Once an Eagle

  The rain let up again, to a soft murmur, and again he could hear the distant, ponderous thump of artillery. He stretched, and rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. The essence of leadership was an unerring ability to winnow the essential from the trivial or extraneous. Fine. But it wasn’t that simple. In the terrible, impromptu colloquy that was war the essential could melt away, the trivial could translate itself into the desperately crucial with a rush. If Thiemann should disapprove the amphib operation; if the hospital should be hit by a whole flight of Bettys; if Prince Hal should repair to his tent and sulk for several days; if that Japanese convoy should turn about in the night and race east-northeast for Cape Sopi or slip through Morotai Strait and be standing off Cape Gamtjaka tomorrow noon—what then?

  Christ, he was tired. Two kids in Swede Lund’s battalion had got killed souvenir hunting in a cave on the Ridge. He’d have to get out a good stern general order on that, threaten any violators with loss of pay or some such. It wouldn’t stop the incorrigible ones like Jackson (who was said to possess three samurai swords, a hara-kiri knife, several battle flags and a Belt of a Thousand Stitches, not to mention innumerable pistols, bayonets and officers’ caps his squad kept to barter for beer with the amphibious engineers—or, if an opportunity presented itself, for liquor with the pilots back at Wokai); but it might check some of the feckless and unwary. This cave crawling had to stop, and pronto.

  And he had to write that letter about young Phelps. Jimmy Hoyt had already written the boy’s parents, but he wanted to add a note. A thin, willowy, rather flat-chested boy with horn-rimmed spectacles and a diffident, mystified air: the last man he’d have believed could have led a platoon well, let alone anything beyond that. Looking at him you thought inexorably of Sunday afternoon concerts, or garden parties where proud and gracious aunts in large hats sipped tea and turned indulgently toward a pale, gangling boy in pinafore and knickers—and your heart sank. Diedrich had told Hoyt that Phelps was capable, a good leader, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything: platoon sergeants often had their own reasons for saying things like that—with a pliant, unassertive officer a sergeant could run a platoon his own way. There had been nothing whatever to indicate that Cecil B. Phelps, 2nd Lt. AUS, at the critical moment of the fighting for Tobaloor Village, would order covering fire and climb up on the roof of the commissioner’s residence, tear off a quantity of tiles and throw grenades down on the defending Japanese garrison until he was wounded through the chest and shoulder; that he would then rally his platoon and go forward, flushing the enemy out of two pillboxes until killed by intense fire from a supporting bunker. Like Tim, he thought quietly; another Timmy Brewster. Cecil B. Phelps was one of the principal reasons they had taken Tobaloor; he was one of the principal reasons Tojo wasn’t going to get away with his Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Damon had recommended the boy for a Congressional Medal; but the letter was more important. Rolling the pencil between his hands he remembered old Jumbo Kintzelman on the range back at Early. “The good Lord made some men big and He made some men small. And then He gave us gunpowder as the big equalizer. Now don’t any of you rookies forget that, hear?”

  Well, it was an equalizer, all right …

  There was the thick, sucking sound of field shoes slopping through the mud outside, and a low exchange of voices; and Damon felt a quick, anticipatory lightness at his heart, a stealthy guilt. God, I’d welcome a sick crocodile tonight, he thought. Just anybody at all.

  There was a fumbling at the blackout curtain, and a voice said tentatively: “General?”

  “Come in.”

  The inner flap was raised and dropped, and a figure slid inside and stood there. Ben, ponchoed, his helmet shoved forward over his eyes, streaming water from every fold.

  “Benjy.” He felt hugely, inordinately pleased. “Come on in and hunker down by the fire. How’s everything?”

  “Just bloody puddle-wonderful.” The Colonel pulled off the poncho and dropped it with a wet thwack on the earth floor. He was wearing a .45 in a shoulder holster, and an indescribably dirty gas mask container was hanging on his left hip. “What the hell are you doing up at this hour?”

  “Communing with myself.”

  “Dizzy bastard.” Ben flopped into a chair. “Boy, I’m telling you I ever lash down a deal like you’ve got I’m going to flake out like old Shafter down at Siboney in ’98. Sunk deep in a hammock with a mint julep in one hand and a palm-leaf fan in the other. And a couple of dusky maidens to tend to my every want.”

  “Sounds pretty fine.” Damon watched the Regimental Commander a moment. He’s got something on his mind or he wouldn’t have stopped by at this time of night, he thought. All at once he felt vaguely depressed. “Only trouble is,” he said aloud, “you’re in the wrong war for that kind of fun and games, dad.”

  “Isn’t it the truth? I ought to have been with Marlborough, or Charles XII of Sweden. The Boy King. Living off the fat of the land, with a great big long baggage train of booze and women and gold coins.” His lean, bony face cracked in a ferocious grin. “Maybe I was. Georgie Patton says he was a legionary with Caesar and a Knight Hospitaller and one of Napoleon’s marshals and God knows what else. Believes it implicitly.”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “Know something curious about these preincarnations of Georgie’s? He’s always an officer. He’s never some poor son of a bitch carrying a spear or sweating his left ventricle off at the wheel of a twenty-pounder cannon.”

  “Blood will tell.”

  “Sort of nice when you can pick your slots, isn’t it? Jesus, can you see him now—tearing around the Sicilian countryside, all swaddled up in history? Syracuse, and Robert Guiscard, and Hannibal? Soldiers! Forty centuries look down upon you … Frenchy says Mac wrote him from Licata every day’s a witches’ Sabbath: Georgie’s got a whole caravan of limousines and they go wheeling around, bells ringing, sirens wailing, lights flashing … Can you imagine when he gets to Rome? All that glawahr …” He glowered at the tent wall. “I know he’s a tanker and a frigging tactical genius and all that—only now and then I just wish they’d shipped him out here among the snakes and fuzzy-wuzzies: he’d have gone right out of his medieval Miniver Cheevy mind.”

  He pulled off his helmet and set it beside his chair. He had picked up an undiagnosed tropical rash all over his scalp, and Weintraub had decided to treat it like impetigo, shaving off his hair and smearing his head with a deep blue dye; he looked weird and irascible, and ten years older than he had when they’d lifted up over San Francisco Bay that smoky morning twenty-two months ago. He’s angry, Damon thought, he’s really upset about something. It isn’t like him to beat around the bush this way.

  “What’s on your mind, Ben?” he said. “Anything you want to look at again, go over?”

  The Colonel’s eyes shot up to his, shot away. “What? No. We’re ready. There isn’t all the room in the world down there for staging, but we’ve got it worked out. Gene was screaming about how we were all going to get knee-mortared to death but I got him simmered down. That lad has a positive obsession about knee mortars. Do you suppose there’s anything Freudian there? I told Dutch we ought to come up with a penile rocket—you know, you fire from the hip, so to speak.”

  “How’s he look?”

  “Who?”

  “Dutch.”

  “Well. Okay.” That reticence again. “I don’t know. He’s pretty tired, I guess. Is it true Oom Paul wants him back at Corps?”

  “Yes.”

  “You going to let him go?”

  “Sure. I don’t want to stand in his way. He’ll get a star out of it.”

  “We’re going to miss him.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  “I guess he could use the rest. I guess we all could.” Ben glanced warily at the Division Commander. “They’re all over your ass, aren’t they, Sam? Dauntless Doug wants us to be in Manila Bay by tomorrow night, I suppose.”

  Damon leaned forward, hands on his knees. ?
??Ben, you can say it. This attack order: aren’t you satisfied with it? Don’t you feel it can go?”

  “Yes, sir. I do.” Then he turned facetious again. “Pierce and destroy, envelop one wing, cut the enemy’s lines of communication. The grand tactics of the Corsican, all rolled into one. I’d have hollered if I didn’t.”

  “How do the boys feel?”

  “They’re wet and they’re weary. But they’re up for it. I was talking to them earlier. They know they can break it open. We’ve got the momentum this time.” He started to scrub his scalp with his knuckles, remembered just in time and dropped his hand. “If only Dutch’s people make a good push over on the left, tie down as many of the bastards as they can …”

  “They will. I’ll have Winnie over there goosing them.” He looked at the map; the sense of disquietude, of untraceable anxiety licked at him like the passage of a snake’s scales. What was wrong? What the hell was wrong with the plan? Ben’s homely, blue-smeared head was a comfort; he felt a warm little hum of affection for this cantankerous, irrepressible man he’d known so long, endured so much with, who was dearer to him than any man living—and then the affection too mingled with the fear, became submerged by it.

  “You’ll—be careful now,” he said suddenly. “With this one. Won’t you, Ben?” The Wolverine looked a bit startled and he dropped his gaze and clapped his hands together. “I mean, don’t try to win it all by yourself …” I’m getting to sound like Westy, he thought hollowly. All full of forebodings and solicitude.

  There was a pause while the rain picked up again, thundering. Ben fiddled with his belt buckle, picking at the mud caked around the brass. “Listen to it rain, will you. There isn’t this much water in the whole world …” Abruptly he reached into the gas-mask container, rummaged around among socks and K rations and tropical chocolate bars and bore patches and drew out a bottle of Ballantine’s. “How’s about a drink, Chief? It’s on me.”

  Damon stared at him. This was as unlike Ben as he’d ever seen him. Does he think I’m coming apart? he wondered with a start of panic—thrust away the thought. “Where’d you get that?” he said, for the sake of saying something.

  “Been toting it around. One of Hallie’s employers in the Ministry or whatever it is. Going-away present. See? Seal’s never been broken.”

  “God stone the crows,” Damon said; but Ben did not smile. “Just what are we celebrating?”

  “Nothing. Everything. Georgie Patton’s reincarnation as Hasdrubal the Hairy.” He pulled a tin cup out of the gas-mask container. “Come on, Chief. Don’t be a dingo.”

  He didn’t know what to say. He reached up and took his own canteen cup off the top of the desk and extended it. Ben poured freely, the liquor a bright orange against the metal. “Hey, that’s plenty,” he protested. He lowered the cup and said in a kind of bantering defiance: “You think I need it?”

  Ben looked back at him steadily. “Everybody out here needs it … You’re tired, Sam,” he said after a moment. “You’re keyed up all the time—you’re wound up too tight. You need to relax.”

  “Yeah but look, Ben, I got a thousand—”

  “Don’t be such a plaster saint!” Krisler burst out sharply—then gave a slow, deferential grin. “I’m telling you, I won’t offer it twice.”

  Damon shrugged and grinned back. “It’s your booze.”

  “You’re a bricking-A. Here’s to ’em.”

  The aluminum lips clicked dully. “To the Salamanders.”

  “To the Scrofulous Saurians.”

  It went down like dense smoke, very dry and bright; Damon shivered, then felt the slow warmth in his guts. All right: he was too keyed up. Maybe. Probably. Who in Christ’s name wouldn’t be? What alternative was there—except putting on your hat and climbing aboard the next B-25 back to Wokai? Well, at least it wasn’t the operation Ben was concerned about; and it wasn’t Hallie. What the hell. He sipped at the Scotch, glancing now and then at the situation map and listening indifferently to Ben, who was running on about a kid in Bowcher’s company named Muldoon.

  “… they’re learning. But Jesus, it can give you the jumps every now and then. He was guarding the CP just before dark down at the Taro Patch and all of a sudden this dogface comes out of the boondocks in spanking new fatigues singing ‘Don’t Get Around Much Any More.’ Muldoon told me: ‘I couldn’t see his stupid face but I said to myself, “Buddy, you ain’t getting around much anymore at all,” and I pushed off the safety. He started hollering, “Don’t shoot, buddy!”—well, I wasn’t having any of that crap and I blasted him good.’ Turned out it was a Nip loaded down with grenades like a Christmas tree. ‘But Doon,’ I asked him, ‘—if you couldn’t see his face and he was speaking perfect English, how did you know it was a Jap?’ He said, ‘Colonel, anybody in this hell hole with a monkey suit that clean is either a Slopey or a rear-area commando. And not even a rear-area commando is going to be featuring split-toed shoes … ’” A lizard dropped from the tent roof and fell on Ben’s sleeve and crouched there, his tail a slender green whip. “Cute little bastards, aren’t they? Except when they get in your coffee or your shoes. I put out a regimental special order: Any GI who injures a gecko draws three weeks’ company punishment. They went for it big. Did I tell you what Jackson said to Bill Bowcher when we laid on that mortar barrage two nights ago?”

  “Ben,” Damon said gently. “Ben.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Ben, what’s on your mind?”

  The Colonel gave him a sudden, very sharp glance and looked down. “Sam, you want to take a drink.”

  “Look, I just—”

  “I mean a good stiff one. Right now.”

  The cup was polished smooth and bright from many scaldings, and had a little lump at the lip. He felt a cold hollow thrust under his heart. “What is it?” he asked.

  “Sam, you want to hold on to yourself. A little. I’ve got some rough news … Rusty just got a TWX from Pearl. Relayed from DC. And—and to DC from the ETO, Sam … ” His face held a fierce, pleading look. “Sam: it’s kind of bad.”

  There was a heel print on the earth floor. With a raised ridge across its center. His heel print. That meant the heel of one of his shoes had been cut by something.

  He said in a whisper, “—Donny?”

  Ben nodded. “Over Pfalzmund. The big raid.”

  “… It’s confirmed.”

  “The plane caught fire, lost a wing. No chutes.”

  He set the cup down on the field desk; picked it up and took a long drink, set it down again. He nodded. “Okay.”

  “… Jesus, Sam. I wouldn’t have had it happen for the world.”

  “That’s okay.” Tommy, he thought; oh my God, Tommy. “Does she know?” he asked.

  Ben shook his head. “Nobody but you. Fats Hebert sent it on from the Eighth … I’m sorry, Sam. Jesus, I’m sorry.”

  “That’s all right. Thanks.” He was standing up. He hadn’t realized he had got to his feet.

  Ben got up and splashed some more whiskey into Damon’s cup, banged the cork into the bottle with the heel of his hand and jammed it back in the gas-mask carrier. For a moment he stood there awkwardly, hands at his sides. “Sam, I’d give everything I own not to have to tell you that.” He bent over and struggled into his poncho, clapped his helmet on his head. “Sam …”

  The lamp was flickering wildly, flaring and sinking: it needed to be pumped up. He felt numb, without breath or blood or feeling. He looked at Ben, whose face was twisted absurdly. “Oh Jesus,” he breathed. “Oh, dear Jesus.”

  “Sam: you want me to hang around?”

  He shook his head. “No. I’ll be all right in a while. I’ll see you at seven.”

  “Right.” Ben gazed at him a moment longer—all at once grabbed him by the shoulders, a fierce, hard embrace; let go and ducked out of the tent. Damon heard him talking with the security detail. Then the voices died away altogether and the rain started to roar again.

  He sat down. My boy is dead. The
re was no reality to the thought. He couldn’t grasp it, take hold of it somehow. He was without a son. It would take some getting used to. After all these years.

  Well: that was what war meant. Killing. The killing of men. If anyone should know, he should.

  He went over to his cot and pulling an ammunition box out from under it took out a folder and began to run through Donny’s letters until he got to the one he wanted, the one the boy had apparently written just before his first mission.

  … I remember what you said about being afraid. Back at Garfield, the time Brand was in the stockade. Remember? I don’t think I’ll make a very good soldier myself. Not your kind of soldier, anyway. I know I think too much, worry too much about things. But I’ll do the best I can, and maybe it’ll be good enough. It’s got to be good enough, because we must win this war. We must and we’re going to.

  But I’m not going to war for the reasons you did. I’m going so that there will be an end to war, to militarism, to tyranny—so that there will never again be situations that will breed starved and diseased and desperate men—like those people we used to see on Luzon. You say it’s impossible (I can see you sitting there saying it), there will always be wars for the reason that men are what they are—greedy and self-indulgent and power-hungry. I say it IS possible, that man can and must change, and that it must come now. And if we have to give up some of our sacred prides and prejudices, if we have to do with less in the way of material comforts, if we must live lives of real austerity and sacrifice in the world to come, so be it. So be it, I say. Let it come. The German pilot who will shoot at me believes in his country, right or wrong, too—else why would he be up there, risking his life? I believe his country is wrong: but what if one day the objective truth of the matter is that my country is wrong? What then?