Once an Eagle

  “Line gone?” Brand asked.

  He nodded. “De Luca,” he said, “get on CROSSBOW wave length and stay with it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  It was very clear now, the burgeoning roar of battle, the hellish, orchestrated cacophony whose every effect he knew so well: sweeping nearer. A forest fire, bearing down, preparing to burn them all. He began to walk back and forth across the tent’s entrance. What would Murasse do? He could consolidate his gain and make a holding action of it. He could swing west below Fotgon and try to roll up Frenchy and release pressure on the airstrip. He could run back west along the highway and hit Swanson in force and clear his own escape hatch to the north.

  Or he could keep right on coming down the alley for the beachhead. Full commitment, Ben had said. Of course you could always be mistaken—in combat three hundred men could look like an army corps. But Ben wouldn’t be wrong about that. And what was he going to say Frenchy had better do? refuse his flank? pull out? attack toward Fanegayan?

  They were all watching him, a ring of faces—fearful, impatient, angry, confused. Waiting. The way he had waited in other days. Waiting for the word that would deliver them all from this new menace, deliver them from death and maiming. For him to act, quickly and correctly, in the face of onrushing catastrophe. Standing there, one hand gripped in the other, sweating, silent, swept with remorse and the sense of betrayal, half-stunned with the awful realization that a gaping hole half a mile wide existed where his beloved 477th had been only a few hours ago, a hole through which the Japanese could even now be pouring, that he had no patrols or communications net to warn him of the movements of what could be the better part of three enemy divisions, and no appreciable reserves to contain a major attack when it did fall upon him—standing at the entrance to the Operations tent thinking all this, he felt the terrible weight of absolute power and responsibility. He must do it—and he must be right the first time. There would not be another chance.

  Which way would Murasse go?

  He found himself staring at the G-2 tent where under the rolled flaps Dan Hanida was interrogating a prisoner. He was one of the few Japanese who had been captured, and he had been taken unconscious; a superior private from the 39th Division. Odd—he’d been wounded in almost exactly the same way Ben had on Lolobiti: a bullet had traveled the length of his arm. His closely cropped head was thrust forward, he was watching his interrogator with an almost myopic intensity. Hanida asked him something and he nodded and said, “Haee.” Hanida spoke again and the prisoner looked back coldly and scowled, then burst into a little torrent of speech. Damon caught the phrase yamato damashi. Unconquerable, unreckoning will. Well, they had that to burn, all right. Dan smiled softly and spoke still again, and this time the Japanese stared at the intelligence officer blankly, in silence. Hanida handed him something to eat, perhaps a piece of tropical chocolate; the Japanese prisoner made a short, quick bow, seized the food almost fearfully and began to eat with desperate ardor, throwing it about in his mouth like a hound chewing.

  Damon turned. Murasse would go for the beach. For the supplies stacked in tiers under the palms, the angular mountains of rations and ammunition and medical supplies. Cut off from these things for days, he would sacrifice anything to reach them. It was not sound tactics—what he should do was turn on Swanson full force, drive him back on Dalomo and withdraw toward Reina Blanca and the north with the mountains on his left flank. But the lure of the beachhead would be too great: hungry, harassed, desperate, he would not be able to resist it. Perhaps he had already given up hope of withdrawal, perhaps—as with Toyada on Wokai—it had never really entered his mind. Yamato damashi. If he could reach the beach he would shoot up the LSTs and smaller craft, burn what he could not use, and either run down into Tanag Peninsula or fall back into the parched and unprofitable ground toward Kalao. It would mean abandoning the airstrip, but he would risk that: they had no planes left anyway, and denying the Americans the use of the strip would count as nothing beside the possible destruction of the principal beachhead. It would also mean splitting their forces and abandoning Ochikubo’s people at the airstrip to the nutcracker between Swanson and Frenchy, and that didn’t make sense from a tactical standpoint. Would Murasse merely feint here and then drive back on Fotgon, into the hole left by Frenchy’s sideslip right, and fall on Swanny’s flank?

  No. There were the transports: his people would have seen them rounding Facpi Point, heading north—he may even have got word of the landing at Dalomo Bay. There were Japanese dressed in Filipino clothing moving around everywhere. Murasse would know he was stripped of reserves, and he would feel his own avenue of withdrawal to Reina Blanca and North Point was about to be blocked.

  He went back to his field chair and got his belt and helmet and field glasses, while their eyes followed him. “Bob,” he said to Spaulding, “round them up.”

  “Sir?”

  “Everybody. Communications people, QM, clerks, cooks and bakers. Strip all rear echelon outfits. We’re going to need everybody—and I mean everybody. You have my authority to sweep it out.” He moved over to the map. “We’re going to set up a line here, at Umatoc, right above Grassy Hollow.”

  Little Feltner was looking at him in amazement. “But Chief, what about the Regiment—aren’t we going up there?”

  “Out of the question. We’ve got troubles of our own. Dick, tell Frenchy to break off his attack and push northeast on Fanegayan with everything he’s got.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m going on up there and get set up. Dick, I want you to hold the fort. Set up a line back here at Ilig, on the high ground, just ahead of the bivouac area, blocking the trail.”

  “Right, General.”

  He looked around the room. Their faces expressed apprehension, uncertainty, disbelief: he was the nerveless, flint-hearted son of a bitch, leaving the Regiment to its fate. Well, that didn’t matter. But this other thing did.

  “They’re going to try to come right through here,” he said sternly. “Right down the trail. And we’re going to stop them. No excuses, no holding back, understand? We’re going to make them pay for every yard.” They watched him—grave and troubled. He had to get them up for this. He smiled grimly at them. “I’ll tell you one thing: if they are ever lucky enough to reach the beach, there won’t be enough of them left to get up a ball game.”

  A rose-and-orange light that glowed softly under the canopy of trees; the tips of the cogon grass swayed weakly, rippling, and figures bent and straightened, hacking at the rich, moist earth. Up ahead a machine gun spoke its short, heavy piece. Dod dod dod. And from Babuyan shells climbed overhead in pulsing, dying-away freight-train cadences and exploded thunderously. Then the silence came back. Damon walked among the foxholes, now and then stopping to talk, thinking, It’ll be dark soon; quite soon now. A swarthy man with a black growth of beard called, “What you say, Damon?” Rossini, he remembered. From Worcester, Massachusetts. A cook striking for mess sergeant. He smiled.

  “All set, Rossini?”

  “You bet your life.”

  “That’s the pitch.” Farther on, two men from recon setting up a light caliber thirty. Speer, a quartermaster officer talking to three signals men about grenades. The tropic day slipping toward dusk: the foliage looked lighter than the sky now, more lambent, as though the world had been turned neatly upside down. He moved along, checking gun positions, fields of fire. A boy was watching him. In the onrushing dusk his face, foreshortened, with its deep, large eyes, reminded him of Donny. A replacement; he didn’t know his name.

  “How you making out, son?”

  “Okay, sir. I guess.” The boy paused, glanced apprehensively at the adjoining foxholes. “I’ve never”—he paused again—“I’ve never been in combat before.”

  “Everybody’s got to start sometime.”

  “I guess so.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Norris, sir. Private, 1371408.”

  “Sure. You’ll do a
ll right.” Damon knelt by his hole. “You’ll do fine. Just keep squeezing them off when you get the word. Did you open a couple of flaps?”

  “Flaps?”

  “Sure. On your belt. So you can get at your clips quicker if you need them. Like this, see?”

  “Oh. Yes. I see.” The boy grinned shyly. “Gee, I never thought of that.”

  He patted him on the shoulder and moved along. It was like the night at Brigny. All over again. He was going along the line checking, reassuring, joking, half a world and a quarter of a century away, in the face of an attacking enemy. That had been his first battle. How curious to come back to this. There was nothing else to do now. His dispositions had been made. Frenchy was moving his gang over as fast as he could to plug some of the hole; all his reserves were committed; he had called for naval gunfire and air strikes, brought up ammunition and chow and strung a few strands of wire. If he had guessed wrong, there would be a disaster and the entire island campaign would be in deep jeopardy; if he had guessed correctly, a lot of these boys digging in and cleaning weapons around him in the deep, roseate light would be killed. And he had guessed correctly: he knew it. Now there was nothing to do but wait, and move around like this, to show some frightened GIs a two-star general wasn’t too good to put his ass on the line with the rest of them.

  “Hey, when are the Nips coming, General?” a fat, jovial company clerk named Heffinglarner called out in his soft Alabama drawl.

  Damon peered ostentatiously at his watch. “They’ll be on the seven forty-eight, I believe. If it’s on time.”

  “By Judas, we’ll derail the bastards …”

  “You’re telling me.”

  Abruptly, like the falling of a dusty mantle, it was deep twilight: the faces around him faded into pale blurs, flat and indistinguishable.

  “You better get into your hole, General,” someone said, “or find you a neon sign, one. Somebody’s liable to mistake you for a Jap and shoot you square in the ass.”

  “Anybody shoots me in the ass will get reduced two grades,” he told them solemnly.

  This sent several of them into fits and another voice called: “What you going to do about me? I’m a buck-ass p-v-t as it stands …”

  The silence was like a weight you tried to push to one side, only to find it had shifted with your effort—a gas-filled bag that swelled and compressed in eerie patterns. There was no moon. In the partial clearing beyond the perimeter—Pritchard could hear it now, unmistakably, in spite of the sporadic firing south of Fanegayan—was the rhythmic rustling of figures crawling through jungle. He glanced at Damon, but the General, who was standing up in the big Command Post hole beside Major Scholes, made no sound or sign. Pritchard brushed the mosquitoes from his face irritably; he could feel his heart beating. They were out there in that black wall. They were coming. At Lolobiti he had taken over a platoon that had lost its officer and noncoms and had handled it with some competence; but this was different. Until dark he had been running errands for the General, helping string wire along the riverbank on their left, organizing and deploying this Coxey’s army, and then on the telephone, taking reports on the progress of elements of the 484th hurrying to plug the gap west of the Kalahe. But there had been no time to do anything right. That was the trouble with war—there was never enough time for what you had to do …

  Beside him Brand murmured softly, “Staging, Chief.”

  “Not yet,” the General answered. “Not for a little while.”

  Pritchard kept peering at Damon’s face, though he could see nothing at all beyond the tall, blocklike form solid against the patterned murk of jungle. In a tight. They were in a tight, now. He’d been with the General long enough to know he was worried—under the free-and-easy manner there was a terse, tight-lipped constraint in Damon beyond anything he’d noticed before, even on Lolo. Several holes away someone was digging softly—short, jabbing strokes: probably cutting a shelf for grenades and spare clips.

  Three men had come into the line just before dark, a corporal and two privates from Bowcher’s battalion—had sprawled on the ground, sitting and lying in the apathetic, head-lolling attitudes of utter exhaustion. Two of them were wounded, and while the medics worked on them they answered the General’s queries in brief, monosyllabic phrases. The first they knew was when knee mortars began dropping into them from the right and rear. Then the Nambus opened up and all of a sudden they were everywhere. Martin was killed. Ainoura was killed. They fell back, tried to set up a line, fell back again. By that time they’d been broken up into isolate clots of men, out of communication, out of ammo. Later they had slipped away, hunting for the outfit, anybody. But there had only been the dead.

  The corporal, a thin, narrow-shouldered man with dark wavy hair, leaned back against a tree trunk. “I want to tell you boys,” he muttered. “It was one hell of a shit storm up there.”

  Damon said, “Did you see Krisler? or Colonel Ross?”

  The corporal shook his head wearily. “Breger said Krisler was killed. Mortar burst.”

  The Old Man’s face barely moved. “Are you sure of that?”

  “No, General. I ain’t sure of anything at all. I ain’t even sure I’m here.”

  “Well, I am,” one of the privates, a short, blond boy named Budjany, said. “And by Jesus, I’m staying here.”

  “You want to stay with us?” Damon asked him. “In the line?”

  “You’re a fuckin-A,” Budjany answered tightly. “They killed my bunky Tommy Speier, I been with him since basic. I saw him get it and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. I ain’t through with them, I’ll tell you that.” He was holding his wounded arm close against his side, but his eyes in the fitful flashlight glow were black and hard. “Give me a couple bandoleers.” He was out there now on the left, in charge of an anomalous detail of permanent KPs and clerks. The corporal, who had been hit in the back, had gone off down the trail toward—

  “—Hey, you guys …”

  The voice was high and tense, words hissed from the jungle depths before them. Pritchard had started violently. There was a rippling click of safeties pressed forward to the off position all over the perimeter.

  “Hey, are you there?” the voice went on, thin with urgency. “You guys—?”

  “Lorelei,” someone called.

  “Look, I don’t know the God damn password—”

  “Who are you?” Pritchard recognized First Sergeant Lattimer’s voice in one of the forward holes.

  “We’re from Bowcher’s battalion. There’s five of us. Let us come in, will you?”

  Sergeant Lattimer called back toward the CP hole, “How about a flare at eleven o’clock?” and Pritchard picked up a flare shell.

  “Christ, no—no flares. There’s Japs all around us. Look, we got a wounded guy with us. Just hold your fire …”

  “Who are you?” Lattimer called softly.

  “Rodriguez, Lou Rodriguez …” Then quickly, angrily: “What the hell difference does it make who I am? For Christ sake, let us come on in, now. We’ve had a rough time up there …”

  “Okay,” Lattimer answered. “Come ahead.”

  There was a hurried, stealthy rustling, and the empty ration cans and rifle clips on the strands of wire tinkled merrily, like distant off-key cowbells.

  “Fire.”

  Pritchard turned in amazement. Damon had his hand on the shoulder of the machine gunner at the leading edge of the hole. “Open fire.”

  The gunner’s helmet swung around. “What? But look, they’re—”

  Damon jabbed the gunner smartly in the neck. “Do as I say!”

  The gun jumped, a blast of blue flame half a foot long leaped from the muzzle in a sudden, stunning roar, and tracers floated like eerie orange balls into the night. Pritchard heard the thunk of a flare shell hitting the bottom of the tube, as the General moved. He gazed front. The Old Man’s cracked up, he thought with sudden horror, he’s blown his top. Someone was screaming, “Hold your fire, you stupid bastards??
?!” Then the flare burst with a sharp crack, in a wild diffusion of light that made his eyeballs smart. He saw a flurry of commotion at the wire: two figures lay on the ground, another was holding his head, and a voice was screaming in Japanese—quick, explosive syllables that made no sense. Rifles were roaring now, two more were down, the last man flitted away, a wild, scarecrow wraith, into the sea of vines. Then the machine gun stopped, and the rifle fire fell away to a chorus of voices calling, “Cease firing! Cease firing …”

  “Trick,” the General was saying crisply. “Couldn’t know Rodriguez has called himself Tico for years. Hates his first name.”

  “I see,” Pritchard answered shakily. The suddenness of the incident, the utterly unforeseen turn of events, and now the return of silence and darkness, had left him jangled, half out of breath. Still, there was something that bothered him. “But if he used Rodriguez’ name—and Major Bowcher’s—”

  “Yes. That’s right.” Damon’s voice was completely without inflection.

  The perimeter was bathed in quiet again. One of the Japanese was moaning softly. Pritchard stood there with the flare in his hand. Oh the bastards, he murmured, half-aloud. The rotten bastards—to pull a trick like that, take advantage of a man that way … Again he heard the thick, deliberate sibilance of men moving. They were coming forward again, in the filthy dark they loved so, the jungle was crawling with them. He felt his head and shoulders shiver once, uncontrollably. With the death of the flare all his vision had deserted him; he could see nothing but gray splotches drifting and sinking in a black field. He rubbed his eyes. The air was close and foul; the odor of earth and damp rot and offal sank into the base of his nose and lodged there. Mosquitoes kept bumping against his cheeks and forehead. By Christ, he wasn’t going to be late with a flare next time, he’d have the place looking like Broadway, he’d keep a—

  “Hello, Yankee Doodle.”