Once past the beach, they hiked into the jungle, dense with large-leafed vegetation and palms. Despite the shelter of the jungle’s green roof, or because of it, the air felt stiflingly damp and hot. The men soon found that there was no place on Leyte to escape the heat, or the rains that came every day. Karras, who had only been out of the city a couple of times in his life, preferred to be away from the jungle, under the open blue of the sky.
They settled in a clearing near a river, a position that they were assured was three miles in front of enemy lines. Machete-wielding Filipinos had done a fair job of scouting the area and freeing it of brush and debris. The men dug their foxholes individually and then collectively cut an L-trench to their 55-millimeter gun. Karras had been named gun captain on Guam.
Sniper fire commenced almost immediately, and the unit was mortared with frequency each day. Soon it became clear that the Japanese were closer than at first anticipated; in fact, their lines were only a couple of thousand yards away.
Three days after they arrived on Leyte, Karras made his first kill, a sniper who had chest-shot a private named Slocum from Apple Valley, Minnesota. Eventually each U.S. soldier killed his first Japanese. Thereafter they ceased to ponder the morality of the act.
As gun captain, Karras felt responsible when a worn breech was discovered in the 55-millimeter gun. A breech from a 155-millimeter Army howitzer, located across the river, was found to be available, but the bridge over the river had been blown by the American army itself to prevent the Japanese from following their path. Karras volunteered, along with two other men, to swim the hundred-odd yards across the river and return with the needed breech. The three of them left that night. One of the men got lucky, contracted elephantiasis after swallowing a mouthful of water, and from that earned a ticket back to the States. Karras did not get sick, and was awarded the first of several medals that he would receive in the course of the war. He would remain most proud of the medal for the swim across the river, which required bravery along with physical endurance and skill. The other medals he received were for killing men.
Despite the K rations and a nagging, fragile stomach which persisted during his Philippine tour, Karras grew stronger and gained more bulk. Daily he lifted the ninety-nine-pound shells, gunpowder canister, and detonator into the tube of the gun. As his strength increased, so did his confidence. Karras had by now seen every kind of combat. He had seen the deaths of many of the men he trained with, some of them friends, some not; as yet, Peter Karras had not received so much as a scratch. But he was still afraid. All of them were still afraid.
Since snipers were everywhere, it was unwise to move around, and foolish to smoke. When Karras wasn’t on the gun, he was down in his foxhole, sitting in the water that would rise from the earth after the daily rain. On patrol in the jungle, his unit would meet the enemy face to face, where they would either kill in the most unthinking way, or die. Karras fought hand to hand, taking the life of more than one man like that, looking into their eyes, sometimes filled with fear and sometimes showing nothing at all. He stabbed them and shot them at close range, and beat them to death in their narrow, jaundiced heads with the butt of his M-1. They were the toughest men he had known or would ever know. And while he began to respect them, he hated them, had to hate them so he would not hesitate to do what he had to or think about what he had done.
In those times in the jungle, he fought without a bayonet. He had seen a friend die, his bayonet stuck in a man he had just killed, frantically trying to pull it out as a Japanese soldier shot him in the back of the head. So Karras used his father’s Bowie knife instead. He used it until he left it in a man who had come into his foxhole with him one black night. Karras had seen him crawling towards him, and he had called for the man to identify himself. The man did not answer, and Karras, without deliberation, buried the knife in the man’s throat. Karras crawled to another foxhole, and in the morning did not go back for the knife. He never knew or cared to know if the man had been American or Japanese.
By late November, it became obvious that the Philippine campaign, predicted as an easy mop-up by MacArthur, was becoming far more costly, bloody, and protracted than anyone had imagined. It was said that the Japanese lieutenant general had abandoned the island to twenty thousand of his own troops, and now the soldiers — sick, starving, resigned to their fates, and living on sea salt and plants — were ready to die in the only way they understood.
December came, and the shelling and sniper fire increased along with the nerve-fraying shouts and taunts from within the jungle. Peter Karras sat in the rain of his foxhole, his M-1 across his lap, his eyes heavy-lidded and hard. He knew, they all knew, that the Japanese had encircled their division. He sat there, trying to recall the smell of his mother’s soup, thinking of Eleni Triandokidis and her warm, wet pussy, the thought of Eleni naked hardening his cock. The only thing to do now was think about things like that, things that made him feel good and made him forget. Think about things, and wait.
7
Peter Karras heard the flutter of the first mortar shell leaving its tube in the middle of the afternoon rain. He had come to duck at the sound of it, the sound like the flap of pigeon wings, dirty gray birds lifting off F Street on Saturday afternoons. The shell and then another exploded nearby. Karras balled up until his cheek touched the water that had risen in his foxhole. He felt mud and dirt shower down heavily on his helmet, heard rifle fire and a boy named Maxson scream. Nearby, the radio man, Rubino from Illinois, called in their position and advised that they were under attack.
Karras laid his M-1 outside the foxhole, caught the warm spark of a round on his hand as a bullet glanced off the stock of his weapon. He mumbled something to himself, raised his head slowly so that his eyes cleared the edge of the hole. The Japanese were coming out of the jungle, through the sword grass, and into the clearing in numbers.
From a foxhole up ahead a machine gun chattered, spent shells arcing lazily amidst a widening cloud of smoke. That would be Harper. Harper, from Cuyahoga River country in Ohio, laying rounds into the clearing towards the torsos of the charging Japanese.
Karras got a khaki-mustard uniform in his gunsights and squeezed off a round. The man threw his weapon to the side, arched his back, and waved his hands dreamily as he drifted down into the mud.
“My arm!” yelled Maxson. “God... damn you, you bastards. My arm...”
The sickening flutter of a mortar launch cut the air. Karras had the strange and sure feeling that this one had his name on it — his mortar shell, he knew. He rolled out of his foxhole, the mortar exploding somewhere behind him, sending a violent eruption of water and mud into the sky. A wall of air pushed heavily at his back.
Karras had left his M-1 in the hole. He stood, moved a few steps forward, drunk with confusion. Then he looked down. His sergeant, a man named Shelby, lay dead in the mud. Karras bent forward and wrenched Shelby’s .45 from his hand.
Karras heard a scream and turned. A Japanese officer, waving his sword, his rotten teeth bared, eager to leave his world and in love with death, ran straight toward him with a caterwauling howl. Karras fired the .45, emptied it, dropped the man several feet short of his mark. Some pieces flew away from the officer’s head as he was blown back off his feet.