by Len Levinson
Butsko sat on his bunk in his private room in the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters. He smoked a cigarette and looked out the window at a close-clipped green lawn inclining toward the sidewalk. He felt creepy, surrounded by so many officers. They were all clean and manicured, like the lawn outside. Their faces were smooth and their hands small and soft. They were the officers who worked in offices. Their knowledge of war came from the books they read and the communiqués that were broadcast from the front.
Butsko felt strange in the room. It was quiet, clean, safe, and far from the front lines. He thought of his platoon sleeping in the jungle, being eaten alive by insects, with filth everywhere and death behind every bush. He thought his proper place was with them, although he hated the front lines. He felt he wasn’t holding up his end, like a slacker or a draft dodger.
There was a knock on the door.
“Come in!” Butsko said.
The door opened and Lieutenant Lewis walked in. “How’re you doing, Sergeant?”
“I hate this fucking place.”
“You hate this fucking place?” Lieutenant Lewis asked, an expression of dismay on his face. “What’s wrong with it?”
“I don’t like to be around so many officers. Don’t you have a room for me someplace in a barracks?”
“Afraid not. This is where we want you.”
“How come?”
“Because we don’t want you to be anyplace where you might get into trouble. We need you intact and clean. I told you why before.”
“What’m I supposed to do—just sit here?”
“No, you can go out if you want—after normal duty hours.”
“Can I go to town?”
“Somebody’ll have to go with you.”
“Who?”
“Me.”
“You!”
“What’s the matter—don’t you like me, Sergeant?”
“Sure, I like you. But I don’t need a baby-sitter. I’m a grown man. I can get along on my own.”
Lieutenant Lewis grinned. “You’re a star now, just like Rita Hayworth and John Wayne. You can’t go around on your own anymore.”
“Bool-shit!” roared Butsko. “What is this—the fucking stockade!”
“I told you the score when we were at Clark Field. We can’t let you get into any trouble. Your country needs you.”
“I understand that part. I just don’t understand why I need a baby-sitter.”
“To make sure you don’t get into any trouble.”
“I won’t get into any trouble.”
“That’s what every soldier says when he boards the bus that goes to Honolulu, and every weekend about fifty of them wind up in civilian jail or the stockade. Come on, Sergeant—you know what I’m talking about. It’s happened to you a few times. Do I have to remind you of what you did in that bar in Brisbane?”
Butsko snorted. He puffed his cigarette and his eyes clouded over. The corners of his mouth turned down. He looked like an ugly little boy pouting because his mother wouldn’t give him any more cookies.
“Listen,” Butsko said, “my wife lives in Honolulu. I’d like to go see her.”
“I thought you didn’t get along with your wife.”
“How do you know I don’t get along with my wife?”
“Because last time you went to see her you beat up some of her house guests and wound up in the Honolulu City Jail. It’s all in your records. Do you think I haven’t read your records?”
“I wanna see my wife,” Butsko said.
Lieutenant Lewis threw up his hands and smiled. “Fine. We’ll go see your wife.”
“You have to come with me?”
“That’s right.”
“When I fuck her, do you have to be in the same room?”
“Of course not.”
“Where you gonna be?”
“If it’s nighttime I’ll sleep on the sofa. If you don’t have a sofa, I’ll sleep on the floor. I don’t give a shit either way.”
Butsko narrowed his eyes as he looked Lieutenant Lewis up and down. “You’re really gonna be with me all the time?”
“That’s right. But it’s not as bad you might think. We’ll have a car and a driver at your disposal too. You don’t have to take any civilian transportation.”
“No shit!” Butsko said.
“No shit.”
Butsko dropped his cigarette butt into the ash can and stood up. “Well what are we waiting for? Send for that fucking car!”
“You sure you want do to this?” Lieutenant Lewis asked.
“I’m sure I want to do it.”
“You know that you might have a problem if you see your wife?”
“I don’t give a shit. I wanna see how she’s spending my allotment.”
Lieutenant Lewis walked toward Butsko and stopped six inches in front of him. He looked up at Butsko’s face and said: “I don’t want any trouble from you.”
“You worry too much. Just go get the fucking car and relax. Nothing’s gonna happen. I’m a star now and I can’t afford to let anything happen, right?”
“Right.”
“Go get the car while I put on my Class As.”
Lieutenant Lewis left the room. Butsko opened the door to his closet and took out his Class A uniform.
EIGHT . . .
The GIs finished digging holes and laying concertina wire. They’d dug latrines and built machine-gun nests. Now it was four o’clock in the afternoon and they lay around on the ground, their chests heaving every time they breathed, and they didn’t think they could get up even if their lives depended upon it.
“Mail call!”
The GIs jerked their heads around and saw Private Milton Goldsboro walking toward them, carrying a sack of mail. They jumped to their feet and rushed toward him, circling around him, waving their hands in the air.
“Anything for me, Milty boy?” asked Frankie La Barbara.
“How about me?” asked the Reverend Billie Jones.
“Anything for Yabalonka?” asked Yabalonka.
“At ease!” shouted Private Goldsboro, dropping his mailbag onto the ground. He opened it and pulled out a package. “At ease!”
“Who’s the package for?” asked Frankie La Barbara, sidling up to Private Goldsboro, trying to read it over his shoulder.
Private Goldsboro pulled the package away from Frankie’s eyes. “I said at ease—you fucking animals!” He held the package behind his back and looked down his long thin nose at the men from the recon platoon, enjoying the power he held over them. “I’m not passing out any mail until you guys settle down!”
“Fuck you,” said Frankie La Barbara, kicking Private Goldsboro’s legs out from underneath him. Private Goldsboro fell to the ground and Frankie yanked the package out of his hands. Private McGurk upended the mailbag and the men dived on top of the packages and letters spilling onto the ground.
“At ease!” yelled private Goldsboro, climbing to his feet. “Get away from that mail! This is a court-martial offense! I’ll report all you fucking guys!”
He tried to push his way through the throng of men surrounding the mail, but it was like pushing lions away from a side of beef. Even Sergeant Bannon was in there, elbowing and clawing like the rest of them. Private Goldsboro looked around, hoping Lieutenant Breckenridge was in the vicinity, but didn’t see him anywhere.
Private Goldsboro sighed. He was the Headquarters Company mail clerk and he knew he should’ve expected this when he approached the recon platoon. Everybody complained about the recon platoon and how it was out of control most of the time. Most GIs were afraid to go near the recon platoon. The recon platoon was the closest thing to lawlessness that you could find in the Army, but Colonel Hutchins always protected them from courts-martial. For some weird reason they were his fair-haired boys.
The men fought over their mail and ran off with their letters and packages. When the dust cleared, Private Goldsboro saw his empty mailbag lying on the ground. Groaning, shaking his head in disapproval, he picke
d it up and slung it over his shoulder, walking away.
Frankie La Barbara held a package under his arm like a football and ran to a tree, dropping to his knees next to its wide trunk, glancing at the return address and seeing that it was from his wife, Francesca. He tore into the package, throwing bits of paper and cardboard over his shoulder. Finally he could see what was inside. The item on top was a length of pepperoni wrapped in wax paper, and with a scream of joy, Frankie ripped off the paper and stuffed four inches of pepperoni into his mouth, clamping down with his teeth, and biting it off.
He closed his eyes and chewed. The spicy taste brought him back to Little Italy in New York City. He saw the narrow streets and the crumbling tenement buildings five stories high. He heard the old ladies in black dresses talking in doorways, and he smelled the spaghetti sauce cooking on a thousand stoves.
Frankie sat on the ground, his jaws still working on the hot pepperoni. He looked into the package and took out a cake wrapped in numerous layers of wax paper. Below the cake was some torrone candy. Underneath that was a box of White Owl cigars. At the bottom was a letter from his wife Francesca.
He scanned through the letter. Francesca said she was all right. She still was working in the factory that made Army uniforms. She said she missed him. She hoped he was all right. She prayed for him every night.
Good old Francesca, Frankie thought. She’s an okay Italian girl. Frankie knew he’d never have to worry about Francesca cheating on him, because she was in church all the time. She believed a bolt of lightning would come down from heaven and burn her to a crisp if she ever committed adultery.
“Hey—anybody want some of this!” Frankie shouted.
He looked around and watched the men eating what their wives, mothers, and sisters sent them, sharing what they had with the men who didn’t receive anything. The soldiers whose family and friends hadn’t remembered them, or who didn’t have any family and friends, or whose packages hadn’t arrived through the glut of military mail, hopped from package to package, taking a cookie here, a slice of salami there, a piece of candy from the next one. The men always shared everything at mail call, and the food didn’t last long. Frankie managed to eat half of his pepperoni, a chunk of chocolate cake, and a bit of candy before everything was gone. He also managed to grab a handful of the cigars.
He leaned against the trunk of the tree and lit up one of the cigars. Puffing thick clouds of smoke into the air, he held up the letter so he could read it again.
On the other side of the clearing, Bannon had two packages and two letters. One had been sent by his old girlfriend Ginger, from his hometown in Pecos, Texas, and the other was from the female to whom he was presently engaged, Priscilla Gladley, kid sister of his old buddy, Private Homer Gladley, who’d been killed in action on bloody Bougainville.
Bannon was surprised to have received the package and letter from Ginger. Last thing he’d heard she was getting married to somebody else. He read her letter and found out to his astonishment that she’d broken her engagement. She said she’d realized finally that the person she loved the most was none other than Bannon. She said she missed him very much and was sorry that she’d got mixed up with the other cowboy.
Bannon was confused by her letter. He didn’t think he’d ever be able to believe her again. But she was one beautiful bitch. She screamed and scratched his back whenever he screwed her, and she used to do the naughtiest oral things. Bannon got a hard-on just thinking about them. He folded her letter, put it away, and opened the letter sent by Priscilla Gladley.
It was a very different kind of letter. It was full of innocence, optimism, and down-home farmland decency. Ginger was a waitress who occasionally got singing jobs with country music bands, but Priscilla was the country in all its wholesomeness. Ginger sang in honky-tonk saloons about country life, but Priscilla lived the real country life in the great state of Nebraska. When Bannon thought of Ginger he thought of blowjobs in hotel rooms, but when he thought of Priscilla he felt clean and pure, and his heart swelled with pride.
On the other side of the clearing, Private Yabalonka chomped a length of kielbasa and read a letter from his kid brother in San Francisco. His kid brother was seventeen years old and said he wanted to join the Marines because he felt like a coward, hanging around the house and going to school when a war was on.
Yabalonka reached into his pack and looked for paper and an envelope. He found the paper but didn’t have any more envelopes. The paper was filthy and wrinkled but he had to write his kid brother immediately and tell him not to do it. He lay the paper on his helmet and wrote frantically.
The GIs heard somebody coming toward them through the jungle. They looked up and saw Lieutenant Breckenridge enter the clearing, his Thompson submachine gun slung barrel down over his shoulder. His helmet was on the back of his head and he didn’t look very happy.
“We’re going out on patrol tonight,” he said. “Anybody volunteer?”
Nobody said a word. Frankie tried to hide behind a bush.
“Bannon, Yabalonka, Worthington, Jones, McGurk, and you too Frankie—you all just volunteered,” Lieutenant Breckenridge said. He looked around and saw the packages and letters. “Did I get any mail?”
Private Worthington tossed him a package. “It was opened by mistake,” he said.
Lieutenant Breckenridge caught the package and held it in the air. The top had been torn open and a cake inside had been ripped apart. It looked like less than half was left. Lieutenant Breckenridge groaned. He felt an overwhelming hatred for the men in his platoon. Now he understood why Butsko used to complain about them so much. Butsko threatened to transfer away, but somehow never got around to it.
I wonder if I should get around to it, Lieutenant Breckenridge wondered as he sat on the ground and groped through the shattered cake for the letter from his mother.
The 1939 Chevrolet was a four-door sedan painted o.d. green. Lieutenant Lewis sat on a pillow behind the wheel and looked over the long front hood as he drove the vehicle over a road in the middle of the Army post.
Butsko sat beside him, smoking a cigarette. It was nearly five o’clock in the afternoon and numerous Army personnel of all types walked the sidewalks because the big central PX was just down the road. Butsko looked at the nurses in their khaki skirts and thought of his current girlfriend, Lieutenant Frannie Divers, back on New Guinea not far from the front lines. They’d said good-bye last night and now he was in Hawaii, far from the Japanese Eighteenth Army. It was difficult for him to adjust to the fact that a person could change his environment so quickly.
Now Butsko was on his way to Honolulu and he couldn’t wait to hit the gin mills. He’d lied about wanting to see his wife because he knew Lieutenant Lewis couldn’t deny him a meeting with Dolly, but what he really wanted was to get drunk and raise hell. He couldn’t wait to cut loose from military horseshit for a while.
Butsko thought that a meeting with Dolly would be catastrophic. They’d get into an argument, he’d punch her in the mouth, and somebody would call the cops. He’d be in jail before he knew what happened. No, there was no point in seeing Dolly. She was probably screwing somebody else anyway.
The car neared the big PX and Butsko found himself staring at a tall husky soldier who walked with a rolling gait. The soldier’s back was to Butsko, and Butsko thought: No, it couldn’t be. The car came abreast of the soldier and passed him. Butsko looked back and his eyes bugged out of his head.
“Stop this car!” he shouted.
“What’s the matter!” replied Lieutenant Lewis in alarm.
“I said stop the car!”
Butsko opened the door and Lieutenant Lewis hit the brakes. The car slowed down and Butsko jumped out before it stopped. Butsko ran, favoring his injured leg, toward the tall soldier, and the soldier stopped in his tracks, his jaw hanging open.
“Shaw—you son of a bitch!” Butsko hollared, attracting the attention of everybody in the vicinity. “What the hell are you doing here?”
/> Private First Class Tommy Shaw, who’d been with the recon platoon when it first hit the beach on Guadalcanal, was unable to speak. His old platoon sergeant was running toward him on the sidewalk. He hadn’t seen Butsko since bloody goddamned Bougainville.
Butsko walked up to Shaw and punched him on the shoulder. “How’re you doing, scumbag?”
Shaw recovered his presence of mind. He realized he wasn’t hallucinating, and that Butsko was indeed standing in front of him. “I’m doing okay,” he said. “What’s going on with you?”
“Not a helluva lot. What’re you doing here?”
“I’m on my way back to the war. What’re you doing here?”
“I’m on my way back to the States. How do you feel?”
“Okay. I noticed you limping. You all right?”
“Yeah, I’m all right. Where you going right now?”
“To the PX to have a beer.”
“Why don’tcha come into town with me. Maybe we can get all fucked up.”
“I don’t have a pass.”
“I’ll take care of that.”
“How’re you gonna take care of that?”
“Because I’m a fucking star, that’s how. C’mon.”
“C’mon where?”
“Follow me and don’t worry about a thing.” Butsko limped back to the car and opened the door to the back seat. “Get in here,” he said.
“Where’d you get the car?”
Butsko bared his teeth. “Will you stop asking so many fucking stupid questions!”
Shaw bent low and got into the rear of the Chevrolet. He was six feet, two inches tall so he really had to get down. Before the war he’d been a professional boxer in the heavyweight division. He’d fought many times in Madison Square Garden in New York City and had been a ranked contender with a manager, a trainer, and a cut man, not to mention a stable of pretty girls representing all races, colors, and creeds.