eternally damp weather. It seems nearly impossible not to have a constant case of the sniffles.

It was hard to write her after he came in from a long, tense flight, weak-headed from breathing straight O2 for hours, his body taut from leaning in to the throbbing yoke of the plane. The fatigue could not be cured by a two-day respite. Hadley had been hospitalized with a touch of anoxia, oxygen deprivation. Alone, Marshall bicycled through the English countryside, the domestic patchwork of fields only here and there revealing the wartime crisis with the barracks and control tower of an air base. He remembered discovering the remains of an old Roman road, then finding it on his map. He had written about it to Loretta in one of the V-mail letters, and he saw now where that detail had been censored out in heavy black ink. The blackout was pervasive, like the fog. Sometimes he was a worse censor than the official censors.

He did not say that the English girls were so desperate for sex that they would have braved machine-gun fire to get to the GIs.

Thought I’d forgotten your birthday, didn’t you? Well, I didn’t, so Happy Birthday, Darling! Wish I were there with you. I’d spank you on one end and kiss you on the other! You know, honey, sometimes I have the feeling that in one or two minor details I just might be falling short of the perfect man for you. One of those minor details is that even when I’m 80 years old and beginning to lose the bloom of youth, I’ll undoubtedly still get caught short on Christmases and your birthdays. So will you please forgive me for not giving you something for your birthday this year and get your present for you for me? (Should that be “for me for you”?) Preferably some of them swell black things with the black trimmings. When you put ’em on, think of me, and I’ll think of you putting ’em on.

And on your next birthday I will attend to all that there stuff myself.

Marshall was stunned. He didn’t recall writing such lovey-dovey letters. When he looked back, it was mostly aviation stuff he thought about.

But he remembered the English girls.

“These girls are wild!” said Al Grainger. Grainger had been cornered by a big-boned cutie at the dance the weekend before Christmas, when busloads of English girls arrived. Marshall quickly selected the first pretty girl he saw and zoomed across the room toward her, with his wing flaps down. She saw him coming and opened her arms. It was as if they were long-lost lovers reuniting on a railway platform. She was Millie, with a brother in the RAF, and between dances, they chatted about bombers. Then the phantom of Millie’s sweetheart off in the infantry on the continent of Africa came between them, and he saw that she wished he were her Christopher and not a lanky Yank. If it had not been for such thoughts, Marshall and Millie might have had a spontaneous coupling right there on the dance floor, while the band was playing “Frenesi.” It astonished him that anyone would attempt to imitate Artie Shaw on the clarinet. Some of the girls jitterbugged to “Frenesi” in a frenzy, whirling their skirts with abandon, burning off the gin they gulped between dances, trying to forget their faraway sweethearts. Marshall and Millie danced to the end of a slow song, bodies pressed tightly together, and he said, “Thank you. He’ll come back. Trust me.” They parted, and a bit later he thought perhaps she would interpret his words as Yankee arrogance—now that Uncle Sam’s flyboys were there to win the war for the English, she could be sure her boy lover would return.

Ma chèrie,

J’ai une femme et cinq fils!

How am I doing, honey, with my French lessons? My college French is coming back to me. I’ve got a couple of pamphlets that I’m