The Final Storm - Jeff Shaara [165]
He began to stammer, and Mortensen grabbed his arm again, yanked him down hard, and Welty was in front of him, kneeling, shouted into his face.
“Shut up! You hear me? Shut up! You wanna go back to that damn white-sheet place? You crack up on me again and I’ll take you there myself. You see that shotgun?”
Welty waited for the answer, and Adams tried to hold back the shaking in his chest, his hands, nodded.
“Look at it!”
Adams obeyed, stared at the cold steel, the fat barrel pointing skyward, the belt of ammo across his chest. Welty grabbed the shotgun, shoved it hard into Adams’s chest.
“You know why we wanted these things? ’Cause they work! We got a job to do, and you already know that those Jap bastards wanna make it easy for us, they wanna walk right up to us and stick a grenade down our throats. We have to kill every one of these bastards, every one! Right?”
“Yeah.”
“I said, right?”
Adams felt the hard grip on his arm, Mortensen still holding him, hard fingers digging into the barely healed wound on his arm. Adams felt the pain, wouldn’t flinch, saw Welty still staring at him, hard and cold, the same hint of madness he had seen in the others. Adams understood now, they’ve gotta know. Am I gonna crack up again? I’ve gotta know. His hands gripped hard to the shotgun, and he realized that what Mortensen said was true, that Welty was right. The shotgun had one purpose. At close range it could blow a man to pieces and take out a half-dozen Japs behind him.
Welty’s voice rose, closer to Adams’s face.
“You talk like a tough guy, but I’m telling you, I want more than talk outta you! We’re gonna kill every one of those bastards! Right?”
Adams saw the fury in Welty’s red eyes, his friend searching him, a frightening urgency. He felt it now, that they needed to hear they could count on him, that Adams was still ready for the fight. He jerked the shotgun from Welty’s hands, knew that Welty shared the memories, the death and the stink, but one memory was Adams’s alone, and he embraced it now, that one dismal day, vivid and pure, digging his knife into the throat of the Japanese soldier, the head rolling away, the fountain of blood. He could smell the man’s blood still, would always smell it, and for the first time he knew he had to have more, that the hate and the pain were part of the men beside him, part of everything he had become. It was why he had to leave the hospital, why the doctors had allowed him back on the line. If he was nuts at all it was because that kind of nuts was what they needed from him. He had to go back, he had to fight. He returned Welty’s stare, no emotion, no fear, the words coming out as perfect truth.
“I wanna kill every damn one.”
On June 4, the Sixth Division’s commanding general, Lemuel Shepherd, was finally allowed to embark on the kind of mission his men were suited for. Coming in from the sea, the Fourth and Twenty-ninth regiments struck the Oroku Peninsula and tore into the defenses that the Japanese naval troops had thought were invincible. Inland, the Twenty-second Regiment served both as reserve and as the cutoff force, moving into what was left of the city of Naha, sealing off the base of the peninsula against any escape for the Japanese forces who now faced seaward. After four days of slogging through intermittent rain and stifling heat, the two regiments succeeded in driving through the Japanese and secured the vital airfield west of the city. But the fight had been difficult, the naval troops putting up a more solid defense than even Ushijima had expected. But the end had been inevitable, even if the Marines’casualties were, once again, brutally high. As a fitting conclusion to the battle, with the Oroku Peninsula securely in Marine hands, Admiral Ota did what he was expected to do. With Marine gunners zeroing in on his headquarters, Ota denied the Marines the privilege of capturing the senior naval officer on Okinawa. The admiral committed suicide.
To the south, what remained of Ushijima’s army had mostly dug