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“I’m going to enlist,” he told Sally Ann that night. They had been listening to the radio all day.
“You could get a deferment, you know. You’re almost thirty.”
“I don’t want a deferment.”
“No,” she said, and took his hand. “Of course you don’t. If you did, I’d love you less. Those dirty, sneaking Japs! Also…”
“Also what?”
Her answer made him realize—as with the business about buying his French letters far from Curry—just how much her father’s child she was. “Also it would look bad. Business would suffer. You might be called a coward. Just come back to me, Phil. Promise.”
Phil remembered what the Answer Man had told him under the red umbrella that day in October: not killed, not injured. He had no business believing such a thing, not all these years later… but he did. “I promise. I absolutely do.”
She put her arms around his neck. “Then come to bed. And never mind the damn rubber. I want to feel you in me.”
Nine weeks later, Phil sat in a Parris Island Quonset hut, sweating and aching in every muscle. He was reading a letter from Sally Ann. She was pregnant.
On the morning of February 18th, 1944, Lieutenant Philip Parker led his contingent of the 22nd Marines ashore on the atoll of Eniwetok. The Navy had subjected the Japanese to three days of bombardment, and intelligence said the enemy forces were thin on the ground. Unlike most of Naval intelligence, this turned out to be true. On the other hand, nobody had bothered to tell the gyrenes about the steep sand dunes they would have to climb after the Higgins boats grounded. The Japs were waiting for them, but they were armed with rifles instead of the dreaded Nambu light machine guns. Phil lost six of his thirty-six, two killed and four wounded, only one seriously. By the time they reached the top of the dunes, the Japs had melted into the thick brush.
The 22nd Marines swept west, meeting only scattered resistance. One of Phil’s men was shot in the shoulder; another fell into a hole and broke his leg. Those were his only casualties after the landing.
“Walk in the park,” Sergeant Myers said.
When they reached the ocean on the far side of the atoll, Phil got a walkie-talkie message from the jackleg Marine HQ that had been set up on the other side of the dunes that had caused them the worst casualties. They could still hear scattered fire from the south, but that was dying out even as they ate a noon meal. A picnic lunch at the seashore, Phil thought. Who knew war could be so pleasant?
“What’s the word, Loot?” Myers asked when Phil holstered the walkie.
“Johnny Walker says the island is secure,” Phil said. He was speaking of Colonel John T. Walker, who was bossing this little farrago along with his fellow colonel, Russell Ayers.
“It don’t sound secure,” said Private First Class Molocky. He nodded toward the south.
But by 1500, the shooting had fizzled away to nothing. Phil waited for orders, got none, posted three guards at the edge of the overgrowth, and told the rest of the men they could fall out until further notice. At 2000 hours they were told to pack up and head back east, where they would reconnect with the main landing force. There was grumbling about having to trek back through the thick underbrush when it would soon be dark, but orders wuz orders and they saddled up. After Private Frankland broke his leg in another hole and Private Gordon nearly put out an eye running into a tree, Phil radioed HQ and asked permission to camp for the night because the terrain was difficult.
“Fucking difficult is right,” said Private First Class Molocky.
Permission was granted. They camped under their netting, but plenty of mosquitos still got in.
“At least the ground’s dry,” Myers said. “I’ve had trench foot, and it’s not for sissies.”
Phil fell asleep to the sound of his men slapping and Private Frankland—he with the broken leg—moaning. He awoke just before dawn, aware that shapes were moving north of their little encampment through the gloom. Hundreds of shapes. He found out later that Eniwetok was riddled with spider holes. Frankland had probably broken his leg in one of them; a Japanese infantryman might have been at the bottom, looking up, as Rangell and Sergeant Myers pulled him out of it.
Myers now put a hand on Phil’s shoulder and murmured, “Not a word, not a sound. They might miss us. I think—”
That was when one of the Marines coughed. Conflicting lights crisscrossed the gray morning—grayer still under the canopy—and picked out the humped shapes swaddled in mosquito netting. The firing began. Six Marines were slaughtered in their sleep. Eight more were wounded. Only one Marine got off a shot. Myers had his arm around Phil; Phil had an arm around Myers. They listened to bullets whicker overhead, and several thumped the ground around them. Then there was a harsh command in Japanese—zenpo, zenpo it sounded like—and the Nips moved on, running and crashing through the brush.
“They’re counterattacking,” Phil said. “That’s the only reason I can think of why they didn’t finish us off.”
“HQ being their objective?” Myers asked.
“Got to be. Come on. You, me, anybody else who’s not wounded.”
“You’re crazy,” Myers said. His teeth shone as his lips parted in a grin. “I like it.”
Phil counted only six men who chased after the Japanese; there might have been one or two more. Now the firing started up again ahead of them, first sporadic, then constant. Grenades crumped, and Phil heard the chatter of the dreaded Nambu. It was joined by other machine guns. Three? Four?
The remaining Marines in Phil’s contingent burst out of the overgrowth and saw the far side of the dunes that had given them so much trouble the day before. It was covered with Japanese soldiers headed for the lightly defended HQ, but Phil’s men were behind them.
A portly Jap—perhaps the only overweight Jap in the whole army, Phil thought later—had fallen slightly behind his comrades. He was carrying a Nambu light machine gun and was festooned with belts of ammunition. Slightly ahead of him was another, thinner machine-gunner.
