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By Root 1404 0

million-dollar wounds that would get them out of the fight. But the Marine Corps’s nasty secret was that they were losing men at such an alarming rate that the training camps could not keep up with the gaps in the line. If a wounded man had healed well enough to fight again, he would. There was griping about that at first, men who dared to show the fear, who had no desire to go back out there, who believed they had already done their share. No one had patience for that kind of talk, and certainly none of the officers. Most of the veterans passed their time in silence, or occupied their thoughts with poker and dice and letter writing, anything that would keep their thoughts away from what they had seen and done, and what they might be asked to do again. They tended to keep separate from the replacements, and Adams had done the same, trying to avoid the idiotic talk. But there was one hitch to the camaraderie he shared with the veterans, a fear he carried every day. He wondered if they knew, if anyone could see through the hard glare he tried to show them, that it all might be counterfeit. Adams had not actually been in a fight, had never fired his rifle, never even seen a Japanese soldier. In early 1944, when the Twenty-second moved ashore through the ring of islands called Eniwetok, Adams had already been chewed up and spit back to San Diego by a disease he had never heard of.

It was called filariasis, and an enormous number of Marines had been afflicted with the parasite from their first days on whatever tropical wasteland they had been ordered to land. Adams had been one of the first in his unit to suffer the awful misery of what some had begun to call elephant disease. More properly, the doctors knew that filariasis could cause elephantiasis, and might not be curable at all if it stayed in a man’s body for any length of time. As a result, the medical staffs took the disease seriously. Adams had been pulled off the line in Samoa, hauled by transport ship back to San Diego, and to his groaning dismay, he had been confined to the naval hospital there for nearly four months. When the disease was explained to him in detail, his griping about abandoning his buddies was replaced by something else: abject terror. The risk that the disease would bring on elephantiasis might have inspired jokes among those who had never suffered from it, since the most grotesque symptoms included greatly enlarged body parts, most notably a man’s genitals. The jokes had been obvious and crude, but Adams had seen the photographs, offered indiscreetly by a drunk corpsman, who thought it might be funny to shock the afflicted Marines with the potential horror of what they had contracted.

But the doctors in San Diego had done their work well, and after suffering through an extended recuperation period, he had been assigned to an office, faced with the horror that all his Marine training had gone to one good use: He would excel as a file clerk.

The men who shared his purgatory knew very well what was happening to the Marines in their own units far out in the Pacific. No one could keep hidden the carnage that had spread across so many islands, names now familiar to every Marine. To the wounded, those names had come back to them in nightmares they could not escape, jungle and swamp and jagged coral reefs, shrapnel and machine guns, places where a friend had gone down, or where the captain or the sergeant had led their platoon into annihilation. Adams had escaped it all, but the guilt of not being there caused nightmares as well. The letters had come, one in particular, from his captain, that Adams’s close friend, a tall mosquito of a man everyone called Bug-eye, had been killed on the rocky coral reefs at Eniwetok. Word of the man’s death had been unreal, a strange joke, but the joke was never funny, and as he shuffled the papers in the nameless office within sight of the vast ocean, Adams had grown more angry and more guilty by the day.

By now every one of the Marines who had been held back on the mainland knew that even in victory, the Marines had