Anyhow, it’s strange the things we agree to do. I’m not entirely convinced we’re that sharp a species.
We did make progress, though. We pushed a salient in a couple of miles without any sign of the Japanese. We tore away sugarcane as we walked; we gnawed on it like kids, sucked on that sweet juice as we marched into the monsoon. Again, the visuals of it are a blur to me, but with the other senses, I remember it like it was yesterday. Sugarcane has always been a sweet escape to me ever since. I just associate it with that time. That despite the intensity of the storm, despite the almost certain horror about to befall us, there can still be that moment where there is something perfect on your tongue, something sweet and gives the brain delight. Who knows, maybe that is the secret to life, to be able to telescope in on something, a beautiful something, however small, while the rest of the shit of the world swirls around you. Maybe that sort of focus and attention is the ultimate form of genius.
I found Gray in one of the jeeps in the rear. They were bringing forward the aid station stuff we would no doubt need when we engaged the enemy. The vehicles moved slower than the men. The soaked, torn earth disagreed with their weight, clutched at their tires with mud two, three feet deep. I walked beside him, offered him some cane as he jounced along on the muddy road. He smiled wanly—he didn’t have it in him to be impolite, it seemed, even in his decimated state—but demurred nevertheless.
I’d offered him condolences before we’d left, when I’d heard about Bill. He’d absorbed them with a minimal nod. It was evident it was not a pain he wanted to share with the world, so I let the matter be. I promised myself, however, that though I would not engage him directly about his loss, I’d nevertheless make sure to be around him. Presence, I find, is so often nine-tenths of the battle.
And it was not like I was inexperienced with soldiers and their loss. It was just that Gray wore it differently. It may be that he had these hugely expressive eyes, and that when you looked at him, you got the sense that all the doors were open, that whatever was In there was visible Out here. He didn’t have to say a word; his eyes had the Universe in them. And the universe doesn’t have to talk, does it? It’s just there in all its starkness, unequivocal in its being. There was no bullshit in Gray. His heart, I could tell, had died.
But something happened that animated him. We took fire.
The Japanese had dug in so well, had been so patient in waiting for us, that we didn’t realize until we were midway between two hills that they were honeycombed with bunkers. Now when I say “bunkers,” there was nothing formal about them—no cement emplacements, nothing like that. These were warrens, ratlines really, carved into the ancient coral that comprised so much of this part of the island’s landscape. The men had become part of the hillside like animals do. No part of them was above ground; they were tucked inside their underground holes, firing out through tiny apertures they’d carved out of the rock. And we were dead center of the cross fire.
Strange thing it is to have hillsides fire at you. You return fire, but you feel like you’re fighting the earth itself.
A half dozen of our guys went down in those first few seconds. And that dead thing, that hopeless corpse that was Gray Allen, sprang to life. He grabbed syrettes, his medic kit, and hurried through the mud toward our fallen. Where a moment before the day had just been filled with that heavy, monotonous roar of the monsoon winds and rain, now came waves of incoming and outgoing fire intermingled. Everyone had full magazines still, and all were determined to empty them as quickly as possible, for fear of dying with unused ammunition in their weapons. It’s always that way, isn’t it? Empty your clip first, make sure one way or another you get your shots in, figure out the consequences later. I only say this because that was the type of firestorm Gray went ripping into.
I really did get the sense he wanted to die.
But I was too busy with my own matters. If you’re a commanding officer, the first thing you need to kill in battle is fear in your men. And that starts with you. You’re no different than the rest of them: you’re scared shitless. The air’s literally filled with death, and those bullets and ordnance are moving too fast for you to see them. It gives you the worst sort of paranoia—the very air itself might rise up and bite you at any second. You become acutely aware of your skin, how thin it is, how you’re as defenseless as a newborn baby in the face of all the gunfire. God did not make our skin with bullets in mind.
That’s how I did it. That was always how I did it. In the face of that madness, I went straight to God, started a dialogue with him whether he was ready or not. It was just this long internal, intense ramble. Lord this and Lord that, with no room to pause, no room to think. I suppose in a way I was jamming my airwaves, filling my head with such distraction that there was no place for the fear. Maybe it’s the same idea as whistling past the graveyard, I don’t know. But I’m operating on two levels—delivering this rapid-fire filibuster of a prayer inside my head to God, all the while barking dispassionate orders to my men. Find enfilade! Set up mortars! Isolate the shooters!
The worst part is that I am a marked man because of the bars on my helmet. You shoot commanding officers first. You always shoot commanding officers first.
Everything is coming at me—rifle fire, automatic fire—and I’m starting to feel sorry for the enlisted men that are dug in beside me. Be a shame for a private to get it because someone was trying to hit a captain! But we’re setting up mortars, trying to get our bazooka team going. It’s rain and mud and smashed coral all around us. Visibility is terrible. The storm has eaten up the horizons. We just know those indistinct gray hillsides are firing at us. And even those massive forms are half-lost to the typhoon rains and winds. That the day is starting to lean toward night is not helping matters. Nothing can be seen with any real certitude, but like I said, you don’t want to be the guy who dies with ammo still in his clip. So we’re putting everything we can into that hillside, and they in turn are putting everything they’ve got into our position. Everyone just firing blindly into that sweltering grayness, hoping that their shots will somehow strike true, and the other side will finally leave them alone.
Through all this, in the no man’s land between us, moved this hunched, determined thing—the only figure out here with discernible human form. The rest of us had pressed ourselves so deeply into the rock and mud that we were unrecognizable as humans. So too with the Japanese in their holes. There was only this man, Gray, his limbs, his head, so naked in the rain as he rushed from fallen man to fallen man. Why the Japanese didn’t bring him down—and maybe they were trying—I don’t know. Maybe it was the Red Cross decal on his helmet, though in my experience the J’s never paid that much heed. Still, it was transfixing. The storm and rain had pounded the color out of the land, had soaked the green from our uniforms, rendered them near-black as we huddled in the mud. But that man kept moving, and that cross, that red cross, was the only color on the land. It was this strange impossible swath of humanity in that otherwise gunmetal day.
Did he want to die that day? Probably. I’ve seen plenty of medics wait for the all-clear before going out to the wounded. But he just went.
More than a few of those guys made it back, too. Maybe they weren’t whole, some of them, but they were alive. They made it back stateside, they had families. They went to pony league games.
Pony league games, right? Well, you ask any of those guys, choking on their own blood in the mud that day, pants filled with shit, brain filled with horror, if they’d like to live to see their kid in a baseball game—even if the kid struck out four times and his team lost 19-0—every one of those guys’d say yes, every one would practically beg for it, because in making an offer like that, in being the only guy on the battlefield that could bestow something like that upon them, you’d be God.
And that’s exactly what Gray was that day.
BRUCE: He’s done. You can record again.
LILY: We’re already going. (beat, the sound of a chair shifting on a
tile floor) You good?
BRADLEY: No, yeah, sorry. Mai Tai went right through me. I was speaking about filibusters earlier. You want to see a filibuster? Watch an old man try to convince his body to take a piss. (a chair pulls out, someone sits) Don’t mean to offend.
LILY: Take more than that.
BRADLEY: Where were we?
BRUCE: You guys were pinned between the ridges.
BRADLEY: Right, well…hey, you mind if we go another round—
LILY: Already ordered.
BRADLEY: No bad days, are there? (clears his throat, shifts in chair) So. We took them. We always were going to. That was the sad thing about the War at that stage. Everyone knew what the outcome was going to be. Everyone on both sides knew we were going to take Okinawa. But still we had to go through the motions. Get guys killed on both sides to make it “official,” I suppose.
We called in artillery to get the J’s out of those hills. In it came, raining down through the storm, splitting those hillsides wide open. Geysers of coral and foliage and body parts erupted everywhere. Whoever was in those hills was either dead or so shell-shocked they were operationally dead to us anyhow. But we had to do the job of securing the place, so I ordered men in there with flamethrowers. That was the du jour thing at the time: if you didn’t want to go in somewhere, you flamed it out. It was like how we used to drown the rats out of their holes back in Utah, except instead of flooding them with water, we flooded them with fire. Horrible way to go, I imagine. Stuck in a hole, a wall of flame coming at you.
It’s night now, mind you. And because of the wind and rain, we still can’t see any better than a fish can in a barrel of piss. But you can see the flamethrowers. Half a dozen teams, up and down the hillsides, on clean-up duty. Thing about a flamethrower is, because it’s a petrol flame, it doesn’t give a damn about the rain and barely gives a shit about the wind. It’s the devil’s hand, or like it anyhow, reaching out, straining at the leash before the fire teams, close to snapping free and having its way with the world. But as long as it gets what it wants when it reaches into those holes, as long as it finds someone and something to burn, maybe it’ll stay in line. Feed a dog enough, even the worst sort of hellhound, and it’ll stay by your side, right?
I was with Gray. He’d about wrapped up the guys he could; most of them were on their way back to the aid station. Most of it for me, being a commander, is not just sending guys into battle, but seeing them out if they’re all shot to shit. It’s a form of gratitude: I haven’t forgotten you; you still matter to us. And besides, you never know if that little bit of support—your presence with them as they’re shuttled back to the rear—is what a wounded man might need to get over the hump, in terms of will, and survive. You just don’t know. But the last thing you want is for them to feel alone. Loneliness kills. I may or may not have already said that, I don’t know.
Gray, though, his exposed flesh wore this pink sheen of rain and blood commingled. He smelled like blood.
That previous resignation I’d seen in his eyes before the battle had not yet returned. I suspected he was redlining with adrenaline, and would soon crash, as the rest of us would. But he seemed present. He seemed engaged. I thanked him for saving the guys he could save.
He didn’t say much, but he was apparently happy because, for a few of the guys anyhow, pony league baseball had won out. The guys had taken hits, but they were going home. War had put some nasty scars in some of them, but it hadn’t killed them. And if it hadn’t killed them, it hadn’t killed their future. Hadn’t killed the unborn kids and their kids, the ones running around out there even today, missing pop flies, crying after they strike out, jumping up and down because they hit a game-winning double. I don’t know, maybe I ascribe too much to him, but that’s what time does. You see the dead in a different way, you venerate them. Maybe that’s why there’s religion. Nostalgia becomes so acute it becomes legend.
But this is war, so there is no reprieve. We’re mopping up, as I said; the enemy’s burnt to black in their holes…or so we think.
It’s Gray and me up on the ridge—we’d taken the high ground once we’d prevailed, and that’s where we were staging from. Fire teams were doing their thing, aid men were conveying the wounded back to rear, and because brass is insisting we push forward, we’ve got a couple of squads already moving ahead, deeper into the Kiyan. So there weren’t a ton of us there. But there was the appearance of a ton of us, because of all of the movement, because of the flamethrowers. Which is a critical part of this story.
See, Gray and I, we’re sending out the last guy that’d been hit, and we turn and see, maybe twenty, thirty feet below us in the darkness, two Japanese. They’ve got no shirts on. They’ve been flushed from their holes by the flame teams, must’ve found another way out. But they’re crouched there in the darkness. Immediately I’ve got my gun out. But it’s pretty clear that these guys are no threat. As I said: no shirts; they’ve got their pants on, they’ve got their tabis on, but they’ve just got this unsettling gauntness to them, like somebody sucked the musculature out of them but left the skin and bones. Well, most of the musculature, not all of it, but you get the point.
And you can tell, they’re trapped. They got free of the hillside, and the flame teams are behind them, but now they’re stuck where we had been earlier, between the two hills, because now we’re on this hill in front of them. To their eyes, they see the vehicles, the men, the movement, and they’re horrified. They don’t know most of this is medical mop-up. Gray’s not wearing his Red Cross, the aid tents are still in the rear. They think we’re still moving the offensive forward, which for the moment, we’re not.
But they don’t know that. All it is is a rainy black monsoon around them. They’ve only just managed to escape getting burned alive. But when they’ve run, they’ve run right into more Americans! There’s no way out.
As I’m sure you’re aware, the Japanese, in defending the islands, particularly near the end, and especially on Okinawa, they were not to surrender. Surrender was a fate worse than death. So what do you do if you’re one of those guys? You’re starved, terrified. And you’re surrounded on all sides. The universe has cast its lot against you.
Something happened. They stopped moving. They saw us and everything just drained out of them. It wasn’t like they were trying to be still so that we wouldn’t see them. They knew we’d sighted them.
They slowly sat. One trembled. I remember seeing his ribs, how they shook.
The other one put his arms around him.
It was a gesture that said death is coming but I am here.
We’ll go there together, okay?
And that poor other soldier, he just went to pieces. This soldier, this man, trying to stay true to the timeless ideas of courage, of grace under pressure, went to pieces instead.
Other guys—some of the flame teams—became aware of them.
I wasn’t going to shoot them.
But Gray instinctively sensed something was coming. He hopped forward into the night. Moved as if to descend the hill toward them.
But the flame teams got to them first.
The devil’s hand reached out.
And got a firm grip of both of the Japanese.
Those guys, they went up like rags soaked in kerosene.
That was it. The rain wasn’t going to put out that fire, and nor were our guys. Those two Japanese soldiers burned, fast and hot, huddled together in that final moment. Somewhere within that burn, the life leeched quickly out of them, but you can’t really know when that moment was. Gray just sat, and I was not too far behind him. We watched the whole way through, the two or three minutes it took for the flame to have its way with the bodies, to char all that it found worthy of charring, then it finally burned out with a final indifferent wink. Then the rain went about its business of washing and cooling the bodies.
We had a bit of time to sit.
The battle went on: the flame teams continued mop-up, the rear continued to do its thing,
the front continued to advance, but we got a chance to sit. To rest and recoup as replacements were called forward.
I wished we had some hooch.
Gray, I could see, was crying.
He apologized. Said it was unbecoming, he knew.
I told him to shut up.
His biggest fear was that he was going to be replaced. That I’d categorized him a “battle exhausted.” Incredibly, though the Holy Grail for these guys was that hall pass home, which mental issues sometimes earned you, he wanted to stay on the lines!
And through all this, he’s just looking down at those dead Japanese soldiers below, barely discernible black masses on a scorched landscape in a hell-black monsoon night, and he’s continuing to cry. It’s that stiff-upper-lip bullshit. Man-crying. Trying to hold it back.
I tell him it’s okay.
He says it’s not.
I say it is. Man needs to fall apart every now and again to be human.
He says being a human, here, isn’t going to win the war.
The Far Shore Page 17