| Jack offered me a butt. I took a Winston out of his pack as he shook one up into grabbing position with an expert smoker’s flip of the wrist. He took the next one in line hands free, directly between his lips, lit his first, and then lit mine with his flame-throwing blowtorch of a Zippo. We both inhaled and blew smoke across the coin-scratched bar. “I was in a fighting hole (called a fox hole by the army and Hollywood, a fighting hole is an entrenched position for one or more Marines in a static warfare position) on Saipan at night, me and two other Marines. Three of us had point (lead Marine in a patrol or lead element in a company) in one hole. It was the most dangerous spot. It was dark, and we knew the Japs were just fifty yards or so outside our wire (the perimeter of a position, so named because most perimeters were marked with barbed wire in World War II). When the cloud cover passed in front the moon, they attacked. It was the scariest fucking thing you could imagine. They came over this hill and right over the wire. We shot the first ones in the head as they tried to cut the wires. The other Japs just used the dead bodies that fell on the barbed wire to jump across the perimeter. The bodies on the wires kept piling up so high, maybe ten deep, that the Japs attacking us had to climb up and over the top of them to try and get to our hole. We killed them as fast as they came over the top. All the while, they were screaming and blowing whistles, horns and shit, and firing at us and throwing grenades. Flares were going up all around, turning the night into phosphorous day. Mortar rounds (simple steel tubes on base plates; mortars lobbed their shells in high arcs so that the shells came down on the target even if it was behind a hill or in trees) were exploding all around our position, showering us with red-hot shrapnel. It seemed like they would never stop attacking and that they had an endless supply of men to send across our wire, over their own soldiers’ bodies and straight into our field of fire. This went on all fucking night.” Jack drew down hard on his butt, taking in a chestful of strong smoke. “I said my prayers that night, Michael. I thought for certain that I was gonna buy the farm (get killed) at twenty years old on some godforsaken island that night. Un-fucking-believable (Marine expletive).” The smoke billowed out of his mouth as he spoke of death. Now I understood why Jack had had to leave the office and go somewhere quiet, cool, and simple and drink a beer. The war had come back to him. Maybe Vijay, with his foreign accent and darker skin, reminded former Marine master sergeant Jack Cotton of the Japs, or maybe Jack, in spite of all his toughness, occasionally had a low tolerance for his own PD’s high pucker factor after all those years of combat in the Pacific. Maybe he was ashamed of his temporary weakness and didn’t want the grunts in the office to see him like this any more than they already had. I couldn’t judge Jack; nobody had ever tried to kill me night after night for five years running. “I was twenty, Michael, just two years older than you are now. You should thank God that you don’t have to see the things I saw and did and felt. I shouldn’t be alive, I should be dead. Most of my buddies were killed.” “Jack, were you in a lot of battles?” Bad question! Jack shot me a stern look reminding me that I was still one dumb rock (idiot, as in “That rock is really stupid”). “Sure as shit I was,” Jack growled. “What the hell do you think? You made it off of one island and they gave you a medal and sent you home to Mama? Fuck that! I went island to island, beach to beach, one stinking jungle to the next the stinking jungle. The only way home was dead. Even if you got shot but could still walk and hold a rifle, they’d patch you up and send you back. There was none of this thirteen months and rotate back to the world (leave the war zone and be returned to the United States) deal like they had in Vietnam. We were in for the duration, five years for me. Five fucking years in hell. I was one tough Marine, though, I’ll tell you that—one tough fucking Marine. We all were. We had to be because those Japs were tough bastards too. That, I give them credit for. Tough fucking little bastards.” |
| The Expeditor (continued) |
