Battle Cry - Leon Uris [3]
“Brown, Cyril!”
“Here.” Christ on a crutch! Right off the farm, a barefoot boy.
“Forrester, Daniel!”
“Here.” Not bad looking, but awfully young. A cherry, no doubt.
“Gray, Mortimer!”
“Yo.” Another damned Texan. Gawd almight damned.
“Hodgkiss, Marion!”
“Here.” The name fits, Buster. Wait till Gunner Keats takes a gander at this motheaten crew.
“Hookans, Andrew!”
“Here.” A big dumb musclebound Swede with two left feet. What the hell had they sent me!
I had to look at the next name on the roster twice. Burnside was staring, dazed-like.
“Lighttower, Shining?” I finally tried it.
“Ugh, I’m an Injun.” The squeak came from behind the big Swede. He stepped out. There, before my eyes was the picture End of the Trail. A skinny, hunched over, deflated piece of redskin with a nose off a buffalo nickel. He grinned at me.
“Zvonski?”
“Zvonski, Constantine. My friends call me—”
“Don’t tell me, let me guess,” I sneered. This customer couldn’t weigh over a hundred and twenty-five pounds with a mortar on his back. A real feathermerchant. How do they expect him to pack a TBY?
My legs nearly buckled at the sight of them. Burnside was pale. Huxley would have a hemorrhage when they tried to operate. Gunner Keats would puke.
The one called Hodgkiss fell out of ranks and picked up two suitcases laying beside his seabag. “What do you have there?”
“A phonograph and some records.” I walked over to him and opened an album. A little swing music always livens up the barracks. But it was horrible. I flipped the pages: Chopin, Tschaikovsky, Brahms—a whole lot of those guys….
“Show them to quarters, Mac. I’m going to the slop chute and get pissed up,” Burnside moaned.
“What you want, chief, eggs in your beer?” The Injun laughed.
To say that the kids coming into Eliot were a change from the beer-drinking, hell-raising professionals of peacetime was the understatement of the year. They were babies, beardless babies of eighteen and twenty. The Corps sure was shot to hell! Radio men—I’m laughing. An anemic Indian, a music lover, a lumberjack with ten thumbs, a Texan who couldn’t move out of his own way, a farmer, a feathermerchant, and the All-American boy. All this and Joe Gomez, a renegade troublemaker.
After our first field problem, Gunner Keats thought seriously of resigning or begging to be shipped out. Huxley, who rarely showed emotion, gagged.
I found them the dirtiest, filthiest work details possible. I went out of my way to be nasty. Shovel garbage at the dump, clean out the crap bowls, dig ditches, swab the decks of officers’ quarters, police the entire camp.
Christ! In the old Corps radio operators were something. They stood watches on the battlewagons…they were respected. These…these things that Major Bolger sent us had trouble with the slowest speed field sets. I wanted to go back to Iceland.
It would be hard to say exactly where a Marine story like this should start and where it should end. The kids were there and we weren’t happy about it. Where they came from, how they got there, I didn’t know….
CHAPTER 1
THE ROOF of the cold, gray, barnlike Pennsylvania Terminal in Baltimore hovered high over the scurrying travelers and the small whispering groups about Gate Three. In clusters of two, three, four and more they stood around stern-faced youths as the moments ticked away. Here a wife and child, there a half dozen pals shouted encouragement. In a corner an aged mother and father and a group of relatives whispered to a sullen lad.
There were many young girls, some weeping, all fighting back tears as they stood by their husbands, their lovers, their boy friends. The almost buzzing sound of their farewell bounced and echoed off the walls of the ancient terminal.
Danny Forrester zipped up his green and silver jacket with the block letter F and shifted his weight nervously from one foot to the other. Grouped about him were his father; his young brother, Bud; and