Once an Eagle

  He went back to the CP in a tumult of rage and frustration. Ben and Feltner and the others were waiting for him in the dugout. They could tell from his face apparently but still Ben said: “How do we stand?”

  “Couldn’t talk him into it. He’s sick. Afraid to try anything now.”

  “How did Koch and Frenchy make out?”

  “No dice. Ran out of gas after gains of thirty to forty yards.”

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  “Oh Jesus is right.”

  “But the stupid bastard—doesn’t he see what the score is?” Ben chipped dried mud from the back of his hand with his thumbnail. “Well God damn it, I know what I’d do if I were you …”

  “Well, you’re not me,” he answered curtly.

  “Check.” Ben handed him a K ration container. “Here—have some of this vitamin-packed dinosaur turd. Keep your strength up.”

  Feltner was listening to this exchange with distress: clearly one did not address a regimental commander in this manner—nor did a regimental commander reply in this manner, either. Damon winked at him, tore open the end of the flat dun carton and shook out the little olive drab tin. Ben was fingering his own carton reflectively. “How many of these you suppose are kicking around in the supply depots? Probably a hundred million of ’em.”

  “Yes, and Tommy’s uncle’s been making most of them, too.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Yep. Erie Container. He’s making millions at it. Millions.”

  “I’m so glad for him.”

  “Yeah. He’ll be a God damn dollar-a-year man next.” There was a certain grisly satisfaction, crouched here spooning this cold, gelatinous hash in a rotting, sweltering, water-logged dugout on the Papuan coast, thinking of Uncle Edgar sitting in his clean, well-lighted office, joking with Headley (Wells Nickerson had died in ’38 of a heart attack), gazing out at the long, windowed façade of the plant, getting on the phone to Somervell, on the phone to Donald Nelson. Back there life was good—full of contracts, and raises, and glowing, limitless horizons …

  Sergeant Chambers came in with a patrol and made a report to Ben, and he watched their faces. They were coming all apart. He knew the signs: the dulled, vacant gaze, the memory lapses, the incoherence, the flashes of unfocused rage; the alarming rise in combat fatigue cases, like the blond kid this afternoon. Cowardice, Traprock Merrick had called it. But too much battle made any man a coward, in time: any man alive. Where did you draw the line? Exhaustion, despair, disintegration of resolve—what difference did it make?

  The phone rang then and Meigs called: “It’s BULL MOOSE, Colonel.”

  He sprang to his feet and picked up the receiver with an exasperated little tremor and said, “BOBCAT here.”

  “Hello, Sam? Dick. You’d better get over here right away. The General’s sick.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “He’s delirious. Nate Weintraub’s over here with him now. He’s running a fever over a hundred and four, he’s completely out of his head. Nate says he’s got both malaria and dengue.” Dickinson’s tart New England voice was hoarse with worry. “I don’t like the look of it, Sam. I want to call a meeting—all regimental and battalion commanders and execs. I think we’d better.”

  Oh Jesus. Another conference! More walla-walla, and confusion, with fear spreading like an oil slick through the whole command. Ben and Feltner and the others were all watching him—a mute, tense expectation that clutched at his bowels. Dickinson was going on about a mortar attack on Frenchy’s lines and he ignored him, gazing back at the faces in the dugout, thinking delirious, fever of a hundred and four—

  “Why Dick, we can’t,” he heard himself saying firmly. “It’s out of the question. We’ve got this crossing to execute. You know all about it, don’t you?”

  “Why, no—what crossing?”

  “The Watubu, here. The General gave it his final okay at fifteen hundred. This afternoon. We jump off at twenty-two thirty. He was going to call me right about now over fire support.”

  “—a night attack?—” “That’s right. He said he was going to issue an attack order to BADGER for the same time, and a diversionary feint by Koch. Didn’t he talk to you?” Feltner was staring at him in horrified amazement; Ben was grinning tightly, his eyes glittering. “Didn’t he talk to you about it, Dick?” he pursued.

  “No—as I say, I got back from seeing Dutch, and Albee came running out and there he was, in a coma. On his cot. I don’t know—there’s some notes on his desk but I can’t—”

  “Don’t worry, Dick,” he broke in. “Hold on tight, now. Look, just take some of this down.” He ran through an attack order, improvising, putting the pieces together, his eyes closed.

  “I don’t think Dutch’s people can do much of anything, Sam,” Dickinson answered worriedly. “And a night attack—”

  “That’s all right. Just tell ’em to make some noise, give ’em the old decoy. If they suck some people over there from the river that’ll help.”

  “But twenty-two thirty … can you be ready by then?”

  “Sure can,” he said briskly. “Been ready for hours. I’m sure we’re going to make it, Dick. Just hold on tight. And you’ll get that sixty ammunition up to us by twenty-one thirty or so, won’t you? I know we’re going to bust it wide open.”

  He handed the phone back to Meigs. All right. Direct disobedience of orders. No, it wasn’t that, actually—it was worse: he was inventing orders, he was arrogating command to himself. Perjury, insubordination—mutiny, for all he knew. All right then. Enough, enough! This pattern of unnecessary butchery had to stop, before they were all dead or down. He’d been a good soldier, the dutiful and obedient subaltern for years and years, and now he was through. With bells. If these kids all around him—bearded, filthy, sick, frightened—could drag themselves forward against the Nambus day on hideous day, he could put his highly checkered career on the line in their behalf. It was little enough.

  “All right,” he said. “You heard the orders. We execute as planned. England expects every man to do his duty.”

  Feltner was speechless. Ben was scrubbing his cropped head furiously with his knuckles. “Jesus Christ, Sam. You went in with both feet, didn’t you?” He nodded. “They’ll brush your ass back to Frisco so fast it’ll smoke all the way.”

  “Probably.”

  His exec laughed soundlessly. “Shoot! You’re just as bad as I am. You like to think you’re a sound, steady, by-the-book type, but you’re not. You’re just another crazy bastard.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Think we’ll get away with it?”

  “We will if Westy stays off his rocker. And if we make it over there.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, that sort of defines the issue, doesn’t it?” Ben stood up, clapped his helmet on his head and shoved it forward over his eyes. “Well: all set for Operation Styx.”

  “—Don’t call it that, Colonel,” Feltner protested.

  Ben winked at him solemnly. “Just whistling my way through the graveyard, kid.”

  The jungle crouched in its threatful silence. Not long now. Ten minutes more. Men would die, soon, because of what he had decided. The hell with that: he wouldn’t think of that. Think of—other things. It ought to work. It was hanging on a shoestring, but it ought to work. It had to. Earlier, he had hooked two grenades through the rings of his pack suspenders and slung his Springfield, called in all available officers and NCOs—there wasn’t time for anything else—and handed it to them straight. “This is not going to be easy. I don’t believe in cheap bromides. But it is our only chance. The fate of every man in the Brigade lies with what we do tonight. That’s why we must make it over there. And we will. That’s all.”

  Firing burst out upstream, at the Narrows, and the sky paled with the glow of a distant flare beyond the forest. He peered forward anxiously. It would alert the posts facing them here, but it was worth the gamble if it drew some support away. He felt as if his head were lifting off: his dizziness, ly
ing out here in the damp dark, was worse. He was coming down with malaria. Yes. His hands were trembling, and his whole body was laved in sweat. He had to stay on his feet. He had to!

  Time was so elastic: it had raced all day, while they rigged the boats with lines, and Pioneer and Demolition brought up logs and planking with slow care. Now it crept with wretched dalliance. The men in the machine-gun emplacement just behind him stirred softly. If the Japanese suspected anything they gave no sign. The reeling, dipping vertigo was worse now, and the nausea. Lights seemed to burst up and down in front of his eyes, and he felt weak as water. He gritted his teeth, locking his hands under his chin. He had asked for this, he’d set this assault in motion, for better or worse—and now he’d better carry it out.

  For no reason at all he thought of Donny. Donny in a school play about Columbus. There had been a scene involving the mutineers, and then Jinny Massengale, who as Queen Isabella was accompanying the mariners through some wild dramatic license, had just told him that he must persevere in his quest, that she believed in him. Left alone on the stage, Donny wrestled with himself—a Hamletesque soliloquy involving much eye-rolling and gesticulation. At this point—it was just before the curtain—Perry Blissman, offstage, shouted, “Land ho!…” And Donny, distraught—Perry in his enthusiasm had hollered his line exactly one scene too early—started violently, then dropped his head in his hands and moved unhappily offstage, to thunderous applause as the curtain fell. All wrong, of course, and the discovery of America, when it did come, was a touch anticlimactic—yet there had been something singularly effective about that moment …

  He looked at his watch. The second hand had begun its darting movement up the left side of the face. Snipping off the seconds, which now began to race again. Five four three two one zero. Behind him he heard the metallic thunk of the mortar shells and a second later, deafening, the machine guns. Their tracers swarmed in violent crossing skeins, festive and terrible, answered by the blue-white flashes from gun muzzles on the far bank. He was on his feet, had seized hold of the rough wood of the banca’s side. They ran it forward into the river: the water went to his waist, his shoulders. He groped his way back, holding on to the outrigger. Men were piling aboard in haste, cursing, bumping one another. But they were getting in. He heard someone call in a clear, even voice, “Roll ’em,” and the craft slipped away from him into the stream, its occupants bent low, paddling furiously.

  “The line,” he shouted, “—who’s got the line?”

  “I’ve got it,” a shadow beside him answered.

  He was seized with a rush of vertigo like fainting, went to one knee.

  “You all right?” a voice said, and then went on quaking in fierce reverberant echoes in the painful core of his brain. —all right? all right? all right? This was bad: he must not let down. The mortars were lashing the other bank in a series of flat, coughing explosions. A flare burst high overhead, a blinding yellow light that made him gasp—and there they were, all six boats, at midstream, water swirling white around the paddles. Machine-gun tracers from the other shore burned into one of the lakatois. He was screaming, “Get him! Get him!” at the top of his lungs.

  Then the flare went out and the distant bank erupted in a madcap roar of gunfire. A flashlight blinked—two and two—and they were pulling on the line with all their might, the lakatoi gliding swiftly back toward them. The roll and crash of firing was like a wall, shutting out sight and sound. A man beside him grunted and fell away, rolling in the brush and mud. The banca bumped against the muck. His turn now. He climbed over the outrigger, gripped the supporting ribs and swung himself aboard, while the others piled in behind him. He leaned forward in the bow, felt the line—taut and dripping.

  “All set,” someone shouted.

  He yanked the light out of a cargo pocket and flashed it. Tracers swam like tiny orange comets near his head and he ducked, steadying himself as the canoe began to move. But slowly. So slowly. Behind him he heard a dull splashing, saw two men lying halfway out of the boat, paddling wildly. Must have found them in the bottom of the boat. He laughed, a feverish cackle—reached forward and seizing the bow line began to haul up on it with all his might. A geyser rose to his left, a faint gray plume, subsided. Knee mortar. Ahead of him he could hear grenades, martellato and deep under the crackle of rifles. They were getting in. Good. Good. He realized he had been holding his breath for a long time—exhaled with a gasp. There was the bank, dead ahead, the little knot of figures pulling. They were there. He leaped out of the banca, fell full length in the mud, got up shakily. The craft was empty, was vanishing again. The other boats were landing for the second time. Mortar shells were dropping in the water now, and on the far bank. He swung to his left, fighting his way through waist-high brush—all at once fell into a hole. His knee hurt, his groin. He was lying on top of a body—a vile, sticky body. Up. He had to get on his feet. He climbed painfully out of the hole and moved along. They had to get the line set up here—the Japanese would be coming downriver soon, they had to hold them or it was all a failure. He turned, but they were moving all around him, ghostly and resolute. He felt a rush of pride so great he thought his heart would burst. They were going to do it. They were going to be all right: he could tell. Someone was shouting commands in a flat, even voice. Who was that? Words. He could hear words like dew falling from high leaves, like pebbles dropping down the deepest well, falling distantly with that soft, slow, ringing plop, and then vanishing. In the ice walls all around. Jesus, what ice walls! He was shaking and murmuring words he couldn’t understand.

  He had collapsed against a tree trunk, his hand on the wrinkled hide of the bark, he was vomiting, gagging and vomiting, and the ground kept tilting and lurching like bristling, greasy surf. He had never in all his life felt so sick. Not even at Malsainterre. Not even at Wu T’ai. Ah God, Wu T’ai. He had to keep going. God, don’t let me crap out, he muttered soundlessly, his teeth chattering. Just that. All I ask.

  With a groan he rose on reedlike stems of legs and went on, retched again, gripping his head in both hands. Lights swelled and faded, faces swept up to him and away, caught inside a curious bubble that was his own body streaming water, boiling, dissolving before his eyes. The next step was Ben. Ben was to lead Baker and Charlie of First Battalion down the meadow. Below Hart’s Island. No. Ben. Too late, the Japanese were waiting just outside the blackout flaps, grinning: they weren’t afraid of their own grenades. Fallen overboard, he was drowning, there wasn’t time—! Lying outside himself this way, a court-martial offense at least and what did they care?—they weren’t going to forgive him for this. Think! The gauze was over his nose, his mouth, he was drowning in his own bodily juices while they held a colloquy over him, the plan. The plan. Was to dismember him, pour his rotting body into several containers of unequal—

  “Colonel. Colonel—”

  A broad, heavy-jawed face, wide-set eyes, black with grime and sweat. A face he knew. Or thought he knew. The eyes glinted brightly. Christ, would it never be day?

  “Colonel, are you hit?”

  “He’s burning up, Wally. Colonel—”

  He had hold of the voice. The voice he knew. The face. He never forgot a name. The dizziness was worse, the sick hot febrile debilitation, but clinging to the voice made a difference. If he could hold on—

  A deadly burst of firing. Nambu. Very close. He was down. Flung down. Lying in a pulpy wet matting that stank of rot and oil and nutmeg. Someone’s arm was over his shoulders. A grenade—a fiery orange flare of light, wild with shadows. Another. And with the thunderous crash of the grenades the hideous bubbling veil began to clear. He was cold, now, entombed in icy conduits that were his bones, but the world was distilling slowly, hesitantly, distant and stark, like coming up out of ether. A fresh world, the edges hard and even. A tangle of fronds and creepers, and Feltner looking at him with alarm. Thank God.

  “Colonel—”

  “The line,” he said. “Are they digging in—?”

  ?
??You all right, Colonel?”

  “Of course I’m all right,” he snapped. His teeth were chattering so badly he couldn’t hold his jaws together, but his mind was clear. Thank God for that: that was all he asked. “Is King digging in along that support line?”

  “Yes. They’re right on the button. Everything’s going great.”

  “Good. Come on.”

  Downstream now the racket was terrific—a rush of small-arms fire that swelled into one vast clamor. “Go on, Ben,” he thought, “tear ’em apart”—realized he must have said it aloud. Feltner was grinning at him, a funny little grimace of relief.

  “We’re going to make it, Colonel! We’re going to do it … ”

  “You bet.”

  Their own perimeter was the key. He hurried up to the line, watched figures bending and recoiling in the dark, their shovels lifting; near him a machine gun squad was setting up, the gunner adjusting the tripod so the traversing dial was level, clamping the legs and stamping the trail shoe into the soft earth, the assistant crouched above him deftly seating the gun’s pintle into its housing, the loader sliding the deep-green ammunition box into line with the feed opening, the brass tag of the belt snapped through swiftly; no fumbling, no mistakes. They’ve learned, he thought with a throb of prideful affection; they’ve learned their trade, they’re soldiers.

  Around them the dark was undergoing a curious change—a subtle, silvery distillation that sifted like powder through the forest. Moonrise. But now it would work for them. He dropped to one knee and put his arm against the trunk of a tree. The land fell away gently, and the trail—the nice, dry Japanese trail they now lay astride—opened into a grove, ghostly gray in the changing dark, with the palms like lazy, graceful feather dusters. Tom Keyes, the King Company captain, swung his arm wide, palm down. The machine guns began firing in short, flat bursts; and now, as moonlight began to tip its way into the grove, Damon could see the silhouettes darting and hear a high, wild cry like an animal in great pain.