Jess didn’t wait for his reply. “Back when you quarantined us, you said we’d be able to go when the nurses did. They’re going next week but we still don’t have our orders. We’ll put our concerns in writing,” she continued. “We’ll expect a reply within twenty-four hours. If that reply says anything about our delicate vaginas, then we will, every single one of us, publish it.”

She turned away and walked over to an empty table. Iris dumped her typewriter in front of Jess. Ruth bought the drinks. And Jess bashed out their words. At the end they had a letter to SHAEF, signed by every single female correspondent who’d been in Europe for more than a month, demanding they be allowed into France.

Eleven

Two days later, Jess and Iris Carpenter were on their way to Omaha Beach on a plane. The first women into France—besides Martha’s unscheduled expedition—after D-day. They had thirty-six hours. No more. While SHAEF might be well aware that The Boston Globe wouldn’t print any military communication about women’s unmentionables, Jess knew they weren’t so sure about Vogue. And so her threat had worked. But it had come at a price. More new rules for “girl reporters” arrived from SHAEF as thick and fast as bombers in an invasion sky and any breach would result in court-martial. And she’d also heard that Warren Stone had been bawled out by his boss once again for his inability to keep the gals quiet. Which would only make him hate Jess all the more.

But as she and Iris flew in lower toward the minuscule Saint Laurent airstrip, between Easy Green and Easy Red, Jess forgot about all that and wondered instead how anyone could land on or take off from the beach. Indeed the pilot looked taut enough to snap as they came in low over Dead Man’s Gulch through ashen bulges of smoke.

“Do you think we’ll make it?” she said to Iris.

“It’d certainly be the definition of irony to have finally been allowed to come, and then to crash land on the beach,” Iris replied.

“Maybe I’ll just close my eyes and pray,” Jess said.

In the end she prayed, but she couldn’t make herself shut her eyes. The sea, a beautiful holiday blue, was full of battleships and tugboats, all flying silver barrage balloons above like misshapen moons, the sunlight dancing off the silver, off the water. Here and there, drowned tanks and derricks could be seen among the ruins of bombed-out boats. The hulking gray of the Mulberry harbor fingered the ocean and bulldozered piles of metal hedgehogs spiked menacingly from the sand. Foxholes, which just days ago had sheltered men, gaped out of the cliff.

They landed safely and Jess and Iris hopped out, sharing a relieved grimace to find themselves alive and intact and in France. On the beach beside them, medics prodded the sand with spades, removing the bodies that had, until now, been temporarily covered over in the rush. Row after row of sticks marked each resting place, and from each stick wafted a canvas bag. Jess walked among them, in the European Theater of Operations, a place where the actors would not come back to life once the curtains came down, focusing not on the things one would ordinarily admire on a beach—the color of the water, an unusual shell—but on the things one should never behold by the seaside.