And Then We Heard the Thunder

by John Oliver Killens

  All through the night all through the next few days the symphony in the hills, the Song of Death, went on and on and almost got monotonous. The 913 were up to their backsides in slit trenches of blood and salty sea and beach and air raids and wind and rain and friendly smiling Filipinos who sometimes turned out to be Japanese soldiers in disguise. It was an uncomfortable business making trip after trip after trip from the beach to the ships out in the bay with the bombs and shrapnel dropping all around you unconcernedly. You could get hurt, you really could get all messed up, as Worm continually complained. But it was better than just sitting on the beach with no place to go with nothing to do but crap your pants and wait for Death. And debate the war’s morality, which, no matter how you looked at it, was academic at the moment. Day and night, the next few days they brought in hundreds and hundreds of infantry and anti-aircraft and engineers and other amphibians, and field artillery, and God-and-Jack knew what others, thousands of them, baby-faced ones and bearded ones and many of them clean-shaven boys scared to death, Negro, Jew, Gentile, Puerto Rican, Filipino, streaming onto the beach and dying on the bloody beach and pushing forward and onward courageously, mostly to the Jam Session in the hills and most of them too scared to think of being frightened. There wasn’t time. There simply positively absolutely wasn’t time. Solly thought, Death was a grim nervous impatient hand-rubbing gleeful sonofabitch.

  The lucky 913 lost only twenty-three men that first very busy week, and after that things weren’t so bad—after the infantry took the battlefront ten-fifteen-twenty miles away. Things weren’t half bad. There were just the pesky air raids which went on and on, night and day and day and night: SHOOOSH-SHOOOSH-SHOOOSH-SHOOOSH SHSHOOSHSHOOOSH BOOMBOOMBOOMBOOM and people got hurt, soldiers and civilians, some got killed, but all this was to be expected. C’est la guerre, as Solly had a way of saying. And everything for Freedom. Of course the men still suffered with the GIs, which was the Army’s affectionate term for the plague of nausea and diarrhea and dysentery rolled into one.

  The 913 set themselves up in a company area right there on Crimson Beach, and they built a latrine, the holy place for dreams and rumors, and a kitchen and foxholes, in which they lived most of the romantic moonlit bomb-dropping South Pacific nights. And they met the Philippine people who came into the company area in multitudes, they were always all over the place, and especially where the food was. They acted like they thought the beach belonged to them. But they were friendly for the most part—those who were not Japanese. You never knew. You never ever really knew.

  And they met Rosita, who adopted them immediately. Beautiful Rosita. Skinny sweet-faced brownly sugared sloe-eyed Rosita with the heartbreaking smile. Six or seven years old and homeless and hungry and parentless and grandparentless and everythingless. “Americanos drop great big bomb go booom! And everybody dead dead dead!” Solly asked her, “How can you love us, little baby? How can you even smile for us? Why don’t you spit on us as we deserve?” She stared at him and smiled. She was the mascot of the 913. Every time he saw her he thought his heart would break in two. How in the hell could this be right? How could this be a better world? Was the entire war a fake? Was he the biggest fake of all? With his frigging I and E? Teaching what he couldn’t believe?

  The men gave Rosita blankets and clothing, much of which she gave to others, and General Grant made drawers for her, cutting them from GI underwear, and she would proudly pull up her dress and show them to everybody who would look. She was Solly’s tenderest moment in the war. He gave her everything he could lay hands on—food, candy, love, compassion—took her out in the bay in the Duck, which was against the regulations.

  She loved the men of 913, one and all and indiscriminately, except that she was especially in love with Sergeant Solly and the long tall Lanky Lincoln, who in two weeks learned to speak in Tagalog and to make jokes with the people.

  Among the Philippine people there were some gullible ones. Yes indeed. One day a pretty young woman came into Solly’s tent and stood staring at him, shy and uncertain. They were the prettiest people in the world. Rosita asked her what she wanted—Rosita, seated on Solly’s bunk and speaking like a housewife with authority to speak.

  After a time Solly said, “Well, what can we do for you, Miss?”

  The lady laughed and tittered, stood on one foot then the other, and Solly was growing warm in the collar. He said, “What is it you want?”

  Rosita’s little face was flushed with anger.

  Finally the woman said, “Will you let me see it—please!”

  “See what?”

  She said, “It—” And she began to snicker again.

  She was thin and had a soft brown face and wide brown slanting eyes too big for her face and shiny white teeth, and Solly didn’t like to be laughed at, whatever the joke was. “What is it that you want to see?”

  “White Yankee say black Yankee have tail tucked down in breeches.”

  Solly’s face burned with his anger. He breathed hard and tried to calm himself before he spoke. “And you believe white Yankee, honh? And you want to see my tail? You believe your great white liberator?”

  Her face was filled with fright now as she sensed his anger. She shook her head. “No—no—no—no! Me don’t believe it. Me just want make sure me don’t believe it.” She bowed her head and backed away. “Thank you, good-bye,” she said, and she went quickly out of the tent and ran up the company street.

  He went to the entrance and called after her. “Come back and I’ll show it to you.”

  Rosita came to him and put her arms around his legs. “Don’t be angry, Sergeant Solly. Stupid girl no know no better!” He picked her up and held her close to him and she was all the children in the world.

  All during this time Hopjack slackened his pace quickly down to a slow drag. All the zip was out of him. All the hop and all the jack. One day he dragged past Worm’s and Solly’s tent, and Worm said, “Hopjack! Hopjack! Scat! Scat!”

  Hop shook his head. “Scat yourself, you little crazy sap-sucker. These damn Japs got the old man in the go-long.” His eyes were red like lanterns and sunken into his skull. He had hardly slept a full hour since they landed. The air raids all night long had given him insomnia. He volunteered as the permanent sergeant of the night guard. Told the CO he wasn’t going to sleep anyhow.

  Solly said, “You’d still rather kick them in the ass than to go home on rotation, wouldn’t you, Hop?”

  Hop shook his head. “That’s a lie the old man could’ve helped from telling.”

  And to break the monotony of Bloody Red Beach there was the Philippine countryside with its tall palm trees and giant banana plants and its coconut trees and its abaca plants and its tobacco fields and its inevitable rice fields and its equally inevitable caribou, the rugged faithful water buffalo, the Filipino’s very best friend. The sturdy menfolks in the fields behind their ploughs and their hard-working caribous and the women carrying babies on their backs and bending in the everlasting rice paddies with the water almost up to their knees. Solly thought of his own, the Negro people, standing deep in the corn and cotton fields of Georgia and Mississippi with nowhere to go and not a damn thing to look forward to. War or no war, it would make no difference to them, except for those who gave their sons up in noble sacrifice to the great bloodletting in the name of peace and freedom.

  The countryside was drenched and splashed with every color known to man in the lowlands and the mountains. And there were mountains everywhere. Solly figured that’s what the Philippines were. Millions of years ago, thousands of mountains came up out of the sea to catch their breaths and decided to keep their heads above water henceforth and forevermore.

  And driving through the little villages, and watching the girls and the women sitting three or four or five in a row on the front steps of their huts with their heads in each other’s laps, picking lice from the heads of long black hair with assembly-line efficiency. And in the evening lovely Philippine women in evening dresses squatting
barefoot on their haunches on the street corners of the capital city. If you were romantic and idealistic you could almost love this country. And all through this time when he wasn’t’ B.M.ing or scared to death, he was asking himself, Why am I here? What am I doing in these people’s country ten thousand miles away from home? Does the damn war make any sense? He felt they were not really wanted in this place, the great American liberators. And yet the war had to make sense to him or drive him crazy. He, Sergeant Solomon Saunders, Junior, Millie’s husband, Mama’s son, the get-aheader, the great morale builder of the Special Men of 913—the young man with a future, going places.

  Two weeks after Liberation Morning, when things had really quieted down to two or three air raids a day and five or six per night and isolated instances of Japanese snipers sniping at you from the jungled mountains (a couple of men were wasted that way), the captain ordered another Orientation Session.

  When Samuels spoke to Solly about it, Solly asked him to get another soldier for the job. Samuels persuaded and cajoled him. Finally Solly said, “Look, I mean it. I don’t believe the War Department stuff anymore. I don’t understand it. I can’t connect it with this madness we’ve gone through the last two weeks. I can’t link it with the Red Cross—and all the rest of it—the killing the starvation and all the rest—” He stopped talking, he thought he might burst into tears. He was remembering the morning they came to this place.

  Samuels said, “Sergeant, you are in the Army.”

  Solly said, “You know Rosita, don’t you?”

  Samuels said, “Rosita? What are you talking about?”

  They stood outside the orderly room. Solly looked around them and away to the green-clad mountains from whence the brand-new day had come to drench the countryside with sunlight. He thought of Georgia—Sunday—summertime. A cow pasture in New Jersey summer Sunday. And in his mouth and in his throat the sick-sweet taste of nostalgia. He saw the crowded beach at Coney Island. He wanted to go home and damn the killing! Damn the suffering and starvation! Damn these poor-assed islands that had been poor before the war and poorer now and God knew what they would be like after the killing was over.

  “Let me put it formally, Lieutenant. I hereby respectfully request that I be relieved of the duties of Non-Commissioned Officer in Charge of Information and Education. I’ll put it in writing if you want me to.”

  The captain sent for him that evening.

  He had taken a swim in the bay in the moonlight and refreshed himself with the memory of that first Liberation Mooring. He got dressed up in khaki and went to the captain’s quarters with the taste of death in his mouth and the stench of dying in his nostrils.

  They stood outside the captain’s tent. A piece of breeze came off the ocean like Millie blowing her hot breath on his sweating face. Millie pregnant with their child. Millie sweet and lovely Millie.

  The captain hitched his trousers. “What’s the matter, Sergeant Saunders?”

  “Nothing, sir.” Just sick and tired of everything. Especially your disguised Southern accent.

  “You and Lieutenant Samuels ‘re doing a damn good job with that Orientation stuff, and I want you to know I appreciate the importance of the job you all are doing. Especially you. And there’ll be other promotions too. The table of organization calls for two more staff sergeants in the company. And I heard today about an American Officer Candidate School being set up in Australia. You have nothing to worry about.”

  Millie blew her hot breath again upon his damp face from across the ocean. And she whispered, “Listen to your head and forget about emotions!” She cried, “Promotions! Promotions! Promotions!” It was his own voice he mistook for Millie’s. Accidentally on purpose.

  He said, “I don’t know, sir. I—”

  The captain said, “I’ve come to realize, Sergeant, there is nothing more important than a fighting man’s morale. You can have all the planes and all the tanks and all the everything else in the world, it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans, if the men don’t know their cause is righteous. I was at a meeting at headquarters yesterday and this thing was brought home time and time again.” He walked back and forth in front of Saunders. He stopped and hitched his trousers. “You and the lieutenant making preparations for the session Saturday morning?”

  Solly’s face was freshly sweating now and felt no breeze from off the ocean. He heard another voice inside him he could not identify.

  “I think you ought to assign the job to somebody else, sir,” he said. “Someone who understands it better—I mean the meaning of the war.” He hated himself for beating around the bush like this. He should just tell this cracker to take the job and shove it.

  “Lieutenant Samuels told me all about it, and I understand the way you feel. I know the Negro don’t get all the breaks he’s supposed to get, but I guarantee you—”

  Solly said, “Sir, I prefer that somebody else—”

  The captain was quickly losing his calm and patience. “You prefer! You don’t have any preference in this Army. That’s the whole damn trouble, I’ve been pampering this outfit too damn much, and especially you, goddammit! Now you listen to me. You’re going to be promoted to staff sergeant and you know damn well you want to be. You don’t fool me one goddamn minute. And you’re going to still be in charge of I and E, and you’re going to help lieutenant with that program Saturday morning. Is that clear?”

  “Very clear, sir.” If he didn’t do it, somebody else would. He might as well get the promotion.

  Rutherford put his hand on Solly’s shoulder. “How come you and me always got to be fussing and fighting? I’ve always been fair and square with you.” He sounded like a woman whining.

  His hand on Solly’s shoulder gave Solly a funny feeling, like he was going to be seasick on an LST. He pulled away from the captain and stood his ground. He wanted to go before he was ill in the captain’s presence. He had agreed to do the job. There was nothing else to talk about.

  The captain said, “This is top secret, Saunders. We’ll probably move out next Tuesday to make another beachhead.”

  Solly almost laughed at first. This was why the captain was so anxious about the men’s morale and the war’s morality. Solly saw the first beachhead again, he smelled the blood of dead and dying and the wholesale defecation and knew the whole war raging in his stomach. He felt the GIs coming on him.

  They had their session Saturday morning in the mess-hall tent. The topic was “Can We Achieve the Peace after We Win the War?” The subtopics were, “1. Can we put the Democracy we fight for into practice for all people?” and “2. Is War inevitable?”

  Solly and Samuels labored and sweated in the morning heat. Samuels said the world would be different after the war. They would live to see a better world where all men would be free and equal regardless of race or creed or color of a man’s skin or his religion. “This is exactly what the war is all about.”

  The men sat quiet in the stuffy heat and listened. Solly felt like a traitor and an uncle tom.

  He said, “It’s up to us, you and me, and all of us, to make sure we win the peace and freedom we are fighting and dying for. It’s up to us to never let them forget the slogans of the war. If we do, shame on us!” He was trying desperately to reach them as the perspiration poured from him. He saw some of them shake their heads in agreement and heard one whisper, “Tell the truth!” Solly said, “Nobody is going to be more concerned with our freedom than we are. If we go back home and go to sleep, shame on us.” He heard the Bookworm clearly this time. “That’s what I’m talking about!” Solly said, “We all know what Fred Douglass said. ‘Who would be free must themselves strike the blow.’”

  During the question period, Lanky Lincoln said to Solly, “Man, don’t you know these crackers going to revert to type? It’s going to be just like it always was. I’m surprised at you. And as far as the inevitability of war is concerned, soon as this war is over with, before the powder gets dry, Russia and the United States going to be at each other’s ne
ck. There is no such thing as peace. It’s always war. It just cools off every now and then.”

  An older soldier named Bell got really hot and bothered. He accused Solly and, by implication, Samuels and the entire War Department of being atheistic. “The Good Book says there’ll be wars and rumors of wars and ain’t nothing you can do about it.”

  Nevertheless Samuels and Solly thought that on the whole the session was a success, and Solly didn’t feel quite as guilty as he had felt when it began. The captain came in near the end of it and congratulated them when it was over. But to hell with the captain’s praises. Solly Saunders didn’t need them. He had told the truth as he saw it and there was nothing to be ashamed of. And yet and yet and yet he did not like the taste in his mouth nor the feeling in his stomach. The question Lanky could have asked was: How can you fight a democratic war with an undemocratic army? It was the question Solly had asked himself many times.

  The men’s morale was not so low the following week. They were getting sort of used to the place and kind of comfortable. True, the air raids had not cooled off yet, and a few people lost little things like their lives each day, and some of the more sensitive soldiers still had not gotten over their first case of the GIs. Be that as it may, they were rewarded for a job well done by being chosen for a new invasion. Some of them were not appreciative.

  But as Solly said, “C’est la guerre.”

  Worm said, “Say your ass. These crazy mother-hunchers gon keep farting around and get somebody all messed up.”

  Notwithstanding, early one pretty sun-washed morning they broke camp, three weeks and five days after they landed, and Rosita followed them laughing and screaming to the place where they left the beach and went out to the LSTs. And she hugged the men of 913, especially Solly and Lanky, she kissed the boys good-by, with tears streaming down her smiling face and some of their eyes filled up shamefacedly, as they left her standing on that lonely beach. Solly died a little that morning as they left her. Six years old and beautiful and parentless and grandparentless and homeless and crying smiling crying. Americanos drop great big bomb go boom! And everybody dead dead dead!