Our jumping-off point was apparently six miles away. The sooner we got there, the more time we’d have to hunker down and get a hot meal before moving forward.
Most of the way we had to march alongside the trail, a knee-deep river of glue. Every so often you’d see guys working together to try and pull something loose from the middle of it, like it was flypaper.
By an hour in we were stumbling along blind, just trying to keep our bodies focused on the next step. Other companies with nothing to do came out of their bivouacs to watch us go up the line. By two hours in, those of us in the back of the column started passing guys up front who’d fallen out. We’d started at first light and by nighttime we still weren’t there and a third of the unit was back behind us. For dinner they handed around boxes of cold canned hash and hard biscuits. When you took a spoon of hash the space in the tin filled with rainwater. Everybody slept where they came to a halt. The CO slogged around for a head count and figured we’d lost forty-five percent of those who’d been able to march. The next morning the major he reported to told him that we’d ended up with the best mark of the battalion.
There were a lot of units around us, packed into not much space. I recognized the PFC who’d been dishing out the mail. While we were waiting, more and more of our stragglers stumbled in. A trail in front of us ran up a hill and disappeared. From the other side, even over the rain, we could hear the occasional small-arms fire. People were cleaning their guns as best they could and hoarding clips. A couple guys threw up and it washed away as soon as it hit the ground. I upended my helmet for a drink. While it filled I threw in a few halazone tablets just to be safe. “Think there are germs in this water?” I asked Leo.
“About nine fucking million,” he said. He did this thing with his hand like he was wringing it in the rain to dry it off. The mud was so fine it outlined his fingerprints. He cupped his hands and splashed himself. Cleaning his face seemed to make him feel better.
Twenty minutes, the CO announced. We were to be the first assault group. We didn’t know where we were headed besides that hill, but our platoon leaders apparently did.
Everyone was sitting cross-legged with his rifle in his lap. The mess sergeant went around with a C-ration stack and guys took what they wanted for breakfast. I had a cold can of beans and sat there mashing them between my molars. Leo chewed on his thumb. We could see G for George, the battalion’s heavy-weapons company, trying to find stable spots on the slope for their mortars. Whatever we picked up — our spoons, our bloc clips, everything covered in mud — got even greasier from all the cleaning oil.
We were National Guard recruits from Wisconsin. Our uniforms were rags, our boots sponges, our rifles waterlogged. We’d never been so tired in our lives. Everybody was sick. No one was talking. All of us were crouched over our weapons. I remembered how amazing it had been to think, when I first saw this place, that some of us were going to stay on it, dead.
“Biggest drunk of your lives, all of it on me, once we’re off the line,” the CO called out. He and the lieutenant shared a little waterproof map and kept looking up the slope and then back at the map.
“Drinks on the CO,” the lieutenant agreed. Our staff sergeants went from group to group, checking weapons and whacking shoulders.
When I was a kid my dad was always off working for the CCC, mostly putting up power lines around the southern part of the state. He did some fence construction and tree planting, too. He was one of the oldest guys there. He worked forty hours a week for thirty dollars a month, with twenty-five of it sent home to the family. He had to wear a uniform and live in a camp during the week. He got up to a bugle at sunrise and only came home on weekends. He said the sign over the main gate read “We’re Here to Lick Old Man Depression.” “Lick him where?” he said when my mom quoted it to some friends they had over. She shushed him. After that he got a job building roads, but didn’t get home much more often. And one night around Christmastime he came home late with frostbite on his feet. Just a little bit, but he was still mad about it. I was seven and my brother was nine. Our dad was sitting with his feet in a pan of water while we sat there watching him. Our mom was somewhere else, staying out of the way. There were Christmas carols on the radio. He looked at us from top to bottom and bottom to top like he hadn’t found anything yet that looked the way it was supposed to.
“What’s the matter?” my brother finally asked him. I was amazed he’d found the guts to do that.
My dad sat there and didn’t say anything. We all listened to my mom empty the pan from under the icebox.
“What’s the matter?” my brother asked again.
“What’s the matter?” my dad said, exactly the same way. It made my brother tear up. One of the Christmas carols ended and another one started. Finally we couldn’t stand how he was looking at us. My brother left first, but I hung around for a minute, to see if it was just my brother or the both of us he hated.
With five minutes left we were told we weren’t going yet. There was some softening up that was supposed to have happened ahead of our attack, but all we could hear was the rain and the kekekekek sound that the geckos made. Word was that the mortar shells were still stuck somewhere down the trail and nobody knew what was up with our artillery. We weren’t happy about waiting but were even less happy about going.
“So what are you going to do about this Linda-and-your-brother thing?” Leo said. “I mean if you’re not dead.”
My stomach was barely keeping itself together. I was taking deep breaths to help with that. “You know what I sometimes wonder?” I finally asked him. “How does she know so much about doing it? Where did that information come from?”
“Oh,” Leo said, raising his hand, “I think I know.”
While we sat there the CO told us we were headed for a foot track over the Owen Stanley Range through the Gap. This range was one of the steepest in the world and divided the island in half. The staff sergeants told us to dump anything nonessential because whatever we took was going to be on our backs the whole way. Doubek inverted his pack and it turned out he’d collected twenty-eight cans of sliced peaches. He figured he could carry six and started trying to eat the rest right there. “One thing the American Army’s never going to run out of,” Leo said, watching him. “Canned fruit.”
We finally got the go-ahead even though the rain hadn’t let up and there’d been no artillery. “What happened to the softening up, sir?” Leo asked the CO as he passed our position.
“The thinking now is that we’re going to take ’em by surprise,” the CO called back. He got everybody moving and we all climbed a preliminary hill, slipping and sliding. No one could keep his head up without losing his footing.
At the top everyone was already beat, but on the other side of a little swale we could see our path climbing up into the clouds. The occasional scout was slithering down the slope in our direction. Where the trail went was cut off by the same clouds that were raining all over us.
It took us about an hour to get organized at the base and ready to climb. Three porters were coming along to hump the extra ammunition until we came under fire. The CO let us rest for a half an hour and then got us going again. The slopes kept sliding out from under us and the porters got a bang over how bad we were at keeping our feet. In places where the mud was covered with leaves a guy would manage maybe one step before falling and taking the next three guys down with him. “Heads up” meant “Catch whoever’s sliding down at you.” We took breaks on our hands and knees with water streaming over our wrists.