From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [439]
The crowd moved reluctantly back toward the dayroom door. But one man ran to the wall and started probing with his pocketknife in one of the holes and came out with a bullet. It was a .50 caliber. Then another man ran out in the street and picked up something which turned out to be three open-end metal links. The middle one still had a .50 caliber casing in it. The general movement toward the dayroom stopped.
“Say! Thats pretty clever,” somebody said. “Our planes is still usin web machinegun belts that they got to carry back home!” The two men started showing their finds to the men around them. A couple of other men ran out into the street hurriedly.
“This’ll make me a good souvenir,” the man with the bullet said contentedly. “A bullet from a Jap plane on the day the war started.”
“Give me back my goddam coffee!” Warden hollered at Stark. “And help me shoo these dumb bastards back inside!”
“What you want me to do?” Chief Choate asked. He was still holding his plate and fork and chewing excitedly on a big bite.
“Help me get em inside,” Warden hollered.
Another plane, on which they could clearly see the red discs, came skidding over the trees firing and saved him the trouble. The two men hunting for metal links in the street sprinted breathlessly. The crowd moved back in a wave to the door, and stayed there. The plane flashed past, the helmeted head with the square goggles over the slant eyes and the long scarf rippling out behind it and the grin on the face as he waved, all clearly visible for the space of a wink, like a traveltalk slide flashed on and then off of a screen.
Warden, Stark, Pete and the Chief descended on them as the crowd started to wave outward again, blocking them off and forcing the whole bunch inside the dayroom.
The crowd milled indignantly in the small dayroom, everybody talking excitedly. Stark posted himself huskily in the doorway with Pete and the Chief flanking him. Warden gulped off the rest of his coffee and set the cup on the magazine rack and pushed his way down to the other end and climbed up on the pingpong table.
“All right, all right, you men. Quiet down. Quiet down. Its only a war. Aint you ever been in a war before?”
The word war had the proper effect. They began to yell at each other to shut up and listen.
“I want every man to go upstairs to his bunk and stay there,” Warden said. “Each man report to his squad leader. Squad leaders keep your men together at their bunks until you get orders what to do.”
The earth shudders rolling up from Wheeler Field were already a commonplace now. Above it, they heard another plane go roaring machinegun-rattling over.
“The CQ will unlock the rifle racks and every man get his rifle and hang onto it. But stay inside at your bunks. This aint no maneuvers. You go runnin around outside you’ll get your ass shot off. And you cant do no good anyway. You want to be heroes, you’ll get plenty chances later; from now on. You’ll probly have Japs right in your laps, by time we get down to beach positions.
“Stay off the porches. Stay inside. I’m making each squad leader responsible to keep his men inside. If you have to use a rifle butt to do it, thats okay too.”
There was a mutter of indignant protest.
“You heard me!” Warden hollered. “You men want souvenirs, buy them off the widows of the men who went out after them. If I catch anybody running around outside, I’ll personally beat his head in, and then see he gets a goddam general court martial.”
There was another indignant mutter of protest.
“What if the cocksuckers bomb us?” somebody hollered.
“If you hear a bomb coming, you’re free to take off for the brush,” Warden said. “But not unless you do. I dont think they will. If they was going to bomb us, they would of started with it already. They probly concentratin all their bombs on the Air Corps and Pearl Harbor.”
There was another indignant chorus.
“Yeah,” somebody hollered, “but what if they aint?”
“Then you’re shit out of luck,” Warden said. “If they do start to