Chapter 2
The boatswain's corrugated voice is heard over the loudspeaker system.
"Boat team number five — repeat, five — form at station three."
You find your feet and they move you toward the
rail of the transport and your shadow joins the men crowding their quickened bodies in orderly and predetermined lines and
scraping their heavy shoes in a gruff shuffle of expectancy.
Your ears sting as the guns of the task force
resume their nightlong exploration of the dim island lying ahead,
sending out an expedition of sixteen-, eight- and five-inch shells
to trace its fugitive boundaries and map them in thunder
and record the charted areas in red and yellow smoke.
Empty Higgins boats, Alligators and the more sturdily armed Buffaloes
scurry about the mother ship in busy clouds of spray
like fat little infant pigs eagerly waiting to be suckled.
Soldiers are going over the side in groups of four
and their white knuckles grasp the vertical strands of netting.
There goes Egan, Whitney, Shearer and the kid called Mouse.
The first men in the craft hold the net inside
to prevent anyone from falling between the boat and ship.
Your turn soon. A man behind you coughs. Another swears.
The man you follow has a face like embalmed youth.
Now. . .You climb over the ship's rail, clutching at rope,
feeling the swaying ladder with tentative toes, somehow not yours.
It writhes with the weight of bodies above and below
and it snaps and plunges in whirling heights of dizziness.
Then your flexed muscles grow taut and they bend back
the water and the sky and the elements and they
drop you into the craft like a jigsaw puzzle piece
Fitted into its proper place to complete the desired pattern.
The assault boat is full of men pressed close together.
Someone says, "Guess we'll have to breathe in half steps!"
But his voice sounds strangely unlubricated and out of practice.
You read an unanswerable question in the eyes of Egan,
and you wonder if he sees the same in yours.
And everyone looks at everyone else as though each man
were trying to gather in the nearness of his fellows
for strength against a loneliness that might come too soon.
The engines roar in the opening bars of a symphony
and a scream of trumpets leaps from the feverish hull.
The chorus of waves rises to a sustained andante
and the kettledrums of shifting equipment roll in irregular counterpoint,
each measure ending in a cymbalstroke of thumping rifle butts.
Then the theme is developed with soles of baritone profanity
softly accompanied by the delicate plucking of a stringed prayer.
You are moving up and down with the rushing breakers
as though you are being carried on a great pendulum
whose accelerating momentum is completely out of yourpersonal control —
the ultimate cycle, the last swing from ship to shore,
with an insignificant little clot of humanity balanced in between.
You watch the transport fade slowly away in dazzle-painted aloofness
and your mind twists itself in a grimace of recollection.
You remember the embarkation point somewhere in the South Pacific.
You remember sweating out the line waiting to go aboard,
the muggy, airless ship's mess where you ate standing up,
the cramped quarters below where you fitfully tried to sleep,
and nights when fear would come to bed with you,
stroking your face with hot fingers, urging her thighs close
while her head hung down heavily on your convulsing throat
and her hair caught in your breath and you choked. . .
This is the best cure for wanting to go abroad.
