A makeshift mess hall had been erected, and cooks were at work preparing the meal. There were no tables — each man had to sit on the ground to eat — and everyone kept his rifle within reach. That was OK, considering the wonderful smells that greeted them.
Steele explained that the supplies for their holiday meal had come from an air drop. Again, it was a testimonial to the miracle of the American supply line juggernaut that the troops on Leyte were soon eating roasted turkey, glazed ham, real mashed potatoes, stuffing, and canned string beans. Each man got a slice of apple pie made with canned apples. The boys had even been allotted one beer each to wash it all down, or all the fresh coffee they wanted. The nondrinkers did quite well trading their beer for extra pie.
“Can you believe this, fellas?” Philly asked in wonder, balancing a heavily laden plate on his knees as he settled onto the ground. “It sure as hell beats canned lima beans and ham.”
Philly was referring to the least favorite “flavor” of C ration. More than one man would return from the Pacific vowing to never allow a lima bean anywhere near his plate.
“It’s sure somethin’,” Deke agreed. His belly growled at the sight, but staring down at the plate, he felt overwhelmed. The mess crew had loaded his plate with more food than he could eat. Their stomachs had all shrunk after weeks and months of living on so little. Philly hadn’t been far wrong when he had kidded Deke about being able to find shade under a blade of grass. Deke was now as lean as a bayonet, and just as sharp and hard.
He took a mouthful of mashed potatoes swimming in butter, closing his eyes as the taste took him back home to better times, before they had lost his family’s mountain home to greedy bankers, when they had still been a family. His father had died in an accident at the sawmill where he’d been working in an attempt to keep the family farm from going under. His mother had died not long after that, most likely of a broken heart and broken dreams. Now it was just he and his sister, Sadie, who was a female police officer in Washington, DC.
He raised a forkful of mashed potatoes in a silent toast. Merry Christmas, Sadie. He hoped that his sister was enjoying her own Christmas dinner, and hopefully not eating it alone. Then again, Sadie was a loner, just like him.
He forced himself to eat another bite because it was so delicious, but he was already getting full. He ended up just looking down at his plate, feasting with his eyes, thinking, Ain’t it a wonder?
His thoughts wandered. When other men recalled the holidays, they spoke of things like presents under the Christmas tree or sled riding. He just recalled it only ever being the four of them, the sole present being an orange, its color almost glowing unnaturally in the winter drabness of the Cole family’s modest home. At other times there might not be enough to eat, but not on Christmas. Ma had cooked buckwheat pancakes and bacon on their flat-topped potbelly stove, the pancakes drizzled with molasses, and Deke had thought himself a prince.
Looking around, he could see that Philly was eating like it was his job, pausing just long enough to shoo the flies away. Nobody dwelled on the thought that these same flies might have been crawling on the Japanese dead just beyond the tree line.
The feast also drew the newspaper reporters and photographers who had been embedded with the troops, covering the war.
One of those reporters caused a stir. He was an older man — much older than the soldiers, at least — with a narrow, hangdog face and a sad smile as he listened to the GIs tell their stories. He was skinny to the point of looking unhealthy. A cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth.
“I’ll be damned, it’s Ernie Pyle!” Philly declared. “Hey, Ernie, put me in your story!”
Pyle was famous among the GIs and well loved for telling their side of things with his folksy, everyman style of writing. He had done just that in Europe and was now covering the Pacific, although he was something of a latecomer to the war in this part of the world.
Part of his appeal was that he was old enough to be their father, and there was something fatherly in his attitude toward the soldiers. It might be his job to write about them, but it was clear that Pyle gave a damn while he was doing it — and then some.
The reporter made his way over to where Patrol Easy sat, and they made room for him on the bench.
“Where you from, soldier?” Pyle asked, his pencil poised over his notebook.
“Philadelphia,” Philly said, clearly delighted by the thought of getting his name in the newspaper.
Carefully, Pyle wrote down their names and hometowns.
“Mr. Pyle, you want some of this?” Deke asked. “I reckon my stomach is so shrunk up that I can’t eat it all.”
Pyle noticed the scars on Deke’s face but didn’t look away. Even the journalist in him was too polite to ask where Deke had gotten them. He seemed touched by Deke’s offer to share his meal. He thanked him but shook his head. “You just do the best you can.”
One of the new guys surprised them by producing a bag of pecans. “Now you can say you’ve had everything from soup to nuts with this dinner,” the GI said with a grin. Nobody bothered to point out that there hadn’t been any soup. He shook the bag, then shared it around. “It’s hard to believe I was on the farm pruning these trees two years ago.”
“If you’re lucky, you’ll be back on that farm two years from now — maybe,” Philly said.
Later, Pyle would describe that moment for his readers and add a few insights: “That’s the way conversation at the front goes all the time. The minutes hardly ever go by without some nostalgic reference to home, how long you’ve been away, how long before you get back, what you’ll do first when you hit the States, what your chances are for returning before the war is over.”
Finally, the famous reporter straightened up. “Merry Christmas, boys,” he said. “Do me a favor and keep your heads down.”
CHAPTER THREE
For the most part, the town had been cleared of the enemy and Patrol Easy got some decent sleep for once. Their full bellies helped. By the next day, they had new orders. Lieutenant Steele explained that he would be leading a squad to hunt the enemy in the jungles and hills surrounding the base. He seemed glad to have shed his duties as a platoon leader to focus on leading these scouts and snipers. The veterans of Patrol Easy didn’t bother to learn the names of the new guys. There would be time for that if the new guys made it through the first couple of days.
“The plan is to bring the fight to the enemy before they get organized enough to hit the base,” Steele explained. “You might say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
“More like an ounce of lead,” Philly muttered.
By now the veterans of Patrol Easy knew all too well what bringing the fight to the enemy meant. It involved creeping down the jungle trails and across the low hills, stalking the enemy. Deke and Danilo took point, leading the way into the forest. Philly trailed behind them.
For this patrol, they would be heading deep into the hilly terrain. The trees thickened, and the ground grew steeper. Soon they were all panting and sweating with the effort of climbing the hill. Clouds of gnats appeared, sticking to their skin and flying into their eyes.
“Do you think this hill has got a name?” Philly wondered.
“To hell if I know,” Deke replied. “I could think of a couple ideas.”
“How about this? We’ll name the hill after the first guy that gets killed.”
“That’s a hell of a way to be remembered,” Deke replied. “Believe me, I’m in no hurry to have a hill named after me, if that’s what it takes.”
Philly’s suggestion came from the fact that it was common practice to name geographic locations after the men who had died fighting on them. Across the Pacific there were places that soldiers had given names to, such as Anton’s Gulch, Sergeant Darby Hill, or Lefty’s Mountain. These unofficial names couldn’t be found on a map, but they were written in the hearts of the soldiers. Whether it was the 25th Infantry Division or the 77th, they all had similar landmarks named for men who had lost their lives in these places.
Deke decided it wasn’t all that different from back home, where the mountains and gaps — a low crossing point in the hills — usually took the name of some man or event that would have otherwise been forgotten, such as Dead Indian Creek or Frenchman’s Gap. Attached to those names was usually some legend that had been passed down through the years. Those names had staying power, but he wasn’t sure that would be the case once the US Army packed up and left this part of the world.
They continued climbing, coming to a dirt road that led to higher ground. The road was so steep and slick with mud that a group of soldiers struggled to get vehicles up the hill. This was a problem for the supply trucks and jeeps being used to carry away the wounded. Deke could hear mortars and small-arms fire in the distance, indicating that there were still plenty of Japanese soldiers around. Each footstep carried them closer to the fighting.
They saw that the soldiers had rigged a system to get the vehicles up the hill by lashing a gasoline-powered winch to a thick tree near the top. A heavy rope was tied to the bumper of whatever vehicle was trying to ascend the road. The winch kicked in, snorting and belching smoke as soldiers strained at the corners of the vehicle, adding their muscle power to get the vehicle up the incline.
The winch was a large, hulking machine, its metal body caked with mud and grease. It must have been a bear to get it into place at the top of the steep incline. As it kicked in, its gears turned and smoke poured from its exhaust pipes, adding to the already thick air of the jungle.