Once an Eagle

by Anton Myrer

  An aid man from the 55th came by now, a slender blond boy from Montana named Rowes, walking with that pins-and-needles uncertainty of the newly ambulatory, and she chatted with him for a moment. He had been hit in both buttocks and on the inside of his thigh, a scant inch below his genitals; and he still felt awkward about it. She could imagine the remarks that would greet him when he returned to his outfit—the flood of obscene banter designed to cover their own fears. She felt that men put too much emphasis on their genitals, worried too much about this particular kind of wound. Was it the worst of all? the very worst? Was it more insupportable than the loss of both legs or both arms, or eyesight, or the terrible head wounds that often left the victim only the dazed, paralyzed facsimile of a man? Yet they all continued to fear it most—clapped their helmets over their crotches or pulled pad covers or barracks bags over them during shelling or bombing raids. If they were hit in the groin or thighs it was the first question they asked the medics or the surgeon, in boundless fear—

  Well, it was a terrible thing. How would she feel, for instance, if Sam …?

  She cleaned out the lab, and helped change dressings on a sergeant with second-degree burns on his legs; then she went down to the supply hut to draw linens for one of the wards. She came out into the hard, tropic sunshine, blinking—and there he was, a thumb hooked in his hip pocket, absently flipping a big yellow coin, peering down the row. His eyes fell on her; his mouth parted slightly and his fine dark eyes came all alight.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Hello.”

  He came up to her easily. He was thinner, and drawn with fatigue—he looked so terribly tired, as though he could never in all the years of his life get slept out again. But his eyes rested on hers with a kind of peaceful wonder. The tight pressure under her heart eased all at once.

  “I guess you came down to see Ben,” she said quickly, and pointed. “He’s up in sixteen—”

  “I know. I was just talking with him.”

  “He’s driving us all delightfully wild.”

  “I don’t doubt it.” He paused. “Who I really came over to see was you.”

  She smoothed the top sheet on her arm with care. It was odd: she had the sense that the fierce tropic glare subsided just beyond them, that the corpsmen and nurses and attendants were passing in a curious twilight. “Everybody says you saved the beachhead at Wokai.”

  “I had a lot of help.”

  She paused; she didn’t know whether to speak of the boy or not. She felt she should—and yet she was afraid he would be hurt if she mentioned it quickly, casually, in this breath-drawn moment of their meeting. “It must have been terrible,” she could not help saying.

  “It was rough in spots.”

  “And now you’re back. Another victory.”

  “Another victory.” And for an instant his face looked so sad, so careworn and defeated she yearned to hold him, hold his head against her breast. She loved him more than she would have believed possible: it made her unsteady. It must be apparent to everyone passing them—by the way her head was inclined, the set of her body, the position of her feet. Everyone must know—and she didn’t care. Let them see. Let them.

  “Thank God you’re all right,” she said.

  His eyes kept coming back to hers. “Ben said you were off today.”

  “I am. I just”—she gestured with the linens—“well, keeping busy.”

  “—Come for a ride,” he said impulsively. “Around the island. We’ll go swimming. I’ve got a jeep.”

  “Of your very own?”

  “Of my very own.” This time he smiled. “Come on.”

  “Yes,” she said simply. “I’ll come.”

  The beach was small, a taut white crescent between miniature promontories of rock. The water inside the reef was a shifting skein of moods—yellow as gold dust, greener than emerald, with strips of the most lambent, heartbreaking turquoise. They swam in the still, warm water of the channel, picking their way around the coral heads that looked like sculpture roughed in by blind old masters, and then lay under the palms that ringed the beach; and the sun’s rays fell on their bodies in a strident lattice of light and shadow, like some barbaric ceremonial. Farther down the cove two native women were wading in the shallows, naked to the waist, wearing long, bright calico skirts, hunting for cowries; one of them was carrying a baby, and a small boy with a stick raced in and out of the water, splashing quicksilver.

  For most of the afternoon Sam had been silent; now suddenly he began to talk. Propped on his elbows, staring out to sea, he told her about a French village by the Marne with red tile roofs and narrow casement windows; the celebrant clamor of the shops in Manila; the harsh purple mountains of Wu T’ai, with the farmers in their pale blue shirts and straw hats. He talked about a captain who destroyed his own command in his contempt for life, and a brutal stockade officer who sought to turn men into animals, and an indomitable Chinese guerrilla leader who was forced to put to death his best friend; he told her about a stupid French general named Benoît, and his father-in-law, and General Westerfeldt, a good soldier who just hadn’t had any luck. She lay still and listened. It was like some vast Achilles shield of battles lost and won, families sundered and reunited—an endless voyage of folly and exigency and hope and loss …

  “You’ve seen so much!” she exclaimed softly. “So much of the world …”

  “Pretty dreary way to see it,” he answered after a moment. “Hell, all I’ve been is a soldier. A man of war.”

  She glanced at him, saw he was watching the native women across the cove. The sun had slipped westward, reaching in under the trees, and the sea glittered. The women had stopped looking for shells. One of them sank into the water, her skirts billowing, gently dousing the naked child who crowed with delight, waving his tiny arms.

  “That’s the only thing that matters. That right there.”

  She turned back to him again, and saw his eyes were filled with tears. His face was almost serene in its hard impassivity, but the tears kept coming, spilling over his lids. He made no effort to avert his face or close his eyes. She reached out and put a hand on his arm. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “So very sorry, Sam. Ben told me.”

  He could not take his eyes off the baby, who kept squealing with delight, waggling its head in an ecstasy of sensation. He started to speak, stopped, his mouth working. After another moment he said: “I heard a kid on Wokai: ‘No freaking nerves. What a flint-hearted, iron-bound son of a bitch.’ Referring to me. No nerves, no feelings. Just a rugged boondocker, a driver, thinking in terms of units, percentages, risks, breaking it open.” He gripped one hand in the other. “It isn’t so. By God, it isn’t so …

  “Sure I’m tough,” he said suddenly. “We’re here, we’re in it, there’s nothing to do now but get it over with—the quickest, savagest way, dog-eat-dog … I’ve got fifteen thousand kids to worry about. Sure, I’m tough,” he said, and looked at her for the first time since he’d begun to talk this way. “What the hell am I supposed to do—chant dirges and tear my clothes, pour ashes on my head? lock myself up in some stone tower, crying about what a heartless beast man can be?—wash my hands of it all? If I thought about them all the time, lying in the aid stations with the tubes in their arms, lying there in the muck, looking up at me with those terrible eyes—if I didn’t shut that out of my mind …”

  He licked his lips. The laughter of the women and children drifted over the amber water.

  “The buck private lies there in the mud shaking all over and says, ‘Oh God, what a frig-up. Look at that two-star son of a bitch—Jesus God, how can he be so stupid?’And there it is—it’s your fault, you see. Your fault. Whatever’s wrong, you’re to blame. You and only you. Nobody else. And then when you have to write those letters home—”

  He broke off. His face was stiff with anguish. She had never seen such naked, unabashed suffering in a man’s eyes. “Sam,” she said, but not to stop him. “Sam …”

  “I didn’
t do it right,” he went on. “I thought I’d foreseen every possible contingency. But I hadn’t. And they paid for it …”

  She understood only part of it. There had been an amphibious landing behind the lines—and by some freakish chance the Japanese had just brought in reinforcements earlier that very night on that same beach, and they were all dug in there and alerted. The assault battalion got ashore, but with heavy losses, and with their radios out of commission. Then for no apparent reason the enemy launched three attacks in force on the Division front just before Ben had attacked. The 477th had broken them up and cut their way through, but it had cost them another six hours, and by that time Jimmy Hoyt’s battalion was decimated and virtually in the water.

  “But,” she said, “if you couldn’t know about the reinforcements—”

  “But I should, I should have made sure. Some way or other. I sent them in, didn’t I?”

  “Sam,” she said in a pleading voice. “Look, you couldn’t help it …”

  “I could help it. It was my business to help it. And I didn’t. Two hundred and thirty-seven dead,” he said tonelessly, implacably. “Who maybe might not have died at all.”

  “But it ended the campaign …”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Sure.” He closed his eyes then, bent forward and his shoulders heaved. “—Oh, the bastards,” he cried softly. “The bastards that bring this on and don’t care about a single thing beyond their oil deposits and rubber plantations and their filthy long-term capital gains … ”

  She put her arm around him. “Sam,” she whispered. “Dear.”

  He seized her then—a desperate, half-blind clutch that made her gasp; his jaw was hard and wet against her cheek. Pressing her fingers against his shoulderblades, stirred by his stormy, terrible grief, she was conscious of the simple power of her love. She loved him, and she didn’t care a fig for all the rest of the world—the native women or Base Hospital 212 or the Pacific Theater of War or his wife or the future of the free world. She held him in her arms, flooded with a wild, ardent joy.

  The moonlight lay on the edge of the cot; the woven rush matting on the tent floor gleamed like braided silver. Twisting his head Damon looked at Joyce, who was lying with her head on his shoulder, her long-limbed body voluptuous and acquiescent and still, glowing like ivory. Her breasts were cool and smooth. Gently he sighed. The dark, irascible anguish that had rent him for weeks and turned him morose and exacting had receded with the past hours: he felt washed, shriven, somehow absurdly absolved. In response to his movement she stirred, and he felt a swift, faint tremor of sensation pass over his body like the wind over a field of wheat.

  “Such a lovely girl,” he murmured. He felt a mild astonishment at himself, lying here in the moonlight in his tent with this girl. After all the years of conjugal fidelity while the post wolves prowled and philandered, after all his strictures about simplicity and self-denial and the obligations of officers and commanders … Yet he felt neither guilt nor apprehension, and it amazed him. He had sought it, it had come, and he was glad. Their lovemaking had astonished him: it was as if they had known each other for years: an easy sarabande of overture and response that swung them, hammock-like, from pleasure to pleasure—and then a mounting, urgent felicity that was like the assuagement of raw wounds.

  Her eyes were watching him: such a steady gaze! A shy, indomitable calm that—he realized with a little start of surprise—was greater than his own.

  He said: “What are you thinking?”

  “How very happy I am right now.”

  He nodded. She was not tormented, enslaved by the future, by consequences and contingencies. He respected that in her; it accounted for the sweet generosity that drew him. Inevitably, without rancor, he thought of Tommy. In her despair she had chosen to blame him for the boy’s death—an accusation that at first had shaken him terribly … and then later granted him a curious absolution. If she wanted to feel that, it was her privilege; but he refused to accept the charge. He was guilty of a lot of things, God knew—but not Donny. If anything, his profession would have served as a barrier, not an inducement; the boy would have gone to war in any event, as twelve million of his contemporaries were doing. It was unfair, but that was Tommy’s way: Tommy was unfair—her careening emotions craved a tangible object, a nameable source for her grief: and there he stood, booted, bristling … He chewed lightly at the inside of his cheek. He could see now he had always dreaded the day that headlong, vengeful destructiveness of hers would be turned against him. Now it had happened—and he was not shattered by it, as he’d feared.

  Abruptly he looked at Joyce, who ran the tips of her fingers along his brow and nose and cheek. This was a different kind of emotional involvement—a little like the difference between quicksilver and old gold. There would never be the hot, fierce catch at his heart he’d known with Tommy—that darting, magnetic excitement that could make him feel like a pirate striking a chest of buried treasure. This was slower, deeper: a southern stream under the oleander and Spanish moss …

  Down in the tents across the road where the Division was bivouacked, they were singing, drunk on beer, their voices hoarse and heavy:

  “Hey, we got the word, rolling out on the ship,

  They said they preferred that the boys didn’t skip

  Just like a big bird: Jackson, this is the strip—

  Moa!—pora! Man—alive …”

  A lugubrious, minor-key chant, heavily syncopated. Damon could see them—sitting on the ground, on cots, on ammunition boxes, sweating, their heads swaying, the tops of the beer cans glinting in the light of the pressure lamps like gross bronze coins. His boys.

  “They said to be brave while you’re going ashore,

  ’Cause that’s the ninth wave and there ain’t any more,

  Just crawl in that cave, bud, you’re covered with gore—

  Wokai! Lolo! Just—survive …”

  Two of the supply clerks had written it after the operation. It had caught on like wildfire, and he had defended its use to the horror of Dickinson and Specs Cruse, who had argued that its sentiments were nothing less than a travesty of the fine old ballads of World War I. “This isn’t World War I,” he’d told them quietly. “This is World War II—and this is the way they see it.” That expansive, cheery fervor of 1918 whose absence the Staff bemoaned was as dead as Nebuchadnezzar: these kids armed themselves with a grisly sardonicism, an inverted pride in their own terrible competence, the bitter sacrifices ten thousand watery miles from home. Maybe the song didn’t compare very favorably with Berlin or George M. Cohan, but it said what they felt. It said what they knew. There would be another operation, and another, and sitting there swinging their beer cans and gazing at one another, they knew many among them would die, as surely as the rising of tomorrow’s sun. They knew it, they accepted it—but they had their own wry protest to make as they moved resolutely toward death and maiming. Listening, staring up at the moonlight he felt a thrust of affection for them so great he nearly groaned aloud—a surging pride, but humble, before their trust, their simple clear-eyed courage.

  “Press home the attack, pal, we’re all under fire,

  Then find me a sack, ’cause it’s time to retire,

  Hey, whip off that pack, Jack—you’re hung on the wire—

  SALA!-MANDER! Double-five! …”

  Beside him Joyce stirred and said: “Cheery little song.”

  “Cheery little war. Wouldn’t you say?” He smiled grimly. “They can sing it as long as I’m running things. I made it the official Division song.”

  She raised her head. “Sam—you didn’t …”

  “Hope to die. Got Boxley to do an arrangement and rehearse the band, and they played it at that traveling USO show two weeks ago. The kids went wild—drowned out the band. Gave me a standing ovation. I thought old Dick was going to lead a mutiny afterward. Staff came in a delegation to protest that it was detrimental to divisional morale.”

  “Yes, Colonel Rutherford—” She stop
ped.

  “Go on. Ruthie said I’m a radical and a slave driver. And I have a line sergeant’s mentality.”

  “Oh, you know everything. Well, a lot of them say you’re both too easy and too hard on the men. You’re overly lenient with things like the beer ration—and then you drive them till they drop.” Her hand lay on his chest. “Some of the men’s arches are broken down, Sam. And we’ve had several serious injuries from individual combat training.” She searched his face. “Isn’t that a mistake—to sustain injuries like that before they even get into battle?”

  He frowned, and rubbed his eyes. “I hike them hard because it’s the best conditioner there is. Also it’s the only way to surprise and dislodge your enemy without having to fight him. Speed of movement. There are some GIs who can’t stand the pace, and we try to reassign them. And the majority who do measure up own the confidence that they can outmarch any other outfit in the Army. I know it’s unfashionable to think so in certain circles, but group esprit can mean the difference between getting up and running, and staying where you’re supposed to.

  “As for the combat training: what are you going to do? You can’t take a boy off a nice, neat, tree-lined Ohio street and say to him, Cut that man’s throat from ear to ear. He’ll look at you as if you’re crazy. He’s incapable of the act. But in the line, on patrol, on outpost duty that is what he may very well have to do. Kill savagely and quickly and silently, like a beast of prey. He has to be trained to do it, Joyce. Man is not an instinctual killer, no matter what they say. Oh some, sure—a few men are the Cadmus soldiers, the dragon seed: but not many.”

  “Is that true?” she asked. “It seems to me there’s a very deep human instinct to kill.”

  “There’s a certain fitful desire to destroy in all of us—a delight in violence, in maiming, in killing, especially on provocation—even though remorse follows. But in cold blood, without provocation—if man is an instinctual killer, why is it so hard to get him to use the bayonet? So the capacity has to be instilled. Somehow or other.” He paused. “Do you know there are many men who won’t fire their rifles in combat? It’s true. They will hold a position, they will dig in and endure shelling admirably, they will even advance under fire—but they won’t shoot to kill the enemy. It took me a little while to discover that. And of course with the bayonet they’re even more reluctant.”