The Final Storm - Jeff Shaara [28]
The boxing was a ritual, something Adams had needed. He felt it the moment he arrived at the Marine base at Guadalcanal, after he endured the automatic look of disgust on the faces of the men who had never left the islands, who had weathered all those bloody storms against the Japanese. He had wanted to tell them, all of them, that he was not new, not a green idiot, that if it hadn’t been for some ridiculous disease, he never would have left them, would never have been shipped home. Adams was desperate for a way back in, a way to prove that to the men who barely remembered him. It was the sergeant, Ferucci, who had opened the door. Ferucci was a tough goon of a man, who came from the hard streets of Jersey City. He knew something of boxing, what he called the sweet science, had talked long and often of Joe Louis and Max Schmeling and Jack Dempsey and Jack Johnson, and the message to Adams was clear. He had missed out on so many of the Marines’great fights, and so he would make fights of his own. He would put on the gloves, stand in front of whatever fool felt the same need, and the better fighter would bloody the other into submission. In eight bouts, Clay Adams had been the better fighter. He had been afraid at first, but his desire was too great, erasing that part of his brain that spewed out all that annoying common sense. He refused to understand what a man’s fist might actually do to your face, that some of these Marines might actually enjoy hurting him, and worse, they might be damn good at it. As the sergeant trained him, Adams had asked all those questions, what it felt like, but Ferucci was wise enough not to answer them. So Adams stepped through the ropes with no idea how much it could hurt to be knocked out, if it hurt at all. And until he saw it for himself, he had no idea that another man’s teeth could end up around his own feet. But Adams’s teeth were still intact. He had surprised the sergeant, and himself, by his smooth talent for slipping away from the fists. And, to both men’s surprise, Adams had another talent as well, the coordination you can’t teach, the instinct for dropping a thunderous shot into a man’s jaw with a perfect right hand. He had knocked out every man he had faced, but unlike the animal cheering that came from the Marines in his audience, Adams felt no special joy in drawing another man’s blood, or watching the man’s eyes roll up into a frightening oblivion. It was never about victory, as much as it was about being one of them, being accepted back into the Twenty-second Regiment. Whatever he had to prove when he had returned from San Diego, he had done a pretty good job of it. In a few short weeks back on Guadalcanal, no one in the unit confused him with one of those replacements.
He had spent too many months stateside, and when Ferucci and the others accepted that he was in fact one of their own, he could finally join in the general displays of disgust for the replacements that had come with him. They sailed to the islands full of that mindless spirit that had been driven into them at the Marine training centers, and once he joined them on the transport ship, Adams quickly learned to avoid them. He could identify them as soon as they spoke, all the talk of adventure and conquest, how they were oh so eager to face the Japs, so much asinine talk from men who had no idea what kind of adventure they were headed for. But the transport carried veterans as well, and Adams felt the same guilt that infected so many of those men, mostly the wounded who had been shipped stateside for recovery and recuperation. Not all of the men from the hospitals would return, of course, many of them too damaged, Purple Hearts and a train ticket home. And not all the veterans who were shipped back out on the transports were as eager to rejoin their units as Adams was. Some had seen too much already, had recovered from what they had hoped were