Jungle Sniper

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The fight for Hill 522 and then for the town of Palo had left the men of Patrol Easy worn out and exhausted. Sleep and hot grub were fondly remembered without any real hope of experiencing them anytime soon, kind of like a kiss from a nurse at the USO dance back in Hawaii.

As they knew all too well, there was no rest for the weary, not when there was a war on. The army had pushed inland, but pockets of stiff Japanese resistance remained. They did not control the peninsula. They had taken Palo, but the port city of Ormoc — and its important nearby airfield — remained in enemy control on the far side of Leyte. Until they had taken Ormoc, US forces couldn’t claim to be in control of Leyte.

Nobody was going to forget Red Beach anytime soon, but Ormoc was the next square of the chessboard that was the Pacific campaign.

“Sounds like somebody else got the short end of the stick for a change,” Philly remarked, listening to the not-so-distant hammering of machine-gun bursts, punctuated by rifle fire.

“Poor bastards are catching hell,” Deke agreed. “Just as long as it ain’t us this time around, that’s fine by me.”

“Amen to that,” Philly said.

As the men dug into their rations, Lieutenant Steele came around. He wore a fresh bandage around his upper left arm, a souvenir of the fight on Hill 522. The bandage was none too clean, a little frayed around the edges, as if it had been torn from the tail of a shirt, and stained with blood.

“You ought to have someone look at that, Honcho,” Deke said.

“In a minute. I’ve got something to say to you all first.”

Lieutenant Steele carried his shotgun slung over one shoulder, the wood showing a fresh scar where he had used the stock to parry a Japanese sword during the fight in that godawful trench. The lieutenant looked a little beat up, but to be fair, Deke supposed they all did.

Steele’s one good eye fell upon the soldiers, taking them all in, one by one. If he liked what he saw, his expressionless face didn’t show it. Even though they’d been together since Guam, Steele remained something of an enigma. He didn’t talk much about his life before the war, or about Guadalcanal. On the other hand, he didn’t ask the men in his patrol much about their own civilian lives.

The lieutenant’s aloof nature didn’t mean that he didn’t care — just the opposite. You could tell from his tone of voice that when he called a soldier “son,” there was a fondness there — he just didn’t always show it. Steele had learned the hard way that an officer always had to keep his distance. How else could he give orders that put his men in the way of an enemy bullet? Outwardly Steele gave the impression that he had one interest, and one interest only, and that was killing Japs.

Deke would have followed the man anywhere.

“I’ll bet the Japs didn’t think we’d take this part of Leyte so fast, did they?” Deke wondered.

“Who knows?” Lieutenant Steele replied. “The enemy is still full of surprises, and the Japs are far from beaten. We’re just lucky that we have planes, and tanks, and naval artillery. The Japs don’t have much of that left. We’re winning this war because we can replace what we lose and they can’t. We’re pushing them back everywhere right now, so that’s something. But you know the Japs. They don’t give up. They don’t surrender — not many of them, anyway.”

“Fine by me. You know what they say — the only good Jap is a dead Jap,” Philly said. He glanced in Yoshio’s direction. “Present company excepted.”

“I am not Japanese,” Yoshio pointed out for the umpteenth time. “I am an American, just like you.”

“If you say so.”

“All right, knock it off, Philly,” the lieutenant interrupted. “The reason that I wanted to talk to you boys is that I’ve just gotten word from battalion that we’re moving out again.”

“Of course we are,” Philly grumped.

“They need us to hit Ormoc on the other side of the peninsula,” the lieutenant said. “There’s two ways to get there. One way is by boat, sailing right down the Surigao Strait and around the tip of the peninsula, then up the Canigao Channel — dodging Japanese planes and whatever is left of the Japanese Navy the whole way.”

“Hell, Honcho, after what we’ve been through, that sounds like a pleasure cruise.”

“If you say so, Philly. It won’t be so pleasant once we get there, believe me,” the lieutenant said. “I hear there’s a wide-open beach that we can land on, plenty of time for the Japs to give us hell while crossing it. They’ll be expecting us.”

Nobody had much to say about that. They had now landed on at least two beaches while under fire, and those landings hadn’t been a picnic. The thought of doing that a third time was almost too much to contemplate.

Even Philly, loudmouth that he was, was left shaking his head quietly, words having failed him.

Steele wasn’t finished. “Three of you lucky bastards won’t be going with us. The thing is, we’re going to split up.” When the men started to protest, the lieutenant raised his hands to quiet them. “This wasn’t my idea. It came from on high, so there you have it. Deke, Philly, and Yoshio, you won’t be taking our little pleasure cruise.”

“Please tell me we’re being sent home for a war bond tour,” Philly said.

“No such luck,” Honcho said. “Remember how I said there were two ways to get to Ormoc? We’ll be coming at the Japs from two directions to keep them confused. The boat is one way. The other way is directly across the peninsula. Twenty miles of jungle, mountains, and Japs. It’s going to be Charlie Company’s job to cut across the peninsula. Battalion wants some scout-snipers to go with them on account of the jungle terrain, so I picked you three.”

“Why us?”

“Because it’s my belief that you three have the best chance of making it to the other side alive — not to mention that you’re the best chance for Charlie Company too. From what I hear, a lot of them are green troops, so they need a few veterans like you to show them the ropes.” Lieutenant Steele sighed. For the first time, he seemed to allow himself to display a flicker of the emotion that he had been holding back. A look of sadness crossed his face, but that look was quickly replaced by a wry smile. “Good luck, boys. You’re going to need it. You know what? We’re all going to need it. I suppose I’ll see you again in Ormoc — or in hell.”

As it turned out, Charlie Company was moving out in a hurry. It was going to take a lot longer to reach Ormoc by traversing the interior of Leyte than it would to get there by ship. Deke, Philly, and Yoshio barely had time to digest the news and say their goodbyes to Rodeo, Alphabet, and Egan — and to give Thor’s ears a scratch — before they had to hurry up and report to their new captain. Honcho had informed them that they were looking for Captain Merrick. They found him bent over a map with a lieutenant and a couple of sergeants. Deke didn’t know how much use a map would be — all they had to do was follow the direction that the sun took each day until they hit the ocean on the other side.

Of course, nobody dared to salute him. There might not be any Japanese snipers in the immediate vicinity, but it was a bad habit to get into.

“You must be my scouts,” the captain said, looking away from the map. He had his helmet off, and from his youthful face and lack of gray hair, it was plain that he was a lot younger than Lieutenant Steele. Not for the first time, Deke wondered who the lieutenant had upset so thoroughly that he couldn’t seem to get promoted. “I hear that at least one of you is the best shot in the army — the army on Leyte, at least. I’m pretty sure that’s you.”

The captain was looking at Deke, who drawled: “If you say so.”

“Well, you’re the mean-looking one.” Captain Merrick squinted in surprise at Yoshio, then took a step back in a double take. “You a Jap?”

“I speak Japanese, but I am an American,” Yoshio said calmly.

“Hell, that’s what I meant,” Merrick said after a moment’s hesitation. He appeared a bit flustered by the sight of a Nisei, but he recovered quickly. “We’re all Americans here. Our orders are to capture a few Japs and interrogate them, but you know how that goes. Not many prisoners. The Japs don’t like to give up, and our boys tend to shoot the ones who do. They’ve lost too many of their buddies at this point. Anyhow, glad to have you, son. Glad to have all three of you. When we head out, the three of you will take point. I need somebody up front who knows what the hell they’re doing. I’ll have a handful of veterans at the rear of the column to deal with any Japs who try to shoot us in the back. We know they’re good at that.”

Deke nodded, and the captain turned back to the map, indicating that they were dismissed.

“He doesn’t seem so bad,” Philly remarked as they walked away. “On the sly, I asked a couple of the guys in his company what he’s like, and they said he’s a solid officer.”

Deke nodded. That had also been his impression of the captain during their brief introduction. Captain Merrick appeared competent enough, with that no-nonsense exterior so common to officers with combat experience. He seemed like a good man, and Deke hoped that he’d last more than a few days. The war was hell on young officers, lost at an alarming rate. Too often they were targeted by Japanese snipers. Other times they died leading from the front. The only men that the army seemed to lose more of were the medics.

Before they headed out, there were preparations to make, made easier because they had already said their farewells to Lieutenant Steele and the rest of Patrol Easy. Lieutenant Steele had given Deke his orders and wished him luck.

“Do you think we’ll ever see them again?” Philly wondered. He appeared to be experiencing a rare moment of introspection. Philly’s usual conversation didn’t vary much beyond the categories of broads, beer, and bratwurst — make that food in general — unless he was complaining about something.

“I don’t rightly know, Philly,” Deke answered honestly. “It’s a big war. We’re all just itty-bitty leaves, caught up in the whirlwind.”

“Well now, listen to you.” Philly pitched his voice up a notch and mimicked Deke’s country drawl. Nearby, Yoshio cracked a smile at Philly’s attempt to sound like anything but a blue-collar working stiff from the row house neighborhoods of Philadelphia. “You’re a regular hillbilly philosopher, ain’t you?”

“Stuff it, Philly.”

The other man gave a short laugh that somehow ended in a sigh. “I hate to say it, but a part of me already misses those bastards.”

“If we want to see them again, we’ll have to live through the next few days,” Deke pointed out. “They’ll have to do the same. It ain’t easy with a war on.”

“I guess you’re right. As for us, we’ll have to be like the Three Musketeers. All for one, and one for all.”

From what Deke knew of the Three Musketeers, they had managed to fight for one another despite their differences. Here they were, a farm boy, a city boy — and Yoshio, who was hard to typify. He knew that Yoshio had also grown up on a small farm, but with his thoughtful air, he was more like a schoolteacher.

Deke thought back to the double take that Captain Merrick had done upon seeing Yoshio. The sight of a Japanese face in a US uniform tended to do that. “Yoshio, don’t you ever get tired of people wondering which side you’re on?”

“Not really,” he said. “You see, I have never wondered myself, which makes it an easy question to answer.”

“Amen to that,” Deke said. “Now let’s see if we can find some extra ammo. Something tells me that there’s gonna be plenty to shoot at in this jungle.”

Deke wanted to travel light. If they had to hump it through the hilly jungle terrain, then he wanted to carry the essentials. That meant his rifle, spare ammo, cleaning kit, bowie knife, canteen, rations, first-aid kit, flashlight, poncho, and blanket. Along with a few extras like a spoon and matches, everything he needed fit into a small haversack. He made certain that nothing rattled or clanked. An unwanted noise at the wrong time could bring attention from the enemy.

He shook his head, watching some of the greener troops prepare for the jungle trek. Some brought too much. Deke figured this was less of a concern because when their packs got too heavy, they would figure out what to discard along the way. Those who didn’t bring enough would find themselves shivering in the frequent rain — even the jungle could get cool on a wet night.

To Deke’s surprise, he spotted the soldier with the eyeglasses whom he had rescued from the sinking landing craft. The soldier recognized him as well and gave Deke a nod. Deke was glad to see that his efforts had paid off in that the young green bean had made it this far. Whether he’d come out alive on the other side of the peninsula remained to be seen. Ruefully, Deke realized that went for himself too. This wasn’t going to be an easy mission.

The only man who managed to carry less than Deke was the Filipino guide who had been assigned to them. The man carried a rifle and a big-ass bolo knife slung across his back. That seemed to be the extent of his gear. Other than a small bag of rice that was stuffed into a game-bag-like cloth sack that hung from one of the man’s shoulders, he didn’t even carry any rations that Deke could see. Maybe he expected the Americans to feed him?

Hope you like beef stew, Deke thought.

Like many of the guerrillas, his uniform, such as it was, had been pieced together out of battered civilian clothes and military castoffs. He wore stained chino pants that had been torn off below the knee like a pirate’s breeches, and an army shirt that had seen better days. The Filipino didn’t even wear any shoes. That was too much for Deke. He’d gone barefoot on the farm plenty of times in the summer as a boy, but his feet weren’t nearly as leathery as the guide’s. Then again, those bare feet enabled the man to move so silently it was as if he floated over the ground.

Up close, the man even smelled like the jungle, a wild, damp, earthy odor — with a bit of campfire smoke and sweat mixed in — that clung to the Filipino like a second skin.

The Filipino guide’s name turned out to be Danilo. Deke learned later that it was a Tagalog version of Daniel. Danilo would be joining them at the head of the column. He was a couple of inches shorter than Deke, lean and muscular as a panther, with dark, watchful eyes. One thing for sure, Danilo was a tough customer. He looked Deke up and down, assessing him, then gave him a satisfied nod.

“Do you know Padre Francisco?” Deke asked him.

Surprisingly, the hard set of Danilo’s mouth widened into a smile. “Padre Francisco? Si.”

Briefly, Deke tried to explain about the raid and how Father Francisco had helped them, but he gave up when he saw the blank expression on Danilo’s face as he struggled to understand English.

Still, the guide nodded as if he’d gotten the gist of what Deke had said. “Compañeros! Kill many Japs!” He grinned again and gave Deke’s shoulder a friendly slap and added in Tagalog, “Mga kaibigan!”

Deke nodded back. He reckoned that he and Danilo would get along just fine. They seemed to have Father Francisco in common, and, more importantly, they both agreed about killing Japs. Deke tried to repeat the Tagalog phrase, mangled it, and settled for saying, “Compañeros.”

No time was wasted getting the column moving. Some liked to joke that the military’s motto was “Hurry up and wait.” Maybe that was true under normal conditions, but not today. Although it was already afternoon, the company moved out. Deke would have preferred to get started in the morning. However, he understood the need for urgency. They had many miles of jungle to cross before this expedition was over, and each hour of daylight mattered.

There would be no point of even trying to go anywhere once night arrived. Deke knew from experience that the jungle dark was so thick that you really couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. The one exception was on bright, moonlit nights, when the jungle came alive with sounds and night creatures. Even then, moving along the narrow jungle trails after dark was hazardous enough without the Japanese to also worry about.

It was Danilo who led the troops down the trail, followed by Deke, then Philly and Yoshio close on his heels. Nearer to the village, the trail started out wide — it was essentially a dirt road leading into the forest. A few small homesteads had been carved out of the trees, but most seemed deserted, their inhabitants having fled to avoid getting caught in the middle of any fighting.

They were greeted by barking dogs and scratching chickens. A few of the soldiers broke ranks long enough to grab a chicken or two, wring its neck, and stuff it into their haversacks. Fresh chicken beat the hell out of canned rations. Deke could tell by Danilo’s scowl that he didn’t approve. For all they knew, these might be his friends’ chickens that would be roasting over Charlie Company’s fires tonight.

After a couple of miles, the road narrowed to a trail and the forest closed in. They arrived at a fork in the trail. There were no signs or markers of any kind, just trails leading in two directions. Danilo considered and then took the left fork. More time passed, and they came to another fork. After a moment of deliberation, Danilo took the right-hand turn.

Deke wasn’t encouraged by Danilo’s slight hesitation. I hope he knows where he’s going, he thought.

Deke realized that they had put an awful lot of trust in this Filipino. Who had picked him out as their guide, anyhow? He wasn’t worried about Danilo betraying them to the Japanese. Aside from a few obsequious public officials who had hoped to align their fortunes with the occupiers, the Filipinos seemed to universally hate the Japanese. However, it didn’t mean that they all made excellent jungle guides, even if Danilo looked the part. But it was too late to go back and find a new guide. At this point, they no longer had any choice but to follow the man. Deke just hoped they had the right man for the job.

The jungle was thick, the air hot and humid to the point of feeling like a wet blanket. The breeze that helped dispel the tropical heat closer to the sea had disappeared.

Deke wiped sweat off his face with his sleeve. There was so much dirt ground into his uniform at this point that it was hard to say if there was even any cloth left, but it seemed to do the job. He wiped off several bugs in the process — the air was thick with gnats and mosquitoes.

The last thing he needed was sweat in his eyes to foul up his aim. They didn’t expect any trouble from the Japanese yet, but Deke figured that you could never tell what those sneaky bastards were up to next.

Danilo glanced back at them from time to time, nodding as he urged them forward, scowling at the sluggish pace, but Deke and the others were forced to move slowly, picking their way along the trail, which had dense undergrowth lining the sides and clutching at them.

It didn’t help that each calling bird or rustle of an animal in the underbrush set Deke’s nerves on edge. He was worried about the enemy ambushing them, but so far the jungle was empty.

Where the hell were the Japs?