Tarawa. Saipan. Angaur. Iwo Jima. Now Okinawa. Gnawing away on the hard, waxy chocolate, Mike thought, I am a fugitive from the law of averages. He had a Purple Heart with two oak-leaf clusters. He couldn’t imagine going through the fights he’d been through without getting hurt. The miracle was, he’d come through them without getting maimed for life or killed. Damn few of the guys he’d trained with outside of Lubbock were still in there fighting. They’d been used, and they’d been used up.
Miracles did happen, of course. They didn’t always happen to the good guys, either. Hitler had been a runner during the last war. He’d taken messages from the officers to the front-line trenches and back again, the kind of thing you had to do before there were radios and field telephones in every company. The usual life expectancy for a runner was measured in weeks. Hitler had done it all through the war. He’d got gassed once, not too badly, but that was it.
And much good it did him in the end. He was sure as hell dead now, and the Nazis had thrown in the sponge. Mike had heard that just before the last Jap counterattack. He’d been dully pleased, and that was about it. The enemy in front of him was not in a surrendering mood.
Eventually, the rain would stop. Eventually, the fighting would pick up again. Eventually, in spite of everything the Japs here on Okinawa could do, they’d be exterminated. The Americans had too many men, too many guns, too many tanks, too many planes, too many bombs.
Suppose I’m still alive and in one piece when that happens, Mike thought. What comes next?
Motion seen from the corner of his eye distracted him. He swung his grease gun towards it. He’d picked up the submachine gun on Iwo. For the kind of close-quarters fighting the punishment brigade did, it was better than an M-1. If you sprayed a lot of lead around, some of it would hit something. That was what you wanted. (He’d also picked up his third stripe on Iwo, not that he cared.)
But this wasn’t a Jap. “Jesus fucking Christ, Captain!” Mike burst out. “Get down in here! I almost drilled you!”
Luther Magnusson slid into the hole with him. He was all over mud. The Japs couldn’t have seen him. But moving around above ground this close to the Shuri Line was dangerous. Machine guns and mortars meant they didn’t have to see you to kill you. They could manage just fine by accident, or by that goddamn law of averages.
“Good,” Magnusson said. “I was looking for you.”
“Oh, yeah? How come?” A lot of the time, you didn’t want an officer looking for you. But Magnusson was all right, even if he did still drink like a fish every chance he got. By now, they’d been through a hell of a lot, and a lot of hell, together. So many familiar faces gone. Magnusson was lucky, too, if you wanted to call this luck.
“Got something for you.” The captain pulled a brand-new twenty-pack of Chesterfields, the kind you bought in the States, out of his breast pocket. The cellophane around the paper kept them dry and perfect. “Here you go.”
“You didn’t have to do that!” Mike yipped, which was an understatement. Magnusson had risked his life to deliver these cigarettes.
“No big deal,” he said. Considering life as they lived it, he might not have been so far wrong.
“Well, smoke some with me, anyway.” Mike draped a dripping shelter half over their heads so the downpour wouldn’t drown their cigarettes. Magnusson’s Zippo-painted olive drab to keep the sun from shining off the case and giving away his position-worked first time, every time. They puffed through a couple of fresh, fragrant, flavorful Chesterfields apiece. Then Mike said, “Those were terrific! Where’d you get ’em?”
Magnusson jerked his thumb back toward the north. “Took ’em from a colonel-no P, natch. He didn’t need ’em any more. I figured they might as well not go to waste.”
Yeah, real colonels got all kinds of goodies men in punishment brigades never saw. Fat lot of good that had done this one. He’d been brave to come up to the front with his men. Now he wasn’t brave. Now he was just dead.
After one more cigarette, Mike asked, “How many of the old guys you think’ll be left after we invade Japan?”
Magnusson looked at him. Along with being dirty, his face was also stubbly. So was Mike’s. The closer you got to the front, the less time you had to worry about stupid things like how you looked. “You sure that’s the question you wanna ask?” the captain said at last.
“Uh-huh.” Mike nodded. “It’s what I was thinking about when you went and dropped in at my mansion here.” Franklin D. Roosevelt had lived in a mansion for real just about his whole life. And what had that won him? An end even nastier than most soldiers got, which was really saying something.
“Mansion, huh?” Mike squeezed a short chuckle out of Luther Magnusson. After a beat, the company CO went on, “Well, a few of us may still be hanging around. Or else none of us. Me, I’d bet on none, but I could lose. War’s a crazy business.”
“Man, you got that right,” Mike said. “Okay, thanks. Pretty much the way I read the odds, too, but I wanted to see what somebody else thought. Other side of the coin is, we may all be gone before Okinawa’s over with.”
Magnusson leaned toward him under the shelter half and kissed him on the cheek. Mike was so caught off guard, he didn’t even slug him. “I couldn’t resist,” the captain told him. “You say the sweetest things.”
Mike told him what his mother could do with the sweetest things. To manage all of it, she would have needed more native talent, as it were, and more stamina than God issued to your garden-variety human being. “In spades,” Mike added. “You can get off this fucking island with a Section Eight.”
“Nah.” More seriously than Mike had expected, Magnusson shook his head. “It’s as near impossible as makes no difference for anybody from a penal brigade to get a psych discharge. The way the head-shrinkers look at it is, if you weren’t crazy already, you never woulda signed up for an outfit like this to begin with.”
“Oh.” Mike chewed on that, but not for long. He nodded. “Well, shit, it’s not like they’re wrong.” From behind them, American 105s threw death at the Shuri Line. A short round might take out this foxhole instead. Mike didn’t waste time worrying about it. He couldn’t do anything about it, so what was the point? The rain drummed down. He wondered if he could dig a little channel so it wouldn’t get too deep in the hole. He pulled his entrenching tool off his belt. That, he might actually manage.
* * *
A couple of weeks after the Army announced the fall of Okinawa, Charlie got a card from Mike, addressed to him at the White House. It was a dirty card, not because it had a naked girl on it but because somebody’s muddy bootprint did its best to obscure the message.
Charlie had to hold the card right in front of his nose to read it. It was short and to the point. Call Ripley! it said. Still here-believe it or not. Underneath that was a scrawled signature and NY24601. Charlie laughed. In spite of himself, the card sounded like his brother. So did sending it where he had.
“That’s good news!” Esther exclaimed when he showed it to her. “Nice somebody’s getting some.” She and her folks weren’t having much luck finding out if any of their Hungarian relatives survived. Magyar officials cared little for Jews. Their Red Army occupiers and overlords cared even less for letters from the United States.
“Half an hour after the mailroom clerk put the card on my desk, Scriabin walked in,” Charlie said. “He asked me, ‘How do you like having a hero for a brother?’”
“What did you tell him?”
“I said it was nice there was one in the family, anyhow. He kind of blinked and went away. Now I’ve got to call my mom and dad. I don’t know how many cards they let those guys send.”
It turned out that the elder Sullivans had also heard from Mike. Their card announced that he was alive and well and doing fine. It was the kind of card you sent to your parents, as the one Charlie had got was the kind you sent to your brother.