Authors: Homer Hickam
“You're going up that beach? You'll never make it.”
Josh noticed the angle of the sun. It was already late afternoon. If he was going to find Shoup, he'd need to hurry. “Look, Major, there's not much light left,” he said. “Most likely Jap will counterattack tonight, give you a big
banzai
scare. Just do whatever you can to keep this beach secure. The Japanese believe they're the best night-fighters in the world, but we skunked them on Guadalcanal and you can skunk them here. When it gets dark, send out a couple of your best men to cut some throats. That'll give them pause. Oh, and steal their water, too.”
“Aye, aye, Skipper. Tell Colonel Shoup I'll hold the line here.”
Josh headed up the beach, a depressing trek that took him past hundreds of bodies and great piles of wreckage and soggy gear, all spoiling in the terrible heat. When he crossed the boundary to Red Beach Two, he was astonished to come upon a big sergeant and several other marines tossing sticks of dynamite over the seawall. The sergeant took a look at Josh, and his jaw fell open. “My God, man, you're shot all to hell!”
“Where'd you get that dynamite?” Josh asked.
“Brought it in with us. We were just about to go over the top to take out some pillboxes. Want to come along? Looks like Jap couldn't do much more to you.”
Josh thought it over and said, “Why not?”
“That's the spirit,” the sergeant said and introduced himself “Bill Bordelon. I'm a Texas boy.”
Josh made a quick study of the man's open, honest face and instantly liked him. “Haven't we met?”
“You bet we have! I was on the Canal. I helped build the runway at Henderson. Ever so often, you'd land there in that junk heap of a PBY of yours. Your pilot made every landing fun to watch. They were always more like crashes than landings.”
Josh smiled. “Mister Phimble taught himself how to fly. It ain't pretty the way he does it, but he generally gets us where we're going.”
Bordelon gave Josh a quick rundown of the rest of his men. Every one of them was a sergeant. “We used to be navy Seabees,” Bordelon confided, “but they decided to make us into marines for this foul-up. Since we were all technical, they had to make us sergeants. We're a whole company of sergeants, believe it or not, what's left of us. We got shot up pretty good coming in.”
“You and everybody else. You got any water?”
“No, but we got plenty of oil in our canteens.”
One of the sergeants silently handed Josh a utility shirt, and Josh put it on. It was a little tight but serviceable. He left it unbuttoned.
“You ready to go?” Bordelon asked.
Josh nodded, and Bordelon gave him a big grin, lit the fuse on a cluster of four dynamite sticks, and yelled, “Come on, all you sergeants! Let's make some noise!”
Over the wall they went, a cluster of ex-Seabee engineers made into marine sergeants carrying dynamite, along with one battered Coast Guard captain, armed only with a K-bar.
The Japanese were caught entirely by surprise.
Sister Mary Kathleen was young, very young, and she had about her a certain Irish farm girl beauty, but her habit covered all but her face and hands. Still, more than a few of the battle-begrimed
rikusentai
glanced avariciously in her direction and, as Soichi had predicted, snarled their intentions to rape her. Although she understood them very well, her response was to nod and smile as if she didn't. The wise captive always seeks to understand the language of her captors, and this was not the first time Sister Mary Kathleen had been imprisoned by the Japanese, or threatened by them. She even understood their curses when they descended into the slang of the streets. She knew gutter Japanese all too well. She also knew her only chance was to keep one of them from going over the edge and following through on his threat. It was the mentality of the pack. If one began his attack, the others, swept along by the frenzy, would follow. Then she and her fella boys would surely be torn to pieces.
A particularly loathsome brute with big yellow teeth reached toward her, only to have his hand slapped away by a defiant Tomoru. Seeing the confrontation, Captain Sakuri came up behind the Imperial marine and struck him on his head, bowling away his helmet. When the man bent over for it, Sakuri, screaming curses, further planted his boot on the man's hindquarters and pushed him to the floor. The Japanese marine crawled after his helmet and, after retrieving it, hastily departed the fortress. Sister Mary Kathleen mumbled her thanks to Sakuri in English, but the officer, in response, burned his eyes into hers, then slowly drew his finger across his throat, saying in Japanese, “Woman, you will not live through this day.” Then he stalked outside.
Sister Mary Kathleen decided to take Lieutenant Soichi's advice and shepherded her fella boys behind the table that held Captain Sakuri's plans and maps and made them sit. “Be like the sea after a storm, me boys,” she directed them. “Be strong but quiet. Heads down, that's it. Do not look at them.”
Tomoru objected. “If a Japonee comes near us again, I will break his back.”
“Nay, Tomoru,” the nun counseled in his dialect. “We did not come here to fight the Japanese but to find the Americans. I think they are coming. You must be patient.”
“Tomoru, you will heed Sister,” Nango advised the young man, and Tomoru, though he frowned, nodded assent. Nango was, after all, the next great chief of their island.
The
rikusentai
kept rotating in and out of the sand fortress, coming in-side to rest and eat and drink and resupply themselves with ammunition. The battle outside had only been noise to the nun. She had no idea what was happening, only that it must be a furious fight. She was surprised that no wounded Japanese were ever carried inside. Did that mean the Japanese were winning? Or were they leaving their wounded on the battlefield?
As the hours went by, the Japanese seemed to be losing control of themselves, becoming ever more hysterical as the battle got louder and apparently closed in on the fortress. Once, three of them came running inside and collapsed, breathing heavily and groaning. Then they rose to their knees and held one another and began to chant something that Sister Mary Kathleen could not understand. She concluded it was in an obscure Japanese dialect. Perhaps the men were all from the same remote village. Captain Sakuri came inside, saw the trio, and spoke to them. Immediately, they all nodded assent and, with shamed expressions on their faces, quietly gathered up ammunition and went back outside into the riotous tumult. Sister Mary Kathleen heard very clearly what the captain had said to them. “Do you expect to live? For shame! Your life is over! Today or tomorrow, you will die, either by the Americans or by suicide. These are my final orders.”
She could not help but feel admiration for Sakuri and the
rikusentai
and marveled at the faith that allowed them to so willingly sacrifice themselves for their causeâbut could they not see how foolish, and ultimately worthless, their deaths would be? Fight for your beliefs and your country, yes, but when the enemy is overwhelming, why deliberately die? To her, by everything her church had taught her, this was a mortal, unforgivable sin. Yet here were all these men, made by the same God as she, accepting death as long as it was glorious, and it didn't matter much if it was by the hand of the enemy
or their own. She reflected that if she had stayed in Ireland, she would have never observed such strange beliefs. Giving it some thought, though, she wondered if that was really true. Her father, during his protracted war with the English, had adopted much the same philosophy, had he not? And if she allowed herself to look back, to trace the line of fate that had brought her to this terrible atoll, it was what her father had believed that had caused his death and therefore changed her life, ultimately bringing her into the sisterhood. And was that not good? Could mortal sin be the direct cause of goodness? She did not know. There was so
much
she did not know.
A sudden crash at one of the portals startled her from her contemplation. A gout of smoke blew inside, a choking sulfurous fog. As it condensed, she saw a Japanese marine staggering around the bunker, his quivering hands reaching out. She saw now that his face was gone, replaced by a gory mass of torn flesh. He swiveled his head hideously and helplessly trying to see, though all that remained was dripping scarlet eye sockets. Pitifully, he staggered to the table and put his hands on it, allowing it to take his weight. She saw now that he had no jaw; his upper teeth, the few of them left, exposed like pink pegs in the purple mush of his palate. Captain Sakuri came inside and wordlessly gripped the man by his shoulder and turned him around. Then the captain put a dagger in the man's hands and watched stoically as the Imperial marine plunged it hard into his stomach and jerked it once, then twice, his terrible face bubbling his agony Though she knew it was sinful, she was grateful when the man fell. She rose to go to his side, to pray for his everlasting soul. Captain Sakuri roughly pushed her away. But then he looked at her, and for just an instant, she thought she saw no hate in his eyes but a kind of desperate sadness, a yearning for an end to the torture. She entered his eyes for a moment, to allow him to understand that she desired such a release herself. Startled by her silent honesty, he opened his mouth to speak, then closed it and walked swiftly to the portal and outside, leaving her and her fella boys alone once more. Now she knelt beside the faceless soldier, crossed herself, and said a prayer for him, and then one for herself:
Saint Monessa, as ye had such faith, ye chose to die upon baptism, let me have an equal faith in the mission God has visited upon me. In yer few short years on earth, ye acquired a marvelous humility and serenity. Teach me, Saint Monessa, and take me and me fella boys under yer protection.
When Sister Mary Kathleen finished her prayer, she waited with hope that she might receive a sign from the tiny saint. She looked up at the roof of palm logs and, though she knew full well it was but her imagination, saw a child in a robe, much like the habit she wore, except woven with gold
thread. The little girl was alert, as if listening, and then she cocked her head, and Sister Mary Kathleen decided she was hearing her prayer. In an instant, the child was gone, climbing into a white nothingness toward the throne of heaven itself.
Run for me, little saint,
the nun silently urged, and then she thought she heard a small tinkle of joyful laughter even while the ground beneath her shook. Though she did not fear death, Sister Mary Kathleen feared pain, and her heart pounded in her chest. Something awful was coming now, something gigantic and wounded, and it was coming to maim and kill all that stood in its way.
Josh staggered along the beach. He still couldn't quite believe what he'd just seen. Sergeant Bordelon and the other sergeants of the Seabee-turned-marine outfit had crawled up next to a bunker and calmly tossed in spewing sticks of dynamite. The bunker exploded in a rain of logs and sand, and then they had sprinted to three more and dynamited them, too. When a blasting cap had gone off in Bordelon's hand, blowing away his thumb, he'd laughed and wrapped it up in a torn strip of his shirt. All the while, Japanese snipers were sniping away. Though wounded several times, Bordelon never stopped until a bullet caught him in the stomach. Finally, he sat down. “Helluva place to die,” he remarked as Josh sat down beside him.
Josh didn't deny the man the truth. “I'll make sure nobody forgets what you did today, Sarge. You and all your sarges.”
Bordelon laughed, frothy pink bubbles appearing on his lips. “That presumes you're going to get off this island alive, Josh!”
Josh waited until Bordelon died before walking back to the beach. Based on an ache he felt in his leg, he suspected he'd been hit again. Bullets snapped past his ears, but he didn't care. His back hurt too much to stay bent over, so he walked upright until he reached an amtrac with its bow pushed up against the seawall. Twenty or so marines were hunkered down around it. One of them was a colonel talking on a radio.
Josh felt a hand on his arm and looked at a navy corpsman holding a canvas medical kit. “You've been hit, sir,” he said. “Sit down and let me take a look.”
Josh shrugged him off. “You Colonel Shoup?” he asked the officer.
A pale, round-faced colonel eyed him. “I am. Who the hell are you?”
“Captain Josh Thurlow. You get the word on Green Beach?”
It took a moment for Shoup to get his thoughts wrapped around the bloody apparition that had appeared before him. “Josh Thurlow. You got to be kidding! I thought you were just a story the guys made up after a round of applejack. Green Beach, you say? Is it open?”
“Was the last time I saw it,” Josh answered. “That's what I walked up here to tell you.”
“Well, I appreciate it, Captain,” Shoup said, “but there ain't a thing I can do about it until morning.”
“You plan to get the Sixth Marines across it?”
“That's my plan. Whether it happens is up to General Smith. The Second Marines are too beat up to take this atoll, but I don't think he's reached that conclusion.”
Josh suddenly felt like he needed to sit down. That was good, since he discovered he was already sitting down even though he didn't remember doing it. The medic was working on him, bandaging here, probing there, powdering him with sulfa. “I think I'll take a nap,” Josh told Shoup. “I mean, if you don't mind ⦔
And that was the last thing Josh recalled until he awoke in Dosie Crossan's arms, or perhaps, after he'd thought about it and smelt the perfumed tropical air, it was Penelope, her glowing black skin so warm to his touch. A sudden scream in the night caused him to open his eyes, and then he noticed the lovely woman he was holding was actually a quilted camouflage cover. He felt around and his fingers dug into gritty sand and then it all came back as to where he was. He looked up and saw a million, trillion stars, glittering little remnants of the beginning of the universe, the vast, undulating belt of the Milky Way, illuminating the pale milky-white beach dotted with wreckage and dead men.