Once an Eagle

by Anton Myrer

  The whole line erupted in gunfire. He raised his rifle and aimed at the scurrying, dancing, moon-shot figures, felt the old, harsh, comforting kick of the stock against his shoulder. Tracers looped high around him, a liana vine fell in a sodden serpentine through the moonlight. But he could hear no sound. The Japanese came on, stumbling, waving their weapons, their mouths wide—but he heard nothing. He was moving in that cone of quiet, of indelible calm that slipped over him in battle like a hood. He emptied his clip, inserted a new one, cut down two Japanese who were scuttling unscathed through a forest of tracers, shifted to an officer who was standing spraddle-legged between two trees, firing a pistol in each hand—a rather tall, slender man who ducked his head as though under a whiplash, then rolled out of sight behind some bushes.

  Then the grove was empty of movement. The machine guns had stopped, and sound rushed into his consciousness again—a mélange of screams and isolate gunshots and imprecations and threatful commands. He crawled back to where Keyes was standing in a hole, talking urgently to a runner.

  “How you doing?”

  “Okay, I guess. Phelan’s platoon’s had a bad time. If they try it again—”

  “They’ll try it again. But now we’ve got them coming to us. Better this way, right?”

  “I’ll tell the frigging world. If they only haven’t got tanks.”

  “Don’t worry. If they’d had any they’d have used them long before this.”

  The moon rose higher now, bathing the trail and grove in a vibrant, milky light. Pioneer and Demolition platoon got the pontoon bridge laid across the Watubu and ammunition parties came up, stretcher bearers went back with their enormous burdens; the signal party brought the lines over. The Japanese attacked again, a poorly coordinated rush in something like company strength, and the perimeter cut them down; the survivors melted back into the forest. There had been no word from BULL MOOSE. Damon ate half a K ration cheese tin, and kept it down. The chill ebbed but the boiling debility stole back upon him, and he walked up and down outside the foxhole CP mopping his face and blinking, fighting the twinges of vertigo. He had to hang on. Just another—another three to four hours. A gamble. An awful gamble. The crossing was good; the left flank was secure—they could beat off a dozen more counterattacks, especially if they were all as piecemeal and disorganized as the last one. But dead ahead, behind and beside Ben’s thrust was one long exposed flank. What if the Japanese threw a couple of companies down the slot between the airstrip and the Mission before Ben could come in behind it and seize that high ground …? They wouldn’t: they were off-balance. They could …

  No: he knew it was right. He could feel it in his bones. Mortar shells began crashing into the grove and he jumped into the hole beside Keyes, who was on the phone, asking for more belted ammunition for his thirties. He sat in a corner of the hole, listening to the dusty sounds of battle from down river: they sounded sporadic, unsure—as though one of the participants was breaking contact; but there was no knowing. The moonlight fell in slick silver scars and blossoms around him. If you could only know. It was like trying to play chess blindfolded, or that goofy game the Aussies played, called “Are You There, Moriarty?”—in which two contestants, blindfolded and prone, clasped left hands, and one asked the question—and on receiving a muffled answer, let fly with a furled magazine, hoping to clobber his unseen assailant over the head …

  A figure loomed up out of the zebra-quilt of moonlight and shadow, a tall, slender man gasping for breath. “This—CP? Where’s Damon?”

  He got up. “Right here, son.”

  It was Jackson, his eyes glittering white under his helmet; he knelt down at the edge of the hole, panting. “We’re down there. At—the beach. We got to the jetty—” He broke off, gave a laugh that was like a sob. “Colonel, they’re shagging ass!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Trying to take off in a couple of barges. All their brass. We got ’em all, right by the jetty … I shot me a frigging general!”

  They were all crowding around him now. “A general?” Damon demanded. “You sure of that, Jackson?”

  “Sure, I’m sure! Any joker with a gut that big has got to be a general … Christ sakes alive, look at his toad stabber!” He extended an arm: Damon saw the jewels glittering on the long curved phallus of the sword hilt like serpents’ eyes. “Bowcher’s got all their papers and crap.” He pushed the samurai sword into Damon’s hands. “For you, Colonel. Souvenir—straight from the top. Caught ’em asleep at the switch, the rotten slope-head bastards!” He laughed the tight, indrawn laugh again. “Yeah! One for Millis, and one for Braun and one for Gantner—oh Jesus, didn’t we clean house! They’re cracking, and it ain’t from shacking, I want to tell you …”

  “That’s great, Jackson,” he broke in. “Now what about the pivot?”

  “What? Oh, yeah: Colonel Krisler says to tell you we’re wheeling west on the Mission. Meeting only light resistance.”

  “Great. Tell him: let her rip.”

  “Right, Colonel.” He got up, glaring happily at the faces around him, reluctant to leave this small, rapt audience. “Oh, didn’t we nail the sons of bitches!” he cried softly. “After all these months—taking it off ’em all these months …”

  Damon sat down again in the mud, the samurai sword across his knees; his legs would hardly hold him up. Watching Jackson move off down the trail he felt all at once close to tears: a watery-eyed old man.

  He had violated all the rules. Arrogating command to himself, night crossing of an unfordable river without artillery preparation or adequate assault craft, and now advance against a fortified position in the dead of night. But there were times when you had to throw the book away. Maybe you could do something like this only once in a war: maybe you shouldn’t ever do it. But they hadn’t had much choice.

  And there had been those diaries he’d pored over night after sweltering night—those tortuous rice-grain columns tinged with mounting exhaustion and despair. He’d been right, he’d read them right: the Japanese had been at the end of their rope, too …

  God, he was weak. So weak he was afraid to try to get up from this foul, wet muck. But he could think, now. The thing to do was—the thing to do was compound the felony.

  He took the speaker out of its jacket and cranked the mechanism briskly. “BOBCAT here. Put me through to BULL MOOSE.”

  There was that high, crackling hum and then Dickinson’s voice, nervous and tart. “BULL MOOSE. What have you got?”

  “How’s Westy doing?”

  “Well, he’s still pretty badly off, Sam. This malaria’s pretty serious, you know.”

  Damon felt himself grinning wearily. “Yeah, I know. Dick, we’ve shot the moon. Position is secure. Our friends are coming apart at the seams. WOLVERINE has taken a bath and turned the corner, and is about to genuflect—if you get what I mean.”

  “Really?” Dickinson’s voice broke with astonishment. “You mean he’s made it to—”

  “That’s the pitch. Dick, they’ve assumed the angle. Ben caught a slew of their brass taking off for points west in landing barges, shot ’em all up. The attacks on our left flank have been disorganized and feeble. They’re all shot. Now, have you alerted PORCUPINE for that tea tango we talked about?”

  “But Sam,” Dickinson paused. “They’re dead on their feet … ”

  “So are we. And we made it. Look, this is the time. Right now. We’ll never get another chance like this.”

  “All right, if you say so, but—”

  “I tell you, we’ve got ’em on the ropes—I can feel it! Shoot the works. Those last two tanks, the Brens, everything. Knock heads, pull anything in the book—but get them moving …”

  “Right, Sam. Right.” Dickinson’s voice seemed firmer. “I’ll do everything in my power. That’s a promise.”

  “Fair enough.” Damon grinned softly in the dark; he was on the verge of retching and his head was aching so he could hardly see. “Angels can’t do more.”

&n
bsp; The late afternoon sun had dipped behind the mountains, and the Grove lay in shadow; the breeze off the water stirred fitfully among the palms. On three sides of the cemetery the massed ranks stood stiffly, somberly, staring at nothing, and Ben Krisler, posted out front of the Regiment, passed his eyes over them and then looked across the Grove to the Mission, its old white walls battered and blackened by fire and demolition, looking forlorn and hollow. To Krisler it seemed to symbolize the whole battle—its desperate hope, its losses, its astonishing unreality.

  He brought his gaze back to the platform made of planking laid across upended fifty-five-gallon drums where Chaplain Unterecker, a roly-poly man with a round, genial face, was reading from the Scriptures, his voice fading and rising as he looked from the text to the troops.

  “…. Praise ye the Lord for the avenging of Israel, when the people willingly offered themselves …”

  Well, they’d done that all right.

  “… when thou marchedst out of the field of Edom, the earth trembled, and the heavens dropped, the clouds also dropped water …”

  Amen to that, Reverend. The War Song of Deborah. Pretty apt, all things considered. What had caused Unty to choose it? He frowned. Hearing the Old Testament always aroused a certain confusion inside him. He saw his mother’s fine, proud face, her faintly oriental eyes, dark above the tablecloth, heard her deep, vigorous voice. “The Jews were the first people to honor the law. The law and the prophets.” And his father setting aside his paper, watching her mildly. “Ruth, what’s the sense in filling his head with all that? This is America—there’s no distinction here. Every man is like another.” “Of course, dear. Only he ought to know, that’s all. And remember.” “Well …” and his father had raised the paper again.

  Every man is like another. In the rough, open-handed Wisconsin of his boyhood there had been few shadows. His father was a Wisconsin Squarehead who liked to go to the ball games down in the Hollow and wasn’t averse to throwing his energies into a Sunday barn raising, where the long, impromptu plank table sagged with cakes and gherkins and meat pies, and the kids played shrieking tag until their fathers roared at them to get out from under foot. His mother sat and sewed and laughed and gossiped with the other women. They went to the Lutheran church—his father’s church—they celebrated Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter Sunday and the Fourth of July with a lot of noise and gastronomic excess, like their friends and neighbors.

  It had been the Point that had shocked him awake. His father had been wrong. Jews were not Americans: they were vulgar, offensive, grasping, unpatriotic; they did not succeed to high command. Not that anyone really said it in so many words—or rarely: it was borne in on him the way tarnish spreads on steel. We were all Americans, we all had come from Europe, sooner or later, richer or poorer—but there were those who were not as worthy, who were inferior. His father hadn’t known this; his mother had. Was that why she had given way to his father’s Christian world …?

  “… then was war in the gates: was there a shield or spear seen among forty thousand in Israel?…”

  He was no coward; no one could ever accuse him of having run from a fight. But he made his decision during those spartan, tormented days on the Plain: he wanted to be praised or damned—it was usually destined to be the latter, he reflected wryly—for what he was, for his own dreams and convictions; not for the acceptability of his father’s race, or the inacceptability of his mother’s. And beyond that, Cadet Krisler had perceived a sharper truth: that his mother’s “inferior” origins could negate completely his father’s “superior” ones. The purblind contempt behind this attitude had aroused him. All right: if the world was prepared, in its senseless bias, to damn him out of hand, he would meet it with reticence. He would not lie, but he would not disclose. He had gone off to France steeped in the defiant bitterness from which all his insubordinate wrath had stemmed. To this day there weren’t three men in the whole United States Army who knew his mother was Jewish.

  “… They fought from heaven; the stars in their courses fought against Sisera. The river of Kishon swept them away, that ancient river, the river Kishon. O my soul, thou hast trodden down strength …”

  Now, standing here in the afternoon stillness, the spanking new eagle and cross of the Distinguished Service Cross hanging from his left shirt pocket, the jungle ulcer burning his buttock, he felt stirred by the somber, stately verses, their slow, majestic fervor. It was as though he had been found derelict in some profound and irreparable way. Yes, and I’m part of that, he wanted to shout, my mother’s people—all the hopeless and impossible battles, like this one: Jericho, and little David, and the sword of the Lord, and of Gideon …

  Chaplain Unterecker had concluded. The flag slipped wearily down to half-mast, and the bugle threw its long, piercing notes through the tropic air.

  Let them sleep, Lord. Krisler followed the rows of crosses that marched back and back, fiercely white against the jungle fringe. There they lay, the ones that had no luck. Svelland, who had single-handed cleaned out two bunkers full of raging, shrieking Japanese before they got him; and Petschek, who had been shot by a treetop sniper; and Marshall and DiMaestri, killed by a mortar burst crossing the river, and Wells who had been hit and had drowned in the swamp in the first day’s attack; and all the others he’d never known, who had perished before he’d landed here at Moapora … It was odd, and a bit cruel. There they lay, far from the fields of home, two crossed sticks and a dogtag, killed in a moment of heroism or cowardice or ignorance or ignominy, but all of them killed in the fragile splendor of their young manhood; and to some heart ten thousand miles away their present moldering was a source of immeasurable grief. And to others—even to many standing here in the still, heavy air—it was nothing at all. Only here, before his eyes, were there no distinctions of race or breeding. Here they slept together, not berthed separately under the neat serration of the crosses but rolled together into one long trench—Christian and Negro and Jew, patrician and laborer: all of them were good enough to die, to sink to mortality and lie together.

  Only in time of peace were they unworthy.

  The bugle’s somber notes went on pealing sadly. His eyes kept roaming about—he could not help it—saw off to his right, drawn up on the other side, Colonel Wilhelm, looking unutterably weary and grim; behind him and to his left Frenchy Beaupré standing stiff and defiant, tears streaming slick and bright against his cheeks. Many men were weeping now, their mouths working, throats swelling as they swallowed painfully and squeezed shut their eyes. But his own eyes were dry; the old mordant anger stirred inside him. They were dead. They had been shipped out here to this pestilential mangrove swamp far beyond the confines of the safe, sane world for ends they were not to share, and ordered to seize a patch of that swamp or be killed: and they had been killed. It was stupid, it was vicious, it was monstrous and flint-hearted and disgusting; but there was nothing to be done about it, beyond what they were doing now …

  The dirty, bloody hell with it.

  It was over. Chaplain Unterecker had descended. There was a short pause and then Sam, whom General Eichelberger had designated Acting Divisional Commander after Westy’s hospitalization and departure, climbed up on the oil drums and called: “At ease,” and the ranks relaxed in a faint, sonorous murmur. There was a little commotion and then two officers—it looked like Feltner and Chase—handed up a sheet of plywood which Sam turned face outward, holding it with one hand. And Krisler heard behind him the drone of surprise. Sam stood there silently a moment, as though he didn’t know quite what to say.

  “This is the first time you have ever been assembled as a division,” he began, the words clipped and clear. “You are the Fifty-fifth Division. And for your shoulder flash I have chosen a salamander. Not because the gecko is our constant little friend here in the tropics where we have been ordered to serve. But because from ancient days the salamander was believed invulnerable to fire. So he is crouching here between two flames, with his right foot stampin
g on a broken samurai sword. You have come through the fire, and you have had your victory.”

  He paused, looking out at them as though he sought to meet the eyes of every man in the massed battalions. His face was drawn, his shirt hung on him in loose, damp folds; the knuckles of the hand holding the plywood piece were bony and white. Old Sad Sam, Krisler thought softly; you crazy, rawhide old son of a bitch. Walked out a malaria attack that would have felled a carabao in its prime—walked it out!—hung on and hung on and were there on your feet when the last bunker behind the airstrip went down. We’re here, standing right here, what’s left of us, because of you and nobody else. And anybody that doesn’t know it ought to have his head examined. And you could be down in Brisbane right now, confined to quarters and waiting to stand trial for a general court, just as a starter …

  “This division—our division—has no long and illustrious history, glowing with great traditions. Neither do its regiments. No American unit had any history of great traditions in 1775. They were built up over the next hundred and fifty years. This division—the Salamander—has just begun. It is going to make its proud traditions from this day on.”

  He looked down; when he raised his head again his face was resolute and grim. “This will be a long and cruel war. We have just set out, all of us, on a very thorny, bloody road—and no men know it better than you soldiers standing here. Some hard things have been said about you—some of you have heard them. What is important—what is memorable—is that you have put behind you the bad days of panic and despair and done what no other soldiers have ever done in the history of the world: in spite of faint support and under the worst conditions imaginable, you have taken a fortified position from the Empire of the Rising Sun. It is an honor to serve with you all.”

  There was an instant’s dead silence, and then from the adjacent battalions, from behind Krisler, the cheer began—a cry that swept through the grove in a wild treble roar. Krisler about-faced. Jimmy Hoyt was cheering, so were Chip Booth and Mac Klementis and the rest of his officers. He tried to call the regiment to attention and gave it up, watched them all—gaunt and ragged and hollow-eyed, dressed in fatigues or khaki they’d scrounged from God knew where—their barracks bags were still lying somewhere in the muck at Milne Bay—while they waved their rifles and pounded one another on the back and shoulders. There wasn’t a man there who didn’t weight at least twenty pounds less than when he came to this evil place; there was not a man who hadn’t seen sights and done deeds he never wanted to see or do again. Yet there they stood, in all their tatterdemalion nobility: wobbly, raggedy-ass, indomitable. The solemn Johns and the hellions, the comics and the squares. All that were left on their feet over thirty-seven terrible days and nights. No one back home would ever know what this had meant, in blood and agony and terror and iron determination: no one. There had been only the communiqué issued by MacArthur’s headquarters eight days ago—“Allied Ground Forces succeeded in capturing Moapora Mission, clearing the Kokogela area of enemy forces”—and that had been all. Nobody would ever know what they had endured.