“Looks like…the war’s over for me,” he said, smiling, his eyes cloudy.
“Let’s make a stretcher for him,” Heavy said, “out of our dungaree jackets.”
“Yeah,” Fremont said, “we can try and carry him back.”
We improvised a litter, and Barney and I took all the rifles while Heavy, Monawk, and Fremont, bending low in the brush, carried Whitey. We moved slow, making as little noise as possible. No sign of the Jap patrol. Maybe they figured they got us. Maybe they moved on.
We’d got about fifty yards when machine-gun fire bup-bup-bup-bup-buped across our flank.
Heavy and Monawk screamed, one unified searing scream of pain-they’d taken the slugs across the legs, and the litter bearing Whitey capsized and Whitey spilled out into the spiky brush. Fremont drove for cover as another spray of machine gun chopped up the landscape. He howled sharply, and then was silent.
Barney and I were flat on our bellies, mosquitoes buzzing happily around our faces. Sweat was running in my eyes and my mouth, salty sweat. My mouth tasted as putrid as this goddamn jungle. Life was less than wonderful, but I resented the men with machine guns out there trying to end it for me.
They hadn’t spotted us, I didn’t think, but they were arcing their machine-gun fire around, bullets cracking, snapping all around.
I could see Heavy and Monawk, like cripples flung from wheelchairs, pulling themselves by the hands across the brambles and brush of the jungle floor, slowly, slowly, slowly finding their way to cover behind some trees. Then I saw Heavy slip down into a hole, a crater formed by an artillery shell. Barney and I edged over toward him, coming across Fremont on the way.
He was in bad shape: gut shot. He was whimpering, barely conscious, his stomach a black/red soggy mess into which he dug one hand, trying to hold his life in.
Above us, Jap bullets chewed up the landscape in a methodical arc.
Staying on our bellies, Barney and I each took one of his arms and dragged him toward the shell hole. We pulled him down in, by which time he was unconscious. Too many people for one small hole. I looked around, frantically; I was burning up, felt like I was looking out through red eyes.
Nonetheless, I saw it: another shell hole, ten yards or so away, a larger hole. In front of it, between us and the direction the Japs had been firing, was a fallen tree, dropped there by a bomb. Just beyond the shell hole, behind a tree, Monawk was slumped, legs shot to shit.
It was more than one machine gun now, and rifle fire was in there, too. Were they zeroing in on us?
Barney and I crawled to the hole, I slid in and he went on past and got Monawk and pulled him down in with us. We had that massive fallen tree between us and the Japs, whose bullets were hitting close enough to home that it was time to give up on keeping our position hidden, and start throwing it back at them.
About then D’Angelo crawled in the hole, grinning. “I told you that turd was warm.”
“Shut up and shoot,” I said.
“You’ll have to prop me up,” he said.
He’d gotten it in the leg.
“Not you too,” I said.
“Thanks for the sympathy, Pops. Prop me up!”
I helped him sit up and he started tossing M-1 fire their way; our efforts seemed feeble compared to the barrage of bullets they were sending us. Barney started to throw Fremont’s rifle and Heavy’s BAR back to them, but they yelled from their shell hole that they were too weak, and in too much pain, to do any shooting.
“You guys can do more good with ’em than us,” Heavy shouted. “Keep ’em…”
His voice trailed off.
“Hit?” I asked Barney.
“Sounds like he passed out,” Barney said.
“He’s got company,” I said, nodding toward a barely conscious Monawk and a slumped D’Angelo.
“Christ! He isn’t dead, is he?”
I checked D’Angelo’s neck pulse. “No. Just unconscious.”
Bullets continued to zing and whiz overhead.
I called out to Fremont and he didn’t answer.
“Looks like we’re it, buddy,” I told Barney. “Everybody else is asleep.”
I thought of Corporal McRae’s remark, back at boot camp, about combat allowing no man sleep. He’d been wrong. So wrong.
“They aren’t sleeping,” Barney said, meaning those sons of bitches throwing machine-gun fire at us.
Neither was Whitey. I could hear him out there, not quite dead yet, yelling “Mother, Mother-Dad, Dad, please help me!”
And then whimpering.
It was the saddest thing I ever heard, but I didn’t cry. I was in that limbo world, that oddly detached place where men under fire go, to keep from going mad during the madness.
With cool desperation I fired my M-1 into the rain of bullets.
Wondering when sleep would next come for me.
And, when it did, if waking would follow.
Barney was leaning against the fallen tree, firing the BAR from within the shell hole. The big automatic rifle made him look like a grizzled, demented dwarf; maybe that look in his eyes was one his opponents in the ring were used to seeing from him-I’d known him a long, long time and never saw it before.
The barrel of my M-1 was getting hot as I fired clip after clip; I too was leaning against the tree, not able to see who I was shooting at, not really, an occasional shape moving in the denseness of the jungle, with only the bullets that were chewing up the jungle around us to prove anybody was really out there at all.
I heard a scream just behind me, and wheeled around and the nose of my M-1 thumped Monawk in the chest like a bayonet. He’d come around, the big Indian had, screaming in pain. Scared the hell out of me, too, but the poor bastard could hardly help it.
Monawk would come in and out of it, like that, blacking out, then suddenly wake and start moaning and groaning and sometimes even screaming, bellowing like a big wounded animal. He was too weakened, too pain-racked, to help shoot or even reload. His legs were shot up real bad, way beyond anything we could do for him with the combat dressings in our first-aid pouches.
“That’s all she wrote for the BAR,” Barney said, lowering the big weapon.
“Watkins carries an extra fifty rounds on his belt,” I said. “Want me to crawl over and get it for you?”
Barney shook his head. “I’ll go. You’re weak with malaria; you wouldn’t be on your feet if you weren’t leanin’ on that log.”
I didn’t argue with him; he had a point-you could’ve fried an egg on my forehead. You could’ve fried a powdered egg on my forehead.
Barney continued: “Anyway, I want to stay over there awhile, and lay down some fire-let’s make the Jap bastards believe they got a whole crowd of healthy Marines on their hands.”
“Why not. Get Fremont’s extra rifle ammo, too, while you’re at it. I’ll lay some cover down for you.”
I fired the M-1 over the log, emptying the rifle rapidly, then switching to another of the M-1s, to keep a steady barrage going while Barney crawled on his belly up and out of our hole and over to the one next door.
Then his BAR opened up, and damn near convinced me there was a whole healthy Marine platoon out here, giving the Japs hell.
I kept switching guns (rifles-this is my rifle, this is my gun, this is for Japs…) with the help of D’Angelo, who was groggy but awake, barely, and able to keep reloading for me. Even rotating six rifles, their barrels got so hot I was afraid they’d warp; the palm of my left hand was scorched black.
At some point, Christ knows when exactly, two soldiers-two young-looking, scared-shitless Army boys-came out of nowhere, crawling on their bellies and dropping into the hole. They were both wounded in the legs, and one in his side as well; they were sobbing with pain. They didn’t have their rifles.
“Who the fuck are you?” I said, with all due sympathy, switching rifles again.