Deke wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand and took a deep breath, but he couldn’t seem to get any real air. He couldn’t help but find himself longing for the clear skies and crisp air of an autumn mountain morning back home. Here the sun always seemed to burn down through a tropical haze.
The comparison to his memories of home made the present conditions seem only worse. He could see the fatigue in the faces of the other GIs, perspiration dripping from their faces, their hair matted to their foreheads under the lips of their steel helmets that grew heavier with each step. Once again, he was glad that he had abandoned his helmet in favor of a broad-brimmed bush hat.
Moisture draped like a wet blanket over everything, heavy and viscous. The air was so loaded with humidity that it made it hard to breathe. Wherever you were, you were enveloped in that blanket of humidity that seemed to weigh down your motions. When a man walked through it, the humidity clung to him like a giant spiderweb.
Speaking of spiderwebs, there were plenty of those across the trail that the guerrillas on point had to break through. Some looked large enough, and the webbing looked thick enough to capture birds, let alone insects. The presence of the spiderwebs was reassuring, however, meaning that no one — in this case the Japanese — had used the trail since the spiders had busily spun their webs the night before.
The jungle seemed as thick as the air, with tangled underbrush and trees creating a latticework of greenery. The jungle canopy of leaves and branches proved so dense almost no sunlight reached the forest floor, creating ominous shadows. This canopy obscured the sky from view, although from time to time they heard aircraft passing overhead. Once or twice a plane flew so low that he could see it clearly through the trees.
To his surprise, both times he had spotted the unmistakable bright-red Japanese meatball on the underside of the wings. Clearly the enemy was still managing to put a few planes in the air. They still had plenty of fight left in them.
Philly had seen the planes too. “Japs,” he muttered as if afraid the pilots could somehow hear him. “You don’t suppose they can see us?”
Deke grunted. “If they could, you’d probably be getting some Japanese lead up your tailpipe right about now.”
Although they had spoken quietly, the exchange appeared to annoy the nearest guerrilla, who looked back over his shoulder to glare at them with the dark, accusing eyes of a jungle cat.
Deke returned the glare, but not for long. He knew that the guerrilla was just interested in staying alive, which meant moving quietly. The terrain forced Deke to watch where he was going, so he mainly kept his eyes on where he was putting his feet next. The trail cut across a jungle floor that was a tangle of vines, roots, and branches that sometimes blocked their passage. His feet felt clunky in his army boots, and he envied the light-soled shoes and sandals the guerrillas wore.
Around them the jungle was thick with the smells of damp earth, decomposing vegetation, moldering wood, and the musk of hidden forest animals — smells not so different from the deep mountain forests back home, Deke realized.
Father Francisco moved up and down the line, saying a word or two of encouragement to each man, both the guerrillas and the GIs. When he stopped by Lieutenant Steele, the two leaders even exchanged a laugh. The guerrilla gave them another stink eye.
To Deke’s surprise, when the priest fell into step beside him, he greeted Deke by name.
“Hola, Deke. I remember you from last time,” the priest said, keeping his voice low. “That business back on Hill 522. You are quite the shot.”
“I reckon that I get lucky now and then. Like my daddy used to say, you can’t hit any of the targets you don’t shoot at. In other words, you have to take your chances now and then.”
“He sounds like a wise man.”
“He wasn’t a fool,” Deke quickly agreed, surprising himself by expressing a thought aloud that he didn’t realize he’d even had. “But my pa sure did have a knack for turning a dollar into dust.”
The priest chuckled. “Wealth is not everything in the Lord’s eyes,” he said.
“Tell that to the bankers when they want their money for the mortgage,” Deke muttered. “They ain’t much interested in prayers and promises.”
For a long time he had held a grudge against his father for losing the family farm by taking out a loan from the bank that he couldn’t repay. Slowly he had been changing that view. Pa had just been doing his best, trying to keep the farm going with that loan, and the Depression hadn’t helped. Almost everyone in the mountains had suffered hard times.
His appreciation of his father had grown deeper in other ways. Pa had fought in the Great War, and now as a soldier himself, Deke understood that his father may have been broken in some way by that war. He certainly never talked about it. He’d just wanted to be left alone on his farm.
But he had not gotten that chance. The Great Depression had taken a toll of a different kind.
“You know that God says it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to get into heaven,” the priest said.
“That sounds about right,” Deke agreed. “There’s nothing so close to a devil on earth as a rich man. Anyhow, you are always asking after everybody else. How have you been, Padre?”
The priest took a long moment to consider Deke’s question. “Do you have faith, Private Cole?”
“I never was much of a churchgoer growing up,” Deke replied, just as thoughtfully. “But I believe in the Lord above. You need to give the Lord his due. If there’s nobody up there, and there’s no heaven and no hell, no right and wrong, no Golden Rule, then what’s it all for?”
“You still believe that, even with the war?”
“Padre, I believe it even more because of the war.”
For the first time, the priest nodded and gave Deke a wistful smile. “I must admit that the war has made me doubt my faith at times. The things I have seen… the things we have done. I have asked myself, How can God allow that?”
“I’m no expert, Padre, but I’d say God is like the big boss man. He doesn’t get his hands dirty much. I think he leaves the right and wrong of it up to us, to make our own choices. You know how when you work for the big boss man, you have to line up with everybody to collect your pay at the end of the week? Just like that, we’ll have to answer one way or another on Judgment Day.”
The priest nodded. “Thank you, Deacon Cole. I think you have an eye that sees more than targets. You have given me much to consider.”
For the next two days, the patrol moved deeper into the interior of Leyte. They could still hear artillery in the distance, one side giving the other a pounding, but the sound grew fainter. The sheer oppressive density of the jungle closed in around them and seemed to swallow up any attempt at conversation, devouring words and sound like a great green anaconda.
On that second afternoon, the sky darkened and the wind picked up, churning the trees overhead. While showers and downpours were a frequent occurrence, the wind indicated that this was a stronger storm. They could hear the gale build force and head for them, howling through the lower depths of the forest. The roar of the approaching wind and thunder was more than a little unnerving. A few heavy droplets began to fall, creating mini explosions as they pummeled the bare soil of the trail.
“Here it comes, boys,” Lieutenant Steele said glumly. “Batten down the hatches.”
When the wind struck, it was like a bowling ball rolling through a forest of tenpins. Around them, branches cracked and trees fell. It was the worst kind of tropical storm, almost like a tornado. Deke worried that the storm was leaving them blind and deaf, vulnerable to attack, but then realized that the Japanese would not have been faring any better in these conditions.