1944 (M's Journal)

A new day. That's what I want. A day not like every other day. A day that does not add to the accumulation of those forlorn eyes. Fish belly white; bottom lake cold. Then I think of the boys that arrive with none. Of the children they will never see. And how must they cry, how can they cry, without eyes. . . .

And still it is cold. The last two days have been officially documented: blizzard. Snow looks like sand as it huddles against our tents, as it gets in our shoes, as it makes even the slightest trip outside miserable. The days are short of light, overcast. Everything appears darker than it is. And there is a heaviness to sound, a notch too much of bass. Wears on you. Grates on you. And you crave the one thing war can never give, yet gives too often: silence. The silence of closed eyes. From the palm of a hand.

I work with five other nurses. The 91st surgical field hospital having been spilt into thirds with the push in mid-december. We travel like gypsies following the army, living off what the war has discarded. We exist because it does. We have work because others sacrifice, which is an euphemism. This is what accumulation does. It compresses you. Weighs you down. Until you have not the strength and you break. You say things you shouldn't say, which is only a pale reflection of what you've been thinking.

I write letters home but not as often as I should. I hate the lies. I hate that I am writing to an audience that no longer knows me, that the girl they said goodbye to no longer exists; yet, these falsified letters, is what I feed them and the riff grows. And I want to say things, write things they would not recognize. So I pretend. I say that I am fine; that everything is going according to plan, that we are winning this war. And in the saying, I am saying nothing at all. I have created this other self, this former self that I inhabit when I write to them. I wear it like a dress that no longer fits. From a distance, no one can tell.

We fix what has been broken, but what has been broken, has been broken for us. Like ice in hot tea, our boys are consumed. There is pride at times and guilt. But mostly a vague disgust, a shimmering anger beyond the tongue to define. As if the eyes have rendered one mute, mute of diction for this carnage, of looking into the blue eyes of a young boy, wiping the sweat off his brow with one hand while holding his intestines in with the other, waiting for help, for his turn, telling him to . . . and then you realize those eyes are just staring. But they aren't seeing you anymore.

There is a language in eyes not seen outside of war, not seen outside the OR. We arrive; and so do they. An odd choreography, them coming from one direction, us, the other. And there are always more of them than us. Dropped in their soaked litters, those oxblood stains, damp, sticky, a look and smell not unlike calf birth. Without the birth. They lie because they can't stand, can't walk and it hits you, the obvious, these teenaged boys, who should be running and jumping like deer, can't. Some never will. Many of them were handsome.

Art by Andrew Jones