Jungle Sniper

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

After the ambush was set, Ikeda studied the details with satisfaction. It was almost a textbook position — troops on the high ground and hidden in the ravines surrounding the plateau. The trail through the jungle ravine was now a death trap.

They knew that they were being pursued by US forces. While it was true that they could have turned and attacked at almost any point, the narrow jungle trail meant that they could only have attacked the enemy head-on. Waiting until the enemy reached this more open terrain meant that they could ambush the entire column at once, with devastating results.

The US troops soon walked right into the trap that had been set for them. With so many targets, Ikeda was having a field day.

He aimed and fired, aimed and fired, dropping soldiers with virtually every shot.

It wasn’t until he had made the mistake of exposing himself to pass orders to his snipers that the enemy had nearly picked him off with a lucky shot.

Or maybe not that lucky. Perhaps it had been skill.

“What have we here?” Ikeda muttered to himself. Safe behind cover, he saw where that accurate shot had come from. Behind a rock, he spotted an American sniper who had a rifle with a telescopic sight and the telltale hat with one side pinned up. This must be the same sniper he had tangled with before.

Ikeda smiled. Things had just become more interesting.

The American sniper had ducked back down behind a rock. Aiming carefully, Ikeda sent a bullet that raised a puff of stone chips and dust off that rock.

“Hey, Charlie!” he shouted in heavily accented English. “I kill you now, Charlie!”

After the initial fury of the attack, the fight settled into an intense and prolonged gun battle. Anything that moved on either side became a target. Given that the troops on both sides were firing from behind cover, the GIs began to rediscover some of their marksmanship skills, taking their time to make each shot count.

“Got one!” whooped a soldier.

But the Japanese marksmen were also taking their toll. Now and then a soldier suddenly sagged. More often than not, those were fatal head shots. Nobody bothered to call for a medic in those cases.

All the medics were down anyhow.

Nobody said it out loud yet, but there was the nagging concern about running out of ammo. Far as they were from the beachhead, there wouldn’t be any resupply.

“Make them keep their heads down, boys,” Merrick shouted from time to time. Without saying it aloud, he seemed to address the ammo issue. “We’ll fight ’em with bayonets if we have to.”

Things were bad. The Japanese had the advantage of higher ground, along with the cover of the ravines. Fortunately the US troops had managed to scrape foxholes into the soil or were taking advantage of whatever cover they could find. The problem was that the enemy nearly had them encircled, firing at them from three sides. In response, the Americans had formed a roughly U-shaped position.

Deke told Yoshio to turn his binoculars in the other direction, directly down into the ravine behind them, to keep an eye out and make sure the Japanese did not try to encircle them. The GIs were already spread so thin that he didn’t want to think about what would happen if the Japanese hit them from the rear.

“I reckon I’ve just about had enough of this,” Deke muttered. He racked his brain for something, anything, that he could do to help get them all off this godforsaken ridge. They couldn’t stay in the open.

But it was easier said than done, with the Japanese snipers pinning them down. Right now their best hope was to wait for dark to make their move.

Deke wasn’t the only one thinking that way. The soldiers were spread out but close enough to be within shouting distance of one another.

“Merrick says to sit tight until dark,” Private Frazier called out to them in his gravelly voice from his own hiding spot fifty feet away. He was now trying to conserve the BAR ammo by firing in short bursts wherever he saw enemy movement. “We’ll make a move then. Pass it on.”

Deke looked to his left. There wasn’t anyone to pass it on to. Like it or not, he, Philly, Yoshio, and their new best friend, Danilo, were the left flank of Charlie Company.

Beyond the four of them was nothing but the jungle ravine and Japanese.

“Don’t that beat all,” he muttered.

If the Japanese decided to rush them in any numbers, the fight might be over in a hurry.

It was brutally hot, and the sun beat down on the soldiers’ helmets. Deke could feel the sweat running down the back of his neck, the rivulets streaming under his shirt collar. His uniform felt perpetually soaked. He tried to keep his mind focused on the task at hand, but instead, his thoughts wandered. He imagined haying time at home, the heat of the day, and how wonderful a drink of cool, sweet water dipped out of a spring had been.

You couldn’t drink the jungle water safely without dissolving halazone tablets in it. Men had quenched their thirst with the untreated water, and they’d gotten sick as dogs. The water back home was right out of a mountain spring, filtered through clean granite, pure as the snow and mountain rain it had come from.

He’d been so hot on those July afternoons working on the farm that there had been times when he had lain on his belly like a dog beside the spring, sucking up water. Couldn’t get enough.

He was just as thirsty now, but there was no cool spring nearby to slake his thirst. The adrenaline from the gun battle, along with the acrid gun smoke that hung in the air, had reduced his mouth to feeling dry as old straw — and tasting about the same.

He raised his canteen, shaking the last drop or two into his parched mouth. The warm drops of water didn’t do much good, maybe even made his thirst worse somehow, so he put a pebble into his mouth and sucked on it — an old trick that his father had taught him when they were putting up hay on July days so hot and dry that the field was like an oven. The pebble alleviated his thirst somewhat.

“You got any water left?” Philly asked hopefully, having seen Deke raise his canteen.

“That was it, fella. I just drank the last two drops.”

“Yeah, same here. Just think how wet we were hiking through that jungle yesterday. What I wouldn’t give for a little of that rain now.”

“Suck on a pebble. It helps.”

“What kind of a bumpkin do I look like?” Philly griped. “Suck on a pebble, my ass.” But after a minute, he gave Deke a sidelong glance, then popped a pebble into his mouth and didn’t complain about it.

He and Philly weren’t the only thirsty ones. Just about everyone had an empty canteen, and there was no hope of going off to find a water source to refill them — not with the Japs keeping them pinned down. Some men plucked the sharp-edged kunai grass and chewed it, hoping to suck a little green juice from it, but the grass was so dry that it offered little relief.

One GI had spotted a coconut that had fallen from a solitary tree on the ridge. The coconut sat on the ground in plain view, tempting someone to crack it open for the sweet milk inside. In his desperation for something to drink, the soldier had started to crawl toward it. A Japanese sniper quickly picked him off.

Deke shook his head at the thought of a man’s life tossed away in hopes of a few swallows of coconut milk, but that was what thirst did.

Off to the right, Deke heard a metallic clatter coming at them. Automatically Deke swung his rifle in that direction.

“Don’t shoot!”

To his surprise, he saw Dickie Shelby crawling toward their position on all fours, his back and shoulders crisscrossed with webbed belts and empty canteens. It was the clatter of the canteens that had gotten Deke’s attention.

“Dickie, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m going for water.”

“Like hell you are. You’re drawing fire, that’s what you’re doing!”

As Deke said it, another shot ripped the air inches from their heads. Laden down like a pack mule, Dickie made an irresistible target. He didn’t so much as flinch when another bullet passed close by. The young soldier’s fear seemed to have melted away, even if his baby fat remained.

“Give me your canteen.”

“Look here now. Don’t get killed on my account.”

“C’mon, give it here.”

Deke handed it over, if for no other reason than to get Dickie out of the line of fire.

“I’m pretty sure there’s a stream down at the bottom of that ravine,” Dickie said, nodding in the direction of the ravine directly behind them. “I have to try to find one, at least.”

“It’s your funeral,” Philly said. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

Dickie didn’t answer but jumped up and ran for the cover of the ravine at their rear. He zigged and zagged as he ran, the clanking canteens swinging every which way, making him a ludicrous sight. He looked like a cluster of khaki-colored grapes with legs. By some miracle, their new water boy wasn’t killed right away. Perhaps the Japanese were laughing so hard that they couldn’t get off a good shot.

“We’ll never see him alive again,” Philly announced.

“I don’t know about that,” Deke said. “Sometimes fortune favors a fool.”

“I guess you’d know, huh?”

“Keep it up and you won’t have to worry about the Japs.”

Philly snorted at that, but he kept his mouth shut.

As the afternoon heat intensified, the promise of water only added to the torment. It might have been better if there hadn’t been any hope of water at all. At one point they heard rifle shots coming from that direction — the sharp crack of an Arisaka. Deke figured that was that — Dickie’s luck had run out, and some Japanese sniper had gotten him for sure.

Less than an hour later, they heard shouting from that direction. Dickie came into view, calling, “Cover me!”

The soldiers on the ridge obliged by pouring fire at the Japanese position. Still, bullets plucked the air near Dickie, or churned up the dry dirt at his feet.

“Magnificent,” Captain Merrick muttered, shaking his head. “I don’t think I can put him in for a medal for fetching water, but damned if he doesn’t deserve a gold-plated canteen.”

“He’s a regular Gunga Din,” someone said.

Against all odds, Dickie had run the gauntlet of Japanese fire, found a water source, and returned. Deke had seen more than a few amazing sights so far in this war, and this had to be one of them. He was witnessing an act of sheer bravery.

Dickie threw himself down next to Deke, positively sloshing. A bullet had struck one of the canteens, punching a hole in it, and Philly grabbed it up and let the precious water flow into his mouth before any more could spill on the parched ground.

“You should treat the water first with halazone,” Yoshio warned, but Philly was beyond caring about that.

Deke fired off a couple of quick shots in the direction of the Japanese who had been shooting at Dickie.

“Here’s a canteen,” Dickie said. “I’m not exactly sure it’s the one you gave me.”

“Don’t matter. Hell, I’d drink out of Hirohito’s canteen at this point.”

Before Deke could say more, Dickie was up and running again at a crouch. He threw himself down once more next to Private Frazier, the BAR gunner, who was the soldier nearest to the snipers’ position. He left a canteen for Frazier, who covered Dickie’s dash for the next position by letting loose a long blast from his BAR.

“I do love that thing,” Philly said in admiration, after he had taken a long gulp of water. “It’s the sound of revenge.”

Dickie ran on, dodging bullets like he must have the luckiest rabbit’s foot in the world in his pocket.

The question was, How long could that luck last?