Battle Cry - Leon Uris [228]
He doubled over, still pulling the trigger of the light. He lay on his stomach with blood squirting from his face, but he kept signaling. Gunfire ripped his body.
The alligator veered! It cut around sharply. Seabags had the message.
Burnside, Speedy and me sprang up and raced toward the prostrate boy who was lying half in the water. Speedy and me grabbed him as Burnside stood erect and hurled grenades into the brush. We dragged him to cover. I bent down and ripped his shirt off.
“God!” Speedy screamed, turning his face from the sight.
“Corpsman! Corpsman! Corpsman!”
Speedy stopped vomiting. “I’ll take him back…” He lifted Levin in his arms, keeping his eyes raised from the sight of the stomach, horribly torn.
“After them!” I shrieked. The squad was behind me, wading madly into the brush to kill.
The Texan wandered to the place where the long line of wounded lay. A working party unloaded the precious plasma from the alligator nearby. A hundred makeshift transfusions were being administered. Other men raced to the lines bogged under bandoleers of ammunition and cases of mortars and grenades. A blood-spattered nun assisted Speedy, laying a poncho on the deck.
“Get the doctor here at once,” the Nun said.
When Speedy had returned with Kyser, the Sister was kneeling over Levin’s gory body, praying. Kyser took one look and nodded his head slowly and was gone at the beckoning of another nun.
“I’m sorry, my son,” the Sister consoled.
“Is he still…”
“Yes, but only for a very few moments,” she said.
“Look, lady…he’s…he’s my buddy…could I stay?”
“Yes, my son.”
Speedy took off his helmet and sat beside Levin. He emptied his canteen on a ragged handkerchief and wiped the sweat from Levin’s forehead. At the touch of the cool rag Jake’s eyes opened slowly.
“Hi, Speedy,” he whispered weakly.
“How you feel?”
“Don’t feel nuttin’. What happened…did the alligator get in?”
“Yeah.”
“Good…that’s damned good.”
“They’ll be evacuating you to the tin can in a couple minutes,” Speedy lied.
Levin smiled. He reached out feebly and the Texan took his hand. “Hold my hand…will you, Speedy?”
“Sure.”
“Speedy…”
“Yeah?”
He tugged Speedy close until his mouth nearly touched the Texan’s ear. “Don’t…don’t let them guys…I want a Star of David…My old man would have a fit if they put a cross over me….”
I walked over to Speedy. He was sitting there holding Levin’s hand although Levin’s face was already covered with the poncho. “We broke through,” I whispered. I tried to offer Speedy a cigarette. He looked up at me and tried to speak. His face was grief-stricken. “He wasn’t sore at you, Speedy, he never was…you were buddies.”
Speedy was trembling all over. “Go on, kid. Take off, you’ll feel better later.” He ran from me toward an abandoned hut.
I looked down the road. Another stretcher was coming in. Burnside lay on it. His eyes were open and glassy.
“Burny,” I whispered.
“He dead,” the native bearer said, puffing past me.
Less than twenty-four hours after the first shot had been fired on Cora Island, the battle for Tarawa had come to a close.
I slumped down to the deck, too exhausted to think. The battalion sat around me and there were only muffled whispers, like the whispers of the guys who had sat on Betio a week ago. Seemed to me I was on a cloud, hanging on in midair. I heard everything but it was like hearing it through a fog. There was the clanking against the coral of the gravedigging party. Clank, then the whisper of sand falling from a shovel to fill a hole…and another…and another. The sound of the alligator rumbled back and forth on the way to the barrier reef where the landing craft waited to transfer the wounded to the destroyer.
I saw Sam Huxley and Kyser through the haze, haggard, talking to one of the nuns.
“I don’t know how we can thank you people enough.”
“We are glad to have been able to help, Colonel.”
“I don’t know what we would have done without you.”
“The natives will build a fine cemetery for your brave men and we shall see that it is well kept. I promise you that. And we shall pray for their souls.