Robert Adams - A Man Called Milo Morai

Midgett shook his head dubiously. “Funny, I ain’t been wrong often, and I coulda swore you were both off sers. But anyway, y’all better git on iny telephone to your base, and real quick, too. ‘Cause this mornin’ the fuckin’ Japs has bombed Oahu in the Hawaiian Islands. The fuckers caught the whole damn Pacific Fleet bottled up in Pearl Harbor, it sounds like on my shortwave radio. Feller I was talkin’ to said all they could see from his place was black, oily smoke and fire way up inta the sky, them and the fuckin’ Jap planes, was all.

“He said he was yet to see airy a one of our planes, so the Nip fuckers must’ve bombed the aerodromes afore any of ours could git up to fight the slant-eyed bastids. Afore he signed off, he allowed as how he ‘spected to see Japs on the fuckin’ beaches afore night. Don’t thishere shit beat all, boys?”

The chaos to which Milo and Jethro returned was indescribable. At the hour of the Japanese sneak attack on the Hawaiian Islands, over half of the noncommissioned cadre and some two-thirds of the officer complement of the training division had been off post to lesser or greater distances. Although their post was thousands of miles from the Pacific Coast, although the only local Jap of whom anyone knew was the post commander’s gardener, an unknowing witness to the pandemonium would never have guessed the truth.

During the two days it took Milo and Jethro to get back, the gates were become mazes of entrenchments, sandbagged strongpoints, machine-gun nests manned by edgy, sleepless, confused men with itchy trigger fingers. Sentries walked the perimeters, while details laid out barbed-wire entanglements just beyond those perimeters, unreeled and laid commo wire for field telephones, dug and roofed over revetments or excavated tank traps and laid land mines. Three-quarter-ton and the new quarter-ton scout cars mounting machine guns on pedestals moved here and there along the perimeters slowly, men with binoculars scanning both ground and skies lest they too be surprised by the treacherous yellow enemies.

Fortunately for all concerned, Milo still was wearing his identity plates strung around his neck under his mufti, but Jethro was not, and not until a Military Police staff sergeant who knew them both of old was summoned would the grim-faced, tommy gun-armed guards allow them to drive onto the base.

In B Company’s orderly room, the CQ, a buck sergeant named Schrader, all but wept openly at sight of the two of them. When he had rendered his report to Stiles, Milo demanded, “Where’s your runner, Emil?”

“Some captain from up division come and took him and damn near ever other swingin’ dick in the whole fuckin’ area, Sarnt Moray. Said he needed bodies for to man the p’rimeter. That was Sunday afternoon, late, and ain’t none of them fuckers come back, neither, not even to eat or sleep or shower or change clothes or nuthin’. I done been here since then all by my lonesome, checkin’ fellers in and watchin’ them all get dragged off for details and all, and I guess I’d’ve plumb starved to death if old Sarnt Trent hadn’ sent me chow and all over here whenever he thought to.”

“Okay, Emil, you did well, all things considered, you did very well,” stated Jethro, clapping a hand on the haggard man’s shoulder and smiling. “Now you shag ass back to your quarters and shower and get yourself some sack time, at least twenty-four hours of it, before you report back here to me. Now, go!”

When once the exhausted man with his dark-ringed, bloodshot eyes and his three days’ growth of beard had staggered out in the direction of his barrack, the two noncoms began to go through the stack of messages.

“The captain called in Sunday, about the same time we did,” Jethro announced. “He should have been back from New Orleans by now, shouldn’t he?”

“Maybe not.” Milo shook his head. “Not if he was driving over the same kinds of roads we were, and his old Ford isn’t a match for your car, either, Jethro. He might well have had a breakdown,in some backwater without a telephone or a wire.”

At that moment, the telephone jangled. Both grabbed for the receiver, but Stiles reached it first. “B Company, Sergeant Stiles speaking, sir.” Then he smiled faintly and visibly relaxed.

“Hello, James … ahh, Captain Lewis, sir. What’s our status? Odd that you should ask me that, sir. Sergeant Moray and I have just driven in from South Carolina to find that someone from up at division has taken it upon himself to strip this company of every man with the exception of cooks, first-three-graders and the company CQ. As of this moment, there are no officers, two master sergeants, one tech sergeant, one buck sergeant and three cooks in all of B Company.”

He fell silent for only a moment, then exclaimed, “ Whaat? My God, James, you can’t be serious. That bad, is it? All right, all right, you can borrow Milo, but only if you help me get back some of my other men from whoever has them just now. War or no war, the last I heard there were inductees due in here on Wednesday, Thursday, latest, and my cadre are needed here, in the company area, one hell of a lot more than squatting in a trench somewhere out on the post perimeter. Besides, does any officer or man really think the Japanese are going to assault us here within the next day or so? Doesn’t it stand to reason they’ll hit California or Washington State first? And the last time I consulted a map, James, California was over two thousand miles from here.”

He paused once more, and Milo could hear Captain James Lewis’ familiar voice, though not his words. Then Stiles spoke again. “Yes, I understand, James. Milo will be over as soon as he can get into uniform and drive there. Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

In the existing paucity of officers, Captain James Lewis ranked high enough to need very little bluster to free the impressed cadremen of his and Milo’s training battalion from the guard and labor details scattered here and there about the periphery of the post. And those men —tired, hungry, sleepless, filthy and shivering with cold —were every one more than happy to clamber aboard the trucks and be borne back to hot meals, showers, clean clothes and their bunks.

By the time Milo had offloaded his company’s men before the mess hall and dispatched the trucks back to the motor pool, then reported back to the orderly room, Captain Muse and two of the other officers were back and affairs were gradually returning to as close to the old peacetime state of normalcy as any of them would again see.

With the dastardly attack on Pearl Harbor and the other military facilities on Oahu, the former flood of trainees became a virtual tsunami , as patriotism, rage and the declaration of war coincided to swell the ranks with not only the hapless draftees, but enlistees by the scores of thousands, the very cream of the citizenry answering the call to the colors of their now-beset land.

Given better pickings from which to choose, the training units began to flesh out, to replace stopgap personnel with really effective cadremen and, consequently, to turn out a far better grade of graduate from the basic training courses. But the great and too-rapid growth also necessitated the quick establishment of more training camps and units. James Lewis was advanced to major and sent to take command of a training battalion somewhere in a new camp in Pennsylvania. Captain Muse was given similar treatment, and all of the other company officers were promoted and shipped out. For all of his refusals, Jethro Stiles soon found himself commanding B Company with the silver bars of a first lieutenant on his shoulders. Milo moved up to first sergeant, with Emil Schrader, now a tech sergeant, as his field first.

Schrader hailed from Kansas and was a son of immigrants from Brandenburg. Though American-born and -bred, he spoke better and more grammatical German than English. Milo often chatted with him in that tongue … and that was where the trouble started.