Tears in the Darkness (22 page)

Combat is a countinghouse of killing and dying, and its cold math makes men feel worthless, worthless and alone. The loneliness never passes—it accrues with each corpse a man encounters along the way—but the first time a soldier stops under fire to tend another man's wound or haul him to safety, he begins to feel he is not so unimportant, so small,
after all. Even in the cruel accounting of the battlefield, he has value. He is a comrade.

Comradeship is a kind of bargain men make with one another—a soldier never leaves another soldier behind—and that promise applies to every echelon. A private in the ranks keeps faith with his betters by trusting in their ability to command, and an officer repays that trust and shows his fidelity by sharing the fate of his men, standing with them on the deck of a sinking ship or digging in with a doomed garrison.

On the dock at Corregidor, the sun had set and the sky was becoming as black as the surface of the water. MacArthur made sure his wife and son were safely aboard the first boat. He stopped for a moment and looked up at Corregidor's heights and listened to the report of its big guns firing against the mainland, then he approached the small group of high-ranking officers waiting nearby.

“I shall return,” Huff heard him tell Wainwright and the others. Then he boarded the boat, and the men on the dock turned back to face the enemy.
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BY THE END OF MARCH
, Ben Steele and his comrades in the 7th Matériel Squadron were subsisting on rice—steamed rice, rice porridge, rice mush, rice soup. A few times a week the quartermaster would send up thirteen cans of salmon flakes and nine cans of condensed milk, but when the allotment was spread among 360 men, it provided just a teaspoon of fish and a splash of milk in each mess kit, scarcely enough to give their gruel some taste.

“This grub is pathetic,” Ben Steele thought, “just pathetic.”

For a while the boys searched for forage and game, rooting in local vegetable patches for turnips or camotes or roaming the countryside to shag papaya, guava, mangoes, cashews. Sometimes a man would bag a monkey or a big snake, or sometimes a patrol would spot some “big game,” a stray carabao or swaybacked horse that somehow had escaped the quartermaster's roundup, and when that happened the patrol would carefully note the animal's location then rush back to their lines with the news, and the lieutenant would send for Ben Steele.

A man did not have to be a Montana marksman to bring down a big critter like a water buffalo or some old spindle-legged pony, but he had to be able to slaughter and dress the carcass quickly in the dark in the
middle of no-man's-land with an enemy patrol possibly lurking, and Ben Steele was good at such work. One shot and the animal was down, then he was on it with his knife.

He slit the hind legs first, cutting the hide from the hooves up the hocks to the thighs, then along the flanks to the shoulders and chest, then up the neck to the throatlatch. When the skin was fully scored, he yanked it off the carcass, then slit the belly open, pulled out the guts, debrided the muscles around the joints, and hacked at the half-dressed carcass with a hand ax until he had cleaved it into quarters. Forty-five minutes start to finish. By sunup the patrol would be back on the line and the meat would be in the squadron's cooking pots.

In some of the other units, men were doing business on the black market, sneaking off to meet smugglers from Manila who crossed the bay in bancas loaded with sugar, eggs, and Filipino cigarettes, but this source of supply was unpredictable. Japanese launches mounted with machine guns plied Manila Bay, sometimes catching the bootleggers on the open water in sight of land. Days later when customers showed up to shop, they would find the food runners washed up on the sand, their bloated bodies mauled by Japanese bullets and the bites of voracious bay crabs.

When the rice ran short, Ben Steele and his squadron mates harvested palay from the paddies and threshed it themselves, but the yield was so small they were still hungry all the time. The hunger was worst at night when they were on watch, alone.

 

THE RESERVE
defense line was now the main defense line—thirteen miles of foxholes, bunkers, and breastworks stretching across the middle of the peninsula. The Air Corps boys (provisional infantry) had been assigned to a one-mile sector not far from the bay. At their backs was a stand of trees, in front two abandoned rice paddies, roughly a thousand yards of open ground. On moonlit nights, Ben Steele and his comrades looked out on a gray no-man's-land of shadows and dark shapes, and on nights when there was no illumination at all, they sat and stared at a wall of black, imagining the enemy creeping along behind it.

Mostly Ben Steele fought off sleep and memories of home, especially memories that made his stomach growl. Roast pork and applesauce—that's all he could think of, roast pork and applesauce. His
mother always added extra sugar to make the sauce sweet, just the way he liked it. After his watch he would spread a blanket on the ground next to his hole and fall asleep, and his daydream would become his night dream, only more vivid, the roast sizzling as it came out of the oven, the applesauce heaped in a big bowl in the middle of the table. Then he would wake up, grab his mess kit, and join the queue for a breakfast of “gummy” gruel that “tasted like wallpaper paste.”
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Although the Japanese had pulled back during the lull, they were still firing on the American lines. Japanese dive-bombers came in the morning, Japanese artillery shells landed on them in the afternoon. One attack caught Ben Steele and another man in the open, and they flopped down in the dirt as the shells started to explode around them.

“Boy, that was close!” the other man said when the barrage lifted.

“You take that helmet off and you'll see just how close it was,” Ben Steele said.

A piece of shrapnel had rent the top of the man's helmet and left a flap of metal sticking straight up. He was unhurt, but the more he looked as his helmet, the more unnerved he became, and soon the medics were hauling him off to a field hospital in the rear.

In fact, all the boys were on edge. Some went around angry, railing at their country for betraying them. And some sank into self-pity and sat down and wept. Naturally, with everyone miserable, no one wanted to listen to the bellyaching of or spend a night on watch in a hole with a man so scared he could not stop sobbing. (“You're making me nervous,” Ben Steele told one of his sniveling watch mates. “Get the hell out of here. I don't want you around me.”) So most men kept their frustration and fear to themselves and sat sullen faced, picking the bedbugs off their blankets or intoning a bitter bit of verse penned by an unknown hand.

 

We're the battling bastards of Bataan

No momma, no poppa, no Uncle Sam,

No aunts, no uncles, no nephews, no nieces,

No rifles, no guns or artillery pieces,

And nobody gives a damn.
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At the end of March, the bombing and artillery attacks increased, a sure sign the enemy was preparing a second offensive.

Now the men were filled with foreboding.

“We're done,” Ben Steele and his comrades told one another. “Only two things can happen to us now, we're going to be dead or we're going to be prisoners of war.”

“And I heard the Japs don't take no prisoners,” one man said.

 

 

 

 

 

A
LATE SUMMER DAY
in the small airless towns that sit in the valley of the Yellowstone. Down Main Street in Worden came a flatbed truck, a mound of firewood heaped high in back. Behind the wheel was Ben Steele, next to him his cousin Pat. As the truck came abreast of a block of stores it slowed down, then nosed to the curb.

They shouldn't have stopped. They knew they shouldn't have stopped. Ben Steele's father had told them to drive straight through to Billings. Straight through! he had said several times.

But they'd been hot loading the truck, hot driving down from the hills, and they thought they'd be only a few minutes, a few minutes cooling off with an ice cream cone.

In the heat of the day the sidewalks were empty, the street quiet. When Ben Steele came out of the store, he smelled the whiskey right away, then he saw it—a large dark pool gathering beneath their truck.

He was atop the mound of firewood now, tossing the logs to get at the kegs of whiskey beneath. There it was, the one that had toppled over when they stopped. The keg had popped its bung and the booze was pouring into the bed of the truck and leaking so fast onto the street there was a runnel of whiskey flowing along the curb.

“Oh God,” Ben Steele thought, “the whole damn town smells of it.”

“Get in the truck, Pat!” he said. “We gotta get out of here.”

 

AROUND NOON
one Friday morning in March 1934, a stranger knocked on the back door of the small house the family had rented on Broadwater Avenue in Billings. The three older children, Gert and Bud and
Warren, were in school. The two youngsters, Joe and Jean, were home with their parents.

The stranger was a customer come to buy a pint of whiskey. The Old Man had been bootlegging for almost two years now, making moonshine in the hills above Hawk Creek and, most recently, selling it from the back door of their rented house on Broadwater Avenue.

They were getting by, the family. The two-story cottage was crowded, but they were eating three meals a day and had a roof over their heads. In the hills, their mother reminded them, there were folks who were shivering in tents; in the city they were standing in breadlines.

The guy at the door looked legit, asked for the Old Man by name. Still, a bootlegger couldn't be too careful. Prohibition was nearly over, the state was going into the liquor business, and word had been going around that the governor didn't want backdoor bootleggers competing with the state's new stores. The sheriff's men were cracking down in every county, and one bootlegger after another was being hauled off to jail. Can't be too careful, they told one another. In hard times the police could always find a stooge to come knocking for a pint.

 

IN THE DISTRICT COURT OF THE UNITED STATES

DISTRICT OF MONTANA

BILLINGS DIVISION

 

. . . On or about the 9th day of March, 1934 . . . the defendant . . . at certain premises located on Broadwater Avenue . . . did then and there willfully, wrongfully, unlawfully, knowingly, fraudulently and feloniously remove and aid and abet in the removal of distilled spirits, to-wit, about 32 gallons, more or less, of whiskey, of which the United States Internal Revenue tax had not been paid.
¹

 

They led the Old Man off in handcuffs and hauled away his basement booze, but the revenue officers were so busy raiding other homes that day that they rushed off without checking the attic, and there, right above their heads in the dusty crawlspaces between the joists, were 150 gallons of the Old Man's best stuff.

Ben Steele always thought the sheriff knew about that upstairs stash, knew that he and his mother started selling the stuff not long after the
authorities put the family's breadwinner in prison garb and shipped him off to a road gang in Washington State.

At three bucks a gallon out the back door, the family made $450 that summer. Bess stretched the cash as far as she could through the fall and into winter. When the money finally ran out, she started serving lard sandwiches for supper and wondered what she'd do for rent.

 

THE RAID
made the
Billings Gazette
. “OFFICERS SEIZE KEGS OF WHISKEY,” the headline read. After a while, Bud got tired of the taunting at school—“So your old man's a bootlegger, eh?”—and he started coming through the back door at Broadwater Avenue with bloody knuckles.

The Old Man came back at the end of the summer, sentence served, still scheming. With an old cowboy buddy he opened a beer hall in Worden, a legit place. Before a year was gone, he was broke and working for wages as a common laborer.

At least there was that, that and the $10 a week Ben Steele was bringing home from odd jobs. His mother always took the money with a smile, but he could see her worry, watched it grow week after week. When he could watch it no more, he quit school and took a full-time job as a camp tender for Jug Clark, a sheep man he'd ranched for summers. Thirty a month plus keep, and every month he sent every cent home.

Late that summer, another Dust Bowl summer that drove up the cost of hay, Jug Clark decided to put his sheep on a train and ship them west across the state to the Big Hole, an enormous mountain valley surrounded by towering peaks. Best hay in the state, and the biggest valley Bud had ever seen.

 

SIX OF THEM
, the boss, four shepherds, and their eighteen-year-old camp tender, trailed eight thousand sheep from the railhead at Anaconda sixty miles into the long valley. Summer and fall were gorgeous, green and gold. Then in late November icy air started to slide down the mountain slopes and collect in the valley bottom. Come December the snow was up to the top of the fence posts and the temperature was the coldest in the state.

The shepherds and camp tender moved into a drafty farmhouse rented out as a kind of barracks. From dawn to dusk they bundled up in
woolens and hauled and pitched tons of hay to the scattered bands. Nights they sat around listening to the wind howl and telling one another the same stale stories again and again. Ben Steele learned about boredom that winter, boredom and the company of men.

In the spring, when it was time to return to the home ranch, the camp tender, restless now, convinced the boss to let him ride ahead to Anaconda with their string of twenty horses.