Now she settled back in her place. The flash of light from the head of Rosa Rosetti’s cot did not shine again. Nor did Norma Kent fall asleep at once.
“A flash of light in the night,” she was thinking. “How very unimportant!”
And yet, as her thoughts drifted back to her childhood days not so long ago—she was barely twenty-one now and just out of college—she recalled a story told by her father, a World War veteran. The story dealt with a stranger in an American uniform who, claiming to be lost from his outfit, had found refuge in their billet for the night.
“That night,” her father had said, “flashes of light were noticed at the window of our attic lodging. And that night, too, our village was bombed.”
“Suppose we are bombed tonight?” the girl thought. Then she laughed silently, for she was lodged deep in the heart of Iowa, at old Fort Des Moines.
As the name drifted through her dreamy thoughts, it gave her a start. She was fully awake again, for the full weight of the tremendous move she had made came crashing back upon her.
“I’m a WAC,” she whispered, “a WAC! I’m in the Army now!”
Yes, that was it. She was a member of the Woman’s Army Corps. So, too, were all the girls sleeping so peacefully there. Here at Fort Des Moines in four short weeks they would receive their basic training. And then—“I may drive a truck,” she thought with a thrill, “or operate an army short-wave set, or help watch for enemy planes along the seacoast, or—” she caught her breath, “I may be sent overseas.” North Africa, the Solomons, the bleak shores of Alaska—all these and more drifted before her mind’s eye.
“Come what may,” she whispered, “I am ready!”
She might have fallen asleep then had not a cot less than ten feet from her given out a low creak as a tall, strong girl, who had caught her eye from the first, sat straight up in her bed to whisper three words.