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TEETH - The Epic Novel With Bite (The South Pacific Trilogy)

Page 7

by Timothy James Dean


  “I thought I died. You look like an angel. What’s your name?” “Gwyndolyn,” she said. “And you can call me Gwyn.”

  She beamed at him, and Johnny’s pain was suddenly easier to bear.

  For the first month, Johnny was too sick to do anything but lay quiet and do what he was told. Doc Mac never said it in so many words, but Gwyn could tell that he was amazed the patient had survived. He took a particular interest in what he called “my miracle man.” Often he came by to change the bandages himself, even when other doctors were on rounds. It looked like the gangrene was gone, but the stubborn infection lingered. The survival of “young Johnny” was still touch and go, Doc Mac thought, but he dared now to hope.

  Once, when his patient was having a particularly bad night, the doctor asked him a question.

  “Do you believe in God?”

  The soldier was nauseous and feverish, suffering from a recurrence of malaria on top of everything else. The question caught him off guard.

  “I was raised in church,” he said. “But after what I’ve seen...” he tapered off. Doc Mac had seen many a soldier in similar straits. They were fresh from a world where mayhem and sudden death were the norm.

  “Young Johnny,” he said. “Let me ease your mind. God does not require your belief in order to exist.” The soldier gazed without comprehension and the old man patted his arm.

  “I hope you won’t make the mistake so many do, of thinking we doctors are in the God business. It’s a common error, or perhaps a hope, among patients. They dearly want us to tell them we can fix everything.

  “Personally, I think of myself more as a gardener. If a limb is badly damaged, or infected, I remove it. If an enemy attacks—like fungal rot on my roses—well, I can treat that. But as for actually making blossoms grow! My! That is an art beyond my few skills.

  “Young Johnny, healing happens inside you, through processes we barely understand. You may be shocked to hear this, but when it comes to life itself, science cannot define it. We recognize it, but do not know what it is. In my opinion, life comes from a power greater than mine.”

  “What are you saying, Doc?” the sufferer grumbled.

  “I’m suggesting that you pray for your life, young Johnny,” the older man said. “I’ve seen it have a salubrious effect.”

  Johnny was too sick to reply. He groaned and turned away. Doc Mac dipped a cloth in water and wiped his forehead.

  “You don’t need all the answers,” the physician said. “I say, just do it. Don’t bargain, just ask for your life. And if you can’t manage it, don’t worry about that either.”

  Johnny said nothing. The relentless drill of agony had wrung him dry. His mind drifted incoherently for some time, but later that night, the doctor’s voice returned. God does not require your belief in order to exist. Strangely, it gave him comfort.

  In his childhood, Johnny had been secure at the center of the universe. God oversaw everything, then his parents, his grandparents and other adults, then Johnny himself, and the rest of the world. That was the celestial order he’d been taught. But under the ferocious onslaught of war, the construct was torn apart.

  Johnny found himself in a living hell, a torment devoid of any loving presence. Human life was a cheap commodity, easily snuffed out. He’d remembered close buddies from the early days before he learned to stop caring. They were complete personalities, with full lives and dreams, turned in an instant into exploded sacks of meat. What was the ultimate meaning? They were no more significant than animals in a slaughterhouse.

  Gradually, a cold conviction seeped through Johnny. Their destiny was his. He was not going to make it. Once he accepted that, things actually got easier. He had a new plan. Before my number comes up, I’ll take out as many Japs as I can.

  Now Doc Mac’s words lifted a burden he had not realized he was carrying. God does not require your belief in order to exist. It was almost as if some part of him worried that losing his faith had killed God.

  The night Doc talked to him, sleep continued to elude him. The pulse in his chest tolled through his body like the somber church bells over the San Diego of his youth. Ask for my life, Doc said. What harm can it do? Awkwardly, he formed the words.

  If you’re out there, take away this pain. Either that, or kill me. I’m at the end of my rope. That was all he could manage. And then the chant rose from the core of his being.

  Fight to live, live to fight! It echoed in his mind, and that was all Johnny knew. He drifted into a fathomless slumber, free for once of the visitations of the living dead.

  Next morning, Gwyn found the patient deeply asleep. With a thumb, she smoothed the furrow between his eyebrows. With her thermometer, she confirmed what she already knew. Johnny’s fever had broken.

  She fetched a basin of warm water, soap, a safety razor, and shaved his face. She studied the clean features and saw how much younger he looked. He was just a boy, whatever ordeal he’d been through. An hour later, Doc Mac sewed up the wound and changed the dressing.

  “Young Johnny,” he told the sleeping man. “I believe you’re on the mend.”

  Three weeks into his sojourn at the Port Moresby hospital, Johnny was transferred to the general ward. He began talking with the other men, and Gwyn saw the company was doing him some good. Soon all the nurses were introduced to the Yank who had beaten gangrene. Many had a frequent smile for Doc’s dashing “miracle Yank.”

  As for Gwyn, she generally visited in the middle of the night, when the lights were low. Johnny continued to have trouble sleeping. His face invariably brightened as she approached. It was only natural, she thought. Hers was the first friendly face he’d seen after he regained his senses.

  The nights were stifling, even under the fans. Gwyn washed the sweat off his face, turned his pillow, and pulled up a chair. They spoke in whispers so as not to wake the surrounding men. By tacit agreement, they steered clear of the war. Johnny loved to hear her tales about fly-fishing with her father in the ice-cold streams of home.

  “Where is that?” he asked.

  “Peachland,” she said, “in British Columbia.”

  “And where is that?”

  “Canada, silly,” she said. “You’re from California?” Johnny nodded. “You go north through Oregon, then Washington, and there’s BC. You’ve never seen the Peace Arch?”

  “Seen it? Never heard of it.”

  “When you drive from Seattle to Vancouver, you’ll find it exactly on the border between the US and Canada. The arch says, ‘Children of a Common Mother.’ It has an iron gate, locked open forever. Sometimes my friends from nursing school and I picnicked there, on our way to shop in Blaine or Bellingham. Whatever did they teach you at school?” she teased.

  “Not much,” Johnny grimaced. He loved the outdoors too, he told her, and he was tickled to find a girl who knew how to tie a fly, and land a mountain trout. In turn, he described hunting deer and elk in the California Sierras.

  But the times he described riding his surfboard on the enormous Pacific rollers off Oahu, he got really enthused. Gwyn saw his eyes light up. For a few moments, he was able to forget his sweaty bed, and she knew that was as good as medicine.

  By his second month at the hospital, it was clear Johnny Willman was on the road to recovery. His bullet wound had knitted into a raised scar. The infection, Doc Mac announced, had been beaten. Johnny’s appetite improved.

  Gwyn was delighted. But the more Johnny’s energy returned, the more he transformed into a different man. And this one, the nurse discovered to her disappointment, she did not care for at all.

  CHAPTER 7

  As soon as “the corner was truly turned,” as Doc Mac put it, it was a feisty and impatient soldier who emerged. This was the John Willman who’d lost every field promotion he’d been given—and there had been quite a few—by shooting off his mouth. When he saw men killed by ill-informed or just plain lousy orders, Johnny found he had to speak up. Unfortunately, his target often happened to be the very officer w
ho had just elevated him. Every time, Johnny had been busted back to Buck Private.

  Luckily for him, his prowess with his rifle was a hot commodity. His field commanders utilized him, but he was regarded with suspicion, something of a loose cannon. General MacArthur was the exception. He admired Willman, and told his officers to ignore what the fellow said. They were to use the sniper like they would a good hunting dog. So Johnny was left alone until they needed him. Then he was sent to sniff out the enemy once more, and show them his teeth.

  Now, while Johnny was stuck in hospital, he read “the Stars and Stripes” and every newspaper he could get his hands on. What he saw fed his obsession with getting back to the General. The invasion of Japan was close, that was clear. In Europe they had called it “Operation Overlord.” Here, it was going to be “Operation Downfall.” He began to berate the medical workers.

  “Do more!” he demanded. “Do it faster! Get me out of here.”

  And it was for this cantankerous soldier that Gwyn developed an aversion. He was impatient and outspoken, and if he was committed to being the squeaky wheel, she was equally determined not to be the grease. Now when she had free time in the middle of the night, she no longer gravitated to the Californian’s bedside. Yet, to her annoyance, she found herself thinking about him.

  Caring too much for any soldier was against her strict rules. Early in the war, she’d learned that lesson the painful way. Now she threw up her hands. The sooner Johnny Willman did manage to talk himself onto a ship out of here, the better it would be. Or so she told herself.

  Johnny continued to make life miserable for those around him. The nurses stopped smiling and coming by to visit. Ministering to the sick and dying was difficult enough, without a hard case riding them.

  The fact was, it was not the staff that held Johnny back, but his own infirmity. As soon as he tried to get up and move around, he discovered just how compromised he was.

  On one occasion, while wobbling between the beds, leaning heavily on Ruthie’s arm, he tripped over his own feet. In spite of her attempt to grab him, he fell hard on the floorboards. Pain seared through his chest, and he let loose some words that made him taste soap.

  Johnny grabbed the bed frame and hauled himself back up. Then he gave Ruthie a piece of his mind. As it happened, Doc Mac was in earshot. He strode over, got an arm around the Yank, and marched him back to bed. He made the boy sit, and let him have it.

  “Young Johnny, you will curb your tongue! I believe you are intelligent enough to understand that abusing my staff hinders, and does not help, your cause. We have more than enough to do,” Doc Mac barked, “without bearing the brunt of your personal war!”

  To his credit, Johnny apologized at once to Ruthie, who he genuinely liked, and to his physician.

  “I’m sorry, Doc,” he said. “It’s just that I need to get out of here! I have to be there for the Jap invasion. I’m better Doc, I tell you. Cut me loose!”

  “Better!” Doc snorted. “I suppose that is why you cannot walk? If you have medical credentials,” he continued, “show me them. Otherwise, accept mine. I will send you packing the minute you are fit. Until then, you will pull in your horns.”

  After that, Johnny redoubled his efforts to walk. He put on a hard face, but inwardly, he was appalled by how wasted he was. He looked at his pale, thin legs, and remembered them tanned and strong, guiding his surfboard through the waves. He demanded a set of crutches and began to get around.

  Doc Mac assigned him to a ward where the men were mobile. Here Johnny saw Gwyn less frequently, although he found himself watching for her. But when she did make the effort to look him up, things quickly deteriorated. At first, Gwyn seemed glad to see him, and asked about his progress. But soon as he got on his favorite topic about getting back to the front, her eyes clouded over. She’d make some excuse and hurry off. Johnny, staring at her retreating back, would scowl. What does she want from me? Why can’t she take me as I am?

  Along with his increasing energy came exasperation with being cooped up. Johnny worked through every book he could find, even a couple Gwyn was kind enough to lend him—“Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights” by the Bronte sisters. They were not exactly up his alley, but they gave him something to fill the hours. Then he went looking for other diversions. A highlight of the week was Saturday nights when they showed a movie in the main mess tent. They’d stretch a sheet, set up the projector, and run the reels.

  The most recent offering was an action flick, “Raiders of Ghost City.” It starred Joe Sawyer in a brimmed hat as “Idaho Jones.” Johnny was on the benches with some of his tent mates when he saw Gwyn and Ruthie come in with a group that included a couple of men in civvies. That gave Johnny a shock, one he didn’t like.

  The lights were turned off and he settled in uneasily to watch the movie. But everything else was quickly forgotten when he saw the lead off. This was a black-and-white newsreel of recent action in Okinawa. The Japanese island was now under American control. The fight had been costly, with fifty thousand US wounded, fully twelve thousand men killed. But it had gone far worse for the enemy. The announcer gave estimates of two hundred thousand troops and civilians slaughtered.

  Sitting in the dark, Johnny puzzled it out. Okinawa—that’s where it’s going to be. That’s where General MacArthur will gather the Army for the invasion. And that’s where I have to get.

  He left while the movie credits were still rolling, before the lights came up. He told himself he’d seen enough, but the truth was, he did not want to watch Gwyn leave with her men friends.

  After that, he really went on the warpath. He even hitched a ride to the Army garrison and camped out all day, insisting on a meeting with the American Commander in New Guinea. An aide informed the Colonel that a recovering soldier was waiting to see him. The Commander was up to his ears, and had no time for courtesies. Late in the day, however, an aide reminded him the GI was still outside. In an expansive moment, Chambers had him shown in. He expected to shake the hand of an injured war hero and promise to send him home. Instead, he found himself confronted by an unruly soldier spoiling for a fight.

  “A slack rear-guard attitude!” Johnny railed, “that’s all that keeps me in Port Moresby! I need to be sent back to the Philippines, and at once, Sir!”

  “And just what are you doing in New Guinea?” the Colonel bristled. “How did one John Willman, recently of Manila, manage to wind up back in New Guinea? Care to explain, Private?” Johnny had no truthful response to share, so he gave a simple one.

  “SNAFU, Sir!” He didn’t need to spell out the Army acronym for a career officer. The Colonel did not normally trouble himself with the fate of one man. He was higher up the food chain than that. Now he pulled his face into a mirthless smile and ordered the gung-ho boy back to hospital. He told him he would be released only when Doctor MacClure said so, and then he would get his orders through channels like everyone else “in this man’s Army.” He warned the Private not to show his face at HQ again without an explicit invitation.

  Once Johnny departed, Henry sent someone to fetch Willman’s New Guinea record. It took time to locate it, stuffed away in a warehouse. But when at last the Commander came into possession of the dossier, he glanced through it and was both impressed and troubled.

  He closed the file and sat back. He was of two minds. He admired a soldier who liked to fight, but he was an old hand at reading “Army-speak.” John Willman had the bad habit of criticizing his betters. Not the Army way. Simply will not do to have any man question command. Still, there’s no doubt about his courage, or his marksmanship. So will I send him to General MacArthur—or home for good?

  The Colonel was extremely busy and Private Willman was a minor bother. He had all the preparations for handing over the reins of command to his successor. In addition, there was his research to complete.

  Some soldiers, like General MacArthur, were commanders of action. Others, such as the Colonel, were better at administrating the vast machine tha
t was the Army. Certainly, Henry was a gifted bureaucrat. It required special skill to organize the myriad details of personnel, property and operations of the American occupation. Chamber’s objective, to be completed by his successor, was to prepare everything for the US withdrawal from New Guinea.

  Most of Henry’s career had been spent on American soil. He had toiled up the ladder of promotion. The highlight of the 1930’s, however, had been the two years he spent as a military attaché at the Embassy in Tokyo. He dutifully put in an appearance at the interminable receptions, but at the same time, he quietly went about his true assignment—the gathering of military intelligence for Washington.

  In fact, Henry was fascinated by the bellicose Nipponese Empire. He cultivated the acquaintance of prominent citizens, including members of the Japanese command, and listened to them carefully. As they got to know him, they had much to say about the Empire’s rightful place in Asia and the world.

  He attended displays of their formidable martial arts, including hand-to-hand combat, and sparring with wooden swords and other weapons. He studied everything he could of their history, heroes, art, and literature. All this gave him special insight into what was to become the enemy Empire. He warned his Washington bosses that war was coming, long before it did.

  He was outraged, but not surprised, by the attack on the Pacific fleet and airfields of Oahu. He was back in the States by then, and found himself with new responsibilities for the outfitting and training of the legions of recruits.

  In 1944, well beyond the normal age of retirement, still in service due to the war, Henry was offered what he viewed as the feather in the cap of his career. The Army’s troops and holdings on the far off island of New Guinea were to be catalogued, and prepared for withdrawal—an orderly handing over of affairs to the Australians.

 

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