by James Jones
During his little comic routine of the ‘honest coward’, Fife had noted that Welsh was the only one who had not laughed. Instead the First Sergeant, who was standing with Storm (who was roaring), only eyed him shrewdly with screwed-up knowing eyes. Now, when Fife had put his assistant clerks to work on the officers’ holes, he went over to Welsh and Storm who, after a prolonged discussion about night infiltrators, were preparing to dig their holes together at a certain spot.
“Hey, First, is this where you guys’ve decided to dig in?” he said cheerfully.
Welsh, in the act of detaching his shovel from his combat pack, did not look up or answer.
“Because I thought I’d dig in over here with you guys if it was,” Fife said.
Welsh ignored him.
“I mean, I guess it’s as good a place as any,” Fife said. “This is where you’re gonna dig, ain’t it?”
Welsh continued to ignore him.
“Is that okay?” Fife said. He unslung his pack.
Welsh stopped his unbuckling of straps and looked up at Fife with eyes of stone and a face as expressionless as unchiselled granite. “Take off,” he barked. “Get the fuck away from me. And stay away from me, kid.”
Storm had stopped his work to watch.
Fife was carried back a step by the sheer viciousness of the sergeant’s retort. “Well, tshooo!” He attempted a sarcasm which did not come off. “I certainly didn’t mean to inflict my presence on anybody.”
Welsh stared at him, silent, refusing to be drawn into any carping discussion.
“Well, I guess I know when I’m not wanted,” Fife said with a lame try at airiness. Visibly crestfallen, unable to hide it, he turned and moved off carrying his pack by its straps.
“Why don’t you ever treat the kid decent once in a while?” Storm said. His voice was dispassionate.
“Because I don’t mean to wind up playin nursemaid and havin to mother some kid, that’s why. I got enough problems to occupy me.” Welsh straightened from his pack. “Here. You got some dirt. Take the shovel and gimme the mattock.”
Storm didn’t answer and exchanged the tools. Behind and above them Lt Culp was coming down the slope in the great leaping strides of a fullback on vacation. Hardly pausing at the CP he collected his mortar section and carried them on down to a nearly level spot almost a hundred yards below. From here they could lob shells over the crest onto the precipitous jungled slopes beyond. After setting up their mortars, they would dig in their own perimeter defense for the night.
For quite a long while everyone was occupied with digging.
Private Mazzi was still infuriated at Tills for having given him the finger when the mortar shells dropped in. It was an unfair advantage because everybody had ducked for cover. On the other hand during the walk across Mazzi had not hit the dirt one time. While he had seen Tills go down on at least three occasions. So Mazzi had every right to ridicule Tills. While Tills had no right to ridicule Mazzi. Him and Tills was supposed to be buddies, but Tills was always doing something like that.
Mazzi had not picked Tills for a buddy. He did not like to be buddying with a cornball hick from Hicksville who was not hep. But in this mortar squad there had not been no choice. In this mortar squad Tills was only an ammunition carrier. Mazzi was designated as the second gunner and carried the baseplate. But he was really only an ammunition carrier, too, because Sergeant Wick and the first gunner, who carried the tube, did everything together and handled all the firing between them. Mazzi hardly got to touch the sights. And the other ammunition carrier Tind was only a punk kid draftee. So there wasn’t nothing left but Tills. Mazzi treated him kind and gave him lots of good advice, and was always right, and Tills always ignored it and did something else, and was always wrong. But he wouldn’t never learn, and wouldn’t never admit Mazzi was always right. That was what come of trying to be buddies with a cornball hick from Hicksville.
But this time Tills had tore it. Mazzi made up his mind he wasn’t having no more to do with Tills. Fullback Culp had ordered them to dig two-man holes and double up, one awake and one sleeping, and ordinarily Mazzi would have dug with Tills. This time instead he asked Tind in a loud voice to dig with him, without saying a word to Tills, leaving Tills to dig alone. And after digging in, he got permission from The Fullback to go up to the crest for a while. All his good buddies who were hep, a whole gang of them from The Bronx and Brooklyn, Carni, Suss, Gluk, and Tassi, were all up there in the 1st Platoon. He could feel Tills looking after him, but he ignored him. Let him do his own damn fucking thinking. See how he liked it. The fact that he had been scared on the walk across didn’t have nothing to do with it. He hadn’t hit the ground, had he? Everybody was scared.
As Mazzi climbed past the CP on his way up, a loud roar of laughter wafted down the steep fall to them from the crest. By standing up and leaning their heads far back the CP men could see the platoons on the ridge, seemingly almost straight above them, small but sharp in the sunlight.
“What the hell’s going on?” somebody yelled up.
“Nellie Coombs’s got a hard on,” a voice yelled down. “Is that horny or not? Waitin here to get his ass shot off.”
“It’s a lie,” the man below yelled up.
“Like hell it’s a lie!” the voice above cried. “I just seen it. It’s no lie.”
Mazzi, as he climbed on, laughed. Nellie Coombs’s sexual propensities were almost legend, as well known as his improper practices at cards. Everyone knew them. And those were all Mazzi’s bunch of hep pals up there in the 1st Platoon. Mazzi would be interested to see how many of them had hit the dirt on the walk across.
The line of slit trenches curved along the military crest of the ridge in a parallel line a few yards below the true crest. On the other side tall jungle trees strung with lianas towered above it. From up here, above the subsidiary ridge and only a few yards lower than the highest point on Hill 209, it was possible to view the entire bowl of the battle area. The officers had climbed up to inspect the company’s line before the work on the holes was done, and Captain Bugger Stein had stood for a long time looking down at this panorama of a military operation. Now, the work of digging done, the platoons could sit on the sides of their holes and have grandstand seats.
Not all of them wanted to, however, and soon a blackjack game which included Mazzi and his New York friends as players, was under way on the edge of Nellie Coombs’s hole. Cries of “Hit me!” and “I’ll stay” competed with the battle noises from 2d battalion. And John Bell though invited to play preferred to sit on the edge of his slit trench and look down into the basin.
It was a formidable sight. Except for the slopes of Hill 209 still under Japanese fire, the entire area was aswarm with American troops carrying supplies and wounded. 2d Battalion still battered at the hill, trying to take it. When Bugger Stein had stood for so long looking down at it, the situation was static. But now, as the first afternoon shadows began to creep out from the deepest hollows down there, a new artillery barrage began to crash down onto the right side of the long ridge where George Co had attacked before. Minutes later a roaring came from the west, growing in volume to a piercing shriek until seven P-38s carrying depth-charges appeared in the sky, then flashed by overhead. The planes made two preliminary passes for looking, then on the third pass dropped the big black drums which threw up oily gouts of flame as they burst along the ridge. Not one landed on the Japanese forward slope toward the Americans. Dipping their wings, the planes flew off. The infantry watched them wistfully. The artillery continued to gnaw at the ridge.
The Japanese, without either planes or artillery to support them, were fighting back toughly. Bell, knocking the flat of his mattock against the edge of his dangling foot with rhythmic thoughtfulness as he sat and watched, could not help feeling, along with his fear of them, a little sorry for them. On the other hand it was a purely intellectual sorrow. They would not feel sorry for him, so to hell with them. Still, he was glad he was on his side instead of theirs.
He was also glad he was here and not there, with the 2d Battalion. Intellectually, he felt sorry for almost everyone. His wife Marty, for instance. In a way this war was tougher on her than it was on him. Bell knew how much a need she had of physical affection, its reassurance, its re-establishment of—of existence, of personality. In a way it was much harder for her to be back there where there were lights, nightclubs, booze, people than it was for him to be here where there was nothing to be tempted by. Much harder. But all of this was intellectual. Emotionally, Bell felt sorry most of all for himself.
Something had happened to him today with the wounding of Peale. Perhaps it was the sheer accident of it. There was no earthly reason why that bullet should have struck Peale and not someone else. But whatever it was, when he saw that little hole in Peale’s leg with its trickle of blood running down the white thigh, the actuality of his own death, perhaps sometime soon, perhaps not, had become a reality to Bell. It terrified him. Bell understood the superstitious talisman he had made of never having anything to do with any other women after being called up; he would not even have conversations with them for fear of feeling some desire. Now he added to that first superstition a second which was that if he and Marty both remained true to each other, he could make it back with his genitals intact. Continuing to tap his pick-mattock against his shoe, he continued to watch the basin, wondering if that first light shot of malaria he’d had this morning would come back on him tonight. Everybody who had it said evening seemed to be the worst time for attacks.
The planes had claimed everyone’s attention, even that of the blackjack players, and when the barrage lifted everybody who was up high enough was watching. From up here the distance to the right end of Hill 209 was greater and the tiny greenclad figures harder to see. They seemed to pass in and out of visibility as they moved up the slope. Much closer, though still far, the small figures of Fox Company’s mortar section could be seen on the reverse slope of the subsidiary ridge, working their mortars like fury. And indeed, all across the basin, as the shadows in the hollows continued to creep outward, wherever there were weapons men served them furiously, putting down fire on the ridge.
This time they went all the way. The tiny greenclad Americans met the tiny Japanese chest to chest on the crest, pushed them back and disappeared over the top. Others followed them. After a moment, when they did not reappear running backward, feeble cheers broke out faintly all across the basin on the rearward slopes, sounding more stimulated by a sense of duty than by any real happiness. Undoubtedly the others, like C-for-Charlie whose cheering was quite light, were thinking more about what might be in store for themselves tomorrow, than about what 2d Battalion had accomplished today.
But the morrow was not to be so bad. 2d Battalion had been ordered to renew the assault at dawn, this time against Hill 210, The Elephant’s Head and the regiment’s main objective. This good news reached them by evening together with the details of today’s fight. The regimental commander had dictated a bulletin which was copied down in longhand on the spot by clerks and sent forward to all companies. It said that American arms had triumphed. All of Hill 209 was now in American hands. Easy Company (whom C-for-Charlie had watched cross their front so woodenly and uncommunicatively) had made a march of eleven hundred yards along the edge of the jungle while receiving fire from two directions, and with twenty-five casualties and the aid of G-for-George had completed the envelopment of the Japanese position. They had killed fifty Japanese, captured seventeen machineguns, eight heavy mortars, and a host of smaller arms. They took no prisoners; the Japanese who had not escaped back to Hill 210 preferred to die. 2d Battalion’s losses had been 27 killed and 80 wounded, many of whom were picked up on the slopes after the battle. The majority of the Japanese dead were not in good physical condition and many appeared to have suffered from malnutrition.
This was the official news, would be written into the Regimental Papers. C-for-Charlie couldn’t have cared less. They were glad 2d Battalion had won the hill, of course. But they were more glad to learn that 2d Battalion was continuing the attack. That the Japanese were hard up for food did not interest them at all. The casualty numbers interested them, though it seemed to them that after what they’d witnessed the numbers were astonishingly light. There seemed some hope in that. If, of course, they were being told the truth.
But the news that interested them most was unofficial. It was not contained in the regimental commander’s bulletin, but it was in the mouth of every messenger who carried the bulletin forward. This was the story of what happened to the two men from George Co whom they had watched the Japanese drag back over the crest in the earlier assault. Their bodies had been found on the reverse slope after the Japanese retreat. Both bodies had sustained numerous bayonet wounds, and one of them had been beheaded alive with a sword. He was found by the advancing E-for-Easy with his hands tied behind his back and his head sitting on his chest. And as a gesture of defiance, or hatred, or something, the Japanese after beheading him had severed his genitals and stuffed them into the mouth of the severed head. That this occurred after death was clear from the lack of blood on the ground near the mutilated crotch. That he had been beheaded alive was equally clear from the amount of blood which had soaked into the earth near the severed neck.
The sheer barbarity of the thing swept through C-for-Charlie like a cold water shock. A cold knifing terror in the belly was followed immediately by a rage of anger. These men they were fighting were veterans of Burma and China and Sumatra. That they professed to hate all white men was well known. That they had perpetrated this sort of outrage in China and the Philippines on their own dark-skinned races was known too. But that they would dare to do the same sort of thing to civilized white American infantry, and specifically the—Regiment of the—Division, was almost too much to believe and certainly too much to be borne. There was a storm of promises never to take a by God prisoner. Many swore they would henceforth coolly and in cold blood shoot down every Japanese who came their way, and preferably in the guts.
The official sources were trying to keep the thing hushed up. Perhaps they felt it might overly frighten the troops. More likely they felt that to let it out would be to allow the entrance of basic human problems into what official sources hoped to keep an essentially simple, uncomplicated military situation. That was what Bugger Stein felt, and he disagreed. Official sources always wanted a clean, clearcut, easily understood military campaign, easily explainable afterwards in terms of strategy and tactics which the generals of the world could write about cleanly, and this sort of thing was embarrassing to that concept. But in spite of official sources the story had swept around the front like wildfire, and Stein did not intend to be a party to the suppression of it. The troops should know what they were in for. Perhaps those two poor bastards hadn’t felt much. After all, with the adrenaline and rage and shock of fighting hand to hand, they were probably half crazed. That was all that Stein could see to hope for.
When the messenger who brought the bulletin delivered his other, unofficial news at the CP on the spur, there was almost a riot of murderous reaction. Storm, Bead, Culp, Doll who had come down from 1st Platoon with a message, and Lt Band all made sanguinary promises. Storm looked particularly killerish. Only Welsh with his sly eyes said, and showed, nothing. Little Dale the second cook with his stooped shoulders and intense, tough, flat-eyed face was almost beside himself and swore to gutshoot every Jap who tried to come to him to surrender, after toying with him five minutes first. Young Corporal Fife’s reaction on the other hand (though he said not a single word) was one of fear, disbelief and finally a massive horror (as he enviously watched these others) that any creatures who spoke a language, walked upright on two legs dressed in clothes, built cities, and claimed to be human beings could actually treat each other with such fiendish animal cruelty. Obviously the only way really to survive in this world of humansocalledculture we had made and were so proud of, was to be more vicious, meaner and more cruel than those one met. An
d Fife, for the very first time in his life, was beginning to believe he did not have the toughness of character which this demanded.
It was Pfc Doll who carried the news up the slope to the platoons on the line. John Bell, when Doll on his way back to the 1st Platoon stopped off to tell the 2d, was standing with his squad leader Mother McCron and Big Queen and another man named Cash. Queen, made sergeant after the defection of Stack, and Cash were both 1st Platoon. Queen’s and McCron’s squads linked the two platoons, and Bell’s and Cash’s holes were the actual joining point. The two sergeants were just in the act of telling the two men to buddy up for the night, one sleeping and one awake, to facilitate liaison between the platoons, when Doll reached the crest, breathing heavily, with his news.
Bell had never seen such reactions on men’s faces. Big Queen turned red as a beet with rage, and muttered something about cracking skulls, flexing his big fists. McCron’s eyes got vague and faraway and his face took on an unwilling, shamed look as if he did not want to hear as he muttered, “Oh, the dirty fuckers,” sadly. Cash, a tall powerfully built Ohio draftee who had been a cab driver in Toledo and was known in the company simply as “Big Un,” on the other hand grinned. He had a cold, gleefully tough face anyway, as hard and of the same texture as an uncracked walnut, and when he grinned and licked his lips like that, his blue eyes squinted, he looked positively and spinechillingly murderous. All he said was “Okay” in a very soft, breathed voice. He said it several times. Bell’s own reaction was one of sickness. He felt sick all over, physcially sick. He said nothing. But he thought. He thought about the new talisman he had made just today, and he thought about his wife Marty. Ah, Marty. He hoped if anything ever happened to him like that, that nobody would ever write or tell her how this cock and these balls of his which she had loved so had finally wound up.