well, and no one had to ask why. The answers lay all around them, shreds of clothing, uniforms of the soldiers from both sides who had fought over this same ground for weeks now. Worse were the bones, and what was still hanging from them, some identifiable, an arm, hand, leg, some just blobs of black filth. The shovels had done quick work, the foxholes easier to dig in the mud, gaps in the coral. But the shovels continued to chop through the remains of the men who had died there. The sickening crunch of bone was never ignored, even by the men who had done this before, who seemed immune to almost any other horror. With every hour the smells had grown worse, had become a part of them, their soggy uniforms, their food, infesting every brain, driving some of the men into nightmares of what … and who … they sat in. The nightmares were brief, most of the men not able to sleep at all, and if they found themselves nodding off for blessed moments in the foot-deep water, the Japanese flares would come, shattering the darkness with harsh green light. The flares usually meant a mortar barrage, the blasts sudden and unpredictable, since the telltale sounds of the knee mortars were disguised by the storm. The Marines had withdrawn as far as the brass considered necessary, but no matter their distance from Naha, or the hills they still had to assault, the Japanese were there. In the dark they came as they had before, but in far greater numbers. The rain disguised any sound, no shadows caught by starlight. The grenades and satchel charges were their weapons of choice, stunning blasts of blinding light, enough to terrorize the men in their foxholes, but enough as well to silhouette the enemy who was often so close, some of the Marines claimed they could smell them. When the individual attacks came, it was rare that the Japanese soldier did any more than sacrifice himself, falling straight into a foxhole with an armed grenade, taking away his enemy and himself, fulfilling his glorious mission. With the American tanks moving up in a vain effort to support the Marines, the infiltrators would go after those much more valuable targets, the men on the ground ordered to keep watch for any hint of Japanese soldiers whose sole mission was to throw themselves and their satchel charges beneath the belly of the tank. Already the armor officers had pulled many of the Shermans farther back, conceding that the Japanese suicide assaults were infuriatingly effective. In the rainy darkness it didn’t matter how many Marines kept watch, some sheltered by the tank itself. When the Japanese came, those men were just as likely to become casualties themselves.
Along the muddy front, the orders from the lieutenants were direct and harsh. At least two men per hole, and as before one had to remain alert, keeping watch, whether there was anything to be seen or not. The ponchos that still held together were all they had for protection, and with no way to dry out clothes or skin, sickness had begun to spread through the men, made far worse by the filth they could not escape. The enemy was suffering as well, but no Marine gave that much thought, knew only that any attempt to leave the foxhole would likely draw fire. The Japanese seemed to wait in every low place, rising up from some invisible nook, seeking out the vulnerable, the careless, the unwary, and if any of the sickest men had the desperate need to find a corpsman, or make it to an aid station, it was just as likely he would run headlong into a band of infiltrators. And with the driving rain muffling the passwords, the danger was more intense than ever that he might be shot down by a jittery hand from his own unit.
NORTH OF NAHA, OKINAWA
MAY 11, 1945, MIDNIGHT
Adams knew the rot had crept down from his groin, a stinging agony, sore and raw, all the way into his boots. He had tried to ignore it, as much as he could ignore anything around him. But he could not ignore Welty. The redhead sat down slowly, settled into the wetness, his two-hour watch complete. Adams began to pull himself upright, the M-1 a crutch,