Hunter Sniper

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Deke and the rest of the company crept cautiously toward the coast, expecting at any moment to meet more Japanese resistance. They were battered and bruised, and more fighting was the last thing any of them wanted.

Even the fight at the coconut grove had cost them dearly. Lieutenant Gurley had been a good man, and so had Private Simmons. They had now joined the long list of soldiers who would not be coming home from the Pacific. The consensus was that Gurley had been a good man, but too eager. Fighting the Japanese wasn’t like in the comic books. It was good to keep that in mind if you wanted to stay alive.

“Damn shame about Lieutenant Gurley,” Philly remarked. He had drifted back to join Deke and Yoshio in the middle of the company moving along the jungle trail, content to let Danilo take point.

“He ought to have known better than to charge right at the Japanese,” said Deke. “There’s nothin’ worse than a dumb officer.”

“You know what, Corn Pone? The thing about you that we can always count on is that you don’t like anybody.” Philly’s tone suggested that he’d held the dead lieutenant in somewhat higher regard. “I do believe that you are the angriest son of a bitch I’ve ever met.”

“I might be angry, but at least I’m not a dead son of a bitch. Not yet, anyway. Always remember that the Japanese can shoot just as straight as we can. An officer like Gurley can get every last one of his men killed. We’re lucky that Captain Merrick has got more sense than that.”

“If you say so.”

Deke had no real love for most officers. In Deke’s book, many officers were just part of the system that kept a good man down. They ranked right up there with bankers and factory owners. There were exceptions to the rule, he thought, like Captain Merrick and Lieutenant Steele, men who knew their business. Another exception might even be MacArthur himself, who seemed to know how to go about winning the war.

“I think that Lieutenant Gurley was frustrated by the enemy,” Yoshio said. “He wanted them to come out and fight. It was his own version of a banzai charge.”

“Well, he’s dead now, and so is Simmons,” Deke pointed out. He had meant to just point out the facts but was surprised to hear the note of anger in his own voice.

The fight at the coconut grave had been an unpleasant surprise. It had shaped up to be their last combat action before leaving the jungle behind. If only they could have avoided it, then several more of the company’s men would have survived.

It was small consolation that they had killed all the Japanese who had ambushed them. In fact, it was quite a lopsided victory. But it would have been better if the fight hadn’t taken place at all. You certainly couldn’t blame Danilo for the ambush. In fact, it was his alert eyes and ears that had kept the Japanese ambush from being far worse.

Deke could understand what Yoshio meant about the lieutenant charging the Japanese position out of anger and frustration. Some of the others had done the same thing. But rage didn’t make you bulletproof. As it turned out, those men had died all the same. It was only the stealthy flanking movement that had snuffed out the Japanese attack, not the foolhardy charge by Lieutenant Gurley and the others.

And why had they died? To capture a little grove of overgrown coconut trees? No — that was the wrong way to look at it, Deke decided. They had died fighting the Japanese, pure and simple. The place and the circumstances didn’t matter. This was a war that was being won by increments.

Meanwhile, something that Philly had said was still gnawing at him.

“Hey, Yoshio,” Deke said. “Do you think I’m angry all the time?”

“Well, not all of the time,” Yoshio said. “Just most of the time.”

Deke chewed that over in his mind. Back home, there had been a lot of people he was angry at, but mostly he had been angry at himself. Here in the Pacific, he could unleash that anger on somebody else — the Japanese.

And that was just fine by him.

All morning, they had been moving toward the sound of fighting. Machine guns, mortars, even some artillery. The sounds indicated that this wasn’t just another skirmish at a coconut grove, but the sounds of a substantial fight taking place. Without doubt, they must be approaching the Japanese bastion around Ormoc.

His fevered mind convinced Deke that he could already smell the scent of spent gunpowder and blood, burning crops and the sap of the broken trees. In places, patches of jungle still pressed close to the trail, so that a thousand tiny branches seemed to scratch at his face and bare hands. He felt each one of them, his feverish skin extra sensitive, each brush against the leaves and branches seeming to have a different texture and shape, like running his hands over rough-cut lumber or rubbing his face with sandpaper.

He shook his head to clear it and took a drink from his canteen.

The fact that he was itching to get back into the fight made Deke realize that he felt marginally better, the fever starting to release some of its grip on him. At least the jungle wasn’t spinning quite as much as it had been. He had been popping aspirin like gumdrops and washing the pills down with more of Danilo’s tea. One or the other seemed to be working, or maybe it was a combination.

Sometimes, after having dodged so many bullets, Deke got to feeling invincible. Anyhow, nobody wanted to think that he could die. Getting killed was for the other guy. It was a convenient fiction that kept a man going, because if you believed that you were going to die in the next minute or the next hour, you’d curl up in the bottom of a foxhole instead of doing your job as a soldier. The fever was a reminder that death lurked in all sorts of ways, lest Deke get too bold.

Up ahead, Deke could see Danilo leading the way along the trail, several feet ahead of the nearest soldier. The Filipino guerrilla reminded Deke of the jungle cat that he had seen, all the man’s senses on high alert, like some creature of the forest.

Deke considered that he knew almost nothing about Danilo other than that he was one of the guerrillas who had served with Father Francisco to fight the Japanese occupiers in any way possible. He didn’t know how old Danilo was, if he had children, or how his family might have suffered under Japanese occupation.

The man had made an effort to nurse Deke back to health in his own rugged way. Would Deke have done the same for him? He realized that he might not have, at least not before Danilo had done so much for him. He felt ashamed about it. When it came to the Filipinos, Deke realized there was so much that they took for granted about these generous people.

Danilo signaled a halt. They saw him crouch, rifle at the ready.

“Dammit, it’s probably more Japanese,” Captain Merrick could be heard muttering as he hurried forward. “Frazier, get that BAR ready.”

Private Frazier hurried forward, shouldering his way past the other men in an attempt to catch up with Captain Merrick at the head of the column. Instead of gunshots, however, they were met with a booming American voice that demanded, “What’s the password?”

Danilo looked at Captain Merrick, who shouted irritably back at the unseen sentry: “I don’t know the damn password!”

There was a pause in which everyone held their breath. The moment was tense, considering that more than one incident of so-called friendly fire had been caused by nervous or overzealous sentries. “How do we know you’re not Japs?”

“Do we look like Japs to you, soldier? We don’t know the damn password because we’ve been hiking through the damn jungle. Goddammit.”

Two GIs emerged from the cover where they had been hiding, their rifles almost casually pointing in Merrick’s direction. As the captain moved forward, they lowered their weapons. More men appeared, and one of them turned out to be an officer. In keeping with policy, there was no exchange of salutes or formalities. Not that most officers needed any. It was easy to tell an officer by the way he carried himself. When it came down to it, Merrick held himself the same way — a little stiff, a little apart from the enlisted men.

No wonder the Japanese snipers keep picking off our officers, Deke thought. They make awful good targets.

“We were told that we should be expecting a patrol that had been cutting across the peninsula,” the officer said. He looked over the battered column. “It looks as if you and your boys caught hell.”

“You have no idea,” Merrick said. “I guess you’ve been having a regular Sunday picnic over on this side of the coast.”

The other officer snorted. “If your idea of a picnic is getting shot to hell on the beach and then fighting Japanese all over the place, then yeah, I guess it has been one helluva picnic.”

Captain Merrick collected directions to headquarters, and then the other officer and his sentries stepped aside to let the company pass. From the looks on their faces, Deke could see that he and the rest of the company must have seemed like a wreck. It sounded as if they weren’t going to get much in the way of relief.

“Everybody stay alert,” Merrick warned. “We didn’t come all this way just to get mowed down by the Japanese — or our own guys, for that matter.”

Before long, the jungle began to fall away as they reached cultivated fields. They passed through a small village, abandoned except for a few dogs that yapped at the men. The fact that their rib cages stood out like wires indicated that the dogs were starving.

One of the men tried to give one of the dogs a few scraps to eat, but Captain Merrick scowled at him. “Knock it off. There’s nothing that you can do for these dogs, except maybe shoot them and put them out of their misery. You want to feed somebody, then save it for the villagers. I’ll bet they’re just as hungry.”

However, the villagers did not show themselves, apparently having fled the fighting. Deke wished them luck. Right now there didn’t seem to be many places to go to avoid the fighting. The Filipinos’ homeland had been turned into a battleground. He supposed that it was unavoidable. Like the old saying went, you had to break a few eggs to make an omelet. In this case, the omelet was returning peace and freedom to the Philippines.

“Look, sir, over here!” a soldier called.

The soldier pointed out the bodies of two women. Their clothes were ripped asunder, and it appeared that they had been bayoneted. Nearby lay the carcasses of two dogs and a goat. It appeared that they, too, had been stabbed to death. The awful smell of decay lingered.

The captain stood over the bodies of the two women, nose buried in the crook of his elbow, studying them. One had graying hair, while the other woman appeared younger. Maybe they had been mother and daughter? Then the captain retreated several steps away and seemed to take several gulps of fresher air.

They had all seen dead civilians before, usually people caught in the middle of war, killed by accident. There were always going to be casualties when artillery shells landed in towns and villages. Some of those stray shells had been American. That was how it was when you were fighting a war, but it was a damn shame, and everybody felt bad about it. Even among these battle-hardened GIs, none of them could fathom the intentional killing of a civilian. They were caught up in a noble cause, fighting to liberate these people.

They knew that the Japanese took a different view. They had seen how civilians were used by the enemy as human shields in Palo. But seeing the two dead women felt different. The women had been bayoneted like the livestock, either out of anger or for sport. Nothing accidental about it.

The captain had shown himself to be mostly calm and steady, but just for an instant, his worn features twisted into something like anger.

“The Japanese did this,” Merrick said, raising his voice so that all his men heard. “Killed these two women like they were dogs. Never forget who we are fighting.”

One by one the men trooped past the gruesome scene, unable to avoid looking at the bodies. The sight couldn’t help but evoke thoughts of wives, sisters, mothers, and daughters back home. These dead women had certainly meant the world to someone. They had been murdered for no good reason at all.

“Damn these Japanese,” Philly muttered. “Damn them all.”