Kill Crazy

by Len Levinson

  I wonder how long it'll take for the Japs to find us, Butsko thought.

  FIVE . . .

  Meanwhile, back at Twenty-third Infantry Regiment Headquarters, Colonel Bob Hutchins sat behind his desk, glancing through reports, communiques, orders from higher headquarters, messages from subordinate commanders, and supply requisitions. Sitting on the desk next to the stack of documents was his canteen, full of white lightning manufactured by his mess sergeant, who had operated an illegal moonshine distillery in Alabama before the war. Occasionally Colonel Hutchins took a sip from the canteen, gritted his teeth, and sucked in air to cool the flames in his mouth. He was five feet nine inches tall and had skinny legs, a flat ass, and a big paunch. His face was puffy and florid, a characteristic common to people who consume large amounts of alcoholic beverages. The white lightning in his canteen was 150 proof.

  A voice came to him from the other side of the tent flap. “Sir?”

  “Whataya want?” asked Colonel Hutchins.

  Major Cobb, the operations officer of the Twenty-third Infantry Regiment, pushed aside the tent flaps and entered Colonel Hutchins's office. “We've received reports of automatic-weapons fire and explosions about a mile in front of our lines, sir.”

  “Got any idea what it's all about?”

  “Well, Butsko's patrol from the recon platoon is still out there.”

  “It must be them.”

  “Unless it's a patrol from another outfit that got lost.”

  “Either way, it's our responsibility.” Colonel Hutchins scratched his vein-lined nose and tried to think. “Send the rest of the recon platoon out there right now, and follow up with J Company.

  “It might be a trap, sir.”

  “I'm sure the rest of the recon platoon and all of J Company can handle whatever's there. Tell them to come right back if it gets too hot. Hurry up. If Butsko and his boys are in trouble, we don't want to leave them hanging.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Major Cobb saluted, did an about-face, and marched out of Colonel Hutchins's office. Colonel Hutchins reached for his canteen and took another swig of white lightning.

  Captain Shimoyama stormed through the jungle, slicing vines and branches with swipes of his gleaming samurai sword. "What's going on here?” he demanded.

  He entered a clearing in which a group of his soldiers were gathered and talking excitedly. They snapped to attention at the sound of his voice. Corporal Goto stepped forward.

  “I believe we've found the Americans,” he said.

  “Excellent,” replied Captain Shimoyama. “Where are they?’

  Corporal Goto pointed toward the darkest part of the jungle. “In there.”

  “Whereabouts in there?”

  “We don't know, sir. We've sent men in to find the Americans, but they haven't come back.”

  “Sounds like sloppy soldiering to me.” Captain Shimoyama turned around and faced Sergeant Kikusaki. “The Americans are right in there.” Captain Shimoyama pointed his samurai sword toward the area Corporal Goto had indicated. “Gather the company here, line them up, and have them sweep through.”

  “What about our men on our flanks, sir? The ones who're trying to encircle the Americans.”

  “I just told you I want the entire company to converge on this point! Can't you understand plain Japanese?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Sergeant Kikusaki's face was flushed with anger as he turned around and reached for the headset of the radio, carried by Corporal Teramoto. Captain Shimoyama raised his samurai sword and touched his thumb to the blade. It was razor sharp, and Captain Shimoyama reflected that he hadn't killed anyone with it yet. He'd only worn it as an ornament at staff meetings and on furloughs, but now at last it would drink American blood.

  “About four more hours till the sun goes down,” Butsko said, looking at his watch. ‘That's not so long.”

  Bannon puffed a cigarette. “Depends on what you call long, Sarge.”

  “Fuck you, Bannon. You used to be a nice, quiet kid, but now you can't keep your mouth shut. I think you been hanging around with this stupid fuck too long.” Butsko glanced at the reclining Frankie La Barbara.

  Bannon didn't feel like arguing with Butsko. He gazed at the bodies of the dead Japanese soldiers that Longtree and Shaw had piled in front of the hole during the lull. Flies swarmed around the bullet holes in the Japanese soldiers’ bodies and flew in and out of their mouths. The sun was hot and the bodies would stink in a little while. Bannon wondered if he was going to see the sun go down that night or whether it would set on his corpse.

  Longtree was eating rice out of a tin container, when suddenly he stopped. “I hear somebody coming,” he said.

  Butsko perked up his ears. He heard the sound too. Numerous Japs were headed in their direction. “Well, boys, I guess this is it,” he said. “Get ready. You remember what I told you, Nutsy?”

  “Yo.”

  “What did I told you?”

  “To throw away any hand grenades that landed in this hole.”

  “You remembered something. I'm proud of you.”

  “Sssshhhhh,” said Longtree.

  They rested the barrels of their submachine guns on the bodies of the dead Japanese soldiers, except for Nutsy, who kept his hands empty and ready to throw hand grenades. They heard Japanese soldiers scrambling through the jungle, looking for them.

  “Don't fire until they see us,” Butsko said.

  Flies buzzed around the dead Japanese soldiers, and mosquitoes swarmed over the GIs as they lay in the muck at the bottom of the hole. The Japanese soldiers came closer. The GIs saw pale green Japanese uniforms moving behind the leaves and branches of the jungle. The Japanese soldiers pressed forward and burst through the dense foliage. Three of mem looked around and spotted their dead comrades. They babbled excitedly to each other and pointed to the corpses.

  "Get them!” Butsko yelled.

  The GIs opened fire with their submachine guns and the three Japanese soldiers were flung backward by the fusillade of bullets. Other Japanese soldiers babbled in the nearby jungle. Then the jungle fell silent.

  Longtree turned to Butsko. “They're trying to creep up on us.”

  “That's because they're a bunch of slant-eyed, yellow-bellied creeps. Shoot them as soon as they get close. You ready, Nutsy?”

  “Hup, Sarge.”

  The GIs waited, their submachine guns ready. They knew the Japs were drawing closer with every passing second. They also knew they were outnumbered astronomically. They expected to become casualties within the next half hour.

  Longtree's eyes and ears were a shade sharper than everybody else's and he spotted the first Jap, ten yards away to his left, crawling through the underbrush. The Jap wore a soft cap with flaps down to his shoulders, to protect him from the sun, and Longtree thought the top of the cap would make a dandy target. He aimed his submachine gun, took a deep breath, and squeezed the trigger.

  The submachine gun bucked and stuttered in his hands, and the head of the Japanese soldier blew, apart, blood and brains splattering everywhere. Longtree let go of the trigger and smiled with satisfaction. Maybe he was going to die, but he'd take a lot of enemy soldiers with him.

  “What you fire at?” asked Butsko.

  “A Jap.”

  “You hit him?”

  “Yep.”

  “Good man.”

  They heard Japanese soldiers calling out to each other, and then there was silence again. The GIs knew that the Japs were trying to zero in on the sound of the submachine-gun fire that they'd heard. Longtree saw movement near the Japanese soldier he'd just shot. Another Japanese soldier had seen the body and was crawling forward to find out what had happened. Evidently he couldn't see that the soldier in front of him was dead and that his head was blown off. The live Japanese soldier crawled closer, pausing every few seconds to listen and look around, but the GIs were still and the Jap saw nothing. The Jap continued his snakelike progression and drew close to the dead soldier. No
w he could see the blood and brains everywhere, and the neck without much of a head left.

  The Japanese soldier opened his mouth to speak, and Longtree pulled the trigger of his Thompson submachine gun. One bullet clipped the Jap on the shoulder, the second flew into his open mouth, and the third blew off the top of his head. The Jap collapsed onto his back, never to move again.

  “Got another one,” Longtree said.

  Butsko grunted. The others continued to search the jungle. They didn't have to worry about their rear, because they had the huge boulder there, but they were vulnerable from every other direction. Their faces were covered with perspiration and their uniforms were plastered to their bodies. They caressed the triggers of their submachine guns and waited for the next Jap to show his face.

  The jungle became quiet, and the GIs knew that Japs were trying to find them. Longtree heard the crackle of a twig and turned to the right. He saw something move in the bushes on Bannon's side. Longtree pointed in that direction, and Bannon focused his eyes on the spot. He saw the leaves shake, although there was no wind. The leaves shook again, and Bannon realized they were festooned on the helmet of a Japanese soldier. Then Bannon saw movement to the left of the Japanese soldier. Two of them were crawling forward. Bannon held up two fingers in front of Butsko's face.

  “Wait till they get closer,” Butsko whispered.

  Bannon nodded and turned to face the two Japanese soldiers. He leveled his submachine gun at them and paused. The one on the right wore the helmet with leaves stuck into it, and the other wore a soft cap with flaps down to his shoulders. The two Japanese soldiers stopped and the one on the right raised his head to take a look around him. His face moved from side to side, and then it stopped suddenly as he distinguished the pile of his dead comrades and something that resembled the barrel of a gun.

  Bannon pulled the trigger, and the Jap's face disintegrated into a bloody gruesome mess. The bullets sent the Jap's helmet flying into the air, and the suddenness of the shots made the other Japanese soldier flinch and hug the ground.

  The Japanese soldier shouted something. Another Japanese soldier replied. Bannon fired a burst at the Japanese soldier next to the one he'd just killed, but the live one was too close to the ground.

  Butsko knew that the live Jap was shouting the position of him and the other GIs, and he had to be shut up. Since bullets couldn't do it, Butsko reached for one of his hand grenades, pulled the pin, let the lever go, and hurled it at the Jap, who was in the middle of a sentence when the grenade plopped down beside him. The Jap stopped talking abruptly and looked at the grenade for a split second, and then it exploded in a fiery flash. The Japanese soldier was blown to bits, along with the foliage around him. Trees crashed against other trees and a cloud of smoke rose into the air.

  One less Jap, Butsko thought. I wonder how long it'll take for the rest of the cocksuckers to find out where we are.

  SIX . . .

  Sergeant Larry Cameron from Brummit, Arkansas, heard the explosion in the distance and held up his hand. He was leading the rest of the recon platoon in the search for Butsko and his patrol, and he and the recon platoon were in no-man's-land, about a half-mile from the Twenty-third Infantry Regiment's front line.

  “You guys, take a break,” Sergeant Cameron said. “I'm gonna try to see what's going on.”

  The men dropped to the ground and took out their packs of cigarettes. Cameron looked around for a low-hanging branch, found one, and jumped up, grasping it with both his hands. He pulled himself up to the branch, placed his knee on it, stood, and reached for the next branch over his head.

  Cameron was six feet one inch tall, lean and rangy, with red hair and bulging green eyes. He was only twenty-five years old but looked forty because he'd seen too much war. He'd been a nice young man when he enlisted, but now was a rotten son of a bitch, like most of the men in the recon platoon.

  He climbed higher up in the tree, biting his lower lip, hoping he wouldn't fall out of the tree. He wished Jimmy O'Rourke were there, because O'Rourke had been a movie stuntman in Hollywood before the war, and he usually did all the fancy tree climbing for the recon platoon. But O'Rourke had been shot in the guts on Hill 700 during the big Jap offensive and was recuperating in a hospital someplace far behind the lines.

  Cameron ascended to the higher branches of the tree; before him stretched a sea of green treetops. He raised his binoculars and scanned the jungle from right to left, looking for something that might indicate the presence of Butsko's patrol.

  Then he saw it: a faint cloud of blue-black smoke to the northwest of where he was. Could that be the smoke from the explosion he'd just heard? It was in the direction of the automatic-weapons fire reported by front-line observers and relayed to Major Cobb. Cameron took out his map and estimated the coordinates of the smoke. It might be some natives roasting a pig, but he didn't think so. Most natives had fled that part of the jungle long ago.

  A burst of automatic-weapons fire echoed over the treetops. Cameron wished he had Longtree along, because Longtree was good at locating the sources of sounds, but Longtree was with Butsko. Cameron cocked his head, and it appeared to him that the automatic-weapons fire was coming from the direction of the smoke.

  He might be wrong, but it seemed like a reasonable course of action to head in the direction of the smoke. He had no alternatives, anyway. Scrambling down the tree, he saw the men below him, sprawled on grass and leaves, smoking cigarettes. He dropped to the ground in their midst.

  “Let's go,” he said. “I think I know where they are.”

  Another Japanese soldier lay dead in the area of the hole where Butsko and his men were lurking. They'd let the Jap get real close before ripping him apart with submachine-gun fire, and now the Jap lay still, blood oozing from holes in his face.

  The jungle was alive with the sounds of Japanese soldiers drawing their noose tighter. Every time the GIs killed a Jap, it permitted the other Japs to home in on the GIs’ position a little more. Japs shouted to each other in the jungle, and their voices sounded as if they weren't more than five or ten yards away.

  “Don't fire until they're right on top of us,” Butsko said softly. “Otherwise we'll just show them where we are.”

  Longtree pointed to a bush. Butsko followed his finger and saw two slanted eyes peering out from underneath it. Butsko shook his head, indicating that all should hold their fire. He wondered what the Jap was thinking, because all the Jap could see were heaps of his buddies lying around the jungle. The Jap took off his hat, raised it on a stick, and waved it around, trying to be cute, hoping he'd draw some fire. Butsko grinned. The Jap put his hat back on and crawled out from underneath the bush, keeping his ass and nose close to the ground. He crept close to his buddy, who lay bleeding nearby, shook him, and said something, but his buddy didn't reply. The Jap crawled closer to his buddy's head and saw there wasn't much of it left. Grimacing, the Jap got low to the ground again and looked around. He saw two of his other buddies lying near the hole, but he couldn't see much of the hole. He hesitated and pursed his lips in thought, then shouted something in Japanese.

  A voice answered from several yards away. Another Jap crawled into view. The first Jap pointed to the dead bodies in front of the hole. The second Jap nodded, and both of them crawled toward the hole. They wanted to see what had happened to their friends.

  In the hole Butsko winked at Bannon and pulled out his bayonet. Bannon withdrew his bayonet, too, and so did Long-tree. Shaw held his submachine gun ready, and Nutsy was poised to throw hand grenades.

  The Japs crawled closer, inch by inch, glancing in all directions, being extremely cautious. They reached the bodies of their friends and prodded them, trying to figure out why they were laid end to end the way they were.

  Suddenly four hands reached over the dead Japs and grabbed the two live ones, who shouted in alarm. The Japs had been taken by surprise, and before they knew what was happening they were dragged into the hole. Butsko held one Jap with his left hand
and drew back his right, slashing forward with his Ka-bar knife and cutting the scream out of the Jap's throat. Bannon held the other Jap while Longtree ripped his guts out. A foul odor from the Jap's guts filled the ditch, and Butsko wrinkled his nose.

  The two Japs were stripped of weapons and ammunition, then thrown out of the hole and piled in front of it to furnish more protection. They heard someone yelling in Japanese not more than twenty or thirty yards away.

  “What is the delay?” said Captain Shimoyama. “Where are the Americans?”

  The soldiers near him kept their mouths shut, because none of them knew. Sergeant Kikusaki didn't say anything either, because every time he opened his mouth, Captain Shimoyama insulted him.

  Captain Shimoyama turned to Sergeant Kikusaki. “I just asked you a question!”

  “I thought you were talking to everybody.”

  “I was talking to you!”

  Sergeant Kikusaki pointed to the jungle. “The Americans are in there.”

  "Where in there?”

  “I don't know exactly.”

  "Why not?”

  “Because the Americans are well concealed. Evidently there aren't many of them. They're killing our men without us finding out where their position is.”

  “I see,” said Captain Shimoyama, scowling. “So what are we supposed to do, have the entire company killed piecemeal?” He glanced around. “How many men are here?” he asked, then counted them and answered his own question. “Eleven. Good.” He pointed in the direction Sergeant Kikusaki had indicated. “You men, form a tight skirmish line and comb that area. The first man who locates the American position will receive a promotion.”

  Sergeant Kikusaki raised his hand. “May I go with them, sir?”

  “It would be wonderful if you'd do something useful around here for a change.”

  Sergeant Kikusaki pulled his sword out of its scabbard. “Follow me,” he said to the men.