Pacific Interlude

by Sloan Wilson

  “The hell it ain’t. To be a winner you have to fight battles. All we should be doing is holding tight out here, waiting for the Krauts to fall on their asses. Then the whole damn world will be against Japan. How long do you think she could hold out?”

  “Mr. Buller, do you really think that MacArthur is somehow the villain of the piece?” Mostell asked as he poured drinks.

  “Don’t get me started,” Buller said.

  “But I’m curious. Do you really think that just one man could make all the big decisions?”

  “If you really want to know, I don’t think we should be over here in the first place,” Buller said. “I think just one man got us into it. Old Dougout is only his boy.”

  “You’d have let the Japs get away with Pearl Harbor?” Schuman said.

  “Roosevelt pushed ’em into that.”

  “That’s bull, but even if it were true, we had to fight.”

  “We could have just sat home and built ourselves a fleet that could bomb hell out of them. Take a few island bases like the Marianas. What the hell are we doing here in the Philippines?”

  “History will answer those questions,” Syl said. “We can’t.”

  “I still say we could have just stayed home and built up our strength while all those bastards fought it out. That’s what old Huey would have done. If they hadn’t shot Huey Long we’d be home getting rich and well-laid instead of getting ready to die for … for the Ruskies and Limeys.”

  “So you’re a Huey Long man,” Syl said, thinking that that somehow explained a lot.

  “Damn right I am. Ole Huey knew that wars are fought for the rich. They do shit all for the guys who have to fight ’em. My father fought in World War One. He and a few million other guys who were lucky enough to live through it came home and starved to death. When a few of them marched to Washington to ask for help, get their bonus, old Dougout himself rode out on a white horse and led tanks against ’em. Like I told the skipper here, I’m in it because I want to go into politics and pick up where old Huey left off. After any war you need a good military record to get votes—old Huey was hurt bad because he had too much damn sense to get into the first world war. Nobody’s going to call me a draft dodger.”

  “Personally I find it very easy to accept that the Japs and Krauts are the bad guys and we’re the good guys,” Mostell said.

  “Likewise,” Schuman said. “And my ancestors were Krauts.”

  “You want that red Stalin to win?” Buller demanded.

  “Any enemy of Hitler is a friend of mine,” Mostell said.

  “How long do you think it will be before we’re told the Russians are the bad buys? Don’t you see that this kind of shit will never stop?”

  “Regardless,” Mostell said, “tomorrow we’re going to have to lug gas.”

  He stretched his arms, and the other officers stood up to go to their boats.

  “In some ways,” Schuman said to Syl just before he shoved off, “I’d rather play penny-ante poker with all cards wild than talk politics. Especially with the likes of your man Buller.”

  My man Buller, my ass, Syl thought, but said only good-night and good luck.

  CHAPTER 18

  THE NEXT MORNING Syl found that new fuel barges already were being pushed in to replace the ones which had been burned and new storage tanks were being built in the ashes ashore. The airstrip was almost ready to be put back in operation and the army was thirsty for gas.

  Major Williams, who looked surprisingly like Major Harris, was just as emphatic as he charged aboard even before the Y-18’s mooring lines were out.

  “By the time you get these barges filled we’ll have the storage tanks ready,” he said. “Until everything’s full, I want nobody to anchor, nobody even to sleep. When the flattops go home, this base will have to keep every plane we’ve got in the air. The navy may figure they won their victory, but the Japs still have plenty of planes all over these islands and they’re still pouring infantry in here on the west coast. It’s a long way to Manila and our planes are going to have to cover troops fighting every inch of the way.”

  “So move it, move it, move it,” Cramer said as he rallied the men to hook up the cargo hose …

  The deadly monotony of the shuttle run which continued day after day, week after week, created dangers of its own. Glassy-eyed with fatigue and boredom, the men bought homemade hootch from the natives who paddled dugout canoes alongside at night while the ship was unloading, and after they got their fill of that they didn’t care where they smoked. With the ship bathed in gas fumes, Murphy fell asleep in his bunk with a lighted cigarette and set his sleeping bag on fire. That was put out quickly enough by sleepers who were awakened by the first smoke, but everywhere Syl walked at night he seemed to see the glow of cigarettes, which were quickly tossed overboard at his approach. During the first month of the shuttle run Simpson put a dozen men on report for smoking.

  Syl’s problem was to devise punishments which would deter the men from such actions without making them even more sullenly reckless. Since little liberty was allowed while the ship was so busy and there was not much for the men to do ashore anyway, the usual punishment of restricting a man to the ship for thirty days was meaningless. All hands seemed to be restricted anyway. Deck courts which could reduce a man in rank involved so much red tape that they were hardly ever held aboard small army ships, and men who had committed serious breaches were sent ashore for trial. Since no one wanted a lot of legal doings in a combat zone, the guilty were often forgiven and transferred to whatever ship had an empty berth. The word spread that the best way to get off a gas tanker was simply to fuck up. Syl suspected that some of the men who smoked and drank openly were trying to escape the vessel, and he mustered all hands to tell them that the punishment for breaking safety regulations was going to be special rotten duties like chipping paint on the boat deck, or boat drill, which meant rowing in circles on a boiling hot day. Looking into their angry faces he felt like a schoolmaster, but the only alternative would lead to disaster.

  After the big aircraft carriers ran out of fuel and left the Philippines the Japs stepped up their air attacks on Leyte Gulf, and almost every afternoon at dusk, a few planes came over, sometimes flying above the clouds, sometimes hedgehopping over the surrounding hills to avoid the radar screen. As Klaxon horns and sirens went off all around the harbor, the men of the Y-18 manned their two machine guns and stood staring at the sky, faces showing a mixture of belly-wrenching fear and a kind of excitement that was almost welcome after the maddening routine of the shuttle run. If the ship was loading or unloading during these air raids the men disconnected the hose and Syl took the tanker to an anchorage safely removed from other vessels. Mostly the bombs exploded on the wretched little city of Tacloban or near bigger ships anchored in the bay. But the Y-18 had a narrow escape on November 15 when she was trying to get out of the inner harbor after a raid began. A Liberty ship whose red Baker flag announced that she was carrying ammunition in addition to her deck cargo of bulldozers followed only about five hundred yards astern as she also sought the necessary isolation from other ships. In the narrow channels these two ships, which had about the same speed, could not escape each other as they headed for broader waters. When a suicide plane darted over the top of a hill and crashed into the bow of the Liberty ship, her crew kept her going away from the surrounding wharves in spite of the flames that climbed from her forecastle and stretched toward her holds and bridge. The fire roared out of control and obviously could reach the tons of ammunition any second, but Syl could see men on her deck running with hoses, no one dropped rafts or jumped overboard. He ordered full right rudder and steered the Y-18 out of the channel, ducking between two shoals to put as much space as he could between his gasoline and that impending explosion.

  Time seemed to stand still. Covered with smoke and flame, the Liberty ship miraculously kept going as the distance between the two vessels widened, first to a thousand, then to fifteen hundred yards, two thousan
d. Then suddenly there was a blinding flash of light, and a wave of hot wind slammed Syl against the pilothouse. He looked up in the sky and saw two green bulldozers hurtling toward him. In the distance they looked like children’s toys tossed into the air, then grew bigger and bigger as they arched menacingly toward the Y-18 and crashed into the sea, bracketing her.

  Buller was stunned as he picked himself up from the deck, where the blast had knocked him. Flying fragments of glass rattled down all around them like hail.

  “Look for survivors,” Simpson said, his voice eerily calm. “Somebody might have jumped.”

  “Left full rudder,” Syl said, surprised to hear that his own voice sounded almost matter-of-fact.

  The crew stood about stunned, some of them dabbing at cuts from the pieces of glass.

  There was nothing in the water anywhere near the spot where the Liberty ship had been except some smoking fragments of hatchboards, one empty raft and a splintered boat.

  Simpson said, “We ought to read them a service—”

  “We have to get out of here,” Syl said. “We’re still too close to shore.”

  Antiaircraft guns at the base and on ships all around them pounded as more planes appeared, high overhead this time. All those shells being poured into the sky would have to come down somewhere, Syl realized. The Y-18 seemed terribly vulnerable, a naked thing without protection, and in his not unreasonable fear she seemed to grow and swell, a target impossible to miss. His mouth was so dry that he couldn’t swallow. He was afraid that his voice would croak, was relieved that it sounded normal as he said, “Come right slowly. A little more. Now, steady as she goes …”

  When they finally anchored in the bay, well away from other vessels, Syl saw through his binoculars that the Yankee Yo-Yo and Schuman’s Gasoline Alley had made it too. They were anchored about a mile away—one had apparently been taking cargo from a merchant tanker when the raid started, the other had probably been headed into the harbor and had turned back before getting into trouble. All three had been lucky this time. But how long before one of them would get it?

  Syl wiped sweat from his face. The antiaircraft guns stuttered into silence as the planes overhead disappeared and darkness fell. Hathaway reported from the radio shack that the all-clear signal had been given, and soon Syl saw his sister ships take in their anchors to resume the shuttle run. His men complained when he followed their lead before the cook had a chance to give them a hot dinner. After their very close call most of them wanted to get drunk, yell, let off steam. But the planes that were still roaring in and out of the Tacloban airstrip in unending processions needed gas. The shuttle run could not be interrupted. When native canoes glided alongside to sell their wares, Syl ordered them off. If the men felt as pent-up and restless as he did, this was no time for them to bring booze aboard. They’d just seen the death of some forty men and had come damn close to joining them, but there was no way to celebrate their own survival, or mourn the incineration of those others—there was just this damnable job of pumping gas, filling up, pumping out again … The danger of air raids would come and go, but the menace to their own explosive emotions would never let up.

  Later that night while they were loading gas alongside a merchant tanker Syl woke up with every muscle aching-tense. He began to prowl the decks. Buller was nodding on the bridge. On the boat deck he found a group of men who had somehow managed to buy bottles of the native wine. He saw the glow of a cigarette before it was tossed over the side.

  “All right, damn you,” he exploded. “Drop those bottles overboard. Any man caught drinking or smoking aboard this ship chips paint for four hours or has boat drill until he gets the idea. If you don’t want to live, some of the rest of us do. You may be stupid enough to forget that we’re all standing on thousands of gallons of gas every minute of the day and night, but I’m here to remind you. One cigarette, one match, one spark from a tool at the wrong time in the wrong place will blow us up just as far as any bomb. Christ, you know that. Accidents take more of these tankers than the enemy. Think of the girls you’ll never lay if this gas blows your cocks off. Survival is ninety percent rotten hard work, not luck. They say the Lord helps those who help themselves. He sure doesn’t watch over tanker men who get drunk and smoke all over the ship. This isn’t chickenshit. I don’t want the crabs out here chewing on what’s left of my roasted balls. Do you?”

  Syl was to repeat variations on that heartfelt speech many times. Wydanski would nod in agreement, and Buller called it “Syl’s Song.” Oratory had never been his style, but when he got wound up on the subject he had no sensation of acting a part. He said it as he felt it and the men recognized that.

  As the shuttle run continued the men of the Y-18 reacted to the tedium and danger in different ways. Some had to be chewed out about drinking and smoking, but some of them settled down almost as though it was a peacetime cruise. There was a big run on the books—a lot of competition for the works of D. H. Lawrence, the art books with nudes. They played cards for pennies, hammered ashtrays out of brass shells salvaged ashore, wove belts from string.

  Often it seemed the officers showed more stress signs than the enlisted men. Wydanski retreated into a kind of dreamworld of the future, made plans for starting up a machine shop in Australia with his Mildred … “Land’s cheap down there,” he said. “We could buy a nice lot on the river where it never gets too hot in the summer and it’s never cold there in the winters. You can grow a lot of your own food. The living is a hell of a lot easier than it ever was at home …”

  Simpson, of course, took a dim view of this … after all, the man was planning to leave his wife in California for a woman young enough to be his daughter. Well, the world was full of folly and sin, and the good Lord dealt with transgressors in His own way.

  Buller seemed to deteriorate worst of all during the shuttle run. His assault on the rolling gasoline drums at sea had left no doubt about his courage, but the mixture of boredom and danger that had to be endured was more than the nerves of the big man could stand. He paced the decks like a caged lion and showed a growing compulsion to play the comic to try to relieve his own tensions.

  As supply officer, he found ways to make his expeditions ashore more frequent. He wasn’t really needed to help operate the ship during her short shuttle runs, so Syl did not mind when he missed a couple while scrounging the base for cases of frozen steaks or new oil filters. Soon he was gone almost all day every day, most always with a plausible excuse and a sack of fresh apples or a crate of frozen turkeys to show when he returned.

  The first time he stayed away all night Simpson, as expected, objected. “We have to do something about Mr. Buller,” he said. “How can we keep the men aboard if we have an officer who’s always absent without leave?”

  Syl didn’t like to admit it, but the ship was more peaceful without Buller, and the fancy food the big man supplied to make up for his absences had pretty well compensated.

  “But what would we do if we got orders to sail?” Simpson said. “We could be sent out of here any time, and if we have to leave an officer behind we’ll have a lot of explaining to do.”

  Syl knew he was right, damn him, and said he’d talk to Buller when he got back.

  Buller did not show until nine the next morning. He had bags of fresh oranges and sacks of mail but it hardly could have taken him twenty-four hours to get them. His face was puffy and his eyes were red—obviously the officer’s club set up in a tent ashore was now serving more than beer.

  “Sorry to be late, skipper,” he said, “but I found an army machine shop where they’ll let us work on our air-conditioning equipment.”

  “Do you think we can actually get it going?” Cramer asked.

  They had never been able to assemble the parts for the air-conditioning equipment Buller had bought in Brisbane because the ship was always underway, loading or unloading. During spark-free conditions no working with steel tools was allowed, never mind the soldering that would be required.
r />   “We can preassemble the whole thing ashore and install it in no time,” Buller said.

  The men loved the idea of an air-conditioned forecastle aboard such a small, junky ship. Hell, even admirals and generals didn’t have air conditioning. Except, of course, MacArthur, who lived like a potentate. When the equipment first appeared, the men had boasted about it to the crews of other ships, then had to back off because the machinery never seemed to get put together.

  Now it would be different. And Buller was a hero again.

  “I’d like to speak to you in my cabin for a few moments,” Syl said to him.

  “Sure, skipper, but I got a truck waiting ashore to take this machinery up to the shop—”

  “This won’t take a minute, the men can start loading it.”

  As Buller followed him into his cabin Syl felt a little like a headmaster about to bawl out the captain of the football team. Role-playing again, Captain Grant?

  “Mr. Buller, we appreciate all the supplies you’ve been getting us and the arrangements you’ve made ashore, but you know we could sail any time and I’ve got to know where you are. From now on don’t leave this ship without checking with me and be back before seventeen hundred every day.”

  “Has old Simp, I mean, Mr. Simpson, been getting to you? Sir?”

  “Just stow that crap, Mr. Buller. You know damn well we can’t have an officer who takes off whenever he wants and stays ashore as long as he wants. You’ve got more sense than that.”

  “What the hell, captain, the war’s almost over. It won’t be long before our guys will be crossing the Rhine—”

  “That may be, but convoys are making up right here for a new push. The war damn well isn’t over for us. Not out here.”

  “It could be …”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Well, we could run this engine without any oil for an hour or so. Then we’d finish the war tied up waiting for a new Diesel or a tow back to Australia—”

  “You’re incredible. That would be sabotage, for Christ’s sake.”