by Chris Lynch
“I was thinking that, too,” Tails says. “I mean, what is it all about? Is it a real raid, or a phony?”
“What difference does it make?” Westphal says. “As long as we get to shoot ’em up and Heads and Tails get to blow ’em up, that’s all the ball game you need right there as far as I’m concerned.”
Westphal’s angle sounds a lot like the “we don’t need to understand everything” approach Klecko was talking about just before The Incident. I look in his direction and give him a nod. He gives me a nod right back and things feel like they’re creeping in the right direction, at least momentarily.
Tom Chaney is one of our two demolition men who are of ordinary intelligence, with Sandy Satchel being the other. These two are in the demo business for the same reason most of us would be: because they just love making things go boom-fall-down and don’t waste any brain cells wondering how any of it works.
“Pretty good speech, whatever it was,” Chaney says.
“Oh yeah,” Satchel says. “Halfway through Brute’s pep talk I was all ready to go out and enlist, before I remembered I was already in.”
Bryant jumps in. “Colonel Brute might have been just preaching to the choir, but even if he was, he sure knows the music.”
“That he does,” Silas says. “That he does.”
“What about you, Private Silence?” Havlicek calls to me as the guys are all getting up to go. I’m already praying that that name doesn’t stick. “Did you hear the words you came hoping to hear? Does the work ahead of us sound like the kind of fighting that matters?”
It’s on the scary side, when you notice just how tuned in Corporal Havlicek seems to be to all the happenings and all the personalities that make up this battalion life. Scary or not, though, I always feel that I want to give him the honest answers his honest questions deserve.
“I have a strong sense that what we are about to embark on matters very much and is important work, corporal,” I say firmly and respectfully.
He nods in my direction and smiles in a knowing, satisfied way, while the rest of the men start letting me have it.
“Oh, right, fellas, we can go to Choiseul now,” Bryant cackles, “because Private Silence says it’s okay.” He yuck-yucks away at his own joke, which would be extremely bad form, if everybody else wasn’t hooting right along with him.
“No, no, no,” Westphal says. “He never told us it was okay, he told us it was …”
“Im-POR-tant!” every last laughing rat in the whole platoon yells as one.
They are still falling over each other, banging their way out the door as I make every effort to punish them. But they’re completely ignoring the withering glare that I normally reserve only for pitchers who think they own the inner half of the plate when I’m at bat, and catchers who try and block that same plate when I’m barreling in to score.
Me oh my, how much I miss baseball now.
I don’t know which stare I have on my face now, where I’m aiming, or how long I’ve been at it. But machine gunner Zachary Klecko has just dropped a big paw on the shoulder of his assistant gunner, and this is where I am now. In the war, all in, and with my buddy every step.
“We came this far,” he says. “Nobody’s gonna stop us now. And nobody’s gonna split us up. Not even you.”
So I guess I’ve been served notice that there will be no more moping around, or else.
“You know, it just occurred to me,” I say, heading out of the empty mess hall and into the empty, endless night. “You and the Marine Corps have the same motto. Semper Fidelis.”
“Always faithful! Of course I know that. I had it first. They came and asked if they could borrow it, and I was very gracious about the whole thing and said sure.”
“Good of you.”
“Well, that’s the kinda guy I am. Good.”
The conversation carries on more or less just like that, until we reach our tent, which we share with our machine-gunning brethren Bryant and Westphal. Klecko and I are quiet and, speaking for myself, anyway, somehow both wiped out and wound up thinking about the Choiseul assignment. We hunker right down to needed rest.
“Semper Fi, Nick,” he hush-calls across the tent to me.
“Semper Fi, Zachary,” I respond.
There is a pause of a very few seconds before “Semper Fi, guys,” wafts up from the vicinity of Bryant’s cot, followed by “Semper Fi, men,” from Westphal’s.
I drift off smiling inwardly and possibly outwardly at our updated version of “good night.” I’m thinking maybe there could be at least one extremely positive thing to come out of the war. That would be if we discover that the peculiar, particular something that makes Klecko Klecko turns out to be contagious.
In a gesture to maybe make up for leaving us behind for so much of the war, the Corps and Navy send us into Choiseul on a fleet of four destroyer transports, marking a definite step up in class and menace from everything that has carried us previously. And these transports are jacked up even further with the addition of six regular destroyers serving as escorts.
It is all adding up now to something important, which is something this outfit needs. The brass finally seems to understand that. They practically read the thoughts of our battle-starved battalion when they code-named the mission “Operation Blissful.”
That all contributes to the general confidence we as a unit carry into our landing at Voza behind Colonel Krulak. Though if you’re being led by The Brute and your confidence is still AWOL, then you should probably just stay back on the boat.
One of the Australian coastwatchers who’ve been helping out as scouts and native liaisons all over these islands is supposed to shine a light to signal that we will get no opposition. When he doesn’t as we near land, things get more tense and we gear up for resistance right from the start. Yet when we hit the beach looking for a certain kind of trouble, that trouble seems to have managed to elude us one more time. We land unimpeded, and immediately we’re on the move with our fifty-pound packs on our backs.
The beach at Voza sits at about the midpoint between our main interests of Choiseul Bay up at the northwest end of the island and Sangigai down in the southeast. There is enough moonlight to see the expanse of pretty white-sand beach for some distance in each direction and a scattering of thatch-roof huts big enough for people to live in. I wonder what they make of the likes of us tromping right through their paradise of a front yard.
That strikes me as funny for half a second.
People live here?
People live here?
But there isn’t time to admire beaches or dwell on the mixed luck of the people who live on them. We march, platoon by platoon, one hundred and fifty yards straight from the sea to the tree line that welcomes us to the jungle of Choiseul.
Except that it doesn’t. Welcome us, that is. This jungle is at least twice as dense as what we found on Vella Lavella, and we have to fight our way through every foot of it in order to make any progress at all.
“This is what we wanted,” Klecko says as he pushes his way into the relentless lushness just ahead of me.
“This is what we wanted?” I say. “I don’t recollect wanting this stuff at all.”
“Silence on the line!” Sergeant Silas hisses, short-circuiting communications for the duration.
The duration turns out to be a test of everyone’s endurance. The path to our plateau of choice is three miles of very steep gradient. The heat, which is so constant in these islands you can quickly forget you were ever comfortable, is more intense than anything we have encountered yet. Practically the only sound we hear is the full-body assault of marines up ahead chopping maniacally at the overgrowth with machetes. I can hear the effort that is going into it and I think it makes me sweat even more heavily.
This is where we can thank our lucky stars and lunatic training for all those months that got us in optimal condition. Because by the first mile, my camo is soaked through beyond saturation point. Sweat is running down my back, down my le
gs, into my boots like I’m filling them from a particularly fetid tap. If I was required to do anything more than propel myself forward and upward carrying my own fifty pounds of gear, I don’t know if I could do it. My legs are telling me that the first mile was actually ten, because despite the best efforts of machete and man, the ground beneath us is a hacked-up hodgepodge of strappingly unchoppable vines, broad slippery leaves and shoots that have fallen on top of them, and mud underneath it all. The mud here is a whole new species to me, something like the consistency of axle grease laid down half a foot deep before you reach anything like a solid earth supporting it.
It is misery every step, and the sounds of tough, trained-up, maximum marines trying to muffle grunts and exhausted groans of effort is almost more painful than if we had to listen to people scream out through it all.
The only creatures so far seeming to hold up well are the flying insects, of which there are billions. I cannot go more than two steps without swatting at them, so I don’t think about it after a while, I just go into auto-swat, windmilling rhythmically at the places on my neck and face and arms they seem to find most appetizing. The blackness is far, far too absolute to see these creatures, but some of them have to be big as bats from the sounds, and from the nips they’re laying on me. Maybe they are bats. Only, sometimes I can’t be sure if it’s one of the bugs or one of the many lashing and gashing branches pressing into me from the tight fit of the corridor we are just about managing to cut through this great monstrous beast of a jungle.
I’m shredded to tatters, when suddenly I detect a change. It’s a slight lifting of the density of the air, a faint sense of men indulging in the sweet sighs of release farther up the line. Ours is the third platoon in the column, and we can see the breathable world opening up gradually to us in the distance as one and another and another sweat-hog devil dog emerges onto the plateau of our dreams.
I hear the sound come out of me the moment I emerge from the hothouse misery. It’s exactly the sound I would make when bursting up out of the water, after diving far too deep for my lungs’ liking.
First thing we do is gather in squad-size groupings to pull ourselves together. The first thing I say when I am allowed to speak is addressed directly to Corporal Havlicek.
“How right do you have to be?”
“I did tell you, though,” he says, forcing enough of a smile to be recognizable through his grimace.
“Yeah, but …” It becomes quickly apparent that even speaking will require pacing myself. “You’re always right enough. Now you say something and it seems to be hyper-right, like God just wants to please you, personally.”
“If that is the case,” he says, “I’m going to have a word with God. Because I am not pleased.”
“This jungle,” Klecko says, slow and measured, “is the jungle that Vella’s jungle wants to be when it grows up.”
The game but underpowered laugh that ripples around our group is a saddening thing. The echo from a family of prairie dogs yipping at the bottom of an enormous canyon would sound just about like we do now.
We probably do a fair impression of the industrious little creatures again as we spend the next several hours constructing our marine-style den of necessities on our small patch of Choiseul high ground. Plateau dogs, you could call us, as we scurry around, digging holes, cutting paths, establishing lookout posts at the far seaward edges of our established perimeter. We get communications set up and all the vital equipment in place, the basics for getting us through till the morning comes and daylight brings a whole new bunch of necessities and objectives.
It is routine stuff and not backbreaking, but by the time we set up our bivouac and climb up for our first time into new hammocks strung between trees, we are aching for that little bit of relief under that new Choiseul moon looking right at us.
At first light we get into motion finishing our camp off to make it a proper command post for our operations. But we’ve barely got the sleep out of our eyes when a Japanese bomber comes barreling in from the north, heading right for us. It was unlikely that we could have made this landing and gotten settled in so easily without the enemy knowing we were around somewhere. It is still a Japanese-held island, a fact we should remember as we do our chores.
For a minute or two we are all suspended, watching the plane come on, growing bigger, louder, showing us his fat belly full of doom. Then, he releases his load, two five-hundred-pound bombs that we watch roll and plummet and then BOOM, one falls right into the water, the very spot where we disembarked last night. Then the second lands BOOM just beyond the waterline, thumping into the beach below us, throwing sand plumes up almost as high as we are now. The impact shakes the whole hill and makes the ground under us tremble as if we were standing on top of a rickety, condemned building.
“Well, they know where we’ve already been,” Klecko says.
“Let’s get back to work, men,” Sergeant Silas says, “before they catch up to where we are.”
That sounds like a reasonable idea to me. And to everyone else, I guess, as each man goes double-time on his task with new energy and determination. We look like a professional building site, or the Navy’s in-house engineering team, the Seabees, as we get in gear.
“Nothing like a fresh-brewed bombing raid first thing in the morning to get a guy motivated, eh, fellas?” Bryant says. Nobody answers, but you don’t need responses when you are as right as that.
Almost as soon as we have a fully assembled command center, officer types start commanding and just like that, our whole demolition platoon, which is us and two more ten-man squads configured just like ours, has got marching orders. And so do three rifle platoons of fifteen men each, including five mortars. We’re descending methodically down the eastern side of the hill on a patrol to discover where the enemy might be hunkered down. We know where their major encampments are, but everyone figures they’re going to be found in a bunch of other places as well. We’re trying to root them out of any place that lies between the plateau and our destination, which is the back side of the barge station at Sangigai. The plan is to attack the station from two directions. Another group will approach it head-on by returning to our landing area and marching up the beach to the northeast. We will be going the more deceptive — and far more challenging — inland route to shock them by emerging right behind their position.
That is, once we have cleared the route. We say “cleared” a lot, which mostly means killing everybody you find in an area you don’t want them to be in.
“All right, now it’s starting to feel real,” my trusted lead machine gunner whispers. Good thing his assistant is always close enough to hear his hushed words.
“Very, very real,” I whisper back, with a little extra huff-puff to my nervous voice. “So real, in fact, we need to stop talking at all.”
“Got it.”
“Shut up.”
The sweat is back again. The heat of the daytime is well beyond even last night’s steaminess, and it feels like instead of cooling us, the jungle just seals the humid heat inside and then works with the death-ray sunshine to magnify it times a thousand. I am reminded again of Klecko’s ant comparison for us, and I am filled with remorse for every last ant I burned with a magnifying glass as a kid.
The flying insects have returned as well, only this time it feels too dangerous to even smack them for fear of attracting Japanese stingers that won’t feel better with a little calamine lotion rubbed into them.
It does not feel as if I have seventy-five of my closest heavily armed friends by my side as we creep along essentially the same route. Because of the permanent dusk under the tree cover and the thickness of the growth down here and the requirement for silence, it feels for the most part shockingly lonely in this place we’re creeping through. Our famous esprit de corps is a very real thing, but it can’t do anything for us right now.
Klecko is the only marine I can see at all times. And of course he is the one I would choose if I had the choice to make, but s
till I wouldn’t mind seeing a whole bunch of them right about now.
Suddenly, I see him hold up a hand for me to freeze and that is what I do while holding up my hand for the man behind. Sweat and insects now slither up and down and across my skin from scalp to ankles and everywhere in between as I play statues in a forest that surely does not want me here. I hold my discipline, have faith in my training, and remain hawkeyed. I survey all around me and resist the urge to stare at Klecko’s hand until I can make it go down with my desperate willpower.
His hand remains up there so long I swear I can feel my hair falling out of my head, one strand at a time. Plink. There goes one. Plink. There goes one.
Klecko’s hand goes down, releasing us to move. My hand goes down. We move.
Here and there, in no real pattern, clearings open up like tiny dream settlements in the middle of density that is nothing short of a freakish deformity of nature, surely never meant to be like this. As we pass through one now I get a boyish, thrilled relief at the sight of Corporal Havlicek leading Klecko at the head of our column. Then he’s gone just as quickly as if we have been wandering lost and alone the whole time and the corporal was a phantom.
Because of the relentlessly contrary nature of the terrain, we are not in a true USMC formation at all. Theoretically, each platoon should be breaking down into its individual formation, like a wedge, or a V, with the squads falling in within that.
But officers on this patrol recognized immediately that nothing complicated was going to hold in such an unyielding jungle, where it’s hard enough for one man to walk in a straight line for long. So we are still under the originally planned command structure, but the reality is that we are functioning as a great mass of individual five-man fire teams flowing down one big hillside.
And the fire teams are straight lines. And because everybody apparently loves to have machine gunners at the front of something completely unknown and unquestionably dangerous, Klecko and I are basically at the leading edge of one column of teams. Somewhere nearby, Bryant and Westphal are following behind Sergeant Silas at the spearhead of another.
