by Jim Shepard
“Where the heck is chow?” Leo wondered. Guys were milling around the bivouac, waiting. You could always tell when a hot meal was late, because everybody started acting like zoo animals.
We were the Second Battalion, 126th Infantry, 32nd Division, Michigan and Wisconsin National Guard, here in New Guinea all of fourteen days and—leave it to the Army—apparently the spearhead of General MacArthur’s upcoming drive to dislodge what everyone agreed were two divisions of the world’s most fearsome jungle fighters from one of the world’s most impenetrable jungles.
Two of us hadn’t hit puberty yet. Three of us couldn’t see without our glasses, and our hygiene officer couldn’t see with them. Before this, only one of the Wisconsin guys had been out of the state. We were fifteen miles from the nearest hut and a hundred and fifty from the nearest civilization, in the form of the mostly uninhabited northeastern Australian coast. We were ten thousand miles from home.
We’d trained in South Carolina, which didn’t prepare us much for jungle fighting but did its bit in getting us ready for the humidity. Any number of us couldn’t keep up during the double-time drills, which meant we had to run around the entire battalion area three times with knapsacks full of grenades. At one point our unit was first in the entire camp in hospitalizations.
We just weren’t crackerjack soldiers. Guys who panicked every morning about climbing into full field dress and getting their beds made in time for reveille and inspection started sleeping already dressed and under their beds. We were each scored on particular skills and then all classified as riflemen anyway and herded onto transports and shipped out. Once we got through the Panama Canal the ships were under orders to never stop moving, so anybody who fell overboard would have to take care of himself. We slept in the holds in canvas hammocks slung in tiers of four from the support beams. The top slot was so close to the metal ceiling that if you tried to see your feet you cracked your head. Everything smelled of socks or farts or armpit. Weapons were stowed in baggage racks and anything else got dumped on the floor. In the exact middle of the trip everyone was issued five dollars, a huge morale builder with the dice and card players. Some guys slept on deck because of the smell or because they figured they’d have a better shot of getting off if the boat was torpedoed. Like that would’ve mattered: all the cargo was high explosives. The whole stern hold was mostly gasoline in seventy-gallon drums.
We had one fifty-caliber mounted aft for protection. If we’d been attacked by three guys in a motor launch, we would’ve been A-OK.
We were only in Australia a week when we were told to pack up for New Guinea. We were playing baseball with some Kiwis when we heard. Leo was in the batter’s box when they called the game. He dropped his bat in the dirt and said, “Shit. I can hit this guy.”
When we got within range of the coast, the smell of everything rotting was so strong that we could pick it up before the shore was even in sight. “What is that?” Leo asked. We were all hanging on the cable railings. “That’s the jungle,” one of the LCT pilots told him. “What’s wrong with it?” Leo asked, and the guy laughed. It was like you could taste the germs in the air. Nobody on deck wanted to open his mouth.
It took our pathfinders an hour just to locate the trailhead that supposedly led inland. If you stepped five yards into the wall of leaves, you disappeared completely. All the barracks bags had to be left behind for the hump, so we carried only our weapons and ammo, knives, quinine tablets, mosquito lotion, canteens, and canvas water buckets. Everything else was left to the bearers. Our first night was spent in an old Aussie camp that was mostly a supply dump, camouflaged. Since Leo and I couldn’t sleep we watched the natives file in carrying everything on poles on their shoulders. They looked scrawny, but judging by the loads they were plenty strong. I tried out some sign language on one. “You need something?” the guy asked when I finished.
They made their own pile and then went off the trail to sleep by themselves. Fifteen of them took like three steps and disappeared. Leo fell asleep too, finally. Then it was just me, listening to the bugs.
I got Leo’s advice about everything. He was older, twenty-one, and had been in the Army for three years and Dog Company for two. We’d been friends since stateside. Or at least we’d gone off on passes together. He liked to say I spent the whole war surprised. Sometimes he enlarged it to life instead of just the war. “You know I ain’t got a single friend?” he told me, like it had just hit him, the night we came ashore.
“What do you mean?” I asked him. “You got me.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” he said after a minute, looking at me. Then he let it go.
The week we met he asked if I was a virgin, and when I told him no that’s how Linda came up. He said, “So you’ve really done everything with her?” and for some reason I told him about all four nights. This was on the chow line and at one point I looked up and the guy ladling out the creamed chipped beef had just frozen in mid-pour. “You did all that?” Leo asked as we found a table. And I told him yes. Because I had.
Linda was in my high-school geography class and my brother was two years ahead. We all drove around in her older brother’s car and argued about whether Mineral Point was the deadest place in Wisconsin or the deadest place on earth. We did our drinking at the turnoff for the abandoned quarry and her brother always said you could do human sacrifice there and nobody would find it for a year and a half. One night after I got my permit he let us have the car and we drove out there thinking about what he’d told us. “I want to show you something,” she said in this low voice once I’d turned off the headlights, then took my head with one hand and leaned me over and kissed me as if she was looking for something really carefully with her mouth and it was all the same to her if she never found it. “Like this,” she whispered a few times, showing me how to make it even better.
“I think I need to show you something else,” she whispered later, and pushed me back again and unbuckled my pants and pulled them down past my hips. She brought her head down to where my pants were. “Where’s your brother?” she asked, like she was making conversation.
“I don’t know,” I said, not even sure how I managed to say that. “What’re you doing?” I asked her, holding her shoulders and her hair.
She laughed a little and let me go. I could feel the wetness and the cold air. “Mmm,” she said, and the warmth came all around me again.
I didn’t know what to say. “Would you marry me?” I finally called out, with my eyes closed, and she laughed again.
The next time we went back I got protection from my brother and we did everything else. The third time I pushed her up against her door and she started making noises, too.
“Why’d you ask about my brother when we were out here that other night?” I said afterwards, when we were just resting.
“When?” she wanted to know. “With my brother?”
I had my face on her shoulder and she had a foot up on the dash. “No, alone,” I told her.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t remember.” She sighed and shifted around and pulled me with her. The car seat underneath us felt soaked.
“So how’d it go, sport?” my brother asked when I got back. “Don’t even tell me. I can see.”
“So I hear you guys are going steady,” he told me the next day after school.
“Where’d you get that?” I asked, though I was happy to hear it. “Linda wants to know all about you,” he said.
“Why doesn’t she ask me?” I said. She’d given me a wave in geography, then disappeared with her friends at the bell.
“I guess because she wants the truth,” he said.
“So what’d you tell her?” I asked.
“What do you think?” he said. “That she jumped the wrong Foss.”
“What’re you boys talking about?” our mom said, coming into the kitchen. She had a bowl of hard-boiled eggs to slice and she was going to line the bottom of her vegetable pie with them.
“Your son’s talk
ing about his new hobby,” my brother said.
“Sounds like he’s talking about a girl,” our mom told him, shelling the eggs into a bowl.
“Where did you find time to talk to her?” I asked him.
“I like to think I don’t wait for life to come to me,” he said, hefting one of the peeled eggs and dropping it back into the bowl.
“Which one did you just touch?” our mom demanded.
“All of them,” he said. He used both hands to smooth back his hair.
“She’s my girl,” I reminded him. “I’m the one who just told you that,” he said.
“So you are talking about a girl,” our mom said. “What’s her name?”
The cat wandered into the room and nosed at his dish. He sat down and we watched his tail do a few slow curls.
“I guess it’s none of my business,” she finally said to herself after looking back and forth at the two of us.
“Your mom’s funny,” Linda told me the next time we were alone.
“How do you know that?” I asked her. I put her brother’s keys up under the sun visor so they wouldn’t jingle when we moved around the steering wheel. I had a little pillow she’d brought for the armrest on the door, and the car was making ticking noises in the quiet.
“I have my sources,” she said, smoothing her cheek along mine.
“How often do you see my brother?” I asked.
“Every single minute of every single day,” she murmured. Then she asked if I could do something for her, and explained what it was. While she waited for me to register what she was talking about, she pointed out that one part of me really wanted to, anyway.
It rained for a full day and everything that could come crawling up out of a hole did: mosquitoes, sand flies, black flies, and leeches. Leo went to clean out his mess kit and found a spider in the bowl clenched like a fist. Nothing got put on without first having been shaken and reshaken. Most mornings something fell out and we all did the stamping dance before it got away.
We took to using smoke pots and head nets for the mosquitoes. But then we couldn’t eat. On one side of the trail the ants were so small that the only kind of netting that could keep them out would have also kept out the air. Ticks clustered in the pinch points in our clothes. In one slit trench, what we thought was smoke one morning turned out to be a cloud of fleas. Little pelletlike bugs even got into the C-rations. Cockroaches ate the glue in the field manuals. Termites collapsed the CO’s field table and cot. We were told to splash or make noise when crossing the creek, because the aborigines said it was happy with crocodiles. By that, we were told, they meant lousy with them.
“So noise scares crocodiles?” Leo wanted to know while they were telling us this.
“No, not really,” the guy giving the briefing confessed.
Some guys were so bored and hot that they sat in the water anyway. “I’m hoping one comes by,” Doubek, our radioman, said when we teased him about it. “Crocodile takes a piece of this ass, I got my ticket home.”
Everywhere you went, if you asked somebody how it was going, he said, “Sweatin’ it out, boy. Sweatin’ it out.” After a while that changed to, “Well, it won’t be long now!” Some of the officers thought the guys who said that were serious.
We had reason to be a little shaky in terms of morale when it came to the big picture. All during basic and the long boat ride over, there’d been nothing but bad news from this part of the world: we were told at least we had Rabaul and its naval base, though none of us knew where Rabaul was, and by the time we found out it had surrendered. They showed us a newsreel called Singapore the Impregnable the week before the Japs took it. Darwin was bombed. Jap submarines shelled Newcastle. “Isn’t that in England?” Leo asked.
“The other Newcastle,” a swabbie told him. We were on deck mid-ocean, lounging near the garbage dump on the stern. “Well, tell the Aussies help is on the way,” Leo said, picking through a crate of wrinkled oranges from the officers’ mess.
Apparently things had looked so bleak that the Aussies figured they’d just give up the northern half of their country, planning to draw their defensive line just above their southern cities. MacArthur supposedly talked them out of it.
Part of his argument, we were told, was that the Japs didn’t even have total control of New Guinea. Though it was only the terrain that left Moresby in our hands. No one could get over the mountains and through the jungle in any kind of fighting shape. All we had holding that side of the island was a Wirraway, two Catalina flying boats, and a Hudson minus its wing. When we came ashore some guys were working on the wing. They had one anti-aircraft gun. In the event of a Jap attack, they said, their orders were to hold out for at least thirty-six hours. When we exclaimed at that, they looked insulted and snapped that Rabaul had only held out for four. The news wasn’t all bad, though: it turned out that if they depressed their anti-aircraft gun to its minimum elevation, they could also use it against landing craft.
When our barracks bags finally arrived they showed up slit open and looted. The CO said he wasn’t going to report it because we’d only seem like a bunch of crybabies. I dropped my rifle into the creek and pulled it out full of sand and water, then spent two nights cleaning it while everybody else was sleeping. Leo found the hammock he’d shanghaied from the boat in the bottom of his barracks bag, and tried to rig it up to a tree and pulled the tree down. The tree was sixty feet high and as thick as he was. The rain forest was so dense it only fell a third of the way before it got hung up on the other trees. The whole thing was swarming with red ants. He said after he got out of the creek and started putting his clothes on again that the bites were like getting stuck with hat pins.
The aborigines came and went. When they wanted something, they did some work. They kept saying “Dehori.” It was pretty much the main word of their language. It meant “Wait a while.”
We got moved farther off the trail into denser jungle. Under the canopy, night fell so fast it was like you’d gone blind. Every so often some of us got to hike to the beach to pick up rations and lug water. Each trip we passed the same noncom from Graves Registration, just sitting around. That’s how we knew there was a lot of fighting going on somewhere: he’d run out of forms.
Offshore, one of our old freighters had been bombed in half and waves were breaking over the bow, which was lying on its side. There was a wrecked Bren gun carrier at the low-tide mark, already half buried by the sand. There was no real harbor so the natives had to ferry all the supplies in on their outriggers, hollowed-out logs with two little poles connected to pontoons on both sides. Everything came in wet because the slightest weight shift capsized the hulls. The quartermaster running the show sat in a folding chair in shorts and a sleeveless sweater way too big for him. The last time we saw him he was trying to open a can of apricots with a bayonet. That night at sundown we hung around before heading back because they were supposed to be showing a movie on the side of the hospital tent, but the projector got bollixed up and the picture kept getting the jiggers.
My brother was in the Air Corps. He wasn’t a pilot, but still.
“It’s not like he’s a pilot,” I told Leo.
“Ever see their uniforms?” he asked me. “They got wings on their chest. They walk into a bar and the girls are all, ‘What’s it like to be up that high in the air?’ What do they ask us? What’s it like to dig a hole?”
He also got twice as many leaves as me. Every time he was reassigned, I heard about another one. And every last time, he went home.
“He’s a homebody,” Leo shrugged. “He misses his ma.”
“You’re not helping,” I told him.
“I don’t see that as my job,” he answered.
I only signed up because Linda was in tears one day and wouldn’t talk about it. “So your brother enlisted, huh?” her best friend said when I asked what was wrong.
“Linda’s upset about that?” I asked her.
“I’m just saying I heard, is all,” she said, offende
d.
I tried for the Air Corps too, but washed out on account of my eyes. Even though I hardly ever wear glasses.
The next day I signed up for the Army National Guard, just in case there was a chance to stay stateside. “I’m goin’ away,” I told Linda outside of school.
“I know. Everybody is,” she said. Then she gave me a huge hug, pulled back to look at various parts of my face, and kissed me, right there in front of everybody.
That was at the beginning of the summer. I had a few weeks before I had to report, but for most of them her family was off at their house on the lake in Michigan.
“So have you brought up marriage?” my brother asked me the night before he left. I was due to report two weeks after him. You couldn’t talk to our mom about it. She was so upset the cat refused to come out of the cellar.
“Marriage?” I said.
“I didn’t think so,” he said.
“You think I should bring up marriage?” I asked him later that night, out on the porch. It wasn’t so much a porch as two steps, but we called it the porch.
“That’s all your mother needs to hear,” he said.
Our father was trying to calm her down in the living room. That’s how he spent most nights at that point. He wasn’t happy about it. Whenever she stopped for a minute you could hear the radio.
“I don’t think I’m ready to get married,” I said. But the minute I said it I thought, But I do want to be buried with her.
Clouds came over and turned black and it rained for three straight weeks. “Where’re all the birds going?” our medic asked right before it started. The trail washed out. They started calling the turnoff to the beach the Raging Rapids. The main forward-supply depot was a lake. The first downpour was like a train coming through and beat at our shoulders and bounced in huge sprays off our helmets. Four days into it our clothes started rotting. Whatever we carried in waterproof bags was soaked. Whatever we carried in watertight containers was mildewed. Tent supports collapsed, trenches filled in, bridges were washed away. The mud got into mess kits and stewpots and underwear and eyes. Guys walked through some areas by holding on to ropes tied tree-to-tree. Everywhere you put your boot you sank in. Every so often someone would pitch into a flooded slit trench. Shoes were gardens of green mold around the insoles. Field telephones corroded. Insulating material rotted. Batteries ruptured and leaked. Rifle cartridges rusted. Ration cans when opened already stank.