Battle Cry - Leon Uris [249]
“Get a corpsman up here. The radio operator has been hit.”
“He won’t need no corpsman. He got it right in the head….”
“Come on, move up!”
Speedy Gray dropped to his knees at How Company and fought for breath for a moment.
“Runner!” a man at the telephone shouted. “Get Major Pagan and tell him to get to the CP and assume command of the battalion. Highpockets is dead and Major Wellman has been wounded.”
“The skipper! God…where is that radio operator?” Speedy asked.
“Over there behind those boulders with the rest of the wounded.”
“Hi cousin,” Seabags whispered weakly as Speedy knelt beside him. “What’s doing…goofing off?”
“Why shore…you ain’t got a chaw on you?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“Look, Seabags, maybe I can help pack you back to the beach and let Doc Kyser….”
“Shucks, Speedy, don’t be giving me no snow job. I got a hole in my belly big enough to put my fist through.”
“Jesus, Seabags…Jesus.”
“Hey….”
“What?”
“Did you get the old guitar ashore all right?”
“Yes.”
Seabags laughed and then began coughing. Speedy put a canteen to Seabags’ lips and laid him back. “This here sounds like that crappy old picture we saw back in Hawaii…look, cousin, would you sing ‘Red River Valley’ over my grave if you can…you sing that right pretty….”
The shelling had died to sporadic bursts. I turned up the loudspeaker on the jeep radio so I could catch a signal and walked to message center. Major Pagan paced up and down nervously.
“Well?” he snapped to me.
“Kingpin will call us about naval support against a counterattack as soon as they get unfouled out there.”
A message center man came up to them. “All rifle companies consolidated and digging in.”
“Good. What about that telephone line to regiment?”
“We’ve lost four men trying to get it down the beach, Major. Intelligence reports that Japs have infiltrated the gap.”
“Can you get that other radio in with them, Mac?”
“We found a piece of shrapnel in it. We’ll never get it fixed.”
“I guess we’re going to have to stand alone,” Pagan whispered.
I went back to the jeep and sat down and waited and wondered where Speedy was with the squad. Danny walked up, then fell flat on his face. He dragged himself to the front wheel and leaned against it and took a swig from his canteen. There were deep haggard circles of exhaustion beneath his eyes. He took off his helmet and dropped his head to his chest.
“Did you find Mary and Joe?” I asked.
“Marion’s dead,” he said. “Spanish Joe is somewhere up around Fox Company…they say he’s going crazy with a machine gun. They’re trying to get the wounded off the beach. There must be half the battalion there.”
Several moments passed. Pagan ordered everyone to stand by to move the command post to a safer spot.
Speedy staggered in, glassy eyed. He got into the jeep and laid an arm across the steering wheel and dropped his head on it. I was afraid to talk to him. I was afraid to ask…it couldn’t be possible…it couldn’t be!
“Speedy, where’s the rest of the squad?” I finally asked.
Speedy did not answer.
“Andy…where is Andy?”
“I don’t know,” Speedy sobbed.
“The Injun?”
“Don’t know.”
“Seabags?”
“Dead.”
“L.Q…. did you find L.Q.?”
“I don’t know! I don’t know! I don’t know!”
“Doctor Kyser, four more on stretchers.”
“Hold them for a second till we make room.”
The long tent was filled with walking wounded who sat about quietly awaiting their turn. Those on the stretchers must come first. Some sat there on the brink of unconsciousness, some agonized with burning pain, but each insisted his wound was small. A long row of the near dead lay on litters on the gory floor.
Kyser took a cup of cold coffee and gulped it down. “Bring in the four new ones…lay ’em down here.” He walked quickly from stretcher to stretcher. “Those two are dead. Tag them and move them outside.” He took the poncho from the body on the third stretcher. “Good Lord, what happened to this boy?”
“It’s Spanish Joe, Doctor. He tried to stop a tank. Jumped on it and threw a grenade down the hatch and spun off. It ran over him.”
He examined the crushed form and nodded slowly.