"That question, General, is moot. And who was it that said, `Yours not to reason why, et cetera, et cetera'?"
"I have no idea, but I take your point." There was a knock at the door. And then three Army enlisted men in hospital garb appeared. Two of them were pushing a table with a Bell and Howell motion picture projector on it and the third was carrying a screen.
"I believe the General wishes that set up in the sitting room," Rickabee said. "Is that correct, General?"
"That is correct, Colonel," General Pickering said.
[Five]
When Sergeant George S. Hart entered The Corps, he brought one thing with him that few of his fellows had when they joined-a familiarity with violent death.
As a cop, he'd seen-and grown accustomed to-all sorts of sights that turned civilians' stomachs, civilians being defined by cops as anyone not a cop. He'd seen bridge jumpers after they'd been pulled from the Mississippi; people whose dismembered bodies had to be pried from the twisted wreckage of their automobiles; every kind of suicide; people whose time on earth had been ended by axes, by lead pipes, by rifle shots, pistol shots, shotguns.
Even before he joined the force, he'd been present in the Medical Examiner's office while the coroner removed hearts, lungs, and other vital organs from open-eyed cadavers and dropped them like so much hamburger into the stainless-steel scale hanging over the dissection table. All the while, the coroner would exchange jokes with Hart's father.
But none of this had prepared him for the motion picture film Major Jake Dillon brought with him from Guadalcanal.
There were five large reels of film.
"You understand, Fleming," Dillon said to The General (for that was how Hart had begun to look at Fleming Pickering The General, not the General), "that this is a really rough cut.
All my lab guys did was soup it and splice the short takes together. This is the first time anyone has had a look at it." After Major Dillon told him to kill the lights in The General's sitting room and started to run the film, it was sort of like being in a newsreel theater with the sound off.
The film began with a picture of a small slate blackboard on which the cameraman had written the date, the time, the location, the subject matter, and his name.
For example:
5 August `1942 1540
Aboard USS Calhoun
En route to Guadalcanal
1st Para Bn Prepares for Invasion
Cpl HJL Simpson, USMCR
Then there were Marines; most of them were smiling. They were standing or sitting around, cleaning their weapons, sharpening knives, working ammunition-linking machines for machine gun belts, or writing letters home, stuff like that.
George was getting just a little bored with this when the content changed. They were at the invasion beach.
7 August 1942 0415
Tulagi
First Wave, 1st Raider Bn
Cpl H.A. Simpson, USMCR
The cameraman was in an invasion barge. You could see Marines with all their gear, hunched down, waiting for the boat to touch shore. They were no longer smiling.
Then you could see the beach, a landing pier, burning Japanese seaplanes, and shellfire, and lots of smoke.
And then guys were climbing over the sides of the barge, Then the camera was out of the barge and on top of the pier; parts of the pier had been destroyed.
And then you started to see bodies. The first body was just lying there, with arterial blood pumping out his back. The camera was on that for maybe ten seconds; it seemed a lot longer.
And then you saw two Marines running along the pier. Both of them, at the same time, just fell down. Not like in the movies, where people clutch their chests or their throats and spin around before they fall. These Marines just stopped in mid-stride, fell down, and were dead.
There was a lot that was out of focus, and a lot of gray space, with no images; and then there were more bodies. Some of them now were Japanese.
"I'd like a drink, please," The General said.
"General," Lieutenant Moore said, "you said to remind you when you'd already had the day's ration."
"Lieutenant, ask Sergeant Hart to get me an inch and a half of scotch, please."
"Aye, aye, Sir. Hart?"
"Aye, aye, Sir."
"Help yourself, George, if you like," The General said.
"You, too, John." There was a shot of some Japanese, in pieces, around a small hole in the ground. After a moment Hart decided it had been caused by the impact of a Naval artillery shell.
There was a shot of a Marine lying on his back with his face blown off.
Bodies. Bodies. Bodies.
There was a shot of some Marine with more balls than brains standing up in the open and firing his rifle off hand, like he was on the goddamned rifle range at Parris Island, sling in the proper place and everything.
And then a shot of a couple of Japanese with the tops of their heads blown off, and then a shot of the Marine with the rifle, closer up now, so close that Hart could see that he was an older guy, an officer, a major. He was gesturing angrily at the cameraman and Hart could tell that he was really pissed that the cameraman was taking his picture.
It went on and on and on, Marines running and shooting their weapons, Marines down, with corpsmen bending over them; even a shot of a guy with blood on his face clinging for dear life to one of the supports of the pier, looking like he was hysterical. There was time enough for The General to ask for three more drinks. Hart made them, and two more for himself.
The last two he made for The General were an inch and a half, straight up.
Finally it was over; and Major Dillon told Hart to turn the lights on.
"Your people did a fine job, Jake," The General said.
"Yeah," Dillon said. "But there's not much I can put in newsreel theaters, is there?"
"I'd like a copy of that," Colonel Rickabee said.
"Colonel, that would he hard-" Major Dillon said.