EVERYTHING LOOKED CHANGED. Behind Hill 209 things had been tidied up and civilized. Camp sites had appeared, and the old jeep track had been regraded and leveled until it was passable to other vehicles. Hiking, C-for-Charlie regarded all of this with interest. Beyond Hill 209, where they had fought and been terrorized on the second and third folds a week ago, puptents were now pitched. On the side ridge where Keck had led his three squads up through the grass and later died of his own mistake, laughing men were bivouacked. The brushy hollow where 2d Battalion had been caught and mortared so badly the first day was now a bustling Message Center. And the new jeep track, with the Engineers still working on it, passed between the left and righthand grassy ridges across the flat and on up the Bowling Alley onto Hill 210, The Elephant’s Head. As they swung along it, raising dust and winded but stepping out smartly because they were being watched by people they now thought of as rear area troops, C-for-Charlie was the lead company of the Battalion and it was their pride that they had effected all these changes they were noting, even though they hadn’t done the work. Because they had done the killing.
This triumph did not last long. Under the shade of the tall jungle trees along the line that followed the crest of Hill 210, the relief went off smoothly. The company they were relieving had been patrolling the past week and had lost two dead and five hurt. But they had not fought any major battles like The Dancing Elephant, and this showed in their admiring faces as they watched C-for-Charlie come up and take over. C-for-Charlie only glared back dourly. There was, they had learned immediately from the men they were relieving, a patrol scheduled for this afternoon. The attack itself was scheduled for tomorrow at dawn.
The march up had been fun, but it had brought them right back here, they suddenly realized, back here where everything counted.
Colonel Tall, however, was not with them today. Colonel Tall, the grapevine had it, was just in the process of being promoted. Nobody in the Battalion had seen him this morning when the march began, and he had not shown up at the rendezvous point by the river where the four companies met. By that mysterious process which nobody understood but which always seemed to know everything about Regimental (and even Division) events before they began to take place, rumor said that Tall was going away to command the detached sister regiment fighting in the mountains, whose CO was so ill from malaria that he could no longer command. This brought sour smiles to the lips of malaria sufferers in the Battalion, most of whom were running consistent temperatures of 104+ during their attacks. Another thing that brought laughter was the comprehension that Old Shorty was being promoted because of their exploits and their shed blood, was being, because of this reputation, jumped in over the Exec of the detached regiment with the temporary rank of full colonel. Nobody really cared very much that he was leaving. They were much more concerned with what his successor was going to be like, and with their forthcoming afternoon patrol.
With regard to the patrol there was, five hundred yards to their front, one more unjungled hill, a small one, rising out of the jungle all alone. This had been named “The Sea Slug”. Since the one bright young staffer had succeeded in nicknaming The Dancing Elephant and making it stick, there had been a rash of names proposed for just about every hill remaining to be taken, by just about every bright young aide who had access to the aerial photos. Naming hills had become a game and a great lark. The Sea Slug, a fat slightly curving ridge really, was so called because of a fanshaped series of ravines spreading out from its inland end, thus resembling the cluster of antennae-tentacles protruding from the head of the sea slug, or sea cucumber as it is more often called. This Sea Slug had been reconnoitered twice by patrols of the 3d Battalion to its seaward or tail end, which was the closer and easier approach; but both times they had been driven back by heavy MG and mortar fire. Apparently it was heavily defended. C-for-Charlie’s patrol was to come at it from the inland or head end, against the fanshaped series of ravines, to see if it was less heavily defended there because of the harder terrain. They were also, if time permitted, to do some chopping work on the trail to enlarge it for tomorrow’s big attack. 1st Lt George C Band, smiling his unfocused, somehow indecent smile, made the decision that Skinny Culn’s 1st Platoon would do the patrol.
Tactically, they were told, The Sea Slug was useless except as an outpost, and as a jumping off point for the major push against the next big hill mass: the Hills 250-51-52-and-53 area, now known in the Division Plans Bureau as “The Giant Boiled Shrimp.” But the Division Commander and the general commanding wanted it because its open length, angling forward, was a perfect approach route to The Giant Boiled Shrimp hill mass. Culn’s patrol, like the others, was being given a walkie-talkie man to call back firing data to the mortars and artillery.
They ate first, picking out of the open cases cans of meat-and-beans or hash or stew according to preference and sitting down with them around on the hillside or on watercans. Then they filled their canteens and moved out, moving slowly, even reluctantly, down the open space of The Elephant’s Trunk toward the same jungle trail which just a week ago they had climbed up from. At the bottom they disappeared into the leaves.
Up above, the rest of the company watched.
Despite fighting experience this was C-for-Charlie’s first combat jungle patrol. Open hill fighting taught nothing about that. All of them had moved through enough jungle on foot to know what to expect. The jungle was eerie. Dripping trees, disturbed birds squawking, the sounds of their own breath in the green air, their feet squishing in the trail’s mud, gloom. Ahead of them the trail branched. Theirs, the left one, immediately narrowed to a track just wide enough for men to walk in single file. It was known to take them in the direction of The Sea Slug hill. Hemmed in by wild bananas, papaya, huge looping lianas, and plants which dangled great fleshy red penises in their faces, they moved along this narrow space, announced ahead by the birds, trying to move quietly and failing, fighting down feelings of claustrophobia, and halting frequently while Culn and the green new Lieutenant took compass readings. Far enough back to be out of earshot the two rearmost squads did some feeble chopping at the trail with machetes which changed nothing. Four hours later they were back with one dead, two wounded, and faces which had aged twenty years.
The dead man was a little known and essentially friendless draftee named Griggs. He came first (after the Lieutenant and Culn) ported by four men bellyupward, his arms legs and head aflop and all dangling downward. Mortar fragments had hit him in the chest. He was placed on the hillside off by himself to wait for the medics to come cart him off, basically resented by everyone because he reminded them they might have been in his place. Of the two wounded who came right behind him one had had his thigh torn wide open by a big mortar chunk; he hobbled along on one foot between two men, groaning and sighing and occasionally weeping. The other one had gotten a piece of mortar shell through his neck and now wore a high gauze collar as he staggered along with his arm around still another man. A group of fresh men from the company took them over and got them started for the aid station while the rest of the patrol dropped down weary and shaky wherever they could on the hillside. They looked like men who had done their day’s work and felt entitled to rest, but resented that they were being underpaid for the type work they did without hope of ever correcting it. Only Culn and the Lieutenant, after seeing them all in through the line, did not sit down and instead went to collect Band and go make their report to Battalion.
The Lieutenant would have preferred to sit down. He did not, however, feel he could do that as long as Culn didn’t. He kept darting looks at Culn. Of them all Culn was the only one this afternoon who had kept his normal disposition, which in Culn’s case was a sunny, happy, smiling one. The Lieutenant, whose name was Payne and who was still pale and stiff faced, would have attributed this to Culn’s superior experience if he had not noticed that all of the others he saw reacted more like himself than they did like Culn. Right now, as they tramped along the side of the hill, Culn was whistling pleasantly a song which Payne had heard before somewhere and which he believed was called San Antonio Rose. Once he stopped whistling long enough to look over and smile cheerily and wink. Finally Payne could stand it no longer.
“Would you mind stopping that damned whistling, Sergeant!” he said, much sharper than he had originally intended.
“Okay, Lieutenant,” Culn said amiably. “If you say so.”
And he did stop. But he went on humming the notes silently to himself under his breath. There was no malice in him toward Lt Payne; he was whistling because he felt good. Skinny Culn was an amiable, easygoing sort of man, willing to live and let live, usually laughing, but he was also a careful, well grounded soldier with nine years service. That was the way he had run his patrol, and he had been nice to the new lieutenant—who, if the Irish truth be known, knew as much about that sort of patrol as he himself did, which was nothing. Culn had waited four years and had reenlisted and shipped over to get command of this platoon—which platoon his predecessor Grove, now predeceased, and with whom he had been good drinking buddies, had also reenlisted to keep, thereby frustrating Culn. But that was all in the game. In the end only Grove’s death and the war had given it to him. Being a good Irish Catholic, if a lax one, Skinny could look upon that without guilt or horror as a sort of personal responsibility passed from Grove to him from beyond the grave. Certainly he did not intend to lose it now, either by having it shot out from under him, or having himself yanked off the top of it for some reckless swashbuckling or other. He also did not intend to lose it by antagonizing the officer who thought he led it. The reason he felt good was because he was alive and undamaged, and had before him the prospect of an easy safe afternoon and evening of loafing and banter before tomorrow, and maybe even a few drinks. It was highly possible that Brass Band would offer them both a good stiff snort when they reported to him. Culn had noticed that Band had taken good care of himself with the liquor situation, which he could more easily do, having a dogrobber orderly who had carried his personal bed roll up here for him. Walking along, he almost caught himself whistling the song again, but stopped himself just in time. They walked on.
“Didn’t you feel anything up there?” Payne asked finally in a strong voice, darting him another look and then looking away straight ahead. “Out there?”
“Feel?” Skinny said. “Yeah, I guess I felt scared. Once there, anyway. Durin the worst of the mortars.” He smiled cheerfully at Payne as though now he knew what Payne’s trouble was, which angered Payne.
“Well, you didn’t look it, Sergeant,” Payne said.
“You don’t really know me very well yet, Lootenant,” Culn grinned. But he was suddenly angry. He felt his rights were being infringed upon by Payne. He had plenty of feelings, but he didn’t have to talk about them. He was not a cog in a machine, whatever Payne thought.
“But when those men were hit!” Payne said. “One died! They were in your platoon!” He was less pale now, away from the casualties, but his face was still stiff.
Culn smiled at him carefully. Payne sounded as if he had known this platoon for years. “Lootenant, I think we done pretty good. And got off pretty lucky. With them treebursts comin in on us like they were,” he said cheerfully. “It ought to of been lots worse, see? And as for feeling,” he said kindly, “the Service nor nobody pays me any extra ‘Feeling Pay’ for feeling. Like they pay flyers ‘Flight Pay’ for flyin. So I figure I ain’t required to feel. I figure I won’t feel any more than’s just absolutely necessary. The minimum feeling. Tomorrow’s likely to be really rough, Lootenant. Did you know that?”
Payne did not answer this. His face looked like a stormcloud and even stiffer than before, and Skinny worried that he had gone too far. Nervously (why antagonize him?), to soften his statement, he chuckled and looked over at Payne and grinned and winked. He saw gratefully that in front of them a little uphill Brass Band had come out of his command post to greet them. Payne saw it too, and looked away in that direction recomposing his face. The CP had been located in one of the old Japanese stick shanties in the shade of the big trees just down behind the crest. Band now stood in front of it. Band was smiling at them proudly.
He did offer them a drink. A good stiff one, at his suggestion. They took it straight from the beautiful, lovely White Horse bottle. And then Band had one himself. George Band did not see why he should not indulge himself in a few little luxuries if they were available without too much trouble, since he was now Company Commander. Jim Stein, memory of whom was fading swiftly day by day, would have considered that highly immoral. But Band didn’t see it that way at all. He had told off his new clerk Corporal Weld and Weld’s number one assistant Train that between them he wanted his bedroll carried up on the march, and into it he had packed six bottles of the best, in addition to his canteens. As it had turned out, they would be leaving here tomorrow and he would have to leave both bedroll and whiskey to somebody, but they might very well have spent a week here before beginning the new attack. In any event he would have one good night’s sleep out of it, and it hadn’t really been too much extra work for his two clerks. If 1st/Sgt Welsh could use them as personal slaves, so could the Company Commander certainly. Like his men, Band had been drinking rather more heavily since the week of ‘rest’ began. He had another one out of the bottle before putting it away and turned his attention to his new lieutenant, Payne.
He watched Payne’s pale, stiff face while they made their report, and decided things might be working out. When they had finished the report, he said, “Well, we better go along to Battalion and tell them all. The new Commander’s arrived, I think.” Band was thinking privately that maybe this new commander might very well offer them all a drink, and Culn was thinking the same thing. “You’re sure everything’s been done for the wounded?” Band added piously. Both men nodded.
Actually there really wasn’t very much to do for them and everybody knew it. They had crossed over into that Other Realm. They had taken their sulfa pills. The medic on the patrol had given them each a syrette of morphine. There was nothing the group who helped them down to the aid station could do for them except give them water and a shot of whiskey. The one with the leg wound kept groaning and weeping and wailing over and over in a child’s voice, “Goddam, it hurts! It hurts!” Quite a large group walked them down, many more than were needed. It was as if they thought they could give the two wounded comfort in sheer numbers, and at the same time satisfy their own curiosity. Also, it was a welcome relief from the boring duty of having to stay in the holes on the line. The group hung around the aid station watching while the doctors worked on them and shipped them out swiftly on a stretcher carrying jeep. Neither of them would ever come back, and the general opinion seemed to be that they were the both of them pretty goddamned lucky. The man with the leg wound, when the doctor unwrapped it to have a look at it, screamed with pain. His name was Wills. The other man’s larynx was damaged and he could not talk at all. The tiny mortar fragment had gone completely through his neck and come out the other side without hitting any major nerves or blood vessels. Once they were gone, waving feebly back from the jeep, there was no more point in hanging around and the group walked back up to the position together. One of these was Corporal Fife, newly of the 3d Platoon, and another was Buck Sergeant Doll.
Fife had done nothing to help either of the wounded, and indeed had not wanted to get close enough to them to touch them. But he could not resist coming along and watching them with obscene fascination from the outskirts of the group between the heads of those who clustered around them. He remembered in detail his own trip back to the aid station, was haunted by it and by the fact that he could have been hit again and killed at any moment. Also, he could not forget the bloodstained trip down to the beach in the jeep, knowing all the time that no matter how bad it looked his wound was not as serious as he had hoped it was. Fife had nightmares about this trip now every night, sometimes waking up screaming sometimes not, but always in a cold sweat of fear and panic the essential essence of which was a feeling of complete entrapment. Trapped in every direction no matter where he turned, trapped by patriotic doctors, trapped by longfaced crewcut infantry Colonels who demanded the willingness to die, trapped by Japanese colonial ambitions, trapped by chic grinning S-1 officers secure in their right to ask only after other officers, trapped by his own government and its faceless nameless administrators, trapped by Stein and his increasingly sad face, trapped by 1st/Sgt Mad Welsh who wanted only to laugh at him. In the dream all these came in on him in an insane jumble of shrieks and accusations while they sat waiting in the middle distance positive that he would prove them all right and show himself to be yellow. Even when he drank himself to sleep those nights after getting out of the hospital during the week of ‘rest’, the nightmare or one of its variations came. Sometimes it was bombers and polyglot faces laughing down at him from the bombbay doors as they released their loads on him: they had trapped him into bravery and killed him. Either way he lost. Naturally, he was somewhat upset by watching the two wounded being handled and cared for. And yet he could not not watch. The worst thing was the element of chance which came into it. The most perfect, most perfectly trained soldier could do nothing to protect against, or save himself from, the element of chance. As he walked away back up the hill, Fife did not feel it was safe, could not trust himself, even to speak. To anyone. And naturally, it was then that newly promoted Sergeant Doll chose to come over and talk to him.
Doll, in fact, thought he had interpreted correctly the painful look on Fife’s face, and that was why he came over. Since making sergeant, a new and powerful sense of paternal responsibility had blossomed in Doll. It applied mainly to his own squad, but it could be extended to every rank below his own in the company. Before being promoted Doll had never realized what a marvelous thing it was to help other people or what sheer pleasure it could give you. When noncoms used to want to help him out with something, he hated them and thought they were pompous. But now he understood it. Fife was the only man who had been wounded and returned to the company, if you left out Storm in the kitchen who wasn’t combat. Doll thought he could understand what a violent shock it must be to get hit and find you were not invulnerable. But all it really needed was a return of confidence, and Doll thought he could help. He had confidence enough for damn near everybody. He had it because he never thought about being wounded or killed. Take tomorrow: by this time tomorrow they were certain to be in it up to their ass; but did he think about that? What was the good of that?
Doll, when he’d been promoted, had requested transfer to the 2d Platoon and a squad there. His own former Squad Leader in 1st Platoon, Sgt Field, had been promoted to Staff and made Platoon Sgt of 3d Platoon; but Doll had asked expressly not to be given his own old squad. He explained to Brass Band that this was because he didn’t think it would look good if he was jumped from Pfc to Sgt over the squad’s former Corporal, who by rights should (and did) get the rating. Also, he said he wanted to be with the rest of the old Hill 210 ‘Assault Force’, all of whom except for Witt were now noncoms in the 2d Platoon. All this sounded good, and Band immediately accommodated him. But the real reason Doll didn’t want to take his own old squad was that he was afraid that there his new authority might be questioned or even laughed at. He could smile at that now. But he was a lot more sure of himself now than he had been a week ago.
There had been a few bad moments when he first began to use his new authority. For instance, one morning at the single formation they had every day during the week off, when the platoon had straggled untidily into its long single line, Doll had stood out in front of them and harangued and harangued them to dress up their line, shouting and cursing, and getting almost no results, though they bobbed and shuffled and looked at each other. It went on like that, with him shouting louder and louder, until finally one of the oldtime squad leaders—a guy who had been one a long time but would never get promoted beyond it—had stepped up, simply called them to attention, then given them the command, “Dress right, Dress!” In seconds the line was perfect, and the whole platoon was grinning at Doll who was standing there with his mouth hung open. The only thing was to grin with them and laugh it off, and Doll did. But for hours afterwards his ears burned whenever he thought of it. But bad incidents like that had been few, and he had his heroisms with the assault force working for him. His squad admired him for that. And he had done other things, like taking on himself more than his share of the dirty jobs instead of passing them out to the guys in the squad. It was astonishing how great his protective sense had grown once he knew they’d accepted him as their leader. And right now, hiking back up the hill to the position, Doll felt that same overwhelming all-pervasive protective feeling for poor Fife. They had used to talk together a lot out in front of the messhall or the orderly room, back in the old days.
He came over wearing a broad, easy grin.
“Pretty rough go, hunh, Fife? Pretty tough row to hoe for both of them.”
“Yeah,” Fife managed to get out in a small voice. He could not associate this heroic personage with the Doll he had used to know back in peacetime. Asshole or not, he had done all those things. And this put him as far away from Fife as if Fife had never met him before, or as if Doll came from another planet.
“I don’t know which was the worse really,” Doll said. “That leg wound probly hurt more right now, at the moment. But the throat wound’s liable to cause more serious trouble later on. Anyway, they both out of it.”
“Yeah,” Fife said gloomily. “If they don’t die of infection. Or get killed in an air raid before they get shipped out.”
“Hey! You sound pretty gloomy! Sure, I guess there always is that possibility.” Doll paused. “How you makin out in Jenks’s squad, Fife?” Both of them remembered Doll’s long, monumental fistfight with Jenks.
“All right,” Fife said guardedly.
Doll raised his eyebrow, his old prewar gesture. “Because you don’t seem very happy.’’
“Happy enough under the circumstances.”
“Old Jenks is kind of a cold fish. Or I always thought so, anyway,” Doll grinned. “Not an understanding guy.”
“I guess he’s a good enough squad leader,” Fife said guardedly. He wished Doll would go away and leave him alone.
“Then you’re happy in his squad?”
“It don’t make much difference whether I am or not, does it?”
“Because,” Doll went on. “Because I ain’t got no corporal in my squad, you know. A Pfc acting. But Band never made him for some reason. Don’t like him maybe? Anyway I thought if you weren’t happy in Jenks’s squad maybe I might put in a word to Band to get you transferred to mine. We’re a pretty leathery crew now—we ain’t green,—but I could help you out at first and show you a few things. The Welshman played a pretty dirty trick on you.” He suddenly wanted to put his arm around Fife, but refrained. “’Course I spose he couldn’t help it, since he didn’t know you was comin back.”
For the first time Fife’s eyes lit up a little. “Could you do that?” he asked. “Would you?”
“Well, sure,” Doll said. He was a little startled at the direction the conversation had taken him. But he could do it. And, now, he had every intention of it. “You want me to do it?”
“Yeah,” Fife said huskily, his eyes shining out suddenly from deep within his tormented face. “Yeah, I would.”
“Okay. I’ll go and see him and—” Doll hesitated. He had started to say: and come tell you what he says later. But that sounded too unsure, and as if he had to ask Band. Instead, he said: “—and come pick you up later.” He slapped Fife on the back.
They had reached the top now, where the rest of the company—in and out of their holes—were waiting for the news from the aid station. Fife watched Doll go off in the direction of the CP and then turned off toward 3d Platoon and his own squad—of which, he reminded himself, he was still second in command. A new, but deeprooted cynicism attacked him and told him not to get his hopes up. But he put it down, at least somewhat. It would be great to have someone to look after him and take care of him, somebody he could trust as a friend. He wouldn’t mind taking the orders of somebody like that. And Doll had done all those things. He knew infantry in-fighting well now, and could teach Fife the ropes. But more than that it was having somebody he could depend on, somebody who was a mentor and a protector and also a friend. Fife suddenly wondered what Doll would say if he knew about what had happened between himself and little Bead. He shuddered. Well, he was never going to tell anybody about that. Nobody in the world. Not even his wife, when he got married someday.
It was getting on toward dark. Fife sat on the edge of his hole and waited for Doll to come back and collect him. Naturally, he didn’t tell anybody. He was superstitious about hexing it, and too it would be too embarrassing if it didn’t come off. Not far away the taciturn closedfaced Jenks was assiduously and expressionlessly cleaning his rifle. Fife continued to sit. When the near dark had grown into full black night with only the farflung tropical starscape lighting it, he knew Doll wasn’t coming. Nobody dared leave his hole after dark. The new, deeprooted cynicism came back making him smile bitterly in the dark. Who knew why? Maybe Band said no. Or maybe he didn’t even go to Band even.
Fife settled himself in the mudslick bottom of his hole. In a way he ought to be glad. 2d Platoon had become the company troubleshooters. They were going to lead off in the attack tomorrow. Did he want to be in that? It was just that he did not appreciate the talkative Jenks. He did not sleep much. The one time he did drop off, the nightmare woke him with a cry which he automatically stifled before he was even fully awake.
Fife was not the only one who slept little. Up and down the line many others had the same hollow in the pit of the stomach, the same nervous tingling in the balls, and quiet conversations passed the time of night between holes while men smoked guardedly into cupped hands. They knew now that it was always like this the night before an attack. Skinny Culn had not been able to resist telling around the story of his little run-in with the new lieutenant Payne (who of course had immediately been nicknamed The Pain) and this was one of the more appreciated topics. Skinny’s self-quoted remark about not being paid feeling pay for feeling like flyers were paid flight pay for flying went from hole to hole with an appreciative snort until everyone in C-for-Charlie knew it. Everything considered it was as good a philosophy as any for this kind of life and everyone who heard it decided immediately to adopt it. Skinny’s other quote was also taken up: Whatever They say, I’m not a cog in a machine. It had been a thought, not a statement aloud to The Pain, but it said for everybody what they all felt fiercely and needed to believe. They took it to themselves, and applied it to their own particular situations, and they believed it. They were not cogs in a machine, whatever anybody said. Only one man looked into it deeper than that. And he didn’t look far, because he had troubles of his own.
Sgt John Bell was having another bad attack of malaria, and he was about to have a nightmare himself. His nightmare was not recurrent, like Fife’s. He had never had it before. And when it was over, he hoped he never had it again. The malaria had hit him shortly before dark. It went along slow for an hour or so. But when the chills, sweats and fever started to take him in their regular as clockwork intervals of ever rising intensity, he had gotten to thinking about his wife and her lover. And to speculating about what kind of a guy he was. Because he was sure she had one. Ever since that day in the grassy trough above the strongpoint when they had started to crawl. Nothing in her batch of warm, loving letters during the week off tended to make him think any differently. Sure, they were warm. But, in there between those lines, his hunger to see sexual hunger in her, through her letters, went completely unfed.
But what kind of guy? A civilian? Would she go with some local guy they had both known all their lives? Or a serviceman. Both Wright and Patterson Fields were right there outside Dayton. Officer? Enlisted man? There would be thousands of Air Corps guys crawling over Dayton, all hungry. He would certainly be a sensitive type, one who could honestly sympathize with her when she felt bad about what she was doing to John. The next thing Bell knew, that one word J-o-h-n was echoing down long high hollow sky corridors and he was in a maternity hospital delivery room. How he knew it was a maternity delivery room, he couldn’t say. Movies, maybe. But he recognized many objects. He was dressed in white gown, white cap and gauze mask. Then they wheeled Marty in. “You have to push,” the doctor said in a kindly tolerant voice as if to a child. “I’m pushing!” Marty cried in a child’s brave voice. “I’m pushing! I’m trying!” And she was. Her rectum had come out until it looked like a doughnut. Bell loved her. “But only when it hits you,” the doctor smiled. He was actually bored. Then he turned to Bell, hands held straight up from the elbows fingers spatulate beside his face in the rubber gloves, speaking through the gauze. “We’re going to knock her out. She’s having a little trouble and I’m going to have to take it.” Bell could see he was smiling behind the gauze. “Nothing to worry about.” He turned back to the table where they had strapped her legs in the stirrups and her arms down and where the anesthetist now had her. Bell sat on a stool a few feet behind the doctor who sat on his own stool. Strangely, at least half his mind was occupied with showing the doctor he wasn’t going to faint. He also knew that he was dreaming.
The head came first, facedown. Deftly, the doctor turned it over and swabbed out the nostrils. Then he eased the shoulders out, twisting it sideways. When it was out to the waist it began to wail in a feeble voice and the doctor swabbed it some more, and it was then that Bell realized that it was black. Coal black. The doctor went on working happily, easing the hips out, the young nurse with her hair tied up hovering smiling at the presence of new life, and Bell sat aghast in horror, embarrassed, disbelieving, and strangely acquiescent, and watched the coal black baby come lasciviously the rest of the way out of the beautiful, beautifully white, shaved crotch of his wife.
The color contrast was strangely gorgeous, oddly satisfying, suddenly very sensual. And more bluntly painful than anything Bell had ever felt in his life.
Now it will stop, he thought, now it will stop and I and me we can both wake up. But it didn’t. And he had to stay there, watching, and trying to wake up and failing. How should he act? Bell looked down at it, still struggling feebly in its effort to escape being out in the cold, cold world living on its own. When he looked back up, both nurse and doctor were smiling at him expectantly. Marty was still out, still unconscious, on the table. So she couldn’t know yet. Had she suspected? The doctor began to work on her again, the finishing up work. The nurse was still smiling at Bell. The anesthetist was smiling at him too, from behind his bottles and gear. A new life had happened. What should he do, say? Had they none of them noticed that it was black? Or didn’t they care? Should he pretend? The worst thing was that he was sexually excited, sexually hot. And very embarrassed. But when he looked back down, he saw that it wasn’t black it was Japanese. He could tell because it wore a tiny, bent up Imperial Army forage cap, with a tiny, baby iron star.
Bell woke up with a ringing cry that he had not learned to smother like Fife had learned, because he wasn’t used to nightmares.
“I can’t see anything! I can’t see anything!” the awake sentry in the next hole cried in panic. “I can’t see anything!”
“Don’t shoot!” Beck called back, from further off. “Don’t shoot anyway! Wait! Don’t anybody fire!”
“It was me, it was me,” Bell mumbled to them, his ears burning red. He was covered in freezing sweat, and now he had a raging high fever. After a moment he rubbed his hand over his face. “I had a nightmare.”
“Well for fuck’s sake try and keep it to yourself,” the sentry called. “You scared the living shit out of me.”
Bell mumbled inaudibly, slid a little further down in the slippery hole bottom, and tried to compose himself. Every bone in his body ached monstrously and separately. His head felt as if it might actually begin to boil the blood passing through it at any moment. His hands were so weak he could not clench them into fists to save his life, and bright hot geometric patterns danced before his eyes in semi-delirium. All that was the fever. But the other remained too, and the horror it had brought. Feebly, because that was the only way his heated brain could think, Bell tried to analyze it. He could understand the Japanese part readily enough. Sure. But why a black baby? Neither he nor Marty had ever had any racial prejudices, or pro segregation ideas.
Searching through his feverish brain, Bell remembered something Marty had told him once, before they were married. They were walking across the campus in Columbus, returning from a rendezvous in the apartment of married friends who let them use it afternoons for their love making. It was early fall. The leaves had been turning fast, and were just beginning to fall. They had been holding hands as they walked. Marty had turned to him, eyes smiling coquettishly, and wearing a slight flush of confession, and had said suddenly: “I’d love to have a black baby. Once. Sometime.” The remark had thrilled Bell. Intuitively he understood exactly what she meant, and also why she’d said it. Though he couldn’t have put it into words, any more than she. It was, first, a crack in the face at social convention which they both hated. It was a compliment to him, also, that she would let him in on the inside of this particular fantasy. But there was more than that. And the only word for that part of it he could give, was the ‘sexual esthetic’ of it. He had been pleased she’d told him and at the same time furious with her. He had squeezed her hand and said: “Well, you’ll have to let me watch the conception of it.” And intuitively she had understood what he meant, too. She had colored deeply and said: “But I happen to be in love with you.” And they had turned in their tracks and gone back to the livingroom rug of the apartment, which was as far as they had gotten, even though both of them missed a class. They had been married that same year, he remembered. Or was it the next year? No, it was the next year.
Bell shifted in the wet hole, burning up with fever. Had that ancient exchange, lost and forgotten in the grabbag of memory, come back to plague him now? But why now and not before? Dull and halfclosed, his eyes stared at the forward rim of the slit trench, only slightly less dark than the surrounding blackness. He was willing to do anything in order not to go back to sleep and risk having that dream again. The whole thing was as clear, as real to him as if it had really, actually happened, only ten minutes ago. But why had he been sexually excited? Why that? Something licked at his mind lightly and he caught at it. The lascivious sensuality of knowing, of being sure, of having proof. Perhaps that was why so many men thinking of their wives, hated other races. Because nobody wanted to know he was cuckold. Everybody preferred the painful doubt to the sensual luxury of knowing for sure. But if the baby was another color, there was no—… Bell felt himself slipping into a waking daydreamnightmare of watching the conception of the black baby, and stopped himself in terror, and just in time.
And from that he learned something else. Or thought he did: what he might desire in masochistic fantasy, for the luxurious pain of knowing for sure, he could almost certainly kill her for, in the reality—simply because he could never admit to himself the desire he had, never, never. Suddenly he began to laugh, hysterically in the fever, but carefully stifling the sound. Cocks and cunts! Cocks and cunts! Who cared who fucked who? When he got himself stopped from laughing, he found to his surprise that he was crying, weeping. He could feel the malaria beginning to recede.
Naturally, he was glad when the next hole passed on the story about Skinny Culn and The Pain. Not only did the conversation keep him awake and away from that nightmare, it also helped him stop thinking. The philosophy? Sure, it was fine. Skinny’s philosophy of not feeling except for feeling pay. Bell snorted like the rest, and embraced it. But when the next hole passed him on the other quote, his mind balked and went blank. “Sure, sure,” he said automatically, “of course.” Not cogs in a machine? Not cogs in a machine? What did they think they were then? Their wanting and needing to believe that was pathetic, shocked him into re-examining the other one: the philosophy. And when he did, he found he saw it entirely differently. Not feel? Not feel? No feeling without Feeling Pay? No caring without Caring Pay? What was happening to them? And to himself? Bell’s watch read 3:05 on its luminous dial. Two hours to go, then.
The artillery began almost exactly at dawn. This time it continued for over two hours. 105s blasted The Sea Slug in its entirety, and the jungle immediately surrounding it. The 155s occupied themselves with the much bigger hill mass of The Giant Boiled Shrimp further on, and invisible from here. The 155 rounds arched shushing high overhead from invisible guns to invisible target. On The Sea Slug terrified, pathetic birds rose squawking in white clouds at every 105 jungle burst. The men of 1st Battalion stood out in the open on the hill and watched the display, reluctantly waiting the order to move. When it came, they moved out along the same route the patrol had taken, C-for-Charlie (due to a request by Band) in the lead, with 2d Platoon as their spearhead.
It was still almost black night in the jungle. Only when they reached the blasted area around The Sea Slug did any light serious enough to see by filter down to them. 1st Platoon’s chopping work yesterday had done no good at all. They could not afford the time or attenuation of going single file now. Men scrambled along through the underbrush on both sides of the trail, tripping over vines and roots, getting their hands and faces scratched and torn, chopping with machetes when they had to. After a hundred yards of this everybody was so exhausted they had to stop and break.
It was when they reached the beginning of the blasted area that they received their first fire. There was now somewhat less than a hundred yards to go. It was amazing how slightly the artillery barrage had affected the jungle. There was a little more light, you could see a little further ahead, and there was some new looking deadfall. That was all. Sgt Beck had told off Doll’s squad to act as point squad of 2d Platoon, and Doll had immediately decided to take the point man position himself. It was Doll who stopped them when he saw the first blast signs.
Doll had in fact not gone to Lt Band at all the night before about Fife. On his way up to the CP he had suddenly found himself angry at Fife for the way Fife had somehow tricked him into offering to take him into the squad. He had had no intention of doing that when he first went over to Fife, but Fife had somehow conned him into it. If there was anything Doll did not like, it was being tricked or conned into something. He preferred an honest approach. Angrily, Doll had stopped off to talk to Skinny Culn for a minute. He of course did not mention Fife. When he left Culn’s hole, Doll was decided.
And he still felt the same way today as he moved along at the head of his squad with two grenades hooked in his belt. It would hardly have been fair to his Pfc acting, would it? Whatever else, Doll’s squad came first. That was why he took more than his share of the dirty jobs, like taking this point himself today, for his point squad: he wanted them to know it. And now when he turned around to tell the man behind to pass the word back to Beck that he thought they were approaching destination, Doll grinned at him reassuringly. It was just then that the machinegun somewhere in front of them opened up with its stuttery voice.
As one man, the platoon dived off the trail into the leaves, some on one side, some on the other. Doll himself, who had caromed off a treetrunk in his blind leap through the leaves, found himself landing squarely on top another man, a young Pfc from his own squad named Carol Arbre. Already lying on his stomach on the jungly ground while Doll was still bouncing half-stunned off his tree, Arbre had not entertained the idea of having someone light on his back; and now Doll, his crotch pressed tightly to the juncture of Arbie’s already powerfully-clamped-together buttocks, sprawled on top of him in the classic position of buggery. A rather girlishly-built, girlish-looking young man, who was continually having his bottom felt in joke or perhaps not in joke, Arbre had been forced throughout his Army career to protest furiously against such indignities. People could not believe, given his girlish build, that he was not homosexually inclined. Now he turned his head back over his shoulder to peer at Doll, red with embarrassment and frowning furiously, and said in a choked voice: “You git off of me like that!”
Doll, still a little stunned from running headlong into the tree, required several seconds to collect his scattered wits. At the same time, stunned as he was, he was not unaware of his crotch pressed to the now-even-more-tightly-pressed-together buttocks of Arbre beneath him. Shaking his head a few times, he rolled off one full circuit to the right, using his riflebutt to keep the muzzle out of the dirt and still have it ready in front of him. And it was just then that they heard the too swift, murderously soft shu-shu sound they knew so well and mortar rounds began to land and explode around and among them. But despite the mortars, within Doll the memory—of his crotch pressed to the (if the truth had to be told) rather sweet, girlish buttocks of Carrie (of course they called him Carrie) Arbre—lingered.
The mortars kept on coming. Doll heard a couple of men yell somewhere behind him. Still out of breath and a little groggy from running into the tree, he tried to think what to do. He was pleased to note, to realize suddenly, that the numbness he had felt during the last stages of the big battle last week, was now coming back over him swiftly—had in fact been growing in him unnoticed since their departure from Hill 210. It left his mind clear, and cool, suffused with a grinning bloodthirstiness. It spread all through him, making a solid impenetrable layer between himself and the choking fear which would not allow him to swallow as he hugged the ground. He could not tell exactly how far the MG (it had now been joined by another one somewhere else) was from him. He debated whether it was worthwhile trying to crawl uphill to it with one or two men and some grenades to see if they could get close enough to throw. He was pulled from this revery by someone vigorously jiggling his left foot behind him. He looked around. Sgt Beck had crawled up from the rear of the platoon.
Beck, when Doll first halted the column, had immediately taken another compass reading, allowing his own new lieutenant, Tomms, to pretend to help: after all, that cost him nothing. The largely inaccurate map they had was not to be trusted very far. They had Culn’s and Payne’s descriptions from yesterday, but Beck was always instinctively suspicious of other people’s explications. He preferred his own two eyeballs, and he was already (even before the message from Doll could have reached him, which it never did because of the MG) pretty sure they were quite close to The Sea Slug. When the mortars started dropping in, he had decided to go forward to find out why Doll had halted them before the machinegun.
Beck too, like Doll, was surprised to find that the old, peculiar numbness was right there, already waiting, and that it had quickly taken him over leaving the rest of him, the best of him, free to act. It was a good thing to know. Apparently it came quicker with practice. No feeling without Feeling Pay! He too felt murderously bloodthirsty. Make them pay, was what his head told him. If you can. If you can make them. Everybody knew the mortars were coming from somewhere on The Giant Boiled Shrimp, and as he crawled forward Beck stopped off by the walkie-talkie man Band had thoughtfully given him and told him to radio back for fire on The Shrimp.
“Tell them to throw every-fucking-thing they got,” he snarled. “Piss on the cost of ammo. Tell them cover the whole damned area! Shut them mortars up!”
Behind him Beck heard a man scream up through the sound flower of a mortar round. It was hardly so much a scream as a guttural, surprised, infuriated “Hagh-ah-ah-ah!” Beck pressed on, tripping and treading on members of his platoon as well as on jungle vines. Well, this was it. They were in it for sure now. He was pleased to note that he wasn’t scared—just afraid. What a fucking, shiteating war. He would have to get the platoon after the goddam war started. A platoon used to be gravy.
As soon as Doll looked around at the jiggling of his foot, Beck tried to smile at him. “What’s the situation?”
There was a drawn, wrinkle-eyed look on everybody’s face, including his own. Everybody had crowsfeet today.
Doll seemed surprised to see him. “I don’t know. I don’t think they is any.”
“Why’d you halt us?”
Doll pointed to the ground. “We were gettin into the blast area, and it begins to get a lot steeper here.”
“I think you were right. You probly saved us a couple guys from that MG.” He paused. “Well, what the hell do we do now? Why the hell don’t Band get up here?”
Beck was thinking out loud to himself more than speaking to Doll, and Doll hesitated before he spoke. “Screw Band! Lissen, Milly,” he said, using one noncom’s prerogative of intimate address to another. Beck’s first name was Millard. “I think we can knock out that MG. See how far he’s firin over our heads here?”
Beck didn’t mind the intimate address. He squinted uphill through the growing smoke. “You think you can?”
“I think we’re deefalaided here. If I take two guys with three four grenades apiece, I think we can crawl up and knock him out and move on in.” He gestured. “Out of this crap.” When the mortar rounds weren’t actually going off, his voice sounded preternaturally loud.
Milly Beck debated. Band should have arrived by now. “Okay. But wait’ll I get the platoon into position. Pick two guys. Them squads should of been up by now without me telling them.” Turning his head rearward, Beck began to roar, waving his right arm. He was sure nobody could see him. But it made him feel better. “Bell’s squad up on the right! Dale’s squad up on the left! Make a line, make a line! You assholes! Load and lock! Prepare to fire cover!”
Behind them somebody else screamed with startled pain as he was hit. While Beck continued to roar, Doll looked over his squad, his whole face grinning. The bloodthirstiness was growing to a dull blood roar in his ears, almost drowning even the mortars. “You,” he said, pointing. “And you.” Then he realized the second man he had chosen was the fawneyed Arbre. “No, not you,” he said; “you,” and picked another. It was instinctively done, without thinking, but even so he was a little surprised at himself. Arbre was as good a soldier as the next man. He could carry his weight. “Everybody take five grenades.” Arbre was staring at him strangely. Doll grinned back at him. On right and left the two squads were moving up. Thorne’s, the fourth squad, was coming up as reserve.
“Okay?” Doll said.
“Okay,” Beck said huskily. “Let’s get the fuck out of this.”
Doll wasn’t really sure they were defiladed. The gunner could probably depress if he wanted. But he gambled and took them forward on their feet, instead of crawling. But they had not gone ten yards when there were screams up above, the explosions of several grenades, and the machinegun stopped. Then voices in English with unmistakable American accents yelled down at them. “Hold your fire! Hold your fire! This is 3d Battalion! Hold fire, 2d Battalion!” Doll was suddenly so frustrated that he bit his lip till tears came in his eyes. He had had himself all primed. And now nothing. Adrenaline and emotion surged through him unreleased leaving him lightheaded.
Seconds later the mortars stopped. An unearthly silence fell, deathly, weird, mentally unmanageable as yet. It was over. At least temporarily. Men strove to adjust themselves to the silence and to the idea that they were not going to be dead yet for a while. There were surprisingly few yells or screams from the wounded, only a few low moans. The two new company medics, who were never as well liked as the two nowdead originals, but who were gaining, moved among them. They were all getting pretty old pro there, Sgt Beck thought, listening and feeling proud.
“Well, shall we get on up there?” he said aloud. He stood up. Other men around him stood up. It was then that Lt Tall George Band appeared, picking his way among the men who had not yet gotten up.
“What’s the situation, Beck?” he asked.
“3d Battalion seems to be in full control on The Sea Slug, Sir.”
“Why did the mortars stop?”
“I don’t know for sure, Sir. Maybe the artillery stopped them. I radioed back for fire.”
“Good work. All right, let’s go up and have a look.” Adjusting his steelrimmed spectacles, Band started off without looking back. He headed for Doll and his two men, who were now standing up holding or wearing all their extra, unused grenades. Beck stood staring after him wanting to curse, but Band did not know this. “You men look like Christmas trees!” he called to Doll in a jocular voice as he clumped along. “Where the hell you going dressed up like that?”
It was a mistake, a mistake from start to finish. Perhaps it was a serious mistake. But Band was not aware of it. He clumped on past Doll heading uphill, pushing his way over the artillery damaged undergrowth. Slowly, in ones and twos, the men began to follow him—except for Beck, who stayed a minute to check on his four wounded: a thing he might not have done or bothered with, had Band not gone on.
Why had Band done it? Nobody knew. Nobody knew exactly why it was a mistake either. Another man could have done and said the same things Band did and said and it would not have been a mistake. But in Band’s case it was one. Everyone present who saw and heard it, marked it down jealously in their little private mental notebooks of references which they just as jealously would not forget. And those who had not seen or heard it were informed by the others, and marked it down just as jealously in their own jealous notebooks. They had not all that quickly forgotten Capt James Bugger Stein, whom they subsequently had heroized out of all reasonable proportion; Bugger had been for them, they believed. And Band knew nothing about it at all, never suspected.
George Band had enjoyed himself immensely during the mortar bombardment—in much the same way Doll had. He had lain with most of the rest of the company back out of range and had felt like weeping when the wounded yelled. He had not gone forward into the fire because his place was back where he could direct the other platoons if they were needed. He really wanted to be up there with them, but he knew it was not his job. But this did not preclude his sharing the emotions which he knew Beck and Doll and the others must be feeling.
Band had also enjoyed himself immensely the night before, with the new Battalion Commander from the other regiment. In fact, his capacity for enjoying himself immensely had increased enormously, out of all proportion, with the simple routine act of becoming a Company Commander. He had always known he would make it, and last night after Payne and Culn had reported, been given a drink, and were dismissed, the new Colonel had asked him to stay a bit. The new Colonel had had a correspondent with him all during the day before and had gleaned from him two bottles of Time-&-Life-bought scotch, one of which he now broke out for just the two of them: Grand MacNeish! He and Band had several snorts of it together. The new Colonel was quite pleased with the results of the patrol, especially Culn’s voluntary lingering under the mortars to put rifle and BAR fire into The Sea Slug’s enemy MGs. “Make them think a bit anyway,” was his retort. “If they’re smart,” he smiled. “I mean, if they know their tactics they’ll withdraw.” He smiled again. “I mean, it can only be an outpost for them. Their main defensive line has to be the hill mass of The Giant Boiled Shrimp.” He and Band had one more quick snort. It was then that Band offered his company to lead off the Battalion for tomorrow. The new Colonel accepted smiling, nodding his big graying handsome head appreciatively; he had already heard about C-for-Charlie. It was the best scotch Band had tasted in he did not know when. He arrived back at the company just as it fell full dark, peacefully content. Band had always known he would get the command. And as he bedded down for the night in the little Japanese shanty, he dwelt upon it.
He would do for them what Stein could never have done; because he loved them. He really loved them. Not with sentimentality like Stein, but with full, tragic cognizance of what voluntary sacrifices would be demanded of them and of himself too. You simply could not treat them equal as men, as Stein had tried. It had to be a stern paternal love relationship, because they were children and did not know their own minds or what was best for them. They had to be disciplined and they had to be ordered. Band had two children of his own. And in his high school classes back home he had treated his students the same way, too. But he could not feel for any of those children back there, students or real ones, what he felt for these children here. How could he, when he had not shared with those the terrible, horrible, brave experiences he had shared with these ones here? A great, warm, paternal, each-child-hugging love brimmed in him. Filled with a sure awareness of the things he and they would accomplish together out of the depth of their more-than-mated love, Band had dropped blissfully off to sleep, not at all disturbed by—more, even relishing—the rocks and knobs of dirt which stuck him in the various parts of his back through the canvas stuffing of his bedroll.
That had been last night. And now, as he climbed the slopes of The Sea Slug to meed 3d Battalion at 7:40 the next morning, after a mortar pummeling that had wounded four men of his best platoon, and some others, he still felt the same way about them. He would do anything in the world for them. Behind him his men followed, much more interested in the terrain they were getting a first look at, than in what their present commander might ever do for them.
“Jesus!” Sgt Doll said to Sgt Beck. “Am I glad 3d Battalion did get there first!”
“Yeh,” Beck said, out of breath. “So’m I.”
What they saw was a series of fingerlike ridges thirty-five to forty feet high, rocky, steep, totally bare, with narrow, bare, ten to twenty foot draws between them. These were on the left. To have scaled them under Japanese fire was more than the toughest wished to contemplate. But on the right was a long, steep grassy slope devoid of cover for at least fifty yards. To have gone up this into MGs would have been to invite being mown like Nebraska wheat. The Japanese had even cut multiple fire lanes in the waist-high grass. Lucky. Lucky.
Band shook hands with the commander of 3d Battalion’s L Company, an old drinking pal of his and Stein’s who had reduced the position, and whose men were standing all around getting back their breath. 2d Platoon, and then the others following, mingled in with them, talking and smoking. But this time there was no evidence of competition, no digs or wisecracks about being late or who got there first.
L had not suffered badly: five men hit, one of them killed. Two of them by the first machinegun further back the ridge, three by the mortars which had hit them at the same time they hit C-for-Charlie. They had found only two MGs on the entire Sea Slug ridge, both suicide crews left behind to hold up the advance apparently. All had preferred to die. But there was evidence that there had been many more. The Japanese had pulled back apparently late yesterday, or last night.
What did all this mean? Neither L Company and its commander nor Band and C-for-Charlie had any idea. Both had expected a much tougher fight. Each would radio back the development to his respective battalion and carry on with his mission unless told otherwise. They decided to leave it like that. When they did radio, they were both told to carry on as planned.
L Company’s orders were to cross to and attack the open ground of The Giant Boiled Shrimp hill mass as soon as The Sea Slug was taken. C-for-Charlie’s were to dig in and hold The Sea Slug against counterattack for an approach route. It was still not yet eight o’clock in the morning. “I’m not at all sure you’ve got the easier job,” L Company’s commander smiled as he shook hands with Band before leaving. “Not if they find we’re using this ridge as an approach route and decide to turn loose those mortars again.” With a grim chill those men of Charlie who heard him thought he might very well be right.
Band put them to work right away. He chose for them the most advanced, most susceptible part of The Sea Slug ridge. Behind them Baker and Able were beginning to come up and spread out rearward from their flanks. As they dug, I-for-Item and K-for-King came up along the ridge and passed through them, I to take the left flank of the attack up the open ground of The Shrimp, twice as big as The Dancing Elephant in area, K to follow them as reserve 2d Battalion, they said, provided 3d was able to move on into the wider areas, was to follow them soon after and join in the attack.
This was not, however, the way it worked out in the reality.
Digging and sweating grimly in the growing heat of the day, 1st/Sgt Welsh was the first man in the company to finish his hole, and he only demanded a very little help from his three clerks. After all, they had to dig Band’s hole and the new Exec’s, before they could start on their own. Sitting in his, and staring off at the high ground of The Elephant’s Head where they had come from, Welsh was made to think of one of those sixteenth century bathtubs he had seen pictures of. Because of the slope, the rear of it rose to his ears while in the front it was two feet deep and halfway up his shins. (This was less than the required three feet but Welsh had cheated, and fuck them.)
Welsh suddenly envisioned himself sitting here with a big fat cigar in his face, a sponge in one hand and a longhandled brush in the other, enjoying this remarkably beautiful view. Which nobody else in the world had a right to look at, or pang! you’re dead! Welsh hated cigars and people who smoked them. But a cigar seemed proper in his vision all the same. He would soap and soap. And scrub and scrub. Not to get clean so much. He never minded being dirty. But because the view and the bathtub demanded it. Behind him his three clerks chattered at their digging like crazy birds, and Welsh had a momentary impulse to get up and boot them all three in the ass.
Welsh had taken a terribly dangerous chance yesterday when they moved out from the weekold vacation bivouac. He had filled two of his three canteens with gin, leaving only one for water. It was a desperate gamble heh heh but now it was paying off. Fuck water! He could get by without water. And with two shots inside his skin now he could look at the world again. It was really a beautiful world he thought looking off toward the distant magnificence of The Elephant’s Head. Where so many men had died and so many others had sickened. Fuck all that! Beautiful. Especially from a filled sixteenth century bathtub. He wiggled his toes in his stickywet socks. Ought to change, but the other pair was already stiff as boards in his pocket. Calmly he puffed on his imaginary cigar.
You guys! You guys! Welsh wanted to holler, listening to his three new clerks jabbering like three Japs behind him. You don’t know how to appreciate nothin’. Of them all he was, he was convinced, the only one left who really understood it. Home, family, country, flag, freedom, democracy, the honor of the President. Piss on all that! He didn’t have one of them, yet he was here, wasn’t he? And from choice, not necessity, because he could easily have gotten himself out of it. At least, he understood himself. The truth was, he liked all this shit. He liked being shot at, liked being frightened, liked lying in holes scared to death and digging his fingernails into the ground, liked shooting at strangers and seeing them fall hurt, liked his stickywet feet in his stickywet socks. Part of him did. In a way he was sorry about young Fife, though. Fife, in a rifle platoon!?
Of all the company including officers, Welsh was perhaps the only one as far as he knew who had never yet felt the combat numbness. He had heard them talk about it, during the week off, and had listened. He understood that it was the saving factor, and sensed the animal brutality that it brought with it. But he had not yet had the experience. He did not know whether this was because life had already made him numb like that years ago and he had never realized it, whether his foreknowledge of what to expect plus his superb natural intelligence heh heh had made him immune to it, or whether it was just that the combat itself had never yet gotten quite tough enough to freeze up his particular brand of personality. There were times, moments, when Welsh realized that he was quite mad. Like: Three cherries on the same stem = George Washington. Two no, never. Three yes, always. Who would understand that if he told them? If he dared tell them. He still hated cherries to this day and could not eat them, though he loved the taste of them. Typically, when his malaria had gotten much worse during their week’s vacation, he had told nobody about it and had hidden it with a kind of secret glee. And he never was going to tell anybody. He didn’t know why. It was all part of this silly game they pretended was adult and mature, that was all. He would go till he dropped in his tracks or some dumb Jap shot him and they could bury him while he laughed. But he did feel a little sorry about Fife. Not a lot, of course. After all, when some ass got himself shot up bad enough to go to the hospital and get himself evacuated forever, and then didn’t have the gumption or guts to follow it through, what the fuck could you do with him?
Welsh settled down in his hole. He had an intuition they were going to have a pretty easy day of it. To prove him wrong, it was just exactly then that the walkietalkie man somewhere close behind him called out he had a message for Band from the new Colonel ordering 1st Battalion to move out immediately in support of 3d Battalion on The Shrimp, Band to call back confirmation. Band came running from somewhere down the line, and Welsh got wearily up from his hole. He was aware that once again he had screwed himself. If he had waited a half hour to start instead of pitching in to get done, he would not have had to dig at all. He grinned mirthlessly.
More men had not finished digging than had finished, like Welsh. One of these was young Corporal Fife on the other, forward slope of the narrow little ridge. Here the fall was less steep than on the rearward slope where Welsh was, but it still required a considerable digging job to make a creditable hole. Fife had attacked it disheartedly with his inadequate little shovel. It seemed an insuperable job, and yet at the same time he knew he must make a good job of it because 3d Platoon had been placed on the forward slope, beside the 2d Platoon who held the apex of the angling ridge. Any counterattack must come right at him. As he dug, Fife was thinking about Fife somewhat the same as Welsh was—but differently. Fife was sure, absolutely and positively sure, that nothing he did could ever have gotten him evacuated. Not even if he had kept after them and persisted about his lost glasses. He paused digging and squinted off toward the (for him) blurred bulk of Hill 210 trying to see just how bad his eyes really were. He did not know if his eyes would see what they were supposed to see to save him. But he suspected not. Between halfhearted stabs with his shovel, he peered off anxiously squinting at The Elephant’s Head, checking and rechecking his bad eyes. When the news to stop digging bulleted itself down the line, he threw down his shovel with a great sigh of relief. Then he realized what that meant, and irrational panic seized him.
Fife had lain with the 3d Platoon along the trail, and just back out of range, while 2d Platoon had taken their beating this morning. One or two rounds hit quite near him. The terror for mortars which he now carried was so great it was indescribable in words, even to himself. Every round that he heard fall had to hit him squarely on that spot where his neck joined his shoulders. After the barrage he had a severe neck ache which lasted more than an hour. Now in his panic at having to leave The Sea Slug and move forward, he did not know if he could actually shoot and kill another human being or not, even if he had to. To save himself. And more, he did not know whether even if all that part did go well, did work right, it would make any difference and he mightn’t get killed anyway. Killed! Dead! Not alive anymore! He didn’t think he could face it. God, he had already been wounded once, hadn’t he? What did they want from him? He wanted to sit down and cry, and he couldn’t. Not in front of the company.
In the fact, the company probably would not have noticed if Fife had sat down and cried. They were all too engrossed in thinking about their own bad luck as they fell in in their squads and platoons. And it really wasn’t anybody’s fault, that was the worst thing. The reason, as Band found out when he radioed his confirmation call, and as the rest of them found out by word of mouth gossip seconds later, was simply that they happened to be closest and somebody was needed right away. Old 1st Battalion got the shitty end of the stick in every sense. Wearily, though more in the morale sense than the physical, they gathered their gear together and prepared to do, once more, the necessary.
It was just at this point that another man in the company was wounded. This was a tall, quiet buck sergeant Squad Leader from Pennsylvania in the 3d Platoon whose name was Potts. Potts’s squad had been the linkup of the 3d Platoon with John Bell’s squad of the 2d. Potts and Bell and two others were standing out in the open by their holes on The Sea Slug, looking out toward The Giant Boiled Shrimp across the jungle that separated them. They were discussing the advance and what they might expect to find over there, and trying to see The Shrimp which from here was only a vague indistinct mass of brown. Bell, who happened to be standing with his back to The Shrimp at that particular moment and looking at Sgt Potts who was talking, saw the whole thing. One moment Potts was talking away. In the next there was a loud “Thwack!”, and immediately after the shrill whine of a bullet ricochetting away. Potts, who was looking straight at Bell and wearing no helmet, stopped in midword and stared at Bell crosseyed as if thoughtfully trying to see something on the end of his own nose. Then he fell down. A red spot had appeared in the center of his forehead. Potts immediately sat back up, still staring out at the world crosseyed, then fell back down again. By this time Bell was to him, but Potts was out, unconscious, those crossed eyes mercifully closed. Bell could see that on his forehead an inchlong groove had been cut—or burned rather, was perhaps the better word, since it did not bleed. Beneath it he could see the white, undamaged bone of Potts’s skull. A spent ricochet from somewhere on The Shrimp, traveling flatways instead of by the point, had passed beside Bell’s head and struck Potts square between the eyes and gone screaming on its way. Laughter beginning to make spasms in his diaphragm and bubble up into his throat despite himself, Bell knelt and brought him around by gently slapping his cheeks and chafing his hands. Potts was perfectly all right. Laughing so hard they could hardly see where they were going through the tears, the three of them helped him back to Battalion Aid Station which was just setting up on The Sea Slug, and where the doctor, laughing also, put a patch over the cut and gave Potts a handful of aspirin. Until the moment of departure he lay on his back resting with his helmet over his face because of his headache, assured of his Purple Heart. Potts did not think it was at all funny, and complained bitterly about his headache the rest of the day. Everybody else roared with laughter whenever it was mentioned. It put the company in a good mood to begin the incredible, unbelievable march they did not yet know they were going to make.
In the future annals of the Regiment (and the Division) it would be known forever as “The Race” or the “Grand Prix.” Sometimes it was referred to also as “The Long End Run.” C-for-Charlie was to become and remain one of its foremost elements. In the maps of the Division history (all drawn very much later) the “Long End Run” would be shown with red and blue arrows to be the logical development of a situation and its equally logical followthrough. The truth was that at the time nobody anywhere really knew what the situation was. As 1st Battalion led by C-for-Charlie came up out of the jungle and moved around the left side of Hill 250, the Shrimp’s Tail, the only evidence of any Japanese was a honeycomb of deserted, well camouflaged emplacements which several men stumbled over and fell into. It was clear to everyone it should have been an expensive battle. But where were the Japanese? Why had they left? Slowly and cautiously, they deployed on the left of 3d Battalion in the flat open ground and probed on. Two hours and two thousand yards later they arrived worn out and waterless on the forward slope of Hill 253, The Shrimp’s Head, without having suffered a casualty.
It really wasn’t all that easy. On their right L Company had had a fire fight with twenty or thirty Japanese on top of Hill 251, a long narrow ridge projecting into the jungle which corresponded to one of The Shrimp’s Feet, finally destroying them with their company mortars from the other end of the ridge. Moving along down below, C-for-Charlie could watch the whole action. Far back on Hill 250 they could see Dog Company busily setting up its heavy mortars. It was very quiet in the bright sunshine. There was tough going in the crotchhigh grass. But at least they could walk standing up. Here and there men shook themselves and settled their shoulders as if to indicate this wasn’t so bad after all; but nobody dared voice the feeling, for superstitious fear that all hell would break loose immediately after.
2d Platoon had again been chosen by Brass Band to be lead platoon, so it was they who were out in front as skirmishers. Beck the martinet had cursed and complained about this to his squad leaders (who agreed with him) but so far had said nothing to Band. Beck himself had switched his point squad, putting Bell’s squad out in front, and when they deployed had placed Doll’s squad on Bell’s right in the safest place, letting the other two, Thorne’s and Dale’s, go to the open left flank. It was in this position, as they walked slowly forward through the tough grass with their rifles held at a low port in tired arms, that Pfc Carrie Arbre left his position and sidled over until he was beside his squad leader. Arbre had seemed to be avoiding Doll, or so Doll thought, ever since the two episodes of this morning. Doll waited.
“Can I talk to you private a minute, Doll?”
“Sure, Carrie.”
As they talked both of them kept their eyes moving to left and right as they moved ahead, looking for emplacements, looking for Japanese.
Arbre frowned, but he had long ago given up trying to make anyone stop calling him Carrie. “I just wanted to ast you why you changed yore mind about pickin me to go with you, back there today.”
A person always expected that Arbre, because of his girlish shyness and sensitive look, would be more educated than most but in fact he wasn’t. He had not gone as far in high school as Doll. Doll had nearly graduated. “Well, I don’t know, Carrie,” he said. “It was just something that hit me. A sort of sudden instinct. Or something.’’
“Well, I can sojer as well as the next man. I carry my weight.”
“I know that. Course you do. Course you can.” By a momentary inspiration Doll was moved to put his arm around Arbre’s thin shoulders which in the shower always looked so much narrower than his wide, lean, woman’s hips, but he did not do it because he didn’t want to let go of his rifle with one hand. They walked ahead through the tough grass. “If I was to analyze it, like I’m tryin to do now, I’d say it was just because I wanted to look out for you and protect you.” Doll felt his heart beat suddenly, as a brilliant idea came to him.
“I don’t want nobody to look out for me,” Arbre said beside him sullenly. “I don’t need any protection.”
“Everybody needs help, Carrie,” Doll said. He turned his head for a second to smile at him, and when he did Arbre turned to look at him, a strange enigmatic expression on his face as if he knew something he was not saying, or as if he knew something Doll was not saying and perhaps did not even know. They both turned back and began looking for emplacements again.
“I want to live through this fucking war as much as anybody,” Arbre said. “I didn’t want to go up there with you.” He moved on ahead, slumpshouldered and narrowchested, with that same strange halfsoft, halfhard, almost apologetic look. “I guess I do need help. I mean, all of us.” With that he turned and moved away, still looking as if he knew something extra.
Doll spared a quick look after him wondering what the hell all that had been about, watching those girlishly goodlooking hips. Then he turned back to the business at hand, shifting his rifle a little, wondering how the hell much longer this walk was going to go on like this. Momentarily he wondered nervously if anybody had noticed the two of them together. Well, what if they did? Everybody knew Doll liked broads. When the hell was something going to happen around here?
It was just then that three bedraggled, scarecrowlooking Japanese men burst out of the jungle brush ahead of them on the left and ran toward them chattering and wailing and waving their hands and arms high in the air, skittering and stumbling along in the stony grass. Doll threw up his rifle and fired, his face a mask of grim satisfaction. So did others, and the three were shot down before they had gotten twenty yards. Then the sunny morning silence returned. In it, the lead platoon watched and listened. Then they moved on. Ahead of them now not too far away was the hill of The Giant Boiled Shrimp’s Head. Behind them, as the column moving forward passed the three corpses, hardly anybody even bothered to look down at them. Their wallets had already been taken.
Like Doll, Buck Sergeant Squad Leader Charlie Dale was one of the men in 2d Platoon who had fired first and definitely gotten one of the three Japanese. Dale had never believed in giving no Jap no chance anyway, and after fighting them for ten days now believed in it even less. Like that one that tried to grenade Big Queen on The Elephant’s Head at the Jap bivouac after surrendering first. They just didn’t have no conception of honor or honesty. Grinning smugly, Dale ran forward to them through the grass. His particular one’s wallet contained nothing of any value except a picture of some Jap broad, which wasn’t much. She wasn’t even naked. But he kept it anyway because he was getting quite a collection of them now. The wallet he threw away. It was falling apart from jungle rot. Somebody—Doll, in fact—found one of those small, individual soldier’s battleflags on one of them, but Dale’s didn’t have anything. Some crappy luck. He didn’t even have any gold teeth when Charlie opened his mouth.
During their week off, with part of his loot, Dale had traded for a pair of electrician’s pliers. These now reposed in his hip pocket with a supply of Bull Durham sacks. If damned Marines could have collections of gold teeth worth a thousand dollars Charlie Dale could by God have one. And this would have been his first chance to use the pliers—except the bastard had to go and not have any. And before he could look over the other two corpses, the order to move out came, which order Dale obeyed swiftly because Brass Band that asshole was close enough to be watching him. And Dale had evolved for himself a new, grandiose plan. Cursing savagely with regret, he led his squad off.
Dale’s plan was a simple one. He had watched the promotions list with a shrewd and careful eye that went far beyond his own sergeantcy. He knew that that fool schoolteacher Band liked him. And he was convinced that Sergeant Field, Doll’s old squad leader, had been promoted to Platoon Guide of 1st Platoon simply to get him out of the way. If anything happened to Skinny Culn now, Dale was convinced he could bullshit Teacher Band into promoting himself into the job of platoon sergeant of 1st Platoon. Also, the Platoon Guide of 3d Platoon was a pretty wishywashy type character. For that matter, Fox, the new platoon sergeant of 3d Platoon was no very great shakes himself. It might be even possible to live to see him replaced without him even getting wounded or killed.
So there were a couple good chances. And Charlie Dale had decided he wanted a platoon. He had gotten a squad and a sergeantcy when he wanted one, just like he planned it. What was to stop him from doing the same thing with a platoon? Just as easy. He meant to watch for some opportunity where he could handle two or three squads in some little action all by himself, and let Band see it. Ahead of him the ground steepened and he shifted his rifle slightly, changing his plodding pace to a lighter, more alert one, and narrowed his eyes. He was sure asshole Band would jump him up over everybody the first chance that offered.
And he was right. Band would have. Band had watched him during the shooting of the three Jap camaraden. He was aware Dale was not the most intelligent man in his company, that his physical courage sometimes took on the look of sheer insanity; and he personally did not much care for the sadistic cruelty Dale displayed now and then, he thought with a smile. But in a war everything had to be used that was useful. He had almost given Dale the 3d Platoon during the mass promotions. Now he wondered if he hadn’t been wrong, too overcautious.
During the long walk forward from Hill 250 across the flat, Band had moved his Company Hq forward in the column. He was reasonably positive nothing much would happen on the low ground; and he wanted to keep an eye on his men out in front, and on any developments. Now as they approached Hill 253—The Shrimp’s Head—he ordered 2d Platoon into a double column of squads, the better to maneuver the steepening slopes, and allowed 3d and 1st Platoons to pass through ahead of the Hq into close support. They were still unfired upon. L Company had caught up to them on the right after their little fire fight, and had signalled they would go around the right side of the big hill while C-for-Charlie went around the left. This was fine with Band. He held back his Hq and Weapons Platoon near the foot while his rifle platoons explored for resistance, unaware that his two best platoon sergeants Culn and Beck were silently cursing him under their breath for not being up front with them and for hanging back whenever the possibility of danger came up. After a half hour’s work, the two companies met on the forward slope without having fired a shot and Band brought his Hq and Weapons up, as did the L Company commander.
It was a perfectly proper maneuver Band had executed, holding back his Hq. L Company’s Commander had done the same thing. But both Beck and Culn could not help wondering why Tall George had moved his Hq forward in the column down there on the flat, where there obviously wasn’t going to be any danger, and where it also was not needed. What kind of cheap display was that? Perhaps they were both being a little touchy. But Beck was still mad at him for leaving 2d Platoon out in front after their casualties on The Sea Slug; and both men remembered how he had waited to come forward on The Sea Slug until after the mortars stopped. It was one more thing both of them chalked up in their little mental notebooks while Band shook hands with L Company’s commander again.
Everybody knew they had now reached the point where they had taken so much ground they were in serious danger of overextending themselves. That was the main problem now. The men stood around waiting to see what their commanders would decide. They were also about out of water. Item and Baker, equally dry, had stationed themselves around on the reverse slope of the big hill. Their commanders came up to join the conference. Still further back, K-for-King and A-for-Able had spread out along both edges of the open ground facing the jungle to cover the flanks; but their lines covered less than a quarter of the distance back to The Shrimp’s Tail. A counterattack coming in behind them in force could cut off both Battalions, and it was still only eleven thirty in the morning. Nobody wanted the responsibility of deciding whether to stay or go on. It was decided that L and C, as lead companies, would both radio their respective Battalion CPs for instructions.
Band, for his part, when he finally got through, found as much if not more confusion back on The Shrimp’s Tail as there was here on The Shrimp’s Head. The new Exec (replacing Capt John Gaff) was the biggest man Band could find to talk to. Col Spine the new Commander was off at an emergency conference with the Regimental Commander and the other Battalion Commanders. The Division Commander was on his way up from Hill 214 personally to meet with them and take personal command himself. In the Exec’s voice, in spite of the whistles and static, Band could detect the same elation and excitement that he himself had felt as they proceeded up the length of The Shrimp without meeting resistance. Water? It was at this very moment being started to them by native carrier; they should get it in half to three quarters of an hour. Also, 2d Battalion was already on its way down the face of Hill 250 with orders to extend the lines of King and Able rearward. Beside Band, Mad Welsh checked and confirmed this for him through the late Lt Whyte’s handsome binoculars which Band handed him. In addition, the Exec said, the other regiment was in the process of being pulled bodily by battalions from the line of The Dancing Elephant and sent forward here, leaving the line undefended on orders of the Division Commander and the General Commanding. They were going all out. It might be a big break: a major breakthrough following right on the heels of a general withdrawal. Or it might be some sort of a trap.
“I know,” Band said thinly.
He really ought to see what was going on back here! Then: Do? What should they do? That was when the pause came. The Exec did not want the responsibility of deciding, either. He didn’t know what they were supposed to do, he said lamely. The Colonel should be back with orders in an hour or so. Maybe even less.
“Time’s a-wasting,” Band said. He felt the thin humorous contempt and superiority of a combat person for a rear area person. He listened disdainfully as the Exec told him if he would wait, if he would not break contact, the Exec would try to get the Colonel. The conference was only fifty yards or so away, and he would take the walkietalkie man with him. Would he wait? Band waited. As he waited, he could feel his eyes narrowing, his neck lengthening as his stance straightened, his jaw setting, his mouth compressing, a combat man against the hillside. He stared rearward toward The Giant Boiled Shrimp’s Tail, toward where the brass was.
When the orders came, they came not in the voice of the 1st Battalion Exec, but from the person of the Regimental Commander himself. That mottlefaced, whitehaired old drunkard with the huge paunch was taking on himself the responsibility of ordering both Battalions to go on, immediately. The Division Commander had already received permission from the General Commanding to change the division’s boundary on the right. The plan was for 3d Battalion to turn right from The Shrimp’s Head and attack toward the beach over a series of more or less connected, open hills. The objective was to reach the beach at the village of Bunabala (which high command had not expected to reach for weeks, or months) splitting the Japanese Army and cutting off the Japanese still holding out against the beach division. Band whistled silently. This was quite some objective, for one battalion—or even for two battalions. As if in answer, the Exec went on that, of course, they would be reinforced as soon as practicable by 2d Battalion and the other regiment.
1st Battalion on the other hand, the Exec said, and Band nodded because he thought he already knew, was to turn right also, but in a wider sweep, on the outside of 3d Battalion, to protect their flank. They were, uh, in an image, to run blocking interference for 3d Battalion who would be carrying the ball. But as they would have no series of connected open hills over which to maneuver, their situation would be somewhat different. They would find on the map a series of widely separated small hills some distance to the left of 3d Battalion’s route. These, which came out into the coconut groves just to the left Bunabala, were their objectives. They were to take them, leaving just enough men to hold each one, and move on—finally to Bunabala, where they would turn left to protect the rear of 3d Battalion fighting on the right. As soon as their water, rations and stretcherbearers reached them, they were to move out. As to future water, they would have to find that for themselves on the way. There were several creeks and some waterholes on the map adjacent to their route. They had water purifying pills, didn’t they? Band said that they did. Okay, that was all, and good luck, the Exec said excitedly. Band was about to switch over, thank him drily and sign off, when the Exec called him.
There was one other thing. “What? What, sir?” Band heard him say dimly, then: “The Regimental Commander says you may find yourself being cut off from your own lines. Certainly 1st and 3d Battalions will be cut off from each other. But within your Battalion your companies may even find themselves cut off from each other.” The Exec spoke slowly, as though the Regimental Commander was giving it to him sentence by sentence. “Therefore,” he said, “you are to consider yourselves operating as independent commands, except where communication is possible. Okay? Over.”
Band’s mouth was suddenly dry with excitement. “Roger,” he said calmly. “Over and out.” When he hung up the instrument, his eyes behind his spectacles were brighter than they had ever been. Independent commands! Operating as independent commands!
The Exec had said earlier that Col Spine would try to keep up with them as closely as was practicable, but Band knew what that meant. It meant Spine would be at least as far back as the front of 2d Battalion or the other regiment, as they moved up to consolidate.
L Company’s commander had received substantially the same dope, with one exception. Their Colonel commanding was going with them. Band and the L Company commander shook hands once again.
C-for-Charlie watched L Company take off. There was a nervous, strangely excited feeling in the air now. It was impossible to tell which battalion had drawn the easier assignment. The front slope of The Shrimp’s Head fell away gently to the right of their own axis of advance, thus creating The Shrimp’s long Face and little Beard which showed up so plainly in the aerial photos. The last elements of L Company crossed the Beard and disappeared into the jungle as C-for-Charlie watched.
Band called a council of his officers and all first-three-graders. Independent commands! He smiled his small smile. When they had all arrived, he told them, “It looks like maybe the whole thing has been blown wide open. Nobody—in our sector anyway—can find the Imperial Japanese Army. Our orders are to keep pushing ahead until we do find them, and then hit them to see how strong they are. If possible, we’re to aid 3d Battalion in the capture of Bunabala. This may be a breakthrough and we may be able to cut them off. Okay, men, let’s get it to movin. We got a lot of walkin to do.” He dismissed them and they started back to their units. He was pleased with his speech. He was pleased with squatting here and making such a speech, in this hot sweltering bright morning sunshine on a dusty mountain slope with the jungle all around below them on this island of Guadalcanal, far off in the tropical South Pacific sea. Independent commands! Band was absolutely certain that his company anyway, for one, was going to be there for the capture of Bunabala.
It was essentially a new word to the company. It had cropped up in a few conversations long, long ago back down on the beach, before combat. The Marines had once sent an illfated expedition to try to capture it. Now Bunabala ran through the company from squad to squad like wildfire and, of course, was immediately changed by somebody to Boola Boola. It was, they knew, a village situated on the beach in the coconut groves. Up to today Boola Boola had been a distant mirage, a nonexistent-in-the-future town they would someday have to attack and take. Now it was, excitingly, their immediate objective.
Their stretcherbearers, rations and water arrived. Nobody carried packs now, but two cans of C ration could be carried in the hip pockets. Almost everybody, for the first time since leaving the rest bivouac, decided to drink down, give away, or pour out their remaining whiskey and refill the second canteen with water. Welsh was one of the few exceptions. He kept his two canteens of gin. Then, equipped as well as they could hope to be, they prepared to move out.
It was just at this point, while the final hitching and settling and stamping was going on, that Milly Beck the martinet and former squad sergeant, now an equally conscientious platoon leader, came to Band with a deeply frowning face and a request that his platoon be put in company reserve. “My boys’ve had it tougher than any of the other platoons, Lootenant. Including The Elephant’s Head. They’ve had more casualties, and are more under strength. They deserve a break now.”
“Did you ask Lieutenant Tomms about this?” Band said, adjusting his glasses to peer at him.
“Him?” Beck said in his stolid direct way. “No. What’s he know about any of it?”
“That’s true,” Band said. He did not like this kind of request. But Beck was scrupulously fair—in his dumb way—and what was more important, he was good at his job. Band thought in silence, pushing at the bridge of his glasses with his middle finger.
“It ain’t fair to leave my boys out there all the goddam time,” Beck added in the silence, as if that made it conclusive.
Afterward Band thought he might have acceded to the request if Beck had not spoken just then. Now, instead, he jerked his head up to stare at him. “Fair? What’s not fair? What’s fair got to do with it? No,” he said. “I’m afraid I’ll have to deny your request, Sergeant. Your platoon is the best I’ve got. They’ve got more experience, they’re tougher, they know how to handle themselves better. They belong out in front.”
“Is that an order then, Sir?” Beck growled, staring at him.
“I’m afraid it is, Sergeant.”
“In other words, the more of us get killed gettin experience, the more of us got to get killed usin it.”
Band felt it was time to pull rank, but he did not do it bluntly or brutally. “As I said, fair has nothing to do with it,” he said crisply. “Unfortunately. In a war everything useful has to be used. And here it is me who decides what is most useful where.” He made his eyes steely behind his steel spectacles. “Any other questions, Sergeant Beck?”
“No, sir.” Beck growled it, furiously.
“Then that’s all.”
“Aye, aye, Sir!” Beck saluted, did an accurate aboutface, and marched away at attention at a solid 120 per. It was the only way left him of showing his disapproval. “My platoon!” he bawled. “Off and on!”
Poor man, Band thought, smiling his small smile. He was sorry. Still, he thought he had handled it pretty well. “Sergeant!” he called, on a sudden whim.
Beck swung around. He was only about fifteen feet away. Nobody else was near them. “I want to tell you something, Sergeant,” Band said, smiling behind his spectacles.
“Sir?”
“Do you know why C-for-Charlie is the Battalion’s lead company today in this attack? It’s because I volunteered us for it to the new Battalion Commander.”
“You what!” Beck cried in disbelief, and crouched almost as if to charge him.
Band raised his eyebrows, and waited. Beck was too old a hand not to know what that meant. “Sir!” he added chokingly.
“That’s right,” Band smiled. “And do you know why I did? It was because I felt C-for-Charlie with its superior combat experience would be more useful there. To Regiment, to the Division, to the attack. To everybody.” He continued to smile, hoping it would sink in.
Slowly, Beck drew himself up to attention, his eyes completely filmed over. “Is that all, Sir?” he said distantly, and with dignity.
“That’s all, Sergeant.”
For answer Beck saluted, aboutfaced and went on. “My platoon!” he bawled again. “Off and on!”
Sadly, Band watched him go.
This time Beck put Dale’s squad in front as point. He saw no reason why Band’s being a chicken shit must make him one too. And this time there was grumbling in the platoon over being first again. Wherever Beck heard it, he cursed them roundly and furiously. He was brooking no argument in his platoon. First Dale’s squad disappeared into the leaves, then the other three. Then came 3d Platoon, followed by the Company Hq, then 1st Platoon, then Weapons. As they disappeared one by one, Baker Company moved around to the front of the hill to form up and follow them.
While C-for-Charlie, ignored by Baker who were worried only about themselves and quite glad of their number two spot, was cautiously beginning its first 1000 yard jungle trek, at least two of its partisans were doing everything in their power to catch up with it. Mess Sergeant Storm and Acting-P.F.C. Witt, unknown to each other, and for different reasons, were both doing their best to find the company.
If C-for-Charlie was not thinking of Witt, and had not thought about him since the night he had run drunk off the side of the mountain, Witt had nevertheless been thinking about them all the time. There was true anguish in his implacable Kentucky heart when he learned they had been moved from reserve up into the attack this morning and he knew he could not be with them because of his vow. At the time he learned it, he was back on Hill 209 carrying watercans and rationboxes. Cannon Company—still thought of as an outfit of bums, misfits and deadbeats, and still without their cannons—had been pressed into service as supply porters this time, instead of as stretcherbearers, and were carrying supplies between Hill 209 and Hill 214, The Elephant’s Forelegs. It was because of this that Witt had not heard about Colonel Tall’s promotion. It was not until noon, when he returned from another pack trip to Hill 214 and overheard some Regimental Hq clerks talking about Tall’s raise in salary, that he found out. He immediately got his rifle and some bandoliers and sneaked off, heading for Hill 214 along the jeep road. He had only been made Acting-P.F.C. two days ago—Acting because all ranks were Acting in Cannon Company, which had never yet been given an official TO—and now he was sure to lose his rating. On the other hand, he had been an Acting-Sergeant in C-for-Charlie for two days. Laughing happily over all of this, he traversed the brand new jungle road between Hill 214 and The Sea Slug, and found Maynard Storm and his entire kitchen all set up on the open ridge, at just about the same time that C-for-Charlie was capturing its first undefended hill off in the midst of the jungle sea.
Storm was having his own troubles. Back at the hospital, when he had sworn to remain a mess sergeant and stay the hell off the front lines, he had also sworn to feed his pore, bleeding outfit at least one hot meal a day if it was at all humanly possible. To this end, back at the empty bivouac where MacTae the supply sergeant was the only other person of authority left and who certainly didn’t mind, Storm had commandeered both company jeeps, loaded them with his cooks, stoves and supplies and had taken off at dawn to feed C-for-Charlie, only to find them already gone when he arrived at The Elephant’s Head. They were, he was informed, on The Sea Slug digging in as Regimental reserve. Patiently doubling back and taking the other road he arrived at The Sea Slug (after considerable argument with the Provost Marshal’s MPs guarding the new jungle section) only to find them gone again. 2d Battalion was already moving into their holes. And here he was stumped. He could not go any farther. Even jeeps could not move to The Shrimp’s Tail until the Engineers made a road, and all supplies were being carried by native porters. Even when there was a road, he was told, other transport would have priority, like ammo, cold rations, water. Modern war, after first wounding him, had finally caught up with Storm in his work. Modern war didn’t give a damn whether Storm fed his company hot food or not. Modern war couldn’t care less about a solitary company mess, trying to get far enough forward to give its outfit hot food and fucking up the highway priorities, and nobody was going to help him. And it had become an obsession with Storm to feed his outfit at least one hot meal a day. Only in that way could he relieve himself of the guilts he felt for not being with them. And now all he could do was sit here with one thumb up his ass and the other in his mouth like some baby. A lesser man would have broken and wept. Storm cursed with tears in his eyes.
On the other hand, Storm’s cooks were all glad. None of them had liked this crazy idea anyway. It was too dangerously near the firing. He had forced them to come here and try this goofy scheme over their collective objections. They didn’t even have any KPs to do the dirty work. And now they watched their near tearful leader maliciously and whispered among themselves that maybe now he would let them go home to the bivouac. Finally one of them got up nerve enough to go and ask him this. Storm delivered him such a left hook in the side of the head that it knocked him down and his head rang for two hours. While he worked. Because Storm had immediately put them all to work.
He did not know exactly when the idea came to him. It was a simple enough connection. Here all around him were men hungering for hot food, and here he was with the stoves and supplies to fix it. So he had set up his kitchen on some nearly level ground ten yards from the main ridge. The stoves were unloaded and fired up, his cooks told off for their various shifts, the skillets put to sizzling on the ranges, and Storm was open for business. He had brought more than enough food in the two jeeps to feed the company three hot meals a day for a week. It might be a long battle. By that calculation, he could feed six companies two hot meals a day for almost two days. Or, if he ... He stopped counting and went back to work. By the time Witt arrived he had fed the two companies of the 2d Battalion holding The Sea Slug one hot meal apiece before they moved out, and had served another hot meal to the one company of the sister regiment which had relieved them. Then he had gotten an even better idea, when a strange company had marched by heading for The Giant Boiled Shrimp.
Coming up from the jungle road back to Hill 214, the sight to these men of a foreign company mess sitting by the trail with stoves aglow and skillets sizzling had caused their eyes to bug out. Several of them had broken ranks and rushed over, only to burn their hands on the slices of hot Spam as they ran to fall back in. Storm had brought lots of bread. Now he broke it out. He also posted a sentry at the mouth of the jungle road to Hill 214. When this man signaled, the cooks on shift started frying all the Spam they could handle. The cooks not on shift sliced the bread and then did the serving, passing out along the column with armloads of hot fried Spam sandwiches while Storm roared and hollered and clapped his hands like pistol shots like some football coach to pep them up. They could not feed every single man like that, there wasn’t the time, but now and then—though rarely—an understanding company commander suddenly decided to call a ten break on The Sea Slug. And there were enough outfits moving across The Sea Slug now, heading for The Shrimp, to keep Storm occupied. Then there would be the evening meal to prepare for this stranger company here. His cooks stared at him as if he’d gone mad, but he didn’t care. Fuck all that! Fuck everything! Feed men!
However, every now and then, he would think of C-for-Charlie, all those faces that he knew so well passing slowly in review before his eyes. Then he would know that it didn’t mean anything, what he was doing, didn’t help at all, was worthless to him. And then that look, whether of rage, frustration, guilt or pain, or all four, would come back over his face. Modern war. You couldn’t even pretend it was human. Then he would plunge back in.
This comic routine, this emotional strophe and antistrophe, was what he was doing when Witt came up the road alone, a solitary figure, humping along under his combat pack with slung rifle and bandoliers, thin and frail looking, his peanut head sunk deep into his helmet shell, Witt the Kentuckian, Witt who hated niggers because they all wanted to vote. Even if one told him he didn’t want to vote, Witt would not believe him. He would simply have to be lying. From beneath the shell, in shadow, his hard implacable eyes peered out like the eyes of some ferretlike animal.
There was a great deal of handshaking. The kitchen had not seen Witt since the night he tried to run down the mountain. A huge meal was prepared for him. Storm fed him all the fried Spam, dehydrated mashed potatoes, and stewed dehydrated apples his small belly could hold. Storm broke out an Imperial quart.
“What the hell are you doin’ up here? Like this? All by yourself.”
“I’m headin back to the company,” Witt said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
“You’re what?!”
Witt grinned. “Goin’ back. Shorty Tall got promoted yesterday.”
“You must be out of your mind,” Storm said.
Witt’s helmetshadowed eyes turned slowly in their sockets to stare at him. “No I ain’t.”
“In the first place nobody knows where they are. They’re way to hell and gone off on their own someplace. They’re not even on The Giant Boiled Shrimp anymore.”
Witt nodded. “I can find them. Somebody’s got to know.”
“The last dope we had here said that all companies of both 1st and 3d Battalions have been authorized to act as independent commands. You know what that means.”
“Sure. They probably out of contact.”
“You must be off your rocker.”
“Why?” Witt said. “It’s the company, ain’t it? They must of left a trail. And Tall’s promoted, ain’t he?” He looked straight at Storm out of his black Kentucky eyes.
Storm stared back. “Have a nuther drink,” he said.
“Thank you, I will,” Witt said politely. Then he smiled his shy smile. “It’s good to see you, Stormy. But what are you doin’ up here feeding all these strangers?”
“I tried to catch up to the company, but we missed them. And these guys was here.” Storm shrugged lamely. “I figured I might as well feed somebody.”
“Well, I guess it’s a good deed,” Witt said. “It was good for me, anyway.”
“Angh,” Storm said and shrugged again. He looked around the ridge. “For two cents I’d go with you.”
Witt got up. “Come on along.”
“But I don’t know what these dumbasses would do if they didn’t have me around to take care of them,” Storm said.
“We’d have some fun.”
“The truth is,” Storm said, “I don’t like to get shot at.”
“Everybody to his own taste,” Witt said. Then he grinned. “I think I like it. But honestly I wouldn’t be doin’ this if it wasn’t the old company, I guess.”
They left it at that. Witt was well aware of the effect his odyssey was creating, and he was openly proud of himself. He hung around talking and having a couple more drinks so that he did not get away heading for The Shrimp, shtumping along in solitary splendor, until just after four, which was just about the time that C-for-Charlie unaided captured their second undefended hill.
Storm watched him until he disappeared from sight going down into the jungle toward The Shrimp behind some native porters at the front end of The Sea Slug ridge. Witt was not aware of this because he was too proud to let himself look back, but he could not help wondering if some of them weren’t watching. Because of having to stop and ask directions so often from so many people who could tell him nothing or only the vaguest rumors, he had to cover almost every foot of The Giant Boiled Shrimp and it was a quarter to five in the afternoon of the next day when he finally reached The Shrimp’s Head and had pointed out to him the trail 1st Battalion had taken. This was almost precisely the same moment that C-for-Charlie was beginning its attack against Hill 279, its fourth, which was defended by a platoonsized body of Japanese.
It was a tough fight and, curiously enough, a boring one. For almost everybody. One man, however, it was not boring for, and this was Corporal Geoffrey Fife, newly of 2d Squad, 3d Platoon, because during it Fife killed his first Japanese.
Most of them could not even remember how many hills they had captured and passed. Everything ran together in one long stumbling breathless rush of green leaves and ropy lianas interspersed with blazing sunshine on bare knobs and dustysmelling masses of kunai grass. Somewhere in the midst of this a night passed. Band, though he told no one, still meant to be in on the capture of Boola Boola (as even he was calling it, now) and he had pushed them so hard that by the time they occupied their third undefended hilltop the next morning they were more like seven hundred yards ahead of Baker instead of the proper two, and everybody including himself was in a stupor of exhaustion which could no longer be the whiskey they had gulped down at The Shrimp because that had long since been sweated out of them. Twice they had run out of water and had had to search off the trail with the map for the marked waterholes. It was at the second of these that Big Un Cash was killed by a light Nambu. So that, while they mightn’t remember the hills, nobody forgot that particular waterhole.
It was located off the main trail on a little side trail which the Japanese had cleverly hidden by leaving a thick screen of undergrowth at its mouth between it and the big trail. They had to search for it until they began to doubt the map or else their own understanding of it. It was defended by five starving Japs with rifles and that one Nambu. This was between the second and third undefended hills, in the morning. Finally somebody stumbled blindly into the side trail. It led downhill into a deep hollow where a muddy stinking pool had been formed by springs. The jungle hid it forever from the sun. Green scum floated on its surface. In spite of that it looked good. Sgt Thorne’s squad of 2d Platoon was point squad at the time. Cash (who had been made Corporal after The Dancing Elephant and had requested 2d Platoon) had been assigned to Thorne’s squad as second in command. When Thorne’s squad took over from Dale’s, he had placed himself in front as point man and had been there since.
The five Japanese had planned their defense cleverly, given their poor circumstances, and had hidden themselves and their little camp behind some downed trees directly across from the side trail so they could fire enfilade on it. They were obviously a suicide group, left behind to take with them in death as many Americans as they could get, but they got only Cash. He was perhaps ten yards in front of the second man as they came down to the pool. He fell forward on his face in the mud hit through the hips, crotch and lower groin by the first burst of fire. Everybody else scattered. Dale’s and Bell’s squads worked around to the right and left while two BAR men under Doll kept the Japanese pinned, and grenaded most of them. Two survivors who stood up were shot and fell into the pool. The two squads met in the center and assured themselves nobody was left. Then they came back for Cash. He was conscious and had managed to turn himself over and wipe some of the mud off his face.
The two dead men bleeding pink, dissolving streams into the pool did not keep them from filling their canteens. It ran out into the muddy water from their bodies only a little way, and then swirling diluted itself into invisibility. “Everybody’s got to drink a little enemy blood in his lifetime some time or other,” Charlie Dale growled cheerfully, whereupon two men vomited, but filled their canteens nevertheless. “You can’t see it, but it’s there!” Dale sang. He was told to shut up by several men and the watergetting work went on, men standing around vigorously shaking their canteens up and down to dissolve the purifying pills, while the two medics did what they could for Cash.
After filling their canteens, a small group explored the little Japanese camp for booty and discovered there the first evidence any of them had seen of cannibalism. They had all heard rumors, but this was no rumor. A dead Japanese man, who apparently had died from artilleryinflicted chest wounds, had been strung up from a branch by his heels and strips of flesh about two inches wide had been cut from his buttocks, lower back and thighs. Apparently they had carried him back this far from The Shrimp before he died, and then they had utilized him. The charred remains of the little campfire where they had cooked him was only a few feet away. All five of the other corpses were ragged, filthy dirty, near shoeless, and starved looking. They obviously had been given little or no rations to sustain them, and curiously enough nobody was very shocked or horrified by the cannibalism. In this mad jungle world of mud, perpetual wet, gloom, green air, stink, and slithering animal life, it seemed far more normal than not normal. Carrie Arbre poked at one of the evenly cut strip wounds with his bayonet and giggled. “He still looks pretty fresh.” “Maybe he was good,” Doll grinned. “Anybody want to try some?” somebody else said. When he heard about it, Brass Band came over to have a look with the new Exec, a longnosed, mean, and meanlooking, Italian 1st Lieutenant named Creo. Charlie Dale found two gold teeth in the head of one corpse. He was finding out that not nearly as many Japanese had gold teeth as he had been led to believe.
The two medics had propped Cash up against the bole of a tree where he leaned his head back and kept both hands between his legs. Sgts Thorne and Bell had somehow gotten themselves tacitly designated to sit up with him. Thorne, of course, was his squad leader and should have been there. But John Bell never did figure out why the hell he should have been stuck with the job. Big Un was bleeding to death internally and they all knew it. It took him about fifteen minutes.
“You guys write my old lady, will you?” he growled toughly, raising his head to look at them. “Don’t forget. I want her to know I died like a man.”
“Sure, sure,” Thorne said. “But nobody’s gonna haf to write your old lady. You’ll come out of this. We got stretcherbearers with us, remember? Battalion Aid Station’s movin up all the time. They’ll have you back to the docs in no time.”
Big Un had laid his head back against the trunk. “Bullshit,” he said. “Don’t bullshit me.” Then he said, “I’m cold.”
The four men sat looking at him with the sweat streaming from them in rivulets. “There, there,” Bell said. “Just take it easy.”
“You guys don’t forget to write my old lady I died like a man,” Big Un said. Then he sighed, first sign of the approaching breathlessness of massive hemorrhage. “You’d think there wouldn’t be any of them here, though, would you? When there wasn’t any on either one of them hills. What was it old Keck said? What a fucking recruit trick to pull.” He raised one arm to rub at his face with his sleeve. “This fuckin mud on my face,” he said. “This fuckin mud on my face.”
Bell sacrificed his one remaining handkerchief and wet it in the pool to clean his face for him. This somehow seemed to make him feel better. “Just don’t forget to write my old lady I died like a man.”
“Just take it easy,” Bell said. “Don’t talk like that. You’ll make it out of this.”
Big Un raised his head again. “Horse shit,” he said. “I’m bleedin to death inside.” He looked at one of the medics. “Ain’t I?”
The medic nodded dumbly.
“See? Maybe it’s just as good. I’m all shot up on the crock. What if I couldn’t fuck any more? Just don’t forget to write my old lady I died manly.”
“Sure, sure,” Thorne said. “I’ll write her. Just take it easy.”
When the breathlessness really hit him, they knew it wouldn’t be too long. “Christ, I’m cold!” he gasped. “Freezin!” The last thing he said, from somewhere down there inside the breathlessness, was, “Don’t—forget—write—oldlady—diedlike—aman.” He went on gasping for almost another full minute before he finally stopped.
The four men stood up.
“You going to write his wife?” Bell asked.
“Fuck no!” Thorne said. “I don’t know his old lady. That’s the Compny Commander’s job, not mine. You out of your mind? I ain’t no good at writin letters.”
“But you told him you would.” Bell looked back down at him who was no longer Big Un, no longer anything.
“I tell them anything when they’re like that.”
“Somebody ought to do it.”
“Then you write her.”
“I didn’t tell him I would.”
Charlie Dale came over to them. “All over?” Thorne nodded. “Yeah.”
A detail buried him at the edge of the main trail, and jammed his rifle in the ground with his helmet on it and one dogtag tied to the triggerguard. Nobody had a blanket to wrap him in, but it was better than leaving him to be eaten by rats or whatever it was lived in this undergrowth. Once they had covered his face and bare hands first, it wasn’t so hard to fill in the hole over the rest of him.
They put up an arrow sign for B Company to show the water.
Then they went on to find the third hill (if it was the third hill) unoccupied, too. This was early afternoon.
But not the fourth. If it was the fourth.
It was Band who decided to go on and not wait for Baker to catch up. He still had his mind on Boola Boola for the next day, and the next hill was only four hundred yards off by the map. Actually it turned out to be nearer to six hundred yards when they got there, and this time they had to chop trail. Up to now they had been able to follow old trails. This too took its toll, as well as the normal exhaustion of having pressed on so hard, and they arrived at Hill 279 eight men short, all of whom had been left stretched out along the trail in varying states of collapse, with orders to come on when they could, or wait and be picked up by the patrol Band had left back on the third, if it was the third, hill for Baker Company.
It was just before leaving this next to last, third, fourth, or fifth hill that Sgt Beck came to Band again with a request that his 2d Platoon be allowed to relinquish the point to somebody else. Again Band refused him, but he promised that tomorrow—in the morning at least, Band amended quickly—Beck’s platoon could go into reserve. So it was once again the 2d Platoon which was in the lead when the company received fire. This time, John Bell’s squad was the point squad.
It was the most—in fact, it was the first—boring situation, and fight, that any of them could remember. That any fight at all could be boring was incredible, but it was true.
They had been listening hard, as they chopped their way along, hoping there would not be any fight at all and they could move right in, and they had not heard or seen anything at all. Then a man in Bell’s point squad hollered and went down as machine-guns and rifles opened up on them. They were about fifty yards from the top of Hill 279 and open ground. The others in the point squad scattered and spread out. The second squad moved into line on the first squad’s left. The prolonged burst had ceased for several seconds. Now a second came. The wounded man lay crying and moaning. The third squad spread out on the first’s right. The tense-faced men lay and looked at each other and up the hill. All this had been without any orders, without a word spoken. Everybody knew his job. Sgt Beck (trailing behind him the new lieutenant, Tomms) crawled up with the fourth squad, Thorne’s, which now had no real second in command. Beck, with his hand, held them there in reserve position. A medic pushed past Beck to get to the wounded man who still writhed and cried out piteously on the ground. Behind them directed by Brass Band the 3d Platoon was already scrambling, but in the noise seeming to glide, through the dense undergrowth on a tangent which would bring them into line on 2d Platoon’s left. 1st Platoon under Skinny Culn and his new lieutenant, The Pain, was moving up to spread out in company reserve. One MG section each from Weapons was on its way to the two front platoons. And the two mortar sections were flat on their faces. The whole thing had taken maybe forty-five seconds since the first shot. Everybody was scared—naturally—but they were also very tired. It would have to happen to them now at the end of the day. Also, the combat numbness had been advancing in all of them since yesterday morning. It was hardly even exciting, and the half hour’s battle which followed was hardly more exciting.
The upshot of it was that they kept drifting left trying to find a hole. And that was the form the battle took. It was soon clear there would be no counter-attack. Band overestimated the enemy force at just under a company. He sent 1st Platoon around to the left of 3d Platoon, but they found no hole either. The three platoons hid behind trees and the huge tree roots and fired back with no appreciable effect. It was tiring, uninspired, nervousmaking work which everybody wanted to get over and done with; but the Japanese defended their little hill expertly and toughly. Two more men had been wounded now, and with their crying and moaning added their small but important bit to the general noise. Finally Band decided on a frontal attack. A charge. It was the only thing he could think of, since his mortars could not fire because of overhead obstruction.
In front of 3d Platoon was a gently sloping depression up onto the hilltop which seemed to present a sort of psychological entrance channel. So 3d Platoon was given the rather dubious honor of making the charge. They wouldn’t just charge, of course. They would work their way forward as far as they could, then give them a grenade shower, and rush. The MGs and the other two platoons would give them fire support and be prepared to join them as soon as they were in. Lt Al Gore, a thin, hollowcheeked, anguish-faced young man, and Sgt Fox, a heavier, hollowcheeked, anguish-faced man, crawled forward to have a look. They would go in two waves of two squads each.
Corporal Fife, as he got himself ready in Jenks’ squad which would be in the first wave, could hardly believe this was happening to him. Somehow he had always thought he would be spared this experience, that somehow something would always intervene to prevent him having to face Japanese in close proximity with bayonets or knife. He was not at all sure that he could kill somebody who was looking right at him. As they started the crawl under the fire the other two platoons were trying to draw away from them, his teeth were chattering and he was shaking like a leaf from head to foot with terror and lack of confidence.
Earlier, when the first fire had opened on them, wounding and breaking the arm of that man in Bell’s squad, Fife’s squad had been directly behind 2d Platoon. While the others were starting their quick move to the left, Fife had simply frozen, standing there crouched in his tracks unable to move, until Jenks had to yell at him irritably to “Come on, damn it! Get to movin!” After that he was able to move, but his mind simply would not function and he could not think about anything. He knew this sort of thing could get you killed, but that did not help him. And anyway you could get killed in a lot of ways, in just about any way at all in fact. This thing about all the ways you could get killed had been with him ever since his own wounding, and now its sheer unreckonability unnerved him. The cries and moans of the hurt man unnerved him further. Why couldn’t he keep his mouth shut? Fife had. This was not just another day’s work to him like it apparently was to Jenks. And also Jenks had never been hit. Getting hit made you realize that you—…
He had tried to do better, helping Jenks herd the squad, pretending he was not unnerved, that he was not thinking of all the unreckonable ways to get killed. But his performance was at best mechanical. And the worst thing in his mind was that he might not be able to kill some Japanese or other who confronted him, and who, therefore, would kill him.
And the same thing was in his mind now as they crawled. Suddenly, for no real reason, he found himself remembering that young, foolish, innocent, gullible Corporal Fife, that total stranger, who once had stood forth in the dawn on Hill 209 and had stretched out his arms willing to be killed for mankind, and the love of mankind. Well, fuck mankind, that bunch of ‘honorable’ animals. Piss and shit on them. That was what they deserved.
They were on their feet before the grenade shower had even exploded. They ran uphill, hollering and yelling. Fife scampered along with them, panting and sweating. Nothing touched him. On his right the usually imperturbable Jenks let out a long, shrill, screeching, quavering rebel yell. Three men went down hollering in the rush. Nothing touched Fife. Then they were in. The second two squads were right behind them. Fife had no trouble shooting. When he first saw those scrawny, tattered, scarecrow yellow men firing their rifles and MGs intently, he could hardly believe it and felt astonished. When he saw one Japanese in a hole whirl with a grenade in his hand and stare at him wide-eyed, he shot him through the chest and watched him fall, the phrase repeating itself over and over in his mind happily that “I can kill, too! I can! Just like everybody! I can kill, too!” Then he looked around for more targets and saw a Japanese running, trying to make the jungle. Head down, arms pumping, he ran in total despair like a man on a too-swift treadmill which was carrying him backward. Fife led him just a hair and shot him through the left side just below the armpit, shouting with elation as the man tumbled with a yell just feet away from the jungle and safety. Then it was all over. 2d and 1st Platoons were pouring in on both sides of them.
A number of the Japanese—maybe half—had got out, running and diving into the jungle leading to their own rear. If such a term as rear applied, in this crazy campaign. The rest, including the two or three who tried to surrender, were shot out of hand by tense-faced, nerve-racked men who wanted no fucking nonsense. The whole thing had lasted just under half an hour. They were all exhausted, by the long trailchopping jungle trek, by the difficult maneuvering through the dense undergrowth, by the fight itself. Now all they had left to do, as soon as they got their breath back, was to get rid of the corpses and make a perimeter defense and dig in for the night. C-for-Charlie had lost two dead and six wounded. The Japanese had lost twenty-three dead. There were no Japanese wounded. But some might have escaped with the others.
Standing with the others of his platoon as they panted and sweated and slowly came back to themselves, or presumed to, Corporal Geoffrey Fife ex-company clerk was astonished to realize that he had personally killed two Japanese. He did not, like most of the others, take part in the poking and looking and souvenirhunting because the corpses made him feel queasy and vaguely guilty. But he watched. Was this the way they’d done it at The Elephant’s Head? And when Charlie Dale whipped out his pliers and Bull Durham sacks and began yanking gold teeth, Fife had to turn away. A few others appeared to view Dale’s toothpulling with distaste, but nobody said anything, and nobody looked as upset as Fife felt. And this upset Fife even more. Don Doll, for instance, was watching Dale and grinning broadly. What was wrong with him? If the rest of the guys could be this tough, why couldn’t he be? He had killed two, hadn’t he?—one of whom had been looking straight at him.
Taking himself in hand, he made himself turn back and watch. He even grinned a little. Doll was grinning. So Fife grinned too. Casually—much more casually than he actually felt—he made himself walk over to one of the cadavers and look at it. He thought of sticking his bayonet in it, to show he didn’t give a damn, but he was afraid that would look too affected. So instead he squatted, taking the stragglybearded greasy chin in his hand, and turned the head so he could look directly into the face. The eyes were still open and a tiny thin trickle of blood had run out of the halfopen, mutilated mouth where Dale had worked on it. Fife gave it a push and stood up and walked away. That ought to show them! He had a strong impulse to wipe his hand vigorously on his pantsleg, but he resisted it. Instead he started getting out his entrenching tool off his belt because soon they’d have to start digging, that much was for sure.
Fife was quite right. That was the next major chore that faced them, before they themselves could face the night. Digging. Their neverending, universal digging. Sweating and panting with exhaustion, digging. Like last night. And almost every night in the world. And sometimes two or three times in the day. A place to lay your head. Three by three by seven, slit trench. Only the very lucky ever inherited another outfit’s holes. Nobody dug the round deep foxholes here because there weren’t any tanks. Here the home was the slit trench. There might not be any atheists in foxholes, John Bell thought with a grim smile, like that dumb Catholic Chaplain in the Philippines said, because nobody here dug foxholes. But he knew a lot of them in slit trenches, and getting more and more every day.
A detail was sent to complete the remaining fifty yards of trail. A patrol was sent back to collect the stragglers and inform Baker where they were. The wounded went out with the patrol. Of the six wounded, only three were litter cases. This meant that one of the four litter teams could stay with the company. Replacement litter teams were to be requested and sent forward, in the morning, perhaps shuttled up from Baker. Everything done, Brass Band decided not to call Battalion. He had not called them last night. After all, they had told him he was an independent command. Independent command! And he was well within the schedule, and even ahead of it.
It was about a half hour after dark—when both of the patrols, and all of the stragglers, were back safely inside the perimeter defense—that the men awake in the section of holes overlooking the trail, heard themselves hailed from the trail in a strong Kentucky accent.
“Charlie Compny! Charlie Compny! Hold your fahr! It’s Witt! It’s Witt! Acting-P-F-C Witt!” the voice added in a burst of sly humor, “of Cannon Compny!”
It was indeed Witt. He had walked the last six hundred yards alone in the dark from B-for-Baker’s position on the next hill back. He had found A-for-Able first, gone on, stopped to read the dogtag on the triggerguard of Big Un’s rifle, reached B-for-Baker where they gave him the password, decided to come on despite their best advice, and here he was. Hardly anyone was asleep yet, and there was a great deal of backslapping, laughter, and handshaking. The first thing he wanted to know was what was the new Battalion Commander like. Everybody was overjoyed to see him, to know that he would have searched them out like this just to be with them. Everybody included Brass Band, who with his insipid smile had only just then decided to place outside the perimeter the roadblock which he had decided the company’s position needed.
Witt of course volunteered for it immediately.
Everybody had wondered why the Japanese had decided to defend Hill 279 and not the others. The answer, which also showed on the map had anyone thought about it, was just on the other side of the hill. Following a usually dry river bed toward the coconut groves and the beach, one of the two major north-south trails across the whole island passed through the jungle just under the shoulder of Hill 279. Beaufort Trail, much further on ahead, and this one here called Dini-Danu in the native tongue but immediately renamed Ding Dong Trail by the Americans, were the only means of moving across the island. It was known that the Japanese used them both to march across their skimpy reenforcements landed from fast destroyers on the other side of the island, and it was because of this fact that Tall George Band decided to throw a block across it. He wanted to deny the Japanese any reenforcements that he could for the battle of Boola Boola tomorrow. He had received no orders about Ding Dong Trail one way or the other, from Battalion or from Regiment, but he was convinced that he could help in this way.
Witt was the first man to volunteer for it, though he had, he said, serious reservations about the whole idea. John Bell was the second, though he could not have told anybody why. The third was Charlie Dale, who still had in mind his plot for getting a platoon, and whose nose had been put out of joint by Witt’s dramatic return. Dale, however, was disallowed by Band, who said two noncoms were enough, and who thereby probably saved his life because Witt and Bell were the only two to survive the mission.
The rest of the volunteers were Pfcs and privates. A couple of men from Bell’s squad volunteered because their leader was going. A man named Gooch, an oldtime Regular and boxing buddy of Witt, volunteered because he was a good friend of Witt and wanted to talk to him. Band wanted two BARs so Bell’s BAR man volunteered. Then Charlie Dale’s BAR man volunteered to go with Witt. They were twelve Pfcs and privates in all. All of them died.
Originally Band had thought to send his entire ‘Old Vet’ 2d Platoon, but had thought better of it and asked for volunteers when he remembered Beck’s protests. In a way it was lucky, because from what happened it was pretty clear that a platoon would have done no more good than the fourteen men Band later decided to send, though more of them certainly would have survived. Band did not yet know that most of his company was already calling him by his new nickname The Glory Hunter behind his back, or that the majority of his higher sergeants already knew from Beck that he had volunteered the company to be lead company. If he had, it probably would not have influenced his decision. Witt did not yet know any of this, either. If he had, it would certainly have made him protest about the roadblock even stronger. As it was, it was strong enough to astonish Band.
“I want to go,” Witt said, when he first volunteered. “But I want to make it plain that I think the whole thing is a pretty bad idea. If they come through there like in any strength at all, Lootenant, they going to knock that roadblock to hell and flinders even if it’s a whole platoon. We couldn’t hold them. But I want to go.”
Band was staring at him in amazement from behind his spectacles. He had only just finished making him Acting Sergeant again a moment before. “You don’t have to go, Sergeant Witt,” he said thinly. “If you don’t want to. Others will volunteer.”
“No, I want to go,” Witt said. “If somethin bad happens, I want to be there so maybe I can help. Besides, nothin bad may happen at all.”
But as it turned out, there wasn’t much he could do to help. Or anybody. They were had cold turkey. The only thing that saved him himself was that he was sitting over on the far left end with Gooch, Gooch who later died silently in his arms so as not to give him away. They had been talking about the last Regimental boxing season. Gooch had just missed making Department bantam champion, winding up as runnerup, and he was explaining to Witt again his excuses for this failure. That was when it hit them.
So there they were, twelve Pfcs and privates and two sergeants, one of them Acting. All normal men in a normal situation, all normal soldiers, who had accepted a normal commission to do a normal job, and death came for them in a normal way—except that nobody dies normally. Not to himself, at least. But the normality of it was what was so grotesque—afterwards, to both of the survivors. Death came for them in the form of a .31 cal machine-gun strapped to the back of a perfectly normal Japanese soldier.
Actually their tactical situation was not a bad one. They had come down the hill in the faint moonlight, explored the trail carefully for several hundred yards (at great danger to everybody), and—Witt and Bell conferring—chosen themselves the best spot available. They picked a place where the sandybottomed dryriverbed narrowed to a gulch so thin that only one man or at the most two could squeeze through it at a time. Thirty yards in front of this, on the downhill, seaward side, they spread themselves out behind a couple of downed saplings which really offered only psychological comfort, both BAR men prominently displayed. One man was told off to watch the other, seaward approach, but they all knew, somehow, that if anything came it would come from inland. Witt was over on the far left, and John Bell was on the right though not as near the nine foot bank.
What they saw, by that faint moonlight, was one man plodding along with a heavy load on his back. He must have seen them at the same instant because he fell to his hands and knees as he came through the narrow opening. The BARs killed at least one man behind him, maybe more. But it did not help, because there were many, many men behind the first one to pull the trigger of the MG on his back with which he hosed down the widening draw before him. It was like being fired at in an empty swimming pool. For the Japanese, it was fish in a barrel. Bullets ricocheted everywhere, catching on the rebound people they had missed the first time around. Japanese machine-guns, at least at this period of the war, were noted for the fact they did not have built into their tripods the ability to traverse. The veteran company in front of C-for-Charlie’s roadblock solved this problem admirably, simply by having the man who wore the gun twitch his shoulders back and forth.
The thing that saved John Bell was that he saw what was happening and was on his feet three seconds before the men around him, hollering “Run! Run!” as he sprinted for the bank. That, and luck. He made it over, into the undergrowth. Two men immediately behind him fell clawing at the bank, riddled through head, trunk and legs like some kind of strange living sieves used in some mad hospital for screening blood. None of the others got even that far. And all it was was simply one sole machinegun strapped to the back of a smart veteran Japanese who wiggled his shoulders.
Witt, on the other hand—and on the other side—saw nothing and was simply lucky. Having Gooch shot out from under him almost in midword so to speak, he leaped for the other bank just behind him in blind panic. In that second the gun swung the other way. Sheer luck. And so there he lay. He had kept his rifle in his hand by blind instinct, but now he could not fire it without muzzle blast getting him found and killed. He lay and counted one hundred and thirty Japanese pass, biting his fingers and weeping real tears because he had no grenades. Just one, even one grenade. He could have caused incalculable damage in that closed space. But Cannon Company had not been issued grenades, and he had not thought to borrow some up above on the hill. In the faint moonlight he watched them pass, able to see in the brighter patches here and there faces which were not the starved, haunted faces of the men who had held the hill. This was apparently an entire company of veteran troops from somewhere who had been landed lately as reenforcements.
How Gooch, in his condition, made it up the bank, and then found him, he would never know. Nor did Gooch tell him. All he did was whisper “Please! Please!”, twice like that, hurt all over as he was, and then Witt held his fingers to his lips. Gooch understood and nodded, and said no more. Witt cradled his head against him to try and show him how sorry he was, and so the best bantamweight the Regiment had ever had died in his arms as he watched the Japanese company file past. A couple of the C-for-Charlie men had lain moaning in the riverbottom, but the first elements of the Japanese column immediately shot these with pistols. And Witt lay thinking one grenade. One grenade, just one grenade.
All normal men. All out on a fairly normal mission. And now all dead.
John Bell on the other side of the dryriverbed had no grenades either. He had divested himself of everything except his rifle and one bandolier for lightness’ sake. But he knew, later, that even if he had had grenades he would never have stopped to use them. For the first time in this war, hysterical panic had taken him over. For him, too, the funny thing was the feeling of how normal it had all been, normal—and easy. Like a terrified jungle animal, he crawled away stealthily through the undergrowth, cunning and crafty, always uphill, always toward the company—and safety. Safety, safety. He did not care if anyone else was left alive or not. It would return often to haunt him later. It took him over half an hour to make the five minute climb. Nobody ever said a word to him about it, including Witt. Some things—unfortunately, usually only the most extreme—everybody understood.
In the morning they went down for the bodies. But before that had happened Witt had gone back to Cannon Company.
It was more than an hour before he could get back up the hill to C-for-Charlie’s perimeter. It took a half hour for all the Japanese troops to pass. And after that, since Gooch was dead now anyway and there was no hurry, he waited almost another half hour to make sure they had left no rear point or booby trappers. But they hadn’t. He was almost afraid to move enough to peep around and look. Finally, he sprinted across, stepping carefully among the bodies of the American dead. When he got back inside the company, he went straight to Band who was squatting by, and still questioning, Bell.
“I ought to kill you!” Witt said in a voice that was higher than he had meant it to be.
The longnosed, mean, and meanlooking, Italian Exec, who was standing near Band, pulled down with his carbine and covered him. Witt laughed at him.
“Don’t worry!” He turned back to Band. “You’re a lowlife, nogood, worthless, ignorant, stupid, legbreaking, shiteating bastard! You just got twelve men shot to hell and killed for nothin. Absolootly nothin! I hope yore happy! I love this compny better’n anything, but I wouldn’t serve in no outfit commanded by a son of a bitch like you! If they ever kill you or get rid of you, I might come back.”
He still had his rifle with him, and with this speech he slung it, turned his back on them to express his outrage, picked up the rest of his gear, and he left. He hiked the six hundred and fifty yards back through the night jungle, back to Baker Company, as he had earlier hiked it forward. At Baker, he paused just long enough to borrow some water and tell the story of the roadblock fiasco, and then went on. He did not get killed. Before daylight he was back with Cannon Company, which had been moved forward to The Shrimp’s Head to carry more rations and water, and where when he reported his section sergeant said only “Christ! You? I thought you’d been knocked off,” and rolled over and went back to sleep.
“I had every right and every reason in the world to shoot him down,” the longnosed, mean, and meanlooking, Italian Exec said after he had left. “Like a dog!”
“No, you did right. I think he was a bit hysterical from what he went through,” Band murmured. Band had not moved and was still squatting, by Bell. He was blinking slowly behind his steel-rimmed spectacles.
“I should have shot him,” the Italian Exec said, bitterly. “He threatened his own Company Commander!”
“No, no. It’s all right,” Band murmured. He went on blinking slowly behind his glasses.
Over on the other side of the perimeter Sergeants Skinny Culn and Milly Beck looked at each other.
“Well?” Culn said.
Beck shrugged. “He’s still the Company Commander.”
Back with the officers Bell finished telling them his story for the second time. “I guess we better wait till morning,” Band murmured. He was still blinking slowly behind his glasses.
It was a pretty sorry sight. Two had been shot in the back of the head with pistols as they lay in the sand. The dryriverbed seemed to be strewn with all of them. One other, like Gooch, had managed to creep up the bank without the Japanese seeing him, and had crawled off a few yards to die, alone, in the underbrush. They carried them all back up the hill and buried them with the two men from yesterday. It made quite a little cemetery. They did all this as soon as there was the faintest light to see by, and they hurried with it as much as they could. Band, who still blinked slowly behind his glasses from time to time when he addressed someone directly, was still pushing hard to make Boola Boola.
The Japanese had taken every weapon and every bit of ammunition they could find down in the draw. Luckily, one of the men to die directly behind Bell against the bank had been a BAR man, who accidentally had tossed his weapon ahead of him up into the undergrowth as he fell. That one was found. But it was with one BAR short—as well as being short twelve more Pfcs and privates—that they started off for Boola Boola just as the sun came up out of the sea, beautifully and gloriously, on the third morning of the attack. On the other hand, they now had the Ding Dong Trail all the way and would have no chopping work to do except possibly for those hills they would have to take along the way. B-for-Baker came up just as they were moving out, bringing new stretcher bearers. Then it was the jungle all over again for C-for-Charlie. Hours and hours. Heat.
They captured two undefended hills, leaving a squad on each to wait for Baker and Able, and emerged from the jungled foothills into the coconut groves at noon, just as 3d Battalion eight hundred yards away on the right was beginning its two company attack against Boola Boola. Band immediately started them over that way, moving them in a column of platoons.
He should have rested them. They looked like a ragged, taggleassed wrath of God, locusts and adders, descending upon a hapless countryside, and that was what they were. They were also beat. That jungle somehow took more out of a man than any other kind of physical endeavor. The coconut groves around them now looked exactly like the ones they had been bivouacked in, back over there on the other side, eons ago, and at the same time they looked entirely different, because this was enemy country now, not American. Band kept them moving. The sounds of 3d Battalion’s fight on the right grew louder. But long before they got there they were spotted and brought under fire. This time they had mortars against them, the big ones. The haggardfaced men hugged the ground and looked sweating across at each other with white eyes. But Band kept them moving, in rushes and small groups. A halfmad schoolteacherish gleam in his eye behind his steel spectacles, he could think of nothing but being in on the battle of Boola Boola. Actually, the mortar fire was nothing like as bad, nowhere had the character of a real barrage, as on The Dancing Elephant. The Japanese were fading fast. But it still hurt men. Finally they made contact.
Band had told the Baker Company commander Captain Task earlier in the morning that he was going to push hard, and now he was more than half a mile in front of Baker which had not yet emerged from the jungle. Captain Task, in turn, had told Band that he had talked to Battalion who were worried about Charlie Company because they had not heard from them. They had somehow already heard about the roadblock fiasco and were worried also about his losses. Band had begun to blink slowly at Task, a thing which Task perhaps noticed or perhaps did not notice, Band couldn’t tell, and had answered that his losses had been negligible, twenty-one men, to be exact, which was nothing for the job they had accomplished. Now he pushed his people even harder, remembering this peculiar, strange conversation. He knew that in war, as in everything else, it was results which counted. And he did love this company, desperately, passionately.
He had told his two squads he left behind on the two undefended hills to come on as quickly as they could, once they were relieved by Baker or Able. Naturally they did not. They did not arrive on the field until Baker Company itself did, which was too late to get hurt.
But in spite of their absence, and the absence of the twelve dead at the roadblock, the company succeeded.
The Japanese had two concentric lines of defense around Boola Boola. These were about a hundred yards apart, and both were clearly visible and well entrenched. Apparently they were determined to make some sort of stand here, and Band came in against the left of the semicircle while 3d Battalion was attacking the right. Actually, 3d Battalion had had to split its attack. Driving in to split the Japanese clear to the beach, they had had to wheel two of their companies right to attack an even larger Japanese force cut off there, so that in fact only one company was attacking the village, in what was really a holding attack instead of an allout effort at conquest. Band of course knew nothing of this. While his 2d and 3d Platoons reenforced by the two machineguns probed at the lines trying to find a hole, he withdrew his mortars far enough back so that they could fire, telling one off to fire for the first line and the other to hit at the second. In spite of the fact that they were attacked on the ground by a wandering squad of Japanese who had no business being there, they laid down good fire.
This went on until the mortar sections had used up every round of their ammunition. But then suddenly they were in, running hard but cautiously slow through the short grass between the long lines of coconut trees, leaping emplacements like the ones they had once looked at with awe and wonder, gasping and weeping and once in a while dying. They did not know that this sudden breakup was all due to the right having crumbled before Item Company’s attack. Nor did they care. Corporal Fife scampered along with Jenks’s squad shooting every Japanese he could see, filled with both terror and elation to a point where he could not separate one from the other. Then Jenks went down with a loud squawk and a rifle bullet through the throat, and Fife had the squad for himself, and the responsibility, and found he loved it, and all of them. John Bell, his panic of last night gone, ran leading his squad and yelling them on, but mainly watching coolly to keep the casualties down. Don Doll ran grinning with his rifle in one hand and his pistol in the other, and when the pistol was empty he let it hang and bounce from its rope lanyard and began using the rifle. They were in. They were in. When they began to come into the village proper, they found the majority of the Japanese killing themselves with grenades, guns or knives, which was just as well because most of those who did not were shot or bayoneted. In all, only eighteen prisoners were taken.
When it was all over, they began shaking hands with the guys from Item Company, grinning at each other out of blackdirty faces. A few men sat down and wept. Charlie Dale garnered many gold teeth, and an excellent chronometer which he later sold for a hundred dollars. Coming on a Japanese sitting dejectedly on a doorstoop with his head in his hands, this beautiful watch sticking out like a big diamond on his wrist, Dale shot him through the head and took the watch. This was almost the only loot taken. Quartermaster people arrived in what seemed like only seconds later, and began claiming everything. Also, almost everyone was too tired, too beat and exhausted, to care about loot. Later, of course, they would all regret it.
They attacked up the beach all the next day. They were relieved the day after. New, clean, smoothfaced, jollylooking troops from a totally new division relieved them and were to push the attack on toward Kokumbona up the coast. The Imperial Japanese Army was reputed to be in full retreat. At least as important as this was the fact that they did not have to walk home this time but were picked up by trucks which drove them back along the coast road sitting staring numbly at each other and at the peacefulooking sun-dappled shade of the wheeling groves, with the bright sea and the sound of the surf only a few yards away.