David HealeySamurai & Snipers
“My country kept the faith. Your capital city, cruelly punished though it be, has regained its rightful place — citadel of democracy in the East.”
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
Deacon Cole kept a wary eye on the trees, looking for any sign of the enemy. The Japanese troops that had escaped the fall of Ormoc and then Palompon had retreated into the Filipino forest, using the jungle shadows for cover as they picked off the Americans traveling the roads. It never ceased to amaze him how one enemy soldier with a rifle could harass an entire company of infantry. No wonder the enemy was proving so hard to beat.
“You see anything?” Philly whispered beside him.
“Just keep your eyes open,” Deke replied. “They’re in those trees, all right, sure as a hound has fleas.”
He felt an itching between his shoulder blades as if a target had been pinned there. The unrelenting combat was finally getting to him, the constant tension wearing on him like a millstone grinding corn, leaving him feeling thin. He pushed back the brim of the bush hat that he’d gotten from a wounded Australian back on Guam and wiped sweat off his forehead before it dripped into his eyes. A few rivulets of sweat ran like rivers through the rough landscape of scars etching one side of his face and neck.
Deke and Philly were part of Patrol Easy, scouts and snipers whose job it was to escort this convoy and do what they could to discourage Japanese snipers — and not get themselves killed in the process. Patrol Easy was made up of a motley group who never would have come together anywhere but the army, Deke thought.
Though Deke was the best shot of the bunch, they all had their own skills and talents that united their unlikely crew. Philly was a damn good spotter who always had Deke’s back. Rodeo hauled the radio for Lieutenant Steele, who might’ve been the oldest lieutenant in the Pacific. Their Filipino guide was a tough jungle fighter named Danilo. Yoshio was their Nisei interpreter and the most erudite of the bunch, always with his nose in a paperback novel. From time to time, they were joined by Private Egan and his war dog, Thor.
Patrol Easy had been fighting together since Guam and had made the landing at Red Beach, near Palo, in a hailstorm of enemy fire that greeted the American arrival in the Philippines. From there they had been grinding their way across the island of Leyte.
Over the last few weeks, one by one the Americans had cleaned out the enemy’s pillboxes and concrete batteries on Leyte. Most of these fortifications had been built using Filipino slave labor. These fortifications and their defenders gradually had been eliminated — blown up, burned out, or shot to pieces. More than a few GIs and Filipino fighters had died in the process. They had paid dearly for each fortification destroyed.
But it hadn’t been enough. It turned out that for the enemy, the green jungle was the only fortress needed. Now their convoy was making its way through this deadly jungle, the soldiers escorting supply trucks making their way from the coast to the inland towns that the GIs had wrested from the Japanese.
Under different circumstances, the forested hills and sunny open fields would have been a pleasant place to explore. But now, the country that they passed through was littered with signs of war, the worst being the bodies of innocent Filipino civilians who had been murdered by the Japanese. The bodies were mostly those of women or older men, bayoneted or shot at close range.
There was no apparent reason for the killings other than a thirst for violence. These civilians weren’t guerrilla fighters, and they certainly had nothing worth stealing. No, the murders were simply another sign of the enemy’s penchant for cruelty and revenge against the civilian population. If the average GI had been hanging on to some thread of compassion toward his enemy, the sight of those torn and bloody civilian victims had broken it. Any Japanese they captured tended to have a short life expectancy. In contrast, the Americans did everything they could to avoid harming civilians.
For now, the enemy still held the upper hand, firing from cover at the convoy. The GIs fired back, but the enemy remained frustratingly elusive.
It had been like this all morning. As the sun rose, the air grew muggy. The convoy moving from Palompon to the American outpost near Valencia crept at a snail’s pace along the winding road that ran beside a narrow, rain-swollen jungle river no more than twenty-five feet wide. If the river had a name, Deke couldn’t remember it and didn’t much care. The river cut through the countryside for many miles before eventually flowing into the sea near Palompon, which until recently had been a Japanese supply port. The port was now in American hands, and supplies were being brought inland.
Normally the river was more like a stream, rocky and shallow enough that soldiers could easily wade across. Deke had seen it in this stage, and it reminded him of the upper reaches of the Clinch River, which he was familiar with back home.
But recent rains had transformed the river into a raging torrent in places. They had even seen the drowned carcass of a cow float past in the swift brown water. The terrain on both sides of the river was rugged and hilly, covered in dense forest. The meandering road was the only practical way to cross this territory. The enemy knew this all too well.
They had lost at least a half dozen men so far to enemy snipers. The frustrated GIs had started hosing down the jungle with the machine gun mounted on one of two M8 armored cars spaced between the trucks like chunks of meat between the vegetables on a shish kebab skewer. The M4 Sherman tank at the head of the convoy used its own .30 caliber Browning machine gun to discourage the Japanese. But the bursts of machine-gun fire did little more than eat up ammo without having much effect on the enemy. The Japanese just kept their heads down, then picked off another target once the suppressing fire stopped.
Even Lieutenant Steele was started to show signs that the random Japanese attacks were getting to him. Just a minute ago, he had turned and fired several rounds from his 12-gauge combat shotgun into the underbrush, pumping out the hulls that went spinning away into the mud. The military hulls were made of brass because the typical waxed paper shotgun shells that were familiar to hunters swelled in the humidity and jammed the gun.
“What are you shooting at, Honcho?” Philly asked.
“Thought I saw something in those bushes,” the lieutenant muttered. He shoved fresh shells into his shotgun.
He preferred to be called Honcho by his men because being addressed by his rank or as “sir” was a surefire way to be targeted by the enemy. Considering that the word came from a Japanese term for a squad leader, the joke was on the enemy.
The tall, taciturn lieutenant had lost an eye on Guadalcanal and now wore an eye patch that Deke had crafted for him out of scrap leather. Honcho’s hair was touched with gray and his men figured that he had pulled some strings not only to avoid being sent home after losing an eye but also to remain a mere first lieutenant. Being a captain meant more headaches. He was more than content to command their squad of scouts and snipers.
Shotgun at the ready, Honcho moved off to check on the rest of the convoy.
“Dammit, we’re sitting ducks out here,” Philly grumbled. He walked a few paces behind Deke, his own rifle at the ready. They both knew that Deke was the better shot, but that didn’t stop Philly from needling him about his marksmanship from time to time. Because Philly was Philly, and Deke’s closest buddy in the army, maybe even in the world, Deke put up with it. “How can we fight the bastards if we can’t even see ’em, huh? This is a suicide mission.”
“I’ve got news for you, city boy. Life is a suicide mission,” Deke said. “Keep your head down and your eyes open.”
They were maintaining their “dime” — keeping a distance about ten feet apart to lessen the chances that a burst of fire from the jungle would take them both out. Deke heard the crack of a rifle. Another GI sprawled unmoving in the mud at the side of the road.
“Sniper!” someone shouted, and once again the GIs scrambled off the road like ants, taking shelter in ditches or under the trucks. They weren’t quick enough. Another shot rang out, and another man went down, wounded. A medic crawled over to help him.
Deke hid behind a truck tire and swung his rifle in the direction from where his keen hearing told him the shots had originated, but all he saw through the sniper scope was a wall of green, so dense that it looked as if a bullet wouldn’t pierce the veil. He couldn’t see anything to shoot at.
He felt a shiver along his spine, wondering again if he was in the enemy’s sights at this very moment. That imaginary target itched on his back. Dammit. He much preferred being the hunter to being the hunted.
“Did you see where that shot came from?” Philly wanted to know. “I swear, this convoy is nothing but target practice for the Japanese.”
“These snipers are crafty,” said Yoshio as he studied the brush that hid the enemy. “We need to outsmart them.”
“When you figure out how to do that, Yoshio, let me know,” Deke said.
Yoshio could move as silently as any of them when he needed to. The sight of the Japanese American in his GI uniform still brought stares of suspicion, like he might be an infiltrator rather than a soldier in the United States Army. But Deke and the rest of Patrol Easy had come to trust Yoshio with their lives because he had proved his bravery more than once.