Chapter 7
Here are the cleft ends and chips of human wood
hacked asunder by the clean-toothed axe of instant death, lying
around in new sap with their split terminals curled up.
You see a stray foot with a shoe still on
and a head with a cigarette still between its teeth.
And here's a dead Jap, miraculously whole, propped stiffly erect
as though waiting for his officer to say, "At ease!"
The brief storm of grenades has uncovered a spider trench
cleverly connected by hidden underground passages
mmmto its subterranean twin,
so that when you look inside, the hole appears empty
and you pass on into the sights of a rifle
jutting from those disheveled palm fronds aimed at your back.
You begin to realize the stealthy nature of the Nip
and you appreciate how painstakingly he has organized the terrain.
You are deeply thankful for the barrage preceding the attack,
and for the dugouts uprooted and the gun positions obliterated
And the Japs relegated to the status of honorable ancestors.
Lt. Nixon waves and yells, "Don't bunch up, you guys!
You're a perfect home for a mortar shell. Keep moving!"
He points to a large rock about fifty yards away
and tells the men to stop when they reach it
in order to properly reorganize for the next cautious advance.
A sniper opens up with the pingping of his .25
and a Yank with a Tommy rushes across the grass
and pauses at the foot of a tree and peers
upward and holds his weapon in an ironic 'present arms'
And salutes the enemy in a final courtesy of lead.
All round you the fighting seems to flare up again.
Japs boil from dugouts like scum rising to the surface
and are ladled off by timely employment of sanitary utensils
and are consigned to refuse before damage can be done.
Look! There's a slithering brown figure behind those mangrove leaves.
Quick! Raise your rifle to your shoulder and take aim.
Shoot him! Attaboy, you blew his nuts off. Shoot again,
the bastard's still kicking. You got him! You got him!
You feel like a babbling halfwit, light and unthinking, as
though you had dipped your reason in flowing blood and
mopped it over your bones and wrung it out and
tossed it for the wind to wear in its hair.
The clump of trees ahead is fuming with rattling gunfire
and it sounds like a forest full of rolling dice.
Come seven. Come eleven. Wheel 'em. Monk 'em. Pass. Fade.
Men are speculating. Some make their point. Others crap out.
And what of the dead? What of those distorted remnants,
those foul, blistered torsos from the rice paddies of Formosa,
those bloated ghosts gone back to the smoke of Fujiyama,
those stepchildren of the Emperor, lately of Honshu or Nagasaki?
Do they feel the swooning heat or the suffocating dampness
or tigers in their intestines or tissue drowning in sweat,
or the sickness, the retching, the drooling, the trembling desolation?
Well, then, who dares compare the simple ease of death
to the agony of living under the strain of battle,
when your eyes leer into the ugly countenance of despair
and your ears deafen themselves to a wounded friend's cry
because the assault must be made strictly according to schedule
and what matter the fallen crumbs from the military timetable;
when your battered soul becomes a dispossessed and separate self,
forgetting the body that bore it, claiming only remote kinship
with a slobbering mouth and hands ashen with fused hatred?
Murder is your sixth sense. You lost the other five.
