“Let me guess, Sergeant,” Nishimoto said. “Is it because he doesn’t think we’re American enough?”
“Something like that.”
The two Nisei just shrugged. “He wouldn’t be the first to think that,” Nishimoto replied, “and he’d be just as wrong as all the other…” He stopped himself: he’d almost finished the sentence with the term rednecks.
Boudreau took a menacing step forward. “All the other what?” he asked.
“Misinformed, Sergeant,” Nishimoto replied. “All the other misinformed.”
Boudreau took a step back and smiled. He took Nishimoto’s diplomatic choice of words as a victory. “What part of Japan you from, anyway?” he asked.
“I’m not from Japan, Sergeant. I’m from San Francisco.”
“And I’m from Oakland,” Bruce Hashimoto offered.
“Hmm…California boys,” Boudreau said. “What team y’all root for?”
“The New York Yankees, of course,” Nishimoto replied.
“How come the Yanks?”
“Because that’s where Joltin’ Joe plays.”
Boudreau had to think for a minute. “You mean DiMaggio?”
“Of course, Sergeant. Who else?”
“Still doesn’t answer my question…How come?”
“Because Joe DiMaggio’s from San Francisco, too.”
“You’re shitting me. He’s really from San Francisco?”
“That’s a fact, Jack…I mean Sergeant.”
Bruce Hashimoto gave Boudreau a quizzical look and asked, “You sure you’re an American, Sergeant? I mean, Joe DiMaggio…Come on! And that accent of yours…Where are you from?”
Boudreau’s face turned red. “I’m a Cajun from Loosiana, you…you…”
Tom Hadley burst into the tent and said, “All right, all right, ladies. That’s enough happy talk for today.” He’d been watching the exchange—greatly amused—from just outside. “Now which one of you guys is which?”
The Nisei introduced themselves all over again.
“Those names,” Hadley said. “They sound too damn much alike. Could cause a lot of confusion when the shit starts flying. Tell you what we’re going to do”—he pointed to Roy Nishimoto—“I’m going to call you Moto One.”
Then he pointed to Bruce Hashimoto. “And you’re Moto Two.”
Bogater piped up, “Why don’t we just make it real simple and call them One and Two, Top?”
“Because these men have names, Bogater, not numbers. Confusing names, I grant you—but names nonetheless. Now, have either of you ever fired a Thompson?”
“You mean the submachine gun, First Sergeant? The Chicago Typewriter?”
“The very same.”
“No,” Moto One replied.
“Me, either,” Moto Two added.
“Then you’ve got two minutes to get your gear squared away, after which you will double time your sweet asses to the CP, which is two tents thataway. Sergeant McMillen will get you checked out.”
Walking out of the tent, Hadley turned to Boudreau and said, “You sure you’re an American, Bogater? Joe DiMaggio….for cryin’ out loud. Who doesn’t know everything about Joe DiMaggio?”
By the third night, the bonding of The Squad seemed complete. From his tent, Jock watched and listened as a raucous, eight-handed poker game raged next door, beneath the faint, red glow of blackout flashlights. He laughed as he realized the men from his battalion were learning a lesson the hard way: the two Nisei were crack poker players.
It’s a good thing they’re only playing for cigarettes, Jock thought. The “Moto Brothers” are cleaning them out. Listen to Bogater complain! He must be losing his shirt.
By that point in the game, Bogater Boudreau had already lost his shirt and more—but had, apparently, gained newfound respect for the Japanese-American GIs. Jock could hear him quite clearly as he shouted over the din of boisterous voices: “The hell with this Moto One and Moto Two noise! Since these Nips are…wait, can I say that? Can I say Nips?”
Bruce Hashimoto shuffled the cigarettes before him into a formidable pile and said, “As long as we’re beating your ass this bad, Sergeant, you can call us whatever you like.”
“Okay, then,” Boudreau continued, “as I was saying, since these Nips are such good card sharps, I say their Squad names should represent their special skills…something more fitting than Moto One and Moto Two. I propose we christen these two Ace and Deuce.”
Suddenly realizing he might be stepping on First Sergeant Hadley’s toes—the man who had given the Nisei their Moto nicknames—he added, “I mean, if that’s okay with you, Top.”
Tom Hadley just smiled. He didn’t seem to mind at all.
Neither Jock nor the poker players realized that someone else was watching, too. Alone in the darkness, concealing the glow from his cigarette in a cupped hand, Melvin Patchett was taking it all in.
He wasn’t smiling.
“Listen to them zipperheads,” he mumbled to the night, “treating them fucking Japs like they was just one of the boys.”
PFC Joe Youngblood was surprised he didn’t have the rifle range all to himself. He’d made a point to skip breakfast so he could be there at sunrise. Sergeant Major Patchett had beaten him to it.
Patchett squeezed off three quick rounds from his .45 pistol, the powhh powhh powhh of the shots shattering the morning quiet on Goodenough Island. The short target—only twenty yards away—was unscathed.
“Sumbitchin’ piece of Colt shit,” Patchett muttered as he eyeballed the sight alignment. Then he turned to look at the approaching Joe Youngblood.
“I heard you coming a mile off, chief,” Patchett said. “I thought you injuns was supposed to be light on your feet. Real sneaky-like.”
Joe Youngblood was big-boned, over six feet tall, and weighed just shy of one hundred eighty pounds. He’d weighed two hundred when he enlisted, before the GI diet in the Southwest Pacific Theater had worked its usual, slimming magic. Still, he could never imagine himself as light on his feet, regardless of the silly myths white people chose to believe about Indians.
“I’m about as sneaky as a bulldozer, Sergeant Major,” Youngblood replied, “and I’m not a chief. Very few of us are, you know.”
Patchett went back to inspecting the pistol in his hands. “What’re you doing out here at the crack of dawn, anyway, Youngblood?”
“I’ve got to zero this M1. Major Miles picked me and Allred to carry Garands on the Blind Spot mission.”
“I thought all you boys would be carrying Tommy guns.”
“No, Sergeant Major. Major Miles wants two M1s along in case we need to actually hit something at long range. You aren’t going to do that with a Thompson.” He glanced at Patchett’s unblemished target and added, “Or that pistol, either.”
“All right, wise guy,” Patchett said, “let’s see what you can do with that musket there.”
Youngblood promptly got down to business. His first shot—at the hundred-yard target—struck the ground right in front of the man-shaped silhouette, spraying dirt all over it. He gave a twist to the sight adjustment knob and fired again. Gazing through binoculars, Patchett said, “You’re on the target, a little low.”
“Okay, just a skosh more, then,” Youngblood said, giving the knob another twist.
“Skosh…that some injun word?”
“Nope. Picked it up from Ace and Deuce playing cards last night.”
“So, y’all are picking up some lingo from them Jap boys now. What’s next? They gonna have y’all eating fish heads and rice, too?”
Joe Youngblood gritted his teeth as he said, “You know, Sergeant Major, all this nasty talk about Japanese-Americans doesn’t mean anything in my book. Every swinging dick around here’s got a hyphen in his nationality—everyone but me. I’m the only real American in this outfit. My people were already there long before yours were getting off the damn boat.”
Youngblood took aim at the far target. He fired once—twice—three times. The
bullet holes formed a tight triangle right where a man’s heart would be.
“Hmm…nice shot group,” Patchett said, with a nod of respect. “Real nice.”
“Damn right it is, Sergeant Major.”
Chapter Nine
Melvin Patchett parked the jeep off the trail and, with a folder full of unimportant papers, set off on foot into the thick woods. The Squad was training in that part of the rainforest—somewhere—so he’d taken it upon himself to deliver the humdrum daily dispatches to Major Miles, a job usually detailed to a PFC clerk.
For Patchett, this was a personal quest: he needed to see just how well this little team—with this very big mission ahead of it—was managing without him. As he crunched through the underbrush, he told himself, I just can’t believe a li’l ol’ cobbled together bunch of dogfaces is shaping up as fast as they want me to believe. Even if I did train every last one of them NCOs myself.
And if they had shaped up that fast, he knew it only meant one thing: They don’t need me one little bit no more…and that’d make me just another stripe-heavy geezer with a load of bullshit war stories and a desk to put his spit-shined combat boots up on.
Even though it was 1000 hours, with the blazing sun climbing above wispy clouds in a brilliant blue sky, it was like dusk on the rainforest’s floor. The thick canopy of treetops conspired to keep out much of the light. Bruce Hashimoto—Deuce—was amazed how difficult it was to see GIs only twenty feet away. But he could still hear just fine, though—and there was definitely someone making his way toward The Squad’s concealed perimeter.
He scurried on hands and knees to tell Sergeant Mike McMillen, his team leader.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” McMillen said. “Get back to your position.”
“But there’s somebody coming, Sarge,” Deuce replied.
“Good. Let him keep right on coming. Just remember, this is a recon exercise. We don’t engage unless—”
McMillen was cut off by the dull pop of a blank round being fired from somewhere on the perimeter. Quickly came the clack-clack of a rifle’s bolt being cycled, another pop…and then Melvin Patchett’s angry voice saying, “Just who the fuck do you think you’re shooting at, numbnuts?” He grabbed PFC Cotton Allred by a shoulder strap of his web gear and jerked him to his feet. Pointing to the waxy yellow spots on his breast pocket—right over his heart—Patchett said, “You dumb cracker. You ever see a blank take a man’s eye out at close range?”
Allred drawled his reply. “Couldn’t tell it was you, Sergeant Major. I though you was part of the exercise. Besides, I wasn’t aiming at your eyes.”
Jock Miles scurried out of the shadows, yelling, “ANYBODY HIT?” Then he saw Melvin Patchett—waxy stains and all—and asked, “Sergeant Major, what the hell are you doing here?”
They walked out of the men’s earshot to talk in private. Patchett launched into a song and dance about the regular clerk being at sick call, the XO wanting Jock’s guidance before dealing with a few of the directives in the folder, Regiment needing some answers right away…and any other baloney that came to mind.
Jock listened to it all in silence, all the while fixing his sergeant major in a glare that said, Don’t bullshit a bullshitter, Top. I know why you’re here.
When Patchett’s string of excuses finally ran out of steam, Jock kept that glare blazing, still not saying a word. He didn’t let up until the sergeant major was squirming in desperation, picking vainly at the waxy blobs on his fatigue shirt, deposited there by PFC Allred’s blanks.
“You want this mission real bad, don’t you, Top?”
“Yes, sir. This has all been a terrible misunderstanding between you and me.”
“Cut the shit, Top. What about the Nisei, then? Have you changed your mind?”
“Well, sir, let’s put it this way. I still ain’t crazy about them—”
Jock interrupted, “I’m not asking you to like them, Top. I’m asking you to lead them…as you would any other GI.”
“Affirmative, sir. I can do that for you. I’d be proud to do that for you.”
Jock offered his hand. “Then welcome to The Squad, Sergeant Major.”
As they shook on it, Jock took in the residue from the blanks on Patchett’s chest. “Looks like I picked the right man to be a sharpshooter,” he said.
“Shee-it, sir,” Patchett replied, “I couldn’t have been more than twenty feet from him. Even my grandma was a dead shot that close.”
In six days, they’d be on the submarine to Manus Island. Jock was glad—no, make that relieved and delighted—to have Melvin Patchett back on the team. This day’s training focused on taking a mountain top, something Jock felt fairly sure they’d have to do on Manus.
As the pre-attack briefing wound to a close, Patchett told The Squad, “This ain’t no step for a stepper, even for an itty-bitty unit like ours.” As he spoke, he prowled around the sand table, where a replica of Mount Dremsel—the suspected OP on Manus—had been used to illustrate the path of attack. “To repeat, the only way for us to do this thing right is attack it from two sides—one team opposite the other—and not end up shooting each other when we get to the top.”
“That’s where radio coordination is going to come in,” Jock added. “Sergeant Botkin, are all the walkie-talkies up and running?”
“Affirmative, sir,” Botkin replied.
“Very good. Here’s the deal…we’re going to run this attack twice today—now, in daylight, on Hill 157; and after supper, we’re going to run it again—in the dark.”
Tom Hadley raised his hand. “The attack in the dark, sir…that’ll be on Hill 157, too, right?”
Jock and Patchett exchanged tight-lipped smiles, delighted Hadley had unwittingly played the straight man so perfectly. Jock delivered the punchline: “Of course not, First Sergeant.”
There was a collective groan from The Squad. Night attacks in the mountainous rainforest were difficult enough, but they were a little easier if you’d covered the ground once before—when you could actually see a couple of feet in front of you.
But life—and the enemy—rarely deal you an easy hand.
“Shut up, ladies,” Patchett said when the groaning persisted. “You’ll find out your objective for the night attack once it starts to get dark.”
“When we stand a good chance of not even finding it,” Hadley mumbled.
“That’s exactly the point,” Patchett replied. “Sergeant McMillen, Sergeant Boudreau, have your teams ready to move out in one-zero minutes.” Then, that coy smile still on his lips, he added, “Best of luck to y’all, now.”
The only issue plaguing the daylight mock assault of Hill 157 was noise discipline. Sergeant Mike McMillen’s team made such a racket coming up the hillside that Tom Hadley, serving as umpire, stopped them halfway and changed roles, becoming mentor instead. “Listen up,” Hadley said, “you guys sound like a train pulling into the station. If someone told me four GIs could make so much noise when they were supposed to be tactical, I would’ve said they were nuts. But you guys just proved me wrong.”
A frustrated McMillen asked, “So what the hell do you want me to do, Tom? Send them to bed without their supper?”
“Don’t smart-mouth me, Mike. For openers, they can stop talking out loud. Did you forget how to use fucking hand signals?”
“No…”
“Okay, so use them. Another thing…their gear is clanking like cowbells because there’s metal-to-metal contact like crazy. Muffle those fittings better—half the cloth tape you put on has fallen off already. Be more generous with that tape…we’ve got shitloads of it for this exact reason.”
“All right, Tom, all right,” McMillen replied, “I get the message.”
Hadley’s critique wasn’t finished, though. “And for cryin’ out loud, knock off the fucking coughing and throat clearing. Make up your mind right now what you’d rather deal with—a frog in your throat or a bullet in your gut. Learn these lessons now—it’s going to be too late on
ce we get to Manus. Are there any questions?”
McMillen’s team uttered a collective mumble: “No, First Sergeant.”
There was the soft crackle of a voice from McMillen’s walkie-talkie: Bogater Boudreau was reporting his team in position to seize the peak.
“Okay, then…let’s get moving,” Hadley said. “We’re holding up the damn show here.”
The night attack problem was every bit as difficult as the men of The Squad feared. Just finding the right place to start their ascent of Hill 123—whose peak was this attack’s objective—was kicking the ass of even an experienced scout like Sergeant Bogater Boudreau. As his team plunged farther into the pitch black of the rainforest, it was becoming more obvious by the second something was wrong.
“We don’t seem to be climbing no hill, Bogater,” Melvin Patchett, the umpire for Boudreau’s team, said. “What’s that tell you, son?”
Boudreau knew he was lost. The extra minutes it had taken for his cocky self-confidence to falter and admit that simple fact had only gotten his team farther off course. “We’re gonna have to backtrack to the trail,” he told Patchett, “get our bearings…and start over again.”
Patchett shook his head. “Hang on a minute there, boy, and think this through. Take a look at this map here.” He spread the map on the ground and lit it with the dim blackout flashlight. “You know damn well where the trail you set out from is—y’all got to recon that before the sun went down. Now, once you’re moving east off that trail, where’s the only place you’re gonna hit flat terrain like this?”
Bogater studied the map for a moment and then circled an area with his finger. “Right here, Sergeant Major,” he said.
“Correct. And what does that tell you?”
“We left the trail too soon. We should be farther north.”
“That’s exactly right, Bogater. So there’s no need to drag our asses all the way back to the trail and start over again, is there? That’d just be a fuckload of wasted time, right?”
Operation Blind Spot (Jock Miles WW2 Adventure Series Book 4) Page 4
