Pacific Glory

by P. T. Deutermann

  Oh, Jesus, he thought. I’m in a crater, and the groundwater is filling it up. Just like all the craters he’d seen when he landed that first day.

  He felt a drop hit his cheek, and then another.

  Wait a minute, he thought. Groundwater would be coming up, not down. He flicked his tongue out to the side of his mouth.

  Salty.

  Not water.

  Blood.

  It was blood, and it wasn’t his. Not good.

  He closed his mind against the ghastly images that were rising in his imagination. He’d made the mistake of looking down into the flight deck catwalks of the Yorktown as they were taking him over the side to that cruiser. The flight deck crews had used fire hoses to sweep body parts off the deck into the catwalks. As the wounded carrier listed farther and farther to port, the catwalks had become a scene right out of The Jungle.

  He closed his eyes and tried to slow his breathing. He knew that when the air ran out he’d start breathing his own CO2, and that would put him to sleep. His ears were still humming like a big generator, so he wasn’t sure he’d even hear rescuers outside calling to see if anyone was under all the debris. The drip on his cheek continued. He closed his eyes and tried to think of a way out.

  A while later, something hit his arm. He looked sideways in the dwindling light of the flashlight. It was a piece of rebar. It withdrew as quickly as he identified it. Then it came again, this time hitting his chest. He yelled.

  Silence. He strained to hear something over the humming in his ears. Then he thought he heard voices. Angry voices. Disgusted voices.

  The probe came again, this time barely visible, on his left side.

  He understood. There must be a body on top of him. The probe had come up bloody, and the rescuers were moving on.

  He yelled again, but it was really hard to get enough air. Even to him, his yell sounded more like a squeak. Then he remembered the carbine.

  Was its barrel full of dirt? Would the damned thing explode if he fired it? So what? he thought.

  He twisted his wrist, reached into the trigger guard, and pulled the trigger.

  Nothing happened.

  The safety was on. He tried to move the tab, but his fingers couldn’t get enough leverage.

  With a desperate push, he got the safety off, put his finger back into the trigger guard, and pulled the trigger. The carbine bucked backward, slamming his right hand against the sand. It felt like it was broken.

  The noise was overwhelming in his tightly packed dirt grave. Gun smoke filled the air pocket. His whole hand stung, and his fingers seemed suddenly full of pins and needles. He pulled the trigger again, not with a squeeze of his finger but more of a spasm. The second blast really hurt his bleeding eardrums, but he was determined. If I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die trying, he thought, ears or no ears.

  Moments later, hands were scrabbling through the dirt, and he got his first breath of clean air, and then another. It took them five minutes to dig him out. A face kept telling him he was going to be okay and not to fire the carbine anymore, okay, Lieutenant? The face looked to be fifteen, tops. Very young, and very scared. “Me, too, pal,” he mumbled, spitting out some more sand.

  Once they hauled him out, they put him on a litter. He protested that he could walk, but the Navy pharmacist’s mate ignored him. “It’s okay, Lieutenant,” one of the kids said. “You’re gonna be fine, but let’s try the jeep just for grins, okay?” As they drove him out of the camp area, he saw in the headlights that the bunker, or the crater where the bunker had been, was already filling with groundwater. There were bloody things floating in that water. He repressed a wave of nausea as he realized that everyone who had sought shelter in the bunker was now hamburger.

  Several oil fires up and down the taxiways and the hardstands illuminated the field. Mick couldn’t see what was burning, but the runway was really torn up and there were pieces of airplanes everywhere, even in trees. Amazingly, the Seabee dozers were already out, their diesel engines roaring at full power, some pushing loads of sand and jungle dirt into the huge craters while others jammed the wreckage of the planes into the jungle or laid their buckets down on fires to smother them. The occasional tracer round spat out from the edge of the field as perimeter defense troops dealt with snipers out in the near jungle.

  The pharmacist’s mate had the jeep in first gear, which was painfully noisy to Mick’s bludgeoned ears. Mick asked him what had happened.

  “Jap battlewagons,” the young petty officer said. “Fucked everything up. You could see ’em, offshore, big-ass clouds of fire, and then those shells comin’ in, wa-wa-wa, boom!”

  “You were watching?”

  “Yes, sir,” the kid said proudly. “I was sleepin’ in one of the meat wagons? Wasn’t nowheres else to go, so I opened the back doors and watched.”

  “You didn’t run for your bunker?”

  “Us medics don’t have no bunkers, Lieutenant. If we’re in a bunker, we can’t see where we’re needed, right?”

  “Right,” Mick said, lying back at last. Medics, he thought. Someone back at pharmacist’s mate school had told them that they were invincible, God bless ’em.

  A chief pharmacist’s mate was doing triage at the field hospital, which was a long tent surrounded by litters spread all over the ground. Mick said he wasn’t really hurt. “Other than this,” he said, holding up his right hand. “This doesn’t work so well right now.”

  “No need to shout, Lieutenant,” the chief said, examining the hand. “I’m right here.”

  Mick stared at the man. “I was buried alive, Doc,” he blurted out, surprising himself when he said it.

  “Scary, was it?” the chief asked, making notes on his triage pad.

  “Are you shitting me?”

  “Not a pound, Lieutenant. Me? I’d’a drowned in my own piss. Listen, you want a Section Eight, I can start the paper.”

  “Hell, no,” Mick said. “I want to go get that battleship. Tell the major I’m ready to beach-party with him again.”

  The chief frowned. “Um,” he said. Mick had to bend forward to hear him over the bloody hum in his ears.

  “What?”

  “The major tried to take off when all this shit started. Hit a crater, ground-looped, burned.”

  “Fuck!”

  “Yeah,” the chief said.

  “Shit,” Mick said. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”

  “That’s what everybody’s saying.”

  “He told me he had a brain tumor,” Mick said. “That since he was gonna die anyway, he might as well take some Japs with him.”

  The chief medic smiled. “Brain tumor, hunh? Not exactly.”

  “I wondered.”

  “Yeah, well, what the major had was a drinking problem. A flight surgeon had to clear him each morning before the brief. Thing was, I think that ol’ boy could fly better hammered than most of the boot pilots flying stone cold sober. So, yeah, they let him go kill Japs. You know he was an ace?”

  “I believe it. He was a leader, is what he was.”

  “That’s gospel, Lieutenant,” the doc said, rubbing weary eyes. “So, you ready to launch and go find some Japs?”

  “I need some coffee,” Mick said, “and maybe one small taste of bourbon whiskey. But then? Hell, yes.”

  “Bourbon whiskey,” the doc said, patting him on the shoulder. “That sounds familiar.”

  His shoulder hurt when the doc patted him. Hell, everything hurt. Except his rapidly enlarging right hand, and that worried him.

  He got his shot of medicinal whiskey, which was horrible, and then made his way to the Operations tent, which somehow had survived the bombardment. There was a new enormous crater in front of the tent, over which a plank bridge had already been built. The generator had been disabled by the blast, so the men inside were operating with flashlights. The big problem was that there weren’t any planes left. The Japanese battlewagons had blown Henderson Field into a mud-mire, and most of its aircraft were in charred pieces out amo
ng the few palm trees still standing.

  “No planes at all?” Mick asked.

  A Marine warrant officer looked up at him with bleary eyes, a cigarette going in each hand. “Yes, sir, there’s four. But there’s no gas.”

  “If I can scrounge up some gas, can I get one of the four?”

  “Could you sign for it with that hand, Lieutenant?”

  Mick looked down at his right hand, which was now almost twice its original size. He tried to make a fist, but nothing happened. It still didn’t hurt.

  “Well, fuck me,” he muttered. “Lookit that piece of meat.”

  “Keep you and it out of that field hospital,” the warrant advised. “They got a new surgeon over there, came in with the general. Likes to cut shit off.”

  “Might as well,” Mick said. “I can’t feel the damned thing.”

  He went back over to the triage tent and told the chief pharmacist’s mate he couldn’t feel his hand anymore.

  “You will,” the chief said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small pill bottle. He gave Mick two pills. “When it starts to hurt, take ’em both, and be sitting down when you do. Preferably somewhere safe. That right there is seriously strong stuff.”

  * * *

  Mick went out the back entrance and walked down what was left of the open-air flight line. When he came to the regular field hospital tents, he saw that many of the forms in their shabby litters had their faces covered in bloody blankets. There were only a few fires still going now out along the runway, and what sounded like a brisk small-arms firefight had erupted at the other end of the runway. He realized he could hear again. He rubbed the dried blood off his neck and crackled his eardrums a couple of times.

  His right hand now felt like a lead boxing glove. The carbine must have broken it when he’d fired it underground, he thought. Otherwise he felt relatively okay. A little shaky-Jake, maybe, and his flight suit smelled like a latrine, but he was alive, unlike these poor bastards. He stepped into the hospital tent and asked a blood-spattered pharmacist’s mate for a sling. He rigged the sling, cadged a tin cup of coffee, and went back outside, where he sat down on a stump.

  He felt like he should be writing a letter home to tell someone he was still alive. The only problem with that was that he had no one left at home to write to. His father had been the vice president of his hometown bank when the crash came. He’d committed suicide when the bank failed in 1929 and revealed some damning irregularities. His mother had withdrawn into mute madness a year later, and Mick, their only child, had thrown himself into his varsity football career at the Naval Academy. His mother was now in a state home for the insane. He wrote her letters from time to time, but the last time he’d gone back to see her, she might as well have been on Mars.

  He surveyed the devastation around the field and decided to stay right where he was. It was like being back on a carrier after an attack. If an aviator couldn’t fly, he was expected to stay the hell out of everyone else’s way. For the next hour he watched more jeeps come grinding in to the field hospital, litters sticking out of their backseats, with far too many of them carrying people to the parking lot morgue. He slipped off the stump, leaned back against it, and went to sleep.

  At sunrise, two R4Ds touched down on the freshly repaired main strip. They taxied up to the field hospital and shut down in a cloud of blue exhaust smoke. Mick recognized them as the military version of the redoubtable Douglas DC-3, rigged out as aeromedical transports. The field hospital people came out and began loading the most seriously wounded into the waiting transports. A Marine first lieutenant came over from the Ops tent, spoke to one of the pharmacist’s mates, and then headed for Mick. He was extremely thin from malaria and was walking with a cane. Mick figured he must have weighed a good ninety pounds.

  “You Lieutenant McCarty?” he asked.

  “Yup.”

  “You’re supposed to ride the medical flight to Santo.”

  “What for?”

  “That,” the man said, pointing at Mick’s hand. “You can’t fly with that, so they want you there for treatment. There’s a real hospital there.”

  “I can fly with the other hand, you know.”

  “Hey, Lieutenant, I’m just the messenger boy, okay? That’s the word from the CO. If you can fly, you stay. If you can’t, you go get fixed.”

  “What’d you do in real life?” Mick asked.

  The guy grinned. “FAC,” he said. “Sniper shot my knee off. Now I run errands here at Ops. Good deal, hunh?”

  Mick shook his head, got up stiffly, and walked over to the nearest transport. He was immediately conscripted to help load the wounded. When they saw he couldn’t use his right hand, they stationed him on the appropriate side of each litter so that he could carry with his left hand. Fair enough, he thought. My legs still work.

  When they were ready to go, he told the loadmaster that he was supposed to go to Santo. The Army Air Corps sergeant looked at him blankly for a moment. “Ain’t no seats in there, Captain,” he said.

  “It’s Lieutenant,” Mick said. “Naval air. I guess I can stand up.”

  “It’s two hours, Lieutenant,” the sergeant said.

  “The general said I have to go to Santo,” Mick replied.

  “On you go,” the sergeant said. “Hustle up, though. They’re sayin’ there’s an air raid inbound from Rabaul.”

  They launched five minutes later, bumping and banging over the rough repairs on the runway. Several of the wounded cried out in pain as the heavily loaded transport gunned it down the strip, its engines shooting flames out the exhaust pipes, and lifted reluctantly at the very end of the matting. Mick found himself a cubicle at the back of the plane in the life jacket locker. He put on a kapok so that it would support his head, sat down among the stash of life jackets, and leaned back on the remains of the Ops generator that was being sent on to Nouméa for repairs. Forward of him were racks and racks of litters hung on the sides of the transport, four high. He could see pharmacist’s mates and a couple of Navy nurses tending to the wounded, hanging bottles, wiping brows, handing out pills and sympathy. The pilots let some exterior air in as they climbed through five thousand feet, and for the first time since he’d been on the island, Mick experienced air-conditioning.

  His right hand was beginning to throb, though. He pulled out the two pills. Take ’em both, the medic had said—but if something happens, I don’t want to be zombied up here, Mick thought. He decided to take one, keep one. In fifteen minutes he was sound asleep.

  Seemingly seconds later he was yanked awake by the sound of twenty-millimeter cannon shells blasting through the back of the aircraft, and then pinned to the left side of the fuselage as the pilots tried to jink away from what had to be a Jap fighter behind them. Mick tried to gather his wits, but his brain was numbed by the pill. He felt the heavy shells whacking the generator at his back while others slashed by his head and down the full length of the transport. He heard screams as some of them hit wounded men, and then the Douglas went way over in a left bank, pulling g’s that forced Mick hard against the floor. The interior of the cabin was filling with smoke, and one engine absolutely didn’t sound right.

  There was another hail of gunfire from behind the aircraft, and both engines quit in a gasp of oil and shattered pistons. The only noise now was that ominous airstream howl of an aircraft fully out of control, going down in a wide left spiral.

  Well, fuck me, Mick thought. I’ve tangled with Zeros before, but now I’m gonna buy the farm as a passenger?

  The smoke in the cabin grew thicker, and Mick instinctively turned his face into the stack of life jackets as the plane’s dive steepened, the sound of the slipstream outside rising to a crescendo. At least there were no more rounds slamming into the transport’s innards, but that fact hardly made a difference.

  Going down, Mick thought. Gonna hit that concrete surface of the ocean at three hundred knots, and then we’ll find out if all the preachers were right or wrong.

&nb
sp; Strangely he was not afraid. He’d been in combat, he’d had some near misses, and half the guys he’d been flying with were already dead. It was as if this were simply a natural outcome. He remembered the unofficial slogan of some of the Yorktown pilots: Fly Navy. Die Navy.

  That refrain sounded a bit off to his drugged brain, but there was nothing he really could do about it, was there, he thought. He wondered if the pilots up front were already dead, but then the transport banked sluggishly back to the horizontal. He began to lean the other way, toward the aisle. The g-forces grew in his belly as the plane pulled up, leveling for a ditch in the Pacific.

  No, no, no, Mick thought. Too fast, much too fast: You can’t ditch at this speed. You fly flat, pull up the nose, stall the bastard ten feet over the water, keeping her wings level, and close your eyes. Assuming you still had engine power. From the sounds of it, though, these guys were trying to fly that proverbial rock the instructors were always talking about.

  The light coming through the portholes changed from white to blue, and he felt the nose come up and hold. He braced himself into the pile of life jackets and waited. The big generator behind him had probably saved him from the storm of bullets from that Jap fighter. Now he prayed that the thing was firmly lashed down or it was going to crush him when they hit.

  He felt the tail keel pounding waves, and then the plane slammed into the water with a vicious crash. The chorus of screams from the wounded was overwhelmed by the roar of water along the plane’s sides. Then it was suddenly silent, but only for a moment. The groans and moans of the wounded men strapped to the hull of the transport were terrible to hear. The aircraft remained relatively level, but Mick already felt water rising around his ankles. He checked his own extremities, disentangled himself from his nest of life jackets, and looked forward along the aisle.

  The interior was filled with dust. The patients were still all strapped in lengthwise in their tiers of litters on either side of the aisle. Then he saw the sheen of seawater on the floor. The light coming through the portside portholes was white at the top but going green at the bottom.