The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [87]
Which he knew would take another week yet, before the destroyer put in at Brisbane. And Slick Nick can keep on with the war effort by bargaining the Aussies out of groceries.
Supply and demand were immaculately matched in Danzer and this ship, he had already determined. By whatever flick of fortune in the chain of command, the vessel was something like a palace guard to the commander in chief in the Pacific, General MacArthur, headquartered in the Australian port. Or as those less kind put it, driven into exile there by Japanese triumphs. MacArthur's war thus far had been an early series of ghastly defeats—Bataan, Corregidor, then the entire Philippines—now somewhat assuaged by amphibious invasions that had rolled back the enemy from New Guinea and a handful of other strategic map spots strewn down the South Pacific. The McCorkle's war this far along consisted of patrol duty and support chores here in the conquered waters central to MacArthur's realm. Ben didn't think he could get away with writing it, but the Southern Cross in the night sky was a constellation of extreme luck for the crew of this ship.
"Lieutenant Reinking? I can't resist telling you"—this was on its way from a redheaded officer so young and junior in rank that he practically shined—"I read one of your pieces in JWP at Northwestern. The one where they held the wake for your teammate in a bar."
Ben wished the junior ranker had resisted speaking up; there were too many faces in that messroom plainly ready to savor morsels beyond any found on the plates. "Kenny O'Fallon, that was," he reeled off to try to get rid of this. "Butte knows how to give a person a send-off." He sent a knotted look back along the table. "What's JWP?"
"Journalistic Writing Practice," the young admirer reddened as he said it. As he spoke, a white-jacketed mess attendant went around the table pouring coffee and dealing out fresh forks for pie. The Navy's ways made Ben feel at sea in more ways than one. Except for whoever was on the bridge the dozen or so officers all ate together at the one long table in obligatory lingering fashion, which meant the talkers got to talk endlessly and the listeners got to listen eternally. Cliques showed through the crevices in conversation; this nonfighting destroyer mostly was officered by a mix of merchant marine retreads, such as the gray slump-shouldered captain who sat at the head of the table regarding Ben without pleasure, and ninety-day wonders (example: Danzer) turned out by officer candidate school. All meal long, Ben had to behave like an anthropologist tiptoeing between tribes.
Right now, with more pluck than sense the redheaded one-striper was back at what he had read in college:
"I'm trying to remember, in that piece. Your football buddy—your and Lieutenant Danzer's—he was killed out here in New Guinea, wasn't he?"
Ben sat there struggling to measure out a more civil reply than No, shavetail, that was another dead one of us.
He was aware of being worn to a thin edge by the time he reached the destroyer. Ever since shipping out of Seattle in what seemed an eon ago, he had filed stories from latitudes of the Pacific theater of combat. The Pacific conflict was a strange piecemeal war, fought from island to island, mapping itself out more like a medieval storming of castles, if the castles had been of coral and moated by hundreds of miles of hostile water and defended by men committed to die for their emperor rather than surrender. Out here, a war correspondent's movements from one jungle-torn place to another were like continually journeying into the black fire of nightmare. He had seen things it took all his ingenuity to put into words that TPWP would let pass into print, and some that would never surface in civilized newspapers.
The dirt road at Rabaul, the dust carpeted with excrement, where the retreating Japanese had evacuated their hospital patients in some manner of forced march, the sick and wounded defecating while they walked like cows with the drizzles.
Constant corpses, the accumulations of death on every fought-over