The ‘Doughnut Dollies’ of World War II

In one especially strange episode, Dorothy and Irene are observed climbing out of the basement of a destroyed house: “Aboveground, for anyone watching, the first sign of their resurrection would have been Dorothy’s boot kicking at a fallen slant of roof, which creaked open like a jaw, its nails like the great crooked teeth of a barracuda.” A house has collapsed on top of the two women, they’ve almost drowned in sewage from ruptured pipes, and rats have bitten their faces, but when they emerge into the light, their dialogue is disconcertingly lighthearted:

“Well, hell,” Irene said.
They laughed in spite of it all.
“Where’d everything go?” Dorothy asked.

Urrea has a weakness for melodramatic imagery: a volume of Shakespeare with a bullet lodged in its pages, a G.I. playing a burning piano in the smoldering ruins of a French village, a convoy of ambulances passing the Clubmobile, “sirens howling, with screams and groans coming from within the vehicles.” When the reader is forced to wonder about small elisions and inconsistencies, such as what Irene and Dorothy did about the facial rat bites (they aren’t mentioned again) or how they could hear groans over howling sirens, the characters themselves fade from view.

This problem becomes more acute when the terror of the war reaches its highest pitch, and the women are confronted with “a pair of signs, one pointing down to Weimar and the other uphill to someplace called Buchenwald.” Anyone who has visited a concentration camp will be willing to believe, as Irene tells Dorothy, that there’s “an atmosphere I can’t define,” even before the women know what they’re about to see. But we need to be absolutely enmeshed in a character’s consciousness to witness something on the order of Buchenwald through her eyes. Otherwise, the brutal catalog of the camp’s contents — a room full of suitcases and shoes, ovens, lampshades, emaciated “ghosts” in striped pajamas — evokes only our own familiar horror rather than Irene’s.

The novel is much stronger where it homes in on Irene’s experience. During the Battle of the Bulge, in January 1945, Irene and Dorothy take a bottle of Champagne to gunners operating a howitzer cannon. Dorothy is allowed to fire a shell, and then Irene gets a turn. “One of the gunners punched her arm. ‘Lady,’ he said, ‘you musta taken out 20 of ’em.’” Slowly, the reality of what it means to have pulled the lanyard dawns on Irene: “What’d I do?” she asks.

Like many veterans of war, Irene and Dorothy keep their memories to themselves after they return to civilian life. Their mutual silence is the engine that propels the novel’s satisfying conclusion, but it’s also an acknowledgment that the two women have joined an exclusive society. Even as Urrea tells the Clubmobilers’ story, he recognizes that some parts of their experience remain impossible to share with those who weren’t there.

On one of their breaks from coffee and doughnut service in the Rapid City, while Irene is watching a plane fly overhead and dreaming of her fighter pilot, Dorothy begs her to pay attention to the two of them: “Irene, you are my family now. … I need you to understand what I’m saying. This is our story.”