Harry Turtledove - End of the Beginning

He had that straight. Damage control was on the ball. They’d kept the fire from spreading, and now they just about had it out. But Bunker Hill ’s flight deck was still a mess. They would have to shove six or eight planes over the side. They would have to repair the planking on the flight deck, too; some of it had caught fire. The air stank of gasoline and motor oil, of burnt paint and burnt rubber and burnt wood. And there was one more odor, too, one that made spit flood into Joe’s mouth before he realized what caused it, and then made him want to be sick. The smell of burnt meat would never be the same for him again.

PLATOON SERGEANT LES DILLON CROUCHED in a shell hole just north of the Wheeler Field runways. The Japs had machine-gun nests on the other side of those battered cement strips. Before long, somebody who didn’t have to do it was going to order the Marines to cross that bare ground. And they would, too, or die trying. Les didn’t want to be one of the poor bastards who died trying.

He heard the sweetest sound in the world: radial engines up in the air screaming their heads off. Hellcats strafed the Jap positions. He watched those.50-caliber rounds chew up the grass over there. Then he heard different engines: Louis Armstrong instead of Benny Goodman. The Dauntlesses put bombs down right on the money and then roared away to get more ordnance and do it again.

Crossing the killing ground still wouldn’t be easy. Any Jap who wasn’t dead or maimed would be up and shooting the minute the Marines came out of their holes. Even the ones who were maimed would hang on to a rifle or a grenade. They weren’t about to let you take them alive. That was fine with Les Dillon. He didn’t want to take them alive anyhow.

A whistle sounded. Les grimaced. This was it-the moment he hadn’t been waiting for. “Up, you bastards!” Captain Bradford yelled. “Are we Marines or not?”

That flicked the men’s pride. The company commander had to know it would. Les sprang up and ran forward. He hunched over as low as he could and dodged from side to side. All of that did more good than snapping your fingers to keep the elephants away, but not a whole hell of a lot.

And the planes hadn’t cleaned out all the Japs. He’d figured they wouldn’t. Marines fell. Others flopped down to fire back. An ice-blue tracer snapped past Dillon’s head. His first thought was of a firefly on benzedrine. His next was that the round had come much too close to punching his ticket. He should have thought that first, but your mind did crazy things sometimes.

Then he was in among the Japs. Some of them were real infantrymen; others, by their clothes, groundcrew for airplanes. They all fought like madmen; the next Jap with any quit in him that Les saw would be the first. But the Marines had no quit in them, either. More of them rushed up to help their buddies. The Japanese didn’t get much in the way of reinforcements; Les had the feeling the ones fighting here were the last Japs standing for quite a ways.

And then they weren’t standing any more. The Marines still on their feet finished off any of the enemy who still twitched. Word about the Opana POW massacre had got out. The Marines hadn’t been any more inclined to take prisoners than the Japs were to be captured even before it did. Now… Maybe they’d follow a direct order to try to capture some enemy soldiers for interrogation. Then again, maybe not. Had the Japs won the fight, Les knew a bullet through the head was the best he could hope for. Things went downhill from there, and in a hurry, too.

Three Sherman tanks rumbled and snorted across the ruined runway. Les eyed them with a mixture of appreciation and disgust. He was glad to see them-he was always glad to see tanks, because they took so much pressure off the foot soldiers-but he would have been gladder if they’d shown up an hour earlier. They could have made taking this position a hell of a lot easier.

He wasn’t the only one with that feeling, either. “Nice of you to join us, girls,” a Marine lisped, giving the tankers a limp-wristed wave.

“They didn’t want to get their hair mussed,” another grimy, unshaven leatherneck added, even more swishily than the first one. Les started to giggle. He didn’t know why, but listening to tough guys acting like a bunch of fruits always broke him up. Some fairies got into the Marines. When they were found out, they left the Corps a lot faster than they’d joined it. He’d seen that happen a few times, in China and back in the States. Some of the men who got bounced were losers for other reasons, too. Others would have made pretty fair Marines if they weren’t queer.

He laughed again, on a different note. For all he knew, there was a faggot or two in the company now. As long as a man didn’t advertise it-some did-how were you supposed to know?

Even while such thoughts occurred to him, he got down in a hole some Jap didn’t need any more. You didn’t want to be on your feet and upright when the Japs could start taking potshots at you any second. The tank crewmen, meanwhile, yelled insults back at the Marines who fought on foot. One bow gunner wanted to jump out of his tank and kick ass. The driver on that tank restrained him. He was probably lucky: ground pounders were likely to be in better shape and meaner than guys who had armor plate to hold the war at bay.

“Enough!” Les yelled. “Everybody-enough! We’ve got Japs to kill. You want to beat on each other, wait till we take Honolulu.”

That name had enough magic to calm people down. Marines who’d been to Hawaii before thought of Hotel Street. Those who hadn’t didn’t, but what they had in mind was something like Hotel Street. Honolulu was the Holy Grail. There were all sorts of incentives for throwing out the Japs, booze and pussy not the smallest among them.

“Where do we go now, sir?” someone asked Captain Bradford.

“I don’t have more orders yet,” the company commander answered. “We did this. Now we wait and see what happens next.” The men knew what to do about that. They settled themselves in the entrenchments they’d just won. Here and there, they heaved Japanese corpses out of them. They lit cigarettes. Some of them opened K-ration cans. As long as they weren’t going anywhere right away, they’d make themselves as comfortable as they could. Hurry up and wait was supposed to be an Army joke, but the Marines lived by it, too.

Dutch Wenzel came up to cadge a Camel from Les. “They don’t put cigars in the K-rats,” Wenzel said mournfully. “You still alive? Hadn’t seen you for a while, so I started to wonder.”

“Well, I was the last time I looked,” Dillon answered. “I wondered about you, too. Don’t see somebody for a coupla hours, you figure maybe he stopped one with his chest.”

“These Japs…” Wenzel bent close for a light, sucked in smoke, and held it as long as he could. Les wondered if he was going to finish that after he finally blew it out. Then he decided it didn’t matter.

Among the Marines, that was practically a complete sentence all by itself. Dutch exhaled a gray cloud and said, “You know, you can get damn near anything for cigarettes from the people here. They been without since they smoked the last of what they had. They go down on their knees to thank you if you give some away.”

“Yeah?” Les leered. “You get one of these gals to go down on her knees for you? I heard of being hung like a horse, but I never heard of being hung like a Camel.”

Wenzel made a horrible face, but he said, “I bet you could get sucked off for cigarettes, no shit. Tell you something-I think I’d rather get blown than lay most of these women. They’re so goddamn scrawny, it’d be like laying a ladder.”

Les nodded. All the civilians on Oahu were skinny. Even the Japs were skinny, and they’d had better rations than the locals. Just the same… “You’ve heard about the prisoners at that Opana place, and the ones our guys rescued down by Honolulu? Those poor mothers weren’t just skinny. They were fucking starving to death for real. Goddamn Japs have a lot to answer for.”