You Think That's Bad (11 page)

Everywhere you went, if you asked somebody how it was going, he said, “Sweatin' it out, boy. Sweatin' it out.” After a while that changed to, “Well, it won't be long now!” Some of the officers thought the guys who said that were serious.

We had reason to be a little shaky in terms of morale when it came to the big picture. All during basic and the long boat ride over, there'd been nothing but bad news from this part of the world: we were told at least we had Rabaul and its naval base, though none of us knew where Rabaul was, and by the time we found out it had surrendered. They showed us a newsreel called
Singapore the Impregnable
the week before the Japs took it. Darwin was bombed. Jap submarines shelled Newcastle. “Isn't that in
England
?” Leo asked.

“The other Newcastle,” a swabbie told him. We were on deck mid-ocean, lounging near the garbage dump on the stern. “Well, tell the Aussies help is on the way,” Leo said, picking through a crate of wrinkled oranges from the officers' mess.

Apparently things had looked so bleak that the Aussies figured they'd just
give up
the northern half of their country, planning to draw their defensive line just above their southern cities. MacArthur supposedly talked them out of it.

Part of his argument, we were told, was that the Japs didn't even have total control of New Guinea. Though it was only the terrain that left Moresby in our hands. No one could get over the mountains and through the jungle in any kind of fighting shape. All we had holding that side of the island was a Wirraway, two Catalina flying boats, and a Hudson minus its wing. When we came ashore some guys were working on the wing. They had one anti-aircraft gun. In the event of a Jap attack, they said, their orders were to hold out for at least thirty-six hours. When we exclaimed
at that, they looked insulted and snapped that Rabaul had only held out for four. The news wasn't all bad, though: it turned out that if they depressed their anti-aircraft gun to its minimum elevation, they could also use it against landing craft.

When our barracks bags finally arrived they showed up slit open and looted. The CO said he wasn't going to report it because we'd only seem like a bunch of crybabies. I dropped my rifle into the creek and pulled it out full of sand and water, then spent two nights cleaning it while everybody else was sleeping. Leo found the hammock he'd shanghaied from the boat in the bottom of his barracks bag, and tried to rig it up to a tree and pulled the tree down. The tree was sixty feet high and as thick as he was. The rain forest was so dense it only fell a third of the way before it got hung up on the other trees. The whole thing was swarming with red ants. He said after he got out of the creek and started putting his clothes on again that the bites were like getting stuck with hat pins.

The aborigines came and went. When they wanted something, they did some work. They kept saying “Dehori.” It was pretty much the main word of their language. It meant “Wait a while.”

We got moved farther off the trail into denser jungle. Under the canopy, night fell so fast it was like you'd gone blind. Every so often some of us got to hike to the beach to pick up rations and lug water. Each trip we passed the same noncom from Graves Registration, just sitting around. That's how we knew there was a lot of fighting going on somewhere: he'd run out of forms.

Offshore, one of our old freighters had been bombed in half and waves were breaking over the bow, which was lying on its side. There was a wrecked Bren gun carrier at the low-tide mark, already half buried by the sand. There was no real harbor so the natives had to ferry all the supplies in on their outriggers, hollowed-out logs with two little poles connected to pontoons on both sides. Everything came in wet because the slightest weight shift capsized the hulls. The quartermaster running the show sat in a folding chair in shorts and a sleeveless sweater way too big for him. The last time we saw him he was trying to open a can of apricots with a
bayonet. That night at sundown we hung around before heading back because they were supposed to be showing a movie on the side of the hospital tent, but the projector got bollixed up and the picture kept getting the jiggers.

My brother was in the Air Corps. He wasn't a pilot, but still.

“It's not like he's a pilot,” I told Leo.

“Ever see their uniforms?” he asked me. “They got
wings
on their chest. They walk into a bar and the girls are all, ‘What's it like to be up that high in the air?' What do they ask us? What's it like to dig a hole?”

He also got twice as many leaves as me. Every time he was reassigned, I heard about another one. And every last time, he went home.

“He's a homebody,” Leo shrugged. “He misses his ma.”

“You're not helping,” I told him.

“I don't see that as my job,” he answered.

I only signed up because Linda was in tears one day and wouldn't talk about it. “So your brother enlisted, huh?” her best friend said when I asked what was wrong.

“Linda's upset about
that
?” I asked her.

“I'm just saying I heard, is all,” she said, offended.

I tried for the Air Corps too, but washed out on account of my eyes. Even though I hardly ever wear glasses.

The next day I signed up for the Army National Guard, just in case there was a chance to stay stateside. “I'm goin' away,” I told Linda outside of school.

“I know. Everybody is,” she said. Then she gave me a huge hug, pulled back to look at various parts of my face, and kissed me, right there in front of everybody.

That was at the beginning of the summer. I had a few weeks before I had to report, but for most of them her family was off at their house on the lake in Michigan.

“So have you brought up marriage?” my brother asked me the
night before he left. I was due to report two weeks after him. You couldn't talk to our mom about it. She was so upset the cat refused to come out of the cellar.

“Marriage?” I said.

“I didn't think so,” he said.

“You think I should bring up marriage?” I asked him later that night, out on the porch. It wasn't so much a porch as two steps, but we called it the porch.

“That's all your mother needs to hear,” he said.

Our father was trying to calm her down in the living room. That's how he spent most nights at that point. He wasn't happy about it. Whenever she stopped for a minute you could hear the radio.

“I don't think I'm ready to get married,” I said. But the minute I said it I thought,
But I do want to be
buried
with her
.

Clouds came over and turned black and it rained for three straight weeks. “Where're all the
birds
going?” our medic asked right before it started. The trail washed out. They started calling the turnoff to the beach the Raging Rapids. The main forward-supply depot was a lake. The first downpour was like a train coming through and beat at our shoulders and bounced in huge sprays off our helmets. Four days into it our clothes started rotting. Whatever we carried in waterproof bags was soaked. Whatever we carried in watertight containers was mildewed. Tent supports collapsed, trenches filled in, bridges were washed away. The mud got into mess kits and stewpots and underwear and eyes. Guys walked through some areas by holding on to ropes tied tree-to-tree. Everywhere you put your boot you sank in. Every so often someone would pitch into a flooded slit trench. Shoes were gardens of green mold around the insoles. Field telephones corroded. Insulating material rotted. Batteries ruptured and leaked. Rifle cartridges rusted. Ration cans when opened already stank.

We had one day when it was cloudy and then thirty-six more
days of rain. Everybody was covered with rashes, sores, blisters, bubbles, boils, and bites. Guys got tropical ulcers, dysentery, pneumonia, and scrub typhus. The skin under married guys' rings got infected with fungus. Our toes turned black and looked fused. The medics called it jungle rot. The rule was that only a temperature over 103 moved you to the rear. The mud sucked the soles off our boots. Everybody just squatted or sat in the rain and shook. Guys with dysentery tried to stay on sloping ground.

On the thirty-seventh day we got the news we were moving up. Doubek, sitting up to his neck in his flooded slit trench, cheered.

“What do you think, we're going somewhere where it
isn't
raining?” Leo asked.

“Who knows when it comes to this screwy country?” Doubek said.

About sixty percent of us were still fit to walk somewhere. Everybody had given up on raingear a long time before. Nobody carried packs but a lot of guys stuffed C-ration cans into their hip pockets. On a little patch of high ground we dumped in a pile everything we wanted carried and the native in charge divided the loads among the bearers while we watched. When the rain was at its worst he sometimes cupped his hands around his mouth and chin and just drank.

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.