Reluctant Warriors

by Jon Stafford

  “All right. Lie down for an hour, right here in my cabin. That will give you some rest and let the tide bring the water level back up some. If anyone wakes you up, I will personally throw them overboard. We’re going to set the rope up on a small raft that you’ll tow. The guys will take you in as close as possible to those corridor things. That way there will be no weight on you directly. How about you with a Mae West with a twenty-foot tether? The rope will play out from the raft you tow.”

  “Sure. Osborne says we need the three-eighths-inch Philippine hemp stashed somewhere in the Forward Torpedo Room. Dougherty knows. He thinks it’s my only chance, because it’ll float.”

  “You lie down for a while. I’ll take care of it.”

  Harry collapsed on the bunk as soon as Phelps and Rocky left the room. In a few moments, he was sound asleep.

  Some time later someone shook him awake. It was Phelps. “Okay, Harry, it’s time.”

  Harry sat up slowly, his wet clothes still clinging to his body, and followed Phelps up on deck. Immediately, he could tell the wind had slackened. Now at least I have a chance, he thought.

  “Harry, we got the rope,” Phelps said. “Good luck.” They shook hands warmly. Then Harry turned, walked down on the ballast tank, and sat down in the raft.

  The first raft, with Ensign Felders at the head, pulled away from the submarine. Three others followed. In thirty-five minutes they were as close in as they dared get to the rocks. Harry slid off into the water and headed out.

  Soon, he found himself alone in the rock corridors, pulling the two-man raft with the two thousand feet of rope slowly playing out. The water in the corridors was lower than when he had come out, and he feared underwater obstacles. The waters swiftly rose and lowered, but it was actually easier swimming than when he came out. With each stroke the tide carried the water in, and in only twenty minutes he could see the two great vertical rocks and feel the water begin to act up.

  He reached the pillars and entered the Cauldron. The comparatively easy swimming turned into a nightmare again, and he swam as hard as he could, his arms and legs going hard. It continued for a long time. His strength held as his heart pounded and he gasped for breath, occasionally pushing off rocks and cursing the life preserver for impeding his progress.

  Almost imperceptibly, the rate of his arms and legs began to slacken. He pulled at the waters as they tossed him about. Once or twice the raft was flung in front of him, but luckily he was not entangled. His speed continued to slacken. As his concentration began to lapse, words from almost forgotten passages plowed into his head, mostly from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. He had read and memorized these as a boy with great joy. Now his mind played tricks on him and carelessly, meaninglessly, dumped King Arthur’s words into his mind:

  Authority forgets a dying king,

  Laid widow’d of the power in his eye

  That bow’d the will.

  He kept up measured strokes in the turbulent waters. More words about the mythical king flooded in his mind.

  . . . because his wound was deep,

  The Bold Sir Bedivere uplifted him,

  Sir Bedivere, the last of all his knights,

  And bore him to a chapel night the field

  That stood on a dark strait of barren land.

  Harry didn’t remember very much after that. He had reached the apex of the Cauldron, and the Mae West, which he had cursed for slowing him down, now kept his head out of the water so he could breathe. Gradually, his strokes ceased altogether, and he began to drift. A wondrous wave of contentment came over him. He saw himself from under the turbulent waters. It beckoned him: if he would only come down where the water was calm, he would no longer have to struggle. He felt completely at peace. The echo of the poem ceased and the voices quieted.

  Drifting with the incoming tide, he floated semiconscious through the waves of the surf and into the placid lagoon, the sound of the surf diminishing with every foot he traveled. A new set of sounds replaced it: the sounds of the hateful island and its unquiet. But he didn’t think about his approach to the verdant green of its lushness, where a plant might grow two feet in a single day, every day. Nor did he contemplate its ever-present decay, where a dead animal’s carcass might completely disappear in twenty-four hours, except for the bones. He did not puzzle over the equal and competing powers of life and death, each so exalted on this speck of earth. The water shimmered, and the sea breezes contained a freshness and renewal. But it was soon tempered by equal doses of pungent and putrefying decay. He gently glided toward Nissan Island, a paradise built over a sewer.

  Strong arms grabbed him and pulled him from the water. It was Ketchel who had waded out.

  “Boy, are we glad to see you, Harry!”

  Gradually, Harry became more alert. He had been set with his back against the trunk of a tree. He heard the men talking, but couldn’t concentrate on what they were saying at first.

  “Chief, how much time we got left before they rush us?”

  “Beats me. It’s about two hours to dark. I was hoping Harry would have a raft, but all he’s got is that two-man thing. Phoebe, get that raft behind us more. We can’t let them put holes in that one too. Look at him, Mike, he’s beat. He gave everything he had for us and here he is. Lucky that Phoebe saw him out there. Has he said anything?”

  “Naw, Chief, just mumbled stuff. Three of us could maybe get on that raft he brought, but not four. So we got crap. I can tell you, I am not leaving that guy or anyone on this damn pest hole for the Nips to torture.”

  “Me neither, Mike. How many magazines we got left?”

  “We got six, Chief. I got ’em here in my lap.”

  “That’s what I thought. That’s about a hundred rounds, including the magazine that’s in here.”

  “You guys okay?” Harry managed to say weakly.

  “Well, Harry, we are, sort of. They must have gotten some more men cause they rushed us about two hours back and got close enough to put a couple of grenades in here. And, they saw the big raft and put umpteen holes in it. Damn. But we killed maybe twenty-five of them and they haven’t been back. Bodies all over the place.”

  “That changes nothing,” Harry managed to say, surveying the two dozen bodies strewn about them. “You three are getting out of this place right now. Where’s the rope?”

  “We tied it to the tree, sir,” little Minton said.

  “That’s fine,” Harry said. He struggled to get up, but could not.

  “Harry, take it easy. We’re not going anywhere,” Ketchel said.

  “Yes, you are! Leave me the gun. You three get in that raft and get out of here!”

  “Harry, Mike and I are not going to do that, leave you here.” Ketchel nodded. Little Phoebe did not look so convinced.

  “No, no! It’s all arranged,” Harry said, trying to sound strong and convincing. “I’m not staying on this God-forsaken place after you pull out. They’re going to pull me in like a fish. Look at the rope, it’s taut.” Harry felt dizzy all of a sudden.

  “So, let ’em pull me in like the big fish,” the old chief said.

  “No, Chief,” Ketchel said adamantly, “I’m stronger than you. Let �
��em pull me in.”

  Harry was seeing spots before his eyes, but he couldn’t let them know. “Don’t fool with me. This Cauldron thing is too much for anything but three strong guys. As it is, you guys are going to be buffeted like hell. This isn’t like yesterday when we paddled right in; it’s ten times worse. If you three guys get in that thing and all hold on to that rope, you’ll get out. Forget about paddling until you get past the Cauldron. Just pull yourself along. I don’t have the strength to pull or even hold on. If you put me in the raft, and two of you are pulling the rope, I’ll be tossed out. If you rope me in, I’ll drown. No, they’ll pull me right out of here with that same Mae West that got me in here. It’s the only way for all of us to get out.”

  He didn’t know how he was able to say all of that. It was one of those times in his life that he did something he shouldn’t have been able to do. And it worked! Harry could see that the three men had bought it, that he knew the Cauldron and they did not. But they did not like it.

  “I order you three to get out of here! Right now!”

  Osborne and Ketchel were still uncertain.

  “Harry, I can’t leave you here,” Osborne said.

  Ketchel shook his head. “I can’t either.”

  “You must do exactly as I say, right now. Otherwise we’re all dead.” The emergency was making Harry more and more conscious. “Look, that damn German did this to us. He lied to us about everything, just to save his own neck.” Harry looked sternly at the three men. “I am saying to you plainly that he’s not worth even one of us. Do what I say and you three get in that raft and leave here right now. Don’t let that guy kill any of us.”

  The others looked at each other, then back at him, and nodded.

  “I’m fine,” he said to them. “Shove off.”

  “Okay, okay,” Osborne said after a long pause. He moved toward the little raft, and then turned back. “Harry, you got a knife for that rope?”

  “No, I guess I don’t,” Harry managed. He was starting to feel woozy again.

  Osborne walked over to Harry, reached in his pocket, and pulled out a Case jackknife with a pale yellow handle about four inches long. “My father gave this to me. He was a good man like you. I expect to get it back in a little while.”

  “In a little while.”

  Osborne turned and went to the raft.

  “See you,” Ketchel said, as the three men made their way into the water.

  Harry could feel himself failing. It was all he could do to smile as the men began to paddle away. His head felt as though it were in a vise; his eyes fluttered. He didn’t move from the tree trunk. As the raft traveled the first hundred yards, he passed out.

  As soon as Osborne reached the submarine, he jumped up on the deck and yelled for Chief Dougherty, who quickly appeared.

  “Bennie, I want you to hook the rope up to that winch in the Forward Torpedo Room.”

  Dougherty looked at Osborne. “Duke, we decided we would pull Harry in by hand.”

  “No,” argued Osborne, “we’re not going to do that. That won’t work. He’ll drown in the Cauldron. We have to have more pull. That little winch will do it.”

  “You got it,” Dougherty said.

  Osborne ran to the bridge.

  “Red,” he said, coming up the ladder, “we have to take a chance on this. We’re against the tide. If the guys pull Harry in by hand, he will have to swim continuously, and he can’t swim anymore. I saw him, Red. He’s completely gone. I want permission to pull him in with a winch. Then, all he has to do is cut the rope.”

  “Duke, you just have to tell me. Tell me and we’ll do it!”

  “I think . . . I think we have to do it.”

  “Then do it!”

  Harry awakened still sitting against the tree. He thought he had gone blind, but then recognized that it was getting dark. The Japanese would be closing in, but he was as dead as alive and didn’t think of them. His focused on only one thing: the rope! He had no way of knowing how much time had passed, or that the guys had made it through the Cauldron and were back at the sub. The flare had already been up. The mission had been a success!

  Perhaps if he had known that, his concentration on the rope would have evaporated. He saw, and knew, only one thing, that he had to get to the rope. He looked at it, though he was not conscious enough to know how far it was away, or how high it was off the ground. He only knew, almost instinctively, that the slender strand was everything! Like a forbidden fruit, the narrow strand stood alluringly before him.

  With tremendous difficulty, he struggled to his feet, his calf muscles like steel cords, aching and attempting to cramp. He staggered, resisting the cramps, focusing all of his attention on the three-eighths-inch rope. He stepped forward, several steps too quickly, and fell backward, missing the tree trunk by only an inch. With considerable effort, he stood again.

  “The rope,” he told himself, “the rope, you must reach the rope!” He said out loud in a low and almost mechanical voice, “I must reach that rope! I must!”

  He stepped toward it and fell headlong. But his legs were loosening up, and his head clearing. He was up faster this time. He mopped his face with his sand-laden right hand, wiping granules into his right eye, and stepped forward.

  “Only a few feet! I must get to that rope!”

  Stiff-legged like a Frankenstein monster in trying to keep the cramps away, Harry advanced only inches at a time. He tripped over something and fell again, almost within reach of the rope. He got up haltingly, reached for the rope, and grabbed it!

  He was swaying enough to almost fall again, but he had it! A wave of exultation swept over him as he held it against his chest. He had it! It was tempting to just sit down and rest! I could just lie down here in this warm sand and sleep, he thought.

  He stood there trying to think for a few minutes. Finally, it occurred to him that he needed more: he needed to find the loop! Osborne’s words came back to him: “Harry, don’t cut the rope until you loop yourself in and tighten it. I’ve made a loop for you.”

  Harry wavered, almost falling, and reached into his pocket for the jackknife Osborne had left him. It was still there!

  Lifting it up to the rope was unexpectedly difficult. With his aching arms, it felt like lifting a truck. His heart still pounding, he tried opening it. Sand, sand was in the way! Finally he opened it, his hands shaking. Then, he stopped.

  “First, the loop.”

  Holding the knife, he looked for the loop. He hadn’t noticed it before, but there the loop was, near his right hand! He noticed his Mae West too, still on his chest and still inflated. With difficulty, he slipped the loop over his head and past his arms, brought it up under the vest to his armpits, and tightened it. His arms seemed to weigh a thousand pounds!

  Again Harry held the blade against the rope and, this time, cut it. Immediately and unexpectedly, he was jerked about fifteen feet toward the ocean, yanking him off his feet. In the next moment, he was dragged right out into the water. Luckily, he was able to twist around so his back was toward the sea as the pull continued. The vest held his head well out of the water as he was pulled out into the lagoon and to the sub at about a foot a second
.

  Despite shooting an American officer, the German wasn’t as crazy as he seemed. His information proved to be important, leading to a PT boat scouting mission less than a week later on January 10, 1944. The mission confirmed his claim that the best entrance to the atoll was between Nissan and tiny Barahun Island to its north. On February 15, a force of 5,800 New Zealanders coasted right through the opening and landed in the giant lagoon. In weeks, an airfield on Nissan was bombing Rabaul, the last step in securing the Solomon Islands, and putting a nail in the coffin of Japanese control over the Bismarck Archipelago.

  Harry thought a lot about Nissan Island after the war. He wondered what he’d shot in the tall grass on the blackened night. Taking up their new position when the Japanese attacked, he’d never had time to go back and see what it was. He guessed it was probably a tapir.

  Unexpectedly, at the oddest times, in church or in a store, the smell of the place would come back into his nostrils. He would think of little Minton hearing the phone ring, of the German’s lies, of the big cannon, and Osborne with the Browning rifle. He never could remember if they’d left the machine gun.

  Mostly, though, he would think on his swims through the Cauldron. He wondered why the German picked that place for them to land. Harry guessed that the old man had never been through it himself. Miraculously, he had lived through four passages of the turbulent water with only a few bruises to show for it. He knew he must have looked pretty funny being hauled out of there backwards by that winch, but it had sure worked great! The Duke had saved his life.

  As the years went by, Harry concluded that a certain vitality never came back into his body after those swims. But he had to smile and, sometimes, even chuckle over it. It was a good trade, a little energy for the lives of men he loved then, and still loved.