Battle Cry - Leon Uris [156]
“Yeah, but that don’t cut no ice. If the Spik got one, Seabags should have got one. And what about Red Cassidy?”
Seabags walked into our circle. “Come on Speedy,” he said.
“Where you going?”
“I’m going to buy Pedro a beer,” he said.
Hardly a night passed when I wasn’t roused from my sack in the small hours of the morning. “Hey, Mac,” a voice would whisper in the dark, “Spanish Joe has got the bug.”
“Get a corpsman.” I climbed half asleep from my cot, lit the coal lamp and took it over to the sack of the stricken Marine. The scene seemed to play itself over a hundred times.
“Hey, Mac, the Injun has the bug….”
“Hey, Mac, Seabags has the bug….”
“Hey, Mac. Better come quick. Danny has the bug. He’s off his rocker now. Screaming something about not liking to shoot rabbits.”
Their faces would be sweaty and torture-wracked and they’d roll and groan to wipe out the nightmare. Then came the pain in the guts and they’d start shaking like a dog crapping. They wasted away quick. It was nasty to see and I hated to stand by and not be able to help them. I could only give them quinine and let them lie there, trembling and moaning about home and things like that, till the fever broke. Then they’d awake with sheet-white faces and black circles under their eyes, too weak to stand up with the goddam bells from the quinine blasting in their heads.
Ninety-five per cent of the Second Division had the bug at one time or another. I had ten recurrences, myself. Most all of us went around with it five or six times.
Each regiment had a small hospital unit but it was soon crowded to capacity, and the division hospital could be used only for a severe case. There was a big base hospital at Silverstream near Upper Hutt, complete with Navy nurses. Silverstream handled casualties from all over the Pacific. It was a beautiful place, the real thing. Big clean wards and a Red Cross and recreation center. You had to be close to dead or an officer to get in, though. I finally made it on my eighth recurrence.
Navy nurses for the most part were little more than ornamental—pretty social butterflies. The corpsmen did ninety-nine per cent of the work. As a group, they were arrogant and ordered us around more sharply than the officers. But you can’t have everything and we all hoped to get sick enough to rate Silverstream in spite of the nurses.
With every hospital bed, makeshift or otherwise, filled with the malaria-riddled division, each battalion set up a shack full of cots to handle the milder cases. Even these facilities bogged down under the capacity load and we were handed some pills and told to go back to our tents and sweat it out.
In a tent, with a hundred and four fever and chills and pains ripping him up, a man finds out what the word buddy means—to bathe a sick kid and feed him and attend to him. Guys that loved each other in a way that no woman could understand. Guys who had been through hell together, and could give a tenderness to each other that even a woman couldn’t duplicate. Many a night I lay half shivering on my cot with my head on the lap of L.Q. or Danny or Seabags while they tried to force some fruit juice into me. “Come on, you salty old fart, open up your ugly mouth before I ram it down you sideways.”
On nights like that I opened my eyes, still full of the chill, and a fire was going on the potstove, made with stolen wood, and the cold drizzly rain beat a tattoo on the tent and it was good to look up and see a smiling face watching. A cool cloth would be passed over my face and I’d drink some stuff they had swiped for me. Soon Pedro, or one of the other tired, beat-out corpsmen, would check into the tent on late rounds and try to make me comfortable. They worked around the clock, those sailors, trying to ease the suffering of the Marines as best they could.
When quinine in pill form ran out, we were given doses of liquid quinine. It was near impossible to stomach. I sometimes thought it would be better to die of malaria than drink it.