Good Night, Irene

These are your sisters and the GIs are your brothers and we expect you to treat them as such. Win this war with your decency. Because we are Americans. And this is what Americans do.

The harder the war got, the more she discovered friends in the world—birds, campfires, water, trees.

The women posed for snapshots. Dozens of snapshots. . . . They imagined that, long after the soldiers had become old, perhaps even after they'd died, someone would come to wonder about these women holding up rifles or tommy guns or donuts and laughing with their grandfathers in front of the big dark truck.

She had done as much as possible to create a stable, gloriously dull life for herself

No one in this dogfight has any illusions: it is all instinct and training. They move like machines. But they never lose their own sense of style. Their own dance moves. They speak the same aerial language.

. . . unpleasant ideas flew away as if she were tossing cats out the back door.

Slowly, both the vaguely ironic and the deeply sincere among them came to see how seriously the Red Cross and the army took this service. And they started to take it seriously, too. They didn’t feel like cooks, didn’t feel like waitresses. Ellie said they were ass-kicking bitches, and they knew that they were. Though Irene said: “I was thinking of Amazons.” Ellie and Dorothy stared at her—she made a soft little muscle—and laughed.

Irene threw her things into the back of the truck and pressed in beside them. The Allies were beating the Germans back across the Siegfried Line. Atrocities were scattered throughout the Ardennes. But she was back with her Sisters. Heading east, following Patton and his warriors into the heart of Hitler’s empire.

Before Irene was a fiancée, she had set out from Staten Island for Washington, DC, the story went, “to find herself.” In a family whose eldest aunt was famous for being the first white woman up the Amazon, there was room for such things.