The Naked and the Dead (107 page)

            And do it again."

            Croft kept looking at the mountain. He had lost it, had missed some tantalizing revelation of himself.

            Of himself and much more. Of life.

            Everything.

Mute Chorus:

ON WHAT WE DO WHEN

WE GET OUT

            (Sometimes spoken, usually covert, varying with circumstance.)

            RED: Do the same fuggin thing I always did. What else is there?

            BROWN: When we hit Frisco, I'm going to take my pay and throw the biggest goddam old drunk that town ever saw, and then I'll shack up with some bitch, and I won't do nothing but screw and drink for two whole goddam weeks, and then I'm going to take it easy going home to Kansas, just stopping off whenever I damn feel like it, just throwing the damnedest old binge you ever saw, and then I'm gonna look my wife up, I ain't gonna let her know I'm coming, and I'm going to give her the surprise of her life, and have witnesses along, by God, and I'll throw her out of the house, and let people know the way you treat a bitch when we're stuck over here God knows how long, never knowing when you're going to catch something, just waiting and sweating it out, and finding out things about yourself that, by God, it don't pay to know.

            GALLAGHER: All I know is there's a fuggin score to be paid off, a score to be paid off. There's somebody gonna pay, knock the fuggin civilians' heads in.

            GOLDSTEIN: Oh, I can just see it when I get home. I'm going to get back in the early morning, and I'm going to take a taxi from Grand Central, and ride all the way out to our apartment house in Flatbush, and then I'm going to come up the stairs, and ring the bell, and Natalie'll be wondering who it is, and then she's going to come, and she's going to answer it. . . I don't know. So much time ahead.

            MARTINEZ: San Antonio, see family maybe. Walk around, nice Mexican girls San Antonio, big wad money, ribbons, go to church, kill too many goddam Japs. Don't know, re-enlist, Army no goddam good, but Army okay. Nice pay.

            MINETTA: I'm gonna walk up to every sonofabitch officer in uniform, and say 'Sucker' to them, every one of them right on Broadway, and I'm gonna expose the goddam Army.

            CROFT: Waste of time thinking about it. The war'll go on for a while.

PART FOUR

Wake

            The mopping up was eminently successful. A week after the Toyaku Line had been breached, the remnants of the Japanese garrison on Anopopei had been whittled into a hundred and then a thousand little segments. Their organization broke completely; battalions were cut off, and then companies, and finally platoons and squads and little slivers of five and three and two men hid in the jungle, attempted to escape the flood of American patrols. Toward the end the casualty figures were unbelievable. On the fifth day two hundred and seventy-eight Japanese were killed and two Americans; on the eighth day, the most productive of the campaign, eight hundred and twenty-one Japanese were killed and nine captured for the loss of three American lives. The communiques went out with a monotonous regularity, terse and modest, not wholly inaccurate.

            "General MacArthur announced today the official end of the battle for Anopopei. Mopping up continues."

            "American troops under Major General Edward Cummings announced capture today of five enemy strong-points and large concentrations of food and ammunition. Mopping up is in progress."

            Astonishing reports continued to come in to Cummings's desk. It was discovered from questioning the few prisoners that for over a month the Japanese had been on half rations, and toward the end there had been almost no food at all. A Japanese supply dump had been destroyed by artillery five weeks before, and no one had known it. Their medical facilities had been exhausted, there were portions of the Toyaku Line which had been in disrepair for six or eight weeks. Finally they discovered that the Japanese ammunition had been almost depleted a week before the last attack had begun.

            Cummings searched through old patrol reports, read again all accounts of enemy activity on the front for the past month. He even digested once more the puny findings of intelligence. In all that, there was no hint of the actual Japanese situation. From the reports, he had made the only possible assumption -- that the Japanese were still in strength. It bothered him, terrified him; this was the most powerful lesson he had ever derived from a campaign. Until now, while he had partially discounted any patrol information he received, he had nevertheless given it some weight. The information here had been worthless.

            He had never quite freed himself of the shock Major Dalleson's victory had given him. To leave his battle front on a quiet morning and return the next day to find the campaign virtually over was a little like the disbelief with which a man would come home to find his house burned down. Certainly he had handled the mopping up with brilliance. The Japanese, once staggered, had been given no opportunity to regroup but that was a hollow triumph, the salvaging of a few sticks of furniture. It enraged him secretly that Dalleson's blundering should have exploded the campaign; the collapse of the Japanese had been due to his efforts, and he should have had the pleasure of detonating the fuse. What irritated him most of all was that he must congratulate Dalleson, perhaps even promote him. To snub Dalleson now would be too patent.

            But this frustration was replaced by another. What if he had been present, had directed the climactic day himself? What really would it have meant? The Japanese had been worn down to the point where any concerted tactic no matter how rudimentary would have been enough to collapse their lines. It was impossible to shake the idea that anyone could have won this campaign, and it had consisted of only patience and sandpaper.

            For a moment he almost admitted that he had had very little or perhaps nothing at all to do with this victory, or indeed any victory -- it had been accomplished by a random play of vulgar good luck larded into a causal net of factors too large, too vague, for him to comprehend. He allowed himself this thought, brought it almost to the point of words and then forced it back. But it caused him a deep depression.

            If only he had conceived that patrol a little earlier in the campaign, had had time to work it out more completely. It had been a botch, and Hearn was dead.

            Well, one could not really call it a shock. Still, for a little while, Hearn had been the only man in the division who was capable of understanding his more ambitious plans, capable even of understanding him. But Hearn had not been big enough. He had looked, become frightened, and crawled away, throwing mud.

            He knew why he had punished him, he knew it was not accidental that he had assigned Hearn to recon. And his end had not been unforeseen. Cummings had extracted at first a fragile grain of pleasure from it.

            Only. . . for an instant when he first heard the news of Hearn's death, it had hurt him, wrenched his heart with a cruel fist. He had almost grieved for Hearn, and then it had been covered over by something else, something more complex. For days whenever Cummings thought of the Lieutenant he would feel a mingled pain and satisfaction.

            In the end the important thing was always to tot up your profit and loss. The campaign had taken a week more than had been allowed for it, and that was not going to count too effectively for him. But there had been a time only a week or two ago when he would have settled for an extra month. Besides, as far as Army was concerned, the campaign had been won by the side invasion of Botoi. That would be undeniably in his favor. Altogether, he had not been either fundamentally hurt or benefited by Anopopei. When the Philippines came up he would have the entire division to employ and a chance to achieve some more striking results. But before that the men would have to be shaken up, given vigorous training, and their discipline would have to be improved. He had again the same anger he had felt in the last month of the Anopopei campaign. The men resisted him, resisted change, with maddening inertia. No matter how you pushed them, they always gave ground sullenly, regrouped once the pressure was off. You could work on them, you could trick them, but there were times now when he doubted basically whether he could change them, really mold them. And it might be the same thing again in the Philippines. With all his enemies at Army, he did not have much chance of gaining an added star before the Philippines, and with that would go all chance of an Army command before the war ended.

            Time was going by, and with it, opportunity. It would be the hacks who would occupy history's seat after the war, the same blunderers, unco-ordinated, at cross-impulses. He was getting older, and he would be by-passed. When the war with Russia came he would not be important enough, not close enough to the seats of power, to take the big step, the big leap. Perhaps after this war he might be smarter to take a fling at the State Department. His brother-in-law certainly would do him no harm.

            There would be few Americans who would understand the contradictions of the period to come. The route to control could best masquerade under a conservative liberalism. The reactionaries and isolationists would miss the bell, cause almost as much annoyance as they were worth. Cummings shrugged. If he had another opportunity he would make better use of it. What frustration! To know so much and be hog-tied.

            To divert his balked nerves, he carried out the mopping up with a ceaseless concentration on details.

Sixth Day: 347 Japanese -- 1 American

Ninth Day: 502 Japanese -- 4 Americans

            The patrols filtered along the trails behind the Japanese lines. In great numbers they threaded all the aisles of the maze, hacked through the jungle itself to find any survivors who might have crawled up a game trail. From early in the morning until twilight the patrols were out and always with the same mission.

            It was simple, a lark. After months of standing guard at night, of patrolling up trails which could explode into ambush at any moment, the mopping up was comparatively pleasant, almost exciting. The killing lost all dimension, bothered the men far less than discovering some ants in their bedding.

            Certain things were SOP. The Japanese had set up many small hospitals in the last weeks of the campaign, and in retreating they had killed many of their wounded. The Americans who came in would finish off whatever wounded men were left, smashing their heads with rifle butts or shooting them point-blank.

            But there were other, more distinctive, ways. One patrol out at dawn discovered four Japanese soldiers lying in stupor across a trail, their ponchos covering them. The lead man halted, picked up some pebbles and flipped them into the air. The pebbles landed on the first sleeping soldier with a light pattering sound like hail. He awakened slowly, stretched under the poncho, yawned, groaned a little, cleared his throat, and stretched with the busy stupid sounds of a man rousing himself in the morning. Then he poked his head out from under the poncho. The lead man waited until the Jap saw him and then, as he was about to scream, the American sent a burst of tommy-gun slugs through him. He followed this by ripping his gun down the middle of the trail, stitching holes neatly through the ponchos. Only one Jap was left still alive, and his leg protruded from the poncho, twitching aimlessly with the last unconscious shudders of a dying animal. Another soldier walked up, nuzzled the body under the poncho with the muzzle of his gun, located the wounded man's head, and pulled the trigger.

            There were other variations.

            Occasionally they would take prisoners, but if this was late in the day and the patrol was hurrying to get back before dark, it was better if the prisoners did not slow them. One squad picked up three prisoners late in the afternoon, and was delayed grievously by them. One prisoner was so sick he could hardly walk, and another, a big sullen man, was looking for a way to escape. The third had gigantically swollen testicles which were so painful that he had cut away his trousers from his groin the way a man with a bunion slits the toe off an old shoe. He walked pathetically, hobbling along and groaning as he held his testes.

            The platoon leader looked at his watch at last and sighed. "We're going to have to dump them," he said.

            The sullen Jap seemed to know what he meant, for he stepped off the trail and waited with his back turned. The shot caught him behind the ear.

            Another soldier came up behind the prisoner with the swollen genitals and gave him a shove which sprawled him on the ground. He gave a single scream of pain before he was killed.

            The third one was half in coma and had no idea of what happened.

            Two weeks later Major Dalleson sat in the newly finished operations and training shack and ruminated pleasurably about the past, present, and future. Now that the campaign was over, the division's headquarters had moved back almost to a cool pleasant grove not far from the sea. At night the breezes made sleep quite enjoyable.

            The training program was going to begin the next day, and this was the part of military life that the Major found most congenial. Everything had been got ready. The troops had set up their permanent bivouacs in squad tents, the walks through the bivouac had been graveled and every company had finished building racks over each man's cot to hold his equipment neatly. The parade ground was finished and the Major was proud of it, for he had supervised it personally. It had been a considerable feat to clear three hundred yards of jungle and level the ground in only ten days.

            Tomorrow there would be the first parade and inspection, and the Major anticipated it eagerly. He obtained a simple childish joy from seeing the troops march past in clean uniforms, in picking a file at random and inspecting their rifles. Before they moved on to the Philippines he was determined to get the division marching decently again.