Once an Eagle

  “What’s on your mind, Ray?” Damon was watching him—a funny glance: faintly mournful, faintly amused.

  “Nothing, sir. Just—waiting.”

  “Yes, there’s always plenty of that, isn’t there? Well, your troubles will be over in a few seconds.” At that moment off toward the airstrip there was a clatter like faulty engines without mufflers, and firing began, rising to a martellato fury, punctuated with deep, even detonations like the bass drum in a percussion section, and the Colonel said: “Didn’t I tell you? Here we go.” Standing up he buckled on his cartridge belt, picked up his ’03 and went out of the dugout.

  Feltner followed him outside into the glare; the ground was spongy and slick from the rain. The Colonel was standing easily, his arm against the trunk of a tree, watching the green figures move forward through the bush, their helmets smooth and dark against the verdure. Damon said something to him and he tried to listen, hating the intrusive force of the gunfire, which had increased. He had learned to identify them—the taut bark of the M1’s, the higher whine of the Arisaka rifle, the heavy dod-dod-dod of the machine guns, the dense cough of grenades—he could pick them out: it was the aggregate that overwhelmed him. It was impossible to think with any clarity while something like this was going on. Firing rose to a rolling bellow of sound, and now the Japanese machine guns began, the Nambus—a hysterical shuttling clamor that pressed at his eardrums. Against his will he saw Boretz on the ground the first day, writhing and rolling, his hands to his head, uttering sharp, yelping screams—drove the image away with a tremor of impatience, his eyes narrowed against the uproar. He must keep his mind clear, he must—

  “They’re not moving,” the Colonel was saying.

  It was true: they’d all hit the dirt. There wasn’t a helmet to be seen. It was going to be like the other times, then. The weight of the past six weeks settled over him. The Japanese had everything—an unlimited amount of ammunition, the higher ground, hundreds of bombproof fortifications, you could never see them—

  “Let’s go,” Damon was saying.

  He looked around, startled. “Sir?”

  “You don’t think we’re going to hang around here, do you?” The Colonel’s face looked all at once very hard and blocklike: a younger, tougher man. “Come on, let’s go up and earn our pay for a while.” And he started walking forward briskly, his rifle held loosely in his right hand, his head down. For a moment Feltner thought of his father, walking ahead of him through the stubble, hunting, out in the Poconos. Unslinging his submachine gun he called to Watts and Everill, and hurried after him, toward the Nambus, which sounded much louder. Grasses, leaves slapped wetly against his leggings, the dizziness seemed worse, and his eyes hurt—shifting them caused quick little flashes of pain. How far was Damon going? What were they going to do? If the troops were pinned down—

  A soldier was running toward them, bareheaded, wild-eyed, one hand in the air. Feltner remembered him vaguely, couldn’t recall his name. Oh Christ, he thought. Of all the moments. Of all the times! The Old Man’ll ream him out, and then me and everybody else in sight. At least he’d hung onto his rifle; that was something.

  But instead the Colonel smiled. “What’s the matter, son?” he asked cheerily.

  The soldier—Phillips! That was his name, Phillips: good—had stopped in dismay, panting. He swung his free arm backward wildly. “The Japs—!” he cried, over the guns’ clamor. “There’s thousands of ’em …”

  “You’re sure of that?” Damon had come up to Phillips and now paused briefly, confronting him.

  “—they’re charging—all over the place! We got to have reinforcements, we can’t stop ’em—”

  “Aw, I don’t believe it …”

  The Colonel’s tone was so relaxed, so deft a balance between sarcasm and casual, matter-of-fact rejoinder that Phillips gaped at him, then began to grin foolishly. For the first time he seemed aware of Damon’s rank.

  “—For Christ sake,” he laughed shakily. With the ebbing of his panic he felt empty, a bit resentful. “I tell you, there’s a million of ’em out there, Colonel …”

  “Well, let’s go see,” Damon said, his voice now just a shade peremptory. “Come on, now.” He pushed on by. Phillips started to say something more; then he caught sight of Feltner and his mouth came together.

  “Phillips,” Feltner told him sharply, “you get hold of yourself now. Cut that out.”

  “Yes, sir.” Phillips wheeled around all at once and fell in beside him, even got in step, which irritated Feltner beyond all bounds. He had a fierce desire to roar at the private, threaten him with all manner of dire punishment—then an equally intense impulse to laugh. His face felt tight and smarting, as though he had poison ivy, and it was hard to breathe. This was going to be difficult—to keep walking like this toward the dry, frenetic hammering, the snap and drone in the foliage above their heads.

  “Colonel—” he said sharply.

  Damon turned. “Yes?”

  “Hadn’t you better take those eagles off?”

  The Colonel shook his head. “Boys don’t know me yet, most of them.”

  “General Westerfeldt has issued strict orders—”

  “I know. Better this way.”

  Jesus Christ, Feltner thought; he stumbled on a root and almost went to his knees. The Nambus were firing in short bursts now, like hundreds of vindictive old women in a terrible quarrel. Bits of leaf kept falling here and there around them. It was like a dream, strolling along this way—but an evil one. This was going to be bad. End badly. If they kept walking forward like this, through the still, oily water, if they just kept walking—

  They were among the assault platoons now—he was aware of men crouching under shrubs, behind fallen trees, in water-filled holes. It frightened him more looking down at them; he felt guilty and angry and foolish all at once. One winter afternoon when he’d been nine or ten he’d been walking carefully along the top of a brick wall and several schoolmates had started throwing snowballs at him and laughing; now, here, he felt the same burgeoning fear and sense of betrayal, the desperate need to lie down, get away, make it be over.

  “Come on, boys,” the Colonel was saying in that calm, invocatory, obdurate tone that seemed to make walking along upright like this both a trivial whim and the gravest obligation of man to man. How could he talk like that—! “Just over that little hump, there. We’ve got to get over there, they’re counting on us today. All of us. Let’s go, now …”

  Their eyes rolled up at him under their helmet rims—a concert of resentment, amazement, distrust. A clear, boyish voice said, “Who’s that?” But the Colonel paid no attention, talked on, moving through them, the chin strap of his helmet swinging against his jaw. “Come on now, boys, we can’t stay here and let them down, you know that …”

  A machine gun opened up suddenly, savagely near, and tracers burned like thick orange wires into the bushes ten feet away. Feltner found himself on the ground, gripping it, breathing through his teeth; he had no recollection of leaving his feet. Just above his head there was a ricochet like a fiddle string snapped. He looked up to see the Colonel still walking back and forth, talking in that impossible conversational tone. A piece of bark chipped away from the ridged elephant hide of a palm not three feet from his face, and the Colonel grinned and cocked his head in that brief little gesture Feltner remembered his father using with other workmen in the packing plant back in Trenton. “Look at that,” he was saying out loud. “Pitiful. Couldn’t shoot in China, couldn’t shoot on Luzon, still can’t hit a God damn thing, here in New Guinea …” He put his hands on his hips and faced two men directly. “Come on now, boys. What do you say? Just up to that little rise. Who’s coming with me?”

  And as though that near-miss had released him, a thin, sallow-faced soldier got to his feet, then two more, one of them a sergeant named Prince, who turned and started shouting at them, waving them up; and then there were a dozen or more, hurrying, pumping their rifles across their bodies.
They were up. They were moving.

  “That’s it,” the Colonel was calling now, swinging his arm like a track coach waving his runners along, “that’s it, now you’ve got it, let’s roll, now …” and then, fiercely: “Let’s take ’em!—” A man went down with a sharp cry but the rest paid no attention; they were all running and throwing themselves down and getting up again, going toward the machine guns, which now formed a solid bar of sound.

  The Colonel had turned to the left, was making his way through vines and plants like octopi, like banana trees gone crazy, threading his way. “I ought to check on Kraus’s gang next. How far are we off the trail, Ray? I wonder if we could come out right next to the—”

  There was the snapping whine of a rifle and a slap like a hand against a thigh, and Archimbeau, the Colonel’s orderly, grunted and started down, sinking in almost dreamy reluctance to his knees. Someone shouted, “Cover! Cover!” The ping-crack came again, and then a ragged burst of firing. Feltner was on his belly under a small bush with great drooping oval leaves. He had no idea where Damon was; he couldn’t see Archimbeau anymore, or Watts. The rifle fired again and there was a whunnnk! right beside his head. He gasped, and jerked his hand back as if it had been burned. Down. The bullets were all going down. Into the ground.

  He looked up, through dizzying layers on overlapping layers of vegetation, squinting with frantic eagerness. There was nothing to see. His heart was pounding unbearably—his whole body quaked with its beating. Behind him somewhere Archimbeau was saying something, or groaning. It was impossible to see—! Still he stared upward, painfully, riding down on his fear with all his might. The nasal slap came again, and he saw—or thought he saw—the most delicately perceptible flicker of movement in the dense canopy of green. He jerked himself to one knee, raised the Tommy gun and fired a burst. The gun’s pneumatic yammer almost stunned him—but at the same time it sponged away his fear. He felt angry, exhilarated, in some crazy way a part of the deafening, racketing weapon, its servant rather than its master: bound in its brutal, shocking, liberating force. He jumped to his feet, darted a few yards to the right, crouched behind a tree and fired again. Then there was silence. Nothing. He wanted to look around, to find Damon, but he didn’t dare shift his gaze.

  … He was conscious of a pacing sound, like the softest of feet advancing through the air—the air!—toward him. The sound went on, no louder, but his fear was gone. He raised the gun calmly, waiting, but the pacing continued, dulcet, oblique, slowing now. A pacing.

  A dripping.

  A branch ahead of him bobbed. Splotches of bright red on the broad spatulate leaves, which danced under the impact. The blood fell in long, glutinous arcs and globules. He gazed at it numbly. It was so incredibly scarlet and slick, lying on the leaves, sliding down in long skeins. It was so red. And now, far up, obscured, a branch rocked with a slow, faltering motion.

  He lowered his eyes. The Colonel, looking at him, gave that quick, crisp nod of his. “Nice work, Ray.”

  Was it? Maybe it was. He didn’t know. He lowered the gun. He had killed a man; unquestionably. Yet he felt none of the things he might have expected to feel—there was neither remorse nor exultancy nor terror; he was conscious only of a weary anger, as though he’d been tried beyond his patience. A savage fusillade came from the left now, and tracers ripped scissoring through the vines. The waste, he thought, the incredible waste of material in this war. Of bullets alone. Then the ludicrous aspect of the thought struck him. He got to his feet. The Colonel was already crouched over Archimbeau, had turned him over.

  “In the chest,” he said. “We’ve got to round up a litter party.”

  “Yes,” he said numbly; he watched Archimbeau’s eyes opening and closing like a sleepy baby’s. His frown, too, was like a baby’s: he seemed neither terrified nor in pain. His lips were moving slowly; Feltner bent down.

  “…You get him, Captain?”

  “Yes—I got him, Archie,” he said tersely. “I got him good. Now take it easy. We’ll get you out of here.”

  They rounded up a minimum stretcher party for Archimbeau, and then went over to First Battalion. Things were no better there. They waded through an evil place where the swamp was black with rot and stagnation, and several bodies, facedown, rocked gently in the little waves they made as they went by. There was a low rise where they lay on their bellies and watched Tom Hurd and a sergeant work their way up within ten feet of a bunker before they both were hit. They were killed instantly, but the Japanese gunners kept hosing them down, and the two bodies quivered and twitched as the torrent of bullets pounded into them. “Oh, the bastards,” he heard himself saying, raging, on the edge of tears, hating all Japanese forever with a hate blacker than the swamp they’d crossed. “Oh, the dirty, butchering bastards …”

  Back at the CP all the news was bad. Colonel Krisler, who had jumped off with Third Battalion, had got down to the Knoll but had been stopped there. The 468th had made it to the edge of the airstrip, and was now under heavy counterattack. Second Battalion was out of communication with How Company. And later, sitting in the foul-smelling dugout eating a K ration tin of pork and egg yolk, Feltner had glanced at his watch in dulled surprise to see that it was nearly two thirty. All those hours. His head ached, and his belly heaved thickly; he felt desolate, fearful, overcome by the malignant power and craft of this enemy who held all the cards, and who knew so well how to play them, one by one.

  “It looks grim, Colonel,” he said.

  “It’s not over.”

  “If we don’t make it, if we can’t break through to the beach with this one—”

  “Then we’ll try something else.”

  “—We’re not even killing any of them …”

  “That’s what they want you to think.” Damon ran his tongue around the edge of his cheek. “They’re dragging back their dead. Didn’t you see the blood on the rifles?”

  “Yes, but our losses—if they get any worse—”

  “Take it easy.” The Colonel’s eyes flickered around the dugout, though they were out of hearing of everyone except Everill, a lineman who was working on the field phone in the corner near them. “Calm,” Damon went on; he smiled his slow, mournful smile, chewing on the K ration. “The higher your rank the calmer you must be. You must instill confidence.” The smile came again. “Even if you don’t always feel it yourself. I’ve seen things in China so bad I didn’t think any of us would get through the next hour. But we did; and they’re still going strong over there.” He wiped his mouth with a big red handkerchief. “Every man—well, almost every man—is afraid. And fear makes for worry, and worry for pessimism. That’s where you come in. You must check it at the source. It’s your job to bespeak confidence, calmness, optimism.”

  Feltner looked at him for a moment. “Then—it’s sort of living a lie, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. If you want to put it that way. But so is all of life. You don’t make the world a present of your innermost thoughts, do you? I’d guess you never told your wife every single thought or emotion or temptation that passed through your mind during a single Sunday afternoon at home. I know I didn’t … Of course it’s absurd, if that’s what you’re thinking. But war is absurd, Ray: war is dishonest, and cruel, and vicious in all its forms. And here we are, sitting at the ass-end of the world, with decisions to make, and a couple thousand kids looking to us for help—for some plan, some move, some miracle that will get them out of this hideous hell and send them home again … ”

  There came a series of deep, dull explosions from over on the left, beyond the Knoll.

  “Mortars,” the Colonel said. “A battle’s like a forest fire, Ray. A big, bad, raging forest fire, out of control. And you’re trying to stop it, you’re in charge. So you get people working here, in this place, get them to face the heat and sparks and battle it—then you move around to check somewhere else and fire some other people up; you try to keep in touch everywhere you can, you encourage, instruct, plead—yes, and threaten if n
ecessary. And at the same time you try to be more vigilant than the fire. And above all you never let anyone see you’re every bit as full of doubts and fears as the lowliest private in the rear rank. That’s your job.” Damon smiled again. “That’s all they’re asking of you.”

  Everill called, “Colonel! WOLVERINE to you …”

  The Colonel was on his feet before Feltner had set down the little green ration tin. “Ben? Sam. They are. In force? All right. All right … ” and Feltner, peering over Damon’s shoulder, could see his fingernail scoring a short arc at the edge of the Knoll below the copra plantation. “All right. Hang on tight, Ben boy. I’ll get you something. Christ knows where or how, but I’ll get you something … ”

  2

  17 Oct 42. Worst day yet. 2 tanks knocked out, remaining 3 bogged down in that excuse for a road. And that-a is that-a. Dutch’s crowd got across west end of the airstrip, then Japs counterattacked in force and he pulled everybody back. Lost nearly everything he’d gained. Why? Was on dry ground (Jesus: DRY GROUND), could have supported them. He is too prudent. There is a time for withdrawing and a time for hanging on to what you can grab: this is time for hanging on. Westy’s pessimism has infected him—they are all succumbing to apprehensions.

  Air strike awful. Really awful. Flight of A-20s came in at treetop level, blasted and strafed How and King. Two BAR men fired back at planes: could not blame them. Six dead, seventeen wounded. So much for Prince Hal and his dead-eye dicks. Granted this terrain is fierce: but there’s Larotai Point and the cove and that sunken maru, not to mention the Grove and the roof of the Mission. There are enough points for reference. Can’t they SEE? or don’t the bastards give a shit?

  One break. One tiny, nervous break. Bowcher got to the sea, on that spit of land between the river and the copra plant or whatever it is. 23 effectives and 1 mg. Got to him at 1530 with LaRocca’s platoon and 2 mgs—best I could do, way things are going. Asked him what he thought. “Hell yes, I’m staying. Feel that frigging ocean breeze!” I said: “Suppose they hit you from both flanks at the same time?” “They won’t: they can’t coordinate their attacks, anyway—their communications are more fouled up than ours.” “I doubt it,” I said. He grinned: his face black as a minstrel show end-man’s. He’ll hold it, all right. He had them dug in in a long horseshoe, with a connecting trench for switching guns. He is TERRIFIC. Told him he was a captain as of right then—thought of Dad and Brigny Farm. He said: “Let’s see how we make out.” He is one cool cookie.