by James Jones
Then it changed, and was not a typical maneuvers any more. The trucks, instead of taking them back to Schofield, took them back down to their beach positions from which the Coast Artillery had already gone home to Fort Ruger. Other trucks, from Schofield, arrived simultaneously and unloaded piles of picks and shovels and axes, sacks of cement and mortar hoes. One truck even unloaded thirty Barco gasoline-driven jack-hammers.
Nobody knew what the hell for.
As if in answer, orders came down through channels that they were to construct pillboxes on all their positions. At the time they were still sleeping in the shelter tents used on maneuvers, but before they could bitch about it still other trucks arrived from Schofield with both pyramidal tents and the cots to put in them. They already had their mosquito bars; in the field on Oahu you always had your mosquito bars. And instead of temporary bivouacs the beach positions suddenly became permanent encampments.
Warden went about setting up his CP at Hanauma Bay for the second time, still with no Prewitt, but forgetting that now. Even in the memory of the old Island men like Pete Karelsen and Turp Thornhill, nothing like this had ever happened before.
Up to then they had always moved onto the beach, set the MGs up in the open, and slept on the sand in their blankets—or, if they were lucky like Position #16 on Doris Duke’s estate, in a beach cabana with the compliments of the estate’s manager (Nobody ever even saw Doris). That was the way it had always been, and that was the way they had assumed it would always be. That an enemy naval force could blow them to hell sitting out there in the open like that, long before it started to send barges in, they fully realized; and, knowing the Army like draftees will never know it, that was just what they expected to happen if the Island was ever attacked. But as long as there were bars to sneak off to and so many Americanized gook girls around to invite onto the position to inspect the awesomely lethal machineguns, they didnt give a damn one way or the other. Anyway, who the hell was ever going to attack this island anyway? The Japanese?
Showing them the MGs was an inspiration. It was practically irresistible. In addition to the awesomeness of the potential death in them there was the intriguing mechanical mystery of an unknown machine function that no American black brown or white can ever resist tinkering with to find out how it works. And with the hard cases you could even let them sit down behind the gun and swing it on the pintle and pull the dead trigger. Not even a virgin wahine could resist that. A haole girl, yes. But not a wahine, because in spite of the absolute triumph of American mechanics, plus all the efforts of the self-chosen-missionaries, American morals had come no nearer to winning a victory in the Islands than had American standards of comfort, so that they did not even mind being screwed in a shelter tent on the sand.
Rumor had it that the rest of the Infantry outfits were doing the same thing and building pillboxes on their positions, but G Company was getting more ass than it had ever gotten before in its history, in spite of the work. Not to mention all the pints and fifths they gave the wahines the money to buy for them, or that if they were broke the wahines bought and brought by themselves—(the good thing about wahines, Mack, that is different from white women, is that wahines like whiskey with their panipani almost as much as us soljers).
If there was anyone in the Company who wondered at all, it was Milt Warden who was unable to take advantage of the bonanza because of his newly acquired fear of fiascoes. Warden, perhaps alone, wondered if maybe this was finally the beginning? if perhaps somebody in Washington or somewhere had gotten ahold of some information or something that had finally worked its way down through channels. He had always wondered just how they began to begin; nobody that ever wrote about them ever seemed to mention just exactly how they began. But since nobody else said anything about it, he did not bring it up either. Maybe he was just being foolish. Besides, it would be a shame to spoil all the fun that everybody but him seemed to be having.
The job lasted a month. It was a wonderful time, even though there was a strict order against giving passes. In a situation like this who the hell wanted passes? Engineer Companies delivered them ready-cut beams and planking of koa wood that they had cut on the slopes of Barber’s Point. All they had to do was dig holes in sand and set beams in them and line them with planking, and then put beams over them and line them with planking, and then cover it all up with sand, after they had made sure the MG apertures pointed the right direction. Their nights were their own. The officers hardly ever came around from the CP in the daytime, let alone during the night. The Company took care not to strain themselves with overwork in the daytime, so as not to detract from the nights. In fact, they were usually so hungover and worndown from the nights that they could not have strained themselves if they had wanted. That was one of the reasons the job took a month. It was a wonderful time.
Another reason the job took a month was Position #28 at Makapuu Head. It was not a wonderful time at Makapuu Head. The thirty gasoline driven Barco drills had been for Makapuu Head. Makapuu Head, a foot under the surface, was one solid rock. Also, the Waimanalo Girls School was eight or ten miles away down in Kaneohe Valley. And, because Makapuu Head was manned by more than a full platoon, instead of just three or four men, there was always an officer there; he even slept there. There were no estates, bars, dwellings, or places of recreation at Makapuu Head—unless you wanted to count the two public outhouses down below on the Kaupo Park beach just opposite Rabbit Island, from which a number of men caught the crabs. All there was at Makapuu Head was the lighthouse out on the Point and the one solid rock, and the Engineers across the highway with the pneumatic drills, digging and blasting into the cliff wall where the highway demolition would be.
Makapuu Head was the most crucial spot in the Company sector. If an enemy landed at Kaneohe, there were only two roads he could take into Honolulu without going clear around the whole island, the Pali road that came down Nuuanu Avenue into town, and Kalanianaole Highway at Makapuu Head. The majority of Pete Karelsen’s weapons platoon, under Pete, formed the nucleus of the Makapuu Head complement because they were the best machinegunners in the Company, and there was another whole platoon of riflemen to protect them because they were precious. But now both machinegunners and riflemen worked together side by side with the Barco drills and shovels like a nigger labor battalion. At Makapuu it was definitely not a wonderful time.
Gradually, as the work on one position after another was completed, and Makapuu still made no headway into the one solid rock, more and more men were shifted out there to help cut with Barco drills the one solid rock. Until finally the whole Company was out there, working in eight-hour shifts, around the clock 24 hours a day. A kind of frenzied ecstasy for work got into everybody, particularly the night shifts for some reason, and specially after The Warden made it his headquarters and took to operating a Barco while lashing sarcastically at everybody in a voice that drowned even the stuttering one-cylinder engines. The cooks stayed up all night in shifts voluntarily, to keep them supplied with hot sandwiches and coffee. Even the clerks and cooks took their turns at working the Barcos; Mazzioli, when he came down from Schofield for a couple of days to look around, put on his unfaded fatigues he had hardly worn in a year and displayed his surprisingly good physique naked to the waist on a Barco and it turned out much to everybody’s surprise that his old man had been a sandhog on the Holland Tunnel job in New York. It was inexplicable, the whole thing. The men who had been out there from the start wrapped handkerchieves proudly around bleeding blisters and laughed uproariously as the blisters on the hands of the new men began to break.
Maybe somebody would even sing the old soldier’s parody of Chow Call.
We’ve built a million kitchens,
For the cooks to burn our beans;
We’ve walked a hundred million miles,
We’ve cleaned out camp latrines.
If we ever get to heaven, the angels all will yell:
Take a front seat, Men of Schofield,
You’
ve done your hitch in hell.
It turned out to be even more fun than wahines and whiskey which was fun. Even The Warden’s wild driving leadership could not account for it. It was the thing that makes Infantry Companies Infantry Companies, and gives old men who were once soldiers the sentimentality with which to tell stories that bore their grandchildren.
A Barco drill has no trigger like an air hammer and it is twice as heavy because its one-cylinder gasoline engine is built right onto the barrel. When they picked it up to move it to a new spot, they had to pick up the whole vibrating bucking mass, bracing it against a thigh to even hold it, because if you turn it off it takes five minutes to start it again with the spring plunger and you have to move it every minute or so. And the only place on a Barco that you can touch without getting burned, except for the grips, is the gas tank under the handles, and after half an hour of bracing the gas tank against your thigh your fatigue pants leg is scorched rusty brown and all the hair is worn off and burned off your leg. Compared to an air hammer a Barco is an antiquated monstrosity, and if you had asked any of the men who complained because they didn’t have air hammers (and all of them did) to trade the Barcos in for them, they would have snorted and said they didnt need air hammers like the goddam Engineers. It was as if they liked burning the hair off their legs, and shaking their back teeth loose when they moved them, and wearing the skin on their hands down to raw meat. It was as if they used them and hated them and loved them and would not have had anything else. It was as if they had never had so much fun in their lives.
And across the road the Engineers with their pneumatic drills digging the demolition listened to them sing and watched them enviously, and they knew the Engineers watched them and laughed and sang even more loudly. Until finally even some of the Engineers, after they got off their own shifts, came over to help.
And in a month it was done, and they laid the brace-steel and poured the concrete themselves for the roofs, and went back to Schofield and garrison soldiering, some of them with a new disease that made it feel like the veins in the shoulders and elbows and wrists were swollen and aching while their fingers and hands and finally their whole arms got tingly numb, a disease that every time they did any work with their hands they would wake up with in the middle of the night and get up and shake their arms back awake while the veins in their joints kept aching a long time afterwards so that they had to go out to the latrine for a Piss Call and smoke a cigaret while they let the aching subside so they could go back to bed, but a disease that they never went on sick call with because they had never even heard of it and did not know it was a disease.
The date was November 28th, 1941.
Chapter 48
IT WAS DURING that same six weeks of grace, from the 16th of October to the 28th of November, while the Company was out in the field sweating their butts off and would have sacrificed a left arm to trade places with him, that Robert E Lee Prewitt began to realize just how necessary being a thirty-year-man was. If you wanted to enjoy being on pass.
It kept coming into Prewitt’s mind more and more frequently how he was not a thirty-year-man any more.
He was still pretty sick when the maneuvers started. At least, his side was still sore enough for him to get up in the middle of the night and sit and smoke in the wooden-armed occasional chair by the bed, when the irritated tossing for sleep in the bed got too frustrating. He had learned that trick at Myer the first time his nose had been broken; the sitting up and not trying to sleep always relaxed you enough so you could doze in the chair.
But by the time the red forces had made their landing, he was much better. Enough better to discover that the secret of at least 50% of the enjoyment of a pass seemed to be the disagreeable knowledge that soon it would end and you would have to go back.
He knew about the maneuvers, all right. Both girls brought the news home with them from work two full days before the maneuvers even got started. Then there were the newspaper articles that mentioned them and used them, just like last year and every year since the European war started, as a springboard for editorials about the world situation and the possibility of being drawn into war. He read them all. He had taken to reading both newspapers thoroughly, by then.
He did not particularly believe what the newspapers said (excluding the sports page and the comics). What they said did not even interest him; it consumed two hours every morning. It put off his enjoyment of the radio-bar and the record-player and the porch over Palolo Valley for as long as he could make the newspapers last.
The enjoyment of the radio-bar and the record-player and the rest of the furnishings had thinned with the knowledge that he was not going to leave them. He did not enjoy having his own key any more because he never left the house so he could use it. Except at sunset, the porch over Palolo Valley showed exactly the same view all day long, everyday, including Sundays, even when he was drunk. All he had left was the newspapers.
Both girls would always still be asleep when he got up, and he would make his own coffee and breakfast and then go into a huddle with the papers on the breakfast-nook table in the midst of the crumbs. Usually, he could make them last until the girls got up at noon, if he worked the crossword. Then he would have coffee with them again. With the Sunday papers, which lasted until three or four in the afternoon, he felt like a veritable rich man.
The newspapers did not say anything at all about the construction of the beach position emplacements after maneuvers ended. So he did not know about that until he finally went down to see Rose and Charlie Chan at the Blue Chancre. But the newspapers did give him an idea.
He went on a reading jag. It was the second real reading jag in his life. The first had been when he was laid up in the hospital at Myer getting over the clap that the rich girl had given him. They had had a good, though small, library at the Myer hospital and he had read his way through almost all of it with a dictionary at his elbow mainly because there hadnt been anything else in the GU ward to do. Reading, he found, was like with pain, or a delicate appetite; you minced your way around the outside tasting this dish and that and getting more and more irritable. And nothing suited you, until you had made up your mind to promise yourself you would read every word on every page. Once you got yourself started and into it you werent irritable any more and it was kind of fun, in a way.
He did that with every book in Georgette’s Book of the Month Club collection, even the bad ones that did not sound true to life, at least not as he had become acquainted with life. But he was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt since obviously he had not known every kind of life (like, the life of the rich, say) any anyway, if you just shut off part of your mind from asking acerbic questions about this and that and limited yourself to just the words you read in through your eyes, you could almost believe all of them, even the worst ones. Besides, it was a good way to pass the time. Much better than newspapers. And it did not give you a hangover.
He read night and day like that for over two weeks. If the girls got up at noon, or came home from work at 2 AM, they would find him curled up in a book with the dictionary and a drink at his elbow. He had found that three or four drinks made many of them much more believable. He would be so engrossed that the girls never got more than a grunt for an answer.
Alma didnt like it. She would try to talk to him and when he would only grunt and go on reading she would usually end up by going off and sitting in silence on the other side of the room. Sometimes she would play records loudly. Alma very rarely played records.
Georgette didn’t seem to care much one way or the other although sometimes, in certain moods, she would seem interested in finding out what was in some of the books and ask him questions about the ones with the more intriguing covers. Then they would sit and talk and he would tell her the stories of them, while Alma would sit in silence on the other side of the room or play her records loudly.
He ran through Georgette’s collection midway in the second week and proceeded to get stinking drunk.
There was not another book in the house. He had averaged two, and even three, books a day; without giving any thought to the fact that his stockpile was beginning to run low. He got very drunk. It was while he was very drunk that it suddenly hit him how much Georgette looked like most of the heroines in her Book of the Month Club collection.
When Alma came home from work and found him passed out on the throwrug in front of the divan, she blew her top that had been accumulating since he first went on this reading jag. They had quite a scene and ended up with a compromise. If she would get him books at the library, he would lay off the liquor—at least to the point of getting wall-eyed. Neither she nor Georgette had a card, but she took one out and started bringing them home to him. Most of the ones she brought were mystery stories. Being a murderer himself, he was interested in finding out more about it as far as it concerned murderers themselves, and he read a lot of them but nowhere in none of them—not even in Raymond Chandler, whom he liked best of all—could he find anything that even remotely resembled his own feelings as a murderer, and finally he got tired of looking.
It wasnt that he did not like mysteries, but after a while they got to sound too much the same—even Chandler got to sound too much the same—And besides, Chandler didnt have many books. It got to be too easy to pick the murderers. All you had to do to pick the murderers was pick out the character who seemed least likely to be guilty, and you had the murderer. And if you looked in the back of the book to find out if you were right, there wasnt enough else left to keep you interested. And after he picked the murderer, he couldnt keep from looking in the back of the book to see if he was right.