For what?
CHAPTER 5
They were in the fourth wave of the new invasion. And some of them got all messed up, but the way Solly figured, they never had it so good. The messed-up ones, they would lie up in some comfortable hospital or they would go home stateside or to Australia, and wouldn’t have to worry anymore about the GIs, which had you forever taking a crap or needing one, and your stomach full of cramps and wind, the goddamn miserable GIs, which went on and on till your excrement was blood and your hindparts were sore and very bloody and on and on and on and on, and don’t forget at the other end, the vomiting, which always reaped a similar harvest. And Lieutenant Graham, the motor officer, who went stark raving mad, as did a half a hundred others on the beach that glorious victorious morning. The last Solly saw of him he dashed up the beach screaming, “The Japs are coming! Retreat! Retreat!” And before anybody could stop him he ran headlong into the water. He was fished out by the Navy, and a PT boat took him screaming and struggling out to the middle of the bay and Solly never saw him again. Of course those who would never go home were lucky too, the dead ones, because they had nothing to worry about. They didn’t even have to worry about whether the war made sense or not or whether a better world would grow out of the embers of this old decrepit earth. They didn’t have to worry whether the Red Cross would invite them to their parties. They had crossed over that River Jordan where all was peace and they could study war no more. No more I-and-E for them.
The same routine, the bombardment, the landings practically uncontested, and of course the GI fertilization of the beach and then the stuff screaming down from the burning hills and the moaning and groaning and blood and dying and further fertilization with blood and human excrement.
That morning on the once white but now crimson beach just before noon in the midst of the screaming thunder from the hills and the dying and the defecating and the moaning and the groaning and the great bloodletting, Billy Baby-Face Banks came up to Solly. There was a wildness in his eyes and a helpless anger in his face. “Sergeant Solly, how in the hell can you say it makes any sense?” He waved his arms. “It’s crazy! Can’t you see it? It’s crazy! Crazy! Crazy! And it don’t make a goddamn bit of sense!” William (no-swimming) Banks.
Solly stared long and hard at the baby-faced soldier—a boy the Army had not been able to make a man of. The tears were streaming down the soldier’s face and Solly felt like crying too. He didn’t trust himself to speak at first. But finally he said huskily, “You know it too?” And he turned and walked away, but Baby-Face followed him. “Sergeant Solly, I want out goddammit, and I’m going to get it the first damn chance I get. I mean it, Sarge!” During air raids he ran into the bay.
Solly said quietly, “Let me know and I’ll go with you.”
Why in the hell didn’t Billy Banks understand that every American soldier had to fight in Freedom’s cause? How could he bolster Billy’s morale when his own was shot to hell? How could you make sense out of madness?
The first night on the newly invaded island they were air-raided all night long. Nobody slept but Lanky Lincoln. The next day they moved about fifty-five yards from the beach and set up camp in a small clearing surrounded on three sides by the jungle and on the other by the open road. A wild creek ran to the east of them and disappeared into the jungle. The second night they hit a streak of good luck. They were protected from the air raids by a ninety-nine-miles-per-hour typhoon. It blew down palm trees and bumped ships against each other out in the bay and turned some over and sank a few of the least seaworthy ones and turned over Ducks, and its over-all purpose seemed to be to wash and blow the island out into the deep black sea, and it pretty damn near succeeded. Solly and Jim Larker and Worm and Lanky and Scotty spent the earlier part of the evening digging an all-purpose family-type foxhole outside a tent they had thrown up hastily and which had even more hastily been blown away by the typhoon. So they ended up in the foxhole, which Solly said was the safest place after all, with trees blowing down all over the place. Sitting there in a hole in the ground the size of a grave, while the world blew away above their heads. The tall helpless palm trees stood moaning and groaning and sometimes screaming from the merciless whipping of rain and wind and hail the size of tennis balls. They sounded as eerie as the pom-pom guns and the shooshing shells of the Japanese mortars flung from the melancholy hills.
Solly said, “One consolation, Tojo won’t be over tonight. Even he can’t maneuver those Zeros in this kind of stuff.”
You could look upward and see everything flying across the foxhole a mile a minute. Worm said, “Tents, clothes, shoes, tree branches, rifles, helmets, gas masks, now and then a skinny soldier, mess kits, cartridge belts, officers and monkeys and bull bats and banana bunches.”
They sat there talking about home and comfort and a good hot dinner and a cool glass of lemonade and a hot cup of coffee and love and job and women, and finally they talked about the war, and Jimmy Larker said, “It’s a war against fascism, and Negroes have as much a stake in it as anybody else.”
Solly said bitterly, “That’s like saying I’m just as rich as you are, when neither one of us has a pot to piss in. You should be in charge of I and E.”
Worm said, “This is the kind of night when I could lay up with me some nice fat pom-pom. I love stormy-weather pompom. With the rain coming down and the wind blowing and your old lady moaning and groaning. Great-day-in-the-mama-hunching-morning!”
Jimmy said, “Forget about the Negro question for the moment. Who’s the main enemy?”
Scotty said, “White folks. Captain Ratoff. Rat off his big white horse right on your big black ass.”
Solly said, “Bilbo and Talmadge and Cap’n Charlie Rutherford and all of their cracker counterparts.” Build that morale, Staff Sergeant Saunders. You’re in charge of I and E.
Worm said, “A nice warm bed and some nice fat juicy pompom, with the rain rapping up against the windowpane but it can’t come in. Great-day-in-the-mama-hunching-morning!” He was sweet-faced and nostalgic.
Solly said, “Still it’s got to be better when we get back home this time. This is a war for Freedom.” You had to believe or go raving mad. Run into the mountain jungle and forget it. “We’ll make it better.”
Lanky said, “Liberty, Egality, and Fraternity and all that other horseshit that these white folks don’t believe in.”
Solly said violently, “Goddammit! We got to believe in something! Tell them, Jimmy.”
Scotty said, “Just cause you a staff sergeant you don’t have to believe everything the man tells you. I thought they beat that shit out of your head in Ebbensville.”
Lanky said, “You talk like one of those true believers, Solly. I’m really surprised at you. You really believe that crap you been teaching outa them Army magazines.”
Scotty said, “You know what I believe in? I’m a true patriot. I believe in them dead American Presidents, every last damn one of ‘em, I’m freakish for ‘em, and I’m gonna collect just as many as I can when I get back in that other world after this shit is over. That’s who I’m gon love and worship—George Washington—Abraham Lincoln—Alexander Hamilton—all them pretty pictures on them little biddy green pieces of paper coated with chlorophyll.”
Solly said angrily, “If you don’t believe in the war, why in the hell are you over here? Why didn’t every damn one of you go AWOL?”
They had guards surrounding the edges of the camp and one of them sounded off so he could be heard by every living that was living, even if he wasn’t swinging.
“Halt! Who goes there?”
The men in the foxhole reached for their wet guns.
It was Buckethead Baker’s frightened voice.
“Halt, gu-gug-goddammit! Who goes there? I ain’t playing mother-fuckers! Sound off!”
The foxhole comrades could hear a rustling noise from the direction of the wild creek and then the rifle started talking.
“Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow! The Japs! The Japs! Pow! Pow!
Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow!”
They were scared deep in their recta, but they leaped out of the foxhole and ran to the rescue, but by the time they got there Buckethead had already stopped one of the enemy and the rest of them headed back upstream. Solly could only see their big broad leathery backsides. Wild hogs in the Philippines were huge and plentiful and vicious, with a reputation of anti-humanism, and they didn’t do to mess with. The one Buckethead had struck after emptying his rifle blindly into the creek stood bloody in water up to his black massive shoulders, staring wonderingly at Buckethead and Solly and the rest of them with the lonesome eyes of a blind man selling pencils in the subway. The bleeding hog tried to turn around and join his buddies, but all he got for his efforts was a bloody watery grave. He sank like a ship going down at sea.
When they got back to their foxhole they tried to keep the weather out by covering it with tenting and nailing the tenting down with pegs. A half an hour later, Buckethead slid under the tenting and joined them, as they sat there discussing wild hogs and caribous and pom-pom and the Democratic War against Fascism and debating whether or not it would be safer and more comfortable to leave the hole-in-the-ground and take refuge in one of the Ducks over on the other side of the area. The water which had been up to their hindparts had at this point crept up to their waists and was still creeping.
Solly said, “It’s a good idea excepting that half of the Ducks have already been up-ended by the typhoon.”
Quiet Jim Larker said, “The Ducks are the driest place on the island. All of them are covered by tarpaulins.”
Worm said dreamily, “Them Filipino women are some pretty people, you hear me? And they’re just about the most. Back in that other place, I was standing one day talking to one in her front yard, and don’t you know, that chick took a whole bath with her dress on, she just kept talking and washing and she washed everything, and if I saw a little biddy bit of something, you did. I almost went blind from looking and I ain’t seen hide nor mustache.”
They laughed and chuckled. Buckethead said, “Man! They really are something. They can stand straight up and hold their legs apart, and pull out their dress and piss without even wetting themselves.”
Scotty said, “You’re right about that. These chicks got bombsights on their pussy!”
They laughed and laughed.
Quiet Man suggested again that they go to the Ducks.
Buckethead Baker said, “Hell naw. You cats crazy or something. It’s raining out there if you didn’t know it. We’d get wet as a sonofabitch tryna get to those Ducks.”
They laughed with Baker. With the water up to their elbows they laughed. Somebody broke wind and the water bubbled and they laughed some more. Worm said, “Start across that wide-open area dark as it is, and one of them trigger-happy studs on guard duty’ll blow you a brand-new asshole. You couldn’t bomb me outa this hole till morning comes.”
They laughed some more. Solly said, “We keep up this island hopping we’ll be needing three or four assholes apiece. It’ll be coming out of our ears and noses.”
But when the water reached shoulder level, which was ear level for the Bookworm, Solly led the stalwarts across the area and into a warm and cozy Duck.
The next day was brilliantly and blindingly hot and almost totally without air raids, and they moved up the road and set up camp near the only American-operated airstrip in the entire Philippines excepting the one back on the other island. The Japanese had airstrips all over the place, on every island, even way up in the bleeding hills—in any place that they could clear away a little piece of area just big enough for one Zero to take off from, and tiny and obscure enough to be hidden from the eyes of Yank reconnaissance.
All along the countryside the air was filled with the sickening odor of rotting flesh. Dead Japanese fanatics stacked up like livestock in the ditches on each side of the dusty road—headless men, armless men, legless men, dead men every last one of them. The savage sunlight cooked their bodies, and dead homo sapiens give off a stench that make dead rats smell like an Evening in Paris some-damn-where. Solly thought, if we followed this madness through to its logical conclusion, we would jump off these Ducks right this minute and get ourselves some fresh meat for a change. Some nice juicy human ham hocks and shoulders and center cuts and heads and tenderloins and ears and jowls and rumps. Over in a field he saw powerful bulldozers, handsome and efficient, and digging shallow trenches and dumping hundreds of Japanese bodies altogether into their final resting places. The smell of death assaulted his nostrils, bloated his stomach, contracted his chest, stuck in his throat, and gagged his windpipe. He leaned over the side of the Duck and puked his insides out. The last thing he saw was a young Filipino woman way over in a field, squatting to make the earth more fertile.
In the midst of all the war’s great ugliness he glimpsed one thing of beauty those first few days of the new invasion, like a lily of the valley growing proudly on a desert rock. He saw a woman’s sweet face as she strutted through the new company area with a baby on her back and a bundle of GI clothing on her dark head. And a brown dog walked ahead of her with his mouth open and his red tongue busy in the heat. She made his stomach hurt, she was so lovely. Her skin like burnt brown toast and her eyes were black and shaped like almonds. Her graceful walk was pure and pretty poetry and a symphony of rhythms as she swung her hips from side to side. He got one brief quick glimpse of her, but the picture stayed with him as if he had shot it with a camera and it would be with him forever. He felt he had seen her face somewhere before, some time some place, felt it deeply in the essence of him. Her name was on the tip of his tongue, her face on the rim of his memory. He almost called out to her.
He was wide open for a women’s face, her proud walk with her shoulders back, her womanliness sweetly disturbing to him. Millie was always with him now, as the days of her dear pregnancy came closer to their final sweet fulfillment. He had not heard from her in ten days, and he ached with loneliness and longing.
A few evenings later in their new camp area, they were standing in the chow line laughing and joking, and the mess sergeant shouting at them, “All right, come and get it in a hurry, goddammit! I got to go into town and get me some pom-pom! I’m sick and tired of round-eye!” The men were laughing but the mess sergeant was not even smiling. Sergeant Perry was dead serious. He was pom-pom happy. In-town might be overrun with Japanese, but he was going, he was going. Solly was daydreaming of his Filipino washerwoman. His dream was all mixed up with Millie and maybe even Fannie Mae. The men were breaking every rule of chowing under combat conditions, the main one being that they should have had a staggered chow line, three men at a time.
But there they were, at least fifty of them standing in line when suddenly the sky aglow with sunset hurled one of those silvery comets toward the earth. The Zero caught the entire island dozing and was almost down to a couple of hundred feet and heading inward when hell erupted from the earth. The Ack-Ack guns began to talk and trails of tracer bullets began to keep company with Tojo as he ducked in and out of the exploding flak like a lonesome halfback running broken-field. Most of the men in the chow line stood like they were mesmerized, and so did Solly, watching the fun and remembering Coney Island and Independence Day, maybe that’s where he had seen her, Filipino washerwoman, impossible, as the tracers followed Tojo like a crazy rainbow getting larger by the second as more and more Ack-Ack guns picked up the merry desperate chase, and now the pretty-colored tracers came lower and lower near to the level of the trees and crisscrossing, and suddenly Tojo was not more than a hundred yards from the chow line of the 913 and less than treetop low and ducking and dodging the tracers which were too damn low for earth-bound people. Tojo began to strafe as he hedgehopped toward the chow line and the chow line emptied in two hundredths of a second. Even Lanky Lincoln moved.
“Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat,” Tojo played a dot game down the company street. Solly ran toward his foxhole next to his tent and dove for it, but before he landed a
nother soldier dove beneath him and just as he landed another fell on top of him and seconds later BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM! The loudest noise he ever heard. He lay there stone deaf and temporarily concussioned and sandwiched between two other soldiers, as the trembling earth shook them together like they were in a malted shaker. Finally they pulled themselves apart embarrassed, and before they could drag themselves out of the foxhole it was BOOM BOOM BOOM! BOOM!
After a time they saw that the boom-boom-booms came from the gasoline dump about a couple of hundred yards away. Tojo had laid his egg dead center. There must have been two or three hundred drums of gasoline in the gas dump, and all night long and every four or five minutes one would leap toward heaven and explode with sound and fury, with great flames licking the angry air to build a fire around the moon. It also was a lighted flare for Tojo, who came all night long that night at twenty-five-or thirty-minute intervals. He would come skipping up the island following the coast at tree level, so low you could shoot him with a rifle and even throw rocks at him ducking in and out of the Ack-Ack fire and laying eggs and playing dots.
There had not been time to build a latrine yet. They’d been too busy bringing fresh troops from out in the bay onto the beach, and arms and ammunition, and taking them to the front and coming back, ducking bullets, back and forth, and all day long into the night. But the Japanese had kindly left an open pit, 20ʹ by 30ʹ approximately, with a plank about ten inches wide that reached from one side to the other. It was about thirty feet from the back of Solly’s tent and half filled with rain and urine and excrement and lighting up the neighborhood. That day they had sprayed oil upon the angry waters but it had not killed nor even stilled the awful stench.
And Then We Heard the Thunder Page 38