Mr. Was (15 page)

“Hmmph!” He crossed his arms and lowered his thick black eyebrows. “I suppose you know that when you do as I ask, you'll be stuck. You won't be able to return to the nineteen nineties.”

Lightning flashed.

“Yes, I will.”

“Oh?” He seemed amused. “How?”

“I'll age,” I said.

Mr. Boggs's eyes widened. Then he began to chuckle,
the deep sound of his laughter joined by thunder—

(Several pages here were missing, torn, or obscured by brown stains.)

Henderson Field
Guadalcanal
August 18, 1942

Dear Andie,

The scaredest I've ever been was when we went over the side of the ship, climbed down those cargo nets, and rode the landing craft up onto the beach. They told us the beachhead was secure—the first landings were twelve days ago—but Jap snipers were shooting at us from the moment we hit shore, but not one of our guys got killed. A fellow from Mississippi named Atkins took one in the knee. Lucky guy. He gets a free ride back to Pearl.

Remember I said we might land on some tropical paradise? Well, you can forget about that. The name of this island is Guadalcanal. Nobody seems to know what that means. There are no canals here, but the guys have all started calling it “The Canal.” What there is, is mosquitoes and biting flies and spiders the size of crabs and crabs the size of cats. The beaches are all right to look at, but between the bugs and the snipers, I wouldn't want to do any sunning there. About twenty yards in from the water's edge at high tide you run into this kunai grass that stands maybe seven feet tall and has edges like a bread knife. The stuff is almost impenetrable, and there's about a hundred feet of it between the beach and the jungle, which I haven't been in yet but I hear it's even worse—

(illegible)

—sitting in the tent that serves as our mess hall, looking out over the muddy, shell-holed airstrip we now call Henderson Field, which was the first thing we took away from the Japs. Nobody else is here right now, since it's way past dinnertime. It's a good place to be alone, and with close to twenty thousand of us here, that's not easy.

God, do I miss you.

Love,
Jack

Henderson Field
Guadalcanal
September 2, 1942

Dear Andie,

We are all waiting for Washing Machine Charlie. There's no point in trying to sleep until he's come and gone. He comes every night, sometimes early, sometimes late. You can hear him a long way off and it's true, he sounds like a washing machine:
chuffa-chuffa-chuffa.

Washing Machine Charlie is a Jap night bomber.

Imagine you are lying in your tent, sweating buckets, slapping mosquitoes, hungry as you've ever been. Most of the supplies were lost in the landings, and you've been living on rice left behind by the Japs. You are waiting. Sometimes he comes early; other times you wait till five in the morning to hear the sound of a distant washing machine.
Shuh-shuh-shuh.
The sound gets louder:
chuffa-chuffa-chuffa.
You close your eyes and grit your teeth and then you hear the explosions.
Boom. Boom. Boom.

They are small bombs, thrown by hand from Charlie's small plane. Most nights no one is hurt, and after Charlie has left, you can sleep. Scud says that's the whole point. Charlie wants us to lose sleep waiting for him.

But Charlie's nothing compared to Tojo Time. Tojo Time is what we call the daily Jap bomber raids on the airfield. A black flag goes up from the pagoda in
the middle of the airfield. Seconds later, you can hear the fluttering drone of their approach—sometimes as many as twenty bombers. As soon as they are in sight, all hell breaks loose. The antiaircraft guns start firing and everybody else heads for the slit trenches and foxholes. Then you hear, even through the antiaircraft fire, the
shhhhh
sound of falling bombs. The bombs hit with a
whump whump whump,
like a giant's exploding footsteps.
Whump whump whump.
Six to eight big steps from each bomber, and if you are one of the unlucky ones, the giant will stomp you flat in your tent.

After they leave, the dead are counted, the wounded are treated, and the rest of us start filling in the craters in the airfield.

Other than that, we are all bored. Our platoon, which is attached to Colonel Edson's B Company, will be hitting the jungle again tomorrow. There're all kinds of rumors about a big Jap force building up out in the jungle, and maybe it's true. Most of the information that gets filtered down through the ranks is bull, but you never know. This will be the third time our platoon has been out, and in a way I'm looking forward to it. It's either that, or wait for the malaria to get you. Almost a quarter of the guys in our platoon have got the bug. What malaria does is, you get the sweats, then a few hours later you get the chills, then you get the sweats again. At first, they say, it's not so bad, but after a few cycles it wears you out and it's all you can do to lift a glass of water. Most of
those who got it can handle it, but four of us are in the hospital and Simmons has actually died of it. That leaves only eighteen of our platoon in fighting shape, and we landed on this pesthole with twenty-nine.

Flanagan, Mrosak, and Hoff were all killed on the airfield when they were helping mount a bomb on one of the P-400s and somebody screwed up. Desimone tripped over a mine the first time we went out on patrol. Billig got appendicitis. They say he's going to be okay. And Sergeant Sadowski, he got stomped by the giant.

And I still haven't seen a single Japanese on the ground. I haven't even shot my gun yet.

By the way, after Sarge Sadowski got stomped, Scud got himself a field promotion. It's Sergeant Scudder now, and you better remember it. He's still the same Scud when it's just him and me together, but when anybody else is around he treats me like his favorite dog.

Love,
Jack

P.S. I got a promotion, too. It's Corporal Lund now. But you can call me Jack.

Henderson Field
September 10, 1942

Dear Andie,

I got a bad feeling. I got a feeling I'm going to die. I haven't even been born yet, and here I'm about to die. I should be worrying about my mother. If I die, I won't be able to save her. But all I can think about is you.

You know that rumor about the Japs coming at us through the jungle? Well, it's official now. They're out there and they're coming this way. Colonel Edson has told us we're to secure a ridge about a mile south of the airfield. What that means is that the Japs are going to have to go right through us to get to the airfield. I don't know what's going to happen, Andie, but I got a feeling it's gonna be bad.

(Later) Now I got an even worse feeling. I just got back from a “dinner” that was nothing more than a scoop of rice, a bowl of piss-yellow bouillon, and a cup of something—I couldn't tell if it was supposed to be coffee, tea, or dishwater. Anyway, I was walking back to the ghetto (which is what we call our little tent city way on the other side of the airstrip) holding a piece of canvas over my head to keep the rain from running down my back, when I saw somebody crawl out of my tent. I was a ways off, and it was hard to see through the rain, but I think it was Scud.

That's one thing you aren't supposed to do. Go in somebody's tent.

Andie, I think he was looking at this notebook.

I've been trying to get up the nerve to go talk to him. We're heading out into the jungle.

I guess it's now or never.

(Unlike the previous entries, which were inscribed with a blue ballpoint pen, the final pages of the notebook are written in pencil. Many of the words are smeared and difficult or impossible to decipher.)

Well, I was right. Dead right. I'm going to die, Andie. For all practical purposes, I'm dead already. My right eye is swollen shut, or maybe gone. I don't know, when I touch it, it hurts so bad I can't tell what's left there. I'm all alone, except for the dead man at my feet and about fifty Japanese soldiers camped a few hundred yards upwind of my position. It's only a matter of time before they notice the cave, before they find me.

I was right about Scud, too. He read the notebook. He didn't admit it, of course—when I accused him he gave me his “what, are you nuts?” look.

“Then what were you doing in my tent?” I asked him.

“I wasn't in your damn tent, Corporal,” he said.

I wondered how much he'd had a chance to read—

(illegible)

—moved us out two hours before dawn. The ridge
we were supposed to secure was about a mile inland from Henderson Field, and our platoon was to occupy a little knob of rock another quarter mile beyond the ridge. There was supposed to be a sort of trail leading from the airfield to the ridge, but the mud got so bad that Lieutenant Cole decided we'd be better off cutting straight through the jungle, climbing over the waist-high roots and using our bayonets to hack our way through walls of vines and patches of kunai grass.

You'd think a mile isn't all that far to walk, but in the dark, trying to get through the tangle of roots, vines, saw-toothed grass, and sinkholes, carrying forty-pound packs and enough guns, mortars, grenades, and ammo to destroy half the Japanese army, we'd be lucky to make five hundred yards an hour. That's assuming nothing goes wrong.

Twenty minutes into the jungle, Jesperson, a big tall kid from Arkansas, had twisted his ankle so bad the lieutenant told him to try to make it back to the base. There wasn't much else we could do, since Colonel Edson was counting on us being in position by 0700. Then it started to rain.

By the time the blackness gave way to dreary, rain-streaked gray, we were a mess, totally soaked, muddy, cut up from the grass, and insect-bit everywhere a bit of skin showed. Being able to see made the going easier, though, and by 0700 we had reached our position and dug in.

The knob stuck up out of the jungle like a big,
grassy pimple erupting from a sea of deep green treetops. We could see Edson's Ridge just to the northwest, where A Company was digging in. Our platoon was supposed to discourage the Japanese from skirting the ridge on the east. The jungle canopy was so dense they coulda walked right between our position and the ridge and we'd never have known it, but what do I know about military strategy?

I was cleaning the mud from the barrel of my Springfield when the first artillery rounds fell, not two hundred yards in front of us.

And those were from our side.

The artillery barrage went on for twenty minutes. When it finally stopped and I stuck my head up out of my shallow foxhole, the solid green mass of trees appeared to be untouched, but for a cloud of blue smoke rising through the fronds.

Then we waited, watching the furtive movements of A Company taking their positions on Edson's Ridge. The other guy in the foxhole with me was Freddy Seberg, a nice guy, but not very bright. He had a habit of asking stupid questions, then answering them himself.

“What's all that smoke? I guess it's from the shells, huh.”

I said, “Yeah.” That was about all you ever had to say around Freddy. There was really no point in even listening when he talked.

I guess I shouldn't be speaking ill of the dead—

(illegible)

—shots from the ridge, all of a sudden it was like a million firecrackers going off. All of us that were in a position to watch had our heads up out of our holes trying to see what was going on, but all we could see was smoke from mortar rounds. Now and then we could hear faint screams—

(illegible)

—looking downslope, when Freddy said, “Is that a Jap? Yup, it's a Jap, hu-UH!”

That was the last thing he ever said. Freddy didn't have a mouth to talk with anymore. His jaw was blown clean off.

I'd never seen a man shot before, Andie, but it was nothing compared to what I'd be seeing—

(illegible)

—in waves, screaming Japanese, throwing grenades. Then they were on us. One of them came right over me and I fired. He didn't even see me, probably never knew what hit him. The one right behind him turned his rifle on me, I slashed at his arm with my bayonet, then stabbed. These Japanese, you get up close to one and you realize how little they are, but they got a lot of blood in them. Everything from then on was a blur. I was in a universe of blood and death and Japs,
shooting and stabbing like some kind of insane killing machine. I remember Lieutenant Cole shouting for us to retreat down the back side of the knob. I looked, and saw a mortar round lift him right up into the air. I didn't need any more encouragement, I was up out of my hole and running like I've never run before, hearing the zipzip of bullets inches from my head, flying down the side of that knob, my feet hitting maybe every twenty feet, diving for the tangled protection of the jungle like it was God's arms—

(illegible)

—just keep going,” Scud said, giving me a shove in the back.

Our BAR man, Adamson, a few feet ahead of me, fell headlong onto a rotting log. Brown beetles the size of mice scurried out, making clicking sounds with their wings. A few of them took flight, weaving through the pouring rain like a squadron of drunken, flying tanks. I watched one of them fly smack into a palm trunk, slide down into the undergrowth.

“Get that man up!” Scud ordered.

I was trying to, but it wasn't easy with Adamson all mud-slimed and tangled up in his weaponry, and weighing close to two hundred fifty pounds to boot. Each platoon had a BAR. That's a Browning Automatic Rifle, which is like a cross between a rifle and a machine gun. Because they were so heavy and awkward, it was usually given to the biggest man in
the platoon. Incredibly, during that wild run off the knob and into the jungle, Adamson had held onto that BAR, bipod and all, along with six ammo boxes. I'd barely managed to hang on to my Springfield. Even more impressive was that Adamson had a hole in his gut, a few inches to the left of his navel. The front of his shirt was soaked red, but it didn't seem to bother him. That was Adamson, farm boy from Nebraska, dumb as a cow, strong as an ox, and stubborn as a mule.