Savage Sniper

CHAPTER SIX

It had been a long walk, after all. Thankfully they hadn’t run into any enemy patrols. It was still a mystery why they had been pulled back to the beachhead in the midst of the operation to seize Palompon. More than likely their orders would involve heading back out into the jungle and hills to deal with the Japanese who remained entrenched elsewhere.

For now the war could wait. Judging by the appearance of the tired men lounging on the sand, they weren’t in any hurry to get back to the fighting. The push across the rice paddies and then Highway 2 toward Palompon had left them exhausted.

“The Nips are beat, all right,” Philly announced to no one in particular. “The trouble is that they don’t know they’re beat.”

“They don’t seem like they’re beat to me,” Deke responded. “But they will be.”

“You wait and see. They’ll send us right back out again. No rest for the weary.”

“I reckon somebody has to actually fight the Japanese instead of unloading more gear on the beach. Maybe the plan is to bury them alive with packing crates. Do you think there’s even anything left back in the States? If nothing else, we’ll have to take back some ground from the Japs just so we have somewhere to put all this stuff.”

“You might just be right about that.”

Deke spent a moment watching the laboring men, then said, “I hate to say it, but I’d rather be on patrol than humping crates up the beach.”

Philly shook his head. “Honestly, I might not mind if the Japanese weren’t so damn determined to kill us — or kill themselves in the process. A normal enemy ought to know when to give up.”

It was a familiar refrain among many soldiers. Truth be told, Deke couldn’t have agreed more with Philly. The Japanese soldiers were bent on destruction — preferably the destruction of American forces, but self-destruction also seemed fine with them. They would fight until their last breath. Time and again they had proved that determination to the bitter end, taking more than a few GIs with them in the process. It was a mindset that Americans still struggled to understand. When faced with defeat, the enemy seemed to think that the only option was death.

Yoshio, the Nisei soldier who also served as an interpreter, had rarely been called upon to translate, because there were seldom any prisoners. Then again, Japanese prisoners did not always survive being captured by troops who had seen too many of their buddies killed.

Deke shook his head to clear it. He knew that he had to stay focused if he wanted to make it out of this war alive. If your thoughts wandered too far, they might not come back, lost as a stray coonhound on a midnight hunt in the mountains.

Philly was right about another thing, although Deke refused to admit this out loud for fear it would swell the other man’s head any bigger than it already was. They all knew that they wouldn’t be on this beach for long. Snipers were in high demand — too high to be allowed to sit around for long. Part of the problem was that the Japanese themselves had so many snipers, which proved to be a highly effective technique in the jungle terrain. A single enemy sniper could easily hold up an advancing platoon or company. Patrol Easy was kept busy dealing with the enemy snipers who waited in the jungle beyond. They had become specialists in the kind of up-close-and-personal jungle warfare that the enemy preferred.

Deke looked around at the men on the beach, studying the determined faces of the other members of Patrol Easy. They had already been through a lot, and there were sure to be more tough times ahead. For the moment they looked content to take it easy.

The question was, What was next for them?

Deke’s eyes scanned the area, taking in the other scouts and snipers strewn out across the sand nearby. The tension was palpable, everyone wondering what their next mission would be, but nobody griped about it except for Philly.

They lay sprawled in the sand, glad to be off their feet, making use of whatever shade they could find. To keep out of the sun, he and Philly had rigged a ragged blanket supported by sticks. It was a rickety contraption that threatened to blow away whenever the wind did more than puff at them, but their goal had been to create the maximum amount of shade with the minimum of effort. If there was one thing a soldier knew, it was that he’d soon be moving on.

The others were taking what rest they could. Yoshio had his nose in a book again. Deke was certain that he’d seen that cover portraying an Old West gunslinger many times, but it didn’t seem to matter to Yoshio if he was reading the same book over and over again.

Deke never had been much of one for reading, but he couldn’t help but envy Yoshio’s ability to transport himself out of this time and place with the help of those pages.

Their Filipino guide, Danilo, squatted on his haunches and watched the activity on the beach with his typical impassive gaze. It looked uncomfortable to Deke, but it was how most Filipinos sat. Danilo never wasted energy when he could avoid it. The only movement he made was to wave off the flies that occasionally buzzed into his face whenever the sea breeze slackened.

Rodeo appeared to be napping. Out of everyone in the patrol, Deke had decided that Rodeo was the least skilled in terms of being a scout or sniper. However, his talents lay elsewhere. It was always Rodeo who carried their walkie-talkie handset or extra supplies. He ran errands for Lieutenant Steele. In a sense he had become the patrol’s gopher, but he was useful all the same.

If it came down to who was the best shot in Patrol Easy, that was simple. Deke grinned. All he had to do was look in the mirror — or the nearest mud puddle.

Egan and Thor sat nearby. The war dog’s tongue lolled out as he panted in the heat. Thor had saved their bacon more than once when he had sniffed out a hidden Japanese soldier or warned them of an infiltrator’s approach at night. It was a wonder that the war dog and his handler were still assigned to the patrol, but they had all become so attached to Thor that they wouldn’t have it any other way.

Two of the original patrol were missing. Most recently, Alphabet had been wounded in the fighting at Ormoc and had eventually been evacuated off the beach to the relative safety of a hospital ship. Back on Guam, they had lost one of their patrol members, Ingram, to a Japanese sniper. The memory of Ingram’s death at the hands of that sniper still nagged at them all, along with the eternal question every soldier asked himself, Why him and not me?

Lieutenant Steele had been called away for a powwow with the other officers, leaving Patrol Easy on its own. No matter — they were too tired to get into any sort of trouble. They had also picked an area beyond the prying eyes of officers or the attentions of the beach masters who were attempting to manage the chaos of the landing zone. A beach master would shanghai any stray soldiers he could and put them to work.

Deke looked around, astonished by the activity on the beach. Even over the course of a few days, the beachhead had been transformed since the initial landing under hostile fire. Since then, the enemy had been pushed back, and the nearby port city of Ormoc had been captured, along with its all-important airfield. After a slow start, due to the threat of enemy ships and planes, more and more cargo was being brought ashore.

Other support areas had been established on the beach. In addition to a command post, there were tarps set up to keep the sun off a group of clerks who labored at typewriters, keeping up with the division’s recordkeeping. This included typing up the lists of the dead and wounded, which grew ever longer thanks to the enemy. Deke was sure that one of those clerks would be Corporal Rafferty, who had been thrown into combat with other rear-echelon troops when the Japanese had threatened to overwhelm the tentative grip on the beachhead. Rafferty had shown that he could handle a rifle as well as a typewriter. When it came down to it, sometimes even a clerk or a cook had to be a fighting infantryman. They had done a damn fine job of fighting on the road to Ormoc.

There was also a tent where Doc Harmon and other medical staff were busy treating the wounded. Some were patched up and sent back out. Wounded who needed more serious treatment were ferried out to the navy vessels for treatment. There was still the threat posed by the Japanese Navy and aircraft, but that had diminished considerably since the capture of Ormoc.

A few enemy air bases still operated, but these scattered planes had been pressed farther from the coast, and the US planes were constantly hunting for them.

Despite these efforts, a Japanese Zero or two still appeared to threaten the beach from time to time, sending the soldiers scurrying like ants.

For other men wounded in the fighting around Ormoc, it was too late. They were buried in a cemetery that expanded by the day. The fresh graves were a reminder to the living that there were no guarantees in a war zone. Almost every man on that beach knew someone whose grave was now marked with a simple cross. These were husbands, fathers, sons, brothers, buddies — none of whom would ever be going home again. As the losses mounted, the best that you could do was put the memories of the dead out of your mind.

Hundreds more had been hurt in the fighting. It was easy to pick out the wounded with their white bandages. The air around the medical tent was pungent with the acrid smell of iodine — and blood. Most of the men bore their wounds silently, and those in pain were dealt with using a dose of morphine.

But there were some men whose wounds were less visible. Deke and the other members of Patrol Easy had passed them coming in. These men simply sat and stared into the distance. The infamous one-thousand-yard stare. It was called combat fatigue. These men weren’t cowards — they had simply seen and done more than they could take. Every man was different. Some would be fine after a decent meal, a kind word, and the time to sit for a while with a blanket over their shoulders. Others would need additional time to come around. For a few tragic cases, their minds were permanently broken by the horrors of war. They were simply a different sort of casualty of war.

He could see the breakers foaming on the coral shelf beyond the beach. However, there was no hope of hearing the soft sound of waves crashing on the shore or the distant squawking of seabirds. This was not a restful beach.

Instead, the breeze off the sea carried the sound of roaring engines from landing craft, Jeeps, a bulldozer or two, and even a few planes overhead. All that engine noise was punctuated by irate shouts. It was easy to pick out the source, because the beach masters were notoriously short tempered and foulmouthed.

Transports ran right up on the beach, and soldiers had stripped to their waists, laboring under the tropical sun to unload the vessels. The toiling troops glistened with sweat, their arms and shoulders and torsos long since tanned nut brown by the tropical sun. You could always tell the replacement troops, because they were either fish-belly white or sunburned as red as a boiled lobster.

They didn’t have an easy task, because the soft sand at the tidal line sucked at their feet with every step. Some men had to work in the actual surf, getting soaked in addition to sunburned.

Watching them work, Deke was reminded of growing up on the farm and all the endless chores, from taking to the fields to hoe weeds to putting up hay. Like these men, he had often stripped off his shirt in the heat, exposing his scars from the bear attack he had survived as a boy. The skin across the scars sometimes felt tight as a drum in the morning. The sun always felt good on them, like it was somehow healing them, but maybe that had been only his imagination.

His sister, Sadie, had worked right alongside him. Even now, Deke rarely took his shirt off, because he was self-conscious about the angry red scars that raked down his side. People asked too many questions. Sadie never commented — she knew well enough how he’d gotten them. She’d been there that awful night.

Watching the laboring soldiers, some of whom bitched and complained the whole time, Deke was sure that Sadie could have worked most of them right into the sand. He grinned at the thought. He and Sadie had come through a lot together. Life on a hardscrabble mountain farm had been hard, but it had gotten a lot worse when the farm had been lost to a greedy banker when the Coles could no longer pay the mortgage.

He missed her and hoped that she was doing all right as a police officer in Washington, DC. It had been a while since he had received a letter from her.

“I could get used to this,” Philly murmured. “Doing nothing and answering to nobody.”

Deke looked over. He had thought that Philly was asleep. Like most soldiers, he could drop off in seconds. Deke always seemed to have a hard time, his thoughts rambling, his senses uneasy about what was out there.

“No, you couldn’t,” Deke said. “After a day of this, you’d be volunteering to head back out on patrol. Worse yet, nobody would let you lay around. You’d find yourself unloading crates.”

“There you go, busting my bubble again. A guy can dream, can’t he?”

“Sure, why not. Dream all you want, Philly. But it just makes it worse when you wake up.”

“Aw, stuff a sock in it, Corn Pone.”

Even after just a few hours on the beach, Deke felt a restlessness settle over him. He cleaned his rifle and sharpened his knife. From time to time, he heard the dull thud of artillery in the distance. It was the sound of unfinished business.

Deke finally allowed himself to doze, but his prediction that they would not be left alone for long was soon proved true. Nobody was going to let them sleep the day away, blissfully forgotten. A shadow soon fell across the lounging men. Deke raised one eyelid to see a young, sweaty private standing over them. He had the nervous look about him that staff clerks tended to get when coming face-to-face with grizzled combat veterans.

“You lost?” Deke drawled.

The private turned out to be a runner from division HQ. He managed to stammer out a message that they were being summoned there.

“Right away,” the runner emphasized, when he saw that the soldiers were making no effort to raise themselves off the sand.

“Yeah, yeah,” Philly said, finally stirring to the point where he managed to lift himself up on one elbow. “Run along now. We’re coming.”

Message delivered, the private appeared glad to retreat. He lost no time trotting away.

“Now what?” Rodeo wondered.

“I’ll bet we’ve done such a crackerjack job that we’re being sent back to Honolulu for some R & R and then on to the States for a Liberty Bond tour. Nothing but steak, booze, and broads.”

“Like hell we are,” Deke said. “It’s never a good thing when somebody comes looking for us. It means there’s a job to do that they can’t find anybody else to do.”

“Or dumb enough to take it,” Philly added.

“Well, there is that,” Deke agreed.