Robert Adams - A Man Called Milo Morai

Moffa had known that his shot had been true to its mark—drunk or sober, his emotional state notwithstanding, the well-trained old soldier could hardly have missed at a range of four yards or less. Milo could still hear ringing in his ears the dead man’s admonition to “lay down! You dead!” And dead he should have been, well dead. So why was he not dead?

Careful examination of the back and the front of his torso, when once he got back to his quarters, had shown Milo only a slight indentation of about a half-inch diameter in the skin above his heart, this surrounded by discoloration that resembled a fast-fading bruise. On his back, a bit below the shoulder blade, was a larger, deeper dent—about an inch and a half—and a wider discoloration. However, when he showered the next morning, he had been hardly able to locate a trace of either of them, front or back. That he told no one of these oddities was partly because he hardly believed them himself and partly because his job just kept him far too busy for another visit to the surgeon.

Like some vast herd of huge beasts grazing the restless waves of the North Atlantic Ocean, the convoy of troop transports, supply ships and naval vessels sailed a course that was deliberately erratic, lest that course be guessed out by the wolflike packs of German submarines, the bane of wartime shipping. On front and rear and along the flanks of this convoy of men, materiel and armaments, speedy, hardworking destroyers flitted back and forth, with every crewman’s eye, every technological device aboard on the alert for the slightest trace of one of the feared submersible raiders of the seas. Should such a trace be suspected, it was the mission of these flankers to interpose their own lightly armored cockleshells between the attackers and the lumbering quarry, while others of their kind steamed to the supposed location of the foe and let off salvos of depth charges—steel drums filled with powerful explosive charges designed to create sufficient concussion to rupture the hulls of the submarines, thus drowning the crews or forcing the craft to rise to the surface, where shells from deck guns could sink them easily. Because of the dangers presented by the U-boats, because of the fact that despite all precautions, submarine-launched torpedos still found their marks, sinking or heavily damaging ships, killing or injuring men and sending to the bottom billions of tons of valuable equipment and supplies, each cargo ship was packed to utter capacity, and so too were the troop carriers, to such a point that the only men aboard who made the passage in any degree of comfort were the sailors and the higher-ranking officers. The troops were packed like so many canned sardines in a ‘tween-decks hot and thick with the reek of humanity, with no room for organized calisthenics and few possibilities for the make-work details traditionally used to keep units and individual soldiers out of trouble, their principal activities consisting mainly of endless gambling and even more endless bull sessions, interspersed with the occasional fight—a welcomed relief from boredom—and noncoms were hard pressed to prevent their troops from becoming just so many slothful, dirty, vicious beasts. They were able to maintain order, discipline and at least a degree of cleanliness only by dint of near-brutality.

So many men were crammed into the ship that only by shifts could they be allowed up into the fresh air topside, there to gather in clumps or to walk the narrow ways around and between the vehicles lashed to the decks; and even these few brief forays into natural light and clean, .crisp air were only allowed in daylight on clear, calm days without deckwashing seas, lest any of these landlubbers be lost overboard.

On such a day, a rare day for the season and the location—the sky of a silvery blue and utterly cloudless—the troopship plowed through a sea almost as calm-looking as a pond. Far away on either hand could be discerned other ships of the convoy, but to the naked eye these were merely large dots; only with magnification could details of them be seen. Headquarters and Headquarters Company of Milo’s battalion were taking their brief sojourn upon deck. Leaving his subordinates to maintain order and discipline among the troops, Milo had sought out a secluded spot—actually, in the cab of a truck—to converse and confer with his commander and old friend, Lieutenant Colonel Jethro Stiles.

“Milo, certain of the staff feel that we—I—ought to make regular inspection circuits down below decks. John Saxon demurs, but then he seldom agrees with much of anything the staff decides. What do you say?”

“I say John’s right… as usual, Jethro. Remember, he went to France on a troopship back in the Great War, so he knows just what kind of hell it is. No, best to let us no’ncoms handle it alone,” was Milo’s solemn reply.

Stiles regarded him narrowly. “That rough down there, is it?”

Clumps of muscles worked at the hinges of Milo’s clenched jaws. “Jethro, whoever designed that slice of purgatory down there was not only utterly sadistic but a certifiable lunatic, as well. How in hell are you supposed to keep up the morale and the self-respect of men who have to wallow, day in and day out, in their own filth? The so-called showers are an insult to the intelligence— the hot water lasts just seconds, you have to soap up fast as blazes before it turns into live steam, then you have to rinse yourself in cold, salt seawater, which leaves you feeling sticky, tacky all over; you may be clean, technically, but you sure as hell don’t feel clean.

“The latrines have round-the-clock lines of men waiting to use them, and what with the cases of seasickness and diarrhea and whatnot, a lot of the men in those lines are unable to wait as long as necessary, so there are mop details at work damn near any fucking time or place you look.

“The men are without exception bored, damnably uncomfortable, irascible and getting stiffer by the hour from a lack of decent exercise. Classes are an unfunny joke. They nod and sleep through them.”

“Why don’t they sleep at night, Milo?” demanded Stiles.

“My God, Jethro,” Milo expostulated in heat, “you saw those racks down there before the troops moved in, didn’t you? There’s only a foot or less of space between each one even when they’re empty; At night, a man has to slide in either on his back or on his belly, because after he’s in, there’ll be no room for him to turn over all night long. The only thing they wear at night is dog tags and jockstraps, and still they stream sweat. A man would have to be utterly exhausted to sleep under those conditions, Jethro, and they have nothing to do to exhaust them and no room to do it in.

“So under every light there’s an all-night poker game or crap shoot, and the noise they generate just adds to the echoing snores of the lucky few who have been able to sleep. We feel it would be most unwise to try to break the games up, for at least when the men are gambling-the nights away, they’re not contemplating the wretched conditions under which they’re forced to live, the swill they’re expected to eat, their complete helplessness inside the fucking steel torpedo target, their sexual frustrations, the nonavailability of booze and beer or even fucking Cokes, the suffering to be ended, maybe, by their deaths where we’re sailing to.

“One of the few good things I can report is that there’s been damned little theft reported down there, but that’s most likely just because there’s simply no place to hide anything and a thief would be found out very quickly … and probably killed or seriously injured on the spot, despite us NCOs. As it is, for the best we can do or try to do, the fights down there are frequent and vicious. We’ve locked up issue weapons, bayonets and every other item that looked like it could be used to kill or badly incapacitate a man, of course, but as you and I both have reason to realize, fists and feet and fingers and knees and elbows can do more than enough damage if a man knows precisely how to utilize them in fighting … and that’s exactly what instructors have been drilling into most of those men since their basic training.”