by James Jones
Mazzi got up drunkenly. “All right, by God I will!” he announced.
He marched out of the tent and staggered off through the cocopalms toward Band’s Hq tent, only falling down once. The others followed him at a distance sniggering happily, content to let him take the dangerous chance alone. All, that is, except Carni who could not get out of his bed.
Mazzi might not have done it if he had not been drunk, or if what happened to him at Boola Boola had not happened. But there raged in him such a despair, hatred, and unredeemable misery that, uninhibited by the alcohol, he no longer cared one way or the other what he did except that the worse it was the better. It had had to be that fucking goddamned Tills! So far Tills had not told anybody, but that did not mean that he wouldn’t. Mazzi was convinced that he would. After all, when somebody hated you as much as Tills hated him, how could they help telling? Especially when you had been showing them up for what they were all their lives? Whenever he thought about it it made his asshole twitch and his stomach burn.
During the Boola Boola attack, when the mortar sections had been counterattacked by that wandering squad of Japanese, they had been caught off guard. There weren’t supposed to be any Japanese around there. Finally they had been compelled to run. Their mission was not to engage in a longrange firefight with a squad of Japanese strays; it was to lay mortar into Boola Boola. The Japanese, firing down the lanes of cocopalms, showed no inclination to come on in and close with them, and appeared content to stay back off in safety and try to pick them off. Behind them on their right not far away was a small tongue of jungle undergrowth. With two men slightly wounded, on hectic orders from Lt Fullback Culp in the smoke, noise and confusion (the Japanese mortars were still laying in searching rounds here and there trying to find them) they dismantled and ran for this refuge in a long uneven sweating line. They were to meet, reassemble and set up again on the other side of it. And this was when, Mazzi thought for the tenthousandth miserable time, that it had happened.
Buttplate in one hand and carbine in the other, running somewhere near the right end of this line, Frankie Mazzi swung around backward to crash through the facewhipping screen of leaves. Once through, he swung to turn face front again, and suddenly felt himself speared, caught, and then held. He knew what it was, but he couldn’t think clearly enough to do anything about it. Some thing had grabbed hold of his ammo belt near his right hipbone. Unable to believe it, plunging and cursing and listening to rifle bullets snickerwhack through the brush around him, he remained tethered, still holding buttplate in one hand and carbine in the other. If he had dropped one, he might have been able to get himself loose and then pick it back up, but he could not think of this except far off dimly. Eyes wide and glaring, his mouth a cavern of teeth, he pushed and jerked eternally in a timeless world whose only measurable moments of sane, live time, coming like erratic red flashes of some mad beacon at sea at night, were the unevenly spaced clicksnaps of bullets through the undergrowth. And there he remained, buttplate and carbine still senselessly in hand. And he knew he would still be there when they came for him, shot him, cooked him, and ate him.
Two men from the section had pushed past him running hurriedly and obliviously, and he had begun to call in a feeble, moronic, plaintive voice the same word over and over. “Help!” Even to his own ears it sounded ridiculously hopeless. “Help!” he keened feebly. “Help! Help!”
It was Tills who came back for him. Eyes glaring wildly also, running hurriedly in a crouch, he had run up, surveyed the scene, and freed him. Mazzi had been pushing and plunging forward all this time. Tills merely shoved him backward two feet and the snag came free. Then they were both running in a crouch, the bullets still slitherclacking around them in the brush. Once Tills glanced over at him, made a liplifting mock of a grin, spat brown from the quid in his jaw, and ran on. By the time they could see sunlight on the other side the bullets had stopped. When they came out into the bright, eyebeating light, they could see the others about thirty yards away already setting up, resetting the bubble levels. They pushed on toward them going slower now, Tills with his carbine slung still carrying the mortar tube in both arms like a baby, Mazzi still with buttplate in one hand and carbine in the other. Someone waved at them to hurry.
“Just don’t think it makes me like you any better,” Mazzi said sullenly.
“Done thank ut makes me lack yew any butter,” Tills snarled. Mazzi was certain he would tell.
And now, as he stood drunkenly before the Hq tent of Glory Hunter Band, he was still just as certain. Everybody would know and laugh about his ignominy. It made his belly grind with cramps.
“Come out, you son of a bitch!” he shouted wildly for his preamble. From the blacked out tent just the faintest hint of light crept out to the waiting men outside. Inside the tent nothing seemed to move.
“I said come out, you cowardly shiteater! Come out and find out what the men in your outfit think of you, Band! You want to know what we think of you? They call you Glory Hunter Band! Come on out and volunteer us for somethin else! C’mon out and ged some more of us killed! You gonna make Captain for takin us into Boola Boola, Glory Hunter? How many medals you gonna ged for that roadblock, Glory Hunter?”
Other men had begun to gather around too now, their grinning teeth white in the bright moonlight. Aware of them, Mazzi raged on, marching back and forth and swinging his skinny arms, compounding insult and profanity with great artistry into an ever higher rising house of cards of his imagination. Twice there were quietly muffled cheers from the grinning men in the bright moonlight. However, nobody else came forward. But there were the gurgles of whiskey bottles.
“You’re a prick, Band! A schmuck! C’mon out and I’ll take you myself! Everybody in this outfit hates your guts! Did you know that? How does it feel, Band, how does it feel?”
Finally the light in the tent went out. Then the flap was thrown back and Band stood in the doorway leaning on his hand on the canvas. He swayed ever so slightly, was about as drunk as they were, and a bottle dangled from his other hand. On the back of his head was the mutilated helmet with the big hole in it he had saved ever since the last day on The Dancing Elephant and personally had shown to almost every man in the outfit. The bright moonlight struck him square in the face, glinting on the steel rims of his spectacles, from behind which his lensenlarged eyes stared out at them blinking that queer slow blink of his. He said nothing. Behind him was visible the dark, mean, and meanlooking, pickle-nosed Italian Exec, once again holding his carbine.
“You think that fucking helmet makes any goddam difference?” Mazzi screamed. “You think anybody cares about that fucking goddam helmet?”
Band continued to say nothing. He looked at Mazzi—and out at the rest of them—squarely, looking them levelly in the eyes, but still blinking that strange slow blink he had acquired, which was not unlike that of some kind of somnambulist.
Slowly the men began to drift away awkwardly. The fun was gone. “Let’s git back to some ser-yous drinkin,” somebody muttered. Soon there was nobody left except the loyal little group of Greater New Yorkers, as Mazzi raved on.
“You think that fucking hero helmet means anything alongside all the good dead men that are really dead?” Mazzi screamed.
“Come on, Frankie!” Suss whispered.
Mazzi jerked his arm loose. “And that’s what we think of you!” he summed up, yelling. “And so courtmartial me!” And he stalked off proudly.
They congratulated him, his tight little Greater New York clan, all the way back to the tents, crowding around him to slap his back and shake his hand, forming a sort of comet of helmets with a diminishing tail and him as the hard core head. Mazzi kept chuckling happily. “I sure got him told,” he said to each one who came up. “I sure got him told.” Other men kept drifting up out of the moonlit night shadows, bottles in hand, to add their drunken applause. Now that Band’s silent slowblinking face was no longer before them, the fun had come back. “And he never said one word back,” Maz
zi chuckled. Then suddenly he saw Tills’s mocking, liplifting face square in front of him and was startled into a new hollow apathy.
“I sure got him told,” he chuckled hollowly to still another well-wisher.
“You sure did!” said his new satellite Gluk.
Tills spat brown out of the side of his grin. He had changed some too, since the first weeks. “You never got nobody tole nothin,” he snarled grinning. “Nothin a tall. And I know.” Mazzi felt completely hollow.
He needn’t have. Tills told the story. During the course of the long orgiastic night and the drunken day that followed until the whiskey ran out, Tills buttonholed just about every man in the company and told him the story of Mazzi snagged, panicked, and helpless. Everybody laughed, but they laughed without malice and there was no ridicule. Mazzi was a hero. As this dawned on him slowly over the next couple of days, Mazzi was able to forget his hollow despair and become condescending again, even to Tills.
There were other repercussions of the nightanddaylong bacchanal. The worst one was a general one affecting everybody, which was not so much that they ran out of whiskey and had to stop, as it was the realization, as they slowly sobered up, that there was no more whiskey to be had because they had not brought any loot back from Boola Boola. This time they had not staggered in loaded down with Japanese weapons, gear and memorabilia. How to get whiskey then? It took on the appearance of catastrophe. Of course, there were a few in C-for-Charlie who didn’t drink. A couple of these were uneducated Baptist ministers from the South. Two others were metalminded C.P.A.’s who had somehow gotten mistakenly entangled with the Infantry. And there were some others. But all of them knew enough to keep their mouths shut and not chortle when the horror became apparent, because none of them really wanted to get beaten up.
But there were other, personal reverberations of the twenty-eight hours’ orgy, too. For instance, Corporal Fife. Corporal Fife was now Sergeant Fife, squad leader of 2d Squad 3d Platoon. Jenks was dead, shot square through the larynx, dying as taciturn and uncommunicative as he had lived—though perhaps this was due to the nature of his wound—and Fife had been promoted his successor on the field by The Glory Hunter. More important, Fife was now sure he had become a real soldier. He did not yet know that as the combat numbness (with which he had not been around long enough before to have any experience) receded, he would come to revise this opinion. One of the nine fist fights that took place that night was Fife’s.
Fife had started the night sitting around gulping down whiskey with Don Doll and some of the men from both of their squads. And he didn’t want to be with anyone else. He felt a fiercely paternal, protective love for each man in his squad, now that it was his squad. And his squad reciprocated with the same son-to-father love for him, now that their Jenks was gone. It was a truism, Fife thought profoundly, that everybody in a war had to have some father-son love relationship of mutual adoration, or the war just couldn’t go on. He was feeling pretty cocky, as the whiskey quiet grew inside his numbed and splintered nerves. But he had saved at least two of them once apiece, and at least three of them had saved him. He had killed eight Jap bastards on the crazy rush into Boola Boola, four of them unarmed and setting. And he had been knocked down twice by mortar. He had found out that he was really much braver than he’d thought, and this gave him real joy. It wasn’t so hard to be a real soldier at all. It was really very easy. All you had to do was do it, whatever it was. He treated Doll as an equal now and Doll could lump it. But Doll now also treated him as an equal. He did not hold it against Doll any more that he had not made him Corporal of his squad that time.
But there was one thing that still rankled him, and that was the way that fucking son of a backbiting bitch Joe Weld had treated him in the orderly tent that day that he and Storm came back from the hospital. This he had not forgotten, or forgiven. Stealing his job like a sneak thief. And then acting so goddam fucking holierthanthou. Rage fumed in him with the whiskey.
They had picked themselves a nice spot not far from their own tent, right on the edge of the groves where it opened up into the open field that led to the river. It was one of the few nice grassy spots that wasn’t hummocky, and sitting under the tall rustling cocopalm in the moonlight they could look across the field to the river and the trees beyond. They drank and talked about one bit of action or another that had happened during their three days’ battle for the village. All of them had nearly passed out at least once during the long, hard, hot marches, and their sorenesses were only just now beginning to appear.
Not far away up the line was the tent where the Company Hq personnel slept, and there was a group sitting out there, too. Fife suddenly got up, in midsentence of somebody or other who was talking, and walked up that way without saying a word to anybody. Joe Weld and Eddie Train the stutterer whose lap Fife had once landed in in terror and the new kid Crown were sitting out drinking with two of the cooks. They were talking about the hardest march, which they believed to be the one from The Shrimp’s Head on to Hill 279. The clerks were telling the cooks! Fife sauntered up to them mouth pursed, tongue rubbing slowly over his teeth, his arms dangling. He went up to within three feet of Weld and stopped, stood there saying nothing. It was almost a minute before anybody seemed to notice him and his silence.
“Oh—uh, hello there, Fife,” Weld said in the condescending voice he had used ever since that day. Before that he had been the meekest lamb. “We were just—”
“Sergeant Fife to you, Corporal,” Fife said. “And don’t ever call me anything else!”
Weld looked startled, behind his glasses. Then his look of start turned into a placating smile. “Well, I guess you really earned the title, Sergeant,” he said unctuously. “The hard way. And I for one sure don’t—”
“Don’t asskiss me, you cheap fuck,” Fife said.
“Now. Now, see here,” Weld said, scrambling to his feet. “I never done—”
He did not get to finish because Fife stepped in and knocked him down without a word—without a sound, in fact, except for the smack of his fist on the cheekbone.
“Hey!” Weld said from the ground. “Hey! I was just sitting here drinking and talking and minding my own—”
“Get up, cheap fuck! Get up, job stealer! Get up, officer ass!” Fife cried. “Get up, and I’ll knock you down again.” First nearby, then further off in the background he heard uncaringly the happy cries of “Fight! Fight! Hey, fight!” and the sound of men’s feet running.
“Sure,” Weld said bitterly, crouching on one knee. “Sure. And it’s easy for you. I’m twenty years older’n you. I’m old enough to be—”
“You’re not! It’s fifteen years!” Fife cried insanely. “I read it in your Service Record! You’re a man in the prime of life!”
“Who’s half your size,” Weld said. He had taken off his glasses cautiously and was holding them carefully out to one side while watching Fife. “You could of broke my glasses,” he said accusingly. “And I couldn’t get new ones. H-here,” he said to Train. “Take my glasses. Watch my glasses, will ya?”
“I-I’m w-watchin m-my own d-damn g-glasses,” Train said. He had already taken his own off and put them carefully away in their case at the first signs of violence, and was now peering around him like some anxious owl. But he took Weld’s.
“I don’t want to fight you,” Weld said. “I didn’t steal your job. It was Lt Band and The Welshman who made me Corporal. Nobody knew you was comin back. I don’t want to fight you, Fife,” he repeated slyly. “I just want—” He didn’t finish. Instead, he made a wild lunging leap for Fife’s middle, to grapple.
It didn’t succeed. Joyously, because he was sure this unsporting treacherous act of Weld’s proved his whole thesis about Weld’s having dirtied his honor, Fife stepped in again and lefthooked him. This time it was more accurate, and on the jaw. It sent Weld rolling away wildly to the ground, where he propped himself on his elbows shaking his head. When he rolled over to sit up, Fife dived on him.
&nb
sp; It was as though a sudden scrambled lightning bolt of happy maleness and joyous masculinity had split Fife’s skull, blinding him with glory. On top of the groggy Weld on the ground, he cuffed and pummeled. Growling and cursing high in his throat and crying “Job stealer!” over and over, he punched with both fists and total abandon at the face below him. Beneath him Weld gasped and whimpered and rolled around trying to get loose. Finally they pulled him off of him.
“Lemme go! Lemme go!” Fife yelled breathlessly.
Somebody helped Weld up. His nose was broken and bleeding. Both eyes were puffed almost shut. Blood ran from his mouth between his broken lips but it was impossible to tell whether he had lost any teeth; however, later it was found that he had not. He was still groggy and he looked bewildered.
Fife, standing unheld now and in command of himself again, though breathing hard, stared at him feeling both happiness and consternation at the destruction he had caused. He was proud of himself, but he hadn’t really meant to hurt anyone.
“And I’ll show you the same thing next time,” he said senselessly, rubbing his fist.
