The Million-Dollar Wound (6 page)

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?”

I managed a smile. “I’m Nate Heller.”

N
EAR
H
ENDERSON
F
IELD

“The detective, yes. What in God’s name are you doing here? You’re easily past thirty-five, I should think.”

“So are you. I got drunk and woke up the next morning in the Marines. What’s your excuse?”

He smiled; even grease-streaked and in wartime, it was the sort of sophisticated, vaguely intellectual smile that had typecast him as British in the movies, even though he was as American as the next guy.

He didn’t answer my question, but posed his own: “You know what we’d be doing right now, if we hadn’t got noble and enlisted?”

“No, sir, I don’t.”

“Testifying to a grand jury, or getting ready to.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Bioff/Nitti affair has really hit the fan, back home.”

“No kidding. I wish they’d subpoena me back there.”

“No such luck,” he smiled. Looking past me, he said, “Isn’t that Barney Ross, the boxer?”

“No,” I said. “That’s Barney Ross, the raggedy-ass Marine.”

“Like to meet him sometime.”

“Maybe you will. It’s a small world, you know.”

“Too goddamn, these days. Got to shove off.”

We shook hands, and he climbed on board, and I turned back toward the beach, where Barney was guiding a wet, groggy sailor toward the airfield.

“Wasn’t that Robert Montgomery you were earbangin’ over there? The actor?”

“Nope,” I said. “That was Lieutenant j.g. Henry Montgomery, the PT boat commander.”

“Sure looked like Robert Montgomery the actor to me.”

“That’s ’cause they’re one and the same, schmuck.”

“What’s a guy like him doing in the goddamn service, of all places?”

“You mean when he could be home running a cocktail lounge?”

The battle continued on through the night—flares and tracer bullets lighting the sky—and well into the next day. The Army guys, who were on the Island in force now, the brass getting ready to launch a counteroffensive, were mostly combat virgins, and these air and sea battles they’d witnessed from the beach were an education.

Marines are pretty notorious for mixing it up with the other branches of the service—the Army and Navy being ahead of us in line, where supplies and equipment were concerned—and a lot of resentment naturally developed; but the sailors who survived their ship going down were treated royally on the Island, and I don’t know of a single fight between a soldier and a Gyrene on Guadalcanal. Maybe the jungle took the orneriness out of us. Maybe the Island was so all-consuming it reduced us all to common dogfaces and leave it go at that.

Or maybe what kept the peace was pogey bait.

The Army boys were Hershey-bar rich; we Marines had souvenirs up the wazoo to swap ’em. The bartering was intense and as all-pervasive as combat: Hershey bars and Butterfingers and Baby Ruths were traded for samurai swords and battle flags and Nip helmets. The Army had plenty of cigars and cigs, too—I swapped a rising sun battle flag for a couple cartons of Chesterfields and a quart of whiskey.

“Got any advice for somebody who was never in combat before?” an Army private asked me, after we swapped for something or other.

“Ever hear the expression ‘watch your ass’?”

“Sure.”

“It’s got a special meaning in combat. See, the Japs know us Americans don’t shit where we eat—we don’t like to take a crap, or even take a leak, in or near our foxhole. So at dawn, when you get out of your hole to go looking for a bush to squat behind, stay low—that’s when the snipers are really on the lookout for you. It’s the most dangerous goddamn time of day.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it, kid.”

“Say, uh—are you feeling all right?”

“Never better. I’m in the pink.”

“Okay,” he said, smiling nervously. And went on his way.

But I wasn’t in the pink. I was in the yellow, from the Atabrine tablets, despite which I had a fever. Goddamn malaria, no doubt.

“Check in at sick bay,” Barney said.

“I already did,” I said.

“And?”

“I’m only running a hundred and one degrees. And I can walk.”

“So you’ll be going back on the line with the rest of us.”

“I guess so.”

I guessed right. Late that afternoon we were moving past the native village, Kukum, to the dock complex we’d built there, a pontoon bridge having been thrown across the broad Matanikau days before. Some of the natives looked on—dark men in loincloths and the occasional scrap of discarded Marine clothing, faces tattooed, ears slit and hobbling with ornaments, frizzled hair standing eight inches and reddened by (so I was told) lime juice of all things, carrying captured Jap weapons: knives, bayonets, rifles. Several of them saluted me; I saluted back. What the hell. They were on our side.

On the sandbar nearby, as a grim reminder to the hidden enemy holding the river’s west bank, lay the charred and/or water-logged remains of several Jap tanks, dropped dead in their tracks like great beasts gone suddenly extinct. A dead Jap soldier, bloating up, bobbled on the water as we crossed the pontoon bridge.

“One of Tojo’s men who made good,” the skipper commented, nodding toward the corpse as we passed. The skipper was Captain O. K. LeBlanc—we all liked him, but he was a hard-nosed fucker.

We pushed through the humid, pest-ridden jungle a few hundred yards and dug in for the night; digging foxholes through the roots of small trees and deep-tendriled weeds and brush was no picnic in the park. All I could think about was how nice it would be to be back in Chicago—indoors.

Barney was bitching about his knee—in that and other joints he had some arthritis setting in, and this sodden hellhole wasn’t helping. He had to do all his shoveling without the bracing of a foot on the spade, and that made it tough; I told him not to worry about it—I could carry his weight, where the digging was concerned.

“Shit,” he said, “you’re half dead as it is. Your fever must be up to a hundred and three by now.”

“You’re the one’s delirious,” I said. “Just take it easy—I’ll do the goddamn digging.”

The next morning, after cold K rations, the skipper got the platoon together and asked for a patrol to go scout up ahead. The patrol was to pinpoint the Japs’ positions for the Army regiment that was coming up and taking over within hours.

I have to say, here, one thing: the number-one Marine Corps rule is
Never volunteer.

Barney volunteered.

“You dumb schmuck,” I whispered to him.

“Fine, Private Heller,” the skipper said. Whether he heard what I really said, or truly misunderstood me, I’ll never know.

Whatever the case, his “fine” meant I was on the fucking patrol, too.

So was D’Angelo, and a big dockworker from Frisco named Heavy Watkins; also a short kid from Denver named Fremont and a Jersey boy we called Whitey, both of ’em right out of high school. There was also a big Indian guy named Monawk. I don’t know where he was from or what he did for a living before the war.

And soon the seven of us were stalking into the daytime darkness of a jungle held by Japs.

We didn’t crawl on our bellies, but we stayed low. Low enough for the bugs and scorpions to crawl on our clothes; low enough for
kunai
grass to cut us. The liana vines, with their nasty little fishhook barbs, reached down to try to hang us. There was no way to move quietly through underbrush and overgrowth like this and I kept thinking about that 1st Marine’s advice about trip wires, knowing any given step could be the end.

“Hey, Ross,” D’Angelo called out, in a harsh whisper. “Those bastards are real close.”

We all looked over at him; the good-looking Italian kid from the South Side was bending down, holding a turd in the palm of his hand, like his hand was a bun and it was a sausage.

“It’s still warm,” he said, very seriously.

Barney and I exchanged glances, wondering if this kid had been on the Island too long, already.

Then, as we started pressing forward, D’Angelo said, in an effort to build support for his case, “It has to be Japanese. It
smells
Japanese.”

Now we
knew
he was going Asiatic on us.

That was when we heard the machine gun.

It was nearby, but not aimed at us.

We settled in behind various fat-trunked trees or logs uprooted from artillery shelling, a man or two behind each; Barney and me together behind a massive tree.

“Who the hell’s he shooting at?” I whispered.

“We’re the only Americans this far forward on this side of the river,” Barney whispered back.

“Well, he doesn’t seem to be shooting at us.”

The sound of it was growing louder, though.

A smile cracked my face. “He’s fishing. He’s sweeping the woods in a three-quarter circle, hoping to hit something.”

“It’s getting louder.”

“I know,” I said, and took a grenade off my belt.

When it seemed to me the machine-gunning had grown loud enough, I pulled the pin and leaned out and pitched.

There was an explosion and a scream, followed by silence.

We pushed on.

For a couple more hours, trudging through the dank jungle, the sun beginning to beat mercilessly down through the trees on us, we patrolled. We saw no more Japs.

Another guy from the platoon, Robbins, found us around four o’clock.

“Take another half hour,” he said, “and then you’re supposed to report back to the skipper.” And he headed on back.

We were just starting back when Monawk nudged my arm.

“Look,” he said.

It was the first thing he’d ever said to me.

But it was a worthwhile comment: he was pointing to the advance patrol of Japs, at least double our number, moving toward us through the jungle.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” I said to Barney.

He waved back toward Heavy, Fremont, and Whitey, who were over to our right. Just parallel to the Jap patrol.

Who spotted them.

And opened up a machine gun on them.

Bullets danced across Whitey’s chest and as if in response Whitey did a little dance himself and dropped into the brush, blood splurting out of his chest wounds like three or four men spitting tobacco. We ran to him, keeping low; the Japs hadn’t seen us yet, and Whitey had fallen out of their sight.