Deke looked around at the sun-washed beach, which was still a strange sight for him, about as different from the mountains where he had grown up as one could get. He missed those mountains, with their brooding, rocky faces and crisp autumn woods. On this Pacific island, the damn sand got into everything, and the air dripped with humidity.
Still, they were able to enjoy a few hours on the beach because the fighting on the island of Guam had subsided, except for pockets of resistance deep in the jungle-covered hills, where a few die-hard Japanese didn’t have the sense to give up. You had to hand it to those Jap troops — they were nothing if not fanatical. They would readily make a last-ditch banzai attack or even starve to death, all in an effort to die for the Emperor, rather than give themselves up. Lieutenant Steele had explained that the Japanese saw their Emperor as a god, not to be questioned but only obeyed. He might be a living, breathing man, but Emperor Hirohito was the heart and soul of Japan.
Deke could understand the determination of the Japanese to fight to the death, even respect it. As a stubborn young man from the Southern hills, he knew what it meant to have your back against the wall and keep fighting. In a sense, he should have been dead a long time ago, and he had the scars to prove it. Deke was a natural-born fighter.
But even if he respected the enemy, he sure as hell didn’t like the enemy. The Japs had killed too many Americans for that, starting with their sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. They had killed Americans on Guadalcanal, sent thousands of sailors to their deaths in Ironbottom Sound, and killed thousands more on Guam. One of those dead had been Ben Hemphill, shot by a Jap sniper within minutes of landing on the beach. Deke had taken Ben’s death bitterly. They had gone through training together, and Deke had promised himself that he would look out for Ben.
Deke had failed, and something in him had snapped. In a blind rage, he had bayoneted the Jap sniper until the body had more holes in it than a rusty bucket. Even that son of a bitch Sergeant Hawley had been taken aback by the sight of that.
The way Deke figured it, if the Japs were so eager to die for their Emperor, Deke was glad to help. He sure had helped that sniper down the road to kingdom come, or wherever it was that dead Japs thought they ended up.
Nobody knew for sure how many Japs were hiding out and refused to give up. Lieutenant Steele had passed along that it was anywhere from several hundred to maybe even a few thousand.
Some of these enemy troops managed to organize occasional raids on the beachhead, but those amounted to little more than suicide missions. Otherwise, the island was firmly in US control.
One of the more comical incidents involving these Japanese holdouts had taken place a few days before, when a makeshift outdoor movie theater had been erected. In the tropical darkness near the beach, the troops sat on logs or on the ground, swatting mosquitoes and smoking cigarettes, watching a movie shown on a bedsheet. The movie had been Stage Door Canteen, and right in the middle of a scene with Guy Lombardo performing, someone had noticed strange laughter. Hell, the Japanese even laughed different. To their surprise, they found a diminutive Jap soldier who had sneaked into their midst to enjoy the movie. He had smiled and put his hands up. The shocked GIs had given him a cigarette and escorted him to the prisoner stockade. Apparently, Hollywood had won him over.
Every now and then, they heard a distant burst of fire or the whump of a mortar. But those sounds were too far off to worry about. Philly had finished up his story about Wanda, which wasn’t any more believable than the one that he’d told about Betty. The only thing they knew for certain was that they were all a long, long way from New Jersey.
“Anybody got any canned peaches left?” Yoshio Shimizu wanted to know. “I’ve got cigarettes to trade.”
“I’ll take those cigarettes off your hands, kid,” Philly said. “They might stunt your growth.”
“You can have them for a can of peaches.”
“Deal.”
Yoshio tossed over a pack of smokes and caught the canned peaches that flew in his direction. Eagerly, he went to work on the can, using his combat knife, punching a hole in the top so that he could drink the sweet syrup.
He passed the can around because Yoshio was generous that way. Deke took a drink, along with “Rodeo” Rodenbeck and “Alphabet” Pawelczyk. Deke savored that hit of the sweet juice, enjoying the luxury of peaches canned on the other side of the ocean.
“Thanks, kid.”
None of them were friends — or not exactly. That was the army for you, throwing men together from all sorts of places and walks of life, guys who wouldn’t normally give each other the time of day. Deke was just a dumb hick. Philly was a wiseass from Philadelphia. Yoshio was a Nisei, a Japanese-American who could speak the language of the enemy and served as an interpreter — if and when there were any Japanese prisoners.
No, Deke thought. They were not friends. They were something more. They were family. You couldn’t choose your family, either, but you would do anything to protect your family. That was the kind of loyalty that Deke understood.
Despite their differences, they knew each other better than brothers, at least to the extent that they could count on one another in a fight. They might not know each other’s religion or what their favorite baseball team was, but they knew that Yoshio could dig a foxhole like nobody’s business, that Rodeo and Alphabet kept their cool when the lead was flying, and that despite all his bluster and baloney, you wouldn’t find a man braver than Philly. As for Deke, they knew he could hit anything he could see with his Springfield rifle. He could be a mean son of a bitch, ornery and sullen, and he wouldn’t tell anyone how he’d gotten his scars, but he was their son of a bitch.
They were missing one man out of their original sniper squad. Ingram was dead, killed by the Japanese marksman they had nicknamed the “Samurai Sniper.” Rumor had it that Private Egan would soon be leaving. He was a war dog handler assigned to them for their scouting mission into the jungles of Guam, before the last big push against the Japanese. His dog, Whoa Nelly, had been killed while saving his life near Yigo. It was only a matter of time before the army figured out what to do with him and he was reassigned.
Then there was Lieutenant Steele. He sat apart from the other men on the beach, smoking a cigarette. He looked tired, his thoughts a million miles away.
They had all left their weapons nearby to go for a swim, with Deke and Lieutenant Steele being the exceptions. Both men kept their weapons between their knees, muzzles up, butts in the sand. Deke held a Springfield sniper rifle with a telescopic sight, while the lieutenant had a shotgun between his knees.
Unlike the others, Deke wasn’t watching the ocean. Instead, his gaze never left the line of jungle that began far up the beach. That was Deke for you, always switched on and never relaxed. So far, it was a quality that was helping to keep him alive out here.
“I’m going for a swim,” Philly announced.
“Shark bait,” said Pawelczyk, whose nickname was “Alphabet”—for good reason, considering that his Polish surname seemed to include most of it.
“What do you care? You can’t swim, anyhow.”
“It ain’t swimming if you’re only knee deep, which is as far out as I ever plan to go in the water. But you go on ahead and feed the sharks.”
“Nah, I’m too stringy for sharks. Anyhow, I hear it’s dumb Polacks like you that they really like to eat. Like caviar for sharks, you know?”