He almost shivered. “I had a gutful of that swill. You know what winning this fuckin’ war means to me? Never having to eat rice again.” Wistfully, he added, “I could sure go for some of that Jap pogey bait, though. Hard and sweet-like the dame that ditched my Uncle Looie.” Pogey bait was Marine for candy. “But you guys don’t need to worry. You’re gettin’ the tail end of the rice, anyway.”
“Why?” we asked.
He sucked on the cigarette, made a face. “The First’s been cut off since we landed, the fuckin’ Navy all but deserted us, what little supplies we got come in from flyboys and destroyers that broke the Nip blockade. If it wasn’t for the food the Japs left behind, we’d’ve been eating roots and bark. But you ain’t gonna have to eat no fish heads and rice; supplies and men are comin’ in every day, now.”
“The tide has turned, then,” I said.
“It’s turnin’. But you still got your work cut out for you.”
“Henderson seems well secured,” I said.
Barney, glancing back toward the busy airstrip-planes taking off, troops trooping in, supplies being unloaded-nodded.
“Boys-if you don’t mind my callin’ older gents like you ‘boys’-my last piece of advice for ya is keep thinking like that and you’ll be deader’n Mr. Kelsey’s nuts by nightfall.”
He was right, of course. The Nips were all around the perimeter, including Sealark Channel-or Ironbottom Sound, as it was informally known, referring to the sixty-five or so major warships resting there, about half-and-half American/Japanese. Nightly shelling from the Sound meant Henderson Field was virtually surrounded. Its security was as false as the orderliness of the plantation palms.
Soon we were moving up, past Henderson, toward the Matanikau River just five miles away, the west bank of which belonged to the Nips, and across which they weren’t shy to come. Shells exploded all around us, shaking the earth and those creatures crawling on it, us included, on our bellies, inching through thick underbrush, thorns and brambles nicking us, marking us, shell smoke drifting over us like dark dirty clouds.
But we weren’t the only crawling creatures. We crawled past snakes, and they crawled past us; we met bugs the likes of which the worst Chicago tenement never dreamed of, but is “bugs” the word when it’s a spider the size of your fist, or a wasp three inches long? Lizards flitted by, forked tongues flicking; land crabs skittled along, like dismembered skeletal hands clawing frantically at the earth. And most of all mosquitoes. Ever-present, less than swarming, but so constant there soon came a point where you couldn’t swat at them any longer.
Finally we reached the forward foxholes, where more of the 1st waited to be relieved. We did that, crawling in as they crawled out, into the two-and three-man holes. Barney and I and that kid from Chicago, D’Angelo, another veteran of Corporal McCrea back at Dago, shared a foxhole with the mosquitoes. Before us was a row of sandbags, stacked, beyond which was a double-apron barbed-wire fence. From our position you couldn’t see the river, but I could hear it, and smell it. The smell of the jungle and the rivers and streams that cut through it was not nature’s finest hour; it was a fetid perfume made from equal parts oppressive humidity, rotting undergrowth, and stink lilies.
The rest of the afternoon we stayed dug in, listening to and watching artillery shells explode, as our side traded fire with the unseen Japs across the river. It never became a passive experience-with every explosion, you knew that if the direct hit didn’t get you, the flying red-hot shrapnel could, and if neither got you, it was getting some poor bastard just like you, down the line. And you knew most of all that you could be next.
In the lulls we’d talk and D’Angelo smoked; he was a thin, dark kid with a sensual mouth that the girls back in the Windy City no doubt loved, for all the good it did him here. We sat beating our gums, comparing bug bites and agreeing that Chicago was a pretty tame place to live, compared to this hellhole, anyway.
Then we watched a sunset paint the sky red and orange, in an impressionistic, tropical dream right out of Gauguin. The moment was a peaceful one; it was enough to make you forget bug bites and shrapnel and humidity, and darkness fell.
Generally speaking, I’m not afraid of the dark. But I’m here to tell you I’m afraid of the dark in a jungle. The rustle of leaves, the flutter of wings, the skittering of land crabs, indiscernible yet ominous shapes moving, looming out there. We’d been ordered not to shoot unless the Japs fired first, so as not to give our positions away. So we crouched in the foxholes with bayonets at the ready, and if I thought this was making me nuts, Barney was truly ready for a padded foxhole.
Seemed like every minute or two, he’d half rise and lunge forward, across the sandbags and barbed wire-a leaf moved in the wind, or an animal rustled in the brush, and Barney was out there slashing, stabbing, destroying imaginary Japs. Some of these nonexistent enemies would sneak up behind us, and Barney lunged to the rear, stabbed, slashed; you never knew when or from whence one of the yellow bastards was going to strike next.
It spread to the other nearby foxholes, and soon our whole platoon was going crazy slashing and stabbing little yellow men who weren’t there. Finally I touched Barney’s arm and said, “Take it easy. There’s lots of sounds out there. If it’s Japs, we’ll know it.”
I’d barely finished the sentence when an ungodly screech ripped the night apart, and I was on my feet, yelling, “Banzai charge!” bayonet flashing in the moonlight.
From a foxhole down the way, a voice that could only have belonged to one of the combat veterans of the 1st, a handful of which had stayed behind with us, whispered harshly, “It’s a fuckin’ bird, mac. A cock or two. Put a lid on it.”
Cock or two? Oh. Cockatoo. Well. I was too scared and tired to be embarrassed. I sat down in the foxhole and pushed my helmet back on my head and the mosquitoes zoomed in for virgin territory.
They came at us the next morning. For real. They came up a slope of golden kunai grass, shoulder-high, the blades of which cut you like a knife, but the Nips didn’t care. They were screaming, “Banzai,” and they weren’t cockatoos, either. They were savage little men in uniforms the color of brown wrapping paper. Many in the first wave weren’t even carrying rifles; they had big mats in their little hands, rushing through the grass lugging those mats, screaming like hopped-up madmen, as were those coming up behind them with rifles in hand, firing past their mat-bearing brethren. Some had machine guns, chattering like a child’s toy gun, but there was nothing childish about the bullets they were spitting at us, kissing the sand through the cloth of the sandbags nearby. There was mortar fire, too, ours and theirs-ours was landing amongst them, scattering them in the air like tenpins; where theirs was landing I couldn’t say. Not near us, thank God.
Barney and I were side by side, firing our M-1s; D’Angelo, too.
We were cutting the Japs down like weeds, like they were the very kunai grass into whose spiky golden sea their bodies sank as our bullets hit the mark.
There was a moment when D’Angelo was firing and Barney and I both were pausing to reload our rifles, the barrels of which were red hot.
“What are those things those little bastards are hauling?” he asked.
“Mats,” I said. “I think they plan to throw ’em over the barb wire, so the ones behind ’em can crawl over it and on top of us.”
Then we were firing again, and they kept coming, shouting “Banzai,” screaming, “Die, Maline!” They kept coming and we kept shooting and they kept dropping, disappearing, into the golden grass. A second wave tried; a third. We cut them down.
A kid named Smith-or was it Jones? — in the foxhole next to us, took a bullet in the head, in his forehead under his helmet. No mosquito bite, that. He tumbled over dead. I saw men die before, but never one so young. Seventeen, he must’ve been. Barney never saw a man die before, and turned away and puked on the spot.
Then he wiped off his face and started firing again.
When it was over, most of their dead remained hidden in the kunai; you could see the impression the bodies made, where they went in, but not the bodies, for the most part. A few were visible-those who’d gotten the closest to us, a few from the first wave, their mats spread out before them like offerings to their emperor or their gods or whatever. They seemed so small, rag dolls flung into the weeds by a spoiled child.
As the days wore on, they grew larger, puffing and swelling in that brutal tropical sun. A stench swept the area like a foul wind. But we got used to it. All of it. Dead, rotting flesh and kids like Jones (or was it Smith?) catching the one with his name on it and falling over dead, eyes blank as an idiot’s gaze. Blanker.
The next attack came on the night of the following day. Shortly before 3:00 a.m. the sky lit just above us with a pale green glow-Jap flares-and coming up the hill in the darkness was the sound of chattering machine gun, mortar fire, and “Banzai!” It was an eerie moonlight replay of the previous attack, and we cut them down like so much cordwood.
Days stretched into a week; we ate K rations, smoked (me, too), talked about good food and bad women, took demeaning shits in the woods with flies swarming around our asses as we did the deed, turned into pitiful lowlife creatures who stank from the sweat of humidity and heat and killing. Even the rains, which came out of nowhere, like the Japs, didn’t improve matters; it merely left us soaked and soaking in muddy foxholes. It made our K rations mildew-it didn’t affect the canned Spam, but the chewing gum and biscuits just somehow weren’t the same.
After two weeks they moved us off the line.
Back at Henderson Field, some Army infantry-the Americal Division-watched us troop in, looking like something the cat dragged in, I’m sure.
“How long you guys been on the Island?” a fresh-faced kid asked.
“Got a smoke?” I asked him.
The afternoon after we came off the line, the war took to the sea and to the sky. Like standing-room-only customers, we watched the show from the edge of the coconut palms lining Red Beach-Barney and me and just about everybody else from Henderson Field, Marine and Army alike. We could see them out there, battle wagons and cruisers and destroyers, from both sides, blasting away at each other with their big guns. Even from the shore the sounds of the sea war were deafening. Still, it seemed oddly abstract-like tiny ships, movie miniatures, battling out there on the horizon.
The air show seemed more real, and was certainly more exciting. Our Marine Grummans fought dogfight after dogfight with Jap Zeros and Zekes; dozens of the Jap planes went down, and not one pilot bailed out. Suicide was in their blood. I knew that from the banzai charges.
Whenever a Jap plane went spiraling into the sea, trailing smoke like drunken skywriters, the boys would whoop and cheer, like the crowd at one of Barney’s fights. I never found myself doing that, cheering the battle I mean, and I noticed Barney didn’t either. Maybe it was because we were older than most. Even at a distance this didn’t seem like a game to us, or remotely fun.
The sea battle brought that home, finally. As we all watched silently while an American cruiser spewed smoke, burning orange against the sky, an obscene midafternoon sunset, Barney looked at me with those puppy-dog eyes gone wet in that battered puss of his and said, “Everybody’s watching like it’s a football game or a movie or something. Don’t they know nice guys are getting blown up out there?”
“They know,” I said, noting the wave of silence that had just washed up over the beach.
Before long, oil-splotched, water-soaked sailors were being brought ashore by rescue boats, among them the PT boats stationed on nearby Tulagi. The plywood torpedo boats bore an oddly cheerful insignia: a cartoon of a mosquito riding a torpedo, drawn by Walt Disney, so it was said. This Hollywood touch seemed perfect to me when I recognized the commander of the boat, who at the moment was helping usher a dazed seaman from the boat onto the narrow shore of Red Beach; his crew was helping similarly dazed, drenched, sometimes wounded gobs.
We were all moving out of the front row of trees to lend a hand, and I moved toward the familiar face.
“Lieutenant Montgomery,” I said, saluting.
His smoothly handsome face streaked with grease, Montgomery didn’t return the salute, his hands full. I could tell he didn’t recognize me.
But he did say, “Lend a hand, would you, Private?”
I did, and as we unloaded the boat, pointing the soaked human cargo toward Henderson Field, other Marines pitching in to walk them there, Montgomery paused to look at me hard and say, “Don’t I know you?”