The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [194]
After the battle plan for the frontal assault had been completed, and it was merely a question of waiting a few days until all the supplies had been brought up to the front, Cummings called a special conference of his staff officers, outlined the new plan to them, and gave orders that it should be developed as a corollary of the major attack, to be used as opportunity granted. At the same time he sent a request through channels for three destroyers. Then he put his staff to work.
After a hurried lunch, Major Dalleson returned to his G-3 tent, and began to draw up the plans for the Botoi invasion. He sat himself down before his desk, opened his collar, sharpened a few pencils with slow absorbed motions, his heavy lower lip dangling pensively and moistly, and then he selected a blank piece of paper and wrote "Operation Coda" in large block letters at the top of his sheet. He sighed pleasurably and lit a cigar, diverted momentarily by the word "coda," which was unfamiliar to him. "Code, it means probably," he muttered to himself, and then forgot about it. Slowly, laboriously, he forced himself to concentrate on the work before him. It was a problem for which he was quite suited.
A more imaginative man would have loathed the assignment, for it consisted essentially of composing long lists of men and equipment and creating a timetable. It demanded the same kind of patience that is needed to construct a crossword puzzle. But Dalleson relished the first portion of the work before him because he knew he could do it, and there were other kinds of work about which he was not so certain. This was the type of job that could be managed by following the procedures to be found in one Field Manual or another, and Dalleson had the kind of satisfaction a tone-deaf person might know in recognizing a piece of music.
Dalleson began by estimating the number of trucks that would be necessary to move the invasion troops from their front line positions down to the beach. Since the frontal attack would undoubtedly be in progress then, it was impossible to decide now which troops could be used. That would depend on the future situation, but it had to be one of the four rifle battalions on the island, and Dalleson separated it into four isolated problems, allotting a different number of trucks for each possibility. There would be trucks needed for the land attack, and the assignment of them could be handled by G-4. Dalleson looked up and scowled, staring at the clerks and officers in his tent.
"Hey, Hearn," he shouted.
"Yes?"
"Bring this over to Hobart, and tell him to work out where we can draw the trucks from."
Hearn nodded, took the piece of paper Dalleson handed him, and strolled out of the tent, whistling to himself. Dalleson watched him with a puzzled and slightly belligerent expression. Hearn irritated him slightly. He could not express it, but he was a little uncomfortable with him, a little uncertain. He always had the feeling that Hearn was laughing at him, and he had nothing concrete to fasten it upon. Dalleson had been a little surprised when the General had transferred Hearn, but it had been none of his affair, and he had assigned Hearn to supervising the draftsmen in their map overlays, and forgot about him almost entirely. Hearn had done his work well enough, quietly enough, and with over a dozen men in the tent almost all the time, Dalleson had paid little attention to him. Or at least at first. Lately it seemed as if Hearn had introduced a new humor. There was a kind of sour snickering at the more boring and meaningless procedures now, and once Dalleson had overheard Hearn saying, "Sure, old Blood and Guts puts the outfit to bed. He doesn't have any children, and dogs don't take to him, so what do you expect?" There had been a burst of laughter which stopped abruptly when they saw he had overheard, and since then Dalleson had had the idea that Hearn had been talking about him.
Dalleson mopped his forehead, turned back to his desk, and began to work on the embarkation and debarkation timetables