| Jack ordered another round of beers, and we both lit up cigarettes, giving Jack some time to pause. He seemed to be calmer now, but just the same, I stayed on guard for another sudden flare-up in his mood. “Yeah, I was on all those miserable islands, Bougainville in the Solomons, Wake, two nights of hell on the beach at Enewetak in the Marshalls, Corregidor, Guam. And the worst of all was that godforsaken black-sand volcano ass pimple, Iwo Jima. We lost a lot of good men on Iwo, eight thousand Marines. On Iwo, it was close range, hand to hand with bayonets and flamethrowers. I’ll never get that smell out of my nose. Never, Michael. Fuck it.” Jack drained the rest of his beer and pounded his glass on the bar. “Barkeep!” He waved his nicotine-stained finger like a magician’s wand over his empty glass and my mostly filled bottle and said to the bartender, “Bang us again” (“Give us another round of drinks”). If Jack kept ordering drinks at that rate, I’d never be able to drive back to the office. But I wasn’t going to budge one inch. First, Jack was the CO, so I wasn’t leaving the bar until he gave the order. Second, I was getting to hear war stories from the mouth of a real warrior and not seeing them as old black-and-white movies on television. After about the fourth or fifth beer, Jack started to cut himself some slack and moved away from his Pacific Island war demons. Maybe the alcohol helped chase them back to hidden bunks in his mind where they were forced to bed down until the next unwelcome visit. They seemed to leave him alone for long enough stretches that he could resume the somewhat normal life he had patched together since his Marine kill-or-be-killed days. I wondered how much time he got in between times like these. Or did he have to drink every day just because day always turned into night, when the Japanese would fiercely attack him in jungles and on beaches, blowing whistles and horns, screaming and shrieking, to try to make him shit in his pants in his fighting hole? “Michael, when I was on Corregidor, the Japs were dug in there pretty deep—you know, in tunnels and caves and up in the mountains. They wouldn’t surrender, so we had to go out on patrol, find ’em, and kill ’em. It was a shit detail and took a few months to get ’em all. The island was also full of poisonous snakes, and at night they’d crawl into our sleeping bags and bite. They were lethal. There were a million ways to get it in the war, and the Japs were just one of them. I saw guys killed by snakes. It was a horrible death. Their bodies would blow up like balloons and turn blue and they’d bleed from their eyes.” I took a butt from Jack’s pack and used his Zippo to light it. “Anyway,” he continued, “the natives in the village we had occupied as base camp to hunt down the Japs told us that they would sell us a spider monkey and that we should tie the monkey up outside our tent at night, and that if any snakes tried to get in while we were asleep, the monkey would go crazy and wake us all up. After we woke up, we’d find and kill the snakes with our KA-BARs” (brand of combat knives preferred by Marines). Jack had my interest piqued. I saw his full smile for the first time, one that used all of his teeth. He had a good smile, sincere—a smile you could trust. I smiled back, and we both smoked and drank beer leaning against the bar. Our minds were in the jungle of Corregidor with the starving, cave-dwelling Japanese soldiers, snakes, and monkeys—nowhere near Queens and the Berkey PD. I knew that when Jack was gone, the purchasing agents temporarily took command over the boots. Jack was telling stories to me, maybe just the way he traded tales with Jake LaMotta, Whitey Ford, Jack Palance, and his other late-night drinking buddies at Billy’s, I imagined. I was feeling rather manly. Then Jack continued with his monkey story: “So the fucking monkey worked like a charm and woke us up every time a snake came within twenty yards of our tent. He’d jump up and down, chatter, screech, and throw shit around like a fucking nut. After we killed the snake with our knives, we had to give the monkey something to calm him down so we could all get some shut-eye. The monkey was too worked up and wouldn’t shut up, so we’d give him a shot of whiskey and that would put him out. The problem became that the monkey liked the whiskey too much and |
| The Expeditor (continued) |
