by Homer Hickam
Bonnyman shrugged. “These marines have had enough. They’re ready to get this thing over with.”
Josh could feel his blood rising. “I am, too. I’ll go with you.” Bonnyman stared. “Hell, Captain, you don’t even have a sidearm!”
“I won’t lack for a weapon,” Josh answered, knowing there would be plenty to pick up along the way.
Bonnyman shrugged, then turned to his marines. “Gents, y’all ready to go?”
The marines nodded, their eyes hooded and determined beneath their steel helmets. Bonnyman looked at Josh—their eyes met for a long second—and then the supply officer said with a smile, “OK. Let’s go.”
And, just like that, they all went. Bonnyman’s Forlorn Hope was on its way with every man in the assault running as hard as he could at the sand fort. The Japanese saw them coming and cut loose with all they had. Bullets blew by, grenades exploded, and some of the running marines grunted and fell. One of the men carrying a flamethrower sprawled into the sand, then got up and kept going, dragging a mangled foot. Josh put a hand under the man’s arm and helped him along. The noise of rattling machine guns, whistling bullets, and exploding grenades and mortar shells was hideous, nearly paralyzing, but Josh kept dragging the marine with the flamethrower with him.
Bonnyman and three marines were the first to arrive at the base of the fort. They began tossing grenades as if they were baseball pitchers warming up. Two Japanese machine-gun emplacements blew up, sending pieces of the guns and chunks of flesh and flying sand raining down on the attackers. Josh and the marine with the flamethrower reached the base of the pyramid, and Bonnyman motioned them to get to work. The marine, gritting his teeth against the pain of his bloody foot, worked the device, and fiery yellow and red flames blossomed from the nozzle. “Put it right there!” Bonnyman yelled, pointing toward the top, and the marine did as he was told, and a roaring, orange liquid fire tunneled through the air with a horrible growl like a demented beast. The Japanese machine gunners on top of the fort were transformed into screaming, flailing torches.
Marines followed the arc of fire, racing up the slope of the fort. The Japanese defenders were screaming, shooting, slipping in the sand, and dying. Josh saw that Bonnyman had somehow come up with a satchel charge, tossing it over the top. A huge, shattering blast followed, and Bonnyman raced up through the sand with Josh close behind. They fell down together and looked to see the result of the explosion. The backside of the slope was covered with dead Japanese.
Josh looked at Bonnyman. “Well, Sandy, I think you’ve pulled it off.” “You think so?” Bonnyman asked, then died when a bullet slapped through his helmet and pierced his skull.
Josh wasn’t aware that Bonnyman had been hit. He clapped the man on his back. “You’re one hell of a marine. It’s been a privilege and an honor.”
Then Josh noticed Bonnyman was dead, and it was as if a plug were suddenly pulled from his body, releasing the last energy he had. He rolled over on his back and rested his head on the hot sand and looked up into the clear blue sky. The terrible noise of the assault faded, and all Josh could hear was his own ragged breathing. He noticed there was some sort of creature flying over him, and then he saw it was but a pelican. Strangely, though, it was looking down at him with interest, and to his astonishment, Josh recognized the bird. Its name was Purdy and Josh had last seen it on Killakeet Island of the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Josh’s grandfather had told stories of Purdy and said his grandfather had done the same. Purdy was so old, he had surely been there in the Cretaceous and maybe before. Now here he was on this terrible, mangled atoll, against all reason. “You old, old thing,” Josh said, breathing quietly, watching with fascination as the pelican continued his infinite circles. “Why did you let this happen?”
Purdy, if it was Purdy, ignored Josh’s question. Instead, he gained altitude, his mottled wings stretched against the wind, and before long he’d vanished and the noise of the battle came back and Josh found Ready lying beside him, looking concerned. “Skipper, you all right? The marines are going inside the bunker, sir.”
“Then we’d best help them,” Josh said and drew his K-bar from its scab-bard with terrible resolve.
Ready looked at the big knife. “You don’t have to, sir,” he said in as gentle a tone as the awful noise of the battle would allow. “The marines, they’ve got it under control now.”
Josh wiped the sweat from his eyes. “I saw Purdy,” he said, blinking furiously.
Ready’s expression was dubious, which Josh thought impertinent. “Purdy, sir? The pelican? We’re an awful long way from Killakeet, sir.”
“You can make that into a song, boy,” Josh said, then stood up and walked down the hill of sand, each step reminding him of the great dunes of Killakeet and how he’d loved to play on them as a boy, running up, then running down, sinking in up to his knees, turning and climbing them again. A smile formed on his otherwise grim lips that seemed hideous under the circumstances. At the bottom of the fort, he heard sounds of struggle and screams coming from within. “Perhaps I might yet get in on the fun,” he said and was quite surprised to hear himself say it. Then he noticed that he was burning up. “I wonder why I’m so hot?” he asked himself.
“Oh, sir, just stop,” Ready cried, taking Josh’s arm and turning him around. “Let the others do it. You’ve done so much already!”
Josh pulled away. “A man’s work is never done, not on this atoll,” he said in as odd a tone as Ready had ever heard his skipper use. His words were cheerful, yet filled with menace. Then Ready saw the copious sweat of fever break out, streaking down Josh’s bearded cheeks to drip off his chin.
“The fever’s on you, sir,” he warned.
“Not to worry. It’s an old friend,” Josh replied, then pulled away and turned at the corner of stacked sandbags that led to the crooked entrance of the fort. He caught the scent of coppery sweat and foul breath that always seemed to accompany terrified and dying men. Marines, bayonets fixed, brushed past him, and he heard shrieks as Japanese defenders rose to meet them. “Now it all begins,” he said and once more surprised himself with his own words. For was this not an ending rather than a beginning? How odd it is that sometimes a person knows more than he knows. He promised himself to think more on that, presuming he survived the next few minutes, which he sincerely doubted, though he didn’t much care. Fever was odd that way.
It was dark inside the bunker, the room barely lit by light from the doorway, and it took a moment for Josh’s eyes to adjust. Yet he easily dispatched a small Japanese marine who grappled with him briefly, then fell beneath a swipe of Josh’s razor-sharp knife. Then Josh turned to meet a Japanese officer who was holding his sword like a lance and running straight at him. Before Josh could react, his shoulder was grabbed by a huge, powerful hand and he was shoved aside.
There was a grunt, a scream, and then Josh saw what appeared to be a native man, wearing but a lava-lava wrapped around his waist. He was doubled over the little Japanese officer’s sword, which was stuck solidly into his stomach. The officer was shrieking at the top of his lungs, but Josh bashed him into silence with a big fist, then flung him aside. The native man, with terrible resolve, pulled the sword from his flesh and then fell to his knees.
Someone had brought a flashlight. It cut across the darkness and swept across the brown, tattooed man, who was looking up at Josh with a remarkably calm expression. The light also caught the awful wound in his stomach, the blood flowing from it like a scarlet river. Josh lifted the man, took his considerable weight, and half-carried him through dozens of churning individual battles until he had him outside in the sunlight where he laid him down. Josh saw better now the tattoos on the man’s chest, blue and intricate, and the necklace of shells and shark’s teeth around his neck. “Thank you,” Josh said and then yelled for a corpsman and for Ready.
No corpsman came, nor did Ready. Bullets smacked into the sand beside Josh and the dying man, throwing up little puffs of grit. Josh pressed his hands
on the terrible stomach wound in a vain attempt to staunch the bleeding. “Thank you,” Josh said again, then put his ear close to the man’s mouth and heard him say, “You are very welcome, my brother.”
Josh impulsively took the man’s hands into his. “Why did you do it?”
Before the man could answer, if he had an answer, he shivered once as if a cool breeze had washed over him, even in the terrible heat, and died. Josh stared at the new corpse. It had the handsome, fit, calm, confident look of a sleeping athlete. Josh, to his great astonishment, began to cry, thick tears making tributaries down his face through the grime of battle and the fresh sweat that was draining out of his every pore.
Then Josh sensed a presence, completely silent but somehow announced as if by trumpets and fluttering pennants. He looked up and discovered he was nearly falling into the eyes, the lagoon-blue eyes, of a freckle-faced girl dressed in a white robe with a white cap with white wings, folded like those of a dove, alongside her cherubic, pink-cheeked face. Around her neck, she wore a silver medallion, and engraved on it was a heart and a cross. Holding the medallion in her hands, the girl knelt beside the dead man. She looked at Josh for a long second, and then she said in a voice tinged with an Irish lilt that was as pure as milk and soft as whipped butter yet heard clearly over the whine and shatter of battle as if it were the only sound there was then or ever in all infinity: “On this day, ye will be with yer Savior.”
Her words startled Josh, and he felt a sudden fear, but then he realized she was not speaking to him but to the young native man who was lying with the dignity of the dead. “Who was he?” Josh choked.
“His name was Tomoru. He was always very brave.”
“He died to save my life.”
“As Christ did,” she replied.
Josh’s mind was filled with turmoil. “But why would anyone die for me?” he asked in a plaintive voice that rang up and down his life.
“Because God is love, my dear,” she answered beneath flying bullets, “and He is with us, even here.”
“There is no God on this island!” Josh protested.
“Yer wrong,” she answered. “He is everywhere.”
“Then he is not a good God,” Josh argued above the hideous screaming still coming from the sand bunker. “He is a stinking, ugly evil God.”
“Nay, nay,” she insisted as a bullet smacked into the side of the already dead man. She reached for the new wound and covered it with her hand. Blood oozed between her fingers. “God is peace. God is life.”
Josh was very hot, so hot he thought his brain might boil and explode. I have fever, he told himself, and I must drink water, cool down, or die. Yet he could not tear his eyes from the woman, nor stop the debate. “God is war,” he pronounced over the roar of a flamethrower and more screams. “God is death. He says so Himself in His awful Bible.”
“God loves especially the sinner,” she replied as a tracer flew a half inch past her ear. She did not flinch. “So He loves ye most of all. And me,” she added mysteriously.
“You must lie down,” he said, suddenly solicitous. “You’ll be hit.”
“Not today,” she answered. “God is saving me for what I must do.”
Josh could take a bullet, and shrapnel could rend his flesh, but such certainty of the supernatural before terrible reality was more than he could bear. “Get down!” he shouted at her as a marine gasped nearby and fell heavily across the legs of the dead native man.
“Don’t be afraid,” she answered while wicked bullets flitted past her like hornets. “God will protect you.”
Now a horrible realization sank in. The girl was not human. She was an angel, or worse. “Go away,” Josh told the apparition as she reached toward the dead marine and made the sign of the cross. “Be gone, I say!”
But the apparition did not go away. Instead, she gently peeled the dead man’s bloody hands from Josh, hands that he didn’t even realize he still clutched. Her lips moved in silent prayer, and then she folded the man’s arms on his chest and leaned over and kissed him on his forehead, his nose, and his cheeks. Then she sat up and looked at Josh with a terrible sorrow that seemed to encompass all the world.
This was more than Josh could take. He stood and compulsively brushed the sand off his trousers while she looked up at him with her luminous eyes filled with love and goodness and all the things Josh couldn’t abide, not on this stinking atoll. “Shall we pray?” she asked. “I shall do my best to comfort ye, absent a priest.”
“I don’t need comfort,” Josh mumbled and backed away from her. “I need to get the blood off my K-bar.” It was an odd thing for him to say, and he knew it, but he had said it, so he jabbed the awful knife into the sand, once, twice, and again, then inspected it. “It won’t come off,” he explained, his voice a croak, and then he noticed that his hand holding the knife was shaking so hard he couldn’t control it. He threw the K-bar down and stared at it. Its blade shimmered back at him in the awful, torturous sun.
“Please, rest yourself,” the girl said in velvet tones.
“I don’t need to rest,” Josh said and then, as he always did when he was confused or uncertain or frightened, abruptly made for the sea, walking hurriedly away from the girl or angel or whatever it was and the dead young man who had died for him.
The sweat kept pouring off Josh as he struggled across the sand. He felt as if he were walking through a blast furnace. To his considerable surprise, he came upon Sergeant Pinkerton, the gunny who’d led the charge off the Higgins boat. Pinkerton was sitting on a sand dune, his face white as cream, his lips gray and shriveled, and there was seaweed draped around his shoulders. “I thought you drowned,” Josh told him, and Pinkerton grinned and a speckled eel climbed out of his shirt, waving its toothy head. Pinkerton said, “I did, Captain.”
Josh blinked the drops of perspiration from his eyes and then saw that the brash lieutenant who’d jumped up on the seawall with a rallying cry was sitting under a shattered palm tree. His helmet was still on backward. With an anguished expression around the terrible holes in his face, he looked at Josh. “I’m sorry you were killed so quick,” Josh told him. “Surely you would have won a medal otherwise.”
The lieutenant shrugged and said, “Remember me.”
“I will,” Josh promised and went on, encountering the little Japanese soldier he’d killed when he first arrived on the beach. “You died honorably,” Josh said to him, but after bowing politely, the Imperial marine turned away.
Then Josh saw the Seabee Bill Bordelon and the supply officer Sandy Bonnyman. They were sitting together on a palm log, engaged in a deep conversation. At his approach, they both turned to look at him. “How do, Josh?” Bill greeted, as Sandy smiled even though there was a bullet hole in his head.
“I’m sorry,” Josh told them.
“What about?” Sandy asked.
“Your getting killed and all.”
“It was our time,” Bill replied.
“When is mine?” Josh was moved to ask.
“God knows,” Sandy answered, which Josh took as either an answer or a question.
Josh walked on, past hundreds of sprawled bodies and piles of battlefield debris and smoking craters. He tripped over a dead marine and fell down. He felt as if he were suffocating and tore off his soggy shirt and then kicked off his boots and threw them away in sailing arcs and then also his socks. He stripped off his bloody pants and even his underwear and tossed them all into a crater filled with brown water and three goggle-eyed Japanese corpses who at least had the decency not to say anything.
Naked, Josh kept walking, leaving a pattern of sweat mixed with blood drops behind. He kept mumbling, reminding himself where he was going and why, to immerse himself in the good, clean ocean and rinse away the awful reek of combat and the blood of the young man who’d died for him and the vision of the odd little Irish girl who wore raiments of white. Josh now suspected she was a devil, for it was well known that sometimes devils sneaked onto battlefields. “I should
have killed her,” he said aloud. He looked over his shoulder, fearful that she might be following, but saw he was alone, not counting the dead men, all of whom were watching him.
When he reached the beach, Josh saw a Higgins boat coming through a shattered section of the reef. Then an amtrac shoved past it and rushed ashore, grinding up on the sand. It stopped, and out hopped none other than Colonel Montague Singleton Burr and his staff of two majors, their pistols drawn as if they were the first men ashore. They ran past Josh, then stopped and turned around to gape at him. “My God, Thurlow,” Burr bellowed. “Where are your clothes? Are you drunk? Pull yourself together, man!”
Josh looked at Burr and decided to do the world a favor and kill the bastard right then and there. It wasn’t personal. Not at all. It was just that Burr needed killing, he really did, and now was as good a time to do it as ever there was. Josh felt at his waist for his K-bar, but all he felt was his own bare skin covered with cracked, dried blood. Burr pushed his face close and Josh got a whiff of Brown Mule chewing tobacco, sweet and disgusting. “You’re a disgrace, Thurlow. Get off this beach before I clap you in irons!”
Josh’s throat was dry as dust, but after swallowing several times he managed to strangle out a few tortured words. “Don’t move, Colonel. Stay right there.” He looked around, spied the nearby body of a dead marine, and crouched alongside, searching for a K-bar. When he didn’t find one, he instead took the man’s entrenching tool. Stripping off its canvas cover, he opened the small folding shovel and walked back to Burr, who, no surprise, defensively raised his pistol and aimed it at Josh’s stomach.
It was a shot Burr could not possibly miss with a bullet that would leave a wide tunnel straight through and out Josh’s back. “Don’t make me do this, Thurlow,” Burr warned, while his staff officers watched complacently, apparently not caring what happened next.
Josh raised the shovel and rasped, “Just remember, Montague. Through privation comes triumph and glory! Your words, sir, and the last you’ll ever hear, God damn your soul!”