When I read Herman Wouk's "The Winds of War" last summer, I loved the words of Julien Benda quoted in the preface:
Peace, if it ever exists, will not be based on the fear of war, but on the love of peace.
It will not be the abstaining from an act, but the coming state of mind.
In this sense the most insignificant writer can serve peace, where the most powerful tribunals can do nothing.
I think this is also a suitable preface for some scenes from Mick's tour of duty in the South Pacific. [Be warned that this is actually going to take us to the battlefields, so be prepared for quite a bit of blood and violence.]
A big thank you goes to one lovely Rooftop lady who volunteered as my research assistant, helping me find out some details about the army and above all solve the puzzling question of Mick's rank.
This one also comes with a nod to all those brilliant authors of books about World War II whose work I have read as a kind of research before writing this (Stephen E. Ambrose, Bill Guarnere and Edward Heffron, Robert Leckie, James Jones, James A. Michener, Herman Wouk, Norman Mailer, Nevil Shute, Kristina McMorris and Mary Renault). Not only were their books extremely useful for developing the story and getting into the jargon, but I learned a lot about aspects of the war I hadn't been very familiar with, like the lives and experiences of enlisted men, the events in the South Pacific, and field medical care. Part of this variety of nonfiction, novels and memoirs came recommended by another Rooftop friend. Thanks again.
What better title song could there be for this piece, that is as much about Mick as it is about those who fight with him, than "Brothers in Arms"? The original Dire Straits version is beautiful enough, but what really gives me goosebumps is the cover Joan Baez once did.
Through these fields of destruction
Baptisms of fire
I've witnessed all your suffering
As the battle raged higher
And though they did hurt me so bad
In the fear and alarm
You did not desert me
My brothers in arms
There's so many different worlds
So many different suns
And we have just one world
But we live in different ones
Now the sun's gone to hell
And the moon's riding high
Let me bid you farewell
Every man has to die
But it's written in the starlight
And every line on your palm
We're fools to make war
On our brothers in arms
July 1945
An unspecified island in the South Pacific
Jimmy came shuffling back into the tent on unsteady feet, ducked through the entrance and carefully closed the flap. I threw him a compassionate glance. He had just been outside throwing up for the third time tonight, and he looked awful with his hollow cheeks and sweaty brow.
"Better now?"
"Dunno", he grunted as he burrowed back into his makeshift bed of blankets and a poncho. "Feels like I've nothing left inside. No idea if that's good or bad."
I sighed. I felt his pain, but there wasn't much I could do for him.
We were all more or less used to getting sick all the time in the stifling, airlessly humid heat of these tropical islands, either because we had eaten something bad or because we had not eaten at all or because we had caught something unpleasant from those billions of mosquitoes and gnats and whatever other insects loved feeding on us.
I had a slight advantage over the others because I was more used to the tropical climate, but I was permanently drenched in sweat nevertheless, and, like the others, I was covered in itching bites and those painful sores we called jungle ulcers and feeling a trifle queasy myself, but not so much that it would have worried me.
Poor Jimmy was susceptible to anything affecting the stomach and had lost even more weight than the rest of us had.
I offered him the bit of cheap brandy left in the hip flask I kept hidden among my things. "Maybe that'll kill off the bug that's plaguing you", I said, holding the flask out to him and making to unscrew the cap.
Jimmy shook his head and turned his face away, gagging. "Put that away for God's sake, I swear I'm gonna puke all over you if I as much as think of eating or drinking something."
"Don't you think you ought to go see Doc Maloney if it's that bad?"
"He'll only give me his pills that always make me feel even sicker. I'll be fine in the morning, I guess."
I had my doubts about that, but Jimmy rolled over on his side and was asleep within seconds. End of discussion.
I didn't like the thought of having a sick man on my squad. I'd have preferred him to spend a day or two in sick bay until he had recovered a bit. The campaign on the island was as good as over and all left to do for us was mopping up, but still …
On the other hand, all my boys, as I had come to call them somewhat affectionately, were tough as nails and never missed a day of duty unless they were seriously ill or injured, and now, a year and three months after we'd sailed from the U.S., they still seemed to be convinced they were doing the right thing by fighting here.
I wasn't so sure any more. I had never been, in fact.
And still I found myself here, leading my squad, day after sweltering day, swearing them in against an enemy I didn't feel too strongly about, bellowing orders, giving directions.
There were times when I felt downright disgusted with myself for permanently encouraging this bunch of bright and courageous young men to fight a battle that seemed so senseless to me, to go out there into the unknown and risk their lives.
I remembered very clearly how surprised I had been when Major Stephenson had informed me four months ago that I was going to be promoted to corporal. "You're the oldest in 2nd platoon, you've got quite a bit of experience, and you have a certain natural authority that makes the young men respect and trust you."
"Me?" It sounded almost like a derisive snort. "Major Stephenson, sir, I …"
"I hope you are not afraid of taking over responsibility, Private Carpenter?" Stephenson had given me a sharp look from piercing blue eyes.
"No, sir, of course not", I had lied, giving the answer that I knew he expected.
He was right in that I was the oldest, and, sadly, one of the more experienced men by then, even if I hadn't been serving for a year at the time, and I had been the de facto leader of my squad since Kenny Terrence got his left hand shot off.
Staff Sergeant Terrence hadn't been the only casualty by far. Half of our platoon had been killed or wounded as we fought over island after island. We had lost most of the noncom officers who'd been around when I joined the company, so there were many battlefield promotions. It had probably just been a question of time until one of them would be for me.
So I became Corporal Michael J. Carpenter, and I have to admit that I had felt a rush of silly pride when I first wore these brand-new chevrons on my sleeve.
Until I realized that the lives of four young men actually, officially depended on me and my decisions now.
Patrick Leary. Richard Conway. Leo Henderson. My old pal Joe Kowalski.
None of them older than twenty-one.
The feeling of importance quickly gave way to a terrible fright.
I entered upon a bargain with fate or the Almighty or whatever powers there were. If I saw my boys through this safely, if I hung in there despite my doubts and my growing fears, I would be rewarded by finding Evelyn once this was over.
I knew this was childish, but I felt a desperate need to latch some purpose onto my involvement in this war I believed in less than ever.
The boys were great all along. None of them seemed to begrudge me my promotion. On the contrary, they seemed relieved the Major's choice had fallen on me and not one of them, or some overambitious ass like Pfc McAllister, a true master of the art of brown-nosing.
We were almost something like a little family, a close-knit band of brothers knowing from the experience of the past months that we could trust each other blindly.
Together, we had dug trenches and foxholes, cut trails through the thick underbrush, gone out on reconnaissance missions in unknown terrain and on nightly patrols in the jungle where death seemed to be lurking behind every bush and tree, and we had endured endless marches weighed down by our heavy packs and other equipment.
We had dressed each other's minor wounds, tended to blistered feet and jungle sores and hands and faces scratched and cut by the shrubs we were crawling through all the time, picked thorns and splinters of metal from sunburnt sweaty skin.
We had shared dreadful rations (Joe and Danny had taken to calling them "SOS", which translated as "shit on a shingle") and secret stashes of cigarettes and liquor, slept huddled together in cramped pup tents that had once or twice blown away from over us in tropical rainstorms, and we had cursed and griped about wet clothes and sodden boots and those God-awful bugs and the tedious boredom of routine duty, and most of all, the weather.
We had grieved for those who had fallen, and we had seen many others evacuated after sustaining grievous injuries, or because they fell seriously ill. There had even been two or three who'd flipped their lids completely, worn out by the bloody, grimy, fearsome reality of war, and thus were shipped home.
My own small squad had been largely lucky since I had made corporal, although there had been some casualties - Leary and Henderson had been taken to an Australian hospital within a fortnight of each other, Leary with a badly broken leg and Henderson with a nasty shoulder injury, but both were expected to make a full recovery given enough time. We had got Jimmy Boone, whom I could now hear retching emptily outside the tent yet again, to replace them.
As for Danny, my other friend from basic training, he had left the platoon long before I was promoted. I didn't gloat or tell him I'd see it coming, but of course I had been proved right in my concerns about his going into the combat zone with one blind eye. Not a month after we our arrival in the Philippines, and just after receiving a letter from his fiancée that she had a little surprise for him, he got hit in the left arm, by friendly fire. It must have happened because he hadn't been able to detect the hand signals of the guy from 1st platoon who was getting ready to fire.
I had tried to talk some sense into him when I visited him in the hospital tent. Of course he wouldn't hear of it, but I implored him, "You've got a girlfriend, and a mother, and Amanda just told you that you're gonna be a father, too. The best you can do for that kid of yours is see to it that he's gonna grow up with his dad around, for God's sake. Believe me, growing up without a father sucks no less if he's died a war hero. Do me a favour and put in for a transfer to HQ. I happen to know that Stephenson needs a new company clerk …"
He had screwed up his face in disgust, but I had remained unfazed.
"… and if you don't do it yourself, you can be sure I'll do it for you."
Danny had applied for the post in the end, and when Joe and Patrick began to needle him after he'd announced he was leaving to take up a desk job, calling him a yellow coward, I thought it wiser to tell them the real reason to save his face. He seemed rather relieved in the end that the truth was out, and the other boys were rather impressed that he'd got this far in the war without arousing suspicion, or getting killed.
I saw him occasionally at HQ, glad that at least he was out of harm's way, relatively speaking. He didn't appear to be unhappy there; he must have felt uneasy out in the field despite his outward bravado, and I knew that having shot one or two Japanese dead had troubled him deeply.
That kind of thought was something I tried to avoid.
You don't think much while you're fighting. It all sinks in much later, when you have stopped moving, when you have counted your dead and your wounded. Often, it was in the middle of the night that the contorted face of a man I'd hit fatally in the chest or neck came back to haunt me.
I dreaded these moments and taught myself to push those images away.
Dwelling on the notion of having taken a man's life, even if it was the enemy, would paralyze me next time I went out there, render me unable to defend myself, or, what was more important, my boys. I couldn't run the risk of losing my head in the thick of the battle. After all, this was war, it was shoot or be shot yourself, and I sure as hell wouldn't let one of the boys be killed if I could help it.
I felt particularly obliged to them after Joe had saved my own life. We had been on one of those hated recon missions, trudging through the thicket, hacking away at branches and lianas with our machetes, the straps of my pack chafing away at the irritated skin of back and shoulders through my drenched khaki shirt, the rifle I carried slung over my shoulder banging painfully into my hipbone with every step.
We had stopped in a small clearing to catch our breaths, and I was slapping angrily at a mosquito that had got into my open-necked shirt, swearing in a low voice.
A shot startled me, so close to my ear that I was deafened for a moment. I swung around furiously.
There was Joe, lowering his rifle.
"Are you nuts, Kowalski?" I shouted hotly, still shaken up. "You almost shot my ear off!"
"Sorry, Carp. Next time I save your life, I'll ask you politely to move aside first." He grinned insolently and pointed to a bulky shape lying crumpled among the bushes.
My heart gave a belated jump of terror.
"I happen to look over there, and suddenly there's that Jap, out of nowhere, aiming straight at you!" Joe continued in an excited voice, concluding rather more noncommittally, "Well, that one can't hurt you any more."
"Jeez." I had found myself dodging bullets more often than I could count, but still I was a little weak in the knees now. "Sorry, Joe. And thanks."
"It's okay. Just did my job. St. Joseph is the patron saint of carpenters after all." He grinned even broader than before.
"Ooh, so we've got our very own company saint?" Richard Conway chuckled.
Now that the imminent danger was over – Conway and Leary had quickly searched the surroundings for more attackers, but the Jap seemed to have been on his own – we were keyed up and giddy, as it happens after a narrow escape, calling Joe "Saint" over and over. (The name stuck.)
Not much later, Leary broke his leg on a similar mission when he stumbled into an overgrown hole in the ground. We hauled him back to the camp on a makeshift stretcher fashioned from branches and two ponchos. Doc Maloney scratched his head with the thinning blond hair as he tried to assess the damage. He only said one sentence, the same he would repeat two weeks later when Henderson reported in to him with a badly mangled shoulder, "You just won yourself a ticket to Australia, buddy."
The rest of us had been lucky in terms of injuries so far. The worst wound I had sustained had been a large metal splinter hitting me in the flank. I hadn't even noticed it at first and thought I had ripped my shirt and cut my skin on a pointy branch as I dived for safety from a grenade being hurled straight at me. Richard had to tell me that something ugly was lodged in my side, and Saint pulled the jagged bit of steel from my flesh with the pair of rusty tweezers he proudly kept in his first-aid kit, sprinkled the spot liberally with sulfa powder and slapped on some Band-Aid.
It took a while to close in the permanently damp environment that never allowed the skin to dry from sweat and rain, but it healed in the end and didn't give me any trouble worth mentioning.
The only time I had really been out of it was when I succumbed to a severe bout of malaria and had to spend a good two weeks at Maloney's hospital.
The Doc and I ended up quite good friends; we had taken to chatting a bit as soon as I was feeling up to longer conversations again, and we still liked to share the occasional cigarette break.
He knew what I really thought about all of this, knew that my view of the war was ambivalent at best, and he did not judge me harshly for it, although he had appeared an unlikely ally at first.
In his early forties now, Doc had been in the army for virtually all of his adult life. One could even say the U.S. Army was his life. But even his belief in this war was beginning to crumble, having spent almost three years facing those tidal waves of wounded and dying men that never ceased to flow into his small field hospital which consisted of nothing more than a small array of scattered, ill-equipped tents.
He had nodded in agreement when I had confided my doubts and fears to him, glad to have found an open ear to vent my feelings to.
The only others I'd have trusted enough to confess my true feelings were the boys, but I could not possibly allow myself to undermine their morale by sowing the seeds of doubt in their minds, lest they'd get ideas and do something rash that would endanger themselves and maybe others, too.
Much as I wanted to tell them to get the hell out of here, I kept going as I was expected to, kept my mouth shut and wondered why I on earth I thought I could do anything to protect them from stopping the fateful bullet that had their name on it.