Patrol Easy, Deke included, had not joined in the chase. They were content to hang back and save their energy for the next fight, which wouldn’t be long in coming. Deke looked around and saw Honcho and Yoshio in the distance, along with Rodeo, Alphabet, and Philly.
Only Private Egan and Thor weren’t there — they had joined the hunt for Japanese who had opted not to run, but who were trying to hide on the hillside. Thor’s sharp nose rooted them out, and the crack of a rifle announced the quarry’s end. No prisoners were being taken.
As was increasingly becoming the case in the Pacific, the fighting felt personal. Killing any Japanese they found was more about revenge than it was about military necessity. Such were the vicissitudes of war.
After all, there were a handful of bodies scattered around the American line. Good American boys who wouldn’t be going home. Their buddies were taking out their anger on the Japanese survivors. Neither Captain Merrick nor Honcho made any effort to put an end to the killing.
Deke took note of the skinny clerk still hovering nearby. He nodded at him and said, “That was some good shooting, kid.”
Private Rafferty grinned a bit sheepishly, but with evident pride. He hadn’t come through the fight completely unscathed, however. Sure enough, he had managed to mash his thumb in the action of the M1, the painful M1 thumb, but had kept fighting. From the looks of it, he had managed to get his thumb caught in the slamming action more than once. The thumb was swollen and bloody.
Deke noticed and said, “Let me see that hand a minute.” He used a scrap of cloth to bind it up. “Good as new.”
“Aw, why are you even bothering with him, Deke?” Philly wanted to know. “He’s just a clerk. How’s he gonna type with his thumb wrapped up like that?”
“Oh, I don’t know about that. We might just make a soldier out of him yet.”
His face was now grimy with dirt and blackened by gun smoke. The uniform that had been relatively clean that morning as he’d performed his clerical duties beneath a tarp erected on the beach was now muddy, torn at the knee, and soaked through with sweat.
Deke’s words had summed it up perfectly. You could almost see the man swelling up with the kind of pride that was hard earned. It didn’t matter how big he was or what his job in the army had been or what he would go back to once the Japanese were contained, for above all things, army clerk Rafferty was now a combat veteran.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The aftermath of that combat was evident on the hillside. It wasn’t pretty. In places the earth was stained red, so savage had the fighting been. Already a few soldiers were calling it the Battle of Bloody Ridge. The name quickly caught on.
Teams of GIs had retrieved their own dead and wounded, but no one was going to clear away the enemy dead.
And there were a lot of them.
“I’ll be damned,” Deke said, looking across the slope. In the heat of battle, his fight had been limited to what he could see through his scope. Now he took in the overall panorama of the battlefield. A few fires still burned where the flamethrowers had touched. But what really caught his attention were the large numbers of corpses. “That’s a lot of dead Japanese.”
“What I want to know is, When the hell are they going to run out of soldiers?” Philly wondered.
“They didn’t run out today, and I reckon they won’t run out tomorrow,” Deke said.
“The bastards would’ve kept coming if it hadn’t been for the tanks.”
“Saved our bacon,” Deke agreed.
Philly grunted. “And fried theirs,” he said, nodding at a blackened enemy corpse.
Nobody liked to talk about it out loud, but there was something horrible about a flamethrower. Bullets, knives, and bayonets were bad enough. A flamethrower was the stuff of nightmares, the war of the future.
Deke leaned over and tried to spit but came up empty, his mouth too dry. The tangy smell of gunpowder still filled his nostrils.
After being laid low by that fever, he had rallied enough to do some good in the fight. He had managed to shoot that Japanese officer, after all.
But he didn’t feel quite right. He could feel sickness trying to get back in, like some critter gnawing at the edges of a door. A feverish tremor went through him now and again. Deke did his best to ignore it. He had been warned that malaria was like that, coming and going in fits and starts.
Victory at Bloody Ridge felt bittersweet. They had won the fight against the Japanese, but a glance at the wounded lined up on their stretchers showed that the price had been steep. Some of the men had their faces covered, having lost their lives on this nameless ridge. Covering the faces of the dead, even with nothing more than a muddy and bloodstained blanket, was the least that they could do.
After the firefight, many of the survivors slumped down on the ground, exhausted. Adrenaline had coursed through their veins, fueling the fight-or-flight response that stretched back to the dawn of humanity, when the first humans had tangled with lions or maybe a saber-toothed tiger. In this case their only choice had been to fight.
Their bodies had burned through that evolutionary jet fuel, leaving them feeling hollowed out and spent, as if they had just run a marathon. Mixed with the exhaustion was a euphoria at still being alive.
A few men managed to get food into themselves. They craved anything sweet, even wolfing down the tropical chocolate bars that had the consistency of chalk. Others sat quietly, too dazed for words, smoking cigarettes, their hands shaking.
The rear-echelon troops who had plugged the gap and experienced their first real combat felt the most dazed of all, but also proud.
However, there would be no resting on their laurels. The newly blooded soldiers weren’t being given a chance to process what they had just been through, not with more fighting ahead.
“We’re moving out!” shouted Lieutenant Steele, once again reluctantly thrust into a command position. The fight at Bloody Ridge had left another lieutenant under one of those blankets. That left the company with just two officers. Honcho had found himself second in command as Captain Merrick’s company prepared for the final push toward Ormoc.
“But I was just getting comfortable, Honcho,” Philly complained, pushing himself up from where he had sprawled on a patch of soft ground. “How about letting us rest for a while?”
“Get your ass up and moving,” Honcho snapped, sounding uncharacteristically short tempered. “That’s an order, goddammit.”
Surprised, Philly hurried to stand up. “Yes, sir.”
Nearby, the others got to their feet as well and prepared to move out. They could see that this wasn’t the laid-back Honcho who had commanded their sniper squad. He certainly commanded respect, but he had never appeared angry before — until now.
The lieutenant stalked away and shouted at other men who were slow to get to their feet.
“Gee, I wonder what got into his craw?” Philly wondered aloud — once the lieutenant was safely out of earshot.
“Yep, he’s crankier than a moonshiner with a hole in his still,” Deke agreed. It was clear that Honcho was stretched thin, and his customary patience with Philly’s banter had finally snapped. “I wouldn’t go poking at him, if I were you.”
Philly snorted. “No worries there. Where the hell are we going, anyhow? I hope it’s not far. Maybe we can hitch a ride on one of those captured Japanese trucks, or even better, a tank.”
“I don’t think we’re goin’ anywhere good. We cleared those Japanese off the ridge, so our next dance is gonna be in Ormoc, sure as an egg-suckin’ dog finds the henhouse.”
They glanced hopefully in the direction of the trucks, the captured Japanese vehicles painted with the lopsided US stars. There was a wide road ahead that would have meant a smooth ride to Ormoc. However, the trucks were being loaded with the wounded, pointed in the opposite direction, apparently for transport back to the beach. Maybe word had gone out that the navy was ferrying the wounded to the hospital ships once again.