“You bet,” McDougald said. “Grab all the chances to loaf you can-they may not come your way again.”
With ether and alcohol and other inflammables inside the aid station, lighting up in there was severely discouraged-with a blunt instrument, if necessary. Once O’Doull had stepped away from the green-gray tent, he took out a pack of Niagara Falls.
“Oh, come on, Doc.” McDougald pulled a horrible face. “Haven’t you got anything better than those barge scrapings?”
“’Fraid not,” O’Doull admitted. “Smoked my last Confederate cigarette a couple of hours ago. U.S. tobacco won’t kill me, and it’s like coffee-bad is better than none at all.”
“Like booze, too,” the medic said, and the doctor didn’t deny it. McDougald reached into his pocket and extracted a pack of Dukes. “Here. Bad is better than none, but good is better than bad.”
“Thanks, Granny. I owe you,” O’Doull said. The noncom was a better scrounger than he was. Some headline that made. O’Doull took a cigarette and stuck it in his mouth. McDougald gave him a light. He inhaled, then smiled. “My hat’s off to the Dukes.”
“I ought to make you put up your dukes for one that bad.” Granville McDougald paused. “Except mine was even worse, wasn’t it?”
“Sure wasn’t any better,” O’Doull allowed. “But this tobacco is, and I thank you for it.”
“Any time,” McDougald said. “Not like I haven’t mooched butts from you a time or three.”
The roar of artillery from behind them drowned his last couple of words. The fire from the big and medium guns went on and on and on. Some of the shells flying west gurgled as they spun through the air. Leonard O’Doull winced at that sound: gas rounds. He tried to look on the bright side of things: “Sounds like we’re finally going over the river.”
“And through the woods, yeah, but where’s Grandmother’s house?” McDougald said. While O’Doull was still digesting that, the medic went on, “About time we got across the damn Scioto, don’t you think? Hanging on to Chillicothe like they have, the Confederates must have pulled God only knows how many men and how much materiel out of northern Ohio.”
“You sure you don’t belong back at corps HQ or something?” O’Doull said. McDougald laughed at him.
They had time to finish their cigarettes, and that was about it. Then the familiar and hated shout of, “Doc! Hey, Doc!” rang out again.
“I’m here!” O’Doull yelled. More quietly, he added, “Well, let’s see what we’ve got this time.”
They had a corporal with a bullet through his calf. He was cussing a blue streak. “Hey, keep your shirt on, pal,” Granville McDougald said. “If that’s not a hometowner, there’s no such animal.”
“Fuck hometowners,” the corporal snarled. “And fuck you, too, Jack. For one thing, it hurts like shit. And besides, I don’t want any goddamn hometowners. I want to blow the balls off some more of Featherston’s fuckers.”
A man of strong opinions, O’Doull thought. His voice dry, he said, “It’s not usually smart to swear at the guy who’s going to help fix you up. You might find out it hurts even more than you expected. And before you tell me where to head in, you need to know I’m a major.” Cussing out an officer was a good way for an enlisted man to run into more trouble than he ever wanted to find.
The noncom opened his mouth to draw in a breath. About then, though, the novocaine O’Doull injected by the wound took effect. What came out was, “Oh, yeah. That’s not so fucking bad now. You can go ahead and sew me up.” He caught himself. “You can go ahead and sew me up, sir.”
O’Doull decided he’d been given the glove. By Granny McDougald’s barely smothered snort, he thought the same thing. But the corporal scrupulously stayed within regulations. O’Doull cleaned out the wound and sewed it up. “Like it or not, pal, you’ve got a hometowner,” he said. “I know you’d be happier if you didn’t get shot, but you could have stopped it with your face or your chest, too.”
“Oh, yeah. I know. I’ve seen-” He broke off, then shook his head. “I started to say, I’ve seen as much of that shit as you have, but I probably haven’t.”
“Depends,” O’Doull answered. “We see plenty of nasty wounds, but the poor guys who get killed on the spot don’t make it back to us. Maybe it evens out.”
“Hot damn,” the corporal said. “Tell you one thing, though-it’s a bunch of fucked-up shit any which way.”
“Buddy, you are preaching to the choir,” Granville McDougald said solemnly. O’Doull decided he couldn’t have put it better himself.
From the deck of the USS Townsend, George Enos watched two new escort carriers come into Pearl Harbor. Like the pair that had previously sailed from the West Coast down to the Sandwich Islands, the Tripoli and the Yorktown were as ugly as a mud fence. They were built on freighter hulls, with a flight deck and a little island slapped on topside. They had a freighter’s machinery, too, and couldn’t make better than eighteen knots unless they fell off a cliff.
But each one of them had thirty airplanes: fighters, dive bombers, and torpedo-carriers. They weren’t fleet carriers; since the loss of the Remembrance more than a year earlier, the USA had no fleet carriers operating in the Pacific. Still, they were ever so much better than no carriers at all, which was what the United States had had in these waters for most of the time since the Remembrance went to the bottom.
“Well, doesn’t look like the Japs are going to drive us back to San Francisco after all,” George remarked. He spoke with the flat vowels and swallowed r’s of the Boston fisherman he was before he joined the Navy to make sure the Army didn’t conscript him.
“Damn well better not,” said Fremont Blaine Dalby, the CPO who commanded the twin 40mm antiaircraft gun for which George jerked shells.
“Didn’t look so good when they were bringing their carriers down from Midway and knocking the snot out of us here,” George said.
“They had their chance. Now it’s our turn.” Chief Dalby was a man who knew what he knew. Even his name showed that: it showed he came from a rock-ribbed Republican family in a country where the Republicans, caught between the Socialists and the Democrats, hadn’t amounted to a hill of beans since the 1880s.
“About time, too.” Fritz Gustafson, the gun crew’s loader, talked as if the government charged him for every word he said.
“If we can get Midway back…” George said.
“That’d be pretty good,” Dalby agreed. He wasn’t shy about talking-not even a little bit. “Run the Japs out there, run ’em off Wake, too, so they don’t come back to Midway, and then we can stop worrying about the real Sandwich Islands, the ones down here, for a while.”
“Gotta hang on to Hotel Street,” Gustafson said. George and Fremont Dalby both snorted. Hotel Street not only had more saloons and cathouses per square inch than any other street in Honolulu, it probably had more than any other street in the world. Sailors and soldiers and Marines might not give a damn about the Sandwich Islands as a whole, but they’d be bound to fight like men possessed to keep Hotel Street in American hands.
“Think four of these baby flattops are enough to take Midway?” George asked.
“Dunno. I ain’t no admiral,” Dalby said. As a CPO, he had a much smaller sphere of authority than a man with a broad gold stripe on his sleeve. But within that sphere, his authority was hardly less absolute. “Tell you what, though-I hope like hell there’s a couple more of those babies somewhere halfway between here and the coast.”
“Yeah.” George nodded. There was a gap in the middle of the eastern Pacific that neither aircraft from Oahu nor those from the West Coast could cover very well. Japan had done her best to get astride the supply line between the mainland and the Sandwich Islands and starve the islands into submission. It didn’t quite work, but it came too close for comfort, both metaphorically and literally.
Thinking of U.S. warplanes looking for enemy aircraft and ships made George notice the combat air patrol above Pearl Harbor. Fighters always buzzed overhead these days. Y-ranging gear should be able to give U.S. forces enough warning to scramble airplanes, but nobody seemed inclined to take chances.