The Liberators

by Chris Lynch

  When the thing that passes for daylight here finally arrives, I take it like a starter’s pistol and bound up out of that moist and foul grave we dug ourselves. Two nights of no sleep has me gaining new edges every hour, and this is just the beginning.

  I go to the next hole over, about twenty feet off, just to make the proper contact with somebody on the good guys’ team.

  I’m within eight feet of the foxhole before I even register what I’m seeing. The two demolition guys, Chaney and Satchel, the ones I didn’t really know that well anyway. They have got new, gaping and oozing mouths on them, right across their throats. Their heads are pivoted all the way back, in case we missed what had happened. They are covered in flying whatevers already and an early-bird rat is catching the worm out of Chaney’s gullet.

  All of that just twenty feet from where my buddy and I spent the long, quiet night.

  Payback is assured. Especially among a population like this, armed, trained, and willing. Especially in a place like this, at a time like this. Where rules and laws, rights and wrongs are defined and redefined constantly, even daily, and always by the side with the higher firepower and outrage.

  We have a patrol lined up already and we take to the trail faster than any unit normally moves first thing in the morning. Like Choiseul, only worse, the heat and the savage biting insects are working on us before we get very far, but it sure doesn’t deter Klecko, who is setting the pace and making it tough for me to keep up. We are out in a four-man fire team of me and Klecko, Heads and Tails. The demolition men are more and more involved the farther we move up the Slot through the Solomons chain. Each island is, again, more inhospitable and hard to navigate than the previous one, but also, each one is more riddled with the famous Japanese honeycomb of caves. People hide so deep you can’t see. Then sometimes they escape out an exit fifty yards away and it’s real frustrating. But the big thing is, there is no way of telling anything once we find a hole in the ground. A cave could hold three fighters or twelve women and children. There could be an escape route or often nothing but a hole in the ground where they are all backed to the wall. Nearly impossible to tell one from another, but the last thing you want to do is stand over a cave with your big mug staring in waiting for your whole fat head to be blown away.

  So, what you do want is demo guys, for one.

  “There,” Klecko barks, and Tails throws himself — bravely or nuttily is debatable — across the ground in the direction of a well-concealed hole where a thick rotting tree trunk is hollowed out and placed perfectly over the hole like a large wooden coffin lid.

  “Get up, get up here! Right now, right now, right now or I’m gonna kill ya right where you are ya bunch of cave hole cowards.”

  I have seen nothing to compare with the energy, the volume, the raw violence Tails is radiating right now in pure Grade-A USMC loyalty to his fallen comrades in the demolition brotherhood.

  “Okay then, guess what?” he screams down the hole even louder. “You’re coming out anyway!” He’s taken a thing off his belt, a sort of canister with a long fuse coming out of the top. I have never seen any explosive that looked like it, but most likely neither has anyone other than Heads and Tails.

  But he doesn’t light the fuse. He yanks it straight out, like we once did with our parachute rip cords. He throws the device down the hole.

  I keep a constant lookout over the perimeter, pointing my machine gun in a wide arc over my half of the patch, while Klecko is supposed to be doing the same. “Keep watch, Zachary,” I snap, but he is fixated on the hole and what is happening in it.

  There is banging, hissing, sizzling. Sparks shoot and shine inside the cave and then up about ten feet above the ground. Smoke follows that, a deep green soupy smoke that is already burning my eyes and nostrils from twenty feet, so I can only imagine what it’s doing to the unfortunates down inside with the thing.

  It is like a whole entire fireworks show, though contained in a smaller space than would be recommended for any show.

  And, as we notice when a man comes flailing and screaming out of the hole, these fireworks would be unlikely to get a license to pop anywhere but in a military setting. The enemy soldier leaps and thrashes like he’s a marlin and Tails has hooked and hauled him in. It is an impressive exit, the guy shooting up like he was rocket propelled. Then he hits the ground with a crunch everybody can hear because he is too agonized by every other thing to worry about breaking his fall with his hands.

  As he writhes on the ground, we inch closer and watch as the skin covering his hands, face, and neck puckers and boils like pea soup overheating on a stove. The man is screaming; his eyes look like they want to propel themselves right out of his bony skull and come over to join our side. They are wild, the eyes, bleach white and blood-vessel orange. There are jagged shards of metal protruding in a staggered line running from the soft skin in front of his ear, over his collarbone, and under his arm.

  The explosive Tails just introduced to the world — but mostly to one nearly-former inhabitant of it — has got everything in it, from phosphorus smoke, to some kind of acid, and even shrapnel. It’s a nasty little masterpiece, is what it is.

  “Nice,” Heads says, walking up beside Tails and putting a hand on his shoulder. The two of them stand close to the man, who is in more agony every second, and watch as if it is a field experiment.

  The Japanese fighter, on his knees, turns upward to attempt to see the guys. He toggles his head side to side trying to catch the sound since his eyes are missing in action. He is slapping and rubbing and patting every burning part of himself, which is every part, and he bends and howls and comes back up and his horrible melting hands and his bent, begging posture and his crying, crying shattered glass voice are all unmistakably begging the men to kill him quickly and mercifully.

  Heads acts like a stupid tourist who doesn’t know the local language.

  “What? Yes, I agree, you shouldn’t slit a man’s throat while he’s sleeping. It is shameful, yes it is.”

  The man is screaming as hard as he can, but it’s as if there is a hand somewhere gradually turning his volume dial down. His body seems to be shrinking, dissolving under the caustic fury of the chemical device and of its maker.

  I look over to Klecko, who has suddenly rediscovered his dedication to scanning the perimeter in the opposite direction. I look more closely at our scientists, as the man’s screams don’t sound like they will be reaching any conclusions any time soon.

  I found them, for crying out loud. I wanted to slice every last Japanese throat on the island not long ago. But not long ago is getting longer ago every second, and whoever this melting, crying man is, he is not going anywhere as far as I can tell. My flesh starts doing something in sympathy for this creature, because there is nothing but creature there now, whoever he might have been once — teacher, bus driver, fisherman. My ears are trying to retract while I stand here with a machine gun and bounce up high on the balls of my feet involuntarily.

  The man’s wailing is broken only by a wild ruckus not thirty yards along this same trail. Our new comrades, secret weapons, and man’s best friends are barking and howling their vicious pointed faces off. Meaning the K-9 Corps has cornered enemy fighters in hidey-holes. A whole big swarm of them, from the sound of things.

  Heads and Tails run down the trail, thoughtless and quick as rabbits. They’re rabid with grief and fear and there’s nothing for it I guess but the reflex of revenge. And explosions, which I would imagine could be a comfort to certain explosive types. Unwise to go off like that, really, dangerous and foolhardy, but I’ve never found geniuses to be very bright, anyway.

  The man’s screaming is still full-throated, but it sounds like a runty lamb who’s too frail to survive and too simple to understand. The hands around her tiny throat are only there squeezing her with kindness, choking her out of compassion, out of her misery. “Baahh,” the lamb man says, from his back, from the ground. “Baaahh.”

  I am staring as I walk to
ward the little lamb man, staring at my partner, who is duty bound to watch the perimeter for people like us except Japanese.

  “Baaahh,” he says, smaller than any lamb, surely. As I look at Klecko’s broad back I rattatattatta fire one burst of machine-gun rounds into that little head, and thank God, the sound ceases.

  I start making my way up the path toward the Doberman pinschers. What luck, our newest colleagues working practically right next door.

  “You coming?” I say without looking back.

  “Not so loud, will ya?” he says, already right behind me.

  It’s night again. We’re in a foxhole again. I have my knife in my hand and my buddy’s head resting on my lap. The knife is because unless I’m manning my gun, I do not spend one second in a foxhole anymore without my knife in my hand. An hour ago I stabbed a snake right through its head. The foxhole is shallow because if we dig more than three feet down the ooze starts rising. It oozed us in our first hole of the evening, coming up slowly and the same temperature as the rotten air here, so we didn’t even notice we were getting oozed until it became visible making its way up our legs. I flew up out of the hole as if a land mine had blasted me. Threw off every stitch of clothing on me, as I felt the slime clinging to me, seeping into my skin, making me itch like a filthy rat dog. Klecko had it on him, too, of course, but he undressed much more calmly. He was clearly not suffering like I was, and he had the bonus of enjoying my dancing dirtball act to take his mind off his own discomfort. It may sound strange, but having him there laughing at me was swell. Kept me from going a lot loonier, and this is how it’s been. We seem to have a rhythm going where one of us goes into one kind of fit or another while his buddy supervises. It’s a system that somehow devised itself, just like our night-talking has evolved. It naturally tuned down lower, lower, because we could not survive without the contact, no way, no way. It’s a magic kind of thing we got now, a private buddyspeak like dog whistles that nobody else can hear, combined with tiny little tongue clickings that came out of nowhere, but we knew and know and that’s just us.

  And the reason his big head is resting in my lap is that it’s a thing we saw Sergeant Silas doing with his bunkmate, Havlicek. “It’s a thing this guy and his gang brought back from Guadalcanal,” the sergeant told us. “Better comfort, better sleep, better watching out for trouble when you alternate positions every couple of hours.”

  Turned out to be good advice, but I won’t be sleeping, so I just do all the upright shifts myself. Works dandy for us, though, because he gets solid rest for the both of us and I can keep talking through the night. I like that, talking to him, whether he’s awake or not. The day on Bougainville had been a relentless, head-shattering noise of bomber planes attacking Japanese positions in their pillbox fortifications. They are only made of coconut logs, coral, and mud, but they seem all but indestructible. The bombers bomb, the enemy responds with antiaircraft shells, our guys respond with mortar fire up into positions near the top of the hill, and all day both sides shoot and shoot and shoot, throw grenades at each other, and shoot some more.

  Then night comes down, curtain drops, show’s over kids, everybody shush now.

  There is so much shush here. So much shush in the night I pray somebody will set off rockets, machine gun the sky, anything, because my ears are screaming and I can hear every rivulet of sweat babbling the whole way down the length of me.

  I stabbed the snake when it was right at my eye level. It remained pinned there while I watched it up close, dying and dead by my hand, and that was the only cheerful moment of my day. Lifted my spirits up right through all three layers of tree canopy above us. The only reason I don’t have the snake pinned anymore is my arm started to cramp after twenty minutes and my arm was never coming back to me without that knife grasped tightly in its fist. Snake is still there, though, with its gaping head, so at least that’s something.

  “This is the worst, Zack,” I say in click-whisper. He’s been out for a while, so I don’t expect an answer.

  “It is,” he says anyway. “Those last two islands were luxury holidays compared to this.”

  “No, I mean the worst, of everything, everywhere, ever.”

  “Ah c’mon. It’s a lot like camping out, when we were in the scouts when we were kids. Remember?”

  “I remember the scouts, but I don’t remember what you remember, apparently.”

  “Come on, sure you do. Same as this, except tents instead of stinkholes and maybe a little less stabbiness and … ah, there ya go. Head-stabbed snakes and everything. You do that?”

  “Yeah,” I say, perking up with tiny jolts of pride and insect stinging.

  “See, you do remember.”

  I can feel when his body goes to sleep, and it goes just like that.

  “It’s been raining nonstop since we’ve been here.”

  He wakes just like that. “Not nonstop.”

  “Nonstop.”

  “It’s not raining now,” he says.

  I look straight up for a second. He’s right. A second later, it starts raining.

  “Yes, it is,” I say, with the triumphant sense of a man who can make it rain.

  “Okay, it is. But it’s not been nonstop. It stops all the time. It just starts up again right away, that’s all.”

  “Fine. Go back to sleep.”

  There is no debate about whether it’s raining or not now. It is coming down so hard and relentless today, it sounds more like machine-gun fire than machine-gun fire does.

  With the squad down to eight men it’s a fairly easy rotation of groups of four, with each group taking one demolition guy and one boss type. The two machine-gunner teams do not get broken up ever, and so Klecko and I are more or less the planet around which all the smaller moons revolve. As it should be.

  “Guadalcanal,” Corporal Havlicek says as we slog up one of the few actual trails the Seabees have managed to cut through this monstrous place. It is a mixed blessing, however, as without any of that ground cover holding it together, the ground is one foot deep of pure rancid muck. I have not seen my feet or lower legs in an hour.

  “You mean the rain?” I ask, half turning to speak low to him as he’s walking behind me. The machine gunners lead today, with Klecko ahead of Tails just the other side of the road from us.

  “Eyes front,” Havlicek says. We splash forward toward our objective, another fifteen minutes up the way. “The rain, yeah. More the stench. There’s more rotting man in this air than any place I’ve been since the ’Canal.”

  “Sorry I missed it,” I say.

  “Careful of rash judgments, private. You might not have missed it yet.”

  That’s a cheery thought to perk up my day. That, and the reminder of the rash that’s begun to spread, purple ivy blooming its way up my whole lower half.

  We get to the spot. And we have drilled this over and over to the point where there’s no communication necessary. The four of us fan right out, off the side of the road and down sixty long yards that is not the muck trough that the road is, but plenty bad in its own way. Every silent, gentle step I take over the slime-slippy, viney hillside releases mushroom clouds of insects that are in my mouth before I can close it, in my ears and nostrils after I do. They are swarming, in me and over me, and I want to vomit, and cough, spit and slap them until I am blue in the face.

  But I am an American marine. And this is my gun.

  Never loved those soldier’s creeds we were required to memorize. But the words give me something to cling to as I do absolutely nothing about the filthy invaders all over me and my comrades.

  We stalk, like panthers. That’s what we do.

  The target is one of the legendary pillboxes the Japanese are so successful with. A recon working way down low on the hill identified it up here, ideally placed for attacking ground troops below and low-flying aircraft above. Depending on their armaments, even landing craft would not be safe from these well-dug gun nests. The hill itself has been their protector, as the shelter is co
mpletely invisible from the relatively well-traveled road above, and we have been waiting for these lovely flood conditions for our chance, when they would be least suspicious of a descent and not too enthusiastic about leaving the house so often to check.

  We are in place. I am set up with my machine gun wide left, with Klecko wide right. We are lying down, training our sights on the front edges of the structure where anyone coming for us would first appear, around the corner from the lone front opening. We are at a substantial downhill angle, and the miserable bugwater, the stinking runoff of a thousand rotting corpses, is cascading right down the hill and up my legs and into my shirt and this time there is no option. I vomit up today’s thousand calories of K and C rations, spreading it all out just in front of me while I remain steadfast, my eye never moving from the sight.

  Corporal Havlicek takes a position right in the middle, taking aim with his Johnson semiautomatic rifle that Klecko and I would trade both our Reisings for.

  Tails ducks and slides and weaves his way down to the pillbox, fast and fearless. I’m right now glad we won him today in the now-routine coin toss that decides which team gets him or Heads. I came up with the process.