The Liberators

by Chris Lynch

  We pass through another clearing and I breathe as much of it as I can before stepping out of it again.

  Then another one is in front of us much more quickly than I’d expect. No complaints on that from me. At this stage, two relatively airy clearings within sight of one another deserves appreciation, if not celebration.

  Celebration then ends abruptly. Havlicek starts waving his arm madly down, down, down, then Klecko waves down, down, down before diving for the ground. I motion down, down, down and then immediately show Heads and Tails behind me just what it means. I hit the ground hard, like I’m trying to crash right through it and maybe come up the complete other side to emerge in Sandusky, Ohio. Or maybe even better, the pitcher’s mound of the ballpark in Centreville, Maryland. Home of both the Red Sox entry in the Class D Eastern Shore League, and my dreams for the future.

  I don’t break through to anywhere, though. Instead, I slither along on my belly just like in so many training drills. In a few seconds, Klecko and me are flanking Havlicek as the three of us crouch behind the fat old husk of a long-fallen tree. Havlicek is talking low into his radio.

  “Yes, we see them. Looks like they’re transferring ammo from the barges into a secret dump underground. Right. You’re in range. Doing it now. In ninety …”

  He’s leaning harder into the fallen trunk, as if his plan is to roll ten tons of rotting wood to flatten the patrol of ten Japanese soldiers.

  “Line them up,” he says, and this is business and no fooling.

  Klecko and I have our machine guns up and we use the top of the trunk for steadying. It’s still an effort for me to keep from trembling the enemies right out of my sights. But I remember to be a marine about it, and I get it controlled.

  “Bigger than I thought they’d be,” Klecko says.

  “That’s ’cause you’re looking at imperial marines and not Army. And when I count you down from five seconds you are going to set your sights on one individual big imperial marine and you are going to fire that weapon at only that man and keep on firing until he is dead. Then, move on. You understand, both of you?”

  “Yes,” we both do, and we both say.

  Other teams are locking in from around our position.

  RattaTattaTattaTattaTattaTatta

  It’s a barrage of machine-gun and rifle fire, but it’s coming from the wrong guys. Something pulled their attention, and the Japanese marines are pouring heavy-caliber heat into one of the teams thirty yards up the line from us.

  “Fire, fire, fire!” Havlicek barks in the loudest voice we have heard since leaving Vella Lavella.

  Already locked on target, Klecko and I join the fight with a series of blasts from the Reisings, and our rounds look to be shooting as straight as any man’s weapon in any man’s army could ever do.

  Two Japanese machine gunners wheel in our direction and we go from short blasts to all-out unbroken streams of bullets aiming at those machine gunners as their ammo whistles and pings the air, the trees around us, very close. Several shots make mini tremors in the big old tree trunk right in front of us. The trunk has now saved my life at least a dozen times as these guys’ aim keeps getting better, death keeps coming closer, and we are just not having it. I feel myself leaning in, flopping over the top of the trunk in an effort to get a better read on my man and I have it, perfect, and as we empty round after round in the Japanese direction I watch my man, watch him go down, watch him fall, his gun dropping harmlessly out of his grip before he pitches forward and I follow through locked on to him until his face bounces off the ground, settles there forever, and my steaming overheated machine goes clickety clickety clickety as the bullets run out well before I do.

  I turn toward Klecko on my left, find him likewise overextended on top of the tree trunk and firing clickety clickety clickety at the seven Japanese corpses spread across the ground and the three who have retreated beyond our range but not beyond our sights or our memories.

  “I think killing is starting to become a habit for me,” I say, dismayed to hear the words and the lack of human feeling behind them.

  “Did you pick the one far left?” Zack says as we push ourselves off the log and stand up.

  “Yeah. Same one for you? What am I saying? Of course we picked the same. Bet we do that a hundred times out of a hundred, whatcha think?”

  “What I think is that I think we both killed him, is what I think. So I figure I’ve lightened the burden on your soul by one half of one enemy kill.”

  “Thanks,” I say, just before Corporal Havlicek seizes control of the subject.

  “Now, marines. No time for being triumphant. Move out, all of you. Back up the road, pronto. Heading back to base immediately. We are no secret to anybody now, and if we don’t fight fleet and we don’t fight clever the enemy is going to put two and two thousand together and realize we are not a full division and that they have a five-to-one manpower advantage. I don’t think we want that,” he says, waving guys on up the hill like a scowling and very serious traffic cop. When Klecko passes him, and then I do, with Heads and Tails jumping into line behind me like they’re hopping a bus, only then does the good corporal start trekking himself. He marches briskly alongside the fire team, overtakes us, and slips into his rightful slot as our leader.

  Darkness falls on Choiseul rapidly and absolutely, the way a big imperial marine pitches himself forward and down. Cold and senseless and complete. He planted his dead face into the island’s brutal, merciless ground because this was the place he chose to die.

  I settle into my swaying hammock, under my comforting mosquito netting and that same moon, too. Today was real war, and tomorrow is already planned to be real, realer still, war. I love the way a hammock sways, barely perceptible but completely altering the life it’s supporting, suspending it three feet above that rotten, cruel ground.

  Zachary Klecko’s hammock is tied at one end to the same tree as mine. We sleep head to head, or head-tree-head, but close enough to communicate and still keep to a modified whisper.

  “Zack,” I say after ten swaying minutes spent with more of my thoughts than I would consider optimal.

  “Yeah?”

  “Other guys could have shot him.”

  He waits a beat or two, a sway or three.

  “Nope,” he says confidently.

  “But what if they did? What if one or maybe more than one other guy was laying into our guy at the same time we were?”

  “I’m not sharing. I think I’m already being generous enough by giving you benefit of the doubt and a fifty percent share. I’m not diluting the shares any further, especially since I hit him with at least twenty shots myself and that would be indisputably dead by any rational measure.”

  I sigh, to send a message to the big-head gunner officially rated as Expert marksman. “I’m going to ignore the parts of that where I’m not agreeing with you but I’m not rising to the bait, either. I never chased a ball outside the strike zone before and I’m not doing it now.”

  “Also, with the positioning of both sides, the angle of our firing line and all that, the shortest distance between dead enemy, far left, and anything coming from our side, was from his chest to my gun. So all my rounds would have got to him before all of anybody else’s.”

  “Have you actually been preparing this?”

  “I’m only trying to relieve your aching conscience.”

  “Yeah, well I’d prefer you just keep your hands off of my conscience. I can handle it just fine.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I just did. But I can do it again if you like.”

  He fake-yawns the conversation toward closing time. “No, that’ll be all, private,” he adds, in a tired voice that does not contain the fakery.

  I have to open it up again, just a crack.

  “So, what if other guys hit him, and we simply missed him every time. It does happen.”

  “No, Nicholas, it does not. I think you got malaria. Go to sleep.”

  Sleep, yes. He is tec
hnically my immediate supervisor, so I must obey a direct order.

  And I do, directly; for the second night running I get the sound, deeply restful night of unconsciousness that I never got on Vella Lavella. Or anywhere else, come to think of it.

  It’s a strange and unsettling sensation, and I’ve only felt it once before. My first season in pro baseball, lowest rung league on the climb up to the bigs. I got hit right in the temple with a huge, blistering beanball. For two weeks I was seeing three of everything, and I also kept getting lost, even in my own neighborhood.

  That’s a little like how this feels. We’re on this mission, to create a mighty racket, hit and run and disappear and blow stuff up and shoot Japanese fighters. All as just a diversion, to fool them into sending troops here from Bougainville — which is the real target for the invasion. If we succeed and live, our big prize is we get to join those boys over there at the genuine actual invasion.

  So, we are expected to make big impressions here, to get them to try and come after us. To kill us.

  But at the same time, we are slithering and tiptoeing and shushing each other because — oh, right, by the way — we don’t really want to get killed.

  It all feels slightly as if we’re getting mentally messed up by our own side. Can a marine ever wobble in this kind of way? Is it permissible? I would bet not.

  I think it would take an awfully long time to really fully understand the military. More time than I will ever have. That’s why the Marines’ structure at the lowest level — that would be my level — has its own built-in, brilliant purpose: Take care of your own patch, your own function, your own task, your duties to your comrades within your own perimeter, and everything will work out. Trying to raise your head and figure out all the bigger pictures puts that head in too much jeopardy.

  My patch, my function, my buddies. Right.

  A buddy and a buddy, both fiercely committed to never getting separated, is a beautiful thing. What happens, though, if a buddy starts to worry about getting separated from himself?

  This marine is going to fiercely commit to not finding out.

  There is one element of USMC functioning at the higher levels that I do find reassuringly reliable.

  That element is The Brute. The commander of the whole operation, he has personally led our section, Company F, on our mission to cause maximum mayhem and destruction to both the barge station at Sangigai, and the Japanese sense of security on Choiseul Island. While the two other companies set out to execute their business elsewhere on the island, F Company is marching on the east side of Sangigai, timed to coincide with E Company hitting them from the west for a crusher maneuver that should be brutal. We stomp along to the destination with a certainty that ignores how dangerously outnumbered we are in this place. It’s a certainty that’s surely filtering down from our leader, The Brute himself.

  I don’t think that man has had one uncertain moment his whole life.

  We are approaching our destination, maybe a quarter mile east along the beach that we can just now see. My heartbeat is picking up as the action comes nearer and realer and it’s evident in the rest of the guys as well. Heads start bobbing a little more emphatically, legs start bouncing that much higher as the nerves and adrenaline of a coming fight turn men into show horses at around this stage.

  We are about to take on the more raucous side of our split-personality profile, which is a welcome change. It’s the softly-softly, creepy silence of the jungle maneuvers that’ll make you nuts, way before the brawling-mauling danger that comes with wide-open warfare will.

  I’m certain every single marine feels the same way. Our Dr. Gentle / Mr. Mental conflict would only ever have one victor. And he is no doctor.

  We come to the patch where the jungle density gradually lets up a bit the closer you get to the beach. The extra oxygen will come in handy for our impending engagement with the enemy.

  The festive atmosphere is supercharged by the knowledge that our ground forces are going to be aided by an air bombardment coming from Vella Lavella.

  Shuuuuush-poom!

  That, however, is not an American bomb, but a Japanese rocket-propelled grenade. It scorches the air as it parts the company right down the middle and sails into the trees behind us.

  “Cover!” the commander yells and platoon and squad leaders up and down the line echo the command. “And: Fire!” The Brute roars. He must have some big thick roots running from his small self, down through the ground and hundreds of feet into earth, to sound as giant as that.

  Giant sounds are now the order of the day. These woods are completely jammed up with rifle fire, grenades, and the screams of angry men mixed with the screams of men who suddenly find themselves hit, ventilated and dying. I am crouched behind one side of a fat banyan tree, with my buddy and machine gun partner on the other side.

  “Plenty for everyone today,” Klecko yells out over the sound of his Reising picking off their fair share.

  “Nah,” I call back. “These ones are all mine.”

  He laughs a howl of a wild laugh, made more so by the ratatat-ratatat-ratatattat music backing it up.

  It was a bold assertion on my part, worthy of a laugh, since there are probably one hundred and fifty Japanese fighters I’d need to be killing. Fighters who, once again, were not supposed to be here. What is it with these guys and being where they’re not expected?

  The smells are combining again. The singular mud and sweat and greenery scent that is already planted in my head from this place is expanding. It’s gaining layers and powers as smoke from a huge range of weapons and gun oils swirls and blends in. The most common Japanese rifles are famous for their heavy, stinky coating of grease, and it’s nasty. Famous also for shooting Americans dead from every sneaky and crafty angle imaginable. The sudden overpowering whiff of blood comes up and reminds me of that fact. Somebody not more than twenty yards down the fire line to my right is hit and falls screaming into the bloody mud in front of him. Dozens of Japanese go down, and while I did not dare look over at my brother marine, I get a clear look at each one of my enemies as he leaves the fight for now and for good.

  This is every bit the craziness of the firefight, all at once. It’s so intense I don’t even hear the roaring engines of the bombers from Vella now reaching the island and its several targets.

  Bu-hoom. Bu-hoom bu-hoom bu-hoom-bu-hoom.

  It is more shocking and frightening than I’d expected as the bombs pound the nearby barge base. It stuns me briefly and I stop shooting and start staring.

  “Nardini, fire that weapon!” Havlicek screams, aware the very second I have gone off plan. “Fire!”

  So I fire. Everybody fires, and fires and fires and fires, the whole Mr. Mental company fires blissfully away.

  We have our prize.

  Because we did our job and then some on Choiseul, we are now moving on to Bougainville. We executed Operation Blissful better than probably anybody expected, and executed an estimated hundred and forty or so unlucky Japanese fighters in the bargain. We hit them in every spot, with every shot. We were like the schoolyard jerk, going around picking fights, getting our licks in, then running away again to pick another fight just a few yards away. We did that over and over again. It was tiring work, but satisfying.

  “I don’t feel like I need to keep count anymore,” I say as the Higgins boats speed us away from Choiseul mostly unscathed. About a dozen wounded. Nine of our guys killed. Nobody I knew really well, though.

  “No,” Klecko says with a bit of surprise. “No, you’re right. I was feeling exactly the same just now. No need. No point after a point, I guess.”

  “I guess,” I say.

  The confidence we brought to the fights throughout Blissful is even higher by the time we move on. It is a step up, a big challenge compared to our previous island and our operations there. But we are learning our craft quickly, and the men who land on Bougainville are smarter, tougher, more daring, and more prepared than they were before.

&nbs
p; “How does it keep happening?” Klecko says with frothing frustration.

  We’re finishing off digging out our second foxhole in only our second night on the island.

  “Which it is that, Zack?”

  “The it that makes each island up on the chain at least twice as nasty as the last one?”

  We both stop digging, but continue sweating and swatting. The bugs here are the drill instructors that taught the bugs we met before.

  I shrug, which I find I’m doing a lot more of lately. “Good planning and resource management?”

  “Thanks for that,” he says.

  Klecko and I jump, backward and nearly out of our skins, when a breathy, angry voice behind us practically bites my ear. “If you two do not shut up this minute,” Sergeant Silas says, “I will shoot you myself in my duty of care to all the other men who should not have to get killed by the enemies you will bring to our foxholes.”

  We are trying to get smoothly to our feet after stumbling around like a couple of lousy comics from the initial shock. It’s quite dark, but still easy to see our very serious squad leader brandishing a very serious pistol in his hand.

  “I am serious,” Silas assures us in low, slow syllables.

  “Yeah, we get that,” Klecko says. “Sorry, sergeant. Won’t happen again.”

  With that skirmish over, we settle in and get comfy for the night in our hole.

  This is as far as you could get from our hammocks of bliss, the memory of which is already slipping fast and far away from us.

  My buddy, for his part, doesn’t struggle in the same way I do. He nestles down on his side, facing me so we both are watching the other man’s back. He silently gives me his disapproving “not this again” scowl.

  I match his scowl with my “not a chance” head shake and we both understand that I will never sleep in a foxhole even if I am stuck in one for a hundred nights. Bougainville is already, even outside of this hole in the ground, the creepiest and most unsettling place I have been in my life. There are Japanese military and civilians absolutely everywhere. But mostly underground, in caves and spider holes that we’ve been told are connected up with miles and miles of tunnels they’ve been preparing just for this occasion for years. That alone would disturb your sleep. But they also have a real fondness for doing most of their dirty work at night. They slip aboveground and then move about this strangely forested place like smoke. They know all the things we never will about the terrain here, and when they are not trying to cozy on down into your foxhole and slit your throat, they are lying low just a few feet off in the dark, whispering Japanese jerk stuff that a guy does not need translated in order to wet his pants over.