And the PT boats chugging all over the place sending up their inevitable smoke screens and making their man-made fog.
Solly sat on the back end of the Duck, looking through the smoke and mist and fog at the backs of the other men, as the Duck ploughed silently through the water along with hundreds of others, kicking up a soapy phosphorescence into the new day that was borning. His face was calm but he was scared shitless and in a way glad of it, because he hoped he wouldn’t mess himself and thereby lose his dignity. Yuk Yuk Yuk and triple Yuk. A destroyer escort went past them almost leaping out of the water as its pompom guns pumped fire toward the beach.
BOMP BOMP BOMP BOMP! BOMP BOMP BOMP BOMP!
Like somebody whipping the side of the widest wooden fence in the world with the biggest inner tube.
And he was scared. He kept thinking that within the next hour or so he would probably be lying on the sandy beach with a hole in his head and dead to the goddamn beautiful WORLD. And for what? The deep fear was that he would die for nothing, like most men did. He would never see his wife again or Mama or Fannie Mae or the baby in Millie’s stomach. And why? He had a right to see his child at least one time in this one life of his. He had a right to hold him in his arms. He had a right to see one more baseball game, he had a right to life and law school and novelist and poet and Fannie Mae and Harlem and success and Coney Island and Harlem Y and Apollo Theater and Dusty Fletcher and Pigmeat Markham and all the rest of it. Break it down to the least damn common denominator, he was plain scared for his own and worthless ass. He had a right to live goddammit! And die of old age, flu, or accident.
He wanted to live and taste the Freedom that the war was being fought for. And see his son grow up in the New World that was coming to him.
His mouth and throat ran wet and dry and cold and hot interchangeably. Crabs clawing at his insides made him need a bowel movement. His chest felt like iron weights were hanging from each nervous hair. Well, goddammit, he wouldn’t mess up his pants, he hoped, and he damn sure wouldn’t break down or up or where the hell it was you broke. I believe in the war—believe in the war. Believe—believe—believe—believe! In close to shore now he saw the palm trees, once undoubtedly handsome and stately, but now they were ragged, scorched and jagged, bent and headless, like victims of a firing squad. Dead men too damn proud to lie down in a sandy grave. Freedomfighters everyone. Anti-fascists all of them.
He thought, with all that stuff they’ve been throwing onto this island since the invasion began, what the hell am I worried about? Nothing could stay on that beach and live after such a bombardment. Not even an anopheles mosquito. Everything was dead and dying and particularly everybody.
Yes, love, the world is waiting for the sunrise, he thought sweetly of the song. Precious darling with our baby. Dear loved ones, the sun may never rise again. Dearly beloveds . . .
“My country, ‘tis of thee . . .
From every mountain top
Let freedom ring . . .”
A piece of water hit his cheek and then another and another. He opened his mouth and tasted the salty water drops and wondered if it were beginning to rain or whether the wind were blowing the water out of the sea. The rain began to come down harder. The sunrise had stopped rising. Day stopped breaking. God was weeping for mankind. Of all the things to happen! The first day everywhere they went they always met the rainy season. He laughed bitterly.
Worm said aloud without looking back, “Now wouldn’t that tickle you grandma’s puz-zerves? Them Mama-hunching foxholes gon be wet as a sonofabitch tonight. Miss Taylor’s baby-boy child ain’t gon have a dry spot to lay his weary head.” Everybody in the Duck laughed like there’d be no tomorrow to laugh again—Solly harder than the rest. Even the little sad-faced Irish soldier who should have gone home on rotation laughed. Solly could have kissed the five-by-five Bookworm. It might be the last time they would ever laugh.
In a Duck nearby he heard the voice of the handsome gray-eyed evil-faced motor sergeant. Greer was singing to the top of his gravelly voice. Even Banks laughed.
“It rained last night
And the night before.
Hope like hell
It don’t rain no more.
Wanna see my baby one more time . . .”
The rain stopped falling as suddenly as it started, just as the Ducks of the 913th hit the beach. The sun began to rise again. The world became alive again and good night sweetheart, till we meet whenever. What a stupid song to think about. And now he felt the ground underneath them even though they were not out of the water yet. It was the first time in his life that terra firma had not felt good to him. Now the water was completely out from under them, leaving them alone on the sandy beach with thousands of soldiers scared to death and stumbling over each other. It was a state of mass confusion and wholesale defecation. The only heartening thing about it was there was no fighting on the beach. The fanatical Japanese had taken down their tents and fled, which made more sense than anybody ever made since Solly came into the Army, or since the last time he talked with Fannie Mae. The Ducks moved nervously across the beach swarming with tenderhearted soldiers. It seemed to Solly that all of them had diarrhea and dysentery. It seemed every other soldier on the beach had his pants below his knees, squatting tentatively and fearfully and poised for flight. Or he was digging him a hole to crap in or he was covering it up or he was pulling down his pants or he was quickly pulling them up again. A panorama of bare backsides of all colors and descriptions. Flat, round, fat, skinny, white, black, pink, brown. Every living with a swinging.
A couple of the Ducks including Solly’s moved to a road and down the road about a hundred and fifty yards, going past thickets of trees and bushes which might be teeming with Japanese for all the silent soldiers knew. They reached a clearing which seemed to be a gun emplacement the Japanese had left behind in a great big hurry. There were about ten or fifteen soldiers, some from the 913; the others were from Anti-Aircraft. They went quietly and nervously to work putting together the giant 90mm. Ack-Ack gun, which was a long slender black cannon that would hurl death miles into the sky. The little fellow who should have gone home on rotation dropped a bolt to the gun’s tripod and it rolled just beyond the edge of the clearing. He went to look for it and he found it and stooped to pick it up and never straightened up again. And he would never go home on rotation or for any other reason. They would never piece him together again unless they did it in the next world that was swiftly coming to him. The explosion picked Solly up from the ground and threw him across the clearing almost to the bushes where other land mines undoubtedly lay quietly waiting for other boobs and boobies. He thought he was dead he thought he was dying he thought he was deaf and he would never hear again. He lay there on the trembling earth with bombs going off inside of his head. He was afraid to move for fear he wouldn’t be able to move. Was he really dead? Maybe an arm was blown away and maybe a leg. He thought he heard other soldiers running gently up the road toward them. Japanese or Americans. He couldn’t care. He had to move, he had to know. He had to move to know to move to know. Was his wet face wet with rain or blood or perspiration? BOOM boom boom boom, the bombs exploded in his head. He had to move. He moved his arms and then his right leg then his left, and then he worried about the Bookworm. He got up and looked around him. The men were stirring now except for a couple of them who would never stir again. Other men from 913 ran off the road with their M-is and their carbines at-the-ready. Two Duck-loads of sandbags came up and the drivers jumped down at-the-ready.
He couldn’t hear what they were saying at first. Finally he realized one of them was saying, “What happened, Sergeant Solly?”
“Booby trap,” he thought he said. He couldn’t be sure. He couldn’t hear his own voice clearly.
He helped the Bookworm to his feet and the other men were coming to, excepting those two who lay over near where the bolt was lost. They lay so still and quiet black and white among the green growth of the bushes. They lay so quietly f
or Freedom. A few more Ack-Ack men came up, and the fresh men of the 913 pitched in, and they shakily continued to put the gun in place, and they surrounded the gun with walls of sandbags.
When they got back to the beach the sun was up and day had broken pretty for the people, and the seventh wave was coming in. Soldiers everywhere B.M.ing and covering it up like proud and shamefaced alley cats. The guns had almost ceased firing offshore and it was a quiet peaceful morning, like Sunday in a Jersey meadow. Soldiers eating and B.M.ing, putting it in and putting it out. “If Mama could see her brave boy now,” the Bookworm said to Solly with his pants flopped down around his ankles. Worm looked so comfortable and sweet and angelic with the kindly sunlight shining warmly on his bare backside. The sun a great big ball of burning ice.
It was at this very moment when—in the words of the great authority on Army Regulations, Private Joseph Bookworm Taylor—it was at this very moment that “the shit did hit the natural fan.”
SHOOOOSH SHOOOSH SHOOOSH—SHOOSH SHOOSHSHOOSH-SHOOSH—SHOOOOOOOOOSH-BOOOOOM! SHOOSH-SHOOSH-SHOOSH-SHOOSH—BOOOM! It sounded like somebody rattling shutters to wake up the world. Heads, arms, legs, torsos, ears, scattered all over the beach. At the first shooshing sound Solly hit the ground and then the explosion and eruption made the earth throw him up and knock him around. He scrambled around on hands and knees like the rest of them were doing, looking for a place to hide, but there was no hiding place. At first he thought, when he could think, our own Navy is firing on us. But when the shooshing sounds and the boom-boom-booms continued up and down the beach, he realized that the Japanese were throwing the stuff down on them from the hills where they had taken refuge during the before-day bombardment.
And through it all he thought he heard the voice of Billy Banks. Does it make sense? Does it make sense? Does it make any sense at all?
And the waves of men kept coming in onto the beach and some were washed back out to sea with the ebbing of the tide.
SHOOSH SHOOSH SHOOSH SHOOSH BOOM
SHOOSH SHOOSH SHOOSH SHOOSH BOOM BOOM BOOM!
There was nothing to do but to lay on the beach and wet your pants and wait for death to take you kindly out of this madness. And hope that those honored dead would not have died in vain. He started to laugh. He was a long long ways from Gettysburg.
And then it was SCHOOM SCHOOM SCHOOM SCHOOM WHEEEEREE—REEE—BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM! AS the guns from the bay started talking again and this time for the hills to listen.
Right smack down in the middle of thunder and lightning and Judgment Day, all you could do is lay on the beach and get right with God and hope you didn’t crap in your pants, for dignity’s sake.
Solly pushed his body up a few inches and looked around him. Bodies were lying all over the place, whole ones and halves and in-betweens and blood everywhere. The beach was changing its pretty complexion from white to rosy red. The edge of the sea was red with blood like his Mama cleaning chicken in the kitchen sink. He didn’t see Worm or Lanky or any of his buddies. He lay flat on his face again like he was in love with Mother Earth. An exhibitionist. Through all the noise, which was now one great big deafening roar, always building, never ending, he thought he heard somebody calling his name. Maybe he was asleep and dreaming.
He heard Sergeant Greer calling. He raised up and turned toward him. The motor sergeant was flat on his belly about a hundred and twenty feet away, wearing a big fat evil grin. The sweetest smile he ever wore. “Hey, Sergeant Crute, can I get me a week-end pass tonight? I needs me some poontang, me.”
Solly turned away and started to laugh in the midst of raging hell and couldn’t stop laughing. His eyes began to fill and he felt the laughter cramping his stomach and oozing through his entire body, he couldn’t stop laughing, his stomach ached, and his eyes ran water, but he couldn’t stop laughing—and—
SHOOSH SHOOSH SHOOSH SHOOSH BOOM!
After the earth stopped shaking him, he looked for the evil-grinning sergeant, but all he saw was a cloud of sand and a crater in the sandy earth where the sergeant lay a moment earlier. And he had had his last poontang.
They lay there off and on all day long between the two death-dealers, amidst the dead and dying and the mutilated. Solly and Worm and Baby-Face went back and forth into the jungle and helped to put up five more Ack-Ack guns and came back to the beach to die a million times per minute.
They built themselves little shallow trenches to squat in and wait for death.
The guns offshore had stopped firing again, because the infantry had gone to the hills to carry the battle to the treacherous enemy, who would not come out and fight them fair and square. And by dark the guns from the hills had quieted down, and on the crimson beach things were peaceful for the moment. Solly and Worm and Lincoln and Baby-Face and Quiet Man sat chatting and snacking like they were back home at Coney Island. The only sounds were that of the monotonous waves lapping and licking the edge of the island. The men told jokes and sometimes laughed, but they could not drown out the muted sounds of the dying and moaning and the groaning all over everywhere. It seemed that all of the medics were stumbling drunk and you couldn’t blame them either. It was one of the roughest jobs on a beachhead—tending to the maimed and the dying and the hopeless and the helpless, and always up to your elbows in blood. But Worm said nevertheless, “They sure do have a drinking good time. And they don’t shit in their pants either and if they do they don’t know the difference.”
Solly thought he wished he was with the infantry. At least they were doing something—not just sitting on their backsides in little shallow graves awaiting death’s convenience.
The gunfire in the hills was one continuous symphony all night long played by Thompson guns and carbines and M-IS and 50-calibers and 20mm’s and hand grenades and flamethrowers, a symphony of sad songs played by amateur musicians. Solly lay in the sand and closed his eyes and wrote his great American novel about the grand and glorious war. Played by boys who should be home playing baseball playing handball playing with themselves, smelling their pee and standing on the corner and looking at the girls with the long legs and pretty ankles and ripe tits, killing time instead of people, going to law school and to dances and to work and libraries and opportunity and planetariums and career and talking about the girls and imagining the girls and going to bed and having wet dreams instead of shamelessly wetting their pants in a nightmare staged in Hell and which went on and on and on and never ended.
He vaguely heard a voice reach into his inner consciousness. “Sergeant Saunders, we have to help the—”
“Help who?” Solly said angrily and sleepily.
He opened his eyes into the face of the motor officer. Lieutenant Graham was drunker than a medic on an early-morning beachhead. He was drunk and open-pored and his eyes were rimmed with crimson. He leaned toward Solly and almost fell on top of him. His face was rosy-red with alcohol and terror. “We have to round up some of the men and help the medics take the wounded out to the hospital ship in our Ducks.”
Solly got up and looked around him. Lincoln and the Worm got up. And Quiet-Man Larker. The symphony still went on and on up in the bleeding hills.
Lieutenant Graham said, “You round ‘em up, Sergeant, and meet me right back here, unshtand?” He leaned on Solly heavily and confidentially. “I’m not cracking up, Sergeant, I just had a few cocktails, and I don’t mean Molotov. But I’m calm, cool, klected.”
Solly rounded up some of the men, and they along with the medics began to round up those who would never be men again. Of course they only took the wounded. They left the dead for later consideration and the Graves Registration boys. Like the handsome blond head they saw lying on the sand without a body, with the deep blue pleading eyes staring up to where the stars lived as if they were watching his own soul ascending to the Hereafter. Like Sergeant Greer, who was nothing but a dog tag now, and like the Irish Ack-Ack soldier. Their first interest must necessarily have to be with the living, since they were a humanitarian Army, which no one would
say for the sneaky hordes of barbarians who were the goddamn enemy. There was the blue-eyed black-haired soldier who would never walk again, not even hobble, he had nothing but patriotic stumps which once were legs, and his blood was very very red. They were red-blooded All Americans. And a colored chap named Jackson of the Third Platoon of the valiant 913th, the right side of his face caved in, and he would never wink his right eye at a girl again the way he used to do back home in Peekskill. He told Solly, “That’s all right, buddy boy. I’m fine.” His right eye had been pushed all the way into his face so that it was level with his ears. Solly took him by the shoulders and tried to keep from looking him in the face. And tried to keep from crying. Jackson’s right eye seemed to have an existence all its own and stared sorrowfully at Solly as he helped him onto the litter. He said, “That’s all right, Sergeant Solly. It ain’t no fault of yours.” Jackson’s blood was the same color of the other soldier’s. Blood-red and red blood. All American. His big black face was masked with blood. There were men whose arms hung on only by the bleeding skin of them. One soldier’s leg was blown off all the way to his crotch and including his urinator. The poor vain handsome bastard kept yelling, “Shoot me! Kill me, you hardhearted sonsabitches! You’d even have more mercy on a horse in my condition!” He begged Solly. “Please, Sergeant, please, blow my brains out!” He tried to hide his privates which he did not have to hide, and then he started to beat himself in the face with his fists till he was out of breath, but it did him no good. They were determined to save his life, for country, wife, and family and the Articles of War. You couldn’t blame them. Solly understood the situation. In the American Army, life was very very precious. He worked with the detail three or four hours and vomited four or five times per hour, till there was nothing else to vomit and he began to vomit blood, which was messy pinkish blood and not as red as the blood that spilled all over the beach. When he was dry of vomit his face filled up and the tears flowed unashamedly. He was too damn chickenhearted.
And Then We Heard the Thunder Page 36