Lone eagle

It took them over an hour to berth the ship, and then one by one the men came down the gangways to land. People were cheering and crying and there were countless tearful scenes being played out on the dock. But this time, Kate wasn't crying for them, she was crying for Joe, as tears streamed down her cheeks as she watched. It was another two hours before she could get on the ship. They were ready to unload the stretcher cases by then, and she went up with a group of orderlies who were going up to take them off. She had to fight to control herself, and not shove her way past them, and she had no idea where to find him on the huge ship. She saw quickly that the orderlies on the ship and the crew were bringing out men on litters and laying them on the upper deck. And she carefully threaded her way amongst wounded and dying men. There was the stench of sick and sweating bodies heavy in the air, and she had to struggle not to gag.

Some of them reached out to her, tried to grab her hands, and touch her legs. And she had to stop every few feet to talk to them. No matter what she felt, she couldn't just walk by. She had been walking a cautious path among them, careful not to step on anyone, and she stopped for what must have been the hundredth time when a man with no legs reached up and took her hand. He had lost half his face, and she could see from the way he turned his head, that his remaining eye was blind. He just wanted to talk to her and tell her how glad he was to be home, and she could tell from his accent that he was from the Deep South. She was still bending down talking to him, when a hand behind her gently touched her arm. She finished talking to the southern man, and then turned to see what she could do for the man who had touched her arm, and he was lying there, looking up at her with a broad smile. His face was thin and pale, and there were small scars from beatings he had sustained from the Germans, but in spite of that she knew who he was. She fell to her knees next to him, and he sat up and took her in his arms. There were tears rolling down his cheeks, as they mingled with hers. It was Joe.

“Oh my God…” It was all she could say.

“Hello, Kate,” he said quietly in a shaking but nonetheless familiar voice. “I told you I had a hundred lives.” She was crying so hard she couldn't talk to him, and he gently wiped the tears from her face with a roughened hand. He had lost an incredible amount of weight, and she could see as she sat back and looked at him that both his legs were in casts, they had reset them in Germany, but the doctors weren't sure yet if he would walk again. His captors had broken them during interrogations and shot him in both legs when he tried to escape. He had hung on to the merest thread of life, and he had come back to her. Kate couldn't even imagine the condition he'd been in, it was hard to believe that it could have been worse than what she saw now, but she knew that it had.

“I never thought I'd see you again,” he said softly, as the orderlies carried his stretcher off the ship, and Kate walked beside him, holding his hand, as he used the other one to wipe his eyes.

“Neither did I,” she said, as her supervisor spotted them, she had been crying silently as she watched them reach the dock. It was a scene they had all seen now a thousand times, but this one touched her particularly because she liked Kate so much. Someone deserved to win in all this, she told herself. There had been enough tragedy in the past four years.

“I see you got your guy. Welcome home, son,” the woman said, and patted his arm. He had a death grip on Kate's hand. “Do you want to ride in the ambulance with him, Kate?” They were sending him to a VA hospital just outside of Boston, and it would be an easy commute for her to visit him. The tides of fortune had finally turned. And Kate knew that, whatever else happened to them, she would be grateful forever for the gift of Joe's life.

She got in the ambulance, and sat on the floor next to him. She had brought a bar of chocolate for him in her purse and she handed it to him as the ambulance pulled out. There were three other men riding with them, and she divided up another bar of chocolate among the three of them, and one of them started to cry.

They had all been in Germany, two of them had been in prisoner of war camps, and the fourth man had been caught trying to escape into Switzerland. He had been tortured for four months and then left to die. They had all gotten nightmarish treatment while in German hands, but in each case, civilians had saved their lives, except for Joe, who had been hidden by a farmer at first, but then had simply hung on to life while in prison, until he was found.

“Are you okay?” Joe was looking her over like a mother hen. He had never seen a sight as beautiful as her hair and her skin and her eyes, and the other three men riding with them couldn't take their eyes off her. They just lay on their litters and stared at her, while Joe held her hand.