Chapter 9
The Nips seem to have dug pits into the slope
of a slight incline, probably reinforcing their compact
mmmearthen breastworks
with sheets of thick iron and revetments of palm logs.
There are slits through which the mouths of cannon speak,
announcing with blustering arrogance that all trespassers
mmmwill be prosecuted,
while vehement machineguns add their singsong gibberish
mmmin agreement.
Camouflaged bunkers, built on the jungle floor, border the position,
and an outer edging of obstacles contributes its further protection.
You can see trees piled up to form an abatis
and shallow trenches containing 'gooseberries' and 'concertinas'
mmmof barbed wire,
and you make out upright entanglements strung through the brush
with tin cans tied at intervals to give the alarm.
Here come the tanks, waddling like slaphappy wrestlers, brutal and
crazed, with their bellies rumbling in an effort to digest
their fuel. They lumber on unsteady treads and vent their
fury by blindly felling young trees with wild, dissolute haymakers.
You see one, then another, then two more lunging forward,
shrugging off a spatter of bullets, recoiling, turning around groggily,
then crouching to charge with their teeth shrieking shrill invective.
As a preliminary, they saturate the area with huge cartridges
that serve up deadly shrapnel fragments on the half shell,
tempting the customers with generous portions and loud sales talk.
Then their 37-mm guns grow tired of the gastronomic dilettantism
and tear back the lips of the pillboxes' twisted mouths
and force down the main dish of hot, scorching destruction.
The position directly in front of you has been silenced,
and as the tanks turn to peddle their delicacies elsewhere,
a combat engineer unit punctually arrives to present the check.
Two men spring up to lay a heavy, pungent smokescreen
that swirls in the heat like the ectoplasm of forgotten
warriors. Wire cutters snip a jagged aisle through the entanglement
and others set off bangalore torpedoes to complete the thoroughfare.
Then the men with flame-throwers dart through the opening
and inscribe their invitations to hell on ignited sheets while
specialists in persuasion set off insistent postscripts of TNT and
slip the blocks through embrasures in the bunker and address
them to whom it may concern, signed, sealed and delivered.
A Jap runs out of the ruins, his uniform ablaze,
and cartridges popping from the ammo belt around his waist.
The engineer wheels and aims his nozzle and presses the
trigger plate on the top of the barrel of his
MI-AI apparatus. A stream of livid fuel spurts like a
fiery rod and describes a trajectory as clean-cut as a
tracer bullet, searing the Nip till his entails ooze pink.
You hear two short, sharp blasts of Lt. Nixon's whistle
and your heart stutters but you rise with bayonet ready.
The air is sticky with smoke and flame and wreckage,
and the earth feasts on a macabre pot of flesh.
Here is a victory garden of ripe corpses, grinning heads
like rounded cabbage and arms and legs in natural disorder
stained with the bright juice of tomatoes, plump and petulant.
A dirty limb twitches under a pile of lifelessness and
you stab it and it stops and lays limply. . .No,
don't reserve space in the obituary column of tomorrow's Times
until you are certain that all bodies are suitably extinct.
These gentlemen of Japan have a highly developed national talent
for looking the part of cadavers — realistically true to death.
Lindstrom prods enemy remains with his bayonet and on his
face you see an expression of extreme revulsion and distaste.
"Hell," says the sergeant, "killing Japs isn't war. It's K.P.!"
