No one paid any special attention to him as he rolled west across the country. Men in uniform were a dime a dozen. More were soldiers than sailors, and more sailors were ratings than officers, but Joe wasn’t unusual enough to draw notice. That suited him fine. He preferred being alone with his thoughts.
His own family lived only a few blocks from what had been Uncle Tony’s house. The bomb could have blown up his mom and dad as easily as his aunt and uncle. He couldn’t see anything but dumb luck that had kept it from doing just that—and there was a thought he would rather not have had.
His train got into the Southern Pacific station at First and Broadway in Oakland at two in the morning on the day of the funeral. His father waited on the platform for him. Dad was in his usual fisherman’s dungarees; he wouldn’t change to a suit till later.
They embraced. Dad hadn’t shrunk, exactly, but he seemed frailer than he had before Joe started flight training. Joe didn’t stop and think how much more muscle he’d added since then; he wasn’t built like a middle infielder any more.
His father kissed him on the cheek, saying, “Good to see you, boy. I wish it wasn’t for something like this.”
“Jesus, so do I!” Joe said. “Those dirty, stinking bastards. I—”
“You go pay ’em back, that’s all,” his father said. “Those other pilots, they can yell, ‘Remember Pearl Harbor!’ when they give the Japs what-for. You, you yell, ‘Remember Tony and Maria and Lou and Tina and Gina!’—and Paul, too, dammit!”
“I will,” Joe said. “I’ve got a picture of ’em in my wallet. Whenever I go up, it goes up with me.” He wished he were flying planes hotter than the sedate trainers at Pensacola. You had to crawl before you could walk and walk before you could run, but he wanted to run like Jesse Owens—run right at the Japs and run right over them.
“Okay, Joey.” His father set a hand on his shoulder. “Come on, then. I’ll take you back to the house. That all your stuff?”
“Yeah.” Joe slung the duffel bag over his shoulder. “They teach us to travel light.” He yawned. “I’d like to sleep for about a week when I get home.”
“Funeral’s at ten,” Dad warned.
“I know. I’ll want to take a bath, too.” After so long on the train, Joe felt grubby all over. “Be nice to get in the tub for a change. I haven’t had anything but showers since I went back East.”
At that hour, the parking lot was almost empty. Next to no traffic was on the roads. They went back to San Francisco on the Bay Bridge. Joe remembered the hoopla with which it had opened in 1936. It was a hell of a lot more convenient than the ferry that had linked San Francisco and the East Bay. It would have been, anyhow, if they could have gone faster than the crawl the new, strict blackout regulations imposed.
Something else occurred to Joe. “You all right for gas, Dad?” He hadn’t paid much attention to gas rationing since becoming a cadet. He didn’t have a car, so it wasn’t his worry.
His father shrugged. “It’ll be okay. And this—this is more important than crap like that.” Joe bit his lip and nodded.
He was damned if he could figure out how his old man navigated in the pitch blackness. Masking tape covered all but the narrowest strip of headlights. What was left didn’t let you see far enough to spit. Dad managed, though. He didn’t clip any of the other cars groping their way through the night, and he got back to the house with no wrong turns anywhere.
After months of bunks and cots, Joe’s bed seemed ridiculously soft. Lying down on it made him feel like a kid, as if he’d shed years. He wondered if the ticking of the alarm clock on the nightstand would bother him. It did—for ninety seconds, maybe even two minutes. After that, he heard nothing.
When the alarm clock went off, he had to figure out what it was and how to turn it off. Reveille had been rousting him since he joined the Navy. He realized he didn’t have to change out of his pajamas before he went to breakfast. Now there was luxury.
His mother burst into tears when she saw him. His brother Carl was sixteen, and stared at him in awe. His sister Angie was twelve. She just seemed glad to have him back. He shoveled down breakfast with the single-minded determination he would have shown back in Pensacola. Carl gaped. Dad grinned. His mother brought him seconds. In Pensacola, he would have overloaded his plate the first time around.
With all the talk at the breakfast table, he didn’t have time for a bath after all. He zipped through the shower and put on his dress uniform. When he came downstairs again, his mother started crying for a second time. Carl’s eyes damn near bugged out of his head. His brother and father wore almost identical black suits. Joe ignored the faint smell of mothballs.
They all piled into the car to go to church. When they got there, they found reporters waiting outside. Joe hadn’t expected that. Goddamn vultures, he thought. Along with the rest of his family, he pushed past them without a word.
Relatives and friends and neighbors packed the church. Joe solemnly shook hands again and again. Dominic Scalzi set a hand on his shoulder. “Garage ain’t the same without you, kid,” the mechanic said. “Guy who’s filling your slot ain’t half as good. But what you’re doing, it’s important. You make all of us proud.” His suit gave off that chemical tang, too.
“Thanks, Mr. Scalzi.” Joe’s mind was only half on what his ex-boss was saying. “Excuse me, please.” He went over and sat down with his folks. There were the coffins, looking dreadfully final—and all the more so because they were closed. He knew what that meant: the mortician hadn’t been able to clean up the bodies enough to let anybody look at them.
Even in the wool dress uniform, he shivered. He’d seen more than one Yellow Peril crash, and he’d seen what happened afterwards. The first time, he’d thrown up right on his shoes. To imagine something like that happening to his aunt and uncle and his cousins . . . His hands slammed shut into fists. He felt as if he’d let them down.
That was ridiculous. The logical part of his mind knew as much. A funeral, though, wasn’t made for the logical part of the mind.
The Mass helped steady him. The genuflections and the sonorous Latin were made, not to drive grief away, but to put it in channels made for its flow. The dry tastelessness of the Communion wafer on his tongue brought the ritual to a close. When the priest intoned, “Ite, Missa est,” at the end, he did feel better.
But then came the funeral procession and the burial itself. He was a pallbearer, of course. He was young and strong and healthy, and he’d been twenty-five hundred miles away from where he could do anybody any good. Watching and hearing dirt thud down on the coffins made him bury his face in his hands.
“It’s okay,” his father whispered in a ravaged voice. “This once, it’s okay.”
Joe shook his head. It wasn’t okay. It wasn’t going to be okay. If it were okay, he would still have been back at Pensacola, and his relatives would have been going on about their business. Instead, he was here, five of them lay in holes in the ground, and the sixth wouldn’t get out of the hospital for at least another two weeks. Tears dripped out between his fingers and fell on the green graveyard grass.
After the burial, everybody went back to his folks’ house. People packed it to overflowing. The war was supposed to have made things hard to come by. The food his mother set out and the booze his father set out made a mockery of that. He wondered how big a hole they’d dug for themselves with such a big spread and with the cost of five funerals. As soon as he did, he shrugged the thought away. At a time like this, you didn’t stint.
Everybody kept pressing drinks on him. If he’d drunk all of them, they would have had to carry him aboard the eastbound train on a stretcher. He poured down enough to put a thick glass canopy—like that of a fighter plane—between himself and the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Then he walked around with a half-filled glass in his hand, which kept most people from offering him a new full one.
They kept telling him—sometimes in alarmingly explicit detail—what to do to the Japs when
he got the chance. He would nod and try to move on. He wanted to do all those things to them. But nobody here seemed to have the slightest idea that the Japs were liable to shoot back.
With everything from Hawaii to Burma lost, with Japanese troops and planes at Port Moresby looking across the Coral Sea towards Australia, Joe didn’t see how people could be so blind, but they were. Civilians, he thought. He hadn’t had much to do with civilians the past five months. He had been one of them. No more. He wasn’t a naval officer yet—he wasn’t what he was going to be—but he sure wasn’t what he had been, either.
Late that night, his father drove him back across the Bay to Oakland. Dad had put away a lot of booze, too, but not even the craziest drunk—which he wasn’t—could do anything too drastic at the speeds blackout permitted. “Take care of yourself, Joey,” Dad said on the platform. “Take care of yourself, but pay those bastards back.”
“I will,” Joe said. I hope I will.
He had no trouble sleeping sitting up, not that night he didn’t. When he woke, the sun was hitting him in the face. His head felt as if someone were dancing on it with a jackhammer. He dry-swallowed three aspirins. Slowly, the ache receded. Coffee helped, too.
After so much time cooped up in a seat, Joe felt like an arthritic orangutan when the train pulled into the Pensacola station again. He had trouble straightening up to grab his duffel bag from the rack above the seat. All his joints creaked and popped.
When he got out, he found Orson Sharp waiting for him on the platform. “Hey, you didn’t have to do that,” Joe said, touched. “I was gonna flag a cab.”
Sharp looked at him as if he’d suddenly started speaking Japanese. “We’re on the same team.” He might have been talking to a moron. “I borrowed Mike Williams’ De Soto. Big deal. If you don’t help the guys on your team, why should they help you?”
Joe didn’t see anything he could say to that, so he just nodded. By the time they’d left the station and gone out into the potent Pensacola sun, he found a couple of words: “Thanks, buddy.” He’d left family behind in San Francisco. Now he realized he’d come back to family, too.
PLATOON SERGEANT LESTER Dillon had been a Marine for twenty-five years. He’d seen a hell of a lot in that span. He’d gone over the top half a dozen times in France in 1918 in the desperate fight that hurled the Kaiser’s men back from their final drive on Paris and toward their own border once more. The last time, a German machine gun took a bite out of his left leg. He’d celebrated the Armistice flat on his back in a military hospital.
Since then, he’d been in Haiti and in Nicaragua and at the American legation in Peking. He’d served aboard two destroyers and two cruisers. If he hadn’t joined the Corps, he didn’t know what he would have done with his life. Ended up in trouble, probably. He was a big sandy-haired guy with cold blue eyes in a long, sun-weathered face, and he’d never been inclined to take guff from anybody. If he’d stayed a civilian, he might have knocked somebody’s block off and done a stretch—or maybe more than one stretch—in the pokey.
Now he sat in San Diego twiddling his thumbs and waiting for the rest of the country to get off the dime. He was ready to hit the beach on Oahu tomorrow. The Navy wasn’t ready to get him there yet, though, or to make sure that the Japs didn’t strafe him or drop bombs on his head or otherwise make life difficult for him.
But things were starting to move. Camp Elliott held so many Marines, it was bursting at the seams. The Navy had bought an enormous rancho up the coast from San Diego. What would be Camp Pendleton would have enough room to train troops even on the scale this war would require. But Pendleton wasn’t ready yet. The contractors swore up and down that it would be come September, which did nobody any good right this minute.
He sat in the enlisted men’s club nursing a Burgie and smoking a Camel. Across the table from him sat Dutch Wenzel. The other platoon sergeant had almost as much fruit salad on his chest as Dillon did. He was three or four years younger than Les, a little too young to have seen France, but he’d done plenty of bouncing around since. He took a pull at his bourbon and soda. A White Owl sent a thin plume of fragrant smoke up from the ashtray in front of him.
“It’s a bastard,” Dillon said. “We could tear the Japs a new asshole if we could just get at ’em.”
Benny Goodman lilted out of the radio. Wenzel paused to savor the clarinet solo and to blow a smoke ring. “Army didn’t,” he observed.
“Yeah, well, that’s the Army for you.” Like any Marine worth his salt, Les Dillon looked down his nose at the larger service.
“Little yellow bastards aren’t bad.” Wenzel liked playing devil’s advocate.
“Fuck ’em. You were in China, too, right?” Dillon didn’t need to wait for the other man to nod. The Yangtze service ribbon was blue in the center, with red, yellow, and blue stripes on either side. “Okay, you saw the Japs in action, didn’t you? They’re brave, yeah, okay, but no way in hell they can stand up to us. Besides, their tanks are a bunch of junk.”
“Six months ago, people said the same thing about their planes,” Wenzel remarked.
“That’s different,” Dillon said. “With their tanks, it’s really true.”
“They’re liable to have better ones by the time we can get over there,” Wenzel said.
Dillon grimaced. That was a cheery thought. He sipped at his beer. After a moment, he brightened. “Well, so will we. The Army just had Stuarts in Hawaii, and they didn’t have very many of ’em. A Lee’ll make a Stuart say uncle any day, and a Sherman . . . !” With reasonable armor and a 75mm gun in a proper turret, a Sherman was a very impressive piece of machinery.
Dutch Wenzel nodded. “Okay. I’ll give you that one,” he said. “But the Japs won’t be sound asleep when we hit the beach, the way the Army was when they landed.”
Now he admitted the Army hadn’t done everything it might have to defend Oahu. The Navy hadn’t, either. If Dillon could have got his hands on General Short and Admiral Kimmel, he would have given them worse what-for than the Japs were, and scuttlebutt said the Japs were hard as hell on prisoners. For that matter, the Marines at Ewa and Kaneohe hadn’t done enough to stop the enemy, either. You get caught with your pants down, that’s what happens to you, Dillon thought unhappily.
“I just wish we could get at them,” he said, and finished the Burgermeister. Sucking foam off his upper lip, he went on, “Sooner or later, we will. And when we do, I want to be the first guy off the boat.”
“First guy to get his ass shot off, you mean,” Wenzel said. Dillon lazily flipped the other noncom the bird. He knew Wenzel was as eager to get within rifle range of the Japs as he was.
Two days later, his company commander summoned him to his office. Captain Braxton Bradford was as Southern as his name; he had a Georgia drawl thick enough to slice. “How would you like to make gunnery sergeant, Dillon?” he asked, stretching Les’ surname out into three syllables.
“What do I have to do, sir?” Dillon asked eagerly. He couldn’t think of anything he wanted more than a second stripe on the rocker under the sergeant’s three.
“Hoped that might get your attention.” Captain Bradford pointed north. “We’re gonna need us a hell of a lot of new Marines. All of those boots are gonna need somebody to show ’em how to be Marines. That there’s one of the things a gunny is for.”
“Oh.” Les thought for a moment, but only for a moment. “Thank you very much, sir, but I’ll pass.”
Bradford’s eyebrows came down and together. His nostrils pinched. His lips narrowed. He would have scared a boot out of ten years’ growth. Dillon already had all his growth. After machine-gun fire, nothing a captain did or said could be more than mildly annoying. Bradford kept on trying his level best to intimidate: “Suppose you tell me why, Sergeant.”
“Yes, sir,” Dillon said stolidly. “They’re going to throw the old breed at the Japs in Hawaii. If I’m up there at that Camp Pendleton place, I won’t get to go. If I stay where I’m at, I will.” He thr
ew away the promotion without the least regret. He wanted some things more than that second stripe on the rocker after all.
It was Captain Bradford’s turn to say, “Oh.” He did his best to hold on to his glower, but his best wasn’t good enough. “Goddammit, I can’t even get angry at an answer like that.”
“Sorry, sir,” said Dillon, who wasn’t sorry one bit.
Bradford’s sour smile showed a gold front tooth. “Now tell me one I haven’t heard. You think of anybody who’d take a promotion to go on up to this new place, or maybe to Parris Island or Quantico?”
“Nobody I know, sir,” Dillon answered. “You can always ask, though.”
“Officers all over Camp Elliott are asking—other places, too, for all I know,” Bradford said. “Lots of good people turning ’em down. You aren’t the only one. In a way, that’s good. We want our first team on the field against the Japs. But we want first-raters showing the boots the ropes, too. If mediocre people show ’em what being a Marine’s all about, they’re liable to make mediocre Marines.”
“Yes, sir.” Dillon said no more. With officers, the less you said, the better off you were. He didn’t disagree with Captain Bradford. He knew what was important to him, though—knew very plainly, if he’d turned down a promotion to keep it. And he had.
Bradford studied him. “Nothing I can do to make you change your mind, Sergeant?”
“No, sir.” Les almost added another, Sorry, sir. But that would have been laying it on too thick.
The company commander made a disgruntled noise down deep in his throat. “All right. Go on. Get the hell out of here.”
Dillon thought about asking Bradford if he felt like going to Camp Pendleton. He didn’t do that, either, though. He just saluted with machinelike precision, did an about-face, and left the captain’s office.
Days of Infamy Page 44
