Jungle Sniper

CHAPTER TWO

Aboard USS Elmore, Deke wasn’t the only one tossing and turning in his bunk. An air of anxious anticipation permeated the ship, so thick that you could cut it with a combat knife.

“How long do you think we’ll be on this damn ship?” Philly asked for about the hundredth time.

“I ain’t the captain — or the admiral, or whoever is in charge of this tub,” Deke replied, for what felt like the hundredth time. “And I sure as hell ain’t General MacArthur. Why don’t you go ask him?”

It wasn’t the answer Philly wanted. “Aw, stuff a sock in it, you ugly redneck.”

Philly rolled over and stared at the bulkhead, where he had entertained himself by scratching profane words into the paint. He could shout them all he wanted, but etching the words into the side of the ship was so much more satisfying.

Deke wouldn’t have let anyone else talk to him the way Philly did. Being called “ugly” had a bite to it, considering that Deke really was ugly, thanks to the scars raking one side of his face. He had gotten into fights over a lot less. But an insult from Philly ran off him like rain off a rock.

Besides, he had learned to listen to Philly in the same way that some folks listened to the radio. When you got tired of what you were hearing, you just tuned it out.

To be honest, Deke didn’t blame Philly for being in a bad mood. Who wasn’t? They all felt miserable aboard this ship. They had been extracted from Leyte just a few days ago and had welcomed being on the ship — for about five minutes, until the boredom set in.

They had been picked up by the ship after the patrol had been sent to Leyte ahead of the invasion to neutralize the massive Japanese battery on Hill 522. Those guns would have played hell with the US fleet that would soon arrive in Leyte Gulf. The successful mission had not given them any kind of free pass. Patrol Easy would be taking part in the invasion of the Philippines.

As bad as Patrol Easy’s behind-the-lines mission had been on Leyte, they were just about ready to go back if it meant a chance for fresh air and activity. Maybe that was what the army was trying to do, Deke decided — drive them all up the wall until they were begging to fight the Japs again.

As if by unspoken agreement, nobody had talked much about what had happened on that Philippine island. In fact, they had been ordered not to talk about it. Maybe it hadn’t quite been a secret mission, but the higher-ups didn’t want word to get out about how well fortified the Japs had been on that island. They didn’t want the troops to get discouraged before they even landed on the beach.

There had been a price to pay for their silence, however. Another squad of snipers had somehow managed to get the credit for the mission. You could thank the rumor mill for that. Maybe it was because those other guys looked the part. They had been adopted as a pet project by a colonel named Woodall who had managed to get them outfitted with the army’s new camouflage uniforms, M1 rifles with scoped sights, and even their own special badge. They had even picked up a name — Woodall’s Scouts. In comparison, Patrol Easy had the appearance of a motley crew of rejects from other units — which they basically were.

The scuttlebutt on the ship had it that Woodall’s Scouts had done the dirty work on Leyte — at least, that was the story going around whenever men from different units found themselves trading rumors.

“I hate those idiots,” Philly said, watching Woodall’s Scouts doing target practice from the stern one day, using the seagulls that trailed in the ship’s wake as targets.

The marksmanship practice had drawn a crowd of bored sailors and soldiers, who had quickly been impressed by the crack shooting with the semiautomatic sniper rifles. In comparison, Patrol Easy was equipped with battered Springfield rifles that Lieutenant Steele had managed to obtain by begging, borrowing, and at least a bit of threatening. Though accurate, the bolt-action rifles did not have the higher rate of fire of the M1 weapons.

All in all, US forces approached sniper warfare in a haphazard manner compared to the Japanese, who viewed the use of snipers as an important tactic against the enemy. Likewise, the Krauts gave special attention to training snipers.

“You’d think Lieutenant Steele would say something and set the record straight that it wasn’t Woodall’s Scouts who took out that battery,” Philly griped. “It was us, dammit.”

“If Steele doesn’t care, why should we?” Deke pointed out. “Just so long as the job got done.”

Philly scoffed. “You know what? You sound just like him. I know I shouldn’t care about what the latrine mayors have to say, but dammit, I do.”

Deke grinned. A latrine mayor was slang for the gossips who liked to stand around jawing and spreading rumors, often in the long lines to use the heads on the crowded ship.

“Don’t you worry your pretty head,” Deke said. “Woodall’s Scouts will get their nice uniforms dirty soon enough. We both know that shooting Japs ain’t the same as shooting seagulls from the back of a ship.”

Deke thought back again to the mission. Patrol Easy’s job had been to make sure that the island stronghold was a lot less well fortified. Similar missions had been carried out by Army Rangers on several of the small islands ringing Leyte Gulf in an effort to knock out the outlying Japanese defenses.

The Rangers had their hands full elsewhere, so the snipers of Patrol Easy had been sent ashore to take out the enemy battery located on Hill 522. Named for the hill’s height — exactly 522 feet tall — the hill had been turned into a heavily fortified position by the Japanese.

This hadn’t been just any gun battery. The guns were twins to the massive batteries aboard the Yamato, Japan’s most formidable battleship. It seemed that the Japanese had made a few spare versions of these guns and didn’t want them to go to waste. They might have been short on massive battleships, but they had plenty of islands that needed defending. The range of the guns enabled them to reach far out to sea, and special shells made them highly effective antiaircraft weapons.

Fortunately Patrol Easy had knocked out those formidable guns. They couldn’t take all the credit, having been joined by a couple of demolition experts on loan from the marines and a band of Filipino freedom fighters. If they hadn’t been successful, USS Elmore and any other ship in the invasion fleet would have been sitting ducks for those big guns.

For Deke, it had put his skill with a rifle into perspective. Sure, he could hit just about anything he could see, but those Japanese artillery boys had apparently been able to hit even what they couldn’t see. They had possessed the ability to sink targets out of sight beyond the horizon. One of the navy gunners had explained how such feats involved lots of mathematical calculations and figuring the azimuth. Deke could figure fast as lightning in his head what others needed a pencil and paper to do, but he’d never had any real formal schooling. He had decided right then and there to leave the azimuths to the navy boys.

The mission had been a success, but that success had come at a price. Deke had seen things that he wished he could unsee, such as the execution of the Filipino guerrillas who had helped them with the mission. Those poor bastards — the ones who hadn’t been killed in the raid itself — had the bad luck to be captured by the Japanese and had literally been put to the sword.

That had been hard to watch. Deke shuddered at the mental picture of their headless corpses staining the dirt red.

Actions like that made the enemy hard to fathom. Who the hell were these Japanese, anyhow? Barbarians, plain and simple. To shoot a prisoner was bad enough in Deke’s book, but to cut off his head with a sword went beyond understanding.

Then there had been that Japanese sniper. He’d been a crack shot, managing to pin down Deke and Philly on Hill 522. Deke had gone head-to-head against that sniper, who was every bit his match. If anyone thought that the Japs were bad shots, they were sadly mistaken.

They’d only just barely managed to slip away. The enemy sniper had then chased them relentlessly through the Leyte jungle as Deke and the rest of Patrol Easy made their way to the beach, where they had been picked up by a navy rescue boat.

Deke didn’t like boats or water all that much, but he’d been damn glad to see that boat.

All in all, it had been a hellacious adventure they’d been lucky to return from.

Now they were on a ship headed right back to that godawful place.

The sense of anxiety they all felt was compounded by the fact that the interior of the ship was hot and smelly from so many men in close quarters. The ventilation system, such as it was, might have been adequate for a ship in the chilly reaches of the Atlantic, where the emphasis was on staying warm. It wasn’t hard to believe that the ship had been built in Bath, Maine, where the temperature rarely exceeded eighty degrees even on the hottest July day. However, the ship’s systems were not designed for the tropical environment. In these cramped quarters, the constant heat and humidity became almost unbearable at times. The porthole was propped open, but it was at least ninety degrees and steamy.

It was hard to describe the particular hell that was being in limbo in these less-than-ideal conditions, all the while knowing that the only way out involved running toward more Japanese machine guns.

At first, despite the discomforts belowdecks, many of the GIs on the ship had reassured themselves that at least they didn’t have to sleep with one eye open, as they’d had to on Guam. That notion soon proved false. Japanese aircraft did their best to target any ships that they came across. At night, the interior of the ship was often dark as the belly of a whale due to a strict policy against any lighting that might make the ship a target for enemy night fighters or bombers. The Japanese Navy also remained a threat — especially the submarines that lurked beneath the waves.

It was probably the thought of a submarine attack that caused the most fear, given that an attack might come without warning and without a chance to fight back. Soldiers didn’t like to feel helpless.

“One minute you’re sleeping in your bunk,” Philly had philosophized. “The next minute you’re shark bait.”

“Don’t you ever shut up?” Deke groused. He couldn’t help but squirm at the thought of going down with the ship. As a mountain boy born and raised, he wasn’t fond of the sea.

USS Elmore was no battleship, but she wasn’t helpless, either, against the marauding Japanese Navy or aircraft that hunted for American ships. Every square inch of the designated attack transport ship was crowded with soldiers and equipment. The few spare inches of the ship’s deck bristled with the equipment of naval warfare, including five-inch guns, antiaircraft batteries, and antisubmarine depth charges. Of course, there wasn’t much that the ship’s crew could do to defend against a surprise attack.

For the soldiers, as if the threat of Japanese attack and the conditions aboard ship weren’t bad enough, they also had to contend with monotony. This may have been the greatest enemy of all. The boredom seemed to make everything worse. According to a few GIs who had experienced jail, life on the ship wasn’t so different in this regard.

Soldiers who had defended one another to within an inch of their lives during the fight for Guam found themselves ready to rip out each other’s throats at the slightest provocation.

It all served as a reminder that this was no pleasure cruise. They were required to stay belowdecks most of the time, in their cramped and airless living quarters, sweating in the heat. They were allowed up on deck for only a few precious hours each day for fresh air and exercise.

This policy wasn’t deliberate cruelty on the part of the officers — there were simply too many soldiers and not enough space on deck to give them free range of the ship. It wasn’t that the ship would become top-heavy and capsize — it was just that the crew needed elbow room to operate the vessel.

Even when on deck, the GIs couldn’t help but feel a little like cattle crowded into the stockyards, anxiously scanning the skies for the first appearance of an enemy plane with the dreaded “meatball” symbols on the wings.

For far too many soldiers and sailors, the sight of the dreaded Rising Sun symbol had meant impending death. There was a reason the Rising Sun was the color of blood. If enemy planes suddenly appeared and raked the deck, there would be nowhere for the soldiers to go. They were sitting ducks, and they all knew it.

So the soldiers spent their time belowdecks as best they could. The atmosphere remained stifling, with not nearly enough air flowing in through the portholes. What breeze blew in was too warm and humid to be refreshing. Many men stripped down to their boxer shorts, but the sweat still streamed off them. Destroyers had the nickname “tin cans,” but they weren’t the only ship where the crew and human cargo felt like sardines.

For Deke, this went beyond simple boredom. Deke couldn’t define it, but something in him faded when he was away from the outdoors for too long. The mountains energized him, as did the cool rush of wind in his face. Even the hushed jungle brought him to life. Being stuck in the belly of a troopship, not so much.

As a boy, he had spent nearly all his time outdoors, either working on the farm or roaming the valleys and forested peaks, often armed with a rifle or shotgun. He had known most of the country for miles around like the back of his hand. More than a few times, he had wrapped up a chunk of salt pork and maybe a couple of apples and walked deep into the mountains. Deke had welcomed losing himself among the high wooded peaks in all kinds of weather, from snow to the fall days when the clouds came right down to the peaks. There had been bear back in the deep mountains, bobcat, deer. Deke hadn’t always been there to hunt, but just to explore. There hadn’t been anyone else around, certainly no one to stare at his scars or ask questions, which suited him just fine.

“I’m afraid that one of these times you ain’t gonna come back,” Sadie had said. “You’ll build yourself an itty-bitty cabin back in them woods and become a mountain man.”

That had sounded all right to Deke back then. In the belly of the crowded troopship, it sounded even better.

If the men of Patrol Easy hadn’t already been aware of their ultimate destination, it would have been hard to know that the ship was basically in position for the coming invasion of Leyte. This was because USS Elmore continued to steam across the surface of the ocean, zigzagging endlessly to make a difficult target for any Japanese on the prowl. There was no land in sight, and the officers had been vague on the details. Hell, maybe some of the officers didn’t even know what awaited them.

“There’s not much to do but wait,” Philly said. “It’s gonna drive me nuts. How much longer are we gonna be on this ship?”

“Get some sleep,” Deke told him. “Let tomorrow take care of itself.”

“Where did you get that nugget?” Philly wanted to know. “They must be handing out fortune cookies in the mess hall.”

Deke grinned into the darkness. He couldn’t take credit for that one. He remembered it being one of the phrases that Sadie had employed during their bleak days in the boarding house, after they had lost the farm. To Deke’s surprise, the words had stuck with him.

“Just something my sister used to say.”

“She sounds like a smart one.”

“You have no idea,” Deke said, and grinned.