The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [103]
Oh, great. He can pray over the machine when it goes flooey. "Let's get this thing to the ship," Ben said in resignation. "Posterity beckons."
The Marine assault force command plainly regarded the TPWP pair and their recording assignment as a nuisance, and just as plainly had been ordered in no uncertain terms to put up with them. Angelides was mostly amused. "Seems dumb-ass to me—who needs more proof people are shooting at us out here?"
The machine when Jones opened its case and started trying to figure out its workings was not the Pandora's box Ben had anticipated, it was worse. It ran on a battery as heavy as a concrete block. It had delicate reels and a delicate needle. The cord to the hand microphone was scarcely longer than a dog leash. His brow creased, Jones at length looked up from the so-called portable recorder. "You know what, Lieutenant? If we're going to pack this thing from here to shore, what we really need is—"
"—a jeep," Ben admitted like someone coming down with a headache. "Excuse me while I beg my way through the Marine chain of command."
Across the next couple of days, with Jones in earphones as he fiddled madly with the recorder's dials, Ben stood on the fantail of the troopship and practiced until his vocal cords were tired. Speaking into the microphone required an entirely different mentality from what he was used to at the typewriter. How did Edward R. Murrow do it? For that matter, how did that moron motormouth Loudon do it?
"Eniwetok's harbor is jammed with ships of the assault force," he stared around at the obvious and could only recite it in strained fashion. Wanting to say: Cass, you should see this. You can't imagine the steel mills it took to do this, wall an entire island with ships. "The Marines aboard this one say they are ready for the real thing after weeks of practice landings here." They say it in the filthy language of war, naturally—pilots aren't the only ones with the vocabulary, Cass. Poor Jones goes around the ship looking like his ears hurt. Angelides these days has a mouth on him like a blowtorch. Invasion is a hellish thing to go through. Nobody is actually ever prepared to die, are they—it's not human nature, the imagination can't handle obliteration. And so the guys below-decks talk tough, so the fear doesn't have a chance to speak up. Again aloud: "Equipment of all sorts is in the cargo bays waiting to roll aboard the landing craft. Artillery, half-tracks, jeeps—"
"Sorry, start again," Jones muttered, repeatedly, from where he hovered over the temperamental recorder. Oh God, Jones, so to speak. At Guam are we going to stick our necks out from here to Thomas Edison and only get a reel full of blank air out of it?
When at last they got done with the rehearsal reel and played it back, Ben winced over his voice. He sounded dry and stiff as sticks rubbed together. As for the quality of what he was coming up with to say, if he had it on typing paper in front of him he would have been wildly crossing things out and scribbling in changes.
In the silence at the end of the reel, he gloomily turned toward Jones. "So what do you think, maestro?"
"Maybe it would help if you had some kind of a script?"
Guam was ear-shattering.
Fiery salvo after salvo from the big muzzles of the American battleships and cruisers, more rapid fire from the guns of the rest of the convoy spread across the horizon of ocean, the bombardment ahead of the invasion was like all the sky's lightning dropping all its thunder at once. Explosions erupted onshore every few seconds, smoke and dust spewing as if from volcano vents. After enough of this the entire island looked like it was on fire.
While Ben struggled to jot the scene down amid the jostling swarm of Marines along the deck rail of the troopship, his memory tunneled back to the Salamaua beachhead in New Guinea. The advantage of darkness there. Friessen's temporarily