Do or Die

by Len Levinson

  Shilansky waved at the guard and kept on driving. Homer Gladley was sure the guard would shoot both of them, but the guard just stood underneath his tree and let them pass.

  “You see?” Shilansky said. “Ain't nothing to it. Just act natural. I know what I'm doing.”

  Shilansky was referring to his peacetime profession as a bank robber in the Boston area, although he hadn't been particularly successful. He'd served time in the Bridgewater House of Correction. The second time he was caught, the judge told him to join the Army or get put away for twenty years. Shilansky joined the Army.

  Shilansky drove toward the supplies earmarked for the top officers in the division. Homer's mouth watered at the thought f all the food around him. He was the platoon chow hound and never got enough to eat. He'd do anything to get more food.

  Shilansky hit the brakes and the jeep stopped in front of the crates of officers’ food. He pulled up the emergency brake, swung his feet around, and jumped down. He strode toward the crates, swinging his arms confidently, feeling intensely alive and happy. He wasn't that hungry and got enough food to eat in the chow line, but he loved to steal. He was a born crook.

  Homer followed him and they approached the crates. Shilansky understood the code on the crates and wrinkled his nose at a pile of C rations. That wasn't even worth stealing. A professional like himself had to go for the big game.

  “Hey, what's the matter with these?” Homer asked. “Where you going?”

  “Shaddup and follow me, hillbilly.”

  To Shilansky, everybody who didn't live in a big city was a hillbilly. He looked around, reading the coded labels, and his eyes fell on a stack of crates filled with canned five-pound hams.

  “Bingo,” Shilansky said. “Jackpot. Grab one of these.”

  “What's in them?”

  “Ham.”

  “Ham!”

  “Keep your fucking voice down.”

  Homer picked up one of the crates as if it were a pillow and dropped it onto his shoulder. Turning, he walked toward the jeep, thinking of ham roasting over an open fire. His momma back in Nebraska baked ham studded with cloves, in a pan with pineapple slices and yams. It had been wonderful sitting around that big table back home with his mother and father and brothers and sisters. His favorite memories were of meals with his family.

  “Where you going with that crate, soldier!”

  Homer's mother's kitchen vanished and he found himself looking at a buck sergeant with an MP band.

  “Who, me?” asked Homer.

  “Yes, you!”

  Shilansky caught up with them. “What's the problem, Sarge?’

  “Where you going with these crates?”

  “We're taking them to General Hawkins's headquarters.”

  “Where's your authorization?”

  “I ain't got no authorization. General Hawkins told me to get them. He said they're having a big feed in the officers mess tonight.”

  “You can't take those crates out of here without authorization.”

  “Oh, yes I can.”

  “Oh, no you can't.”

  “Talk to General Hawkins about it. I ain't got time for this shit. Let's go, Homer.”

  Shilansky and Homer attempted to walk away. The MP put out his hand and tried to grab Homer's biceps, but Homer was the biggest man in the recon platoon and the MP couldn't wrap his fingers around it.

  “Halt, you two!”

  Shilansky turned around and walked toward the MP, stopping in front of him. He brought his face forward so that their chins almost touched. “Are you fucking crazy?” Shilansky asked angrily.

  “Put down those crates!”

  “I guess you don't know who I am. I'm General Hawkins's right-hand man, and you'd better start behaving yourself, god-damnit!

  “I said put down those crates!”

  Shilansky realized he couldn't bluff this MP, so he tossed him the crate of hams. When the MP reflexively raised his hands to catch it, Shilansky punched him in the mouth with all his strength.

  Shilansky's fist and the crate of hams struck the MP at the same time, knocking him backward.

  “Run!” screamed Shilansky.

  Homer Gladley stretched out his long, bulky legs and sped toward the jeep. Shilansky was right behind him, swerving to the side and jumping into the driver's seat. Homer dumped his crate of hams into the back and dived in after it. Shilansky shifted into gear and kicked the accelerator to the floor.

  The jeep's wheels spun in the muck, then grabbed and sent the jeep flying away. The right front wheel hit a bump and Shilansky bounced up and down, his helmet falling off and landing on the ground. Shilansky steered around a tree and Homer Gladley hung on to the crate of ham so that it wouldn't fall out of the jeep.

  My helmet, thought Shilansky as the jeep sped through the jungle. My name's stenciled inside my helmet. He realized with a sinking sensation that he'd screwed up another robbery.

  Maybe they won't see my name inside, he thought hopefully. Or maybe they won't be able to read it if they see it.

  The MPs arrived in the Twenty-third Regiment's area three hours later, and found out that Lieutenant Horsfall was at a meeting with the regiment's operations officer, Major Cobb. The MPs decided that the matter at hand wasn't important enough to warrant an interruption of the meeting, so they took seats on the jungle floor outside the operations tent and waited. There were three of them; one was the MP sergeant who'd tried to stop Shilansky and Homer Gladley.

  Forty-five minutes later the meeting broke up and the officers streamed out of the tent. The MPs asked for Lieutenant Horsfall and were pointed toward him.

  “Sir,” said the MP master sergeant, “are you Lieutenant Stanley Horsfall?”

  “Yes,” replied Lieutenant Horsfall, wondering what he'd done wrong.

  “Has your jeep been missing, sir?”

  “Have you found it?”

  “Yes, it was abandoned on the side of a road not far from here. Do you know a Private...” the sergeant paused as he read the name stenciled inside the helmet in his hands. “... Shilansky, Morris, US 515638.”

  “Yes, he's in my platoon.”

  The master sergeant smiled and exchanged glances with the other MPs. “Well, sir, we believe this man and a confederate have stolen military property, as well as your jeep.”

  The master sergeant explained how Shilansky and the other soldier had stolen the crate of ham and assaulted the MP buck sergeant. “Evidently it was your jeep that they used.”

  “What did the other man look like?” Lieutenant Horsfall asked.

  The master sergeant looked at the buck sergeant.

  “Well,” said the buck sergeant, “he was about six foot two and weighed about two hunnert twenty, two hunnert thirty pounds. He was a real big guy with kind of a round face, and I think his hair was blond underneath his helmet.”

  “I see,” said Lieutenant Horsfall, who knew exactly who the buck sergeant was describing.

  “Know who he is?” asked the master sergeant.

  “Not offhand,” lied Lieutenant Horsfall.

  “This man Shilansky—do you know where he is right now, sir?”

  “Yes, he's out on a patrol.” So that's why the patrol went out so early, Lieutenant Horsfall thought.

  “Do you know when he'll be back?”

  “Sometime tonight.”

  “We'll be waiting for him.”

  Beside a meandering river ten feet wide, the patrol from the recon platoon sat around an open fire and roasted the stolen hams on thick skewers. The stream of fragrant smoke curled as it rose to the tree tops. Behind the soldiers was a tall stone bluff fifty feet high. They were three miles from their front and didn't think anyone would be able to spot the smoke. If someone did, they'd be afraid to go into no-man's-land to find out what was going on.

  It was five o'clock in the afternoon and the sun was sinking low on the horizon. In another hour it would set. Birds chirped in the trees above them, and monkeys hopped from branch to b
ranch. No breeze blew and clouds of insects hovered around them. Occasionally an insect would, dive down, suck some blood, and pull back again, flying up to join his relatives.

  Butsko smacked a bug about an inch long against his cheek, then scraped the bug's remains with his fingernails. “Fucking little bastard,” he muttered. “When this war is over, I'm going someplace where there ain't any bugs.”

  “There's bugs everywhere,” said Jimmy O'Rourke, the former movie stuntman from Hollywood, who thought he looked like Clark Gable and tried to act like him.

  Homer Gladley, his eyes bulging with desire, turned the ham over on its spit. “There ain't much bugs back where I come from. Not like this anyways.”

  Butsko glared angrily at him. “Shaddup, you fucking thief! I don't wanna hear a peep outta you! You made a lot of trouble for me today!”

  “Sorry, Sarge.”

  “I said shaddup!”

  Homer Gladley pinched his lips together and looked repentant. Butsko raised his arm and wiped away the rest of the bug with the back of his hand. “As soon as things settle down, I'm getting away from you fucking guys. I've had it with the whole goddamned bunch of you. You give me nothing but trouble. I want a nice, normal platoon fulla nice, normal guys instead of the thieves, liars, cutthroats, and degenerates I got now.”

  “Shit,” said Frankie La Barbara, “you never had it so good. At least with us you have some fun and you eat like a king.”

  “I hate youse all,” Butsko said. “I never seen such a bunch of fuck-ups and scumbags in my life.”

  Gladley poked one of the hams with his bayonet. “Looks just about done,” he said. “Everybody outta my way.”

  The men drew back and Homer lifted the spit off the fire, lowering the hams to a bed of leaves he'd laid out. The hams were reddish-brown on the outside, sizzling and crackling, filling the air with a sweet, pungent fragrance.

  “Okay,” said Homer Gladley, stabbing his bayonet into a ham. “Dig in, guys.”

  The men attacked the hams with their bayonets.

  “Wait a minute!” said Butsko.

  Everybody stopped and looked at him.

  “Me first.” The corners of his lips turned down, Butsko pushed Bannon out of his way and stabbed his bayonet into one of the hams, slicing off a chunk four inches thick. He lifted his piece on the tip of his bayonet and brought it to his nose, sniffing it like a fox. “Okay.”

  The men resumed their attack on the hams, carving off pieces for themselves, elbowing and pushing each other, and the Reverend Billie Jones nearly lost a finger to Corporal Sam Longtree. In seconds the ham disappeared from the bed of leaves; only the spit remained. The men sat on the ground and chomped the meat. Each had about a pound all to himself. It was better than anything they got on the chow line.

  “Shit,” said Shilansky, his jaws working like a threshing machine, “old Sergeant Butsko says we're fuck-ups and scum-bags, but he never turns down any food we steal.”

  Gnawing on his hunk of ham, Butsko heard him and knew he was right. He shouldn't eat the stolen goods, because it set a bad example. But he needed a good meal every now and then to keep his strength up; otherwise, how'd he be able to fight the Japs?

  “Shaddup, you petty fucking small-time crook,” Butsko said. “Shaddup before I stick this ham up your ass.”

  The GIs gorged themselves on the stolen ham while their fire smoldered in its pit. The smoke trailed upward to the tops of the trees and hung in the air because there was no breeze to blow it away. The GIs didn't know it, but a sizable cloud of smoke had formed over their heads, and it could be seen for a long distance.

  No one on the American side noticed the cloud of smoke, due to the hustle and bustle caused by the changeover of units. To the new men it didn't appear threatening, so why worry about it? Many of the GIs were replacements with no experience with war, and it was just another cloud to them.

  But the Japanese observers on the other side of the line had been in the area for four months, and most enlisted soldiers in the Japanese army were farmers who knew a cloud of smoke when they saw one. The observers passed the word along that a cloud of smoke was hovering over a patch of the jungle, and the artillery commander in that sector decided to lob a few shells over to disrupt whatever the Americans were doing.

  His order was relayed to an artillery battery, which loaded up its big guns. It took aim at the jungle underneath the smoke, and when the guns were zeroed in, the order was given to open fire.

  The GIs were taking their last bites of ham, their stomachs stuffed and their minds lulled with satisfaction. Some of them were finished already, lying on the grass with their eyes closed, letting their stomachs digest the food. Others lit up cigarettes when they finished, the perfect end to a first-rate meal.

  Butsko sat with his knees in the air and his back against a tree, smoking a Pall Mall and wondering how he'd get Shilansky and Gladley off the hook when they returned from the patrol. Shilansky had told him about losing his helmet, and since the helmet had Shilansky's name inside, Butsko knew there'd be trouble. MPs probably would be waiting for them to return from the patrol. Maybe Butsko could say that Shilansky and Gladley had been killed on the patrol, and then, after the MPs went away, Shilansky and Gladley would be resurrected from the dead. The big problem would be Lieutenant Horsfall. Somehow Butsko would have to convince old Horseballs to go along with the scam.

  When Butsko heard the whistle of the first incoming shell, he thought he was imagining it. He tried to tell himself it was a bird singing or a cricket chirping a love song to his mate, but a second later he knew it was the real thing.

  “Hit it!” he screamed.

  He collapsed onto the ground, hugging his helmet to his head, squinching his eyes shut and waiting for the shell to land, while all around him the recon platoon took cover, terrified by the sudden change in their situation. One moment they had been exulting in the aftermath of a good meal, and a moment later their lives were on the line.

  The shells smashed into the jungle and exploded, knocking over trees and sending tons of dirt flying into the air. The sound was deafening and the ground heaved like the deck of a ship in a typhoon. One shell landed in the river, blasting water into the air, and when it came down it was like rain. Another shell hit the rocky bluff behind the GIs, causing it to collapse in an avalanche of rocks and boulders that made Bannon and Longtree jump up and run through the screaming, churning hell to avoid getting buried alive.

  Bannon and Longtree put some distance between them and the rolling rocks, then dived into a wide shell crater big enough for both of them. Their eardrums ached from the sound of explosions, and the bombardment was so fierce that they thought they'd lose their lives. Longtree realized that the smoke had attracted the artillery shells. He'd thought about the smoke while he was munching on ham, but his combat instincts had been dulled by several months of duty away from the front. He told himself he'd have to be more careful in the future, if he survived the present.

  Monkeys screeched as they tried to get away, leaping from tree to tree and along vines; some were decapitated by whizzing hunks of shrapnel. Birds were defeathered and torn apart in midair. Lizards and snakes were blown out of the ground, and the clouds of insects were burned to nothing.

  The GIs gritted their teeth and hung on, praying for the bombardment to stop. Butsko, like Longtree, realized the smoke had given them away. He cursed himself for being so careless. Underneath a fallen tree, Homer Gladley chewed on a mouthful of ham, trying to eat as much as he could before he died. Private Jimmy O'Rourke wondered what Clark Gable would do if he were there, and decided he'd make a grim face and tough it out. O'Rourke tried to do that, but he couldn't help flinching whenever a shell exploded nearby. The muscles in his jaw twitched uncontrollably and he chewed his lips in terror and apprehension.

  The Japanese artillery commander didn't have ammunition to waste, so he ordered the barrage stopped. Raising his binoculars, he gazed at the target area and saw that the cloud of sm
oke had increased ten times and become a deep shade of gray. Smiling, he figured the Americans out there would think twice before they started any more fires, if they were still alive.

  Amid the smoke and burning trees, all the GIs in the recon platoon were alive but numbed from the sudden barrage. At first they didn't know it had ended because their ears were ringing and their hearing was temporarily impaired. Then, after a minute or two of silence, Butsko realized it was over.

  “Let's get out of here!” he said.

  He jumped up and ran away from the area, which had become a nightmare of shell craters, blasted trees, and fires. Holding his rifle at port arms, Butsko dodged around the debris as he ran from the devastation, and the recon platoon followed him in a long file. Soon they were in another green jungle, and new insects swooped down on them, but Butsko kept going for a half hour, in order to put a substantial amount of distance between his platoon and the site of the bombardment.

  “Okay,” he said, dropping down on the moist leaves. ‘Take a break, and from now on, no more fires!”

  “Does that mean we can't smoke?” asked Jimmy O'Rourke.

  “That's not a fire, you stupid son of a bitch. “Butsko groaned . as he pulled out his pack of Pall Malls. “You fuck-ups don't know anything about anything, and one of these days you'll probably get me killed.”

  Frankie La Barbara held his hand over his mouth and muttered: “That won't be no great loss to the world.”

  “Who said that?”

  The jungle was silent. Butsko lit up his cigarette. He knew that Frankie La Barbara had made the remark. He's gonna pay for that one, Butsko thought darkly.

  FIVE . . .

  Shortly after ten o'clock that evening, the Japanese raiding 1 party slipped into the jungle. It consisted of fifty handpicked 1 men and was led by Captain Kashiwagi. Second in command was Sergeant Kato.