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Chapter One
The rain came in squalls, in slanting silver sheets and bounced on the helmets and ponchos in a million little bursts of light, ran glistening down the folds of the camouflaged fabric and merged with the streams flowing along the two ruts of road. Off to the right at the edge of a field the fuselage of a plane, an old mock-up stump of a body without wings or tail, used in training some long-departed paratroopers, lay like a rotting prefabricated cigar. Beyond it through the pines the rain fell in a cold white streaming on the gray plate of the river; and to Alan Newcombe, dizzy with sleeplessness and exhaustion after three days and nights of field problems in the Carolina swamps, it was as though everything were finally melting away — they were all, pine woods, fuselage, the whole platoon — floating away, dissolving into the curtain of cold, endless rain.
The idea had in fact a certain pleasing, if morbid, inevitability about it. It completed the farce — a fitting sequel to the three days of patternless, confused digging and running and crawling: to walk solemnly out into the gray, fetid water, knee-deep, waist-deep, chest-deep, rifles held at high port — so of course as to keep them dry — finally, implacably, transformed into three columns of helmets bobbing like turtles or, overturned, floating like so many listing coracles, filling with water. Crescendo and curtain. Bye bye, second platoon, bobbing helmets gurgling, foundering: bye bye. Slow dissolve...
"God damn it, Al—"
He had stepped on a heel in front of himagain. He muttered, "Sorry, Jay," to O'Neill's exasperated backward glance. Why couldn't he keep from stepping on O'Neill's heels? Some fatal attraction, no doubt: some strange trajectory curving back to Mother's oxfords moving ahead of you on the swept dirt paths of the Public Gardens. Ah, they have left you far behind now: have left you lost and wandering —
They had stopped. That was odd: after three days and nights of interminable, purposeless movement there was no reason they should have stopped now. Was there? Yes, there were their huts — the black tar-paper and cardboard huts — which being only cardboard should not be dry inside but were dry...and occasionally even warm enough. But they, the huts' occupants, stood out here in the rain: as was fitting. Like rows of sodden, wingless fowl.
Beside him O'Neill snuffled twice; turning his bony face toward Newcombe he said in a low, conversational tone:
"The good word. The good, warm, dry word for today."
"Straight from Olympos," Newcombe answered him.
"All right", Lieutenant D'Alessandro said. Tall and well-built, with handsome, delicate features, he advanced a step or two, pushed his helmet to the back of his head and confronted the platoon with his hands on his hips. "That was a terrible problem we secured. A terrible problem. I suppose you know what a terrible problem that was. You all heard what the Major said, didn't you?"
Nodding solemnly he paused for emphasis. The platoon stood silently in the rain and waited.
"Now you men listen to me: I've got a private ambition. I'm going to run the snappiest crack platoon in the entire Marine Corps... Let's call it a vanity of mine."
Rocking back on the heels of the yellow paratrooper's boots he affected, Lieutenant D'Alessandro nodded again; flashed all at once a bright, disarming smile.
"Look at all those pearly teeth," O'Neill observed.
"D'Alessandro for the smile of beauty."
"And the boots. Don't you wish you'd got to go to Quantico, Al? That could be you, son: you too could be a handsome officer."
"All right," Lieutenant D'Alessandro went on, oblivious, unhearing. "Now it's been pretty wet out for several days, as you're all probably well aware of by now..." He flashed the bright broad smile again.
"You see? He's hep. He's got his ear to the ground."
"Comfort of the troops solely."
"...and there will be a weapons inspection tomorrow morning when we fall out."
There was a murmur of protest from the platoon.
"Knock it off," Sergeant Hamway sang out in a soft nasal twang.
Lieutenant D'Alessandro frowned and bit his lower lip. "Now let's not have any gum-beating about it. I know you're fagged. I'm fagged myself. You're going to be a lot more fagged than this, too: I can promise you that."
"Old salt," O'Neill muttered; his nostril gurgled again thickly. "Old salt from Quan-tee-co, V-A."
"Straight from the equine orifice."
"Now just what the pete does that ninny know about—"
"All right, now," Corporal Kantaylis, standing beside them, murmured; and they both fell silent.
"And it isn't too far away either, that day." Lieutenant D'Alessandro threw back his head in an odd little nervous gesture. "So let's all get with it now, and settle down and get on the ball. Shall we? Whether you want to admit it or not, your rifle's your best friend: she's dearer to your heart than any of the little chippies in Kinston, or back home either — and don't you forget it. And when I say clean weapons I mean just that: clean weapons. By formation tomorrow morning... Well, I guess that's about all." Sergeant Hamway leaned toward him and whispered something and Lieutenant D'Alessandro straightened and said: "Oh yes. Sergeant Hamway reminds me that there's a training film tonight at eighteen hundred. "
A moment longer he passed his eyes up and down the front rank with an expression half-yearning, half-reproving — a nervous, wistful, indecisive gaze; smiled again and splashed off through the mud in his paratrooper's boots.
Sergeant Hamway wiped his face slowly with the palm of his hand and said, "All right: you all heard what the lieutenant said..."
The Big War. Copyright © by Anton Myrer. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
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