Pacific Sniper

Chapter Four

Moving with the caution of a boxer who’d been bloodied by the punches of his opponent, the US troops advanced deeper into the island terrain. Much of the landscape had been ravaged by the big naval guns leading up to the landing, thinning out the coconut trees and vegetation like a madman’s scythe.

The result was a brutal landscape of shattered trunks, lone fronds standing out like battered flags, and shell holes like wounds in the tropical soil.

Looking around at the scenery, if you could call it that, Deke felt tense. Walking through the shattered groves was like walking through a tropical version of hell. It was more than a little disconcerting. From all around them, they could hear skirmishes being fought. Their turn was coming, that was for sure.

“I don’t like it,” a soldier muttered. “I don’t like it one bit.”

“What I want to know is: Where are all the Japs?”

“Don’t worry. They’re here.”

“Maybe we wiped them out.”

“They’re pulling us in, waiting for us to walk into a trap.”

Surely the naval bombardment had softened up the enemy. The fleet had stood off from shore, launching hundreds, if not thousands, of shells at the island in a spectacular show of force. But from what Deke could see, most of that firepower had landed on empty beach and what some of the men had taken to calling “jangle”—the overgrown vegetation on the peninsula that was not quite so dark or dense as the depths of the island’s jungle.

He didn’t see any evidence of destroyed enemy fortifications. The Japanese must have dug in farther back from the beach, and more deeply, than the navy gunners had calculated. This did not bode well for the fight that the marines and soldiers now faced.

Deke couldn’t help but think that the island battle was like putting two bugs in a jar and making them fight. For both sides, there was no way off the island and nowhere to go. In the end, only one side would remain, but they would surely be battered in the process.

The soldiers marched farther into the blasted terrain as the eerie silence grew.

The Japanese had made it clear that they intended to stay and fight, no matter what.

A shot rang out. Up ahead, a soldier fell.

“Sniper!” the sergeant yelled. “Everybody down!”

The soldiers scattered, diving for whatever cover they could find. A few jumped into nearby shell holes. The rest crouched behind clumps of tropical grasses or shrubs.

The sniper fired again.

Calmly, Deke scanned the jangle up ahead for any sign of the sniper. He noticed that a few trees poked up above the scrub. This seemed to be the most likely hiding place for the sniper.

“Medic!”

“Forget it!” the sergeant shouted. Just a few feet away from Deke, the bullet hole in the soldier’s helmet was plain to see. There was no mistaking the deathly stillness of the man’s body. “He’s gone. Somebody get eyes on that sniper. Conlon, that means you!”

“Sarge?” The soldier with the sniper rifle was behind a bush, frantically scanning the terrain with his eye pressed to his riflescope.

Another shot rang out.

“I’m hit!” someone screamed.

It was a soldier Deke remembered from training. He thought the man’s name was Rivers. The bullet had hit him in the knee, leaving him helpless out in the open. He tried to drag himself to cover, and another shot came in, striking him in the shoulder.

Deke had the uneasy feeling that the Jap sniper was choosing his shots carefully. He was taking Rivers apart, one bullet at a time.

The enemy fire sounded more like a sharp puff than the usual crack of a rifle. Deke recalled seeing the rifle of the Jap that he’d shot. The weapon had been shorter than the American rifles and apparently chambered a smaller caliber. It was deadly enough but didn’t pack the punch of the.30–06 round used by the Americans — a powerful round that could punch through two inches of wood at five hundred yards.

The Japanese bullets weren’t anything like that. Then again, the shot wasn’t as loud, making it hard to determine where the shooting was coming from. In a sense, the quieter Japanese weapons made the perfect sniper weapon for jungle fighting.

Deke didn’t want to be the Jap sniper’s next target. He stretched out on the sand, behind a tree trunk mostly reduced to splinters. He could smell the fresh sap, sharp and green. His rifle rested on the trunk.

At the next shot, his eyes focused on a tree one hundred feet away. A flicker of movement there had caught his eye.

He didn’t have a telescopic sight like the sniper, but maybe he didn’t need one. He was certain that the Jap sniper was hidden in that tree. The tree was a little taller than the others and stood a little apart, offering a clear line of fire. It was just the tree that Deke would have picked to shoot from.

If the Jap was camouflaged anything like the soldier Deke had shot earlier, it was no wonder that they couldn’t see him.

Maybe I don’t need to see him.

The trunks of these coconut trees or whatever they were weren’t like the trees back home. They didn’t have any branches but rose straight up to bunches of fronds. The trees reminded him of big old feather dusters with most of their feathers missing.

If the sniper was in that tree, then he was hiding in the treetop.

Deke lined up his rifle sights in the middle of that bunch of fronds. He was shooting blind.

Another shot came in. The whimpering from Rivers ended.

“Dammit, we’re pinned down. We don’t have time for this. For Crissakes, Conlon, don’t you see him yet?”

“No, Sarge!” the sniper cried out. “Where the hell is he?”

But Deke knew. He couldn’t have explained exactly how.

He let out a breath, held the sights steady, and squeezed the trigger. It was almost a surprise when he felt the reassuring kick of the rifle against his shoulder.

He lined up the sights again, but there was no need for a second shot.

In the treetop, a bundle detached itself like an oversize coconut and tumbled to the jungle floor below.

“Got him,” Deke said, standing up. Not waiting for the others, he started forward.

Still sheltering behind a clump of bushes, the sergeant stared at him. “I’ll be damned, Cole,” he said. “You bagged that Jap. That’s two so far, if we count the one you stuck full of holes.”

“I reckon.”

“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but we might make a soldier out of you yet.”

The sergeant climbed to his feet. Most of the other soldiers were still hunkered down.

“That Jap bastard was aiming for Nelly,” said Egan. During the sniper attack, he had covered the dog with his own body.

“They’re afraid of the dogs,” the sergeant said. “Hell, that dog might be bigger than they are.”

“It’s not right to be trying to shoot dogs.”

“Egan, I swear you love that dog more than your girlfriend.”

Somebody else spoke up. “Everybody knows that dog is his girlfriend.”

A couple of guys laughed. “Hubba, hubba.”

They were all shaken up. Rivers was dead, not to mention Ben’s death earlier. But kidding Egan about his love for the dog was the relief valve they all needed. Egan just smiled and scratched Nelly’s ears.

“All right, all right. Let’s get going again. And Deke? You’re on point. You see any more Jap snipers, you know what to do. But I want you to stay in sight. You see anything up there, you signal back.”

“Like what, Sarge?”

“Like the Jap army, that’s what, you dumb hick. We know they’re here somewhere, just waiting for us.”

Nearby, Conlon shot Deke a dirty look. After all, he was supposed to be the one who dealt with enemy snipers.

Deke ignored him. He didn’t care what Conlon thought. If Conlon was going to lug around a rifle with a fancy telescopic sight, then he ought to do something useful with it. Like shoot Japs.

Taking point, Deke moved ahead of the others, his eyes flicking across the landscape ahead. He held his rifle with the barrel pointed slightly down, ready to snap it to his shoulder. His feet moved soundlessly, boots finding the sandy spots between the twigs and branches littering the ground.

Deke grinned to himself.

He might be on an island surrounded by thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean, but he suddenly felt right at home.

As far as he was concerned, he wasn’t on patrol.

He was hunting.

For Deke and the rest of the soldiers, the day seemed to stretch on endlessly as they moved from one nameless coconut grove to another. Sometimes they encountered small pockets of resistance that resulted in a short, sharp fight.

So far they hadn’t encountered the enemy in any kind of numbers. The worst fight took place against a Japanese machine-gun emplacement. Finally, a soldier worked himself close enough to hurl a grenade into the cleverly disguised pillbox and silence the gun. Two of his buddies who had tried before him lay dead in the sand. The squad was making progress, pushing deeper into the interior from the beachhead, but at a terrible price. Sarge didn’t seem to mind ordering men forward into harm’s way, but at the same time, he didn’t hesitate to lead from the front. The lieutenant preferred to hang back.

These fights were taking place all over the interior of the island adjacent to the beaches. There were pockets of defenders concealed within concrete pillboxes that revealed themselves as barely more than slits in a hummock of sand. Each of these pillboxes took precious time to clear as the day wore on.

But these were all small fights. It was as if the Japanese forces had simply melted into the jungle.

“What I’d like to know is: Where are all the Nips?” Deke wondered.

“They’re out there, all right. It’s like they’re leading us on.”

“Leading us into a trap?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

“I guess we’ll find out the hard way,” Deke said.

A distant rifle cracked, and they all ducked. But none of them had been the target. If they had, then one of them would already be dead. These Jap snipers rarely missed.

“One thing for sure is that there’s no shortage of snipers.”

“You got that right,” Deke said.

Throughout the day, the Japanese snipers had harassed the GIs. Fighting back was frustrating and nearly impossible. No sooner did they get a position on the sniper than the Jap slipped away — only to shoot at them from a new position. Orders were to ignore the snipers and advance, but that was easier said than done. The sniper proved to be an unrelenting thorn in their side.

Deke kept wanting to slip deeper into the jungle so that he could engage the snipers one-on-one. To him, the rest of the platoon felt like a ball and chain. But the sergeant wasn’t having any of that.

“Cole, get your ass back here,” Sergeant Hawley shouted as loudly as he dared. “Stay in sight.”

Finally, the sergeant had enough of trying to rein Deke in and put Conlon back on point.

Conlon moved forward cautiously, making a show of swinging his scoped rifle every which way with herky-jerky motions.

Deke moved back with the rest of the platoon. He fell into step beside Egan, leading his dog on a leash.

“Conlon puts on a good show. Too bad he hasn’t shot any Japs yet,” Egan said. “You do know that if you quit pissing off the sergeant that your life would be easier?”

“Easier said than done.”

“You know what your problem is, Deke? You’re stubborn. If you were a dog, I’d put a choke collar on you.”

“I’d like to see you try.”

Egan just shook his head and moved a couple of paces away.

The afternoon shadows were finally getting long when a runner came with a message. Soaked in sweat, scratched, and bleeding from his dash through the underbrush, he delivered the message to the lieutenant.

The lieutenant read it and snorted. “Well, isn’t it just like the captain to forget us until he needs something.”

“Sir?” the sergeant asked.

“They want a man sent back to the beach to join an anti-sniper squad. The Japs are tearing us up everywhere, and the colonel wants to put a stop to it. Conlon has already got a sniper rifle, but I’m not sending him, dammit. We need our sniper, never mind what the colonel says.”

“Then who do we send instead?”

Both men looked around. There were a couple of ways to approach this situation. Some officers did the right thing and sent the best man for the job. Logically, that would have been their designated sniper, Conlon, but the lieutenant had already decided against that.

Many officers and sergeants saw a headquarters request such as this one as an opportunity to get rid of a soldier who was slacking off, troublesome, or generally a pain in the ass.

All things considered, it was probably no surprise when the lieutenant’s gaze settled on Deke. Since Ben’s death that morning, he’d hardly spoken to anyone and had kept to himself. Then again, he was the only soldier who had managed to kill not one, but two, Japanese soldiers.

“What about him?”

The sergeant nodded. “Good choice, sir. Good riddance, if you ask me. The last thing we need is that troublemaking hick to slow us down. We’ve got an island to capture.”

“That’s the spirit.”

Sergeant Hawley called Deke over and gave him the news.

“Congratulations, Cole. We’re sending you back to HQ. It turns out that they need some volunteers for the recon troop. We are volunteering you.”

Deke nodded but didn’t verbally acknowledge the sergeant, needling him.

Sergeant Hawley scowled. It didn’t take a mind reader to know that he was glad to be getting rid of Deke.

Hardly anyone acknowledged Deke as he left. With Ben gone, he wasn’t especially close to anybody else in the platoon. He’d always been the sort of man who kept himself to himself. Anyhow, they had already seen men die today. There hadn’t been any goodbyes for Rivers, shot through the head by that Jap sniper. The way they figured it, at least he was walking away on his own two feet.

“Good luck, Deke,” muttered Egan, the dog handler. He had taken off his helmet and poured water into it for the dog to drink. “Maybe we’ll run into each other again. Meanwhile, don’t get your ass shot off.”

Deke reached down to scratch the dog’s ears.

“See you around.”

He turned and disappeared into the jangle.

Deke didn’t know it yet, but the rest of the war was about to change for him.