The hand released him, and the sergeant was there, hands on his shoulders, a happy grin, a flood of words through stinking breath. The sounds engulfed him, and Adams glanced around, beyond the small roped-off square, saw hands in the air. A hundred Marines were standing, wild eyes and wide smiles, cheers and shouts, all directed at him. He began to feel his fists relaxing, the agony of desperately tired arms, sniffed through blood in his nose. He tried to escape the sergeant’s breath, looked for his victim, saw him sitting slumped on a short-legged stool, tended to by a corpsman. Adams pushed that way, through the arms of the sergeant, saw the beaten man staring down, still unseeing. Adams stopped, nothing to say, saw blood on a towel, another corpsman coming through the ropes, words … broken jaw.
He felt a hard slap on his back, the sergeant pulling him toward the ropes. Adams stopped, resisted the man’s grip, looked out at the Marines, not as much cheering, their attention drawn away to the next pair of fighters. He saw them coming up close to the ring, towels on their heads, the boxing gloves laced up, ready, the next act in the show. Adams tried to feel the joy, victory, but the dull soreness in his arms was taking over, the blood clogging his nose. He bent low, the sergeant helping him through the ropes, stepped down off the plywood, the single step to the steel of the deck, a towel now wrapping his shoulders.
“Nice job, kid. Like to see you take on Halligan next. Thinks he’s a tough guy. You can loosen a few teeth in that big damn mouth.”
Adams looked toward the sergeant, saw confidence, businesslike, and then a corpsman was there, cotton in the man’s hand.
“Hold still, Private. Let me get you cleaned up.”
Adams didn’t protest, felt the sergeant working on his hands, removing the boxing gloves, while the corpsman stuck something into Adams’s nose, cleaning out the blood.
“There. You breathe okay?”
Adams pulled air through his nose, nodded, and the corpsman was gone as quickly as he had come. Behind Adams, a voice came from the ring, the lieutenant, the names of the next pair of fighters.
“All right ladies, simmer down. Next bout. From Greenville, South Carolina …”
Adams stared out across the deck, the open sea, the sun low on the horizon, salt spray in the air. Above him sailors lined the railings, more of the audience, men staying close to their anti-aircraft guns. Higher up he saw faces on the bridge, but only a few. The men running this ship had better things to do than watch Marines on the deck below beating the hell out of each other.
To one side, Adams saw another ship, like this one, moving on a parallel course, more ships beyond. He wanted to stay on the deck, loved the open air, the ships, but the wet towel around his shoulders was growing heavy, cold, and a chill ran through him. He moved through a hatchway into a short corridor, saw a single sailor coming toward him, passing by, a quick glance.
“You win?”
“Yeah. KO.”
“Figures. Marines.”
The man moved away, and Adams flexed his tired arms, took a long deep breath. He could hear the cheers behind him, the new fight beginning, and one part of his brain wanted to watch, but his legs wouldn’t move any other way but down, the exhaustion complete. As he moved farther into the ship, the smells returned, grease and paint and the stink of diesel fumes. He thought now of the shower, one minute of blessed hot water, and then his bunk, his quarters, the tight squeeze with forty other men. But there would be space for him, someone making way, a show of respect coming even from the men who had stayed below, who cared nothing for boxing. They knew his name now, knew he had proven something they all wanted to prove, that he was a tough son of a bitch. He passed another sailor, the man ignoring him, and Adams saw the ladder, leading below, felt for the railing with a stiff hand. He started down, gingerly, tired legs, thought, yep. KO. Another one. I’ll be damned.
The boxing was a ritual, something Adams had needed. He felt it the moment he arrived at the Marine base at Guadalcanal, after he endured the automatic look of disgust on the faces of the men who had never left the islands, who had weathered all those bloody storms against the Japanese. He had wanted to tell them, all of them, that he was not new, not a green idiot, that if it hadn’t been for some ridiculous disease, he never would have left them, would never have been shipped home. Adams was desperate for a way back in, a way to prove that to the men who barely remembered him. It was the sergeant, Ferucci, who had opened the door. Ferucci was a tough goon of a man, who came from the hard streets of Jersey City. He knew something of boxing, what he called the sweet science, had talked long and often of Joe Louis and Max Schmeling and Jack Dempsey and Jack Johnson, and the message to Adams was clear. He had missed out on so many of the Marines’great fights, and so he would make fights of his own. He would put on the gloves, stand in front of whatever fool felt the same need, and the better fighter would bloody the other into submission. In eight bouts, Clay Adams had been the better fighter. He had been afraid at first, but his desire was too great, erasing that part of his brain that spewed out all that annoying common sense. He refused to understand what a man’s fist might actually do to your face, that some of these Marines might actually enjoy hurting him, and worse, they might be damn good at it. As the sergeant trained him, Adams had asked all those questions, what it felt like, but Ferucci was wise enough not to answer them. So Adams stepped through the ropes with no idea how much it could hurt to be knocked out, if it hurt at all. And until he saw it for himself, he had no idea that another man’s teeth could end up around his own feet. But Adams’s teeth were still intact. He had surprised the sergeant, and himself, by his smooth talent for slipping away from the fists. And, to both men’s surprise, Adams had another talent as well, the coordination you can’t teach, the instinct for dropping a thunderous shot into a man’s jaw with a perfect right hand. He had knocked out every man he had faced, but unlike the animal cheering that came from the Marines in his audience, Adams felt no special joy in drawing another man’s blood, or watching the man’s eyes roll up into a frightening oblivion. It was never about victory, as much as it was about being one of them, being accepted back into the Twenty-second Regiment. Whatever he had to prove when he had returned from San Diego, he had done a pretty good job of it. In a few short weeks back on Guadalcanal, no one in the unit confused him with one of those replacements.
He had spent too many months stateside, and when Ferucci and the others accepted that he was in fact one of their own, he could finally join in the general displays of disgust for the replacements that had come with him. They sailed to the islands full of that mindless spirit that had been driven into them at the Marine training centers, and once he joined them on the transport ship, Adams quickly learned to avoid them. He could identify them as soon as they spoke, all the talk of adventure and conquest, how they were oh so eager to face the Japs, so much asinine talk from men who had no idea what kind of adventure they were headed for. But the transport carried veterans as well, and Adams felt the same guilt that infected so many of those men, mostly the wounded who had been shipped stateside for recovery and recuperation. Not all of the men from the hospitals would return, of course, many of them too damaged, Purple Hearts and a train ticket home. And not all the veterans who were shipped back out on the transports were as eager to rejoin their units as Adams was. Some had seen too much already, had recovered from what they had hoped were million-dollar wounds that would get them out of the fight. But the Marine Corps’s nasty secret was that they were losing men at such an alarming rate that the training camps could not keep up with the gaps in the line. If a wounded man had healed well enough to fight again, he would. There was griping about that at first, men who dared to show the fear, who had no desire to go back out there, who believed they had already done their share. No one had patience for that kind of talk, and certainly none of the officers. Most of the veterans passed their time in silence, or occupied their thoughts with poker and dice and letter writing, anything that would keep their thoughts away from what
they had seen and done, and what they might be asked to do again. They tended to keep separate from the replacements, and Adams had done the same, trying to avoid the idiotic talk. But there was one hitch to the camaraderie he shared with the veterans, a fear he carried every day. He wondered if they knew, if anyone could see through the hard glare he tried to show them, that it all might be counterfeit. Adams had not actually been in a fight, had never fired his rifle, never even seen a Japanese soldier. In early 1944, when the Twenty-second moved ashore through the ring of islands called Eniwetok, Adams had already been chewed up and spit back to San Diego by a disease he had never heard of.
It was called filariasis, and an enormous number of Marines had been afflicted with the parasite from their first days on whatever tropical wasteland they had been ordered to land. Adams had been one of the first in his unit to suffer the awful misery of what some had begun to call elephant disease. More properly, the doctors knew that filariasis could cause elephantiasis, and might not be curable at all if it stayed in a man’s body for any length of time. As a result, the medical staffs took the disease seriously. Adams had been pulled off the line in Samoa, hauled by transport ship back to San Diego, and to his groaning dismay, he had been confined to the naval hospital there for nearly four months. When the disease was explained to him in detail, his griping about abandoning his buddies was replaced by something else: abject terror. The risk that the disease would bring on elephantiasis might have inspired jokes among those who had never suffered from it, since the most grotesque symptoms included greatly enlarged body parts, most notably a man’s genitals. The jokes had been obvious and crude, but Adams had seen the photographs, offered indiscreetly by a drunk corpsman, who thought it might be funny to shock the afflicted Marines with the potential horror of what they had contracted.
But the doctors in San Diego had done their work well, and after suffering through an extended recuperation period, he had been assigned to an office, faced with the horror that all his Marine training had gone to one good use: He would excel as a file clerk.
The men who shared his purgatory knew very well what was happening to the Marines in their own units far out in the Pacific. No one could keep hidden the carnage that had spread across so many islands, names now familiar to every Marine. To the wounded, those names had come back to them in nightmares they could not escape, jungle and swamp and jagged coral reefs, shrapnel and machine guns, places where a friend had gone down, or where the captain or the sergeant had led their platoon into annihilation. Adams had escaped it all, but the guilt of not being there caused nightmares as well. The letters had come, one in particular, from his captain, that Adams’s close friend, a tall mosquito of a man everyone called Bug-eye, had been killed on the rocky coral reefs at Eniwetok. Word of the man’s death had been unreal, a strange joke, but the joke was never funny, and as he shuffled the papers in the nameless office within sight of the vast ocean, Adams had grown more angry and more guilty by the day.
By now every one of the Marines who had been held back on the mainland knew that even in victory, the Marines had been gutted in battle after battle. Most of the assaults had been amphibious landings, the newsreels in American theaters displaying with patriotic pride the grand show of landing craft swarming ashore in so many obscure places, places where the Japanese waited, places that someone at the top had labeled important. Adams heard the talk from the hospital beds, some of it loud and stupid, the men who begged to go back out there, to join the party, killing Japs as though it were a bird shoot. There had always been that kind of talk, through boot camp, through training in San Diego, more training on Guadalcanal. There, in September 1944, the Twenty-second Regiment had been assigned as part of a brand-new Marine division, the Sixth, created from what some in the other divisions thought to be dregs, leftovers, the crippled and shot-up remains of other units. But the brass knew differently and made sure the men who formed this new combat unit knew it as well. The Sixth was commanded by a fire-breathing dragon, General Lemuel Shepherd, who had organized the various ground troops and engineers, the corpsmen and tankers, into a solid fighting force, and had done it on Guadalcanal by re-creating what could only be called another boot camp. The training had been fierce and brutal, especially for veterans of the combat regiments who thought they had already faced their worst challenge from the enemy. Shepherd had been a hero at Belleau Wood in the First World War, earning medals before most of his command had been born, but having a hero at the top didn’t stop their griping. Even the officers who carried out Shepherd’s orders had begun to wonder if the general’s pride was going to brutalize these men far beyond what they could expect from the Japanese.
By the time the rigorous retraining had concluded, the officers knew what Shepherd had already known, that this new division would put up the best fight the Marines could offer. There were rivalries, of course, the other Marine divisions always certain that they were the best, the toughest, the most feared by the Japanese. The brass ignored most of that, focused instead on where all of this angry spirit could best be used. By late 1944 the planning had been complete, the bases established primarily on Guadalcanal and Guam. As the War Department’s two-prong strategy ripped away the island bases from the grip of the enemy, what men in Washington knew only as pins on a map, the Marine and army divisions had suffered in horrific and costly battles. Every month brought some new plan, another invasion, another beach, another jungle. Individually, the regiments that now formed the Sixth had been engaged in fights that began with the disastrous defeat at Corregidor in 1942, right up through the conquest of Guam two years later. But since the summer of 1944, the Sixth had been the focus of General Shepherd’s intense training, all units brought up to full fighting strength, rested and refitted for yet another campaign. While they did their work at the base on Guadalcanal, other Marine divisions had continued the fight across the islands, the most recent the bloodletting on Iwo Jima, the fight that the newsreels were already trumpeting as America’s most heroic success. But the Sixth was continuing to strengthen and prepare, receiving an influx of veterans from some of the earlier campaigns, men who had crossed the beaches at Peleliu and Saipan. Throughout the entire Corps, new recruits were being sprinkled into the veteran regiments so that no commander would have to lead completely green troops into battle. On paper the Sixth might be a brand-new division, but they carried too many veterans to ever be labeled untested. Only the commanders knew what that test would be.
Adams had joined the Corps shortly after Pearl Harbor, had spent what seemed to him to be an eternity in the training bases stateside before his opportunity had come to sail westward. The indignity of the filariasis had been more than a health scare. Adams carried a kind of pride that only a few of the men around him would understand. He was the youngest of two, his brother serving in the army as a paratroop sergeant. Jesse was older, and in Clay’s mind, tougher. When Clay announced to his brother that he had joined the Marines, Jesse seemed to understand even then that the younger brother had something to prove, to make up for all the fistfights, all the youthful bullying that Jesse had been called upon to prevent. In the mining town of Silver City, New Mexico, a man was defined by his toughness, and Clay had not been the biggest or the strongest, not in school, and not in his own home. Their father was a vicious brute of a man, who hated life and struck back at his own misery by striking first at his sons. When Clay enlisted and announced to his parents that he wanted to go to war, his father’s response had been an uncaring shrug, no ceremony, no pride. Neither Clay nor his brother had been surprised. Far more difficult for both boys had been the tearful wrath of a terrified mother, the woman who had stood as much ground as her frail spirit would allow, absorbing the endless abuse from the man she had married. Clay had never shaken that from his mind: one awful night after dinner, his proud announcement that he had enlisted to be a Marine, and his mother’s response, a shocking surprise, this quiet-suffering, soulful woman exploding with angry tears. Clay still didn’t
understand that, the furious attack aimed at her youngest son. To the eighteen-year-old, it had seemed grotesquely unfair that his mother would expect her precious boys to stay close at hand, and that just by leaving, he was abandoning her to a life she could not escape alone. Jesse had been as supportive of Clay as any older brother could be, had stood between Clay and his mother with calm assurances that everything would be fine, that the Marines would do Clay some good, teach him to be a man, teach him to be a better man than her own husband. And so Clay had had no second thoughts, had made his escape, had taken the train westward to San Diego. He could not know that within months, Jesse would fight that same battle again, this time for himself. Clay had wondered if it had been worse for his older brother, if Jesse had been infected even more strongly by the guilt of abandoning the family. It was a horrifying dream to realize that his mother expected either of her boys to stay in that horrific place, to be her family, sacrificing any boyhood dreams only to work in the copper mine, destined to mimic the suffering and the decay of their father.
But his mother had finally softened, and within weeks of his enlistment, her letters began to reach him. The first piece of news was that Jesse would go to Europe, would jump out of airplanes, and later, Clay learned only that his older brother had quickly risen to sergeant in the new Eighty-second Airborne Division. Clay had been amazed by that, but then, he knew his brother would have something to prove as well, would have to accomplish anything that would prevent him from sinking back into their father’s life in the copper mines. Clay had wanted to hear all about that, the whole idea of jumping out of airplanes not only wondrous but utterly insane. But there could be no letters directly between them from a world apart, just the tidbits of news his mother would pass along. It came mostly in a trickle of sadness, but Jesse was at least alive, had fought through the campaigns in Sicily and then Normandy. As Clay labored in the clean white offices of San Diego, there had been a glint of sunlight in one of her letters, a cheerful announcement that Jesse was coming home, the paratrooper’s war over. But Clay did not want to write to his brother, not yet, not while he endured the embarrassment of sleeping on white sheets in soft beds. Once free of the hospital, the office work had drained him of his dignity. The daily routine had seemed to be designed to inflict a more agonizing death on an eager Marine than any enemy weapon could. Clay could never admit to his brother what his duty had become, and so he lied about it by not writing at all. He had the perfect excuse of every Marine who toiled in some godforsaken jungle, or on some atoll that no one could find on a map. Mail was chancy at best, letters requiring long weeks to reach their destination, if they arrived at all. For months Clay kept silent from his own family, ashamed that he had failed to do what his brother had done, to fight the good fight, to earn his stripes. Certainly there would be the secrets the paratrooper would never share with his mother, the stark horror of all that he had seen, how many of the enemy he had killed, how many friends were lost. If there was a hot spear in Clay’s back, driving him out beyond his recuperation and his soft bed, it was that. He wanted to be that kind of warrior, sharing those stories with his brother, comparing the different enemies, the fears and miseries and triumphs, a link the two of them could have for the rest of their lives. He knew that their shared respect would be a perfect shield against the fury of their father, and give solace to the woman who only wanted her sons to survive, to return, to be her pride in a home where pride had long disappeared.