Battle Cry (72 page)

“You’re feeling sorry for yourself,” Marion said.

“What’s the matter? Marines can’t feel sorry for themselves? Marines ain’t allowed to get homesick?” Andy shouted.

“Why don’t you let me write you out a T.S. chit and go over and cry on the chaplain’s shoulder,” L.Q. spat.

“Sure, Mac sold us a bill of goods. Everybody is selling us a bill of goods.”

“Go up to Lulu and cry with some of the doggies. They feel sorry for themselves too.”

Danny tossed and clenched his teeth as another pain tore through his body.

“Go on, Mary, tell him something fancy from the goddam books you read.”

“Why don’t you shove off, Andy?”

“Poor bastard. Look at him…you like to see a guy like that cry?”

“Why don’t you grab a ship and go down and play with the Kiwi birds, Andy? I think you’re getting yellow.”

“Stop it, you two,” Marion hissed. “We’re all in the same boat. What were you looking for when you joined the Corps?”

“Yeah, Semper Fidelis, buddy,” Andy snarled and walked from the tent.

For three days they kept a constant watch over the fever-ridden Danny. It seemed as though it would never break. Doc Kyser came up to look at the cases in the Fox camp and removed the less sick to Sarah. As for Danny and other severe cases, he feared the long choppy ride would damage the inflamed, enlarged joints. There was little or nothing known about the virus passed by the flies and mosquitoes.

Danny’s temperature hovered between a hundred and two and a hundred and four. In the cycles when it shot up he went into deliriums, calling over and over for his wife. Each day brought a new sign of wasting of what had once been a strong constitution. The siege of dengue fever all but squashed the listless will of Huxley’s Whores.

The day before Christmas found the battalion in sadder straits than I had ever seen it. The camp on Sarah was like a morgue. Everyone was touchy and even the comics and the cooks who prepared a chow with all the trimmings failed to lessen the bitterness. The men were too bitter to bitch. A Marine bitches when he is happy. Watch out when he’s quiet. Gunner Keats urged me to go up to Fox Company for a few days now that Lighttower and Spanish Joe were back on duty. I was anxious to see Danny and took his offer and set out with the early morning alligator run.

When I landed at the Fox camp, I found it a far cry from the wild stories. It was quiet, too. All about was evidence of the dengue fever epidemic. Any release they had found in their former escapades had been cut off under the stern command of Major Wellman and Marlin.

Sister Mary greeted me like a long-lost father and led me to the radio shack. I entered the tent and dropped my gear. Danny lay with his back to me. I walked to his sack and sat on its edge. The movement of the cot made Danny groan and roll. I was horrified! It had been five weeks since I had seen the lad. He had wasted to a skeleton. His eyes were ringed with thick black circles and his cheekbones protruded from a chalk-colored flesh. A long growth of hair gave his slitty eyes the look of a wild animal. I had known he was sick, but I had no idea it was like this. I wanted to cry.

On the deck lay a stack of neatly tied letters, and pinned to the tent side so he could see it, a picture of Kathy, the picture I had seen a thousand times pinned up in the barracks at Eliot, at McKay, at Russell, aboard the
Bobo
and the
Bell
and the
Jackson,
and always beside him in his foxhole or in his pack.

“Hi, Mac,” Danny whispered.

I leaned close to him so he could hear. “How do you feel?”

“Not so hot.”

Pedro Rojas trudged into the tent and greeted me. Pedro showed the fatigue of working around the clock with the fever-ridden company. “How’s the sick-bay soldier today?” he said, jamming a thermometer into Danny’s mouth and kneeling to inspect the gallon can of fruit juice he had left in the morning. “Dammit, Danny, how you expect to get better? You didn’t drink no juice at all.”

“I…I can’t…it makes me puke.”

“How is he?” I asked.

“The bastard is goldbricking,” Pedro said as he walked out.

I followed him. “What’s the scoop?” I asked.

“Damn if I know, Mac. The fever goes up and down, up and down. The damn kid won’t eat. He hasn’t taken solids in a week.”

“Isn’t there anything Doc Kyser can do?”

Pedro shook his head. “He’d be all right, like the rest of us, if we knew we would ever get home.” He smiled weakly and plodded off to another tent.

Seabags approached me with a messkit full of Christmas dinner: turkey, all white meat; sweet potatoes; cranberry sauce; stuffing; peas; ice cream and a cup of eggnog. “Hi, Mac, when you blow in?”

“I’m up for a couple of days,” I said. “Danny looks like hell.”

“Yeah. Maybe you can help me get him to down some of this chow. He’d be a lot better if he ate.”

“Why don’t you grab my mess gear and get into line? I’ll see if I can feed him.”

I went back into the tent. “Hey, Danny, get a load of this. Turkey and all white meat.”

He rolled away from me. “Look here, you sonofabitch,” I snapped. “You’re going to eat this or I’m going to jam it up your ass.”

He managed a feeble smile. I propped him up and for a tortured two hours prodded him to take nibble after nibble till the mess gear was half empty. Danny finally lay back and asked for a cigarette and patted his belly.

“That was good. I hope I don’t puke it up.”

“You better not or you’re going to have to start all over, I crap you not.”

“I’m sure glad you came up, Mac. Going to take off your pack and stand at ease a while?”

“Yeah, I think I’ll stick around a couple days.”

He gritted his teeth and closed his eyes. “I don’t know Mac…I just don’t know no more.”

I ate the rest of the chow and lit up. Marion, Seabags, and Speedy came back and for a long time we were all pretty quiet. Last year it was in a warehouse on the Wellington docks. This year, in the middle of nowhere. Where would next Christmas bring us? How many of us would still be together? I gazed over the water past the lagoon. It was a big ocean. Every day made the States look farther and farther away. Speedy looked at his guitar but he didn’t feel much like singing.

Then we heard voices; softly at first, then louder and louder. I looked out of the tent up the road. It didn’t sound real. We saw a flicker of candlelight wending down the road and the harmony of the singers sounded like nothing a guy could expect to hear on earth, it was so beautiful:
“Silent night, holy night, All is calm, all is bright….”

The natives from the village appeared with candles in their brown hands, their arms filled with gifts of woven pandanus leaf.

“Sleep in heavenly peace….”
The tired Marines of Fox Company went up the road to greet their friends and arm in arm they entered the camp.

Marion led a young native and an old native into our tent. I was introduced to MacArthur and his father, Alexander the old chief. We shook hands and went over to Danny’s cot. MacArthur put several woven pillows under Danny’s head and said, “Cros Alexander want know why friend Danny no come and see?”

“Sick, very sick,” Marion answered. As MacArthur relayed the message to the chief the old man nodded knowingly and bent down and felt Danny’s back and stomach, making him wince. He placed his wrist on the sick boy’s forehead and finally jabbered an order to MacArthur, who sped back to the village.

Several moments later MacArthur returned panting. He held a cup made from a hollowed coconut husk which contained some yellowish liquid.

“Drink,” MacArthur said.

Danny propped on his elbows and gazed at the stuff. Alexander nodded and with gestures assured him it was quite safe.

“Make feel better, yes no.”

Danny swallowed the stuff with face screwed at the nasty taste and fell back on his cot. He slept.

In a few moments a huge circle of Marines and natives formed in the camp’s center and as darkness fell a fire was made. Then East and West joined voices and sang the Christmas hymns.

With wooden boxes used as drums, the native men began beating rhythmically and the center ring filled with grass-skirted dancers. Everyone clapped in time to the beats as the stately bronze girls flipped and swayed in perfect unison. Then a small girl, shapely and young, took the center and the others drifted to the sidelines. MacArthur explained that she was the “sept dancer,” the representative of Alexander’s clan, an honor that fell only to a direct descendant of the chief. She had been carefully trained in her art since babyhood. The other girls were merely backdrops. With a wad of gum going in her mouth she began her dance with very slow hip gyrations. The young lady must have surely been tutored by Salome, I thought. As the clapping generated steam she flung off her brassière so as not to cramp her style. She glided around the circle’s edge, her feet moving as if she were on skates and her hips swinging tauntingly. She swayed back to the center and as the drums beat faster and faster it looked as if she would take off in ten directions at the same time.

“This is dance of chicken,” MacArthur whispered.

Wiggling her shoulders, she began a fierce controlled shake that set her breasts shivering. She took short rapid hops with her rear pointing out angularly. Her skirt bounced and swayed madly. The clapping became quicker and quicker, trying to pass her tempo, and she increased her motion until she was a wild flitting blur in the firelight. I thought she must surely shake herself to pieces but she only added more speed as the beats became louder and faster and exuberant shouts arose. She danced until at last she dropped exhausted to the ground…. The Marines were no longer so lonely.

The festivities reached a hilarious climax when McQuade stepped into the center of the ring. Around his chest he wore three confiscated halters tied end to end to circle his girth. His monstrous belly hung over a grass skirt and he wore boondockers and a big black cigar plastered in his teeth. With the help of the revived village dancer they put on an exhibition of the hula never seen before by the eyes of man. The dance was matched only when Two Gun Shapiro, Major Wellman, and Marlin, similarly attired, tried to outdo them with their native partners.

Suddenly I felt someone shoving through the crowd to the edge of the ring where I sat with my boys. I turned and there, moving in beside me, was Danny. His eyes were bright and some of the color had returned to his face.

“Merry Christmas, Mac!” he shouted. “Anybody got a beer?”

PART SIX

Prologue

OUR SHIP
pulled into the lagoon. We took a trip up to Cora to say so long to Levin and Burnside and packed to leave the atoll. Seabags had good reason to get seasick this trip.

The ship, a liberty ship, the
Prince George,
carried no other cargo except Huxley’s Whores. The “Kaiser Coffin” had nothing to hold her below her water line and she bobbed like a cork for a slow sickening week at seven knots an hour. Often on the rising swell the
George
’s screws came clear out of the water and as she sank she rattled and shuddered till we thought she’d rip apart.

After New Year’s she pulled into Hilo on the island of Hawaii with Sam Huxley’s beleaguered Whores.

As had been the case on Guadalcanal, we were bringing up the rear. Once upon a time we had believed the Sixth was destined for glory. Two years and two campaigns and we were still cleaning up messes.

The camp was hell. Bitter cold during the night, hot in the day. Very little water and it was rationed. The diet of New Zealand was supplanted by Hawaiian pineapple.

The worst of it was the dust. It choked us by day and night. It was impossible to keep the tents or gear clean. Five minutes after a fresh cleaning the wind blew ancient lava dust around, atop and beneath us.

Liberty in Hilo stank. The island was mainly inhabited by Japanese-Americans. A rumor had been spread that the Second Division were paid killers. Our reception was one of cold hospitality. There were a couple of whorehouses in town but the long, unromantic lines of men being policed by the shore patrol made for the type of love that most of us weren’t looking for. Again a smile and the voice of a buddy meant something that none but us could understand.

The grim irony was being so close to the States we could almost touch and taste and smell. It almost drove us crazy hearing American voices over the radio, reading American newspapers, and speaking to American girls at the USO near camp. But we were as far away as ever, perhaps farther, for the Corps had not chosen this forlorn campsite without reason.

Soon again came the hikes, the drills, the inspections, the field problems—the drudgery of soldiering. New replacements flooded in from the States. Fresh-faced, wisecracking youngsters. We didn’t take the trouble to ridicule them, for they stood in awe of the Guadalcanal and Tarawa veterans, now hard-beaten vets of twenty and twenty-one years of age. New equipment and more firepower filtered in.

But the Second Division was listless and tired. We all wanted home now, no bones about it. Yet, there was that inexplicable doggedness that told each man he would stick it out. We hiked the same miles but it was just going through the motions. We were old soldiers with moxey. Yes, even Sam Huxley just went through the motions now.

As weeks passed, again came the hope that this coming invasion would be the last, that they might let the Sixth establish the beachhead. And spirit was replaced by a new driving force. A killer drive. The Second Division, forgotten in the mountains of Hawaii, developed might, power, and the urge to be the professional killers we were accused of being in Hilo.

Then came the news the Fourth Marine Division had hit the Marshalls as a follow-up to Tarawa and that a Fifth Marine Division was being formed.

CHAPTER 1

Dearest Sam,

I am terribly excited. I’ve just finished seeing Colonel Malcolm. We lunched together at the officers’ club and he told me all about you. Oh, my darling, I’m so proud. I got a full account of the wonderful work you have done with your battalion and heard that you are up for another decoration. He also told me, off the record, that you are next in line to succeed him as commander of the Regiment. But darling, couldn’t your boys have thought up a better nickname for the battalion? I think it’s awful.