Whistle (10 page)

But all of that was just extra stuff added on the top. The patrol itself was still the patrol.

Whenever Prell thought of his squad and the patrol, a kind of fluttering qualm of apprehension rose in his stomach. It was not a qualm of conscience. It was a spasm of responsibility, dread and helplessness—a simple reflex to cry out No! no! It verged on panic. He always wanted to cry No! no!—and always, crying No! no! did not help or was too late. Their individual portraits flashed across the front of his mind like in-motion close-ups on a movie screen. A head turning sideways to grin. A shoulder rising beside a smiling face in a gesture. Then the anguished but clearly focused mental pictures he had of the hurt ones, each man of them, would follow. Dead, or dying, or wounded. He would never lose those. That horrible, Godawful clank that had given them away. A canteen, it had sounded like.

They were not even Prell’s own squad. Prell had been moved to them when the original squad leader was shipped home sick. But he found little to improve on or change. They worked well together without him.

The mission was to patrol out and seek contact. A large Jap force had moved away from the center of the line in front of Munda and couldn’t be found. Specifically, they were to find out if the Japs had reoccupied a small steep valley on the right that they had previously abandoned but now, intelligence thought, might have moved back into.

It was an almost routine job. If you counted it ordinary and routine to be walking miles in enemy territory along jungle trails that might at any moment be trip-wired or foot-mined in a jungle too dense to travel off the trails. It was impossible to describe the fatigue and exhaustion of that kind of walking. The narrow foot trails slicked over with mud. The valley they were to inspect they found empty.

On the way back, on a hunch, Prell decided to take them on a little detour up a side trail, to look at a small side valley. The trail veered off to the left uphill two hundred yards through the jungle to a low ridge. And the trail had been heavily used lately. Both Prell and his point man sensed something was going on over there beyond the ridge.

Halfway to the top he halted the squad and he and his point man crawled on up to have a look. The valley was alive with Jap infantry. The opposite valley wall was a semicliff and there were some small caves and overhangs on it and Japs were crawling all over it. They obviously were preparing an attack.

Both of them recognized Sasaki immediately. It wasn’t hard to recognize a Jap general. Whenever he said anything, everybody else jumped. Sasaki was a heavy-chested man, well-fed, with a thick graying British-officer-type mustache. His picture had been posted around the Division, and a reward of $1000 was being offered to the man who killed him. Prell and the others knew about him only that Imamura and Admiral Kusaka, joint commanders of the Jap Southeast Area, had sent General Noboru Sasaki to command all of New Georgia after the American invasion. It gave Prell a sudden thrill to know that he held the life of an important man in his hands, and had carte blanche to kill him. He knew how political assassins must feel. Sasaki was with a group of other men, obviously officers, and they were studying two maps. In addition, Sasaki was smoking a big, fat, very un-Oriental cigar. He walked back and forth gesticulating with the cigar as he declaimed to the others. Prell put the binoculars he had been issued for the mission on him, anyway, to be sure. It was him, all right.

A lot of things were going through Prell’s mind at that moment. He was already getting down into prone position and loop sling to fire. First was the idea Sasaki might get away, walk off somewhere out of sight or into one of the caves, the way he was moving about. Second was the thought that he himself, Prell, was the best shot in the squad, in any case. Third, the New Georgia campaign and the possible effect on it if he succeeded. Only fourth, if at all, was the splintered fast flash of thought of the personal fame and that $1000 he might get by knocking off the Jap commander in New Georgia. Prell was absolutely certain about the thought sequence.

As he got into his sling, he was already whispering to his point man. To go back. Get them ready to move out. No, get them moving now. But quietly. No noise. When he heard the first shot, he should start them running.

Prell was not worried about how he himself would get out. He would get out, all right. If only to claim that reward. But it had already occurred to him it was odd that with a general like Sasaki present there were no outposts around.

Thank God the two of them had gotten off the trail into the undergrowth, before they peeked over the crest. Prell had never felt more fully and more joyously alive than at that moment.

With the point man moving, he rolled down to get his sight. He was satisfied he had done everything correctly. He had his men already moving out. Everything was proper. He had forgotten nothing. Now all he had to do was shoot. Hoo, man. He had not scored High Expert and high regimental rifle four years running for nothing. But he wished he had a 1903 Springfield for this shot, with its folding leaf sight, instead of a Garand. He should have kept the point man here with him as a witness to the kill.

Below him the general was still walking and gesticulating. He must remember to allow for shooting downhill. He moved the rifle ahead of the general, to where the officers with the maps were. The general would stop, just there, just when he came up to the map . . .

It was then that he heard the single, loud clank of American equipment somewhere on the trail behind him, and wanted to curse.

It stopped him. And he lost his sight picture. The general was moving away from the maps again. Well, he would catch him at the other end of his pacing, when he stopped to turn. Prell moved the rifle ahead of him again.

Then he heard—or sensed—the jungle plants move behind him, and a Jap soldier leaped on him screaming and firing his rifle.

It was amazing the Jap did not hit him, at that short range. It did not say much for their rifle training. Warned a fraction of a second ahead of time, Prell was already rolling, and fired three fast rounds into the man’s chest as it touched his rifle barrel. Then he was on his feet ready to run. But nobody else was there. More firing and screaming was coming from back down the trail. It had the sound of catastrophe.

Prell cast one last, anguished glance behind him. There was no hope. The general was moving swiftly, into one of the caves, surrounded tightly by the bodies of the other officers, to protect him. There was nothing to do. Prell ran.

They were lucky. A big, well-prepared patrol would have killed them all, at once. Apparently the group that heard them was a small one of only five men, and had no help nearby. When he came running down, his men were just finishing killing the fifth. One of his men was slightly wounded. A nick. His own single Jap trooper apparently had been all alone.

Prell slowed long enough to yell at them to move. The ones in front were already running down the trail, and needed no urging. The others began to follow. “Move, move,” he screamed at them. The Jap troops often called mortars down in on themselves, and Prell had anticipated it.

Mortar shells began to whump in around them. One man a little in front of Prell went down from a near direct hit. Prell and the man immediately in front of Prell, hardly pausing, scooped him up by the armpits and half-carried him. A man up ahead dropped back and took over Prell’s half of him to free Prell. Prell paused, to make sure they were all in front of him and running, then turned around to fire rear guard, running backward. But no enemy were visible behind them on the trail. Another man went down from a mortar round but got up and ran on by himself. Then the patrol was apparently through the mortar screen. That was when the .50 caliber took them from the flank.

The Jap was firing from an obtuse angle to the line of the trail. Fortunately, they had run nearly through his field of fire by the time he could get his gun going. Fortunately, most of them were already through. Only the men at the tail end caught the fire.

Prell, of course, was the last man. A burst caught him across the thighs, and cut him off from his legs and feeling them just as if a big scythe had swept through a field, and Prell knew he had had it, or if he hadn’t, his legs certainly had. The impact seemed to fling him forward. As he started to fall, he watched the same burst, drifting higher, take the two men running downhill in front of him across the lower back and lungs, inches higher on the third man than on the second. There was no question they were killed. The third man was his point man, Crozier. Both bodies went on running several yards before they fell. Prell, his teeth clenched, by sheer force of will, helped along by the push of the heavy bullets, managed to run past them on his non-legs before he too folded up like thin cardboard and fell straight down on his face, headlong, sprawling. He had the curious impression that he was continuing still to run, horizontally, even as he struck. But as he fell his mind told him none of it really mattered anyway, because his mind told him he was finished.

He yelled and a couple of his squad ran back for him, in tandem, like a pair of matched, finely trained horses, and got him by his armpits. But in the same moment, miraculously, all firing stopped. The jungle quiet, always ominous, and never really quiet, which seemed to drip from the trees like moisture, fell on them.

They turned him over on his back. His number two crawled over. Their faces looked scared. “Well, let’s see! Let’s see!” Prell demanded irately. “Damn it!” He needed passionately to know. See for himself how bad it was. “Don’t just sit there!” His number two and another man unbuckled his belt and began to pull his pants down. Prell, beginning to sweat as they moved him, sent two men back up the trail for the two dead. Crozier, and Sims. He was damned if he was going to leave them here, for the Japs to piss on, or eat, or whatever it was they did with their captured dead.

The legs were a mess, when they got his pants down. Like hamburger. It made his belly go cold inside, looking at them. The skin across his thighs was already turning blue from bruise. It was impossible to tell how many of the heavy .50 caliber bullets had hit him. He was bleeding badly. But there didn’t seem to be any arterial bleeding. The first hopeful sign. His number two sprinkled sulfa powder on them and began tying on tight compresses. While he did, Prell briefed him, through clenched teeth, on what he had seen and on the presence of Sasaki, “In case anything should happen to me.”

Prell knew he had to get them out of there. And do it swiftly. There wasn’t anything he could do for Crozier and Sims, but he could still do something for the others. The other two wounded could walk, after a fashion. He himself couldn’t walk, and he could feel the bones grate together in his legs. Two other men were already improvising a stretcher out of their buttoned-up fatigue blouses and two rifles. When they got him on it and hoisted him, Prell thought for a moment he would pass out. Then he got them moving and out of there.

As they moved away, mortar rounds began to drop singly around the trail junction, searching for them with tree bursts. By a matter of minutes he had anticipated them again.

As they moved along, the thought of the state of his legs made Prell’s belly go cold again inside. You never considered how important your legs were to you until you didn’t have them and couldn’t call on them. There was no way you could move much at all, when you didn’t have legs. It was then that he made up his mind that if he lost them, he wouldn’t stay.

They knew they only had half a mile to go. But on the mud-slicked trail the going was difficult. For the walking wounded, the men carrying the dead and the men carrying Prell. Up to then Prell had not felt much pain, just a dull toothache in his legs that warned him the pain would be coming and he could depend on it. On the march, it came. With each step of the men carrying him he could feel the splintered ends of his femurs moving around in the already tortured flesh of his thighs like sharp instruments, further lacerating the already torn meat. He was worried one of them might cut its femoral artery, and tried to hold as still as possible. But it was impossible to be still. For Prell it was the beginning of an odyssey of movement and pain that would continue for two months and carry him halfway around the world to the Army hospital in Luxor. And the pain part wouldn’t end then. He had put one of his BAR men back as rear guard and the other out front, to try to fend off any Jap patrols hunting for them. Luckily they did not meet any head-on. As they got nearer to their own lines, the trail branched out into a series of parallel trails and transverses that the Japs had built to supply their now-abandoned line. Here he could maneuver a little and give them the slip. Twice they hid, as talking Jap squads moved along nearby parallel trails looking for them. But the fatigue-blouse stretcher under Prell’s legs was beginning to be soaked with his heavy bleeding. He went halfway out and came back several times. When they got within hailing distance of their own line, they decided they had better take a chance and yell for help.

A reinforced patrol with a medic in it came out to cover them while the medic worked on Prell and strung a plasma bottle on him, and then escorted them in, to everybody’s vast relief and delight. At the battalion aid station the battalion surgeon looked at the legs and shook his head. Dolefully. He crudely splinted the legs to keep the femurs from working any more and had Prell strapped on a regular, real stretcher to be jeeped out. For Prell this was the end of it, and he knew it, at least with this outfit. He would probably never see this outfit again. There had been times when he had hated it, and every person in it, but now he hated to leave it. As they hung him on the body-loaded jeep, he kept his face set. He was flown out the next afternoon. The battalion commander gave the whole squad the morning off, to come down and see him. That did not sound as if anybody suspected him of misconduct.

It had not been a lucky patrol. All the same, Prell knew he had done everything right and correctly. He had done everything both according to the rules themselves, and according to the unwritten law that, unspoken, went along with the rules. The unwritten law was that you never risked your men. Unless the gain was worth it. Double worth it. In Prell’s case the gain had been worth more than that. Even if it had never got realized.