by Len Levinson
“I can’t take this fucking war anymore,” Frankie said.
“You think I can?”
“Just as soon as I get myself patched up, I’m going AWOL.” Frankie lit the cigarette and gazed into Shilansky’s eyes. “You coming with me?”
Shilansky snorted. “I remember what happened last time I went AWOL with you. We got caught.”
“That wasn’t my fault.”
“It wasn’t my fault either.”
“It was nobody’s fault,” Frankie said. “That was in Honolulu, and how can you go AWOL in Honolulu, where there’s a fucking MP on every streetcorner? Here there’s nothing but jungle. This is a big fucking island. They’ll never catch us.”
“What if the Japs catch us?”
“The Japs are to the east of us. There ain’t no Japs to the west of us between here and Hollandia. They’ll never find us.”
Shilansky’s brow wrinkled in thought. “I don’t know. I’ll think about it.”
“Don’t think about it too long,” Frankie said. “Our best chance to bug out is now. When we’re back at the regiment, it’ll be harder.”
“I know,” Shilansky said. “I’ll tell you when the doctors are finished with me. I don’t think I’m healthy enough to go AWOL right now.”
“If you go back to the regiment, how healthy you think you’ll be then? They’ll just throw you back into the fucking meatgrinder again.”
“Shut up and lemme think,” Shilansky said.
TWO . . .
Major General Clyde Hawkins, the commanding officer of the Eighty-first Division, was jubilant. His soldiers had pushed the Japs back to the Driniumor and were now advancing beyond it, encountering scattered resistance. It appeared to General Hawkins that the Japs had shot their wad in the fighting of the past few days, and they were defeated in the region around Aitape for the time being.
General Hawkins had blond hair and a blond mustache. He was a graduate of West Point and had been first captain during his senior year. Ambitious, steeped in military tradition, he wanted to become general of the Army someday. This victory was important to him, because three days earlier the Japs had kicked his ass and made him look bad to his superiors. They’d criticized him for waiting too long before launching his counter-attack against the Japs.
But now he was a winner again. His division was pressing forward. General MacArthur would read his name in the communiqués and remember who he was. General Hawkins was the son of a general and the grandson of a general, both of whom knew MacArthur. General Hawkins hoped to be famous and great like General MacArthur someday.
Master Sergeant Abner Somerall, the sergeant major of the division, pushed aside the tent flap and poked his head into General Hawkins’s office. “Colonel Hutchins is here to see you, sir.”
“Oh, no,” muttered General Hawkins, because he hated Colonel Hutchins with a passion. Colonel Hutchins was a drunken old stumblebum as far as he was concerned, a constant thorn in his side. “Send him in.”
“Yes, sir.”
Sergeant Somerall withdrew his head. General Hawkins frowned as he stuffed an Old Gold cigarette into his ivory cigarette holder. General MacArthur smoked a corncob pipe, and General Hawkins used an ivory cigarette holder for his trademark. He lit the cigarette at the end and took a puff. The tent flap was pushed to the side again, and Colonel “Hollerin’ ” Bob Hutchins entered the office. He strolled to the front of the desk and saluted.
“Morning, sir,” he said.
Colonel Hutchins was five feet eight, and his big beer belly hung over his cartridge belt. He had the florid complexion of the alcoholic, and a button nose. On his forehead was a bandage, and he appeared as though he had tits because there was a big bandage over his chest. He was commanding officer of the Twenty-third Infantry Regiment.
“What can I do for you?” General Hawkins asked.
“I need replacements bad.”
“So does everybody else around here.”
“When’ll we get replacements?”
“How should I know?”
“You’re a fucking general. You’re supposed to know something.”
General Hawkins puffed his cigarette and glowered at Colonel Hutchins. General Hawkins hated the son of a bitch. They argued constantly. Colonel Hutchins had no respect for General Hawkins’s rank, and General Hawkins couldn’t relieve Colonel Hutchins of command because Colonel Hutchins was a tough front-line commander who always came through when the chips were down.
“I don’t know everything,” General Hawkins replied, not inviting Colonel Hutchins to sit down. “I can’t predict the future.”
“I need soldiers,” Colonel Hutchins said. “I’m down to about forty percent of my full strength. My regiment took the brunt of that Jap attack, you know.”
“I know, but I don’t have anything for you. Is that all?”
“Naw, it’s not all. Have you got anybody in the stockade?”
“Don’t tell me you’ll take prisoners from the stockade!”
“I’ll take any warm bodies I can get.”
“I don’t think you want anybody in the stockade. There’s men there who’ve tried to kill officers, who’ve gone AWOL, who’ve stolen stuff, and who’ve turned tail and run in the face of the enemy.”
“I can make soldiers out of them. Can I have them?”
“If I give them to you, you’ll have to take full responsibility for anything they do.”
Colonel Hutchins smirked. “Don’t worry about that part. I don’t pass the buck, like some people I know around here.”
General Hawkins’s face became stony, because he knew Colonel Hutchins was talking about him. “You can have anybody you want in the stockade,” he said. “Just be careful that one of them doesn’t shoot you in the back.”
“The only person around here who’d shoot me in the back would be you.”
Their eyes met and hatred beamed between them. Colonel Hutchins wanted to jump over the desk and punch General Hawkins in the mouth, while General Hawkins wanted to pull out his Colt .45 and shoot Colonel Hutchins in the head.
“Anything else?” General Hawkins asked.
“Can I have it in writing?” Colonel Hutchins said.
“Can you have what in writing?”
“Your authorization for me to take anybody I want out of the stockade.”
“Tell Sergeant Somerall to type it up and I’ll sign it. Anything else?”
“No.”
“Don’t you ever say sir?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Get out of my office.”
“Yes, sir.”
Colonel Hutchins saluted smartly, did an about-face, and marched out of the office. General Hawkins puffed his cigarette and frowned unhappily. Back at West Point they’d never taught him that someday he’d have to deal with an officer like “Hollerin’ ” Bob Hutchins.
Frankie La Barbara was all alone, sitting cross-legged on the ground. All his buddies from the recon platoon had gone inside the medical tent, and none of them came out yet. Other soldiers had arrived in trucks and jeeps and were carried into the tent, but still he sat there with his broken nose, which he couldn’t breathe out of.
I’m gonna be disfigured for life, Frankie thought. No broad will ever look at me again. I used to be a good-looking guy, and now I’m a fucking geek.
A medic walked up to him. “C’mon.”
Frankie stood, wiped the dust from the seat of his pants, and followed the medic into the tent. Tables were lined up on two walls, and medical personnel examined soldiers. Some soldiers were carried into the adjacent room, where operations were performed. It was dark and hot inside the tent, although the lower part of the walls were rolled up. The medic pointed to an empty table.
“Lay down over there.”
Frankie leaned his M 1 rifle against the side of the tent and sat on the table. The air smelled like chemicals mixed with blood. Men groaned and moaned under the influence of morphine. He heard the voices of doctors and nurses in
the operating room. A nurse with a big fat ass was examining a soldier on the other side of the tent. A few medics looked at another soldier. A nurse peeled bandages off a third while a doctor looked on.
A nurse walked up to Frankie, and he thought she looked familiar. She had pale blond hair and blue eyes, and was quite pretty.
“Don’t I know you from someplace?” the nurse asked.
“I think so,” Frankie replied. “Are you from New York by any chance?”
“No, I’m from Ohio.” She wrinkled her nose, and then suddenly a smile broke out on her face. “You’re Frankie La Barbara, aren’t you?”
“That’s my name.”
“I’m Betty Crawford.”
“Oh,” Frankie said, “yeah, I remember now.”
“You were one of Sergeant Butsko’s men, right?”
“That’s right.”
Frankie remembered her now. He’d met her at the hospital on New Caledonia after he’d been stricken with malaria on Guadalcanal. He’d gone to visit Sergeant Butsko, who’d been wounded in the gut, and she’d been one of Butsko’s nurses.
Betty remembered that hospital in New Caledonia too. She’d had a brief affair with Butsko before he returned to his outfit on Guadalcanal. She’d never forgotten Butsko because she thought he’d given her the best fuck of her life. She and Butsko kept the affair a secret, because she was an officer and he wasn’t. Such relationships were frowned upon in the Army.
“Where’s Sergeant Butsko now?” she asked.
“He was wounded on Bougainville. Last thing I heard, he was in a hospital on Hawaii.”
“Was he wounded badly?”
“He got hit in the leg. They were gonna cut it off, but then they decided not to.”
“My goodness,” she said. She couldn’t imagine Butsko without a leg.
“I imagine he’ll show up again someday, like a bad penny.”
“Sounds like you’re mad at him.”
“I hate the son of a bitch.”
“Why?”
“Because I hate him—that’s why.”
“What’d he do?”
“Because he’s a rotten son of a bitch.” He looked up at her. “What’re you gonna do about my nose?”
“Is that your main problem right now?”
“The war is my main problem, and then comes my nose.”
“Lie down and I’ll look at it.”
Frankie lay on the table and stretched out. Betty bent over him and brought her face close to his; he felt like grabbing her and sticking his tongue down her throat. She was beautiful in his opinion, although she looked worn out, like all nurses in combat zones. Even the young ones acquired bags under their eyes and lines around their mouths.
“This might hurt,” she said, moving her fingers toward his nose.
“Can you give me a shot?”
“Haven’t you already had one?”
“No.”
“Yes you have. Don’t lie.”
“Well, I can always use another one.”
“Lie still.”
“No shot?”
“I said lie still.”
She gripped the edge of the bandage in her chewed-down fingernails, and pulled it away from his skin.
“Ouch,” he said.
“Ssshhhh.”
“Ouch!”
She removed the adhesive part of the bandage, but the bloody gauze stuck to his nose. She tugged, but it wouldn’t come loose.
“That hurts,” he said.
“I know it hurts. Just keep your mouth shut and you’ll be all right.”
Frankie closed his mouth. She took a deep breath and yanked the bandage off his nose. He shouted in pain.
“Take it easy,” she said, dropping the used bandage into a tin can on a tray being held by the orderly beside her.
She bent over Frankie’s nose and examined it. It was just about the most mangled nose she’d ever seen in her life. Bones and cartilage stuck out of skin that was caked with blood. The flesh of his nose was torn to shreds. It looked as though he’d require major plastic surgery.
He saw the expression on her face and knew what it meant. “Pretty bad, huh?”
“I won’t lie to you,” she replied. “It is pretty bad.”
“I’ll be disfigured for life, right?”
“They can perform miracles with plastic surgery these days. You’ll probably be shipped out to a hospital where they have a special plastic-surgery team.”
“Back to the States?” Frankie asked hopefully.
“Oh, no,” she said. “Probably Hollandia. Actually, they might be able to do it here.”
“Shit,” he said.
“I’ll have to clean it now. I think I’d better give you a shot.”
“It’s about time.”
She didn’t have to roll up his sleeve, because he didn’t have one. He’d torn off both his sleeves days ago in order to keep cool in the torrid jungle. She dabbed his right biceps with alcohol on a piece of cotton, then took the needle from the tray, squirted a drop into the air, and jabbed it in.
“I look like a clown,” Frankie muttered. “No woman will ever fuck me again.”
“Sssshhh,” she said.
Frankie closed his eyes and felt as though he were floating in the air.
The wheels of the cargo plane touched down on the runway, and Master Sergeant John A. Butsko from McKeesport, Pennsylvania, felt relieved. He hated to fly and always worried that the plane he was on would crash.
But the plane hadn’t crashed. It had been an uneventful journey from Henderson Field on Guadalcanal to Tadji Field on New Guinea. No Jap Zeros had hurtled out of the sky at twelve o’clock high to shoot down the cargo plane. No Jap antiaircraft batteries tried to blow it out of the air. Now Butsko was home. He’d never been on New Guinea before, but his regiment was somewhere in the vicinity, according to what he’d heard on Hawaii.
Butsko wore new Army-green fatigues, new combat boots, and a new stiff fatigue cap, similar to a baseball hat. He carried his few belongings in a light field pack between his legs. Also in the field pack were his orders, not made out in his own name. The orders were forged with a phony name. Butsko was technically AWOL from his hospital on Oahu in the Hawaiian Islands.
The cargo plane rumbled and roared as it sped down the runway. Butsko looked out the window and saw tents, quonset huts, and stacks of supplies under tarpaulin wraps. Soldiers were all over the place, wearing helmets and carrying rifles. He was back in a war zone again, and felt the old tensions creep onto him like lizards and beetles.
The cargo plane slowed down. Butsko looked around at other soldiers sitting on the benches that lined each side of the fuselage. Crates full of supplies were stacked in the center of the deck, and the light was dim because the portholes were small.
Butsko wanted to light a cigarette, but there was no smoking during landing. His leg ached slightly, but he could walk on it pretty good. He thought he must be crazy for going through so much trouble to return to the war, but he couldn’t help himself. He hated the war and all the bloody, brutal killing that went with it, but he’d felt like a slacker and a coward in the hospital, taking it easy and getting blowjobs from nurses while other soldiers were fighting and dying at the front. He reached a point where he loathed himself, and that’s when he started paying bribes and falsifying documents. The doctors said he wasn’t ready to return to the front yet, but what’d they know? He couldn’t double-time five miles, but neither could they. Those doctors all looked like they were ready to keel over at any moment. A good piece of ass and a cold breakfast would kill them all, Butsko thought.
The cargo plane rolled to a stop. Butsko and the other soldiers unfastened their seat belts. Butsko stood and stretched, then bent over and looked out the window. A ground crew rolled a ladder toward the plane, and in the distance he could see a building with a wind sock on the end of a pole. Beyond the building was the vast jungle.
The door to the cargo plane opened.
“A
ll right, everybody out!” somebody shouted.
The soldiers lifted their bags and lined up in front of the door. Butsko took his place among them, wondering where in hell the Twenty-third Regiment was in all that jungle out there.
THREE . . .
The stockade was near the beach and consisted of a quonset hut surrounded by a barbed-wire fence ten feet high. MPs guarded the gate and the perimeter. Colonel Hutchins approached the stockade, with Sergeant Frick at his side. Sergeant Frick was an MP, the NCO in charge of the stockade.
“I don’t think you’re gonna want any of these men,” Sergeant Frick said. “They’re a bunch of rotten eggs.”
Colonel Hutchins grunted. He was sure General Hawkins referred to him, Colonel Hutchins, as a rotten egg from time to time. Colonel Hutchins believed rotten eggs sometimes made the best front-line soldiers, because they were usually nasty, violent sons of bitches. His recon platoon was full of bad eggs, and they had done a fine job until they were just about wiped out during the past few days.
Sergeant Frick went forward and spoke with the MP-guards. One of them opened the gate. Sergeant Frick beckoned to Colonel Hutchins.
“This way, sir.”
Colonel Hutchins followed Sergeant Frick into the stockade. Colonel Hutchins wore his steel pot on his head and his Colt .45 in a holster fastened to his cartridge belt. The sleeves of his shirt were rolled up, and he carried a thin switch of wood in his right hand like a swagger stick, slapping it against the side of his leg.
The stockade area wasn’t very large, and Colonel Hutchins couldn’t see any prisoners outside. He figured they must be in the quonset hut, hiding from the heat. Four MPs double-timed into the stockade, holding their carbines at high port arms, slowing down when they reached Sergeant Frick.
The door to the quonset hut was open, and the MPs went inside first, hollaring “Attention!” Colonel Hutchins heard rushing and bustling inside the quonset hut. Then Sergeant Frick went inside.
“Let’s go, you sons of bitches!” he bellowed. “Move your fucking asses! Look smart! Shape the fuck up!”
