Once an Eagle (82 page)

He could have laughed with relief. When you gonna come again, rain? Shot with luck. So far.

He swung his head near Bowcher's. “He's gone. Let's move out. You lead.” They crept swiftly away through the seething thunder of the rain.

 

The dugout had
that intolerable stink the Japanese always seemed to impregnate everything with: like rotting fish and roasted chestnuts and ether and untended urinals. They would never get it out of the place no matter what they did. Feltner put his head down, trying not to breathe. He felt light-headed, a trifle dizzy, and wondered idly if he was getting malaria. Nearly everyone else had. People came and went, Colonel Damon kept cranking the field phone and talking to various people and Feltner tried to hold his mind on the operation but it kept skittering away, taking refuge in snatches of reverie or reminiscence. The worst of it was they were all tired now, worn down; it was nothing like the early days when they'd first got here. God, it seemed like twenty years …

Watts was gazing at him again—that adenoidal stare, mouth open; and Feltner looked away, scowling. It was awful, waiting like this for things to get going. But when they got going it was worse. It was a choice of perfectly insufferable evils. Of all the places he could be right now, he had to be in the hottest, filthiest, most dangerous place in the whole lousy globe. Well, one of the most dangerous. Russia was worse, probably; or some parts of China—if you were a Chinese. But that was all. Was it chance, the plain luck of the draw, as Ross said—or was there some grand design that had brought him here from California, from Georgia, from Philadelphia; from the somber, hushed offices of Llanfear and Watrous? He could still be there—it seemed impossible this morning, but he could—adding up the long, neat columns of figures, taking masses of unrelated data and translating them into the precise tabulation of a corporate entity, in black and white: balanced, functioning, present-and-accounted-for. The Army had appealed to him originally for this very reason; his marriage had foundered, he was weary of Philadelphia, and there was an uncle in the Inspector General's department whom he saw infrequently, and whose life and manner gave forceful evidence of the service as a world of order and precision, of strict accountability. It took him two months to discover he'd mistaken symbol for actuality: he was appalled by the waste and inefficiency of the peacetime Army.

But war! War overturned all the counters. In war you took a relatively organized, relatively precise and accountable instrument and watched it disintegrate into a hash of disastrous fragments before your very eyes. It was hideous. Equipment—valuable, expensive equipment—was lost or thrown away, supplies never arrived as planned, men melted away—on stretchers or under ponchos or, worst of all, were reported missing in action. Units lost contact with one another, supply dumps went up in roaring infernos or rotted in the muck and tropic sun, nobody knew half the time where anything
was;
and the more one struggled to cope with this avalanche of spendthrift heedlessness and chaos the worse it got …

“—yes, along the creek,” Colonel Damon was speaking into the phone, his eyes roving idly around the dugout. “Just get as far down there as you can. That little knoll, what we talked about. Flank it if you can, get in behind it and take it out of there—it's key. Yes, I know. Keep right on top of them, now, Benjy. Right. Right. Good luck, boy.”

Feltner watched him as he rang up Third Battalion, issuing orders, his voice perfectly casual. Once Damon caught his eye, and winked; sweat hung in a greasy gob at the point of his chin, dripping on his trousers, and his fatigue jacket was darkly stained across the shoulders. He'd come in from that patrol at quarter of three, soaked to the bone and shivering; then he and Krisler had been in a huddle for half an hour or more, then he'd been on the phone to Colonel Wilhelm and then he'd gone up to the line companies. At five thirty he'd come back into the CP and said: “I'm going to take ten. Wake me if anything comes up,” and had lain down on Caylor's field cot and gone sound asleep, had waked in ten minutes to the dot and swung his feet to the floor, wanting to know if the grenades had got up yet.

Feltner sighed, waiting, clasping and unclasping his hands and watching the regimental commander. He could never be like that. Never. MacFarlane had been quick, tearing around and shouting at people; but Damon acted as if it were an exercise back at Beyliss. Which it wasn't. It damned well wasn't. Less than a minute now. He could hear men moving past the dugout—the rustle and chink of armed men walking. There was no talk, no laughter.

“What's on your mind, Ray?” Damon was watching him—a funny glance: faintly mournful, faintly amused.

“Nothing, sir. Just—waiting.”

“Yes, there's always plenty of that, isn't there? Well, your troubles will be over in a few seconds.” At that moment off toward the airstrip there was a clatter like faulty engines without mufflers, and firing began, rising to a martellato fury, punctuated with deep, even detonations like the bass drum in a percussion section, and the Colonel said: “Didn't I tell you? Here we go.” Standing up he buckled on his cartridge belt, picked up his '03 and went out of the dugout.

Feltner followed him outside into the glare; the ground was spongy and slick from the rain. The Colonel was standing easily, his arm against the trunk of a tree, watching the green figures move forward through the bush, their helmets smooth and dark against the verdure. Damon said something to him and he tried to listen, hating the intrusive force of the gunfire, which had increased. He had learned to identify them—the taut bark of the M1's, the higher whine of the Arisaka rifle, the heavy
dod-dod-dod
of the machine guns, the dense cough of grenades—he could pick them out: it was the aggregate that overwhelmed him. It was impossible to think with any clarity while something like this was going on. Firing rose to a rolling bellow of sound, and now the Japanese machine guns began, the Nambus—a hysterical shuttling clamor that pressed at his eardrums. Against his will he saw Boretz on the ground the first day, writhing and rolling, his hands to his head, uttering sharp, yelping screams—drove the image away with a tremor of impatience, his eyes narrowed against the uproar. He must keep his mind clear, he must—

“They're not moving,” the Colonel was saying.

It was true: they'd all hit the dirt. There wasn't a helmet to be seen. It was going to be like the other times, then. The weight of the past six weeks settled over him. The Japanese had everything—an unlimited amount of ammunition, the higher ground, hundreds of bombproof fortifications, you could never
see
them—

“Let's go,” Damon was saying.

He looked around, startled. “Sir?”

“You don't think we're going to hang around here, do you?” The Colonel's face looked all at once very hard and blocklike: a younger, tougher man. “Come on, let's go up and earn our pay for a while.” And he started walking forward briskly, his rifle held loosely in his right hand, his head down. For a moment Feltner thought of his father, walking ahead of him through the stubble, hunting, out in the Poconos. Unslinging his submachine gun he called to Watts and Everill, and hurried after him, toward the Nambus, which sounded much louder. Grasses, leaves slapped wetly against his leggings, the dizziness seemed worse, and his eyes hurt—shifting them caused quick little flashes of pain. How far was Damon going? What were they going to do? If the troops were pinned down—

A soldier was running toward them, bareheaded, wild-eyed, one hand in the air. Feltner remembered him vaguely, couldn't recall his name. Oh Christ, he thought. Of all the moments. Of all the times! The Old Man'll ream him out, and then me and everybody else in sight. At least he'd hung onto his rifle; that was something.

But instead the Colonel smiled. “What's the matter, son?” he asked cheerily.

The soldier—
Phillips!
That was his name, Phillips: good—had stopped in dismay, panting. He swung his free arm backward wildly. “The Japs—!” he cried, over the guns' clamor. “There's thousands of 'em …”

“You're sure of that?” Damon had come up to Phillips and now paused briefly, confronting him.

“—they're charging—all over the place! We got to have reinforcements, we can't stop 'em—”

“Aw, I don't believe it …”

The Colonel's tone was so relaxed, so deft a balance between sarcasm and casual, matter-of-fact rejoinder that Phillips gaped at him, then began to grin foolishly. For the first time he seemed aware of Damon's rank.

“—For Christ sake,” he laughed shakily. With the ebbing of his panic he felt empty, a bit resentful. “I tell you, there's a million of 'em out there, Colonel …”

“Well, let's go see,” Damon said, his voice now just a shade peremptory. “Come on, now.” He pushed on by. Phillips started to say something more; then he caught sight of Feltner and his mouth came together.

“Phillips,” Feltner told him sharply, “you get hold of yourself now. Cut that out.”

“Yes, sir.” Phillips wheeled around all at once and fell in beside him, even got in step, which irritated Feltner beyond all bounds. He had a fierce desire to roar at the private, threaten him with all manner of dire punishment—then an equally intense impulse to laugh. His face felt tight and smarting, as though he had poison ivy, and it was hard to breathe. This was going to be difficult—to keep walking like this toward the dry, frenetic hammering, the snap and drone in the foliage above their heads.

“Colonel—” he said sharply.

Damon turned. “Yes?”

“Hadn't you better take those eagles off?”

The Colonel shook his head. “Boys don't know me yet, most of them.”

“General Westerfeldt has issued strict orders—”

“I know. Better this way.”

Jesus Christ, Feltner thought; he stumbled on a root and almost went to his knees. The Nambus were firing in short bursts now, like hundreds of vindictive old women in a terrible quarrel. Bits of leaf kept falling here and there around them. It was like a dream, strolling along this way—but an evil one. This was going to be bad. End badly. If they kept walking forward like this, through the still, oily water, if they just kept
walking
—

They were among the assault platoons now—he was aware of men crouching under shrubs, behind fallen trees, in water-filled holes. It frightened him more looking down at them; he felt guilty and angry and foolish all at once. One winter afternoon when he'd been nine or ten he'd been walking carefully along the top of a brick wall and several schoolmates had started throwing snowballs at him and laughing; now, here, he felt the same burgeoning fear and sense of betrayal, the desperate need to lie down, get away, make it be over.

“Come on, boys,” the Colonel was saying in that calm, invocatory, obdurate tone that seemed to make walking along upright like this both a trivial whim and the gravest obligation of man to man. How could he talk like that—! “Just over that little hump, there. We've got to get over there, they're counting on us today. All of us.
Let's
go, now …”

Their eyes rolled up at him under their helmet rims—a concert of resentment, amazement, distrust. A clear, boyish voice said, “Who's
that?
” But the Colonel paid no attention, talked on, moving through them, the chin strap of his helmet swinging against his jaw. “Come on now, boys, we can't stay here and let them down,
you
know that …”

A machine gun opened up suddenly, savagely near, and tracers burned like thick orange wires into the bushes ten feet away. Feltner found himself on the ground, gripping it, breathing through his teeth; he had no recollection of leaving his feet. Just above his head there was a ricochet like a fiddle string snapped. He looked up to see the Colonel still walking back and forth, talking in that impossible conversational tone. A piece of bark chipped away from the ridged elephant hide of a palm not three feet from his face, and the Colonel grinned and cocked his head in that brief little gesture Feltner remembered his father using with other workmen in the packing plant back in Trenton. “Look at that,” he was saying out loud. “Pitiful. Couldn't shoot in China, couldn't shoot on Luzon, still can't hit a God damn thing, here in New Guinea …” He put his hands on his hips and faced two men directly. “Come on now, boys. What do you say? Just up to that little rise. Who's coming with me?”

And as though that near-miss had released him, a thin, sallow-faced soldier got to his feet, then two more, one of them a sergeant named Prince, who turned and started shouting at them, waving them up; and then there were a dozen or more, hurrying, pumping their rifles across their bodies. They were up. They were moving.

“
That's
it,” the Colonel was calling now, swinging his arm like a track coach waving his runners along, “
that's
it,
now
you've got it, let's roll, now …” and then, fiercely:
“Let's take 'em!—”
A man went down with a sharp cry but the rest paid no attention; they were all running and throwing themselves down and getting up again, going toward the machine guns, which now formed a solid bar of sound.

The Colonel had turned to the left, was making his way through vines and plants like octopi, like banana trees gone crazy, threading his way. “I ought to check on Kraus's gang next. How far are we off the trail, Ray? I wonder if we could come out right next to the—”

There was the snapping whine of a rifle and a slap like a hand against a thigh, and Archimbeau, the Colonel's orderly, grunted and started down, sinking in almost dreamy reluctance to his knees. Someone shouted, “Cover!
Cover!
” The ping-crack came again, and then a ragged burst of firing. Feltner was on his belly under a small bush with great drooping oval leaves. He had no idea where Damon was; he couldn't see Archimbeau anymore, or Watts. The rifle fired again and there was a
whunnnk!
right beside his head. He gasped, and jerked his hand back as if it had been burned. Down. The bullets were all going down. Into the ground.