Days of Infamy

“Right.” Joe felt silly. Part of him recognized that this was a piece of the celebration, too. The rest was embarrassed all the same. He worked conscientiously at the beer. He supposed one was okay. If he had more than one, he didn’t think he’d be able to see straight for his afternoon classes. He had enough trouble keeping up in navigation the way things were.

When he went to the mess hall for lunch, Orson Sharp all but waylaid him. “How did it go?” his roomie demanded.

“I got up,” Joe answered. “I got down. I’m still here. I bounced the landing a little, but I’m still here.”

“All right!” Sharp grabbed his hand and squeezed it and pumped it up and down. Like everything else about the Mormon, his enthusiasm was perfectly genuine. He’d soloed the week before; his competence was perfectly genuine, too. He seemed delighted to have company, even though Joe was competition for a precious slot on a carrier. “We may be the first room where both guys have soloed.”

“Yeah?” Joe hadn’t thought about that. “I guess maybe we are. Pretty neat. Maybe we’ll stay together when we switch squadrons, too.”

“I think we’re stuck with each other,” Sharp said. “We’ll probably make ace the same day.”

“Yeah!” This time, the word burst from Joe’s throat with savage enthusiasm. And then something else occurred to him. “When you soloed, did your instructor try to buy you a beer?”

“Sure.” Orson Sharp was anything but self-conscious.

“What did you do?” Joe asked.

“I had a glass of apple juice instead,” Sharp answered calmly. “He said it looked like beer from a little ways away, but that isn’t why I did it.”

“Why did you, then?” Joe inquired, fascinated by the way his roommate did what he thought he ought to do without worrying in the least about anybody else’s opinion. He wondered if he could have matched such self-assurance. He doubted it.

Sharp looked at him. “I like apple juice.”

Joe laughed out loud. “You break me up, buddy, I swear to God.”

“That’s nice.” No, nothing bothered Sharp. “Before too long, we’ll both be breaking up the Japs.”

“Yeah!” Joe said again.

THE LANDING CRAFT bobbed in the waves as it waddled through the Pacific toward the beach. Shells flew overhead. Lester Dillon remembered those freight-train noises only too well from the First World War. Along with the rest of the men in the clumsy landing craft, he bent down a little, as if that would help if one of those shells came down here instead of on the beach. Booms up ahead said the cruisers and destroyers doing the firing were rearranging the landscape pretty drastically.

Suddenly, the landing craft’s bottom grated on sand. The swabbies who were in charge of the ship as long as it was on the water unhooked the landing ramp at the bow. It thudded down, kicking up quite a splash as it did.

Captain Bradford was hitting the beach in this landing craft, too. “Come on, y’all!” he yelled, swarming forward. “Let’s go!”

“Move! Move! Move!” Dillon added, even louder. “The longer you hang around with your thumbs up your asses, the better the chance the Japs have of dropping one on a whole bunch of you.”

Marines raced out of the boat. Their boots thudded on the steel ramp. Clutching his rifle, Dillon ran for the beach, too. As soon as he got off the ramp, he went into the water more than halfway up to his knees. It was cold water, too. He swore as he splashed shoreward.

As soon as he got up onto the beach, he threw himself flat and aimed his Springfield, looking for targets. “Keep moving, men!” Braxton Bradford shouted. “Can’t let ’em pin us down here!”

Landing craft by the dozen were vomiting Marines onto the beach. All the officers and noncoms were screaming the same kinds of things. As Platoon Sergeant Dillon ran inland, he looked back over his shoulder. The destroyers and cruisers had ceased fire, but they were still out there, ready to drop shells on anybody who gave the leathernecks trouble.

Dillon caught up with the company commander. “How are we doing, sir?”

Bradford sprawled behind a bush going brown from lack of rain. “Well,” he drawled, “it’s a hell of a lot easier when they don’t shoot back.”

“Ain’t that the truth?” Dillon agreed. “This doesn’t look a hell of a lot like a Hawaii beach, either. Ocean’s sorta green, sorta gray, not blue like it’s supposed to be.”

“Damn near froze my feet when I went in, too,” Bradford said. “I remember the first time I went into the Pacific in California. Hell, it was a hot day, and there I was at the goddamn beach, so I charged right on into the water. A minute later, I charged right on out again, too. Damn near-damn near-froze my nuts off.”

“I believe it,” Dillon said. “Like you say, the weather can get hot, but the ocean never warms up.”

Bradford looked up to the sky. “Other thing is, we don’t have any of those goddamn Zeros strafing our asses here. If we can’t get air superiority-”

“Sir, if we can’t get air superiority, we’ll never make it to the beach, let alone off it,” Dillon said.

“Uh-huh.” The company commander nodded. Dillon had seen more optimistic nods. Hell, he’d felt more optimism himself. Zeros had proved much more effective than anything anybody had dreamt the Japs owned. From Pearl Harbor to Australia to Ceylon, they’d chewed up Wildcats and Buffaloes and Warhawks and Spitfires. Allied planes hadn’t done a whole hell of a lot of chewing back, either.

“Up to the flyboys,” Dillon said.

“Yeah.” Captain Bradford nodded again. “They reckon they can do it-and we get to go along for the ride and find out if they’re right.”

“That’s the sixty-four-dollar question, all right,” Dillon agreed. If the Japs kept control of the air over Hawaii… Well, Pearl Harbor had shown what air superiority was worth. And if it hadn’t, the sinking of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse and the disaster in the Philippines would have. It wasn’t a battleship world, not any more-carriers had more clout.

The Marines continued their advance inland. Dillon kept shouting to his men to be careful. He kept warning them that it wouldn’t be so easy when the real thing started. He kept reminding them that the Japs would shoot back, and nobody was doing any of that here. And he kept seeing that all his warnings were going in one ear and out the other. More than half the Marines he led hadn’t been born when that machine-gun bullet took a bite out of his leg in 1918. They didn’t know what being under fire was like. Live-fire exercises made them think they did, but those weren’t the real thing. Nobody shot to kill in live-fire exercises. The Japs, on the other hand, would be playing for keeps.

Dillon wasn’t worried that his Marines would turn tail when they came under fire. He wasn’t even worried that they would freeze up and not shoot back. He had absolute confidence in their courage. He did fear that too many of them would stop bullets because they leaped before they looked, or because they didn’t know what to look for before they leaped. A few hours-sometimes a few minutes-of real combat would teach a lot of those lessons. Sadly, he didn’t know anything else that would. Some of his Marines would get killed before they could learn, and that pained him.

Unlike a real amphibious assault, this one ended with a bus ride back down to Camp Elliott. Some of the men pointed to Camp Pendleton, where bulldozers and steam shovels and carpenters and masons swarmed. The big new base was going up lickety-split. Les Dillon remained glad he had nothing to do with it. The men on this bus with him-they were the ones who’d go into action first, and that was what he wanted to do himself.

Some of them were looking out across the Pacific instead of at the construction on land. His own eyes kept sliding west and south, too. A little more than two thousand miles away: that was where he wanted to be.