“If you don’t want to go to war,” First Sergeant Jethro Stiles remarked to Milo, “then isn’t it a bit silly to allow your warships to escort the merchant shipping of a combatant? Roosevelt—or someone very close to him, at least—wants us in the war against Germany and Italy, you can bet your GI shoes on that, my friend. Of course, it may well be economics, pure and simple. Arming for a war and then fighting it is a surefire way of pulling a country out ,of a depression. He’s tried damned near everything else, the crippled old socialist bastard, so maybe he figures this war business to be his last card. I tell you, Milo, the people of this country are going to live to heartily regret allowing that man and his near-Bolshevik cronies to play their socialistic New Deal games on the citizens and institutions and economy of this country. And now he and they are going about making damned certain that, like Wilson, they drag us into another war in which we have no real business.”
Stiles sighed deeply, then shrugged. “Naturally, I could well be wrong on the whys. Roosevelt and his Red-loving friends may just be all a-boil to help Mother Russia, but that’s as poor a reason to send Americans to be killed and butchered as any of the others. Josef Stalin is as much a murderous animal as is Adolf Hitler, if not more so; power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and Stalin has been in power for longer than Hitler, so we can be certain that he has become far and away more barbaric. And if proof of that last were needed, consider his recent purge of his own army’s officer corps.
“If this is Roosevelt’s reason for plunging our nation into another European war, it is akin to making alliance with a bear to fight a pack of wolves; even if we win, what is there to stop the bear from attacking and eating us? Maybe that’s just what Roosevelt and his crew want to happen.
“Maybe it’s what is ordained, too. Russell and Wells and not a few others seem to be of the opinion that socialism is the wave of the world’s future. Sometimes I get the sinking feeling that we—the world’s republics and monarchies—are at the best only fighting a grim, foredoomed, rearguard action against that which is to be.”
Abruptly, he switched back to his everyday, workaday voice and manner. “Oh, shit, Milo, if I keep on in this fucking vein, I’ll be singing ‘Einsamer Sonntag’ and opening a few of the larger, more important of my own veins.”
“‘Lonely Sunday’?” queried Milo. “I don’t think I’ve heard of that song, Jethro.”
“It’s called ‘Gloomy Sunday’ in this country and other English-speaking countries. It was written some years ago by a Hungarian, I believe, and has become infamous because so very many people, worldwide, suicided while listening to it. Also, it is said, every artiste who recorded it has come to a bad end.
“Which, my friend, is precisely the end you and I are going to come to if we don’t get cracking and have this report ready for our little captain to turn in to Colonel Oglethorpe on Monday.”
One weekend in late 1941, one class having just finished and another not due until the middle of the coming week, Stiles and Milo had left the skeleton-manned company in the hands of a weekend charge of quarters and taken a few days of accrued leave together at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Free-spending Jethro had easily snagged a brace of attractive and complaisant “ladies” to share the beachside cottage he had earlier rented. When he and Milo were not fishing in the icy surf or enjoying their catch along with a plentitude of other foods and alcohol, they enjoyed the attentions of their bed warmers.
On the Sunday afternoon, Milo and the two women sat close to the driftwood fire blazing on the hearth while Jethro basted for the last time a bluefish stuffed with herbs, spices, breadcrumbs, onions and finely chopped shellfish. The aroma of the baking^fish, of the horse potatoes baking with it and of the other savories simmering in the battered saucepans atop the gas burners filled the small parlor with mouthwatering cheer every bit as much as did the opened magnum of champagne and the two unopened still-chilling ones nestled in a washtub full of cracked ice.
Pleasantly tiddly, Milo had but just arisen from his place to fetch a fresh magnum when he heard rapid footsteps ascending the shaky stairs, then an even more rapid pounding on the front door. He opened it to admit their landlord, Huell Midgett, a long-retired Coast Guard chief of about sixty years.
Politely ignoring the two female “guests,” the old petty officer took a few breaths so deep as to set his beerbelly and multiple chins ajiggle, then said, “Boys, ain’t none of my own bizness, of course, but you two is both of you Army off sers. Ain’t you?”
Jethro looked up from the fish and smiled. “Close enough, Chief Midgett, close enough. We’re noncoms, but first-three-graders. Why?”
Midgett shook his head dubiously. “Funny, I ain’t been wrong often, and I coulda swore you were both off sers. But anyway, y’all better git on iny telephone to your base, and real quick, too. ‘Cause this mornin’ the fuckin’ Japs has bombed Oahu in the Hawaiian Islands. The fuckers caught the whole damn Pacific Fleet bottled up in Pearl Harbor, it sounds like on my shortwave radio. Feller I was talkin’ to said all they could see from his place was black, oily smoke and fire way up inta the sky, them and the fuckin’ Jap planes, was all.
“He said he was yet to see airy a one of our planes, so the Nip fuckers must’ve bombed the aerodromes afore any of ours could git up to fight the slant-eyed bastids. Afore he signed off, he allowed as how he ‘spected to see Japs on the fuckin’ beaches afore night. Don’t thishere shit beat all, boys?”
The chaos to which Milo and Jethro returned was indescribable. At the hour of the Japanese sneak attack on the Hawaiian Islands, over half of the noncommissioned cadre and some two-thirds of the officer complement of the training division had been off post to lesser or greater distances. Although their post was thousands of miles from the Pacific Coast, although the only local Jap of whom anyone knew was the post commander’s gardener, an unknowing witness to the pandemonium would never have guessed the truth.
During the two days it took Milo and Jethro to get back, the gates were become mazes of entrenchments, sandbagged strongpoints, machine-gun nests manned by edgy, sleepless, confused men with itchy trigger fingers. Sentries walked the perimeters, while details laid out barbed-wire entanglements just beyond those perimeters, unreeled and laid commo wire for field telephones, dug and roofed over revetments or excavated tank traps and laid land mines. Three-quarter-ton and the new quarter-ton scout cars mounting machine guns on pedestals moved here and there along the perimeters slowly, men with binoculars scanning both ground and skies lest they too be surprised by the treacherous yellow enemies.
Fortunately for all concerned, Milo still was wearing his identity plates strung around his neck under his mufti, but Jethro was not, and not until a Military Police staff sergeant who knew them both of old was summoned would the grim-faced, tommy gun-armed guards allow them to drive onto the base.
In B Company’s orderly room, the CQ, a buck sergeant named Schrader, all but wept openly at sight of the two of them. When he had rendered his report to Stiles, Milo demanded, “Where’s your runner, Emil?”