01 The Big Blowdown

by George Pelecanos

  This rifle sight’s a little low, thought Karras. He raised it up an inch.

  Slocum, who had a mother, made choking sounds as he began to drown from the fluid filling his lungs. Did the man in the coconut palm have a mother? Slocum, who had spiky blond hair and rounded his vowels in a funny kind of way when he spoke, had a mother for sure. Slocum had described her in detail to Peter Karras, just the night before.

  Karras squeezed the trigger on his M-1. The man in the coconut palm, who was no longer a man, fell to the ground and bounced one time.

  Chapter 6

  Peter Karras always said that he chose the Marine Corps before the Army could choose him, and though he came to say it in a joking manner, he spoke the truth. His best friend Joe Recevo had gone to the Army early in the draft—Karras had listened to Recevo grouse about it all the way—and Billy Nicodemus had been shipped off to Europe in 1943. His other friends fared better: Jimmy Boyle managed to pull a Four-F on account of his bum ear, and Perry Angelos, who had completed his degree at Catholic University, drew desk duty with the Army Corps of Engineers. Karras was the last one left uncontacted, and knew that his time was near. He wanted only to have a choice; Karras feared naval duty over anything, especially feared the prospect of facing death within the confines and close quarters of a ship. And the idea of being a dogfaced grunt, regular infantry in the U.S. Army, did not appeal to him in the least. After all, he had been told throughout his life that he was a Spartan, believed the warrior implications that went with the tag, and simply felt that the Army was not in any way the equal of the Corps. There was also the element of living up to a certain image in his father’s eye. Karras’s mother had tried to keep him from the service with a phony Greek birth certificate that she had used for other purposes on several occasions, but Karras would not be one of the men who walked the streets of Washington without a uniform, men who were frankly considered less than men by most of the women around town. So he did not wait. He enlisted in the Marine Corps, and tuned out his mother’s anguished cries, and endured the unreadable, watery-eyed stare of his father. He was twenty-two years of age, and off to war.

  After twelve weeks of basic training at Parris Island, Karras returned to D.C. on a ten-day furlough, fifteen pounds heavier, all of it muscle, with a new, handsome hardness to his tanned face. On the first night home, he had dinner with his parents—his mother had prepared a lamb—and then met some friends at a pool hall and beer garden at 5th and G. The next day he rang up a girl named Eleni Triandokidis, the younger sister of a friend from Central High whom he had had an eye on for some time. On those rare occasions when Karras had found the privacy to masturbate while at boot camp, it had been Eleni to whose image he had returned most.

  She was a shapely brunette with thick ankles and rather large calves for a girl her age—Eleni was seventeen when Karras first courted her—and a nose that crinkled when she smiled. Eleni’s people were from the Peleponese, not Sparta, so Karras’s parents would not have approved. Peter Karras would not have taken their advice in any case, as after their first date, dining under the stars on the patio at the Roma on Connecticut Avenue, he convinced himself that he had fallen for her, that he maybe even loved her in some detached, dispassionate way. What he loved, of course, was the image of being with her, to taste the salt of sweat on her breasts and lie between her muscled thighs. Karras had his way with her the night before he shipped back out, in the basement of her parents’ house off Kansas Avenue in Northwest, his hand over her mouth at the end to keep her from waking the old man. There was the mumbled promise of an unofficial engagement before he went out her door for the long walk home.

  Back on Parris Island, he was recommended for and accepted the position of DI, a favorable situation on the surface in that it kept him in the States. But he soon found that he was working seven days a week and pulling extra shifts for a sergeant who was often out drinking beer. After thirty days of that, and with the vague desire to test himself in some unforeseen way, he requested and was granted overseas duty. He shipped out to Norfolk, then to Hawaii, where on the island of Kauai he found himself training in an artillery outfit that specialized in 55-millimeter guns.

  After zigzagging across the Pacific for almost two months, he landed in Guam and was told that his outfit would continue to train. Somehow Karras managed to get on the wrong side of a Sergeant Skinner, a real SOB from the old school, so Karras pulled a three-month duty repairing belly stoves. But the tedium was relieved by rugby games on a stone-filled field, and the assemblage of a crack baseball team, on which he played catcher. Eventually, he and his unbeaten teammates were flown to Saipan, where they played opposite Cecil Travis, the Senators’ shortstop who was on an island-hopping tour designed to boost troop morale. Beating Travis and his boys was the highlight of Karras’s tour of duty; it made him wish he could see his friend Billy Nicodemus, who loved baseball as much as life. He had not heard from Billy in more than a year.

  On returning to Guam, the outfit threw what had become their weekly party, in which the six members of each tent pooled and drank their beer rations in one night. As the night progressed, the humor grew crueler and there was at least one fight. A private from Kentucky named Valin, who went on incessantly about his Louisville fiancee, was encouraged to drink more than the rest, the idea being that a passed-out man could not talk. The atmosphere was meaner than usual that night, as there was a feeling among the men, a feeling fueled by strong and repeated rumor, that they were to be shipped out for combat very soon. Valin did not pass out, kept on bragging about his girl, and late in the party a couple of guys in the outfit held him down while another poured Listerine down his throat. He vomited immediately and fell flat on his stomach into a deep sleep. Then someone pulled Valin’s pants down around his ankles, and another fellow crouched behind him, and a third brought out a camera, and from just the right angle took phony bugger pictures to the laughter of the remaining men. The photographs were sent to Valin’s fiancee the next morning. Karras did not participate, but did not move to stop them. This episode was not mentioned again, not even that afternoon when they had sobered up. And it was not mentioned three weeks to that day, when a Japanese shell cut Grayson Valin clean in half.

  The night after the beer party, Karras, who felt the need to get away from the men in his outfit, hopped a ride on the back of a supply truck to a division two miles down the road, where a movie was set to be shown in the main tent. The schedule called for a Rita Hayworth picture, but it turned out to be an Abbott and Costello, which drew boos initially and then uninterrupted laughter once the projector rolled.

  After the show, Karras stood outside the tent and lighted a cigarette. He heard a voice that sounded familiar in tone and accent.

  “Hey, Marine,” said the voice.

  Karras turned. The voice belonged to a fellow named Tommy Rados, a Washingtonian with an easy style, a great dancer and storyteller who was well liked in the Greek community by both men and women.

  “Tommy,” said Karras. “How you doin’, chum?”

  “Real good,” said Rados, who shifted his shoulders and smiled.

  “Seen any action yet?”

  “Uh-uh. You?”

  “We’re fixin’ to, I think,” said Karras.

  Rados hummed a few bars of a popular tune, kicked some dirt at his feet. “Say, I’ve got an army buddy in the infantry, made it off Guadalcanal. He wrote a letter to me, mentioned a local boy in his outfit, guy named Recevo. Didn’t you used to pal around with a fellow named Recevo?”

  “Joe Recevo, yeah. Why, he’s all right, isn’t he?”

  “Far as I know. ‘Course, the letter’s kinda old now.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Karras, who pitched his cigarette out into the night.

  “Yeah,” said Rados, with a reassuring smile. “Well, I gotta get back. Stay safe, Pete.”

  “You too. Tommy. See you in D.C., hear?”

  Karras liked Rados, thought he was a good Joe. Five years later, when he saw Tom
my Rados cutting it on the dance floor at the Casino Royal back in town, he felt glad to know that Rados had made it through.

  Karras walked back down the road through the thick starless night. The next morning, he shipped out for Leyte, one of the Visayan Islands in the Philippines, somewhere between Samar and Mindanao. It was late October 1944.

  Though the landing met little resistance, the fear level was as high as it would get for the men and boys, who for the most part were facing combat for the first time. Going in, there was talk and some derisive laughter over MacArthur’s wade in the surf at Red Beach near Tacloban, the true story having gotten around of the famous image being staged. But any laughter during the landing was short and forced, as each man sweated tightly through his own thoughts. Next to Karras on the boat a fellow named Begonia tried to expel gas but instead shit his pants; Karras breathed sparingly, wanting only to get away from the cramped quarters of the LCI.

  Once past the beach, they hiked into the jungle, dense with large-leafed vegetation and palms. Despite the shelter of the jungle’s green roof, or because of it, the air felt stiflingly damp and hot. The men soon found that there was no place on Leyte to escape the heat, or the rains that came every day. Karras, who had only been out of the city a couple of times in his life, preferred to be away from the jungle, under the open blue of the sky.

  They settled in a clearing near a river, a position that they were assured was three miles in front of enemy lines. Machete-wielding Filipinos had done a fair job of scouting the area and freeing it of brush and debris. The men dug their foxholes individually and then collectively cut an L-trench to their 55-millimeter gun. Karras had been named gun captain on Guam.

  Sniper fire commenced almost immediately, and the unit was mortared with frequency each day. Soon it became clear that the Japanese were closer than at first anticipated; in fact, their lines were only a couple of thousand yards away.

  Three days after they arrived on Leyte, Karras made his first kill, a sniper who had chest-shot a private named Slocum from Apple Valley, Minnesota. Eventually each U.S. soldier killed his first Japanese. Thereafter they ceased to ponder the morality of the act.

  As gun captain, Karras felt responsible when a worn breech was discovered in the 55-millimeter gun. A breech from a 155-millimeter Army howitzer, located across the river, was found to be available, but the bridge over the river had been blown by the American army itself to prevent the Japanese from following their path. Karras volunteered, along with two other men, to swim the hundred-odd yards across the river and return with the needed breech. The three of them left that night. One of the men got lucky, contracted elephantiasis after swallowing a mouthful of water, and from that earned a ticket back to the States. Karras did not get sick, and was awarded the first of several medals that he would receive in the course of the war. He would remain most proud of the medal for the swim across the river, which required bravery along with physical endurance and skill. The other medals he received were for killing men.

  Despite the K rations and a nagging, fragile stomach which persisted during his Philippine tour, Karras grew stronger and gained more bulk. Daily he lifted the ninety-nine-pound shells, gunpowder canister, and detonator into the tube of the gun. As his strength increased, so did his confidence. Karras had by now seen every kind of combat. He had seen the deaths of many of the men he trained with, some of them friends, some not; as yet, Peter Karras had not received so much as a scratch. But he was still afraid. All of them were still afraid.

  Since snipers were everywhere, it was unwise to move around, and foolish to smoke. When Karras wasn’t on the gun, he was down in his foxhole, sitting in the water that would rise from the earth after the daily rain. On patrol in the jungle, his unit would meet the enemy face to face, where they would either kill in the most unthinking way, or die. Karras fought hand to hand, taking the life of more than one man like that, looking into their eyes, sometimes filled with fear and sometimes showing nothing at all. He stabbed them and shot them at close range, and beat them to death in their narrow, jaundiced heads with the butt of his M-1. They were the toughest men he had known or would ever know. And while he began to respect them, he hated them, had to hate them so he would not hesitate to do what he had to or think about what he had done.

  In those times in the jungle, he fought without a bayonet. He had seen a friend die, his bayonet stuck in a man he had just killed, frantically trying to pull it out as a Japanese soldier shot him in the back of the head. So Karras used his father’s Bowie knife instead. He used it until he left it in a man who had come into his foxhole with him one black night. Karras had seen him crawling towards him, and he had called for the man to identify himself. The man did not answer, and Karras, without deliberation, buried the knife in the man’s throat. Karras crawled to another foxhole, and in the morning did not go back for the knife. He never knew or cared to know if the man had been American or Japanese.

  By late November, it became obvious that the Philippine campaign, predicted as an easy mop-up by MacArthur, was becoming far more costly, bloody, and protracted than anyone had imagined. It was said that the Japanese lieutenant general had abandoned the island to twenty thousand of his own troops, and now the soldiers—sick, starving, resigned to their fates, and living on sea salt and plants—were ready to die in the only way they understood.

  December came, and the shelling and sniper fire increased along with the nerve-fraying shouts and taunts from within the jungle. Peter Karras sat in the rain of his foxhole, his M-1 across his lap, his eyes heavy-lidded and hard. He knew, they all knew, that the Japanese had encircled their division. He sat there, trying to recall the smell of his mother’s soup, thinking of Eleni Triandokidis and her warm, wet pussy, the thought of Eleni naked hardening his cock. The only thing to do now was think about things like that, things that made him feel good and made him forget. Think about things, and wait.

  Chapter 7

  Peter Karras heard the flutter of the first mortar shell leaving its tube in the middle of the afternoon rain. He had come to duck at the sound of it, the sound like the flap of pigeon wings, dirty gray birds lifting off F Street on Saturday afternoons. The shell and then another exploded nearby. Karras balled up until his cheek touched the water that had risen in his foxhole. He felt mud and dirt shower down heavily on his helmet, heard rifle fire and a boy named Maxson scream. Nearby, the radio man, Rubino from Illinois, called in their position and advised that they were under attack.

  Karras laid his M-1 outside the foxhole, caught the warm spark of a round on his hand as a bullet glanced off the stock of his weapon. He mumbled something to himself, raised his head slowly so that his eyes cleared the edge of the hole. The Japanese were coming out of the jungle, through the sword grass, and into the clearing in numbers.

  From a foxhole up ahead a machine gun chattered, spent shells arcing lazily amidst a widening cloud of smoke. That would be Harper. Harper, from Cuyahoga River country in Ohio, laying rounds into the clearing towards the torsos of the charging Japanese.

  Karras got a khaki-mustard uniform in his gunsights and squeezed off a round. The man threw his weapon to the side, arched his back, and waved his hands dreamily as he drifted down into the mud.

  “My arm!” yelled Maxson. “God…damn you, you bastards. My arm…

  The sickening flutter of a mortar launch cut the air. Karras had the strange and sure feeling that this one had his name on it—his mortar shell, he knew. He rolled out of his foxhole, the mortar exploding somewhere behind him, sending a violent eruption of water and mud into the sky. A wall of air pushed heavily at his back.

  Karras had left his M-1 in the hole. He stood, moved a few steps forward, drunk with confusion. Then he looked down. His sergeant, a man named Shelby, lay dead in the mud. Karras bent forward and wrenched Shelby’s .45 from his hand.

  Karras heard a scream and turned. A Japanese officer, waving his sword, his rotten teeth bared, eager to leave his world and in love with death, ra
n straight toward him with a caterwauling howl. Karras fired the .45, emptied it, dropped the man several feet short of his mark. Some pieces flew away from the officer’s head as he was blown back off his feet.

  I’m not going to die today. Today is not my day to die.

  Maxson had crawled from his foxhole, in shock now or dead, not moving at all. A jagged piece of bone jutted out from a frayed sleeve, black with blood, where his right arm had been. Karras moved past Maxson, looked up toward the buzz of an engine and the whir of props. Two B-25s rose over the hills and descended into the valley, flying above the coconut palms. Black bombs dropped from beneath the planes, the bombs tottering as they fell. The edge of the jungle erupted in sudden flame. Then the planes strafed the clearing as they passed overhead. Men dove for cover, were shot, or fell to their stomachs shaking, all of them illuminated from the bomb flames that rose like torches in the gray afternoon light. Karras dropped the spent .45 from his hand and ran.

  He leaped into a foxhole where Harper sat hunched over his machine gun. Karras put his boot to Harper’s side, pushed him away. A clean, black star sat square in the middle of Harper’s forehead. Below his useless helmet, the back of Harper’s head was pulp.

  Not today. I’m not going to die today. Goddamnit, man, look at me. Look at me! I haven’t even got a scratch.

  Karras laughed.

  The bombing had been like setting fire to a beehive. Karras could hear the rest of them coming out of the trees now, running across the field. The Japanese were shooting into foxholes as they ran, then jumping in, thrusting with their bayonets.

  Karras put his hand out of the hole, pulled the machine gun in with him. He took the feed belt from the cartridge box, unraveled it, and draped the belt back over his shoulder. Within the confines of the foxhole, it was very hot. He wanted to be out. In the hole, he found it hard to breathe.