Paul looked more closely at the corpse. Mackensen had said he was seventeen, just about the same age as Debbie's brother. He was small and frail and looked more like thirteen than seventeen. Most Japs were smaller than Americans, but this man couldn't have been more than five feet tall and probably didn't weigh more than a hundred pounds.
Then Paul noticed how unhealthily thin the dead man was. He was almost emaciated and Paul made a note to pass that fact on to battalion. The only bodies they'd seen lately had been badly burned or shredded, which made it impossible to estimate their overall health. If everyone in the Japanese army was as hungry-looking as this sorry cadaver, then the Japanese supply system had completely broken down.
Hell, just last night Paul and his men had eaten a hot chicken dinner from a mobile field kitchen. When was the last time the Jap'd had a full meal? Weeks, he guessed, and it was probably boiled rice. If the Jap army was starving, that was good news.
Paul checked the man's equipment. The uniform was worn thin and in tatters. It was a far cry from what he and the others were wearing. It was still above freezing, but the air was damp and chill, just what his mother referred to as perfect pneumonia weather. This poor Jap must have been freezing, which might have thrown off his aim.
The slowdown in the American advance had permitted rear-echelon units to move closer to the front, and the men had actually been able to warm up in a tent with a portable stove the other day. Paul wondered when the dead boy had last been warm.
The young man's footwear was as bad as the rest of his gear. The soles of his boots had worn through and been replaced by pieces of wood. Paul looked at his own combat boots and wet-weather gear. He was dry and fairly comfortable. How the hell had the dead boy even been able to function? Again, it was information to send back to battalion.
A couple of men had checked the Jap's mouth and pronounced in disgust that there were no gold fillings. Paul felt a queasiness in his gut and walked away. He found refuge behind a bush and puked everything that was in his stomach, including what might have been left of that hot chicken dinner. He heaved until his stomach hurt and then his body shook. He had just killed a man and the reaction had set in.
Finally, he got control of himself and rejoined his men. Mackensen looked at him sympathetically. "You okay, sir?"
Paul chose to lie. "I'm fine."
"Your first?"
Paul took a mouthful of water from a canteen, swirled it around his mouth to cleanse it of the taste of bile, then spat it out. "Yeah. It shows, doesn't it?" He was slightly ashamed of his reaction in front of the rocklike first sergeant.
"Well, sir, that puts you one up on me," the first sergeant said with undisguised admiration. "That was damned good shooting and great hunting."
Paul thought Mackensen was kidding. His first sergeant had to have killed scores of the enemy. But then, who knew whether you actually killed or not? Many times Paul's men had blazed away at an unseen enemy, or in the general direction where they thought the Japs were. The results were impersonal and generally unknown. This type of killing was unique.
The only other times they'd actually seen the Japs they'd killed were during that banzai charge and when they'd taken out that bunkered-in tank.
"Thanks, top," Paul said, and managed a grin. "That means a lot coming from you." He saw looks of undisguised admiration on the others in the area. 1st Lt. Paul Morrell was a killer. Killer Morrell had blown a Jap's ass out of a tree and saved their lives. With the GIs' sense of exaggeration, he knew the legend would grow and have him shooting a score of Japs out of a score of trees and with only six bullets. Well, the only life he was certain he'd saved was his own.
Paul recalled Ruger's comment about his not firing during that earlier Jap attack and how upset he'd been to realize it. Now, not only had he fired his carbine, but he'd killed with it. He would not, however, tell anyone that this was the first time he had actually fired his weapon in anger. Killer Morrell. He decided he sort of liked it. More important, if it gave his men more confidence in his abilities, then it was all to the good. All he had to do now was make sure he deserved that confidence.
Part Four: Resolutions
Chapter 63
Maj. Stan Kutchinski was furious. For the second time in the last three missions, an engine was acting up and he would have to abort the bombing run. As he looked down at the gray-black ocean almost twenty thousand feet below him, he cursed another missed opportunity. This should have been his sixteenth mission, but an oil leak in one of the B-29's four engines had changed all that.
Earlier in the war, he would have pressed on along with the other bombers in his command since the B-29 could easily fly with three, or even two, engines. But orders were orders, and in the case of mechanical failure, he was to turn back. It wasn't something he could hide, as the problem forced him to shut down one engine. Thus, he had turned back to base and relinquished command of the other bombers to his number two.
Kutchinski wasn't concerned about being considered a coward for aborting the mission. The twenty-five-year-old major had seen enough aerial combat to satisfy any requirement for bravery. Instead, he was upset about missing a chance to rack up another score toward getting to go home. As a means of pacifying rebellious young officers who wanted out of the war, the military had reinstated the policy of rotating bomber crews back to the States after twenty-five combat missions. Today would have been sixteen if his plane, the Polish Pope, hadn't decided to act up.
With sixteen in, he would have needed only nine more, and that would only have taken a few weeks, a month at the most. Back home, he might have been discharged and given the opportunity to latch onto one of the civilian airlines. Kutchinski was convinced that air travel was the thing of the future, and he wanted on board an airline as quickly as possible. At the worst, he would have been given a military job training other pilots and would still have had time to make contacts with the airlines.
Aborting bombing missions because of mechanical failure wasn't done because there was so much danger from the Japanese planes and guns. In fact, the runs weren't particularly dangerous at all anymore. Jap interceptors were almost nonexistent, although the occasional kamikaze would try to ram a B-29, and Japanese antiaircraft guns had been battered into mush by other bombers.
But mechanical failure was a solid reason to abort because of the possibility of having to bail out over Japan, where there was the overwhelming likelihood that they would be killed out of hand by the angry Japs. Kutchinski and his men had heard too many tales of Americans being literally ripped to pieces by Jap mobs. Sometimes he wondered if he could blame the Japs. On previous missions they had flown over the Kyushu battlefields and seen the clouds of smoke reaching thousands of feet into the sky from the blackened and ruined land. What was occurring below in that tragic inferno was scarcely imaginable. Then they thanked the gods that had permitted them to join the air force rather than the godforsaken infantry.
Kutchinski's real fear was that there'd be a general stand-down because of a lack of targets before he could reach twenty-five missions, and he'd wind up being stuck in the military for the rest of eternity. No matter how the pie was cut, there were now too many planes and too few targets. Today they were to have bombed a valley where the Japs might be hiding some soldiers. A valley? What the hell kind of a target was a valley? Then he'd decided that it would have been a good one if it had helped him get to that magic number twenty-five.
"Major?"
It was Sgt. Tom Franks, the belly gunner, calling on the intercom. "What is it?"