by Anton Myrer
There was a little pause and then all at once the stocky boy with the curly hair got up, yanked the casualty tag off the front of his jacket and said savagely: “All right, let’s go, let’s get it over with—Jesus Christ, they never leave you alone in this frigging lash-up …”
“What are you bitching about, Becker?” a rifleman named Saunders with both legs splinted called to him. “You been goldbricking your way all over the Pacific for two years and a half …”
“Yeah, what do you know about it?” Becker demanded hotly, but several other men grinned, and a thin, gangling soldier with glasses Damon didn’t know, whose chest was heavily bandaged, got to his feet and said doubtfully, “I’ll give it a try but I don’t know.”
“Good boy.” Damon turned to Siebert. “Can he make it?”
The doctor gave him the same sharp, hostile glance. “How in hell should I know? All it can do is hemorrhage …” But now others were moving up around him, he was speaking their names, those that he remembered. Siebert was still staring at him angrily. He had to do this: he had to. There was no other way.
A field telephone man named Tampler was sitting on the ground; no wound was visible on him. “How about it, Tampler?” he asked. “Will you come along?”
Tampler looked up at him tearfully; his big frame seemed actually to have shrunk, and his hands were shaking in that tight, palsied tremor Damon knew all too well. “I can’t, General,” he murmured. “I’ll just—I won’t be able to cut it. I know I won’t …”
“All right, Tampler. You don’t have to.” He moved on through the tent, entreating, exhorting, explaining, while the sound of firing crackled and thumped up the trail, building again, and still more wounded were brought in from outside, crowding the ragged tent further. He had guessed right: Murasse was pouring everything into the Babuyan assault.
“Hey, Damon!” He turned. Rossini, his belly and groin a mass of gauze, a bottle of plasma above his head, his thick, dirty face dreamy with morphine. “Hey, what do you think of the frigging cooks and bakers now?”
Harden your heart. “I think they’re fine, Rossini. The best. I’ll put them up against any outfit in the Pacific, any day.”
There they stood, over thirty of them, swaying on their feet, while young Ward of G-1 talked to them. Walking wounded, going back up because he had asked them to go. Because he had asked them to. They were filthy, the older ones had beards, they looked like half-starved old men—and not one of them was over twenty-seven. They were terrible, they were pitiful, they were magnificent; he was filled with awe and a kind of heartsick fright, watching them creep out of the tent to pick up weapons and ammunition.
He put his hand to his face. Christ, he was tired. They had to hold. They had to. Frenchy had pulled off his sideslip beautifully, the alley west of the Kalahe was solid. A bunch had broken through Agee’s crowd just before dawn and were still wandering around somewhere behind them, but it was less than platoon strength; they weren’t enough to do any real harm. The main thing was to break the back of the main force, chew them up as an effective unit. Anyway, he had guessed right. All they had to do was hold on, now. He’d have to make sure of adequate protection for the ammo parties. The recon company ought to be shifted—
“Filthy ghoul.”
A wan, white face on a cot behind him, the lower part of the body covered with a blanket, only one foot protruding. Only one. A plasma bottle with its tube feeding down to a slender, white arm. A supply corporal, what was his name? Bright blue eyes fixed on him with glassy force. “Had to come in here to get us, I notice …”
Damon stared at him in silence.
“—Not enough to slaughter everyone in sight—no,”—his voice was rising shrilly—“you’ve got to come in here and drag us out again—”
“Look, soldier—”
“—a filthy, bloody ghoul and I don’t care who knows it—you think I care? I’ll tell you, I’ll tell the whole stupid world what a dirty, bullying ghoul—”
Damon took a step toward him. “Be silent!” he said with all the threat he could muster. He turned to a medic, conscious of the long battery of eyes. “Shut this man up, you hear? Shut him up! … ”
He went out of the tent trembling with dread, holding his belly openly with one hand, unable to stop thinking now of Westy, trying to drive it out of his mind.
They were shouting deep in the jungle: a single high-pitched voice, haranguing, and now and then an answering bark of approval, like some devil’s litany. Brand, sitting behind the machine gun, thought savagely, Getting ready to try it again, getting up their nerve—and was filled with cold rage. Crouched near him in the long rectangular CP hole, the Old Man was saying to Cuddles Dickinson and Major Falk, the headquarters commandant:
“We’ve got to hold this line. Right here. There must be no faltering, no second thoughts, no talk of falling back. Impress that on your people.”
“Think they’ll try it in broad daylight?” Falk asked.
“Yes. He’s got to. He’s got to keep going. He’s in just as deep as we are now …”
Brand kept watching the General. He looked completely whipped; his shoulders sagged, his face was grimy and hollow and gray pouches of exhaustion lay under his eyes. He was sick, Brand knew—he’d gone and got him some more paregoric from Corrazzo, but he was still running badly. My God, he was tough; even when Brand himself had sunk into a brief, fitful, nap around three he’d wakened to find the Old Man gazing out into the jungle and talking to someone on the phone and giving the word to a runner. But now he looked all through: his eyes had receded under his brows to sharp, white points, and the heavy gray stubble on his cheeks made him look old and sad. But he was still functioning. He’d had the shakes after the fire fight up at the Hollow—the bad one, just before dawn; but here he was now, deftly loading a BAR magazine, forcing down the spring with his thumb, engaging a cartridge base, another, another, listening to Deacon Feltner, who was saying they were dangerously low on fifty-caliber ammunition and mortar shells.
Moisture dripped soddenly from the trees. Over by the river the spell was broken by scattered shots and the muffled crash of a grenade. If they hit us again, Brand thought tiredly, I don’t know. Looking back southward from the gentle rise he could see through the screen of palms a slice of the sea beyond Babuyan and a transport, riding at anchor. “Lousy Navy bastards,” he muttered, and ground his teeth. With their dry sacks and three hots a day and movies and ship’s stores and their freshwater showers … He thought of the afternoon on Benapei when the Old Man had come in sweaty and tired from that deal up at the Horseshoe to find the weird shower Brand had rigged for him out of a halved oil drum punctured and slung from a tree branch and two buckets full of water that tilted on ropes slung from other branches. The Old Man had stood under it soaping himself up and singing “Love Me and the World Is Mine.”
“Joe,” he’d said, “I’m going to put you in for the Navy Cross. Valor beyond the last call of duty. By God, the three guys I’d like to shake hands with are the three guys that invented the wheel, the mosquito net, and the shower.”
“How about gunpowder?” he’d asked, and Damon had grinned at him and made an obscene gesture, boyishly.
“Bugger all gunpowder. To the end of time.” And then he’d gone on singing. Well, the world wasn’t his, not by a long shot; but she loved him all right, if he was any judge. Lieutenant Tanahill. He’d been surprised beyond all measure that night back at Dizzy Spa when he’d come back to get the Old Man’s laundry and heard them talking inside the tent. For a moment he’d hung there, listening avidly—then had slipped away in confusion, a little guilty for having listened at all. It had upset him at first: Damon had struck him as way above something like that—open-handed with beer and passes, and he liked a drink himself when he could get one. But he hadn’t seemed to need liquor or women the way most of the men out here did; as though he could shove it on the back burner where it couldn’t get in his way—as though real fear or loneliness or na
meless hunger could never reach him. Now he knew differently. The Old Man just didn’t show it, that was all: he felt it, all right. He’d observed him once, reading his son’s letters one night late, the visored fatigue cap low over his eyes. Watching, Brand had seen him pass a hand across his brow and eyes and go on reading. He kept them in a leather-cased envelope his daughter had given him for a birthday present. It was all cracked now, green and feathery from mildew, and several times Brand had been tempted to clean and soap it for him; but he was afraid the Old Man might be sore if he brought it up … and now Lieutenant Tanahill had been sent stateside. That bastard Massengale. More of his work.
Damon had come up beside him. “Still holding the convention?”
He nodded. “Thinking up some devilment.”
The perimeter was very quiet. Sunlight burned through the foliage, glinted now on a helmet, now on an empty case of belt ammunition, rifle swung. A shadow—some noncom—knelt by someone’s hole, talking urgently; straightened and moved along. It was hard to imagine that so many men were here around him, motionless, sweating, waiting for the tiger to spring. Unlike most soldiers, Brand did not hate the jungle: its murky tangle concealed him as well as the Japanese that sought his life, and he could use cover better than the next man. But the waiting was hard. Perspiration crawled through his eyebrows and streaked his chest.
De Luca said: “Message for you, General.”
Damon turned and took it, read it softly aloud. “CONDOR to CUTLASS. Phase Line Orange must be held at all costs. Any further withdrawal expressly forbidden. Am confident you can hold on. 629th RCT embarking Dalomo for Blue Beachhead at once. Sent it in clear, did he?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Ain’t that fine. So the Japs could monitor it and know just what to expect, I suppose.”
No one said anything for a bit and Brand asked, “Where’s Phase Line Orange?”
“First two days’ objective. Right where we are now, as a matter of fact.” He handed the radio to Dickinson and glared at the jungle wall. “Any further withdrawal. What does he think—I’m going to try to set up a line out in the water?” His lips curled mirthlessly. “Jesus, it’s good to know he’s got confidence in us, isn’t it? If we don’t hold here we might as well start swimming back to Benapei … ”
“That’s a long swim,” Brand murmured.
“Isn’t it, though.” The General’s face was working.
“What did he do,” Dickinson said, “—get cold feet?”
“Maybe. Wants to cover himself with Army. Get it on the books in case the roof falls in.”
“They can’t possibly get here in time, can they?”
“Sixty-five miles by water? Not a chance. But pass the word on this one that help is on the way.”
“But why, General? If they can’t even—”
“Because men have got to have things to hold on to,” Damon snapped at him, his face tight with exasperation. “Especially at miserable, fucked-up, rotten times like this one …” Cuddles’ sober Yankee face looked blank and startled. The Old Man smiled wearily. “I’m sorry, Dick. It’s been a long night.” He slapped the Chief of Staff on the shoulder. “Take it easy, now. Go on back to the novelties counter. We’ll get out of this yet, you’ll see.”
It’s Krisler, Brand thought. That’s what’s got to him. Old Paprika Ben. He’s afraid Krisler’s packed it in, along with the rest of them, up there. God, he’ll take it hard if Krisler’s stopped one: it’ll cut him to the heart.
“Win?” the General was saying over the phone in even, level tones. “No matter how hard they hit on the right, don’t pull over there. It will be a feint. What he wants is the trail … Yes. That’s right … No, they’re steady: they’ll hold. I’ll be in touch …”
Brand smiled softly, listening. By God, there wasn’t a thing the Old Man couldn’t cope with: artillery, demolitions, tactics, first aid—he knew his trade from muzzle to butt plate. How many of the rajahs could make that claim? Brand remembered during a lull last night, some kid yelling from a nearby hole, “She won’t work! My rifle—the operating rod won’t move …” And Damon roaring at him: “Piss on it!” and then the kid’s voice, thin and incredulous: “—on my rifle?” By Jesus, he was the kind of general to serve under, they could say anything they wanted to. Even now, exhausted and outgunned, there he was, loading magazines and sending off runners, figuring how to beat the bastards … Watching the iron gray face Brand was swept with a surge of affection that seeped, warm and pervasive, into the hard center of his heart and made his hands tremble.
… If you hurt the Old Man, he said silently, traversing the gun a few degrees, peering through the thin screen of guava bushes and vines, if you so much as touch a hair of his head I’ll kill you myself, all of you. With my hands. Till the black end of time. “And that’s a promise.”
“What?” Whelan, a headquarters company casual who was serving as his loader, was gazing at him in surprise.
“Nothing.”
The high, haranguing voice was louder now; or there were others. Mortar shells began to fall in the groves to the right, moving nearer like approaching thunder. He picked up his M1 and checked the clip and bayonet studs, then the row of grenades in the shelf at the forward edge of the emplacement, thinking vaguely of the evening back at Dizzy playing cards with several other NCOs and Goethals saying to Enright, “Of course he’s shacking with her. What do you think they’re doing—playing cribbage? Santosky saw them at the beach near Tafua swimming one afternoon.” Goethals’ narrow little eyes had rolled around to him. “How about it, Joe-Joe? Isn’t he humping that gash?”
He’d looked at the thick, low forehead, the cunning grin. He’d never liked Goethals much. “What gives you that idea?” he’d countered.
“Ah, come off it, buddy-ro. What is he—some kind of a sacred bull or something? How about it? Give us the skinnay.”
He knew it was a lie but he couldn’t help it. Goethals’ tone, the intimation that it was nothing more than a cheap-and-easy roll in the hay, had forced his hand. “As a matter of fact there isn’t anything there,” he said. “And I ought to know if anybody does.”
He stared them all down, but Goethals grinned his thick, lewd grin and said: “Who you conning, Joe-Joe—you expect us to believe that? Santosky saw them …”
“And anyway, his business is his business, when it isn’t yours.”
“Hey, are we playing cards or what?” Higgins demanded; but Goethals went on, more loudly:
“What? It’s everybody’s business if anybody’s there to see it. What’s Damon that he’s so special?”
Right then Brand knew he’d have to fight him. He was down nearly fifteen pounds, his arm was barely healed, he felt tired and defeated at the very idea; but if that was how it had to be, all right. “He’s worth a dozen of you,” he said slowly.
Goethals laughed. “More than that—several hundred. He runs the Double Five: sergeants are a dime a dozen.”
“I mean he’s ten times the man you are. Rank aside.”
The platoon sergeant’s brows rose. “Maybe so, maybe no. He doesn’t have to sit on his ass in the boondocks in the rain, take out patrols.”
“He’ll do anything you will, twice. And do it better.”
“I wouldn’t exactly say that.”
“Take it easy, Walt,” Tech Sergeant Luria said. “Damon’s all right and you know it. Give me two cards.”
“Sure. I never said anything against him as a DC. I’ll vote for him—if they allowed me to vote. We’re talking about this other thing, that’s all.”
“You’re not talking about it,” Brand retorted, “you’re making up a lot of crap about it.”
Goethals grinned again. “Hey, that shower you fixed up for him, Joe-Joe: has it got duckboards and handles? is it screened off, for playing—you know: drop the soap?”
The others all laughed. That was the trouble with Goethals: he had this sly way of saying things—you couldn’t always be sure whether he was k
idding or not. He’d seemed to be kidding—and then maybe he wasn’t at all: it was hard to say.
“Have your fun,” he muttered.
“What’s the matter, Joe-Joe? Your feelings hurt? You got that tired, mashed-down sensation? Hell, you’d think he was your father.”
“You’d be lucky to have a father like him.” And then, baffled and angry, he had a little inspiration. He added: “In fact, I don’t even know if you have a father …”
It got quiet all at once in the tent. Goethals’ face turned set and very hard. He ran his thumb along the edge of the deck of cards. “That’s not so funny, Brand.”
He smiled now. “It isn’t?”
“No. It isn’t. Let’s check this out: are you kidding or not kidding?”
Brand put down his hand and looked straight into Goethals’ gray-green eyes. “It’s up to you, buddy,” he said levelly. “If you’re kidding about the Old Man I’m kidding about your father.”
Goethals said nothing for a moment. “You’re not in very good shape, Joe-Joe. And you’re spotting me twenty pounds.”
“I’ll work that out.”
They locked eyes for another few seconds, and then Higgins said, “Let it alone, Walt. Don’t you know better than to get going on that?” and at the same time Luria demanded:
“Look, are we playing cards or aren’t we? What the frig is this all about? Or are we going to fight over something none of you knows anything about? Is that it?” And it had blown over; but neither Goethals nor any of the others had ever brought the matter up in his presence again.
The voices had subsided; there was only a sporadic yelling behind the tossing green sea of jungle. Braced tensely now, listening, Brand caught the ear-splitting crack of knee mortars just ahead and he shouted, “Here they come!” and ducked in the hole. He was showered with dirt and bits of débris. He pressed his helmeted head against the damp earth, watching the Old Man, already huddled against the forward edge of the pit, talking to the radio, his words coming in remote, disjointed snatches of phrase: