American Front

Knowing the Dakota was wounded ate at him, so much so that he burst out, "I'm afraid we're going to lose the goddamn war."

Hiram Kidde understood him perfectly. "Fleet's not go

"What's that?" Carsten said.

"Now that we're stuck here on the beach, we have to make like soldiers instead of sailors," Kidde answered.

"That's not all bad." Carsten pointed to the row on row of iron cots. "Nice to be able to get some sack time without Crosetti farting in my face from the top bunk. Chow's better, too, same as it always is when we're in port instead of steaming. But… yeah. I haven't been out of a ship for such a long stretch since I joined up. I don't much like it."

"Me, neither," Kidde said, "on both counts, and I been in the Navy damn near as long as you've been alive. Other thing is, when you're on a ship you aren't just spi

"Orders," Carsten said, making it a dirty word. "Somebody says you got to do it, you got to do it, never mind whether it makes sense."

"I'm damn glad you understand how that is, Sam, damn glad," Kidde said in a tone of voice that made Carsten realize he'd been betrayed -worse, that he'd just gone and betrayed himself. Smiling at how nicely the trap had worked, Kidde went on, "Got a lot of walks out there that need policing. Get yourself a broom and get to it."

"Have a heart, 'Cap'n,' " Sam said piteously. "You send me out in the sun for a couple hours here and they can stick an apple in my mouth and serve me up at the officers' mess tonight. I'll be cooked meat." He ran a hand along his arm, showing off his fair, fair skin.

"Grab a broom," Kidde said, all at once sounding much more like a chief petty officer than a buddy.

"I hope you screw Maggie Stevenson," Carsten said, and then, while Kidde was still blinking (any male human being who didn't want to screw Maggie Stevenson had to have a screw loose himself), he added, "Right after the guy with the chancre."

There were people who, when they said things like that, started fights. When Carsten said things like that, he got laughs. "You're a fu

Sam smeared his arms and his nose and the back of his neck with zinc ox ide ointment. He was unhappily aware that the stuff didn't do much good, but it was, or at least it might have been, better than nothing. He supposed that made up for the medicinal stink of the goop.

Resigning himself to baking, he went out, broom and dustpan in hand. The dustpan wasn't standard military issue; some ingenious soul had mounted it on the end of a broomstick, too, so Sam didn't have to bend down every time he swept something into it. He approved of that. He approved of any thing that made work easier, especially when it was work he had to do.

The walks were pretty clean. Even ashore, sailors were most of them neat people, carrying over the habits they'd picked up at sea. Whenever he came across a cigar butt or a crumpled-up empty pack of cigarettes or a scrap of pa per, he swept it into the dustpan with a muttered, "God damn the Marines."

He muttered his curses for two reasons. First, he didn't know whether Marines were actually responsible for the trash, though he would have bet on it: they weren't trained to neatness the way ordinary Navy men were. The other reason was that, even if he'd been right, some Marines walking by might have heard him, and they'd have beaten the stuffing out of him just as enthusi astically as if he'd been wrong.

Marines strolled through Pearl Harbor as if they owned the world. Marines acted that way even aboard ship. It drove Navy men crazy -but you had to be worse than crazy to want to mess with one of the hard-faced men in forest green. Even if you were a tough guy and you beat him, all of his buddies would come after you then, and they hung together a lot tighter than sailors did. Marines put Sam in mind of mean hunting dogs. You took them to where the game was, you pointed them at it, and you stood back and let them kill it. If you got in the way, they'd chew you up, too.

And so, when, after an hour or so of Sam's being out in the sun, a Marine walking past turned to his friend and said, "You smell something scorched?" Carsten kept on pushing his broom. Both Marines, themselves bronzed and fit-looking, laughed. He sighed. He couldn't do anything about the kind of skin he had except wish he were back in San Francisco, or maybe up in Seat tle. Seattle was a good town if you were fair. The sun hardly ever came out, and when it did it was a lot paler than the lusty fire in the sky above Pearl Harbor.

Thinking of things in the sky above Pearl Harbor, Sam sca

A couple of Navy men came by. They weren't off the Dakota; Carsten hadn't seen them before. He picked up snatches of their conversation-place names, mostly: "Kodiak… Prince Rupert… Victoria… Seattle."

Since he'd just been thinking wistfully of a cooler clime, he called after them: "What about Seattle?"

The two men stopped. "Nothing good," one of them answered. "The goddamn Japs have reinforced the limey fleet off British Columbia."

"You're right-that isn't good," Sam agreed. The places they'd mentioned made sense to him now. "They sailed up by way of Russian Alaska and then down along the west coast of Canada, did they?"

"That's what they did, all right, the bastards," the other sailor agreed unhappily. "On account of it, the North Pacific Squadron can't hardly stick its nose out of Puget Sound."

"You don't have to tell me about the Japs," Carsten said. "I was on the Dakota after they suckered us out of Pearl." The two strangers nodded sympathetically, for once at a predicament other than his sunburn. He went on, "You ask me, everybody in the whole damn Pacific had better watch out on account of the Japs. They're making like they're buddy-buddy with England, but if the limeys ever turn their backs on 'em, they'll get cornholed faster'n you'd believe. Us, too. I already seen that happen."

"We weren't out here yet when the Japs suckered you guys," one of the strangers said. He stuck out his hand. "Homer Bradley, off the Jarvis." He was sandy-haired but, to Carsten's a

"Dino Dascoli, same ship," his companion added. The Honolulu sun wouldn't faze him; he was as swarthy as Vic Crosetti.

Carsten shook hands with both of them and introduced himself. Then he explained how the Americans' dash after the fleet that had launched the aero plane had gone wrong, finishing, "As soon as we got torpedoed, it was easy to figure out what the hell we hadn't thought about. Next time, I hope we don't stick our dicks in the meat grinder that particular way."

"That's the truth," Bradley agreed. He studied Carsten's uniform. "You talk like a Seaman First, Sam, but you sort of sound like you think like an officer, you know what I mean?"

"Too damn much time on my hands, that's what it is, just like everybody else on the Dakota who isn't fixing her up," Sam said. "Nothin' to do but stuff like this or else sit around and play cards and shoot the breeze and think about things." He gri

His new acquaintances gri