Josh smiled, though it was a sad smile. “Since the Bering Sea. You headed up a marine detachment that came aboard the old Comanche, and I was at the time the lowest ensign on the duty roster. I was told to look after you.” Josh recalled Burr as a young man, climbing eagerly up the gangway to board the cutter in Ketchikan. Burr had been filled with piss and vinegar, like a boy playing war in his brown khakis, leggings, and flat tin helmet. He’d had a big forty-five caliber pistol strapped to his waist. It occurred to Josh that it was probably the same pistol Burr had on his pistol belt now, though it wrapped around a waist that was considerably thicker than during the old days in Alaska.
“I didn’t like you the first time I laid eyes on you, Thurlow, and nothing has changed my mind since,” Burr announced.
Josh put out his hand. “Maybe so, but isn’t it about time you and me made peace?”
“You can just go ahead and put your mitt away because I’ll never shake it. Don’t look at me that way. You know why. You married the woman I loved and then you got her killed. Do you think I could ever forgive you for either of those things?”
Josh lowered his hand. “I guess not. But I loved Naanni, too.”
His reply was a sneer. “Sure you did.”
If you only knew how much, Josh thought, remembering Naanni’s face when she’d looked up at him from their marriage bed. And then, though he tried not to, he also saw her face when it was cold and bloody and as empty of life as the frozen tundra in mid-winter.
“You loved her just as much as you love your present girlfriend, I’m sure,” Burr sniped, then laughed harshly. “The coconut telegraph has been alive with the news that you impregnated the black wife of that cannibal coast-watcher on New Georgia! I wonder what Miss Theodosia Crossan, Killa-keet Island, North Carolina, is going to think about that? Isn’t that her name and address? Why, I suppose anybody could write her a letter, tell her all about what her boyfriend’s been doing out here while she sits home pining away.”
The naval artillery had stopped again and Josh looked toward the battered atoll, the dust settling around it. It was shining bright yellow in the sun. “That ‘anybody’ won’t be you, will it, Montague?”
“Don’t worry, Thurlow. I won’t do it, though God knows somebody should.”
Now came a sudden heavy thumping and the muffled shouts of men behind plated steel. “You boys keep it quiet in there!” a thin voice shrilled, and Josh turned to see a tall, skinny ensign and two sailors pushing against a watertight door. The ensign looked frightened.
Josh could never stand to see a thing caged, neither a raccoon in a roadside zoo or even a bunch of marines on a troop ship. “Let them boys out,” he demanded, advancing on the ensign who looked at Josh with wide eyes.
“Those men are kept inside for a reason,” Burr called over his shoulder from the rail, though he made no move.
“That might be,” Josh muttered, “but it ain’t a good one.” He thrust himself between the sailors and pulled open the door. “You fellas get on out here, get some fresh air.”
He didn’t have to say it twice. A flood of marines, dressed in their smart new camouflage utilities and canvas field packs, fell outside, their sweaty faces raised to the blue sky and breathing deep the first fresh air they’d had in hours. Then they headed for the rail to bask in the cooling breeze and take in the thoroughly pummeled, smoke-shrouded atoll that lay before them. The naval guns boomed again with great claps of thunder, and the shrieks of their rounds flying over, followed by the hollow thumps of explosions on the island, caused the marines to cheer.
“Thanks, Captain Thurlow!” a gunny sarge named Pinker ton called out, then clapped his mouth shut when he saw the scarlet visage of Monkey Burr who looked ready to chew nails. But Burr said nothing and waded through the marines and stomped up the ladder to the bridge.
A young marine slipped up beside Josh. “What’s going to happen today, sir?” he asked. Josh looked at the boy, fuzzy cheeked and wide-eyed beneath his helmet. Two months ago, maybe less, this boy had been in a boot camp in San Diego or Parris Island. Before that, he’d been at his mother’s knee.
“What’s your name, son?”
“Randy Hewatt from Atlanta, Georgia, sir.”
“Drink your water, Randy,” Josh said.
“Sir?”
“Before you go over this rail, fill up with water. Don’t wait until you get thirsty. It’s going to be a hot day, and a long one.”
The youth puzzled over Josh’s advice for a short second, then said, “They say you killed a hundred Japs in one night on the Canal. Pretty damn good for Coast Guard, sir. I hope to get a hundred myself today.”
It hadn’t been a hundred. Twenty, maybe. But, yes, Josh had cut throats that night on Wilton’s Ridge. And the next morning, he’d pulled off his boots and poured a sticky black liquid from them into the mud. It stunk like rotten blood, which it was. “Oh, the glory of it all,” he muttered.
“What was it like, sir? On Guadalcanal?”
“Easier than it’ll be on this sandy spit,” Josh said beneath his breath, too low for the boy to hear. “Drink your water, I said!” he snapped, and lurched off to another position on the rail where he wouldn’t have to look at the dead boy who wasn’t dead yet but was headed in that direction, sure as the tide would fall and the reef before them would rise. He imagined the boy’s mother standing at her door holding a yellow telegram from the Navy Department. The boy’s father was rising from his easy chair, a newspaper in his hand, a quizzical look on his face . . . Josh shook the vision out of his head and tried to think of something else, anything else.
And the clock ticked on. Two battalions of the Second Marines had been in their amtracs and the slab-sided, ramp-dropping Higgins boats for five hours, riding around in circles. Josh suspected the men inside were probably desperate to get off what had turned into a boxy inferno of vomit, urine, gun oil, diesel fumes, and sweat. He had seen that even off Guadalcanal where the landings were mostly unopposed.
Now Josh was surprised to see a line of amtracs and Higgins boats making their way toward the J. Wesley Clayton which had been named after one of President Roosevelt’s financial advisors. The company of infantry aboard her had been designated as part of the reserve. Apparently, someone in the command structure had decided to go ahead and send it in on the first wave. To Josh, this represented the first sign of nervousness by General Smith and his staff. “You’re starting to figure it out, aren’t you?” he whispered, then shook his head. “Too late. Too late.”
There was no planned second wave. The Sixth Marine Regiment was in the troop ships but no one thought it would be necessary to send them in. No one. Every time there was a briefing, the briefing officer always ended with that note. The Sixth Marines were there just in case but no one thought they were necessary. From his voracious reading of history, Josh knew the capricious gods of battle especially loved to spoil the certainty of staff officers.
And then, abruptly, the thunderous naval bombardment once again stopped. On the atoll, the breeze tumbled away the yellow smoke, and beneath the tropical sun, the spit of sand began to glow like a sliver of gold lying atop a vast blue tabletop. It was pretty, Josh thought, postcard pretty. All that was needed were hula girls, their hands making erotic movements of welcome. Come you, marines. Come you, and make love to us.
Josh’s mind flew aloft and looked down at what lay before the invasion fleet. Two miles long, Betio was flat, nothing higher than thirty feet on the entire island. It was shaped like an eel with its head facing west and its limp tail hanging east. The widest part was where the crucial airfield was located, seven hundred yards from beach to beach. Most of the island was barely the width of a football field. The American fleet was aimed at the northern coast of Betio where there was a protected lagoon behind a long reef. It was easy to see why the planners of the assault figured it would take only a morning’s work to seize it.
But Josh had seen General Smith’s detailed topographic map of Bet
io. It showed what was known from numerous aerial photography missions. The Japanese clearly had been working tirelessly for months to prepare for an invasion. Dozens of big coastal artillery pieces, embedded in concrete bunkers, were in place, and the Japanese were famous for being competent artillerymen capable of accurate, rapid fire. There were also long sand embankments stretching across the island. There had been an argument about what those embankments were for. Most of the staff officers felt they were lines of defense. Only a few had determined their true purpose, the absorption or deflection of the pre-invasion artillery rounds.
The map also showed a vast array of steel bar obstacles on and near the beach, designed to snag landing craft. And just back from the beach were an assortment of palm log bunkers, probably used as machine gun nests. Josh had no doubt that snipers were also dispersed across the atoll behind every sand dune and in the tops of palm trees. Betio was, in effect, a hornet’s nest. But the best defense for the Japanese this day, Josh believed, was not anything they had built. It had been provided by the gods of war.
The reef.
Josh mind flew down Betio’s reef. It completely surrounded the atoll, except for the eastern tip of the eel’s tail which led to the shallows between it and the next atoll up named Bairiki. Josh knew reefs, even loved them. They were the protective home of vast numbers of fish, lobsters, crabs, and other sea life. They were alive themselves, the calcidic outer shell of millions upon millions of tiny creatures that came out at night to feed on plankton. When the creatures died, their progeny kept building one on top of the other. The result was a dense wall of layered brain and lettuce corals, jutting pillar corals, sharp staghorn and elkhorn corals, all laid down in a rainbow of colors, all gloriously beautiful and, put together, a formidable barrier.
The plan to assault Betio was to grind over its reef in amtracs which were small boats with tractor treads. But what of the larger Higgins boats following behind? They were nothing but tricked-up plywood barges. When they plowed into the reef . . . Josh pressed his mouth into a tight line of worry. Between the reef and the atoll was a wide, shallow lagoon. A killing ground.
Josh felt vibration in the soles of his brown shoes. The engines of the J. Wesley Clayton were rumbling awake. The old freighter was making headway. He saw the other transports were shifting their positions, too. Sergeant Pinkerton appeared at his side. “Why are we moving?” he wondered.
“The current’s been pushing us away from the beaches all morning,” Josh answered.
“Situation normal, all fucked up,” Pinkerton concluded, wearily.
The transports slogged up-current, the amtracs and Higgins boats chasing them, and the clock kept ticking. Josh looked at his watch and was shocked to see how late it was. The morning was nearly gone and not a single marine had started toward the atoll. “Jap will be coming out of his hole to take a breath and maybe a smoke,” he said, thinking aloud. “If our battlewagons let loose again, they might catch him in the open.”
“Then they’ll do it,” Pinkerton said.
But they didn’t. The battleships Maryland, Tennessee, and Colorado, the heavy and light cruisers, and all the other naval artillery platforms remained silent as gray ghosts. Then, therel A big splash in front of the old Maryland indicated the Japanese shore batteries were not only still alive but capable of challenging the American fleet. Soon, a dozen splashes around the big ships indicated more guns opening up from shore. “Damn!” Pinkerton grunted. “How the hell did them Japs live through all that blasting?”
Josh said nothing, even though he recalled one of old Captain Falcon’s axioms: When you send a man into battle, tell him the truth, especially if the going will be hard. A man should be allowed a certain contemplation of his likely fate.
“You know a lot about stuff,” Pinkerton persisted. “Tell me what you think the situation is so I can get myself and my boys ready.”
After a moment’s reflection, Josh said, “There’s a seawall that runs the length of the beaches. I’ve seen it in aerial photos. It looks to be about three or four feet high and built out of palm logs. My advice is to get yourself and your boys to it as quick as you can.”
“And then what?” Pinkerton demanded.
“Stay alive,” Josh replied. “And fight like hell.”
On the wind now came a wild cheering from the island. It was the Japanese rising up out of their holes. Some of them were yelling, in perfectly understandable English: Come you marine. Today you die!
When some of the marines began to look worried, Sergeant Pinkerton called out to them. “Let ’em yell. They’ll all be dead soon.”
Then there was an ominous fleck of yellow on the sea. Josh raised his binoculars. Just as he feared, a dodging tide was in fulsome retreat and the reef was rising in front of the invasion fleet like a gigantic stone fence.
And still no marines went forward.
Homer Hickam, The Ambassador's Son
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