by Ivan Doig
This day, the magic number did not change.
The hours of the day in their circling of the earth returned now to the troopship. Spellbound by the immediate presence of Cass in the inked words, Ben read the letters over again, knowing all the while there was another recipient of her lines of love or whatever approximated it.
Life was a sum of unlikelihoods, but in his wildest imagining he could not have seen ahead to this, sharing professions of love from another man's wife. Were those letters to a long-absent husband somewhere at mail call on a jungle island like these? They couldn't be, the soul issued assurance. Why wouldn't they be? said the demons of the heart.
Only belatedly did he become conscious of being observed in his troubled séance with the set of letters. He tried not to show the extent of his embarrassment, and missed by far.
Angelides gruffly offered up: "This appears serious."
"I have to hope she is," Ben trying a doomed grin along with it.
Angelides waited, attentive to more to come.
"I'm in a fix, Andy. She's married."
The sentences escaped from him before he knew it. He hadn't told Prokosch when he had the opening. Never would he have told Danzer. He had not even confided in Jake, repository of life's complications that he was. Angelides in alert stillness on the next bunk he would have trusted with his life, but the confession he had just made came under another category entirely. I'm not equipped for this. Ben creased the letters closed. "Keep it under your hat, okay? I can't take any pride in being a homewrecker. If that's what I turn out to be, even."
"Sorry, I'm no help to you there," Angelides said as if it was a test he hadn't taken. "All I've ever been round is love 'em and leave 'em. I got left."
Ben looked over at him. One spill of guts for another. It seemed his turn to come up with something medicative. "You'll have better luck later on. Civvie life will be full of lovelies looking for Marines in shining armor, you'll see."
In an exceedingly swift motion Angelides no longer was flat on his back but sitting tight as a coil on the edge of his bunk. "Ben? Something you maybe better know. In case it affects what you want to write or something like that. When the shooting match is over"—that always meant the war in conversations like this—"I'm staying in." He worked up a rough grin behind the exchange of confidences. "True-blue to the stinking Corps."
Ben did not say anything immediately, confounded once again by a teammate he was supposed to know like an open book. War mocked the notion of some sort of order in the human race. The only sane route he thought he knew—it was also true of Cass, Jake, anyone he would lay down his life for and they for him—was to serve as dutifully as you could during the duration, then reconstitute yourself when peace came in whatever measure. Get on with the existence you were cut out for, or, in terms blindingly similar to the argument he would have made to Dex Cariston, we are servants of war forever. Yet here was Angelides, capability itself, turning his back on the TSU degree and probably married life, to stay on in uniform as a glorified groundpounder foreman, rewarded with stripes on his arm and little else. A garrison career for enlisted men was boredom with bad surprises sewn in; just ask the poor suckers stationed on Guam in 1941 when the Japanese imperial army showed up.
By now Ben's silence was saying much in itself. "You're sure," he tried with Angelides, "you just want grunt life to go on and on?"
The bared smile. "You can't tell by looking? It fits me like a cork in a virgin."
Word came that a piece of cargo with highest priority and his name all over it awaited at the airfield, and when Ben went to fetch the dreaded recording equipment, it was attended by the wearer of the most disheveled uniform on Eniwetok.
"Hi, Lieutenant. Gosh, it's hot here."
"Jones!" Elated to see that familiar ugly puss under the crumpled fatigue cap, he fought back the impulse to ask a torrent of questions about East Base, especially the WASP side of things. "Old home week, right here in equatorial Eden. I can't believe Tepee Weepy took a fit of sanity and sent you along. I can use all the help there is." Saying so, Ben circled the recorder in its carrying case distrustfully. It basically resembled the bulkiest suitcase imaginable. He looked around the cargo shed for the technician whiz promised with it, then realized.
"Jones, I hate to take your name in vain, but please don't tell me you're the tech aide, too."
"That was the order that came down," this stanza of the enlisted men's repertoire practically sang from the bedraggled corporal. He puckered in contemplation and came up with a morsel of solace for Ben: "They did give me the manual and I read it on the flight over."
Oh, great. He can pray over the machine when it goes flooey. "Let's get this thing to the ship," Ben said in resignation. "Posterity beckons."
The Marine assault force command plainly regarded the TPWP pair and their recording assignment as a nuisance, and just as plainly had been ordered in no uncertain terms to put up with them. Angelides was mostly amused. "Seems dumb-ass to me—who needs more proof people are shooting at us out here?"
The machine when Jones opened its case and started trying to figure out its workings was not the Pandora's box Ben had anticipated, it was worse. It ran on a battery as heavy as a concrete block. It had delicate reels and a delicate needle. The cord to the hand microphone was scarcely longer than a dog leash. His brow creased, Jones at length looked up from the so-called portable recorder. "You know what, Lieutenant? If we're going to pack this thing from here to shore, what we really need is—"
"—a jeep," Ben admitted like someone coming down with a headache. "Excuse me while I beg my way through the Marine chain of command."
Across the next couple of days, with Jones in earphones as he fiddled madly with the recorder's dials, Ben stood on the fantail of the troopship and practiced until his vocal cords were tired. Speaking into the microphone required an entirely different mentality from what he was used to at the typewriter. How did Edward R. Murrow do it? For that matter, how did that moron motormouth Loudon do it?
"Eniwetok's harbor is jammed with ships of the assault force," he stared around at the obvious and could only recite it in strained fashion. Wanting to say: Cass, you should see this. You can't imagine the steel mills it took to do this, wall an entire island with ships. "The Marines aboard this one say they are ready for the real thing after weeks of practice landings here." They say it in the filthy language of war, naturally—pilots aren't the only ones with the vocabulary, Cass. Poor Jones goes around the ship looking like his ears hurt. Angelides these days has a mouth on him like a blowtorch. Invasion is a hellish thing to go through. Nobody is actually ever prepared to die, are they—it's not human nature, the imagination can't handle obliteration. And so the guys below-decks talk tough, so the fear doesn't have a chance to speak up. Again aloud: "Equipment of all sorts is in the cargo bays waiting to roll aboard the landing craft. Artillery, half-tracks, jeeps—"
"Sorry, start again," Jones muttered, repeatedly, from where he hovered over the temperamental recorder. Oh God, Jones, so to speak. At Guam are we going to stick our necks out from here to Thomas Edison and only get a reel full of blank air out of it?
When at last they got done with the rehearsal reel and played it back, Ben winced over his voice. He sounded dry and stiff as sticks rubbed together. As for the quality of what he was coming up with to say, if he had it on typing paper in front of him he would have been wildly crossing things out and scribbling in changes.
In the silence at the end of the reel, he gloomily turned toward Jones. "So what do you think, maestro?"
"Maybe it would help if you had some kind of a script?"
Guam was ear-shattering.
Fiery salvo after salvo from the big muzzles of the American battleships and cruisers, more rapid fire from the guns of the rest of the convoy spread across the horizon of ocean, the bombardment ahead of the invasion was like all the sky's lightning dropping all its thunder at once. Explosions erupted onshore every few seconds, smoke and
dust spewing as if from volcano vents. After enough of this the entire island looked like it was on fire.
While Ben struggled to jot the scene down amid the jostling swarm of Marines along the deck rail of the troopship, his memory tunneled back to the Salamaua beachhead in New Guinea. The advantage of darkness there. Friessen's temporarily lucky National Guard unit crawling ashore unhit. The worn-down Japanese defenders heading for the hills. A victorious landing if there ever was one. And I still ended up shot, didn't I. He looked out again at the island being smashed by shells and bombs from the invasion armada. Guam was an ugly lump in the ocean, rocky bluffs and jungle ravines looming behind the crescent of shore called the Devil's Horns. At least he and Jones did not have to follow on inland to the hand-to-hand fighting there, their task ended at the beach. Look where the damn place is, though. This isn't anything like Eniwetok. There the distance from where the landing craft disgorged the assault troops to the practice beach was about the length of a football field. Here, for real, the shore of Guam lay beyond what looked more like a quarter of a mile of coral shelf. The assault force would have to wade it all. Prowling through his riflemen as he checked over their packs and combat equipment hung all over them, Angelides looked ready to leap over the side and swim the distance. He had been through two of these to Ben's one. You're the professional soldier, Animal. If the odds on this don't make you look bothered, maybe I worry too much about the difference between practice and the real thing. Shelling the living hell out of the place this way ought to even things up some. When we go in with the damn recorder, dead silence onshore would suit me.
Struggling through the Marine mass toward him was Jones, a steel helmet somewhat lopsided on him. He had to shout to make himself understood to Ben a foot away. "They're telling us, 'Load up.'"
"Then let's go do it."
After a maximum of administrative runaround they had been allowed the backseat of a jeep assigned to Headquarters Company. It and a few others of a small motor convoy would follow—more aptly, wallow—in over the broad reef behind an armored half-track mounted with a 75 mm. cannon and a machine gun. Angelides' contingent wading in would be in clear sight off to the side. The jeep had nothing else to recommend it as a battle vantage point; a temporary steel panel had been installed where the windshield ordinarily was, with a slit for the driver to see through.
"It's still awful open, Lieutenant," Jones had pointed out when they looked over the vehicle in the cargo hold.
"Don't I know it. We'll need to crouch down until we're kissing the floorboards."
Now as they started to make their way below to get themselves established in the motor convoy's landing craft, the din of the invasion bombardment growing even louder overhead, a hand gripped Ben's shoulder. Startled, he in turn grabbed Jones to a halt and turned around. Angelides, looking lethal in his camouflage helmet, was there roaring in his ear: "Get in the halftrack. You and Bible boy. Not the jeep, savvy? I fixed it with the loading officer and he fixed it with the trackie crew."
Ben hesitated. The half-track, which was half tank and half truck, would be in the lead crawling across the coral and draw enemy fire accordingly. "You're sure?"
Angelides winked. "One of us ought to keep his pecker dry in case fun in the sack ever comes back into style. Might as well be you." He slapped Ben on the shoulder, purposely right on the TPWP patch. "See you on the beach, recording star." Ben watched the big figure draped in ammunition bandoliers and grenade pouches recede back to his men at the deck rail.
All was commotion in the flotilla of landing craft bobbing against the ship. Jones had been down earlier to secure the recorder in the jeep, and now he and Ben wrestled the hefty equipment case out and into the back of the half-track and climbed in after it. The gunners there turned and met them with dubious looks. One cracked: "Hitchhikers, huh? That gorilla sergeant says we're gonna make history taking you along."
"That's the theory," Ben vouched. His voice sounded tight, and he rubbed his throat to try to relax it. Jones squirmed down beside the recording equipment, manipulating plugs and scanning dials as though they were compasses in a stormy sea.
The minutes of waiting before launch dragged by. The gunners slouched amid their stocks of ammunition and smoked, which maybe helped their nerves but not those of the pair at the recorder. At last the dispatching officer, lordly on the troopship, gave the signal and their landing craft and the one with Angelides' group of Marines putt-putted away like ducks abreast.
The half-track a metal box within a larger floating metal box, Jones and Ben could not see out during the short yet endless voyage. Engine noise and wave slosh and ominous clatter from the gunners as they made ready seeped through the crashing intervals of the bombardment. As best as Ben could tell, the shelling so far was all one-way, the naval barrage suppressing whatever waited on shore. At least the landing craft was not being blasted out of the water. Yet. "Waipu was a breeze, we walked right in," Angelides' recapitulations played unrelentingly within Ben, "Tarawa was total hell, they threw everything at us," the one experience against the other. Either outcome, he had to somehow summon into the microphone in his hand. Jones had traded his helmet for earphones—Ben hoped that kind of faith would be rewarded—and looked up expectantly with his finger over the on switch, but Ben signaled him to hold off. "Not until we're on the reef. This is recess."
As soon as the broad-beamed craft ground to a halt against the shelf of coral and the landing ramp descended, everything changed as if a single order had been given to every enemy soldier bunkered against the bombardment. Guam erupted back at the invasion force. Geysers in the surf met the half-track as it clanked down the ramp, the Japanese artillery opening up. Bullets pinged off the armored sides like terrible hail. "Inhospitable bastards," one gunner grouched. Grimacing, Ben held the microphone out the back of the half-track to catch the sounds of being under fire. When Jones gave him thumbs-up that the recorder was functioning for sure, he climbed over the tailgate and slid into the water to his thighs, holding the mike up out of the wet.
"War has many calibers," he began speaking from the shelter of the rear of the half-track. "The Marines wading ashore here at Guam are getting an earful of the Japanese arsenal." A nasty sploosh nearby punctuated that. When his flinching was over, Ben reported: "That was a mortar shell, fairly close." No sooner had he said so than a larger eruption sent jarring tremors through the water and the air. "And that was big artillery, probably a howitzer in a shore emplacement. In the background you can hear Nambu machine guns. Their muzzle flashes are red, like Fourth of July rockets going off everywhere on the bluff above the beach. The Marines make the joke, if it is a joke, that if you listen enough those machine gun bursts sound like 'RIP RIP,' although resting in peace is not how any man hopes to come out of this day." Tallying such details in words as exact as he could make them was crazily vital to him right then, something other than fear for the mind to try to hold on to in the midst of battle. Jones's suggestion of a script turned out to already exist in him, accumulated from as many combat zones as the correspondent patch on his arm had taken him to. The lore of war. An unsought education. Spectator to himself in this, he talked on into a seeming abyss of time, the assault occurring in unreal slow motion, infantrymen moving at a heavy-legged slog against the water and the coarse shelf of reef. He clung to the tailgate with one hand to help his own footing, the half-track creeping over the rough coral at the same methodical pace as the wading Marines on both sides of him.
"Off to my left the rank being led in by Sergeant Andros Angelides is strung out wide. Bullets are hitting the water around them." So far, though, the rubber raft rode high and empty near the medical corpsmen as it was towed. Ben described that, the infantry lifeboat voyaging into the sea of hostilities. Leading the wave of men ahead, Angelides surged steadily along, turning sideways occasionally to present less of a target as he looked things over and bawled an order. Keeping up the running commentary with whatever arrived to him—the distinctive whumping
sound of a Japanese mortar round; the carcasses of landing craft burning on the reef in back of the men in the water; the confused mix of smells, fine fresh salt air, stinking exhaust fumes, gunpowder odor from the half-track's cannon firing furiously—Ben consistently tried to estimate how far the first of the Marines were from the beachhead. By any measure it was too long a way while being shot at. While he looked on, soldiers near Angelides crashed over into the surf, one, two. All along the advance line of wading troops were other dark blobs of bodies in the water.
"Men are being hit as they come into closer range of enemy fire," he somehow kept the words coming, "too many to count. Someone's helmet just floated by upside down."
