Tales of the South Pacific (21 page)

Joe wasn't able to keep that promise to himself, but that was different from getting rock-happy. He could do something about not drinking. That was up to him. But there was nothing he could do about the rock.

He and eight hundred other guys were put on the rock. Somebody had to be there. If it wasn't Joe, it would be somebody else. There he stayed! He was on the rock when the Marines went into Guadalcanal. He was there when a new general named Eisenhower landed in Africa. Half the men on the rock thought he was a Nazi big shot. But later on they learned. He was on the rock when Mussolini hauled tail, and on the rock Joe heard the news about Normandy. Some Marines flown out of Tarawa landed there, and then flew on. Eddie Rickenbacker was there for a few days. And so was Mrs. Roosevelt. They went on, but he stayed. For Joe the war was the rock.

It was a coral atoll west of the date line. From it you could see absolutely nothing but the Pacific Ocean. Only the flaming sun, almost directly overhead, told you where east and west were. At night half the stars were upside down and the other half you had never seen before.

The island within the atoll was a mile and a quarter long and a quarter of a mile wide. The airstrip for land planes used up practically the entire island. The seaplane base used up the rest. It was, everybody on the rock stoutly believed, the finest seaplane base in the Pacific. No one told them that there were at least a dozen better.

Trees had once covered the rock, but now only a fringe remained, like hair on the head of a bald man. Living quarters clung to the sides of the island or clustered at the southwest end.

The rock had one great blessing and one great curse. There was inadequate drinking water, and each night about seven a breeze blew off the ocean. Joe, in particular, used to say, "The only thing keeps me goin' is that breeze. No matter how tough the day is, you can always look forward to the breeze!"

In a way, the water problem was not an unmixed curse. It gave the men something to think about and something to work on. What they said about the water could not be repeated, but what they did about it was amazing. Every spare piece of tin on the island, every chunk of canvas, every old oil drum was put to use. First of all, men built a watershed. For this they used a large, flat, sloping surface. Most were of tin, some of wood, and a few of canvas. Then they built gutters around the sides, and sloped the principal gutter into a spout, which ran into a barrel. Ingenious men, like Joe, somehow procured lengths of rubber hose, which they fitted over the spouts. In this way they could fill three or four drums without shifting them. All they did was shift the hose. Joe was unusual, too, in that he invented the ready-made shower. He built his watershed out from a tree and placed his four drums on stilts. For a bath, he stood under one of the drums and let her go! The water was always warm. He never had a cold shower, but at least he got clean. That was more than he had been able to do for the first five months he was on the rock!

But no matter how much Joe washed, he still got skin diseases. Everybody in the South Pacific got the same diseases, but it was somehow worse when you got them over and over again, always on the same rock. Joe first noticed that something was wrong when he began to feel dizzy at two o'clock in the afternoon. He found out later he was short of salt. Sweating, sweating all day long for thirty days a month and thirty-one some months seeps the salt right out. Before Joe got wise, he had a case of prickly heat. One morning he woke up just as usual, but soon after he put on his shirt he felt somebody stick a handful of pins in his back. Right between his shoulder blades. He jumped and looked around.

"Whassa matter, Joe?" one of his friends asked.

"Somethin' hit me!" he claimed.

"Where?" they asked.

"Right here!" He started to point to his shoulder blades, when he was hit again, in back of his left knee. He started to scratch.

"Uh-uh!" the men shouted. "He's got the itch!"

Boy, he had it! And he kept it! For three months. Every morning and afternoon he would be attacked by spells in which he could have sworn people sank darts into his body. It was no good scratching. That only made it worse. After a while large areas of Joe's body were covered with a red rash. Acid perspiration had eaten away small flakes of skin. When new perspiration hit these spots, Joe would close his eyes and swear. He reported to sickbay finally, and there he joined a long line of other sufferers. A big pharmacist's mate, who felt sorry for each of his patients, would appear with a bucket of white stuff and a paper-hanger's brush. He would spend about twenty seconds on each man. Give him a real paint job. There was menthol in the white stuff, otherwise Joe could not have stood the furious itching that came back day after day.

As with all the other men, the itch finally worked down between his legs. Then his misery started. At night the man who slept above him would shake the bed and yell, "Joe! Stop scratching yourself!" Joe would grunt and roll over. But in the morning, skin would be missing from his crotch.

It was then that his legs and armpits became infected. In the morning line-ups Joe had noticed half a dozen men who stayed to one side until the big corpsman was through his paint jobs. He used to wonder what happened to them. Now he found out. When the simpler cases were dismissed, the infected cases were attended. With a small scalpel the patient corpsman scraped away accumulations from each blister. Then, upon the open wound, he placed a salve. The healing process was terribly slow. Sometimes a month. And all that time you had to work, just the same. Twenty minutes after you left sickbay, sweat was running over the salve. In twenty more minutes the sore was bare.

Then Joe noticed a funny thing. Everybody he met on the rock had some special medicine that was a sure cure for the itch. But everybody had the itch! The only thing Joe found that cured him was a preparation somebody sent from the States. The man who owned it tried it out, and it worked. A solution of salicylic acid in merthiolate. Four other men used it between their legs, and in half an hour it had eaten away their skin. They went to the sickbay. But even after that some fellows went right on using the dynamite. On some it worked. Joe was one of them. He would lie down, paint himself liberally, and then bite his knuckles. It hurt like the devil. "I'm lucky," he would say. "It works on me." He continued to have heat itch, every month for twenty-seven months, but he had no more infections. He felt most sorry for those who did. He knew they had a tough time of it.

Joe had only one other serious medical affliction. His feet! Like most men on the rock, he fought an endless battle against fungus of the feet. Unlike the itch, this fungus came and went. And it was never bad, unless you were one of the unlucky guys that got poisoned from it. Then your feet swelled up, and one man even lost three toes. It ate them right away at the roots. His friends, when the disease first started, told him he had leprosy. Later on they got plenty scared and a wild rumor sped through camp that it really was leprosy. The doctors put a stop to that in a hurry. Just a deep infection. But the guy lost three toes, all the same.

For the rest, you just took as many showers as you could, ate lots of salt, and hoped for the best. Once Joe got five big lumps under his left arm, but seven walloping doses of sulfa drove them away. "I drank about nine gallons of water a day," Joe told his friends later, "and didn't go to the head at all! Where did the water go to?"

It was the atabrine that gave Joe his worst trouble. He hated the little yellow pills and wasn't sure they did any good. The American Medical Association said they were a waste of time, and Joe was pretty sure the doctors back home knew more than the sawbones on the rock. Hell, these guys couldn't even cure the itch! But all the same everyone had to take his atabrine tablets daily. That was not so bad until you began to turn yellow. Then you got worried.

Joe started to wonder if maybe those stories weren't true after all. "As I got it straight from a doctor," one of the men confided to him one night, "all this atabrine does is keep malaria down. It don't show on you, see? You're yellow, and it don't show. But all the time malaria is runnin' wild! Down here!" He slapped the fly of his pants. "And when they got all the work they can out of you, they send you on home. A livin' wreck! They stop the atabrine and the disease pops out all over you." Then he lowered his voice mysteriously and slapped his fly again. "But mostly here," he said in doleful tones. "You're nothin' but a burned-out wreck."

The men in Joe's hut wondered if there was any truth in what the man said. It stood to reason you took atabrine only to keep something in check. If they were hopping you up with dope, only so you could work without falling down, that was bad enough. But what if taking atabrine for three months, say, made you lose your power? Did it mean you couldn't ever have any babies? Or did it mean something worse? With wonderful funds of ignorance and superstition Joe and his friends considered the question from all angles. They found no answer to their informer's devastating insinuation: "All right! All right! How do you know you ain't losin' your power?"

Joe had no way of knowing. In fact, like hundreds of men on the rock, he had no reason to believe that he had any power. He had been in love once or twice, but he had never married. Nor had he slept with a girl. He had wanted to, once or twice, but morals, lost opportunities and all those strange things that keep men from doing what they otherwise want to, had intervened. He had to guess about his power, but he sure didn't want to lose it. As days passed and he became more yellow, he began to wonder darkly if maybe that guy was right. He wanted to talk to somebody about it, but he had noticed that whenever you got started on something like that, you got into trouble. Bad trouble.

Two months before, Joe was lying in his bunk. It was about eleven-thirty at night. Suddenly he heard a loud shout and sounds of a fight. With the rest of his hut he scrambled from bed in time to see two officers and three enlisted men rounding up a chief petty officer and a young seaman whose nose was bleeding.

A third officer hurried to each of the huts. "All right, men!" he said quietly. "Back to bed. Break it up, men. Break it up!"

Next morning hushed whispers flamed through the camp. No one ever said anything officially, but the C. P. O. and the seaman disappeared. Later Joe got the word. The chief got sixteen years in Portsmouth and the seaman two years in Mare Island. Eight nights later Louie sneaked into the nurse's room. The one whose plane was forced down. Louie went to jail, too. After that Joe just stayed away from everything to do with sex. It was an expensive luxury on the rock. "And," he had sworn, "it ain't gonna get me!"

Fortunately, a smart young doctor got wind of what was troubling the men. He wrote to Washington for an official statement that atabrine did not affect virility. It was signed by a Jew, an Irishman, a Protestant, and a doctor from a little town in Missouri. Eight hundred copies were made, and each man on the rock got one. But the young doctor's second idea was even better. He got a clever photographer who could copy pictures from magazines. Then he found two photographs of prominent movie stars who were attracting great publicity as bedroom athletes. He had the photographer make a poster seven feet by ten feet. The two movie stars were leering at one another. Below in big letters was their confession: WE JUST LOVE ATABRINE! Men came from all over the island to see the sign. It did a lot of good.

Joe had fought it out on the rock for sixteen months when two important events occurred in his life. He got a new skipper, and a liberty ship carrying some SeaBees stopped at the island for engine repairs. Joe's old skipper was sent home under some kind of a cloud. Either he went to pieces mentally or he got into trouble over the accounts of the officers' club. Joe never got the right of it.

The new skipper was a Navy type. He was a commander fifty-two years old. He would never go higher. He was a hard-drinking man who could not be relied upon. Yet he was an excellent fellow, and no one would prefer charges against him. So he dragged on and on, from one unimportant job to another. Many loved him but few respected him. Ambitious young men sought to leave his command at any opportunity, but they buttered him up while he was their superior. Some of them even bit their lips in silence when he made passes at their lovely wives. Before he was on the rock a week even Joe knew that he had been sent there as some kind of punishment. Something he had done in the States. Joe never got the right of it.

The Skipper, as he was known, started innovations at once. By God, he was the boss and things were going to be different. If he had to come to this god-forsaken island, he'd show them a thing or two. His first order was that each man must sleep under mosquito nets at all times. He almost had a mutiny on his hands, and the ringleader was Joe.

The huts in which enlisted men slept were foul things. Quonsets for eight men housed twenty-four. Men slept in double deckers, and even though there was a breeze at night, it could not penetrate the crowded quonsets. On some nights Joe lay in bed and sweated all night long. When the order came for mosquito netting, therefore, he rebelled. He tried it for two nights and found that he had what a doctor would have termed claustrophobia. He struggled with the net and almost strangled. In the hot, sweaty night he swore he'd not use a net again. He tore it off.

Next day he was before the new skipper. "I'm going to make an example of you," that red-faced man said.

When the words were spoken, Joe visibly trembled. For sixteen months he had kept out of trouble, and now he was in, up to his ears. "Get me out of this! Get me out of this!" he prayed. "I don't want no trouble!"

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" the Skipper shouted. "You think you can get away with murder around here?" He looked up at the frightened seaman. Joe licked his lips. The Skipper was about to throw the book at Joe when he remembered why it was he had been sent to the rock. "Got to start over!" he muttered to himself. "This time I'm starting over!" he promised under his breath.