Once an Eagle

  But they’re in pitiful shape. Pitiful. Twenty-two days in the line without relief. Shoes coming apart, beards, fatigues hanging on them in rags, indescribably filthy and haggard. Running ulcers, malaria, dengue, dysentery, Christ knows what else: ⅓ of the command down with something or other. Westy wasn’t kidding. All look half-starved. “What are you getting to eat?” “Well—Ks, Colonel. When we can get them.” “How about hot chow?” “Well, they say no cooking, it draws Jap fire.” “That’s a roaring crock—if you wiggle your ass it draws fire!” This from Jackson. Intermittent sniping, just enough to keep you on edge. Decided to get them a hot meal by noon tomorrow if they give me the bastinado for it.

  Worst country in the world. Bar none. Raining again. Waded in knee-to-hip-deep water for over a mile around perimeter. Fired on twice. No damage. Got the word from Feltner. Japs attacked in force on 30th, several platoons skeedaddled, dropped their weapons and ran. Lost all they’d gained. Still happening sporadically. Asked Osterhaut at Able about estimated enemy strength in the Grove. “Gee, I don’t know, Colonel.” They are afraid to patrol. Jungle has them licked, more than the Japs.

  Their morale is very, very low. Have got to jack them up, any way possible. Chow, shoes (but WHERE?), relief (ditto). But mostly Dad’s Force of Personal Example: they feel they’ve been left here to rot—uncomfortably near the truth. Going to have to carry them on my back next two weeks. There are going to be some changes made around this place: everyone pulls his weight or over the side he goes. There are not going to be any reinforcements: either we do it or we go under. Told Ben he’d have to hump, too: get everywhere, lead patrols, assaults, anything. He said, “Jesus, don’t I know it, Sam. Don’t you worry: I’ll be right there.” He will, too. Good old Ben. If this war is going to be won—and it does not look like a breeze tonight—the old fuck-ups and troublemakers are going to win it.

  Big pow-wow back at Westy’s less than sensational. Dutch Wilhelm full of ponderous Germanic phlegm and pomposity, but steady; only tired. Dickinson shifted over from G-3 to CofS: well, Westy had to give it to somebody, I suppose. Tart, tenacious Yankee, maybe a little overawed by “burden of command”; maybe not. Frenchy Beaupré irascible and tense, staring up at the tent roof, dirty crusty compress sticking up above his collar; only one of them that’s been near enough to the front to get creased. Prince Hal Haley over from Moresby, cap jammed over one ear, tilted back in his chair, ankle on knee, exuding that good old Air Corps charm: no skin off his ass. Specs Cruse droning on and on, scholarly and meticulous and utterly maddening. “The majority of enemy works linked by communications trenches.” (Who hath measured the ground? to quote the bard.) “Recent activity reveals an increase in antitank ditches being constructed along southwest boundary of airstrip and east of Grove. Triangular patch of jungle between Watubu Creek and Mission dense enough to furnish excellent concealment for both attacker and defender.” (There’s a clever thought.) “Enemy strength estimated at seven to eight hundred.” Even Dutch’s eyes wide with disbelief at that one. Why does G-2 ALWAYS underestimate enemy strength? do they pick them for their boundless optimism—or is it simply a way of bolstering their own courage?

  Plan is for Dutch’s people to jump off at 0630, preceded by 8 light tanks (all we’ve got from what I can gather) along old cart track toward airstrip. We’re to jump off at 0640, along no cart track old or new. Attack order received without huzzahs. These are apparently the tactics that produced no results three days ago. Frenchy protested that the cart track simply will not hold up armor, and I suspect he’s right. This is not what Georgie P would call tank country. Confab went badly. Westy kept wandering off subject, falling into petty wrangles about the use of two captured Jap barges for transporting elements of the 484th up from Kokogela. They can’t get here in time for the operation, so why squabble about it?

  Dutch convinced we won’t make it: could see it in his eyes. Short dissertation by Herb Hodl over shortages in mortar shells, followed by listless debate on artillery preparation, which will not be lavish. Frenchy again staring at ceiling, looking as if he wanted to throw us all into a pit of coral snakes. Westy turned to Haley about air support. “You want it, Wes, you can have it.” That glittering professional smile. “We’ll give you a strike at 0600, treetop level. Really work them over.” Frenchy all at once exploded. “Oh Jesus, yes, by all means come over and lay it on my crowd again! Maybe you can do even better this time—maybe you can wipe out EVERYBODY in the forward positions!—” Prince Hal no longer smiling (a certain relief). “Now just a minute, Beaupré—” “Sure, bombs away, mission accomplished—just spare us, will you, Haley? Spare us the heroics. I’d rather let the fucking Japs do it!” Westy calling, “Boys, boys! This isn’t getting us anywhere …”

  True enough. A short silence. Debated whether to say anything. Could use two days—even one—badly: reorganize, straighten out some of Caylor’s mess. But as junior member of the firm determined on silence. To request postponement would only sink them all lower. Some of them resent my soaring in out of the blue like this, anyway: Hodl, Dickinson, Frenchy. And Westy has his heart set on attack. What the hell. Maybe it’ll go through.

  More walla-walla and paper passing, followed by a short fight talk by Westy. He is frightened, and weary unto death. Stuck out here at the ass end of the line, no support, every man’s hand against him, MacArthur breathing down his neck. Pretty rough, all right. Wound up pleading with us. “I know we can do it, boys. Just one more effort and we’ll be out of this …” Worse than if he’d said nothing. Filed out like a team after a fearful first two periods, taking field for even more disastrous second half. Frenchy turned to me violently. “Hear you fired Caylor and sent him home. Big mistake.” “Is that right?” I demanded crossly. “Yeah—you should have put the son of a bitch to work hauling ammo till he dropped and then shot him in the balls.” And he walked away without another word.

  These conferences are stupid. Brass should go to forward units—assuming they ARE forward, that is—not other way round. This just wastes time, pulls commanders away from their outfits, where they ought to be 100% of the time.

  Had a twinge of panic coming back to the CP in the dark. There is simply not a breath of air: like hot, thick blanket dropped over you, strangling you gently. Wild fusillade at Baker—had terrified visions of large-scale attack, breakthrough, massacre in the swamps. Turned out to be trigger-happy outbursts. Gave them hell. Mosquitoes beyond belief—makes Luzon look like that God damned Everglades Club.

  What the hell: maybe it’ll go through. But I don’t know.

  The night was perfectly still: the thick, ominous silence before disaster. Damon shook off the thought. Accustomed to the darkness now, he saw Bowcher’s hand move, and inched his way forward, conscious of the preposterously loud slithering rasp of his clothing on the crushed and matted growth, trying to minimize it. To his right the jungle hung in a high, bristling, malevolent mass—trees and creepers and fronds so tangled and interwoven you could feel their solidity. He worked his way up beside the Sergeant, felt the lips against his ear:

  “Bunker. There. See it?”

  Staring hard he shook his head: relaxed then and swung his head slowly back and forth, and did see it—a narrow horizontal bar, blacker than black, broken by foliage. Then he saw another behind it and to the right, and what he thought was still another, stepped back to the left.

  There was death. Well echeloned. Watching him calmly, perhaps. Perhaps not. He nodded, studying the emplacements, the lay of the land. The oppression and fatigue that had burdened him back at the CP, after the conference with Westy, was gone; he felt alert, all his senses alive, ready for anything that might arise. The immediate area—the relatively open approach, the slight rise toward the bunkers, was beautifully covered. But there was a declivity, a sort of trench that ran across the front of the nearest one and then curved back at an angle between it and the one to the right. Could a squad get in there? Would a solid volume of covering fire enable them t
o work their way between the two and flank them? It looked possible. And what would be behind them? two more? twenty-two? An M1 opened up—slam, slam, slam: shocking detonations that racketed and reechoed through the jungle. Then silence again. Some triggery bastard. Didn’t they know better than to give away their positions with rifle fire like that? Shapes shifted and rearranged themselves. He conferred briefly with Bowcher and they worked their way along the little draw, which was filled with detritus and the spines of creepers. He was conscious of the presence of the nearest bunker, immediately to his right now, like a thumb on the nape of his neck. Mosquitoes whined savagely against his face and eyes; he resisted the desire to slap at them, rubbed his cheek against his shoulder. A huge mango tree loomed ahead of them, an all-arching black mass, as if holding up the harsh wall of the forest. Something—an insect, a tiny lizard—raced over his wrist and pattered on the leaves. Sweat was streaming down his cheeks and behind his ears. Moving forward now required a conscious effort of will. Bowcher’s pauses were becoming longer: he too was feeling the pressure of moving in unknown land, to the rear of one of the bunkers. But his whisper was perfectly calm:

  “Want to go on?”

  Damon debated. The incessant, unanswerable, maddening dilemma—whether to quit with what you knew or risk it to gain still more. He raised his head, moving his eyes through the savage gloom—and heard, immediately ahead of them, the rhythmic tchnk of an entrenching tool: a thick, dull sound, methodical. He let it decide him, put his lips to Bowcher’s ear.

  “No. Seen enough. Let’s go.”

  With infinite care he turned and started back. He felt curiously depressed now, weary and inadequate. Sweat soaked his face and stung his eyes. The air, this close to the earth, was weighty and foul, like some descending gas. He was seized with impatience to get back to the CP, find out what Ben had encountered, if anything else had come in, and fought against the tendency to hurry. There was so much to do, and no time to do it. Something scurried minutely in the brush ahead of him, and he waited and then moved on, taking his weight on his hands and elbows and knees. Far off, in Wilhelm’s sector, he heard a mortar shell explode, followed by two more.

  He reached the edge of the draw, worked his way past the two stumps, the oval bush, and waited for Bowcher to come up beside him. He felt unutterably tired—he wanted the Sergeant to lead going back to the outpost. The prospect of creeping back down into the stinking water of that swamp, gripping the slimy black tentacles of the roots, filled him with revulsion. He waited, thinking of nothing, while Bowcher moved up on his left side; wiped the mosquitoes and the sweat from his forehead and cheeks with his hand.

  When he opened his eyes again there was a man. Standing in front of him, not eight feet away, an earthen gray against the darkness. He almost gasped. Bowcher’s fingers, resting on his thigh, had gripped him in a convulsion. He could not move. While he stared at this apparition, transfixed, his throat swollen unbearably, the man raised his arms and stretched, arching his back like a cat, and released a deep, low sigh; then began to flex his legs, raising them against his chest and then lowering them, his footfalls scarcely audible. And now, mingled with the stench of the swamp, was the acrid odor of sweat and urine and something denser, like sour wine and woodsmoke. Damon gazed at him stupidly, filled with alarm. Where had he come from? There had been no sound of cloth brushing against bushes or bark, or the crisp rhythm of foot-steps. It was as though he had dropped from the sky …

  The Japanese stretched again, a kind of luxuriant indolence in the simple movement. He was stretching because he’d been confined. Perched in a tree? He was bareheaded, a solidly built boy with short, thick arms—Damon could all at once see him more clearly; he had no weapon in his hands. Damon started to reach back for his pistol, put his hand on the hilt of his knife instead. He would have to kill him—quietly. If not, all hell would break loose. They might make it by running back, they might not. Probably not. Or they could wait here and see what the sniper did. It seemed impossible that he wouldn’t see Damon in another second. He eased the knife out of its stiff new sheath and brought it up beside his face. Bowcher’s hand had relaxed and gone away—probably to his own knife or pistol; but the Sergeant was waiting to see what he would do. What would he do? It was crazy to crouch here like this, waiting for him to turn, spot them, scream an alarm—

  Something tapped the visor of his utility cap, then his knuckles. Tensed for the act he started—realized in the very next instant what it was. Rain again. Spattering now on his hands, his back, the great damp pliant leaves above and around him. Rain. Within five seconds it had swollen to a slashing downpour, sweeping over him in chill washing waves that cut off sight and sound in its burdensome roaring, smashing on the dense vegetation like the blows from a thousand flails. He was soaked to the skin, and wildly shivering. He wiped his face against his sleeve and looked up. The Japanese was gone. He had vanished, just as quickly. He could not have run, could not have climbed. Then—then he had gone down. Spider hole. He lived all day in a spider trap near this oval bush, and came out at night to stretch. What a war …

  He could have laughed with relief. When you gonna come again, rain? Shot with luck. So far.

  He swung his head near Bowcher’s. “He’s gone. Let’s move out. You lead.” They crept swiftly away through the seething thunder of the rain.

  The dugout had that intolerable stink the Japanese always seemed to impregnate everything with: like rotting fish and roasted chestnuts and ether and untended urinals. They would never get it out of the place no matter what they did. Feltner put his head down, trying not to breathe. He felt light-headed, a trifle dizzy, and wondered idly if he was getting malaria. Nearly everyone else had. People came and went, Colonel Damon kept cranking the field phone and talking to various people and Feltner tried to hold his mind on the operation but it kept skittering away, taking refuge in snatches of reverie or reminiscence. The worst of it was they were all tired now, worn down; it was nothing like the early days when they’d first got here. God, it seemed like twenty years …

  Watts was gazing at him again—that adenoidal stare, mouth open; and Feltner looked away, scowling. It was awful, waiting like this for things to get going. But when they got going it was worse. It was a choice of perfectly insufferable evils. Of all the places he could be right now, he had to be in the hottest, filthiest, most dangerous place in the whole lousy globe. Well, one of the most dangerous. Russia was worse, probably; or some parts of China—if you were a Chinese. But that was all. Was it chance, the plain luck of the draw, as Ross said—or was there some grand design that had brought him here from California, from Georgia, from Philadelphia; from the somber, hushed offices of Llanfear and Watrous? He could still be there—it seemed impossible this morning, but he could—adding up the long, neat columns of figures, taking masses of unrelated data and translating them into the precise tabulation of a corporate entity, in black and white: balanced, functioning, present-and-accounted-for. The Army had appealed to him originally for this very reason; his marriage had foundered, he was weary of Philadelphia, and there was an uncle in the Inspector General’s department whom he saw infrequently, and whose life and manner gave forceful evidence of the service as a world of order and precision, of strict accountability. It took him two months to discover he’d mistaken symbol for actuality: he was appalled by the waste and inefficiency of the peacetime Army.

  But war! War overturned all the counters. In war you took a relatively organized, relatively precise and accountable instrument and watched it disintegrate into a hash of disastrous fragments before your very eyes. It was hideous. Equipment—valuable, expensive equipment—was lost or thrown away, supplies never arrived as planned, men melted away—on stretchers or under ponchos or, worst of all, were reported missing in action. Units lost contact with one another, supply dumps went up in roaring infernos or rotted in the muck and tropic sun, nobody knew half the time where anything was; and the more one struggled to cope with this avalanche
of spendthrift heedlessness and chaos the worse it got …

  “—yes, along the creek,” Colonel Damon was speaking into the phone, his eyes roving idly around the dugout. “Just get as far down there as you can. That little knoll, what we talked about. Flank it if you can, get in behind it and take it out of there—it’s key. Yes, I know. Keep right on top of them, now, Benjy. Right. Right. Good luck, boy.”

  Feltner watched him as he rang up Third Battalion, issuing orders, his voice perfectly casual. Once Damon caught his eye, and winked; sweat hung in a greasy gob at the point of his chin, dripping on his trousers, and his fatigue jacket was darkly stained across the shoulders. He’d come in from that patrol at quarter of three, soaked to the bone and shivering; then he and Krisler had been in a huddle for half an hour or more, then he’d been on the phone to Colonel Wilhelm and then he’d gone up to the line companies. At five thirty he’d come back into the CP and said: “I’m going to take ten. Wake me if anything comes up,” and had lain down on Caylor’s field cot and gone sound asleep, had waked in ten minutes to the dot and swung his feet to the floor, wanting to know if the grenades had got up yet.

  Feltner sighed, waiting, clasping and unclasping his hands and watching the regimental commander. He could never be like that. Never. MacFarlane had been quick, tearing around and shouting at people; but Damon acted as if it were an exercise back at Beyliss. Which it wasn’t. It damned well wasn’t. Less than a minute now. He could hear men moving past the dugout—the rustle and chink of armed men walking. There was no talk, no laughter.