The Final Storm - Jeff Shaara [137]
The training had been driven hard into all of them, no man left behind, no man, and he had seen the extraordinary effort even his own men had made to pull the casualties back down the hill. To the officers, the emotional lesson had come from a textbook, that the officers would inspire their men on their own if necessary, retrieving any man who went down. But there was nothing inspirational in watching his own men get shot to pieces. He had felt useless, angry, building a hate for the Japanese and for himself, the lieutenant who was supposed to take care of his boys. From his perch, he could monitor their progress, one of those duties spelled out in another textbook, but the Nambu gun in the cave was too close to him, too utterly infuriating, too dangerous and deadly, and was killing his men with casual ease.
The perch also gave him a perfect view of the fighting out to the side, someone else’s men, more of the bare rocky places peppered with the bodies of Marines, mixed alongside dead Japanese, black bloated corpses that might have been there for days. The Marines would certainly retrieve their own, but he could see clearly now that the Japanese had no such priority. All up through the ragged hillside, bodies were laid out in grotesque shapes, some disguised by the mud so that a man wouldn’t know what was there until he crawled across it. The rain had washed some of that away, but not in the low pits, the shell holes and flat places like the one that held him now. Beneath him the mud seemed to be more like stinking black oil, what was left of three Japanese machine gunners, the rags of their uniforms holding shattered bones close by in a cluster of burnt brushy stubble. He had tried to ignore them, knew that whatever artillery shell made the hole that gave him protection had probably been the same shell that killed the three men, and so they might have been there for a week or more. He pulled himself to the farthest corner of the muddy pool, but beyond was flat open rock. He had tried moving that way already, to escape the small piece of hell, only to draw fire from another Nambu gun that seemed suspended in the rocks no more than twenty feet above him. From the mud hole he was just back at an angle the gun couldn’t reach, and the enemy seemed to know that, and so, for now anyway, ignored him.
The Nambu in the cave sprayed out fire again, and he thought of the nickname someone had come up with to describe the sound, the chatter of a woodpecker. Doesn’t sound anything like that from here, he thought. Sounds like something I need to blow to hell. He had kept his attention mostly on that one place, expected that the Japanese who occupied the cave might still try to erase him with a grenade. Until more of his men could make their way closer, there was nothing else he could do but wait, and so, with his ammo running low, he had made that one Nambu his single purpose. The carbine rested on one knee, its muzzle barely above the stubble, waiting for anyone at the cave mouth to show himself. Instead they kept their fire on the men down the hill, who still struggled to push upward inches at a time.
He rose up slightly, looked below, Marines in every corner of every gap, some firing upward, some just hunkered down. Dammit, he thought, sure as hell some of ’em are waiting for me. They need something, someone to get them moving. The longer they sit, the worse it’s going to get. The mortars will find them, even after dark. He raised his head a few inches higher, saw farther below, more men along the base of the hill. They were just reaching the incline, the Japanese greeting them with waves of fire,