General MacArthur frowned. It was not exactly what he wanted to hear or expected, but in this case, even the general seemed ready to admit that Oatmire had a point.
“You might just be right about that, son. Now, dismissed!”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Deke and the rest of the company crept cautiously toward the coast, expecting at any moment to meet more Japanese resistance. They were battered and bruised, and more fighting was the last thing any of them wanted.
Even the fight at the coconut grove had cost them dearly. Lieutenant Gurley had been a good man, and so had Private Simmons. They had now joined the long list of soldiers who would not be coming home from the Pacific. The consensus was that Gurley had been a good man, but too eager. Fighting the Japanese wasn’t like in the comic books. It was good to keep that in mind if you wanted to stay alive.
“Damn shame about Lieutenant Gurley,” Philly remarked. He had drifted back to join Deke and Yoshio in the middle of the company moving along the jungle trail, content to let Danilo take point.
“He ought to have known better than to charge right at the Japanese,” said Deke. “There’s nothin’ worse than a dumb officer.”
“You know what, Corn Pone? The thing about you that we can always count on is that you don’t like anybody.” Philly’s tone suggested that he’d held the dead lieutenant in somewhat higher regard. “I do believe that you are the angriest son of a bitch I’ve ever met.”
“I might be angry, but at least I’m not a dead son of a bitch. Not yet, anyway. Always remember that the Japanese can shoot just as straight as we can. An officer like Gurley can get every last one of his men killed. We’re lucky that Captain Merrick has got more sense than that.”
“If you say so.”
Deke had no real love for most officers. In Deke’s book, many officers were just part of the system that kept a good man down. They ranked right up there with bankers and factory owners. There were exceptions to the rule, he thought, like Captain Merrick and Lieutenant Steele, men who knew their business. Another exception might even be MacArthur himself, who seemed to know how to go about winning the war.
“I think that Lieutenant Gurley was frustrated by the enemy,” Yoshio said. “He wanted them to come out and fight. It was his own version of a banzai charge.”
“Well, he’s dead now, and so is Simmons,” Deke pointed out. He had meant to just point out the facts but was surprised to hear the note of anger in his own voice.
The fight at the coconut grave had been an unpleasant surprise. It had shaped up to be their last combat action before leaving the jungle behind. If only they could have avoided it, then several more of the company’s men would have survived.
It was small consolation that they had killed all the Japanese who had ambushed them. In fact, it was quite a lopsided victory. But it would have been better if the fight hadn’t taken place at all. You certainly couldn’t blame Danilo for the ambush. In fact, it was his alert eyes and ears that had kept the Japanese ambush from being far worse.
Deke could understand what Yoshio meant about the lieutenant charging the Japanese position out of anger and frustration. Some of the others had done the same thing. But rage didn’t make you bulletproof. As it turned out, those men had died all the same. It was only the stealthy flanking movement that had snuffed out the Japanese attack, not the foolhardy charge by Lieutenant Gurley and the others.
And why had they died? To capture a little grove of overgrown coconut trees? No — that was the wrong way to look at it, Deke decided. They had died fighting the Japanese, pure and simple. The place and the circumstances didn’t matter. This was a war that was being won by increments.
Meanwhile, something that Philly had said was still gnawing at him.
“Hey, Yoshio,” Deke said. “Do you think I’m angry all the time?”
“Well, not all of the time,” Yoshio said. “Just most of the time.”
Deke chewed that over in his mind. Back home, there had been a lot of people he was angry at, but mostly he had been angry at himself. Here in the Pacific, he could unleash that anger on somebody else — the Japanese.
And that was just fine by him.
All morning, they had been moving toward the sound of fighting. Machine guns, mortars, even some artillery. The sounds indicated that this wasn’t just another skirmish at a coconut grove, but the sounds of a substantial fight taking place. Without doubt, they must be approaching the Japanese bastion around Ormoc.
His fevered mind convinced Deke that he could already smell the scent of spent gunpowder and blood, burning crops and the sap of the broken trees. In places, patches of jungle still pressed close to the trail, so that a thousand tiny branches seemed to scratch at his face and bare hands. He felt each one of them, his feverish skin extra sensitive, each brush against the leaves and branches seeming to have a different texture and shape, like running his hands over rough-cut lumber or rubbing his face with sandpaper.
He shook his head to clear it and took a drink from his canteen.
The fact that he was itching to get back into the fight made Deke realize that he felt marginally better, the fever starting to release some of its grip on him. At least the jungle wasn’t spinning quite as much as it had been. He had been popping aspirin like gumdrops and washing the pills down with more of Danilo’s tea. One or the other seemed to be working, or maybe it was a combination.
Sometimes, after having dodged so many bullets, Deke got to feeling invincible. Anyhow, nobody wanted to think that he could die. Getting killed was for the other guy. It was a convenient fiction that kept a man going, because if you believed that you were going to die in the next minute or the next hour, you’d curl up in the bottom of a foxhole instead of doing your job as a soldier. The fever was a reminder that death lurked in all sorts of ways, lest Deke get too bold.
Up ahead, Deke could see Danilo leading the way along the trail, several feet ahead of the nearest soldier. The Filipino guerrilla reminded Deke of the jungle cat that he had seen, all the man’s senses on high alert, like some creature of the forest.
Deke considered that he knew almost nothing about Danilo other than that he was one of the guerrillas who had served with Father Francisco to fight the Japanese occupiers in any way possible. He didn’t know how old Danilo was, if he had children, or how his family might have suffered under Japanese occupation.
The man had made an effort to nurse Deke back to health in his own rugged way. Would Deke have done the same for him? He realized that he might not have, at least not before Danilo had done so much for him. He felt ashamed about it. When it came to the Filipinos, Deke realized there was so much that they took for granted about these generous people.
Danilo signaled a halt. They saw him crouch, rifle at the ready.
“Dammit, it’s probably more Japanese,” Captain Merrick could be heard muttering as he hurried forward. “Frazier, get that BAR ready.”
Private Frazier hurried forward, shouldering his way past the other men in an attempt to catch up with Captain Merrick at the head of the column. Instead of gunshots, however, they were met with a booming American voice that demanded, “What’s the password?”
Danilo looked at Captain Merrick, who shouted irritably back at the unseen sentry: “I don’t know the damn password!”
There was a pause in which everyone held their breath. The moment was tense, considering that more than one incident of so-called friendly fire had been caused by nervous or overzealous sentries. “How do we know you’re not Japs?”
“Do we look like Japs to you, soldier? We don’t know the damn password because we’ve been hiking through the damn jungle. Goddammit.”