Chapter 20
Talk, talk, talk. You like to listen to men talk
at a time like this, because their lips seem to
bloom into ponderous slowgaited poetry and it is rich and
wholesome. The sky has been knocked loose and the cardinal
points of the compass have been jumbled in wreckage, but
they are straightening things out with their tongues and reducing
chaos to ordinary commonplace by nonchalant gestures. And it is
not a single battle they have taken part in, it
is thousands of battles and they have been fought by
thousands of men a thousand ways a thousand times over,
with everyone having a thousand versions of the same thing.
There seems to be some excitement near the Command Post,
and the men quiet down and they look and listen.
You raise yourself on one knee and see a file
of begrimed soldiers on the far side of the clearing
stumble across the matted brush, guided by a gesticulating sentry.
A young, blonde lieutenant, who seems to be in charge,
waves a curt dismissal order to the men and turns
to report to Colonel Watson in the regimental headquarters dugout.
The rest of the detachment, battered and wary, flop listlessly
down to lie in the sweat of their utter exhaustion.
One of them is near enough to hear you speak
and you try to attract his attention. "Hyah, hairy ears.
You look like you've been overdrawn at the blood bank.
What happened?" When he faces your way, you recognize him
as a member of Company A, 759th Amphibious Engineer Battalion
with whom your unit had practiced assault landings on maneuvers.
"It was rough," he says. "It was rough and rugged.
A complete snafu. The sons of bitches sucked us in
and we caught everything but the Goddamn boat going home."
His mouth is open and words fall out in a
tired monotone and you retrieve them and put them together
in proper sequence. He is saying that he was attached
to the division that spearheaded the attack and he hit
Beach Blue at H-hour minus thirty minutes and his mission
was to push inland and capture high ground so that
enfilading artillery support could be directed to assist following waves.
"The barrage we laid down was so strong it will
take me the rest of the day to stop vibrating.
Anyway, it sure cleaned the Japs from their shore defenses
because when we came in there wasn't hardly anyone there.
We had every kind of landing craft, including rocket-firing types,
and plenty of tanks and heavy weapons and it sure
looked like nothing on earth was going to stop us."
But the Nips were waiting behind the stretches of shoreline
and were deployed to make every man and bullet count,
and the attackers paid for every inch. Finally, they were
able to reach the foot of the hill and they
divided themselves into a lot of small teams in order
to surround the entire circle of the hill's military crest.
"We chopped our way upward, fighting for each little rise,
and WHAM! The whole world came to a screeching halt.
You know what? They were rolling landmines down on us!
Everything got fouled up, and the attack was badly stalled,
and all our rear elements had to dig themselves in.
In the confusion we got cut off from our unit
and had to find our way to your assembly area."
A passing officer stops to stare curiously at the group.
He asks, "Are you boys the refugees from Beach Blue?"
"Yes," replies one, "we spent a lifetime there this morning."
