The Far Shore

by Paul T. Scheuring

  To this day, I wonder what he meant, and which war he was referring to that needed to be won.

  In moments like that, when you can feel the pain in a person, you go to what you know.

  So I told him, Don’t worry, God cried too.

  He looked at me. Incredulous. Maybe wanting clarity, I don’t know.

  Anyhow, I started telling him the story of Enoch. You know it?

  Of course, probably not, given the version I know is from a Mormon text. Anyhow Enoch comes up on God, and he sees that God’s weeping. He’s shocked, obviously, because God’s God, and God’s all love, all powerful 24/7/365, right? Well, God, it seems, is looking down at earth, at what Man is doing and has done, and it’s broken his heart. The wicked choices of His children will result in their damnation. And if they’re damned, and cast to Hell, then God will be deprived of their company. That’s why God cries. He doesn’t want to be alone without his creation.

  Gray absorbed that. He sat on that burnt hillside for a long time in the rain. So, he finally said, then all soldiers in this war would be hell-bound. You, me, them.

  I mulled it. Told him that, well no, there’s evil and then there’s a response to evil. Those that are responding to the evil aren’t going to burn. They’re just doing what needs to be done, shitty and unwanted as it is.

  I didn’t get the sense that worked for him. He turned a few things over in his head. Got to his feet.

  Maybe it’s the idea of evil that’s the problem, he said, then started the long walk for the rear.

  We didn’t get far.

  Because the J’s were beat, but weren’t completely beat.

  They always had some insane counter-move that’d work in the short run but wouldn’t ultimately change the outcome of the war.

  They sent in paratroopers. Flew some of their last remaining bombers in through the night—through that abominable weather—because they knew we wouldn’t have any airpower in the skies. They dumped hundreds of guys behind us to cut our supply lines. And it was smart, because we were stretched thin at that point.

  The small group that included Gray and myself was completely cut off from the rear.

  It was chaos. We were perhaps half a company at best, and a handful of those guys were aid men. You have to understand, because of the storm, we hadn’t heard the planes. The parachutes themselves were silent. And the Japanese paratroopers, once they’d dropped onto that dark rainy landscape, they were masters of the silence in their split-toed tabi shoes. We had no idea that they were upon us until they were upon us. They diced up our guys with knives, with close-quarter sidearm fire—they’d put the pistol into your neck, or into your tunic to muffle the blast. Goddamn, if a war was won on silence, the J’s’d win every time.

  We were fifty, we were twenty, we were a half dozen before we knew it.

  I tried to collect the troops around me—I was with Gray and the aid men. I did my best to marshal them, dig in somewhere. The J’s no doubt had us outnumbered at this point. They’d put down our radio guys already. We were utterly isolated. We were fighting a battle the rear didn’t realize was happening.

  I told Gray and the others the only ally we had—the only chance we had—was daylight. We had to hang on for an hour or two more. The rear would start to get a clearer idea what was happening up here at that point, and they’d come for us.

  But the J’s were hunting us. You could hear them out there—or evidence that they were out there. Small bits of coral kicked up by their feet, rolling down the hills toward us from above. The snap of small branches being trampled.

  We’d in turn run blindly through the darkness. Trying to get away from the sounds. Trying to find better cover. Somewhere we could make a last stand if need be.

  With the first light of day, as the palms and hillsides took barely discernible form against the sky, the rifle fire started.

  The rifle, you understand, is not a stealth weapon. The report carries too much. It’s a high-pitched crack that carries over the top of battles and weather. If it is a stealth operation, there is something desperate about using a rifle. You’re announcing your location. You want something so much you’re willing to make that trade-off.

  And what they wanted, I realized, was me.

  The bars on my helmet. The bars on my lapel.

  Hit the officers first, they always tell you.

  Kill the head, and the rest of the snake dies pretty quick.

  Three different shots clustered around me. Two into the coral hillside behind me, and the third, that one went into the hillside too, but not before taking a split-second shortcut through my calf. Oh Jesus Christalmighty, don’t ever get shot in the calf.

  Good I was with aid men, because they were on me immediately.

  But I knew if the J’s had riflemen sighting me in the low grayness of that morning, if they could discern my bars from that remove, then they had scopes or spotters with binoculars, and that made them all the more lethal.

  I ordered Gray and the others to move. “Ordered” might be too polite. I told them “Get the fuck moving!”

  The problem was we were largely out in the open, other than the chunk of coral we’d enfiladed behind. The darkness had given us a false sense of concealment.

  But we didn’t have any choice. They already had clean sight lines to our position.

  So we ran. Right out into that open space, right into the teeth of those riflemen.

  Goddamn is the rifle an accurate weapon.

  A headshot on one side of me. A headshot on the other side of me. Followed by that horrible sound of a body hitting the ground without any attempt to arrest its own fall. The same sound a shank of meat makes when it’s dropped indifferently on a butcher’s floor.

  I scrambled wide of the other guys, if only to get my bars away from the others. It was the one truly courageous thing I did during the war. I tried to draw their fire.

  Sure enough—and I’d learn this later—it worked to some extent. Gray peeled off with another aid man into the rain, and the J’s up there in their snipers’ nests, they made their choice—take down the guy with the red cross on his helmet, or the guy with the captain’s bars? They pumped every round they had at me.

  I took one in the hip, or maybe I should say love handle. Same thing, went right through me, chunked out two or three fingers’ worth of flesh from my side. But I got into a fold in the hills, this divot carved out by runoff over the years. I did this ungraceful tumbling set of somersaults, losing just about everything on the way down—weapon, belt, ammo—incredibly, one boot. But my bars, my helmet, I still had that. You know how I knew that? Because I landed on my head. I remember that metallic crunch, the liner straining at my ears like it was going to pull them off.

  The main thing was: I was safe.

  I’d collected a couple extra holes in my body, but I was still in the game. It’s a good feeling. Amidst all the horror, there is this tiny, small victory. It’s like being no-hit by an opposing pitcher, and you’re the one guy that ekes out a single. You lose 10-0, but you’re the guy that at least got a single.

  But then pretty quickly, the reality of things comes back to you.

  It’s silent out there again.

  Which is not good on a lot of fronts: it means the J’s have gone back into stealth mode, and there also isn’t the sound of American guns. It’s just me in this shithole coral box canyon or whatever it is—pinned down Japanese paratroopers, the worst of the bunch—on a big game hunt. Guys said that the J’s, they took the bars off the officers they killed, and fashioned miniature shrines out of them back home to celebrate their victory. I don’t know if this is true or not, but that’s what guys were constantly saying. And judging by their efforts to get me, I could see how it was true.

  The goddamn wind. The goddamn rain. The hish and wish of those palms overhead.

  Somewhere beneath that, the J’s were moving, repositioning. They had to be. They weren’t going home. You don’t get in a bomber and fly through a mon
soon and drop in between the enemy’s front and rear and expect to go home. You do all the damage you can, then you die. I was the coup de grace.

  My .45 was up the hill.

  I had a quick debate with myself. Go up there and get it, give yourself a chance to fight? Or do you get seen if you do that? Doesn’t matter if you’re gonna get seen, of course they’re going to find you. Yeah, that may be so, but is a .45 gonna get you out of a firefight with the most merciless troops the Japanese army can offer? Then I started thinking different thoughts: Do the J’s still take POWs, or are they killing them on sight, like some of the guys are saying? And what happens if they do take you, and you go back to Japan? You heard horror stories about that. And then, goddammit, before I know it, I’m thinking about my kids. I’d made a promise to myself never to think of them in the field. I didn’t want to mingle the innocence of them with the evil of the battlefield. I didn’t want those things ever to coexist in the same place, even if it was just within the walls of my head. Besides, if I tried to picture them too much, I found, very early on in my deployment, if I tried to pull their faces into focus in my head, it hurt so colossally I couldn’t function. Better just to know vaguely that they are there. That they are the light at the end of your tunnel. But don’t look too squarely at that light. It will blind you. It will break your heart.

  Four kids already, and I was only twenty-three. Like I said, Mormon girls. Industrious, once you marry them and get them in bed.

  Then somebody grabbed me hard. It was Gray.

  He was in the ravine! How the hell did he get in the ravine?

  He pressed his face to mine in the silence, shook his head ever so slightly. He gave a half-inch nod up the ravine, his eyes never leaving mine. Shh, the J’s, right there, that nod said.

  He took my hand. His hand, I remember, was ice cold. The hand of a dead man. He pulled me up the ravine. Little rocks fell around us, declaring our location. Out there, over the edge of the ravine, branches snapped in response. They were coming. They knew we were here.

  Everything ramped back into that strange, dual state of fight or flight that is war: simultaneously one hundred miles per hour and in slow motion. They were there! They were right there! Cresting the hill, taking their first shots at us, and Gray is pulling me not toward them, not away from them, but down, into the earth.

  We were swallowed up suddenly, by shadows, by the dry underbelly beneath the soaked battlefield.

  He’d pulled me down into some of the old Japanese emplacements. The warrens scorched black by flamethrowers. The “mopped-up” ratlines.

  Slam! He jammed shut a crude door that had been a day before breached, managed somehow to secure it or barricade it, then we were running headlong into the darkness. Away from the light. Away from the surface world. When I say running, it was nowhere near that. We were hurrying as fast as we could, which was this panicked, forward-driving crouch, because the tunnels were never more than four feet high.

  This was where the J’s had lived, hunkered down like moles, as they’d spent months waiting for us.

  He had a small flashlight with him, and that blackened world strobed through our vision in a frenzied blur as we scuttled away.

  So much near the surface still wore that oily black stink of the flamethrowers’ fuel. We pushed on nearly blind through a thick carpet of detritus—tumbling through and stirring up what had once been furniture before the flames had eaten them up. Mixed in were the personal effects of these men—their clothes, their bedding—all reduced to a half-ash, half-oily sludge. How many bodies were a part of that sludge, I cannot say. I have never smelled something as putrid as what hung in the air in those tunnels. I could feel the bile rising in my stomach. Funny thing is, if you think about it, we were just bile in the earth’s stomach at that moment, weren’t we? All these intertwined intestines beneath the earth, filled with the half-digested by-product of battle—everything apparently so inseparable in the light of day reduced to a homogenous, grimy bunch of shit in that darkness. We protest too much, don’t we? Thinking we’re so different from everything. You end up in the same place, one way or another.

  There’s another way out, he’s saying.

  I realize that he’s been saying this for a while, but I’ve been too sick to hear it, my ears too full of my own heartbeat and breaths and fear.

  If we can just get to it first, he’s saying. Before they find it.

  Where’s Mitchell, I manage. Mitchell was the last guy he’d been with when I last saw him a few moments before.

  Bullet, Gray said.

  Before we knew it, we were into the heart of the place. The main “living quarter.” The ceilings were perhaps a half-foot taller, and the flames had not reached this far into the interior. The walls and furnishings were intact. Bedrolls, pictures, noodles—a vain attempt to cram vestiges of civilization into a four-and-a-half foot tunnel. If the flames had not gotten here in the preceding days, we had—GIs had. There were six Japanese soldiers here, all blown open in one way or another by Thompsons and BARs. God, the amount of flies! Thousands, I swear to God, millions, supping on the sticky sweet blood of those J’s. They were either too drunk on it or just plain indifferent, because virtually none of them moved when we entered. They just milled there in that black, ever-moving carpet upon the corpses, feeding feeding feeding.

  It was a hub, this place. No less than a half dozen tunnels branched off from it.

  Gray motioned to one of them. This way, he said.

  But no sooner had we made for it when gunfire rippled through the warrens.

  The echo, Jesus Christ, the echo. It was enough to put you flat on the ground with your hands over your ears. How the J’s endured a single artillery bombardment down here, I’ll never know.

  It was impossible to know which way the gunfire came from. It was only a couple of shots, but it was followed by a couple more, from a distinctly separate location. It was the J’s. Had to be. As far as I knew, we were the only US soldiers left, so it didn’t seem they’d be engaging anyone.

  What they were doing was letting us know they were there. And not just in one place.

  Gray shoved me back between a seam in the rocks, flipped off his flashlight.

  You have never seen a darkness that black. If you are in true, pure darkness, it actually glows. With a 100 percent absence of light, the eye or the mind starts to conjure things, starts to give color and dimension to the nothingness. It pulsated around us, malfeasant.

  For a long time there was nothing, just the sound of those languid flies and their perpetual feast a few feet from us.

  But then it came. A Japanese voice. It could have been coming from anywhere.

  “Maybe we don’t pretend anymore.”

  “Maybe we don’t pretend anymore, okay?”

  “American captain, yes I am talking to you.”

  All the while the blackness danced.

  I felt Gray’s palm calmly rest on the back of my neck, somewhere between comfort and admonition. I am here. Don’t take the bait.

  Then all went silent again.

  Goddamn, it was hot down there. Hot in those burnt-out, shit-slickened bowels of the earth. We were being digested. I swear to God we were being digested. The earth was slowly cooking us in imperceptible increments.

  Neither of us had a sidearm. We had nothing but that flashlight.

  It was silent long enough that we could feel a false security, if only to peel off our tunics. Try wearing a field jacket in a hundred-degree heat with a hundred percent humidity. It was like heaven to get out of that thing.

  An hour passed. It may have been three. With what fear does to the brain, what that darkness was doing to our eyes, it was impossible to have any sense of time.

  Then a grenade went off. It may have been fifty, one hundred feet away, in a distant passage, but it nevertheless blew everything out of me. It took the entirety of my being to bite down on the shriek that escaped from my lungs. I was no doubt crying, because I could feel tiny ri
vulets running down my cheeks. Could have been sweat, but not likely. I was as primally shit-scared as an infant.

  I heard nothing from Gray.

  Then, once the concussions had rolled away through the halls, after a perfect pause that let us know that the grenade had been thrown for effect, the Voice came back.

  “You see the movie Grand Illusion, American officer?”

  I’m rocking back and forth at this point, my arms around my knees like a crazy person.

  I felt Gray’s hand again on the back of my neck.

  It was this calm, sure thing.

  Sure all the way to the center of the earth.

  “We have honor. Officer to officer, there is honor,” said the Japanese darkness.

  Which, of course, is the ultimate bullshit. Officers were the big Get for them, because they could be pumped for information. Or better put, tortured. You did not want to be an officer in a Japanese POW camp. They were Tokyo-Rosing me; come out, come out, we’re friends, yes, just a couple of down-to-earth humans that can have tea and a laugh together. It’s one thing to have an enemy. It’s another to have a dishonest enemy. Just try to kill me and be up-and-up about it, Jesus Christ.

  We waited, because there was nothing else we could do.

  A couple of the J’s passed by at one point, moving through that central hub room, but we were apparently far enough removed in our little cleft in the earth that their weak flashlights did not find us. Then they were gone again.

  It was a horrible thing, crouched there in the dark. No one was coming to save us. We were unarmed. No one even knew we were here. Only the Japanese did.

  Either they’d get us or the dehydration would. We were cooking alive down there. But to move, to seek water, was to be found.

  It went on like this interminably. The darkness danced and shimmered in our brains. Our mouths and throats were dry, though we were smack dab in the middle of a monsoon.

  Then a light shone in the darkness.

  A tiny thing, winking on.

  It was a razor-thin semicircle, like the crescent moon at its most gossamer.

  It was Gray’s flashlight. He had pressed it into his palm, turned it on.