by James Jones
“You know this trainin is mostly horseshit, Captain,” Milly told him earnestly. “It ain’t gonna mean a fuckin damn thing when we get up there again. We—”
“No, Sergeant Beck,” Bosche said, rubbing his always immaculately and smoothly shaven, little fat round jaw. “Let me make it plain that I don’t agree with you there at all.”
“Well, Okay, Captain. Like you say, you probly seen more combat than we have. But we still think it’s bullshit. Except for the range firin, a course. But we’ve gone right on and done ever bit of it, and nobody’s goofed off and nobody’s complained. We’ve backed you up on it right down the line.”
“I know you have, Sergeant,” Bosche said.
“Well, now they want to take away our beards. That’s nothin but just plain, lowdown, dirty pool. We—”
“Unfortunately, there happens to be in Army Regulations a paragraph which specifically states that beards will not be worn in the Army. I think it dates back to the Cavalry and Indians Wars. The Division Commander has seen fit to invoke that particular Regulation. I don’t see that there’s a damn thing I can do about it.”
“Well, will you write him a letter of protest for us?” Milly Beck asked earnestly. “We—”
“You know you can’t go around writing letters of protest like that in the Army, Sergeant,” Bosche said evenly. “When I get an order from a superior, I have to obey it just like you do.”
“I see,” Beck said. “Then you won’t write the letter for us?”
“I don’t see how I possibly can. I can’t.”
“Okay.” Beck scratched among his own tangled growth and thought for a moment. “Well, what about mustaches, Captain?”
“The order says nothing about mustaches. As far as I know, there is nothing in Army Regulations which says an enlisted soldier cannot wear a mustache. In fact, I think there is somewhere a paragraph specifically permitting it.”
“I know,” said Milly Beck. “I mean, I think there is, too. I think I’ve seen it. But you won’t write the letter for us about the beards? How much they mean to us?”
“I would,” Bosche said simply. “I’d be glad to. But I simply can’t. My hands are tied.”
“Okay, Sir. Aye aye,” Beck said and saluted.
And that was all he had to bring back and report. In the first test of his you-back-me-up-I’ll-back-you-up policy Bosche, it was decided, had come off a little less well than his promise. He was, it appeared, just like everybody else in this world, and no titan at all. If just one officer, one Company Commander, had seen fit to write the Division Commander about the importance of beards, maybe the Division Commander would have rescinded the order. No Company commander did. Almost overnight, beards disappeared from Guadalcanal, except for a few New Zealand Pioneer outfits, and some small US Marine units who had never seen any combat anyway. But the mustaches stayed. The only way left to protest the loss of beards now was to grow the most ridiculous, outlandish mustaches possible, and those who had sufficient face hair tried. And the training went right on.
The sense of doom was growing now. Nobody really wanted to go up to New Georgia, not even the swashbucklers. Doll and Fife had become bosom buddies since the night of Fife’s fight, and they discussed the thing privately. Fife found himself oppressed by a deep and penetrating sense of the doom growing everywhere within the Division. This on the other hand did not bother Doll at all and, while he admitted that he really did not want to go, he found certain things exciting and intriguing about going up to New Georgia.
“We got it and it’s here,” he said. “There ain’t a fucking damn thing we can do about it. So there it is. And there’s certain things about combat that I find enjoyable.
“Do you believe there’s any life after death?” he asked after a moment.
“I don’t know,” Fife mumbled. “Certainly not like all the churches say anyway. The Japs believe if they die fighting they go straight to heaven forever. How primitive can you get? I just don’t know. That’s the truth.”
“Well, I don’t know either,” Doll said. “But sometimes I can’t help wondering about it.
“Let’s go down to the dump and get some canned fruit,” he grinned after a pause.
This was one of their favorite pastimes, ever since the making of swipe had started. The two of them had, in effect, become the canned fruit suppliers for the whole of C-for-Charlie. There was, Fife knew, something deathlike about it. He was not like Doll. And yet he always went. It was like biting on your own wound.
They would swagger up, hands resting on their holster flaps. They were swashbucklers. Fife had a pistol too now, come by at Boola Boola where he had taken it off a dead American he had found lying facedown with his toes turned in or was it out? They really were swashbucklers, and Fife loved it. Because for these few moments he could believe he was what the new cannonfodder thought he really was. A soldier? a pirate? anyway, a swashbuckler. The moment he found out about the swipe making, the General Commanding had ordered armed guards posted on all the ration dumps. They had orders to shoot to kill. That was what made it fun.
So they would walk up. The armed guard would be sitting way up there up on top, rifle in hand, and he would always be a cannonfodder. What you gonna do with that gun, bud? one of them would say. Shoot me or somethin like that? Nobody who was really hep called it a piece or arm any more. Usually they would be shouted at. By the cannonfodder. There would be threatening gestures. Somebody, some wit, in the company made up a word for the especially weak ones, which was cannonmudder. They would simply stand and look at him, hands resting on their holster flaps. Then they would take what they wanted and walk away, turning their backs disdainfully. Nobody was ever shot. But Fife was not like Doll. And he knew it.
When he first realized it, it was that bad time after the combat numbness left them and they had not yet found out about the swipe. He had never believed that he could be terrified by any of these puny piddling little air raids again, but he was. And Doll obviously was not. Fife had thought the combat numbness was a new state of mind. And when it went away and left him again a quivering mass of jelly, he was not prepared. He was forced to face once again the same fact he had faced before, which was that he was not a soldier. He was right back where he started. It took every ounce of courage he could muster to continue sitting under the cocopalm drinking and not run dive into his slit trench during the air raids. He could do it and he did but it cost him more than it did other people, like Doll. So he was forced to face up once again to the same old fact he had always known. He was a coward.
Perhaps it was that, that knowledge, which made him take advantage of the loophole when it appeared and Old MacTae the young supply sergeant told him he should. Of course, everybody who possibly could was taking advantage of the loophole. Even Doll tried to take advantage of it, but he was so disgustingly healthy that there was nothing at all he could do. The loophole was the recently discovered fact that Division hospital had relaxed the sternness of their evacuation policy.
It all started with Carni, Mazzi’s hep pal from Greater New York in the 1st Platoon. Almost everybody except a few like Doll now had malaria in the company. But Carni had it so bad that he really could not function. Day after day he went on sick call with it, was handed a handful of atabrine, and came back to lie on his bunk totally incapacitated. And now, because of the atabrine, he had yellow jaundice to boot. Then one day he did not come back from sick call. Two days later they were informed he had been evacuated.
He was the first. Immediately almost everybody who had any malaria at all went on sick call. Unfortunately it helped almost no one. But slowly, over the weeks, first one then another of the honestly serious cases began to disappear and not come back from sick call. They were being sent, for the present moment anyway,—or so rumor had it—to either Naval Base Hospital No. 3 on Ephate in the New Hebrides, or to New Zealand. Naturally New Zealand was better, and there was much anguish in almost every outfit at the thought of friends getting drunk an
d laid in Auckland New Zealand. Ephate had only one small town in which there was nothing except natives who tried to sell souvenir handcarved boats to everybody and to each other.
Then Stormy Storm got himself evacuated, and the lid was off. Storm was unique in that he was the first man any of them knew who got evacuated for a plain physical disability rather than for some disease like malaria or jaundice. His physical disability was his wounded hand. Having nothing else to utilize, and being one of those who obviously were never going to get sick with anything and would therefore have to stay and watch his friends leave him one by one, Storm decided to try with his bad hand again since they were loosening everything up so. To his astonishment, and everybody else’s, he was examined by exactly the same doctor who had sent him back to duty during The Dancing Elephant, and was this time evacuated. The doctor did not even remember him. When Storm made the hand grate for him and told his story, he clucked his tongue and said someone had been seriously wrong in sending him back. What Storm really needed was an operation, and he was sending him to New Zealand because his hand would be in a cast for several months. The people there might even send him Stateside. But he should never have been sent back to duty. Storm, naturally, did not tell him who had done it. Almost everybody in the company came by to say goodby to him in the hospital where he was smoking cigars, eating well and enjoying himself since he was not at all sick.
And with Storm’s success, just about everybody tried to get into the act. In one month and two weeks after Carni was evacuated for malaria, over 35% of the old C-for-Charlie—the men who had ridden back in the trucks from Boola Boola—had managed to get themselves evacuated for one thing or another. Many many more had tried and failed, and a few who knew they had no chance had not tried at all. And one man had been offered evacuation and had refused it.
Who else could it be but The Welshman, Mad Eddie Welsh the First Sergeant? His malaria, unlike John Bell’s malaria which had leveled off as a medium bad case, had gone on getting worse like Carni’s malaria had. When he was found in a dead faint one day slumped across his desk with indelible pencil still in hand, he was carried up to Division hospital and ordered evacuated. He came to to find himself in a small section reserved for first three graders, in a bunk right next to that of Storm. The colored ticket for evacuation was already attached to his bed foot.
“Aha, you fink bastard!” he bellowed. “So it was you who got me hauled up here!” His crazy eyes glinted with an insane feverishness. Storm could not tell whether it was the fever of the malaria, or simply Welsh’s personality.
“Knock off, First Sarn’t,” Storm, who was smoking a cigar, said cautiously. “I’m a patient here like you, and I’m bein shipped out like you.”
“You’ll never get away with it!” Welsh roared. “You’ll never beat me out of my job, Storm! I’m too smart! Anyway, while you’re okay in the kitchen, you got no head for Administration! I know you!”
Storm, knowing him, simply could not believe he was delirious. From down the aisle the frail young 2d Lt doctor who ran the ward came running with a wardboy.
“Now you just take it easy, Sergeant,” he said. “You’ve got a temperature of a hundred and five and two tenths.”
“You’re in cahoots with him!” Welsh hollered.
For answer the Lt shoved him back on his pillow and put a thermometer in his mouth, at which point Welsh bit the thermometer in two, threw it on the floor, leaped out of bed and ran out the tent flap and back to his company. He did not die, as the Lt predicted he would; and he continued to recommend to everybody, smiling his sly, mad smile, that they try their damnedest to get themselves evacuated while there was still time.
Into the midst of all this activity, like some ghost from another world, Buck Sgt Big Queen suddenly returned. True to his word, he had stowed away on a ship coming to Guadalcanal. Due to some quirk, he had not been sent to Ephate or New Zealand, but to a hospital in New Caledonia, which meant that if he was sent back to duty he would not be sent to his old outfit but to some new Division in New Guinea. On the other hand, the doctors there—because the bullet had taken a large bone chip out of his upper arm and left that arm slightly impaired—had offered to send him back to the States to become a combat instructor for draftees. Queen had refused to accept either alternative and finally had gone AWOL and stowed away on a boat heading here and aboard which, when he told his story, he was treated like a prince the rest of the voyage. But now, seeing what he had come back to, he was stunned. This was not his old outfit: Culn gone, and an Officer? Charlie Dale, an ex-cook! the Platoon Sgt of 1st Platoon? Jimmy Fox gone? Jenks dead? Stein relieved? Pvt John Bell a Platoon Sgt, too! Fife the clerk a combat squad leader? Pfc Don Doll a Platoon Guide? Queen, who because of his absence was still only a Buck Sgt squad leader, could not accept it. It was too much for him. After two days of drinking swipe and reminiscing, he reported back to the hospital complaining about his crippled arm and was at once shipped out to New Zealand.
Nobody seemed to know just why the doctors were doing all this. They had been so tough while the campaign was going on. Now, though, men who came back said the doctors smiled at them, asked them what was wrong with them, and even helped them describe and elaborate their symptoms if they had trouble talking. Apparently none of this was Division policy, which was as tough as ever. Apparently the doctors themselves had decided the veterans of the campaign had suffered enough, and had taken it upon themselves to help oldtimers get evacuated if it was at all medically possible. Almost without exception no green replacements were ever evacuated; only oldtimers.
Fife, when it came his turn to try and utilize this marvelous loophole, did not really expect much to come of it. In fact, it was MacTae who talked him into going. Fife had had a bad ankle ever since a high school football accident had torn some ligaments which made the ankle susceptible to going out of place on him. He had learned to anticipate in such a way as to take most of his weight off it before it went all the way out. Also, on most marches and during the campaign, he kept it taped up with a basketweave bandage he had learned from the old family doctor who had treated it originally. But he rarely thought about it. All of this had become as much a part of his normal life as his bad teeth, or bad eyes. Then one day, walking to noon chow with MacTae who happened to be passing, it had gone out on him again from stepping wrong on a halfdried mud rut. He had leaped to take the weight off it, but only partially succeeded. The pain was exquisite.
“Why, you’re white as a sheet!” MacTae said. “What the hell happened to you there?”
Fife shrugged and explained. It didn’t hurt after the first minute if he was careful to set his foot down absolutely straight.
MacTae looked excited. “Well, have you been up to the docs with it? You haven’t? Really? Why, you’re out of your everlovin mind! You can get evacuated on that!”
“You really think so?” Fife had never considered it.
“Sure!” MacTae said excitedly. “I know guys who got shipped out on a lot less than that.”
“But what if they turn me down?”
“So what of you got to lose? You won’t be any worse off than you are now, will you?”
“That’s true.”
“Man, if I had somethin like that, I’d be up there like a shot! Trouble with me, I’m so sickeningly healthy I ain’t never gonna get myself shipped out!”
“You really think so?”
“I wouldn’t hesitate a second!”
Largely because of MacTae’s enthusiasm, Fife went. He was still as unsure of himself about most things as he used to be, now that he had rediscovered his cowardice. But there were other things about him which had changed. Fistfighting, for instance. The old Fife had abhorred fistfights, largely because he was afraid of losing. The new Fife adored them, and had had six or eight more fights since his beating up of Corporal Weld. He no longer cared deeply whether he won or lost, as he used to. Every bump he gave, and every bump he took, caused in him an immense sense of releas
e from something or other. And he was not afraid to tackle anybody. All this showed up in his first encounter with Witt, after the Kentuckian’s transfer went through. Witt had been back two days and drunk both nights, and Fife had had one fight, before they actually ran into each other face to face. When they did, Fife went up to him and smiled and stuck out his hand. Squinting his eyes and putting his head a little on one side and grinning, he said, “Hello, Witt. Or are you still not speakin to me?” Witt had grinned back and taken the hand. He seemed to sense some change he liked. “No. I guess I’m talkin to you now.” “Because if you’re not, I thought we might as well have it out right here and now,” Fife grinned. Witt nodded, still grinning. Apparently he had seen the fight. “Well, we could do that. I think I could still take you. But you got a pretty good right hand there. If you tagged me with that right hand, you might could whup me. Awys pervided I couldn’t keep away from it, a course.” “There ain’t really no need though,” Fife grinned, “now. Since you’re talking to me. Is there?” “Not really,” Witt said. “What do you say we have a slug of swipe instead?” Cynically, they did. And it was this quality—of cynicism, or whatever the hell you called it—that worked for him when he went up to the hospital on sick call after MacTae suggested it.
When his turn in the line came and they called him into the examining tent, he saw that the examining doctor was Lt Col Roth—that same big, meatylooking, wavywhitehaired, pompous Lt Col Roth who had examined his head wound and been so contemptuous to him about his lost glasses. As far as Fife was concerned, that blew it. Only, this time Lt Col Roth smiled. “Well, soldier, and what’s your trouble?” he said, smiling in a sort of conspiratorial way. It was obvious that he did not recognize Fife. And that was the way Fife played it.