The Race for Paris by Meg Waite Clayton

couldn’t imagine it was really July, that back home people were drinking iced tea and fanning themselves on front porches, eating sliced watermelon and corn freshly cut from the cob, and peach ice cream. We weren’t alone—everyone at the front was wet and miserable. Everyone anywhere near it was. Wet from the rain and being out in it every minute, cold from being wet and from the chill coastal air.
    “One clear day, one clear morning,” Liv said, “and the breakthrough will come.”
    Breakthrough . The word was everywhere. The troops and supplies were amassed on the beachhead, ready for the push totake back France. Getting tired of being ready. General Bradley himself—the commanding officer of the American troops in Normandy—had shown up at the Vouilly Château the day before, slipping quietly into the barn opposite the old bakery, coming to the press rather than calling the press to headquarters so as not to alert the Germans to Operation Cobra, which he was there to explain. The weather needed to clear enough for air support to go in first, though—the US Eighth and Ninth and the British Royal Air Forces: B-17 and B-24 heavy bombers, B-26 Marauders, and the fighters, the P-38s, P-47s, and P-51s. The largest air strike ever ordered—that was what we were waiting for at the Saint-Lô–Périers road.
    Now Eisenhower was here, too. He’d flown in from London in a heavy storm, only to have General Bradley tell him the attack he’d come to witness had been called off due to weather and admonish him for risking the flight.
    Fletcher did a great imitation of Eisenhower flicking his cigarette into the mud, and in a rotten imitation of the general’s voice said, “‘Perhaps the only perk to being Supreme Commander is that I can’t be grounded, even by you, sir.’”
    “This damned weather is going to be the death of me,” Eisenhower was said to have remarked.
    “The death of us,” Fletcher said. “He means the death of all of us here at the front. The death of the Allied effort.”
    Waiting. It takes a bigger toll than you might imagine when every second offers the specter of the military police taking you into custody, or of a battle beginning that would be the end for so many and might be the end for you. I’d done what I was supposed to do while I waited. I’d written a piece on the waiting:
    All of war is waiting for something. Waiting in a mess tent line for bad food. Waiting for orders, or for daylight ordarkness, for the weather to clear enough for planes to fly. All of war is waiting except when you’re in it and you wish all you had to do was wait.
    We waited, and Fletcher taught Liv and me to shoot.
    The first time Fletcher put the revolver that had been his brother’s in my hands, it made me more nervous than I would have imagined.
    “Lordy, Fletcher,” I said, “correspondents aren’t supposed to carry weapons!”
    “Of course they aren’t, Jane,” he agreed. “It’s against international law. But you and Liv are AWOL. What’s one violation more?”
    “And you, Fletcher?” Liv said.
    “I’m not a correspondent. I’m a military photographer, one of the few benefits of which is that I am allowed a weapon.”
    He turned me toward a tree and wrapped his arms around me, guiding me in the aiming of the thing. I hit the trunk that first shot, with his hands warm on mine, the stubble of his beard brushing the edge of my brow and his chest against my back so that I was sure he could feel the thud of my heart. My gaze was not on the tree I was to aim for but rather on my arms lined up with his, my hands in his palms, my breasts pressed together in the posture. When Fletcher let go and told me to fire on my own, the bullet hit nowhere near the target.
    “For someone who so obviously loves the feel of a gun in your hand, it’s sad that you’re such a bloody lousy shot,” Fletcher said.
    As he dipped his head to reload the gun, Liv mouthed, “A playboy,” and made a face that left me