Quietly pleased with himself, Shindo flew back towards Oahu.
A LONG COLUMN OF BOOTS marched through the mud in a driving rainstorm of the sort southern California Chambers of Commerce pretended this part of the country didn’t get. Lester Dillon had spent enough time at Camp Elliott to know better. The youngsters who wanted to be Marines looked thoroughly miserable.
Dillon was miserable, too, but he didn’t show it. As far as they were concerned, he was immune to vagaries like weather. If rain hit him and ran down the back of his neck, if his boots squelched in the mud-well, so what? He was a platoon sergeant. At the moment, he was a platoon sergeant who craved coffee with brandy in it, but these puppies didn’t need to know that.
“I can’t hear you!” he shouted, pitching his voice to carry even through the downpour.
The boots had been singing a marching song. Understandably, the downpour dampened their zeal. Dillon understood that, all right, but he wasn’t about to put up with it. They weren’t supposed to let anything dampen their zeal. That was part of what being a Marine was all about. If rain could do it, coming under fire would be infinitely worse. Coming under fire was infinitely worse, but they had to act as if it weren’t. They roared out the song through the rain:
“I still can’t hear you!” Dillon shouted, but not so angrily: they were loud enough to wake the dead now. And they were getting tougher. When they started training, this tramp through the rain and muck would have prostrated them. Now they took it in stride. Few physical challenges fazed them any more. That too was part of what made them what they ought to be. But it was the easy part. A lot of them-farm boys and factory workers-had been in good shape before they started training. But being in good shape, while necessary to make a Marine, wasn’t enough.
Would they stick together? Would they think of their buddies, their unit, as more important than themselves? Would they throw away their lives to save their buddies if they had to, knowing those buddies would do the same for them? Would they go forward where staying safe required hanging back?
If they managed that-if they managed it without fussing about it, without even thinking much about it-they’d be proper leathernecks.
Dillon couldn’t remember how he’d absorbed the lessons he needed to have. He knew damn well they’d been in place before he ever went Over There. What he saw in France, what he did there, only confirmed what he’d already had.
“Sergeant?” one of the boots said.
“Yeah?” Dillon growled-he wanted them to think he was God, and an angry God at that.
“This is fun!” the youngster said.
That flummoxed Dillon. In all his years in the Corps, he didn’t think he’d ever heard the like. “It’s not supposed to be fun, goddammit,” he said after that momentary amazement. “This isn’t a picnic. It isn’t a lark. Those Nip assholes are gonna fuckin’ kill you if they get half a chance. They’re good at it. That means we gotta be even better. You hear me, maggot?”
“Yes, Sergeant!” the boot bellowed. You hear me? had to be answered at top volume, lest worse befall. Worse would bloody well befall here any which way. “Drop down and give me fifty pushups,” Dillon growled. “Fun, my ass!”
“Yes, Sergeant!” the boot shouted again. He was a big, blond, wide-faced kid named Kowalski. Fifty pushups in the rain, in the mud, with a heavy pack on his back, were no joke. He was filthy and damn near dead by the time he finished them. Dillon wasn’t sure he could have done them himself. Kowalski, though, plainly would sooner have died for real than failed. That was a Marine’s way of thinking, too. He bounced to his feet after the last one, panting and scarlet but ready to go on with the march.
“Still having fun?” Dillon asked him.
By his expression, the kid wanted to say yes. But he wasn’t-quite-that dumb. “No, Sergeant!” he said loudly.
“Okay,” Dillon said. “Get it in gear.”
After a hot shower and a clean uniform, he told the story that evening over a beer in the NCOs’ club. Dutch Wenzel shook his head as if he couldn’t believe his ears. “Fun?” he said. “What the fuck is the world coming to?”
“Beats me,” Dillon answered. “How much fun will he think it is when his pal gets shot in the guts? How much fun will he think it is when he does? It’s a job, for Chrissake. We gotta do it, and we gotta do it right, but fun? For crying out loud, Dutch!”
“Easy, man-easy.” Wenzel raised a placating hand. “You’re preaching to the choir here.”
“Okay, okay. It rocked me, though, I tell you.” Les shook his head, too. He still couldn’t get over it.
“Fun!”
“Don’t blame you,” Dutch said. “Even for a boot, that’s pushing it. Hey-I heard something pretty good, though.”
“Tell me,” Dillon urged. “Maybe it’ll help me get the taste of this out of my mouth.”
“I hear we launched a new carrier,” Dutch told him. “Gotta start making up for what the Japs nailed last summer.”
Les nodded. “That’s a fact-and you’re right; that is good news. What are they calling this one?”
“Essex,” Wenzel answered. “There are supposed to be more in the pipeline, too.”
“There’d better be,” Dillon said. “You gotta figure we’re going to lose some on the way in. We need to smash whatever they’ve got and have enough left over to handle their land-based air. If we don’t, we shouldn’t even start.”
“Yeah, well, you know that, and I know that, but do they know it back in Washington?” Wenzel said.
“Beats me,” Dillon said. “I’ll tell you one thing, though-we’re gonna find out.”
JANE ARMITAGE FOUND IT HARD to believe 1943 was more than a month old. Christmas and New Year’s had passed quietly. What was there to celebrate? And one day, one month, here was a lot like another. Oh, it was a little warmer in the summer, a little rainier in the winter, but, both times, only a little. She remembered Ohio. You didn’t have any trouble telling summer from winter in Columbus. In Wahiawa, you could lose track without a calendar.
Flowers bloomed. Butterflies danced and bees buzzed. Snow? When the school was open, she’d had to teach special lessons about snow. The third-graders couldn’t have understood half the Christmas carols if she hadn’t.
Downtown Wahiawa, such as it was, had suffered since the Japanese took over. All the stores that sold new clothes, new dishes, new furniture-new anything, when you got right down to it-had gone belly-up. New stuff had come from the mainland, and nothing came to Hawaii from the mainland any more except the occasional airplane full of bombs. Much as Jane approved of those, she didn’t want to buy one and take it back to the apartment.
Secondhand places, now… Those flourished. If you wanted a toaster or a dress or something to read, you got it secondhand. Used goods, if not abundant, were at least available. Jane sometimes felt like a ghoul when she sorted through them, for a lot of them came from the households of people who’d died in the fighting. But what could you do? Those luckless souls had no further use for their goods, and the people who were still alive desperately needed them.
When Jane saw a copy of Murder Must Advertise in the secondhand-book shop, she had all she could do not to jump for joy. She liked mysteries in general and Dorothy Sayers in particular, and she’d never read that one. Showing eagerness, though, would have run up the price. Nothing was fixed these days; everything depended on how much the seller thought he-or, in this case, she-thought the buyer would part with.