by Jeff Shaara
Welty led Adams along the ridgeline, the crest of the hill not more than a few yards above them. The Japanese works had simply faded away, the hillside now cut up by deeper holes, some of them made by American artillery. The mud was as it had been all across the hill, thick black pools gathered in the low places, most of those places now occupied by Marines. Welty moved quickly, appraising the position, men looking up at him as though appreciating his authority, even though almost none of them had ever seen him before. They moved past a thicket of brush, more burned stubble, a deep pocket, sharp rocks that opened into a miniature valley that was cut several feet deep into the hillside. In the bottom was a cluster of Marines, a thirty caliber, metal ammo boxes scattered around them. The tripod of the machine gun was broken, one leg supported by a well-placed rock. Welty stopped, the men staring up at them with dull, tired eyes. Welty said, “You’re not the thirty I sent down here. Where’d you boys come from?”
The men looked up at him with puzzled glances toward each other, and one man said, “We come from down the damn hill. Where you come from? Mars?”
The smell of the men reached Adams now, sour, filthy, the wetness around them thick with the same horror that seemed to fill every low place. Adams nudged Welty, said, “They’ve been here awhile.”
“Yeah, we’ve been here awhile. You think we can just go marching up and down this damn place like we own it?”
Welty glanced toward the ridge above them, stepped down into the depression, and Adams followed, the smells growing, could see how the hole could hold these men in good protection. The machine gun was tilted to one side, the rock not quite level for the tripod, and Adams could see a carpet of spent shells, spread all past the muddy bog the men seemed anchored to. Close beside him, Adams flinched, saw two corpses, men wrapped in ponchos, boots sticking out toward him. Marines. Welty said, “What’s your unit?”
“You got the password, Captain Four-Eyes?”
“Hell no. Ain’t had one for a couple days. How about ‘Lala palooza’?”
“Close enough. Zeke here’s been waiting to stick somebody who can’t get the l’s right. Ran out of grenades last night. You got some you can spare?”
Welty fumbled through the baggy pockets on his jacket, Adams doing the same, each man pulling out a pair.
“Here. Take these. We got a few more. There’s a few dozen of us up to the right, a Jap trench, or something like it.”
The closest man took the grenades from Welty’s hand, passed them to the others, spoke for the first time, a low, hard whisper.
“These won’t last long. Full dark, the rain will come. After that, they’ll come for us. Not much we can do.”
The man’s voice was different, and even through the whisper, Adams could hear his words distinctly, clear, the telltale sound of an education. Welty focused on that man as well, said again, “What unit?”
“Doesn’t matter now. We’re Marines.”
Welty glanced back at Adams, then said, “Twenty-ninth? You been up here for …”
“Three days.”
Adams stared at the well-spoken man, saw age, a glimmer of seriousness he had seen before. He moved closer, squatted, said in a whisper, “You’re an officer.”
The man stared at him, shook his head slowly.
“Nope. Not anymore. Lost my whole damn company. My bars went with ’em. They followed me up here, and I got every man killed. Some of ’em got hauled off somewhere, an aid station maybe, but pretty sure they didn’t make it. Mortars caught most of us. Too much blood, too many heads half blown off. I didn’t get a scratch. I assumed somebody’s trying to tell me something. So, I thought I’d better listen. I lead men, they die. So no more of that. I’m stuck up here with these two boys, and I assume somebody put me here for one reason, to fight. No more fancy uniforms.” He looked at Welty, and Adams saw the dead calm in the man’s eyes, a deep hint of madness. “So, how about you?”
Welty shook his head, said only, “Private.”
“Well, Private, welcome to our corner of the war. I’m guessing somebody sent you down here to check on us. Fine by me. You’re in command. We heard your boys coming up on those rocks out there. Can’t say it’s a very good place to be, once the rain starts. There’s a few more of us down farther, deep ground, like this. Caves everywhere, Japs inside, waiting for dark. I hope you’ve got a hell of a lot more grenades than what you gave us. The rain oughta start any time now.”
Adams was baffled, glanced skyward, the darkness sifting over them, but the air was clear, no rain at all. He heard a sound, far up on the crest, a low voice, scuffing on the rocks. He put a hand against Welty’s arm, the redhead looking that way as well. The three men didn’t look up at all, slid back farther into their muddy grotto, pulling the thirty with them. The man they called Zeke said, “Half a box. All we got left.”
The officer shrugged, said to Welty, “We’ll hold out here as best we can. We can keep the infiltrators away for a little while. But once the rain starts, we’re probably finished. You will be too, unless you get the hell out of here. The entire Japanese army knows we’re here.”
The sounds above them were increasing, low voices, and Adams heard the dull thump, familiar, a grenade jammed on a helmet. There was another, more thumps on the rocks. Welty grabbed his arm, yanked him hard through the stinking mud, pulling him back into the deepest part of the hidden hole. The grenades came down now, tumbling, bouncing, one landing close to the corpses. They ignited in a scattering of blasts, and Adams pulled his knees up tight, the M-1 against his gut, the blasts blowing mud and dust into him, the ringing of shrapnel on the rocks around him. Above the position, the Japanese could be heard clearly, shouting out, single taunting words, names.
“John! Joe! Hey Doc!”
Another wave of grenades tumbled down, some farther away, the hillside erupting in bursts of fire, more mud and shrapnel, one of the gunners close to him grunting, a hard groan. Adams wanted to move, to help the man, but the grenades did not stop, continued to bounce and thump on the rocks out past the entrance to the odd hiding place. Adams held his knees as tightly as he could, his helmet tilted down toward the worst of the blasts, heard the sudden eruption from the thirty, the gunner firing a brief burst into nothing, a streak of red reaching far out into the dim light, the gun silent now.
“Come on down, you yellow bastards!”
“Time for me to go, boys.”
The words came from the officer, and in the last glimpse of daylight Adams saw the man crawling forward with his carbine, wanted to shout at the man to keep back. The grenades came down farther away again, a carpet of blasts to the right, one sharp scream, a man crying out. The officer seemed oblivious, moved out beside the mangled corpses, leaned down, pulled the ripped ponchos over one man’s body, straightening the legs. He stood now, climbed up from the low hole, stepped out onto the rocks. Adams stared in horror, no one saying anything, the officer a clear shadow, silhouetted by the blasts of fire down below. He aimed the carbine high, fired a burst, made a strange sound, calling out, not words, just a cheer, a mad hurrah. The grenades came now, a half dozen, bouncing around the man. Adams watched as he caught one in his hand, threw it hard back up the hill, the sound of a brief laugh, but the grenades were too many, and before the man could fire the carbine again, the ground around him erupted into a burst of fire. Adams ducked low, felt impacts against his legs, his helmet, heavy wet slop. All along the hill the grenades kept falling and the Marines answered by tossing up their own, up and over the hill, the two sides only yards apart, spread along opposite sides of the muddy ridgeline. There was almost no rifle fire, no targets for the M-1s, the enemies too close for mortars, too close for artillery. Some of the fights erupted face-to-face, knives and bayonets, but when the two sides kept their distance, there was no effective weapon except the handheld bombs. Throughout the long night, men on both sides surged up and out of their hiding places, seeking any glimpse of their enemy, but few were adventurous enough to leave the fragile
safety of their own side of the hill. While the supply of grenades held out, they flew back and forth over the hilltop, coming down on their unseen targets like rain.
The trench had been no trench at all, not in the way any Marine had hoped. Welty kept them in place, but less than an hour after full darkness, the mortar shells had come. They were carefully aimed, unusual, but the Japanese clearly had the range on this particular part of the hill. The mortars came down on both sides of the snaking trench, and then, dead center, men shredded and cut apart, Welty immediately pulling the survivors back down the hill. From the right flank Mortensen had sent word that the Japanese had come up from behind, a hidden tunnel the Marines still couldn’t locate. Adams had heard the thirty caliber offer bursts of fire for long seconds at a time, and then silence, only the pops of the rifles, the dull eruptions from grenades from both sides. The thirty caliber machine gun Welty had sent to the left had never been heard from again, and there was no time to investigate that, no hope of finding anyone in the dark. It had to be bad, no one optimistic that any gunner who suddenly stopped firing had done so by his own choice. The chaos was absolute, any Marine who could was waging his own war, seeking targets from bursts of fire, or emptying magazines and tossing grenades in a desperate hope that the enemy was there. The wounded were many and loud, the voices drawing more fire, grenades mostly, from Japanese troops who had slipped in among the American positions. With Welty forced to bring the men down, Mortensen did the same, and in the muddy defiles and ragged rocky heights, men began to slide and tumble and scamper back down through the places they had climbed the day before. Some did not stop until they made the bottom of the hill, and even then, the fire from Japanese guns on the far hills took aim at landmarks already established in daylight. As the Americans pulled down and off Sugar Loaf yet again, the vicious fire from what remained of the enemy’s artillery spread flashes of light over the mud and wreckage of the bare landscape, and showed the retreat for what it was, a desperate escape for the Marines.
On the hill, men still hunkered low, lost, digging into softer dirt, wallowing in the filthy mud, the smells of the corpses not nearly as pungent as the smells from the explosives and the smoke that surrounded them. Some of those men tended wounded, would not leave them behind, strangers offering whatever help they could give, help that more often was a ripped shirt or a syrette of morphine. The dead offered one last gift, ammunition, men forced to tear through the horrifying remains, stiff or bloody corpses that might still be holding ammo belts and grenades. Throughout the night the fight continued, the Marines who remained on the hill engulfed in a blind war with an enemy who seemed to lust for death, as long as that death took Americans along for the ride. The Japanese made no secret of their tactics, loud shouts, often in English, taunting the Marines with name-calling and threats, the Japanese seeming to know they had the Marines exactly where they wanted them. As more grenades rolled down into shallow cover, the casualty count continued to grow. From distant officers word filtered up the hill that a general withdrawal had been ordered, but most of the men who sat terrified in their holes had no way of hearing that, and most of those had no will to do anything but sit in one place and wait for the dawn.
Adams had stayed as close to Welty as he could, and the others in their squad, even the ever-hostile Yablonski, had accepted Welty’s authority as absolute. Others who had stayed higher on the hill had fought on as best they could manage, an extraordinary game of hot potato as grenades flew across the crest of the hill from men on both sides. But the Japanese had the advantage, greater number, and, apparently, greater supply of grenades, fed to them from the supply caves on the south side of the hill. With the grenade war becoming a lopsided affair, many of those Marines who could still move had done what Welty had done, obeyed the panicky instinct to pull back to some kind of safety, every man hearing the order in his brain, whether passed on to him by an officer or not. Get off the hill.
The flash of fire blinded him yet again, a cascade of broken rock and mud burying them, the smoke burning his lungs. Adams waited for it to clear, holding his breath as long as he could, kept his face straight down into the soft, putrid dirt. He raised his head, blinked through the blindness, the flecks in his eyes, knew that with each blast the enemy had come forward, low scampering shadows who waited for their own mortars to clear the way before launching themselves straight into wherever the Marines might be. He pointed the M-1, searched frantically for movement, did not fire. With no targets, a flash from his own rifle would just tell the closest enemy where he was, and it was a certainty that a grenade would follow. Welty was pulled up beside a small rock pile close to him, a makeshift barricade Welty had gathered in the first minute they had stopped. Adams kept himself flat in the muddy depression, desperate optimism that a wad of uprooted brush might protect him, still tried to dig himself in wherever it was soft. Behind them Adams knew there were others spread out in a low gash in the rock, some beyond, up the far side. In the lowest place wounded had been dragged, a gesture of desperation, no corpsmen or medical bags to be found. Those who were conscious had done an admirable job of keeping quiet, muffled cries from men whose limbs were shattered, whose chests had been battered by shrapnel from a grenade or ripped by the shards of steel from a mortar shell. Adams kept his stare on a bare rocky plane, sloping ground that led away into nooks and crevices he could not see. He glanced toward Welty, knew Welty was doing as he did, pointing the M-1 outward, would pour a clip of fire toward anything that could be Japanese. Adams gripped the K-bar knife in his left hand, clamped against the stock of the rifle. It was awkward, a clumsy way to shoot, but marksmanship meant very little now, and having the knife ready for immediate use was more of a priority now than it had ever been in a foxhole.
He let out a breath, good night vision, searched with stinging eyes for any flicker of motion. Without any warning another mortar round came down, a hard blast down behind him, the force jarring him off the ground, something hard striking his feet and legs. He yelped, pulled his feet up close, panic, rubbing one hand on his legs, wiping through mud and filth. But there was no pain, no sign that he had been struck by more than the debris tossed out of the deeper hole by the round. But then a new thought came, no, my God … and he jerked his head around, stared into smoky black dark, wiped his face, saw flickers of flame on the already burned brush. The scream came now, too loud, the sound piercing the dark.
“Oh God! Oh God! Doc! I need a doc!”
Welty slid back away from his small rock pile, down into the hole, right into the thickest smoke from the blast. Adams whispered, “You okay?”
“Do your job!”
There was no other response, and Adams was frantic now, turned back, searched the ground in front of him for any sign of movement, still trying to hear through the ringing in his ears, wanted to call out, to ask how bad it was, but there could be no sound. He wasn’t sure how many men had been down in the deeper hole, had pulled one of the wounded down there himself, helped by another man, anonymous in the darkness. Adams tried to breathe, to clear the misery of smoke and burning powder from his lungs, heard the man cry again, softer, could hear a flurry of muffled motion, and now, one more word, a faint, gentle sound.
“Mama …”
No one spoke, a long second, and then a familiar voice, from beyond the low place, the growl Adams knew well: Yablonski.
“We gotta shut him up!”
Welty responded, an angry whisper.
“Shut you up! He’s done!”
Adams looked that way, felt swallowed by the smells from the low ground, the explosives blending with the awful soup of what remained of the men. He knew the deep place had been crowded, the wounded laid together, thought of the men who had tried to help them, no one he knew. He heard more scuffling, a low curse from Welty. Out the other way, along the hillside, Adams heard a soft rustle, and now, a few feet away, a low voice.
“He want mama? You want mama?”
Adams jerked around, nothing,
darkness, but the accent was too clear and he yanked the M-1 that way, groped for the trigger, felt the grenade drop onto him, a dull thunk that jarred his helmet. Adams made a shout, desperate fear, felt the grenade with his hand, flung it out toward the voice, dropped his face to the mud, the blast immediate, close, splinters of steel ripping the soft ground around him, a punch striking his arm. He yelped again, pulled the arm in tightly, heard another cry, could see movement in the darkness, the Japanese soldier stumbling, a noisy stagger, falling away, groaning. Adams felt his heart exploding in his chest, fired the M-1, the flashes blinding him. The clip popped out of the rifle, and he rolled, tried to reach the cartridge belt, realized his arm was burning, sharp pain. His fear turned again to panic and he heard a sharp whisper, close beside him.
“You hit? Get back here!”
Welty was there now, pulling Adams by the pant leg, lower into the hole, and Adams hooked the unhurt arm through the strap of the M-1, grabbed the wound with his free hand, was shaking, the panic unyielding.
“I’m hit! My arm! Jap was right there!”
“Shut up! Get down here.”
Adams let Welty pull him down, hit level ground, his feet sliding hard into another man, no protest.
“Sorry …”
“Shut up. Nobody alive here. Just sit tight. Might have to use the bodies for cover. Some of ’em are fresh. It’ll be different tomorrow.”
The smell of the bodies was overwhelming him, combining with the fear, the sweet sickly smell of blood and insides, a powerful odor of excrement. Adams held the arm tight against him, tried to ease his feet off the body, waves of sickness rolling through him. Welty pulled on his arm, Adams resisting, but relaxing now, Welty wrapping something on the wound, a soft whisper, “Best we can do for bandages. It’s not bad, doesn’t feel like you’re bleeding much. You need morphine?”