by James Jones
What they saw, by that faint moonlight, was one man plodding along with a heavy load on his back. He must have seen them at the same instant because he fell to his hands and knees as he came through the narrow opening. The BARs killed at least one man behind him, maybe more. But it did not help, because there were many, many men behind the first one to pull the trigger of the MG on his back with which he hosed down the widening draw before him. It was like being fired at in an empty swimming pool. For the Japanese, it was fish in a barrel. Bullets ricocheted everywhere, catching on the rebound people they had missed the first time around. Japanese machine-guns, at least at this period of the war, were noted for the fact they did not have built into their tripods the ability to traverse. The veteran company in front of C-for-Charlie’s roadblock solved this problem admirably, simply by having the man who wore the gun twitch his shoulders back and forth.
The thing that saved John Bell was that he saw what was happening and was on his feet three seconds before the men around him, hollering “Run! Run!” as he sprinted for the bank. That, and luck. He made it over, into the undergrowth. Two men immediately behind him fell clawing at the bank, riddled through head, trunk and legs like some kind of strange living sieves used in some mad hospital for screening blood. None of the others got even that far. And all it was was simply one sole machinegun strapped to the back of a smart veteran Japanese who wiggled his shoulders.
Witt, on the other hand—and on the other side—saw nothing and was simply lucky. Having Gooch shot out from under him almost in midword so to speak, he leaped for the other bank just behind him in blind panic. In that second the gun swung the other way. Sheer luck. And so there he lay. He had kept his rifle in his hand by blind instinct, but now he could not fire it without muzzle blast getting him found and killed. He lay and counted one hundred and thirty Japanese pass, biting his fingers and weeping real tears because he had no grenades. Just one, even one grenade. He could have caused incalculable damage in that closed space. But Cannon Company had not been issued grenades, and he had not thought to borrow some up above on the hill. In the faint moonlight he watched them pass, able to see in the brighter patches here and there faces which were not the starved, haunted faces of the men who had held the hill. This was apparently an entire company of veteran troops from somewhere who had been landed lately as reenforcements.
How Gooch, in his condition, made it up the bank, and then found him, he would never know. Nor did Gooch tell him. All he did was whisper “Please! Please!”, twice like that, hurt all over as he was, and then Witt held his fingers to his lips. Gooch understood and nodded, and said no more. Witt cradled his head against him to try and show him how sorry he was, and so the best bantamweight the Regiment had ever had died in his arms as he watched the Japanese company file past. A couple of the C-for-Charlie men had lain moaning in the riverbottom, but the first elements of the Japanese column immediately shot these with pistols. And Witt lay thinking one grenade. One grenade, just one grenade.
All normal men. All out on a fairly normal mission. And now all dead.
John Bell on the other side of the dryriverbed had no grenades either. He had divested himself of everything except his rifle and one bandolier for lightness’ sake. But he knew, later, that even if he had had grenades he would never have stopped to use them. For the first time in this war, hysterical panic had taken him over. For him, too, the funny thing was the feeling of how normal it had all been, normal—and easy. Like a terrified jungle animal, he crawled away stealthily through the undergrowth, cunning and crafty, always uphill, always toward the company—and safety. Safety, safety. He did not care if anyone else was left alive or not. It would return often to haunt him later. It took him over half an hour to make the five minute climb. Nobody ever said a word to him about it, including Witt. Some things—unfortunately, usually only the most extreme—everybody understood.
In the morning they went down for the bodies. But before that had happened Witt had gone back to Cannon Company.
It was more than an hour before he could get back up the hill to C-for-Charlie’s perimeter. It took a half hour for all the Japanese troops to pass. And after that, since Gooch was dead now anyway and there was no hurry, he waited almost another half hour to make sure they had left no rear point or booby trappers. But they hadn’t. He was almost afraid to move enough to peep around and look. Finally, he sprinted across, stepping carefully among the bodies of the American dead. When he got back inside the company, he went straight to Band who was squatting by, and still questioning, Bell.
“I ought to kill you!” Witt said in a voice that was higher than he had meant it to be.
The longnosed, mean, and meanlooking, Italian Exec, who was standing near Band, pulled down with his carbine and covered him. Witt laughed at him.
“Don’t worry!” He turned back to Band. “You’re a lowlife, nogood, worthless, ignorant, stupid, legbreaking, shiteating bastard! You just got twelve men shot to hell and killed for nothin. Absolootly nothin! I hope yore happy! I love this compny better’n anything, but I wouldn’t serve in no outfit commanded by a son of a bitch like you! If they ever kill you or get rid of you, I might come back.”
He still had his rifle with him, and with this speech he slung it, turned his back on them to express his outrage, picked up the rest of his gear, and he left. He hiked the six hundred and fifty yards back through the night jungle, back to Baker Company, as he had earlier hiked it forward. At Baker, he paused just long enough to borrow some water and tell the story of the roadblock fiasco, and then went on. He did not get killed. Before daylight he was back with Cannon Company, which had been moved forward to The Shrimp’s Head to carry more rations and water, and where when he reported his section sergeant said only “Christ! You? I thought you’d been knocked off,” and rolled over and went back to sleep.
“I had every right and every reason in the world to shoot him down,” the longnosed, mean, and meanlooking, Italian Exec said after he had left. “Like a dog!”
“No, you did right. I think he was a bit hysterical from what he went through,” Band murmured. Band had not moved and was still squatting, by Bell. He was blinking slowly behind his steel-rimmed spectacles.
“I should have shot him,” the Italian Exec said, bitterly. “He threatened his own Company Commander!”
“No, no. It’s all right,” Band murmured. He went on blinking slowly behind his glasses.
Over on the other side of the perimeter Sergeants Skinny Culn and Milly Beck looked at each other.
“Well?” Culn said.
Beck shrugged. “He’s still the Company Commander.”
Back with the officers Bell finished telling them his story for the second time. “I guess we better wait till morning,” Band murmured. He was still blinking slowly behind his glasses.
It was a pretty sorry sight. Two had been shot in the back of the head with pistols as they lay in the sand. The dryriverbed seemed to be strewn with all of them. One other, like Gooch, had managed to creep up the bank without the Japanese seeing him, and had crawled off a few yards to die, alone, in the underbrush. They carried them all back up the hill and buried them with the two men from yesterday. It made quite a little cemetery. They did all this as soon as there was the faintest light to see by, and they hurried with it as much as they could. Band, who still blinked slowly behind his glasses from time to time when he addressed someone directly, was still pushing hard to make Boola Boola.
The Japanese had taken every weapon and every bit of ammunition they could find down in the draw. Luckily, one of the men to die directly behind Bell against the bank had been a BAR man, who accidentally had tossed his weapon ahead of him up into the undergrowth as he fell. That one was found. But it was with one BAR short—as well as being short twelve more Pfcs and privates—that they started off for Boola Boola just as the sun came up out of the sea, beautifully and gloriously, on the third morning of the attack. On the other hand, they now had the Ding Dong Trail all
the way and would have no chopping work to do except possibly for those hills they would have to take along the way. B-for-Baker came up just as they were moving out, bringing new stretcher bearers. Then it was the jungle all over again for C-for-Charlie. Hours and hours. Heat.
They captured two undefended hills, leaving a squad on each to wait for Baker and Able, and emerged from the jungled foothills into the coconut groves at noon, just as 3d Battalion eight hundred yards away on the right was beginning its two company attack against Boola Boola. Band immediately started them over that way, moving them in a column of platoons.
He should have rested them. They looked like a ragged, taggleassed wrath of God, locusts and adders, descending upon a hapless countryside, and that was what they were. They were also beat. That jungle somehow took more out of a man than any other kind of physical endeavor. The coconut groves around them now looked exactly like the ones they had been bivouacked in, back over there on the other side, eons ago, and at the same time they looked entirely different, because this was enemy country now, not American. Band kept them moving. The sounds of 3d Battalion’s fight on the right grew louder. But long before they got there they were spotted and brought under fire. This time they had mortars against them, the big ones. The haggardfaced men hugged the ground and looked sweating across at each other with white eyes. But Band kept them moving, in rushes and small groups. A halfmad schoolteacherish gleam in his eye behind his steel spectacles, he could think of nothing but being in on the battle of Boola Boola. Actually, the mortar fire was nothing like as bad, nowhere had the character of a real barrage, as on The Dancing Elephant. The Japanese were fading fast. But it still hurt men. Finally they made contact.
Band had told the Baker Company commander Captain Task earlier in the morning that he was going to push hard, and now he was more than half a mile in front of Baker which had not yet emerged from the jungle. Captain Task, in turn, had told Band that he had talked to Battalion who were worried about Charlie Company because they had not heard from them. They had somehow already heard about the roadblock fiasco and were worried also about his losses. Band had begun to blink slowly at Task, a thing which Task perhaps noticed or perhaps did not notice, Band couldn’t tell, and had answered that his losses had been negligible, twenty-one men, to be exact, which was nothing for the job they had accomplished. Now he pushed his people even harder, remembering this peculiar, strange conversation. He knew that in war, as in everything else, it was results which counted. And he did love this company, desperately, passionately.
He had told his two squads he left behind on the two undefended hills to come on as quickly as they could, once they were relieved by Baker or Able. Naturally they did not. They did not arrive on the field until Baker Company itself did, which was too late to get hurt.
But in spite of their absence, and the absence of the twelve dead at the roadblock, the company succeeded.
The Japanese had two concentric lines of defense around Boola Boola. These were about a hundred yards apart, and both were clearly visible and well entrenched. Apparently they were determined to make some sort of stand here, and Band came in against the left of the semicircle while 3d Battalion was attacking the right. Actually, 3d Battalion had had to split its attack. Driving in to split the Japanese clear to the beach, they had had to wheel two of their companies right to attack an even larger Japanese force cut off there, so that in fact only one company was attacking the village, in what was really a holding attack instead of an allout effort at conquest. Band of course knew nothing of this. While his 2d and 3d Platoons reenforced by the two machineguns probed at the lines trying to find a hole, he withdrew his mortars far enough back so that they could fire, telling one off to fire for the first line and the other to hit at the second. In spite of the fact that they were attacked on the ground by a wandering squad of Japanese who had no business being there, they laid down good fire.
This went on until the mortar sections had used up every round of their ammunition. But then suddenly they were in, running hard but cautiously slow through the short grass between the long lines of coconut trees, leaping emplacements like the ones they had once looked at with awe and wonder, gasping and weeping and once in a while dying. They did not know that this sudden breakup was all due to the right having crumbled before Item Company’s attack. Nor did they care. Corporal Fife scampered along with Jenks’s squad shooting every Japanese he could see, filled with both terror and elation to a point where he could not separate one from the other. Then Jenks went down with a loud squawk and a rifle bullet through the throat, and Fife had the squad for himself, and the responsibility, and found he loved it, and all of them. John Bell, his panic of last night gone, ran leading his squad and yelling them on, but mainly watching coolly to keep the casualties down. Don Doll ran grinning with his rifle in one hand and his pistol in the other, and when the pistol was empty he let it hang and bounce from its rope lanyard and began using the rifle. They were in. They were in. When they began to come into the village proper, they found the majority of the Japanese killing themselves with grenades, guns or knives, which was just as well because most of those who did not were shot or bayoneted. In all, only eighteen prisoners were taken.
When it was all over, they began shaking hands with the guys from Item Company, grinning at each other out of blackdirty faces. A few men sat down and wept. Charlie Dale garnered many gold teeth, and an excellent chronometer which he later sold for a hundred dollars. Coming on a Japanese sitting dejectedly on a doorstoop with his head in his hands, this beautiful watch sticking out like a big diamond on his wrist, Dale shot him through the head and took the watch. This was almost the only loot taken. Quartermaster people arrived in what seemed like only seconds later, and began claiming everything. Also, almost everyone was too tired, too beat and exhausted, to care about loot. Later, of course, they would all regret it.
They attacked up the beach all the next day. They were relieved the day after. New, clean, smoothfaced, jollylooking troops from a totally new division relieved them and were to push the attack on toward Kokumbona up the coast. The Imperial Japanese Army was reputed to be in full retreat. At least as important as this was the fact that they did not have to walk home this time but were picked up by trucks which drove them back along the coast road sitting staring numbly at each other and at the peacefulooking sun-dappled shade of the wheeling groves, with the bright sea and the sound of the surf only a few yards away.
CHAPTER 8
BAND WAS RELIEVED three days later.
But before that happened the whole of C-for-Charlie had gotten blind, crazy drunk in a wild mass bacchanalian orgy which lasted twenty-eight hours and used up all the available whiskey, and Band—partly because of this great drunken rout—learned finally what his command that he loved so really thought of him. The honor for this development had to be given to, of all people, Private Mazzi the hep Bronxite of the Weapons Platoon.
The orgy itself was incredible. And it only stopped at all when it was discovered in drunken panic, like in some mad, fearridden, delirium tremens nightmaredream, that there was not a single Imperial quart, not a single drop of whiskey left anywhere in C-for-Charlie.
The scene was the coconut groves, where the new bivouac was this time. They were hardly down out of the trucks when the bottles, left behind here so long ago by different men and cataloged so carefully by Storm, were out and being utilized. MacTae and his clerk, in an excess of guilty love and aided by Storm and his disgruntled cooks who had returned from The Sea Slug when their stores ran out, had pitched all of the company’s pyramidal tents at the new site, and had even set up the cots in them complete with their blankets and mosquitobars. The kitchen fly was up and the stoves were lighted. All the weary warriors had to do was clamber down and start drinking seriously, as soon as they could draw their marked bottles from Storm’s locked chests.
All of them were a little bit mad. The combat numbness, with its stary eyes and drawn faces, had not yet left them
and would not, this time, for a much longer period than last time. This led John Bell to theorize privately that, given a sufficient number of times up on the line after each of which it took longer to lose it and recover, combat numbness might possibly perhaps become a permanent state. Meanwhile, at the orgy, almost everybody vomited one or more times. Several men got down on their hands and knees, in the moonlight shining tranquilly down into the beautiful if deadly coconut groves, and bayed the moon like wolves or hounds. Another group of ten or twelve divested themselves of all clothing and, bareass nude, ran tripping and dancing like Martha Graham students across the open field beside the bivouac to swim in the Matanikau in the moonlight. There were at least nine fist fights. And Don Doll tried to seduce Carrie Arbre.
But the climax, the high point of all of it, was when Mazzi decided to beard Tall George Band in his den and tell him what he thought of him. What his outfit thought of him.
He was egged on to do it by Carni, Suss, Gluk, Tassi, and the rest of his Greater New York buddies. They were all sitting drinking in the tent of Carni, where Carni lay in bed drinking too but knocked nearly out with an especially bad malaria attack which had hit him on the way home in the trucks. Home? They were talking, naturally, about the campaign. Band had pushed them far too hard. Band had taken dangerous chances. Band had not needed to take them into Boola Boola at all where they were not even needed and which was not even their assignment. And, of course, The Glory Hunter should never have tried to set up that disastrous roadblock. Everybody was busy knocking Band, when Mazzi growled at them they ought to tell Band himself and what was the good of sitting around here yacking about it. Carni, droopyeyed and slackfaced from the fever, and who was the leader of the little Greater New York group of hep guys if it could be said to have a leader at all, looked over at him and asked in a voice hollow with fever and cynicism why the hell didn’t he do it himself then? Yeah, somebody else said, why didn’t he? Yeah, Suss added, why not? all he had to lose was that Pfc he might hope to get on the next promotions list because, Suss grinned, while it was certainly safer in the Weapons Platoon, the chances for rapid advancement there were correspondingly much more limited.
