by Sloan Wilson
“Damn it to hell!” Mahoney had said that night after the colonel had explained the plan. “Don’t they know anything about how paratroopers work? You don’t jump on top of the god-damn enemy! You don’t throw three thousand men right down on top of nests of antiaircraft artillery and machine guns and thousands of armed men, ready and waiting!”
“Well, this time I guess they do,” Caesar had said bitterly. “The colonel’s sure the Navy will have blasted every gun off the island before we get there. Didn’t you hear him?”
“I wonder,” Tom had said, “how many of us will even hit the goddamn island? It’s pretty small. I bet they dump half of us in the water.”
The idea had been to take off for the jump at four o’clock in the morning and to start landing troops on the island with the first light of dawn. The plan had been for the Navy to start shelling the place two days beforehand and to have landing craft approach to make the Japs think the invasion was coming from the sea.
I will be sensible, Tom had thought late on the afternoon before the invasion. I will be sensible and go to bed early, and get a good rest. He had lain down on his cot and tried hard to think of nothing, to make his mind a complete blank. He had not wanted to think of the small island, Karkow, lying now under shellfire from the Navy, with the Japs in their caves. He had not wanted to think of Betsy, and he had not wanted to think of Maria. How painful had been the memory of a kiss or of anything good he would never have again! He had lain still, pretending to be asleep when Mahoney came in and stretched out on the cot near him.
“Tom?” Mahoney had asked after a few minutes.
“Yes.”
“It’s funny,” Mahoney had said. “I was just thinking, we got nothing to worry about. I mean, we either don’t get it tomorrow, and we got nothing to worry about, or we do get it tomorrow, and we got nothing to worry about.”
“That’s wonderful.”
“No, I mean it. I been worrying a lot about what kind of job I’ll get after the war. Now I’m not worrying about it.”
“No worries,” Tom had said.
They had both lain there on the canvas cots, unable to sleep, and a curious lightheaded mood had taken possession of them, almost gaiety. At about one o’clock they had given up trying to sleep and had gone to a near-by dispensary, where some doctors were playing poker. They had joined the game and had accepted a few drinks of medicinal alcohol from the doctors, but they had not got drunk; they would have been crazy to do that. It had not really been necessary to get drunk. The jokes had all seemed astonishingly funny, in fact everything had seemed funny. The doctors had not known that he and Mahoney were supposed to take off in a few hours for Karkow. One of them had complained bitterly about having to be on duty all night, and about what a great financial sacrifice a doctor in the Army makes, because he could be making ten times more money at home. Mahoney had sympathized with the doctor, his great face morose and understanding, without a hint of irony, and Tom had laughed inside until his stomach hurt.
At about three o’clock Mahoney had said, “Well, I guess we got to be going. How about it, Tom?”
“I guess so,” Tom had said.
“Hey, you can’t quit while you’re ahead,” one of the doctors had objected.
“Sorry,” Mahoney had said. He and Tom had left the doctors without saying where they were going, not so much because they weren’t supposed to tell as because it was more bitter and more funny to hear the doctors complain about breaking up the game too early.
Tom and Mahoney had gone from the card game to the mess hall and had had a big breakfast. They had sat together, looking at the young boys, the members of their companies, fresh recruits, most of them, filing into the mess hall, the sleep still in their eyes. More than half of them had never been in a combat jump, and they had looked incredibly young, almost like schoolboys as they filed into the mess hall to get a good breakfast before taking off.
“We’ve got five or six years on most of them,” Mahoney had said, and Tom had understood that he said it in sorrow for the young boys, for at times like that, each year of age, each year behind you, seemed like a million dollars in the bank that could never be taken away, and the old were to be envied more than anyone on earth, for they had lived their lives, but the young were vulnerable–their lives could be stolen from them.
Breakfast had been over quickly. The men had lined up outside the mess hall, and trucks had taken them to the air strip where the big planes waited, their engines quiet, their propellers motionless. The men had strapped on their parachutes and checked their equipment. It had still been dark. The moon had been almost full, a lopsided moon, and the warm tropic night had been stroked by a breeze as soft as the touch of a woman’s fingertips. The sky, even before dawn, had been full of peaceful birds, and the jungle beyond the air strip had hummed with life. Tom and Mahoney had walked out on the air strip together, but they had been assigned to different planes. As they parted in the middle of the air strip, Mahoney had said, “Take it easy, boy–and when you hit, close up with my boys fast. And keep those damn kids of yours from shooting my men up–it’s going to be close quarters when we get there.”
“You better not be worrying about that,” Tom had said. “Don’t let your kids freeze up–they’ll do it every time. I’m telling my boys to go in shooting and to keep shooting until nobody shoots back.”
Mahoney had grinned. “You’re a tough bastard,” he had said. “I’m glad you’re on our side.”
Tom had walked up the ramp of his plane, and Caesar Gardella had helped him to check to make sure his men were all there and that they were fully equipped. Tom had been cheerful and bluff–he had learned to do that by then. And as he had told Mahoney, he had given his troops one parting piece of advice. “Just keep firing,” he had said. “Start firing when you hit the ground and don’t stop till the place is ours. Remember just one thing: The trouble with most green troops is they don’t fire their guns, especially when things are mixed up. They remember too much about ‘Safety First.’ Don’t shoot each other if you can help it and don’t shoot up the other companies, but keep firing. You’re not going to be blamed if somebody gets hurt.”
Tom had sat in the airplane, like the young boys on all sides of him, chewing gum and looking out the window in a matter-of-fact way. A sergeant had shut the door of the plane. Tom had swallowed twice as the engines coughed, then roared, and had fastened his safety belt as the plane started to taxi down the runway, rushing faster and faster, until it finally soared over the gleaming sea. He had grinned at the boys around him, and they had grinned back–that had been part of the ritual. The plane had gained altitude, and gradually it had begun to grow cold. Caesar had walked down the aisle passing out blankets. Out the windows of the plane, Tom had seen the pale stars, already beginning to fade before the approach of dawn. Anyway, I will leave a child, he had thought. It had been a curiously comforting thought.
The flight to Karkow had seemed short, far too short. It had been comparatively comfortable to huddle in a bucket seat under a blanket, with the engine droning drowsily. Far below, the moon had made a path on the sea, and there had been nothing else to look at until the flash of big guns at Karkow became visible. By the time the plane reached Karkow, it had been light enough to see–the whole operation had been behind schedule from the start. Thousands of feet below, the island had looked no bigger than a pebble on the ruffled surface of the sea. What had seemed to be only a few inches from the pebble, about twenty tiny-appearing ships had lain, and from both the ships and the island puffs of smoke occasionally lit by pale flashes of flame had floated upward. The planes carrying the paratroopers had circled at a high altitude, waiting for the ships to finish their bombardment. Suddenly the smoke from the ships had stopped. A squadron of bombers had roared in low over the island, and the whole place had seemed to explode into smoke and fire.
“Boy!” Gardella had said. “This isn’t going to be so bad! By the time we get down, there isn’t going to be a
nybody alive!”
“It won’t be so bad,” Tom had said, thinking of the Japs hanging on in their caves, waiting for the interval between the bombing and the landing of their enemies to come out and man their guns. He had wondered what it was like to hang on in a cave, with the bombs crashing overhead, waiting. Suddenly the Japs had not seemed so much like caricatures of little yellow men grinning and holding bayonets any more–he had found himself feeling more in common with the Japs hanging on in their caves down below, and waiting, as he was waiting, than with all the safe people in the world, the people at home, safe, and the sailors far below, safe aboard their ships, and the crews of the bombers, who were flying home right now to have hot coffee and a morning nap, their part of the invasion over. It must be tough to wait in a cave, he had thought, knowing that soon the whole works is going to be thrown at you. It must be tough, it must be like waiting up here. And yet, I will leave a child, he had thought.
The sky had begun to grow bright and blue, with an intense quality, almost like a stained-glass window. The surface of the sea had become jade green, flecked with white over the shoals to the south of Karkow. As the plane circled lower, it had become obvious that the sea was rough. It’s blowing pretty hard down there, Tom had thought. I’ll bet more than half of us will be blown clean over the island. I hope they have enough rescue boats down there.
A big gray transport near the north end of the island was unloading landing craft, Tom had seen, and these now began to circle as though in preparation for a landing, but the element of surprise must be diminished, he had thought, by the big planes circling overhead. Below him Tom could see the first of the planes carrying paratroopers begin to level off and head for the island. For the first time the guns on the island had opened fire, and almost immediately one of the big planes had begun to smoke and quietly, almost as if by plan, had slanted into the sea. The men in Tom’s plane had already stood up, and the door had already been opened in preparation for the jump. Standing near the door as the plane slanted lower and lower, Tom had seen the men from the planes ahead bail out, had seen a few plummet down without the flutter of a parachute, had seen others drift over the island or fall short of it into the sea. He had seen hundreds land on the smoking island, which was already crisscrossed by tracers; he had seen more than one thousand men spilled into the air by the prodigal planes, and then he himself had been in the air, falling. There had been the jerk of the parachute opening, and he had swung like a violent pendulum back and forth, the great lip of the cliff down below, men all around him in the air, and, just below, one man also swinging like a pendulum in the wind had crashed into the jagged side of the cliff and was being dragged over the sea, his parachute still full of wind, like the sails of a sloop in summer. Tom had twisted, working the risers of his parachute with all the strength of his wrists, spilling wind from it, angling in over the edge of the cliff. From below tracer bullets had arched up at him, slowly, like candle flames in the air. Then there had been a sudden impact, and he had been dragged over rocks, fighting his harness, until he had found himself lying in a gully, free of his parachute, a gun in his hand, and all around him gunfire and the hoarse shouts of men.
Everywhere there had been Japs, and the paratroopers had been coming down like rain all over the island. There had been no clear line of battle, only a melee, the Japs and paratroopers all mixed up together. And as Tom had known would happen, a lot of the green troops had been afraid to fire, for fear of killing their own men. They had frozen, and Tom had crawled from his gully, rounding up his men, cursing at them and shoving their guns into their hands. The Japs had not been afraid to fire–they had taken it as a matter of course that they would kill some of their own men. It had been necessary for the paratroopers to fire too.
Hank Mahoney had been behind a rock, near the ravine where Tom had landed, and there had been three Japs with a mortar just to the left of him. Tom had found Gardella, and the two of them had got part of the company together and had just managed to clean out the Jap mortar when Mahoney ran out from behind his rock. Tom, barely seeing a moving figure out of the corner of his eye, had whirled and thrown a hand grenade. “No!” Gardella had yelled, just too late. In the instant while the grenade had been poised in mid-air, and Mahoney had still been running, like a schoolboy about to receive a forward pass, Tom had seen who it was, but then the grenade had exploded, Mahoney had crumpled, and at the same time a machine gun had opened up on Tom and his men. Tom had motioned to Gardella and the others to withdraw to the shelter of a near-by shell hole. He himself had flattened his body against the earth and had crawled over to Hank. Mahoney had been lying on his belly, and no injury had been visible on his back. “Hank?” Tom had said. There had been no answer. Tom had put his hand under Mahoney’s arm and turned him over. Mahoney’s entire chest had been torn away, leaving the naked lungs and splintered ribs exposed. His face had been unsoiled and serene. Perhaps that, in addition to the panic-stricken torrent of self-accusation, had contributed to Tom’s madness. With courage and surprising lucidity of mind, he had undertaken the rescue of a corpse. Picking up Hank’s blood-drenched body, he had run, cleverly dodging from rock to rock. When confronted by a cave full of Japs, he had carefully propped Hank up in a shell hole and under heavy machine-gun fire had crawled to within fifteen feet of the mouth of the cave and tossed in two hand grenades. When the smoke and dust had cleared, he had gone into the cave with a knife, finding six Japs dead and one half alive. With grim pleasure he had finished that one off and calmly returned to Hank’s body. Picking it up as if it were a child, he had continued across the island. He had fought his way almost to the beach on the opposite side when it occurred to him that he didn’t know where he was going, for there was nothing on the beach, and no doctors had yet been landed anywhere on the island. Carrying Hank’s body into a pillbox which had been cracked open by bombs, he had knelt astride it and had committed his ultimate act of agony and madness: he had tried to give Hank’s pitifully torn body artificial respiration. Remembering fragments of lessons in lifesaving he had taken as a boy, he had pumped Hank’s stiffening arms up and down relentlessly, succeeding only in forcing blood through Hank’s nose and mouth. He had had no idea how long he applied artificial respiration, but after a long time he had become aware that the shooting outside the pillbox had stopped. The whole island had suddenly hummed with silence. Picking up Hank’s body, which had stopped bleeding, he had run to the top of a knoll. “Medici!” he had shouted. “Medici! Medic!”
A sergeant halfway down the knoll had called to him and pointed toward a medical corpsman bandaging a man’s knee a hundred yards away. Tom had run there and gently put Hank’s body on the ground near the man with the injured knee. “This is an emergency case,” he had said to the medical corpsman. The man had glanced briefly at Hank’s body, then walked over and examined it closely.
“You don’t need no medic for this guy,” he had said casually. “He’s been dead for hours. Put him with the other dead over there.” The corpsman had gestured toward an irregularly shaped pile covered by a torn parachute. Flies had been crawling on the white cloth.
“No,” Tom had said.
“He’s dead,” the corpsman had replied.
“He’s not.”
The corpsman had glanced at Tom sharply and sighed. “I’ll do it for you,” he had said and, leaning forward, had unceremoniously started to drag Hank’s body away.
“Don’t touch him. I want a real doctor for him,” Tom had said.
The corpsman had straightened up and stared at Tom. Then he had called over his shoulder to a group of soldiers who had sat down in the dirt and already started a card game. “Hey, come over here,” the corpsman had said. The soldiers had wearily got to their feet. Holding a knife in one hand, Tom had stood astride Mahoney’s body. The soldiers had approached him slowly and stopped a few yards away.
“Captain, that man you’ve got there is dead,” the corpsman had said. “Let these men take care of him, and you
get a rest.” The soldiers had spread out around him, but had kept their distance. Tom had said nothing, but his big body had been tense and alert, and some of the soldiers had started to back away. After a moment of silence Tom had said calmly and reasonably, “I just want this man here to see a real doctor.”
“Let him go,” a fat corporal had said to the corpsman. “The captain looks like a mighty big man, and somebody’s going to get hurt if we rush him.”
“The guy’s psycho,” the corpsman had said.
“Let him go find a doctor if he wants,” the fat corporal had replied.
While they were arguing, Tom had suddenly stooped, picked up Mahoney’s body, and burst through the loose circle they had formed. He had run hard, without feeling the great weight of Mahoney’s body. After a few minutes he had felt gravel under his feet and had heard many voices. Looking up, he had found himself standing only a few hundred feet from the sea, surrounded by Negro troops pouring from a landing barge. “What’s the matter, Captain?” a gigantic Negro master sergeant had said. “You looking for the medics?”
“Yes.”
“They’re taking some wounded out to the hospital ship right over there,” the enormous sergeant had said, gesturing toward another landing craft several hundred yards down the beach. Tom had started off, but had felt a big hand on his shoulder. “Let me carry him for you, Captain,” the sergeant had said. “You must be beat.”
“I’ll take him.”
The sergeant had already put one great arm around Hank’s body. In a shocked voice he had suddenly said, “Captain, this man’s dead. Look at his chest.”
“Let him alone.”
“Ain’t no use, Captain,” the sergeant had replied in a soft voice. “Put him down and take yourself a rest.”
“I’m not going to put him with the dead.”
“Of course not. Let me put him right down here.” The big sergeant had put gentle and respectful hands on Hank’s body, and Tom had not objected. Carefully the sergeant had put Hank’s body on the gravel a hundred yards from the other men. “Sit down now, Captain,” the sergeant had said.
