The Naked and the Dead (3 page)

            Now, in the distance, the shore of Anopopei slid by slowly, almost like a huge ship itself. Naw, Red thought, Hennessey wouldn't go into the water unprepared. He was the kind of kid who would put away money for marriage before he even had a girl. It was what you got for following the rule book.

            He drooped his body over the rail, and looked down at the water. Despite the lethargy of the ship, the wake burbled rapidly. The moon had passed behind a cloud, and the water looked dark and malevolent, terribly deep. There seemed an aureole about the ship which extended fifty yards from the side, but beyond that was only blackness, so vast, so dense, that he could no longer determine the ridge line of Anopopei. The water churned past in a thick gray foam, swirling and shuddering along the waves the ship formed in its passage. After a time Red had that feeling of sad compassion in which one seems to understand everything, all that men want and fail to get. For the first time in many years he thought of coming back from the mines in the winter twilight with his flesh a dirty wan color against the snow, entering his house, eating his food in silence while his mother waited on him sullenly. It had been an acrid empty home with everyone growing alien to one another, and in all the years that had passed, he had never remembered it except in bitterness. And yet now, looking at the water, he could have some compassion for once, could understand his mother and the brothers and sisters he had almost forgotten. He understood many things, remembered sad incidents, ugly incidents, out of the years he had knocked around, recalled a drunk who had been robbed on the steps leading up to Bowery Park near Brooklyn Bridge. It was a type of understanding which could have come to him only at this moment, culled from all his experience, the enforced restlessness of two weeks on shipboard, and the mood of this night as they moved toward the invasion beaches.

            But the compassion lasted for only a few minutes. He understood it all, knew he could do nothing about it any longer, and was not even tempted. What was the use? He sighed and the acuteness of his mood slipped out with his breath. There were some things you could never fix. It was too mixed-up. A man had to get out by himself or he became like Hennessey, worrying over every gimcrack in his life.

            He wanted none of it. He'd do no man harm if he could help it, and he'd take no crap. He never had, he told himself proudly.

            For a long time he remained staring at the water. He had never found anything. All he knew was what he didn't like. He snorted, listening to the wind cling to the ship. All through his body he had the sense of every second sliding past, racing toward the approaching morning. This was the last time he would be alone for months, and he savored the sensation. He had always been a loner.

            There wasn't anything he wanted, he told himself again. Not a buck, not a woman, not a one. Just let there be Two-bit Annie around the corner when he felt like company. There wasn't anybody else would have him anyway. He grinned and gripped the rail, feeling the wind lap against his face, inhaling the swollen vegetal smells it carried from the island across the water.

            "I don't care what you say," Sergeant Brown told Stanley, "you can't trust any of them." They were talking to each other in low voices from their adjoining bunks. Stanley had been careful to pick them together when they first came on board. "There isn't a woman you can trust," Brown decided.

            "I don't know, that isn't the whole damn truth," Stanley muttered. "I know I trust my wife." He didn't like the way the conversation was going. It was feeding a few worms of doubt in his mind. Besides he knew Sergeant Brown didn't like anybody to disagree with him.

            "Well, now," Brown said, "you're a good kid, and you're smart, but it just don't pay to trust a woman. You take my wife. She's beautiful, I've shown you her picture."

            "She's really a good-looking dame," Stanley agreed quickly.

            "No doubt about it, she's beautiful. You think she's gonna sit around and wait for me? No, she ain't. She's out having herself a good time."

            "Well, I wouldn't say that," Stanley suggested.

            "Why not? You ain't going to hurt any feelings of mine. I know what she's doing, and when I get back I'm going to have a little accounting with her. I'm going to ask her first, 'Been having any dates?' and if she says, 'Yes,' I'll get the rest out of her in two minutes. And if she says, 'No, honey, honest I haven't, you know me,' I'm just going to do a little checking with my friends and if I find she's been lying, well, then I'll have her, and, man, maybe I won't give her some lumps before I kick her out." Brown shook his head in emphasis. He was about medium size, a trifle fat, with a young boyish face, a snub nose, freckles, and reddish-brown hair. But wrinkles had formed about his eyes and there were several jungle ulcers on his chin. At a second glance, it was apparent that he was easily twenty-eight years old.

            "It certainly would be a dirty deal for a guy to get when he does go back," Stanley offered.

            Sergeant Brown nodded soberly, and then his face turned bitter. "What do you expect? Do you think you're going to go home a hero? Listen, when you get home folks are going to look at you and say, 'Arthur Stanley, you been gone a long time,' and you'll say, 'Yeah,' and then they'll say, 'Well, things've been pretty rough here, but I guess they're going to improve some. You're sure lucky you missed it all.' "

            Stanley laughed. "I haven't seen much," he said modestly, "but I do know that those poor civilians don't begin to know the score."

            "Man, but they don't," Brown said. "Listen, you've seen enough combat at Motome to have an idea. Why, when I think of my wife fooling around probably right this minute, while I'm lying here sweating out tomorrow, I begin to get mad. . . mad." He cracked his knuckles nervously, fingered the steel pipe between their hammocks. "It ain't as if tomorrow is gonna be so bad although they'll have recon working its ass off, but a little work ain't gonna kill us." He snorted. "Hell, if General Cummings was to come up to me tomorrow and say, 'Brown, I'm putting you on unloading detail for the duration,' you think I'd bitch? In the pig's hole I would. I've seen enough combat to last ten men, and I'll tell you this invasion tomorrow if we was to be shelled from the ship to the beach and back couldn't begin to equal Motome. That was one day I
knew
I was gonna be dead. I still don't see how I got through it."

            "What happened?" Stanley asked. He flexed his knees carefully to avoid kicking the man in the bunk above him, only a foot above his head. This story he had heard a dozen times when he was first assigned to recon, but he knew Brown liked to tell it.

            "Well, from the beginning when they assigned the platoon to Baker Company for that rubber boat deal, it was a cinch we were screwed, but what could you do?" He went on, telling a story of how they had set out in rubber boats from a destroyer several hours before the dawn, had been caught in an ebb tide and seen by the Japanese. "Man," Brown said, "maybe you think I wasn't keeping a tight asshole when those Japs started firing at us with an AA battery. There wasn't any of our boats that didn't get hit some and start sinking, and in the one next to us was the Company Commander, Billings was his name I think, and the poor bastard had just broken down completely. He was crying and moaning and trying to fire off a flare so the destroyer would open up and give us some cover, but he was shaking so much he couldn't hold the flare gun in his hand.

            "And in the middle of all that, Croft stands up in their rubber boat, and he says, 'Why, you ornery sonofabitch, give me that gun.' Billings gives it to him, and Croft stands up in plain sight of all those Japs on the beach, fires the gun twice, and then loads it."

            Stanley shook his head in commiseration. "That Croft is quite a guy," he said.

            "Quite a guy! Listen, he's made of iron. He's the one man I'd
never
cross. He's probably the best platoon sergeant in the Army and the meanest. He just doesn't have any nerves," Brown said bitterly. "Out of all the old guys in recon, there ain't one of us whose nerves ain't shot. I tell ya, I'm scared all the time, and Red is too. And Gallagher, he's only been with us six months but he was in on the rubber boat deal and he counts too I suppose, he's scared, and Martinez is the best little scout you could ever want but he's even more scared than I am, and even Wilson although he don't let on much is none too happy. But Croft -- I tell you Croft loves combat, he
loves
it. There ain't a worse man you could be under or a better one, depending on how you look at it. We lost eleven guys out of seventeen in the platoon, counting the Lieutenant we had then, some of the best guys in the world and the rest of us weren't good for anything for a week, but Croft asked for a patrol the next day, and they assigned him to A Company on TDY until you and Ridges and Toglio came in as replacements and we had enough men to make up a squad."

            By now, Stanley was interested in only a facet of this. "Do you think we'll get enough replacements to fill out the platoon?" he asked.

            "As far as I'm concerned," Brown said, "I hope we never get the replacements. Until then, we're just an odd squad, but if we ever get up to T/O we'll still only be two squads of a lousy eight men apiece. That's the trouble with being in an I and R platoon, you're just those two undersize cavalry squads, and they send you out on missions where you really need an honest-to-God infantry platoon."

            "Yeah, and we get screwed on the ratings too," Stanley said. "In any other platoon in the regiment you and Martinez would be staffs, and Croft would be a tech."

            Brown grinned. "I don't know, Stanley," he said, "if we get the replacements, there's still a corporal open. You wouldn't sneeze at that, now would you?"

            Despite all his efforts, Stanley felt himself reddening. "Ah, hell," he muttered, "who am I to be thinking of that?"

            Brown laughed softly. "Well, it's something to think about."

            Furiously, Stanley told himself that he would have to be more careful with Brown in the future.

            A psychologist in a famous experiment rang a bell every time he gave food to a dog. Naturally, the dog's saliva flowed at the sight of the food.

            After a time the psychologist took away the food, but continued to ring the bell. The dog kept on salivating to the sound of it. The psychologist went one step further: he took away the bell and substituted many kinds of loud noises. The saliva continued to form in the dog's mouth.

            There was a soldier on the ship who was like the dog. He had been overseas for a long time, and he had seen a great deal of combat. At first the sound of a shell and the impact it made were very much connected to the fear he felt. But after many months, he had known too much terror, and by now any sudden sound would cause him panic.

            All this night he had been lying in his bunk and shuddering at the sound of quick loud voices, or at a change in the throbbing of the ship's engines, or at the noise of a piece of equipment when someone kicked it along the floor. His nerves were pitched tauter than he could ever remember, and he lay sweating in his bunk, thinking with dread of the morning to come.

            The soldier's name was Sergeant Julio Martinez, and he was the scout of the I and R platoon of headquarters company of the 460th Infantry Regiment.

2

            At 0400, a few minutes after the false dawn had lapsed, the naval bombardment of Anopopei began. All the guns of the invasion fleet went off within two seconds of each other, and the night rocked and shuddered like a great log foundering in the surf. The ships snapped and rolled from the discharge, lashing the water furiously. For one instant the night was jagged and immense, demoniac in its convulsion.

            Then, after the first salvos, the firing became irregular, and the storm almost subsided into darkness again. The great clanging noises of the guns became isolated once more, sounded like immense freight trains jerking and tugging up a grade. And afterward it was possible to hear the sighing wistful murmur of shells passing overhead. On Anopopei the few scattered campfires were snubbed out.

            The first shells landed in the sea, throwing up remote playful spurts of water, but then a string of them snapped along the beach, and Anopopei came to life and glowed like an ember. Here and there little fires started where the jungle met the beach, and occasionally a shell which carried too far would light up a few hundred feet of brush. The line of beach became defined and twinkled like a seaport seen from a great distance late at night.

            An ammunition dump began to burn, spreading a rose-colored flush over a portion of the beach. When several shells landed in its midst, the flames sprouted fantastically high, and soared away in angry brown clouds of smoke. The shells continued to raze the beach and then began to shift inland. The firing had eased already into a steady, almost casual, pattern. A few ships at a time would discharge their volleys and then turn out to sea again while a new file attacked. The ammo dump still blazed, but most of the fires on the beach had smoldered down, and in the light which came with the first lifting of the dawn there was not nearly enough scud to hide the shore. About a mile inland, something had caught fire on the summit of a hill, and back of it, far away, Mount Anaka rose out of a base of maroon-colored smoke. Implacably, despite the new purple robes at its feet, the mountain sat on the island, and gazed out to sea. The bombardment was insignificant before it.

            In the troop holds the sounds were duller and more persistent; they grated and rumbled like a subway train. The hold electric lights, a wan yellow, had been turned on after breakfast, and they flickered dully, throwing many shadows over the hatches and through the tiers of bunks, lighting up the faces of the men assembled in the aisles and clustered around the ladder leading up to the top deck.