Gold to Airy Thinness Beat

Chapter Ten

Stephanie wasn't foolish enough to complain but she did wonder, as Tony had, about who had thought doing a tour for the troops would be a good idea. They were already serving, in awful conditions with the threat of death ever present. The last thing they were going to want to do was give even more to buy war bonds. Particularly given that the bonds were intended to help them. It wasn't much help if they were being required to buy it themselves.

She found out rather quickly just how right she was. The troops didn't like Tony and regularly booed him right off the stage during his speech. He treated it with his general optimism, acting as if the show were a comedy and that was the expected reaction from the crowd. The producers even got in on it, creating a second number for her and the girls to preform after he left.

The soldiers were much happier to see her and the girls.

Given the conditions they were forced to endure, Stephanie did her best for them. She'd put on as big a smile as possible during her performance and readily mingled with the troops after the shows. Many of the man seemed to have those embarrassing posters of her and she would sign them and force herself to laugh when they would make suggestive remarks about how she looked in them. She found out quickly that, over here, she was seen as even more of an icon, and less a person, than she was in the States. Rather than Lady Liberty the symbol of freedom, however, she was far more Lady Liberty the pin up girl. She'd known the producers had been sending out the posters to the soldiers in massive stacks but knowing it and seeing it were two different things. There was no way Bucky hadn't at least seen one and she cringed at the thought of him finding out the identity of the girl in them.

An unfortunate side effect of those stupid pictures was a number of the men believed her to be a certain type of woman and had certain expectations of her when they met. After getting groped for the fourth or fifth time, and having at least two guys get aggressive and then angry when she wouldn't respond the way they wanted, Tony started coming out and staying next to her as they greeted people. The various camps also assigned soldiers to her and the girls to keep an eye on things and make sure no one got out of hand. Stephanie had dealt with the same sort of problem in the States, to a lesser extent as many of those guys had women in their lives who would not approve. As always, she was annoyed by the fact she wasn't allowed to protect herself when she was more than capable.

Luckily, the majority of the men treated her and the girls with nothing but kindness and respect. Whenever they performed near a town or village she and some of the girls, with Tony as their escort, would accept an invitation for a drink or a dance at the local tavern. This usually led to a large group forming, with her, the girls, and a resigned Tony in the middle. Every now and then someone would have a bit too much to drink, or would simply be a jerk to begin with, but they were always dealt with by Tony or the other men before anything could escalate.

As the days passed and they moved closer to the front she began to see just how bad things really were. The news reels at home, she realized, focused on the soldiers who were stationed farther back, often well out of the action. They were shown happy and fit, in clean clothes and dry conditions, ever ready to charge ahead into battle.

The reality was, this close to the front at least, the men were exhausted and run down. They would sit in cold mud and on the hard ground to watch her, their clothing woefully inadequate to the weather. Stephanie stayed in each location for only a few days but, even in that short time, it was long enough to see men sitting in the crowd cheering her one day, and in body bags the next.

With so much new fodder for her imagination the nightmares she had about Bucky grew a thousand times worse. She saw his eyes staring vacantly from a body bag, his body blown to pieces on the battlefield, or sitting shell shocked and vacant in a corner, the man she knew barely recognizable after exposure to the horrors of war. She searched for him everywhere, and with each new day bringing no sign and no word she began to despair she would ever see him again. She watched as a few of the girls grew close to men they met in various camps, promising to write and keep in touch after leaving, and had to resist the urge to warn them about the future of constant worry they were setting themselves up for.