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( Chapter Ten: ❛ THE ARMY BOY HOURS ❜ ) DECEMBER, 1943
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AFTER THE DISPUTES WITH TWO OF HER CLOSEST FRIENDS SHE'D HAD OVER THE PAST COUPLE OF WEEKS, walking down the pavements of Melbourne with her arm hooked around Hoosier's bicep made her feel nothing less than scandalous.
Theoretically, Ginny hadn't done anything that had gone against her morals. Indeed, she announced to her mother at a tender age that she would never do something just because everyone else was doing it, and she wasn't. She wasn't taking a Yank for the sake of having someone to decorate her arm — she'd gone through enough alongside Bill Smith to make that quite clear, four months of ifs and buts and maybes had brought her to where she was now, and she wasn't ashamed of any of it, no matter how much Jackie and (more so) Gordon tried to force that opinion on her.
Besides, she was told enough to be allowed to do what she wanted, and if she wanted to spend time with an American, she would. How Company and other members of the division had been sent on a thousand mile march from the middle of nowhere back to Melbourne, and he was finally back in her arms after three days of his absence. He recounted the grueling experience to her as they walked the streets one afternoon, "We went on this big ol troop train," he told her as they passed a photo booth that said four for a quarter! "Our food ration was down to one sack of raisins and one sack of uncooked rice each — apparently we were given that because a Jap soldier can live on the same for three God-forsaken weeks, which is the biggest sack of shit I ever heard."
"Makes sense though," reasoned Ginny through the cigarette that she smoked delicately with her free hand, "I heard the Japanese train their soldiers in very intensive ways. Apparently they have to spend lots of time on their endurance because they spend so long surviving in those underground holes in the jungle."
"After we were given our little sacks of chow, it was three days of marching those thousand miles back to Melbourne. Three days. We slept on our backs in the sand, more fuckin' blisters than Japs in the jungle. I came back, 'course, and went straight to sleep, but some of the others went out. Leckie got the boot from his Aussie sweetheart and both him and Chuckler got thrown in night-jail for assaulting an officer, or somethin'. Jackie said she didn't want to be in kahoots no criminal so Lew also got a kickin' to the curb, so we've had a fuckload of moping about recently. Did Jackie mention?"
She leaned further into him and sighed, "Jackie and I haven't spoken much recently, if I'm being honest. I mean, I haven't even seen her since I left my job at the switchboards, because we don't work together anymore. I'm glad to be away from that place, though — I always despised it there. You know, I recently had my aptitude test for the AWAS, actually."
