The Undaunted

C-Rations and Good Luck Charms

After a brief lesson on loading and handling the gun safely, Jack held it out to her. Jenny hesitated only a second before wrapping her hand around the gun, carefully keeping her forefinger out of the trigger housing as Jack had shown her until she was ready to actually pull the trigger.

He stood behind her and corrected her stance several times before he would actually let her fire. Jenny, determined to hit her targets on the first fire, listened to Jack's softly murmured instructions and did everything he told her to so as not to waste ammunition. Later, when he examined the holes she had put in the board they were using as a target, Jack's lips twisted and what might have been an amused smile or a grimace. Jenny wasn't sure.

"Well?" She looked up at him nervously and bit her lip.

Jack's eyes met hers and the grimace finally softened into a smile. "You'll do. I hope you never have to use it, but if you do, you're ready."

Jenny smiled in relief. She knew Jack wouldn't say that unless it was true. He was the last man on earth to bullshit and she appreciated that. After that, Jack and Jenny strolled through the camp, stopping every now and then to talk with one of the soldiers.

The ones who had known Natalia in Italy asked about her.

"We've all had to find new good luck charms now that we no longer have Natty," Casey said. "My buddy gave me this before he died." He held up a much-tarnished St. Christopher's medal between his fingers, his boyish smile for once poignant as if he were trying his damnedest to hold back tears.

Jenny studied him, wondering if she had misjudged him when she first met him in the jeep in London, wondering whether he had more substance than she had thought. Or if war had deepened his character.

"Would you mind if I photographed your lucky charms?" she asked the soldiers, looking at Jack for permission, knowing the pictures of the men with their new talismanic objects would be a moving follow-up to her Natalia story.

Jack nodded and the men rose to their feet. They crossed the field, past lines of washing strung from tent to tent, past water bags swinging from tripods, past a phonograph with Jo Stafford singing into the night. Inside each tent she saw the same thing...war-touched GIs transformed into heartbreakingly young boys and their good luck charms:

The Domino sugar tablet that one carried with him since Italy because, he said in a terrible understatement, life in Europe was damn short on sweet stuff; the red tin of Tuxedo Club pomade that had sat in another man's pocket and deflected a bullet; the sweet-smelling green wrapper from a cake of Camay soap that a WAC with a lovely smile had given another as a keepsake because she'd had nothing else to give him.

There were also the much folded and studied photographs of mothers or wives or girlfriends or dogs or even horses. And strangers like her. So many of the men had pictures of beautiful women from magazines or calendars, their faces and bodies creased into pocket-sized shapes. What did those pictures remind the men of? Jenny wondered as she saw, many times, the photograph of her naked back, the one the PRO in Italy had ruined for her.

And another that she had forgotten: Jennifer Snow in a floor sweeping Worth ball gown with a full princess skirt, thin straps crisscrossing her back, which was otherwise bare, the fabric having been scooped away down to her sacrum. She looked as if she had no place in this world she now found herself in, as if she came from another universe entirely and that was, she supposed, the point of the pictures. They were the only means, out here, by which beauty could be held in the men's hands. And perhaps the pictures reminded each GI that there was another world besides this one, a world they could return to, if only they survived.

Jenny kept smiling as if it wasn't at all disconcerting to know that so many men kept pictures of her. After one over-eager private asked if she would go to dinner with him in Paris once it was liberated and she had gently deflected him, she saw Jack studying her face closely.