Whistle

Chapter 5


THEY CAME IN JUST AT six o’clock. Behind them the sun was lowering in the west. It turned everything in front of them a reddish gold. The great red bridge with its great bellying bight of cable and flimsy-looking roadbed suspended under it, visible from miles away out at sea, was golden in the sun. So were the hills at both ends of it. It was indeed a golden gateway into America, its twin supports towering up. Time seemed to hang as the ship slid along, homing to it. Facing it, tough grizzled old troopers with years of service broke down. Restrictions limiting the open upper decks to officers had been removed and everyone who could hobble or crawl was up there on them. In the channel, the great stately bridge moved slowly, majestically toward them. As the ship passed under it, hooting its arrival blasts on the ship’s horn, the heads of the men craned back to look straight up at it and a ragged cheer went up. Inside the bridge was home ground, and they had finally reached it. Inside the channel, first Alcatraz and then beyond it Angel Island and Fort McDowell, the place where most of them had started their Pacific voyaging, separated themselves from the bay coast behind. Along the starboard the Embarcadero glittered. The ship curved, then turned in slowly toward it. Behind the docks Telegraph Hill and Nob Hill made rising curves. Hungry eyes studied every detail. This scene was about all of San Francisco and the bay area that any of them, almost without exception, would get to see. If the owners of the eyes had known that, they would have studied each detail even more closely. At the docks Army and civilian ambulances were waiting for them, and continued to roll in in a long line. As the ship nosed in, ship’s medical personnel began to move through the crowds of bathrobed men on the open upper decks, telling them to get below.

The main impression they got was one of enormous growth. Urban, industrial, maritime, civic. Even men who had only been gone six months, like Landers, thought they could see a difference. Whole new forests of smokestacks seemed to have sprouted. Industrial smoke seemed to have doubled. Shipping had tripled. Truck traffic had at least doubled. There were many more installations, and many more people, everywhere. To men who had been away one year, or two, or more, like Strange, it did not even seem the same city. Then they were whisked below, bundled ashore and hustled into the ambulances. From which they could see next to nothing. They were being moved around with all the ceremony of a stockyard delivery. Then, in a long string, aided by policemen and stopped traffic lights which halted all cross traffic, the ambulances headed for the Army’s Letterman General. They traveled in convoys of twenty and thirty, with sufficient distance between to let the backed-up cross traffic through. Some of them made four and five trips. A few of the men, seated by the ambulance rear windows, caught glimpses of a city.

Forty-eight hours later the vast majority of them were on their way east, or south, the bulk of them by train, a few, like the Air Force boy with dry gangrene, by plane.

One of the men the reprocessing was hardest on was Bobby Prell. Although he said next to nothing about it, Prell was in constant pain from his legs. The pull of the traction he was in assured that. In addition, the slightest movement of the ship transmitted itself through the weights on his feet up his legs to his shattered thighs. During the voyage, he had lived in mortal terror of a storm at sea. Fortunately, the weather had stayed fine.

From the moment the ship nosed into the dock, Prell feeling each particular bump in a series of shocks through his broken bones, to the moment he was laid out in a hospital car berth on the train east, Prell and his legs were taken out of traction twice, carted ashore, jounced across Frisco in a seemingly springless damned ambulance, moved twice in a rolling bed to different wards, rattled to the train station in another springless ambulance, hoisted through a hospital car window to his berth. Only sheer stubbornness had kept him from crying out a dozen times. But he had made up his mind he was not going to let anybody see him blubbering.

He had seen nothing of San Francisco, and he had had no desire to.

From the time he had been wounded and had got his squad back inside the lines, he had been carded, tagged and stamped, indexed and inspected, numbered and catalogued increasingly the closer he got to home and any kind of civilization. In certain of his worst moments, it seemed to him it was more important to them that they keep track of him and not lose him than that they keep him alive. It seemed to Prell there ought to be a better way to treat men who had given their life and limb for their country, but there didn’t seem to be any better way of handling it. If there was, nobody had figured it out. He had come almost to feel that he was actually a piece of that “living meat” the casualties on the ship jokingly so liked to refer to themselves as. But so far he had managed to keep his mouth shut about it.

He had already gone through two major operations, and been wired and screwed back together. And would apparently have to go through another, to get the wires and screws out of him. When the first group of doctors at Letterman examined him, one of the younger surgeons studied his file and whistled, then smiled with admiring disbelief the way a man might over a piece of brass sculpture hammered out by another. It gave Prell a certain thrill of pride.

Because Prell wasn’t fighting only to save his legs; he was fighting to save his life. He had already made up his mind that if they took off his legs, he was going to kill himself. He would shoot himself in the head. Or perhaps in the heart. He hadn’t decided which yet. But he certainly wasn’t going to go on living around the clock in a Veterans’ Hospital without any legs. Even if they took off only one of his legs, it would not be enough. He wouldn’t live with one leg, either. He didn’t have to do it, and he wasn’t going to. So the way Prell figured it, he wasn’t saving only just his legs. He was saving his whole life. And he wasn’t particularly ready to die yet.

So at Letterman the young surgeon’s reaction was a shot in the arm. It meant at the very least that there was still some hope. There was an indifferent impersonality in the admiring smile but that didn’t matter to Prell since he knew the surgeon was looking at him as a job of work. He had no way of knowing how hard Prell had fought, and how many times, to keep them from amputating. Prell did not tell him. He compressed his lips and kept his mouth shut again. Nor did he mention all the incredible, unbelievable pain all the moving around had caused him. Prell was playing his cards, the bad hand he had been dealt, as tight and as close to his shirt as he could, and was taking no chances. The enormity of the pain might be a point in favor of amputation. The surgeon, however, seemed to know. All Prell had in front of him now, he said, was the three-day train trip, and then soon they would begin to be able to tell. Only three days on the train, then he could rest. The reason they were sending him so far, to Luxor, Tennessee, was because not only did they have one of the best orthopedics leg surgery teams there, they also had about the best postoperative team in the country.

“I can do it standing on my head, sir,” Prell said cheerfully. But he was already sweating from the pushing and probing.

The doctor gave him back a funny, arrogant smile. “Let us hope you don’t have to,” he said, in a snobby superior way. Apparently he didn’t like brash confidence in potential amputees. Prell didn’t care, or even get angry, since this one wasn’t going to be making any of the crucial decisions. Through the sweat on his upper lip and forehead, he made himself grin.

It was, however, a lot easier to talk about the train trip than to do it. High physical pain that did not cease could over a long enough period be supremely tiring. To both the body and the spirit. It could drain the will away like an open sewer vent. The two days of movement from the ship to Letterman to the train had taken an enormous toll from him, more than he had guessed, and by the time he was finally deposited, weak and sweating, in his berth in the hospital car at the station, Prell could only look ahead with a kind of stunned unbelief to the idea of three whole days in a jouncing, swaying train.

When you were very sick or very bad hurt, your very consciousness seemed to withdraw into the deep inside of you, until you were no longer aware, except vaguely, of any life outside of you. Bit by bit you were pushed further back into yourself by pain until your will was reduced to one simpleminded, singleminded, dedicated thought, which in Prell’s case was that he would not cry out. He would not make a sound. He knew if he did, he would begin to holler “Mama!” Or start begging them to take him off before the train started, back to Letterman and amputate the goddamned legs. It was like those slugs in the jungle that pulled in their eyestalks and shrank when you stepped near them or touched them with a cigarette. Prell had not had a mama since he was eleven. And he did not intend to give up the only pair of legs he’d ever had.

Then, finally, even that thought left him. He simply lay, silent, waiting for them to start, driven back to his uttermost, most basic, bedrock consciousness of existence.

It was almost like a—a religious experience. That was the only word Prell could think of to use. He might as easily have said mystical, but mystical was not a word Prell used except in crossword puzzles. So instead he used religious, lamely. It was as though the pain alone by itself had made him drunk. As though the pain, by slowly but effectively sealing him off from other awareness, had turned him inward in a total, uninterruptible concentration as if he had passed through the outer yellow flame of a candle into its center, which was not hot but purple and cool. And in there with him in that cool center was an awareness of another presence. Somebody or some thing was in there with him. It, or she, or he (it was not a personality) did not do anything. It was not an added strength. It was not an aid. Nor was it a detriment. It was just there. Prell realized that what he missed most was Strange. Strange, or somebody from the company. And it made him angry. Angry that they were not with him, and angry that he needed them to be.

The medics had filled him with as much dope as they safely could before bringing him down, and Prell lay in a kind of delirious euphoria, more pain-induced than dope-induced, waiting for the jolt in his legs of the train starting, and thought about the company. And about his squad. And about their last patrol.

There were many ramifications. The patrol itself was the patrol. But everything after it had been added on to compound and complexify it. Prell imagined, in his rapturous state, that he could see through it all clearly now.

The patrol was the least part. Prell had no scruples or misgivings about the patrol. He had handled everything the best way he could. And no matter what anybody said, he had made no mistakes. The retreat with the dead and the wounded after they had been hit he had handled superbly. Just getting the dead out was a feat. Not many could have done it. And he had made f*cking damn sure he got the intelligence message back accurately. He had given it himself. It had saved the Division a lot of men two days later.

The squad he felt less good about. But any qualms he had were not qualms of conscience. Nobody liked to see their buddies they had lived with get killed and shot up in front of them. Nobody liked to command, then. But in a firefight men got wounded, and they got killed. It was enough testimony and evidence about his squad, to see how they had all made a special trip to come down and say good-by to him before he was flown out. He had got out of it with two dead and two wounded out of fourteen men, not including himself. Not many noncoms could have done as well.

All the rest of it had started afterward. With Winch. Or if not with Winch, with somebody else and Winch had picked up on it. Simple jealousy. As far as Prell was concerned that was what it was, jealousy. Although how anybody could be jealous of a poor son of a bitch about to lose both legs, Prell could not figure.

It had really started with the battalion colonel. He too had made a special trip down to see him before he was flown out. And it was squatting beside Prell’s cot in the big tent, with his aide and a couple of other men standing there to listen, that he had said he wanted Prell to know that he was going to recommend him for something. He didn’t know what yet, but something. Prell had been in too much pain and too worried about whether he was going to lose his legs to give it much attention. He had said he didn’t want any medal. But it had given him a certain thrill. He had thought, then, maybe a “V” Bronze Star, or maybe even a Silver Star.

Then it had been the regimental commander, at the New Hebrides Base Hospital. The Jap attack his patrol had forewarned them of, and the resulting battle, had brought enough casualties in the regiment that the regimental commander had decided to make a quick flying trip down to the New Hebrides to visit them. Beside Prell’s bed in the big ward he had said his own office was recommending Prell for the Distinguished Service Cross. He would, he said, have liked to have a celebration, but since that was impossible with Prell in bed he had brought along an Australian imperial quart of Scotch whiskey as a present. Since Prell couldn’t drink it, the American Naval nurse had taken it and kept it for him until after his second operation, when he could drink it. Or at least a part of it. After that he had become the prize pet pig of the hospital staff, the nurses, the ward boys, the doctors. And it was after that that the rumors went around the hospital that the Division was recommending him for the Congressional Medal. One of the nurses had told Prell. It could well have been that the regimental commander’s visit, and the Distinguished Service Cross recommendation, had helped him a lot with the doctors in his fight to keep his legs. Prell had certainly used his new notoriety to aid him when he could.

A DSC was not something to snort at. Prell did not honestly think he deserved a DSC. He had told the regimental commander he didn’t think he deserved it. Still, it would, as the regimental commander said, jokingly, look good up there on his chest alongside his two Purple Hearts. And Prell knew a Regular Army thirty-year soldier with a DSC could pretty much write his own ticket in any outfit he went to, after the war. As for the Congressional Medal, that was something in an entirely different category, and he simply put the rumor out of his mind. Prell was a conservative about decorations, and believed with the old-timers that if you were alive and there to receive it, you did not deserve any Medal of Honor. If he did not deserve a DSC, he certainly did not deserve any Medal of Honor. Besides, he was much too busy fighting with the doctors, and everybody, about his legs. The whole tiling had faded away, and had been forgotten. Until Winch appeared.

Prell had already heard that Winch was calling him a glory-hunter. Somebody had brought it down from New Georgia. Then Winch had appeared in Efate, not wounded, not even looking especially sick. And had started saying the same thing there. People were always quick to bring you that kind of news; they loved it. Winch was saying Prell had lost two of his squad killed, and two others badly wounded, because he was trying to earn himself a medal for killing General Sasaki. Fortunately, Johnny Stranger had arrived a week before Winch.

There was little Prell could do. About anything. Lying there trussed up like a chicken, in his plaster casts and ropes and weights. He certainly couldn’t get around much. Winch had come in to see him, once, just after he arrived. Winch almost had to. It was almost a necessity, if he didn’t want to create a serious scandal. They had just looked at each other. Then Winch had given his sneering smile, and sort of contemptuously offered his hand. Prell had had to decide whether to take it. All his instincts told him to say, “Go f*ck yourself.” But he had to decide whether it would look better to take it, or look worse. If he did not take it, he was afraid it would look as if Winch’s gossip and accusations were upsetting him. In the end he had taken it, shaken it once, and let go of it. After a just barely decent interval, and one question about his legs, Winch had left. Later, Prell wished he hadn’t taken the hand.

If there was anybody around anywhere who knew whether the Division was recommending Prell for the Congressional Medal, it would be Prell’s company commander up in New Georgia, and if the company commander knew, his 1st/sgt would certainly know, too. Prell literally would rather have died than ask Winch. Prell would not even mention it to Strange. Winch, if he knew, was not mentioning it to anyone in the Efate hospital.

Strange’s arrival at the hospital a week before Winch was a big lucky break for Prell. Prell could tell, just from the way Strange treated him, that back up in the company in New Georgia, at least, nobody was thinking badly of him. No matter what Winch was saying. Strange thought Prell was some kind of a dumb hero, or something. Strange was a big help.

But all of that was just extra stuff added on the top. The patrol itself was still the patrol.

Whenever Prell thought of his squad and the patrol, a kind of fluttering qualm of apprehension rose in his stomach. It was not a qualm of conscience. It was a spasm of responsibility, dread and helplessness—a simple reflex to cry out No! no! It verged on panic. He always wanted to cry No! no!—and always, crying No! no! did not help or was too late. Their individual portraits flashed across the front of his mind like in-motion close-ups on a movie screen. A head turning sideways to grin. A shoulder rising beside a smiling face in a gesture. Then the anguished but clearly focused mental pictures he had of the hurt ones, each man of them, would follow. Dead, or dying, or wounded. He would never lose those. That horrible, Godawful clank that had given them away. A canteen, it had sounded like.

They were not even Prell’s own squad. Prell had been moved to them when the original squad leader was shipped home sick. But he found little to improve on or change. They worked well together without him.

The mission was to patrol out and seek contact. A large Jap force had moved away from the center of the line in front of Munda and couldn’t be found. Specifically, they were to find out if the Japs had reoccupied a small steep valley on the right that they had previously abandoned but now, intelligence thought, might have moved back into.

It was an almost routine job. If you counted it ordinary and routine to be walking miles in enemy territory along jungle trails that might at any moment be trip-wired or foot-mined in a jungle too dense to travel off the trails. It was impossible to describe the fatigue and exhaustion of that kind of walking. The narrow foot trails slicked over with mud. The valley they were to inspect they found empty.

On the way back, on a hunch, Prell decided to take them on a little detour up a side trail, to look at a small side valley. The trail veered off to the left uphill two hundred yards through the jungle to a low ridge. And the trail had been heavily used lately. Both Prell and his point man sensed something was going on over there beyond the ridge.

Halfway to the top he halted the squad and he and his point man crawled on up to have a look. The valley was alive with Jap infantry. The opposite valley wall was a semicliff and there were some small caves and overhangs on it and Japs were crawling all over it. They obviously were preparing an attack.

Both of them recognized Sasaki immediately. It wasn’t hard to recognize a Jap general. Whenever he said anything, everybody else jumped. Sasaki was a heavy-chested man, well-fed, with a thick graying British-officer-type mustache. His picture had been posted around the Division, and a reward of $1000 was being offered to the man who killed him. Prell and the others knew about him only that Imamura and Admiral Kusaka, joint commanders of the Jap Southeast Area, had sent General Noboru Sasaki to command all of New Georgia after the American invasion. It gave Prell a sudden thrill to know that he held the life of an important man in his hands, and had carte blanche to kill him. He knew how political assassins must feel. Sasaki was with a group of other men, obviously officers, and they were studying two maps. In addition, Sasaki was smoking a big, fat, very un-Oriental cigar. He walked back and forth gesticulating with the cigar as he declaimed to the others. Prell put the binoculars he had been issued for the mission on him, anyway, to be sure. It was him, all right.

A lot of things were going through Prell’s mind at that moment. He was already getting down into prone position and loop sling to fire. First was the idea Sasaki might get away, walk off somewhere out of sight or into one of the caves, the way he was moving about. Second was the thought that he himself, Prell, was the best shot in the squad, in any case. Third, the New Georgia campaign and the possible effect on it if he succeeded. Only fourth, if at all, was the splintered fast flash of thought of the personal fame and that $1000 he might get by knocking off the Jap commander in New Georgia. Prell was absolutely certain about the thought sequence.

As he got into his sling, he was already whispering to his point man. To go back. Get them ready to move out. No, get them moving now. But quietly. No noise. When he heard the first shot, he should start them running.

Prell was not worried about how he himself would get out. He would get out, all right. If only to claim that reward. But it had already occurred to him it was odd that with a general like Sasaki present there were no outposts around.

Thank God the two of them had gotten off the trail into the undergrowth, before they peeked over the crest. Prell had never felt more fully and more joyously alive than at that moment.

With the point man moving, he rolled down to get his sight. He was satisfied he had done everything correctly. He had his men already moving out. Everything was proper. He had forgotten nothing. Now all he had to do was shoot. Hoo, man. He had not scored High Expert and high regimental rifle four years running for nothing. But he wished he had a 1903 Springfield for this shot, with its folding leaf sight, instead of a Garand. He should have kept the point man here with him as a witness to the kill.

Below him the general was still walking and gesticulating. He must remember to allow for shooting downhill. He moved the rifle ahead of the general, to where the officers with the maps were. The general would stop, just there, just when he came up to the map . . .

It was then that he heard the single, loud clank of American equipment somewhere on the trail behind him, and wanted to curse.

It stopped him. And he lost his sight picture. The general was moving away from the maps again. Well, he would catch him at the other end of his pacing, when he stopped to turn. Prell moved the rifle ahead of him again.

Then he heard—or sensed—the jungle plants move behind him, and a Jap soldier leaped on him screaming and firing his rifle.

It was amazing the Jap did not hit him, at that short range. It did not say much for their rifle training. Warned a fraction of a second ahead of time, Prell was already rolling, and fired three fast rounds into the man’s chest as it touched his rifle barrel. Then he was on his feet ready to run. But nobody else was there. More firing and screaming was coming from back down the trail. It had the sound of catastrophe.

Prell cast one last, anguished glance behind him. There was no hope. The general was moving swiftly, into one of the caves, surrounded tightly by the bodies of the other officers, to protect him. There was nothing to do. Prell ran.

They were lucky. A big, well-prepared patrol would have killed them all, at once. Apparently the group that heard them was a small one of only five men, and had no help nearby. When he came running down, his men were just finishing killing the fifth. One of his men was slightly wounded. A nick. His own single Jap trooper apparently had been all alone.

Prell slowed long enough to yell at them to move. The ones in front were already running down the trail, and needed no urging. The others began to follow. “Move, move,” he screamed at them. The Jap troops often called mortars down in on themselves, and Prell had anticipated it.

Mortar shells began to whump in around them. One man a little in front of Prell went down from a near direct hit. Prell and the man immediately in front of Prell, hardly pausing, scooped him up by the armpits and half-carried him. A man up ahead dropped back and took over Prell’s half of him to free Prell. Prell paused, to make sure they were all in front of him and running, then turned around to fire rear guard, running backward. But no enemy were visible behind them on the trail. Another man went down from a mortar round but got up and ran on by himself. Then the patrol was apparently through the mortar screen. That was when the .50 caliber took them from the flank.

The Jap was firing from an obtuse angle to the line of the trail. Fortunately, they had run nearly through his field of fire by the time he could get his gun going. Fortunately, most of them were already through. Only the men at the tail end caught the fire.

Prell, of course, was the last man. A burst caught him across the thighs, and cut him off from his legs and feeling them just as if a big scythe had swept through a field, and Prell knew he had had it, or if he hadn’t, his legs certainly had. The impact seemed to fling him forward. As he started to fall, he watched the same burst, drifting higher, take the two men running downhill in front of him across the lower back and lungs, inches higher on the third man than on the second. There was no question they were killed. The third man was his point man, Crozier. Both bodies went on running several yards before they fell. Prell, his teeth clenched, by sheer force of will, helped along by the push of the heavy bullets, managed to run past them on his non-legs before he too folded up like thin cardboard and fell straight down on his face, headlong, sprawling. He had the curious impression that he was continuing still to run, horizontally, even as he struck. But as he fell his mind told him none of it really mattered anyway, because his mind told him he was finished.

He yelled and a couple of his squad ran back for him, in tandem, like a pair of matched, finely trained horses, and got him by his armpits. But in the same moment, miraculously, all firing stopped. The jungle quiet, always ominous, and never really quiet, which seemed to drip from the trees like moisture, fell on them.

They turned him over on his back. His number two crawled over. Their faces looked scared. “Well, let’s see! Let’s see!” Prell demanded irately. “Damn it!” He needed passionately to know. See for himself how bad it was. “Don’t just sit there!” His number two and another man unbuckled his belt and began to pull his pants down. Prell, beginning to sweat as they moved him, sent two men back up the trail for the two dead. Crozier, and Sims. He was damned if he was going to leave them here, for the Japs to piss on, or eat, or whatever it was they did with their captured dead.

The legs were a mess, when they got his pants down. Like hamburger. It made his belly go cold inside, looking at them. The skin across his thighs was already turning blue from bruise. It was impossible to tell how many of the heavy .50 caliber bullets had hit him. He was bleeding badly. But there didn’t seem to be any arterial bleeding. The first hopeful sign. His number two sprinkled sulfa powder on them and began tying on tight compresses. While he did, Prell briefed him, through clenched teeth, on what he had seen and on the presence of Sasaki, “In case anything should happen to me.”

Prell knew he had to get them out of there. And do it swiftly. There wasn’t anything he could do for Crozier and Sims, but he could still do something for the others. The other two wounded could walk, after a fashion. He himself couldn’t walk, and he could feel the bones grate together in his legs. Two other men were already improvising a stretcher out of their buttoned-up fatigue blouses and two rifles. When they got him on it and hoisted him, Prell thought for a moment he would pass out. Then he got them moving and out of there.

As they moved away, mortar rounds began to drop singly around the trail junction, searching for them with tree bursts. By a matter of minutes he had anticipated them again.

As they moved along, the thought of the state of his legs made Prell’s belly go cold again inside. You never considered how important your legs were to you until you didn’t have them and couldn’t call on them. There was no way you could move much at all, when you didn’t have legs. It was then that he made up his mind that if he lost them, he wouldn’t stay.

They knew they only had half a mile to go. But on the mud-slicked trail the going was difficult. For the walking wounded, the men carrying the dead and the men carrying Prell. Up to then Prell had not felt much pain, just a dull toothache in his legs that warned him the pain would be coming and he could depend on it. On the march, it came. With each step of the men carrying him he could feel the splintered ends of his femurs moving around in the already tortured flesh of his thighs like sharp instruments, further lacerating the already torn meat. He was worried one of them might cut its femoral artery, and tried to hold as still as possible. But it was impossible to be still. For Prell it was the beginning of an odyssey of movement and pain that would continue for two months and carry him halfway around the world to the Army hospital in Luxor. And the pain part wouldn’t end then. He had put one of his BAR men back as rear guard and the other out front, to try to fend off any Jap patrols hunting for them. Luckily they did not meet any head-on. As they got nearer to their own lines, the trail branched out into a series of parallel trails and transverses that the Japs had built to supply their now-abandoned line. Here he could maneuver a little and give them the slip. Twice they hid, as talking Jap squads moved along nearby parallel trails looking for them. But the fatigue-blouse stretcher under Prell’s legs was beginning to be soaked with his heavy bleeding. He went halfway out and came back several times. When they got within hailing distance of their own line, they decided they had better take a chance and yell for help.

A reinforced patrol with a medic in it came out to cover them while the medic worked on Prell and strung a plasma bottle on him, and then escorted them in, to everybody’s vast relief and delight. At the battalion aid station the battalion surgeon looked at the legs and shook his head. Dolefully. He crudely splinted the legs to keep the femurs from working any more and had Prell strapped on a regular, real stretcher to be jeeped out. For Prell this was the end of it, and he knew it, at least with this outfit. He would probably never see this outfit again. There had been times when he had hated it, and every person in it, but now he hated to leave it. As they hung him on the body-loaded jeep, he kept his face set. He was flown out the next afternoon. The battalion commander gave the whole squad the morning off, to come down and see him. That did not sound as if anybody suspected him of misconduct.

It had not been a lucky patrol. All the same, Prell knew he had done everything right and correctly. He had done everything both according to the rules themselves, and according to the unwritten law that, unspoken, went along with the rules. The unwritten law was that you never risked your men. Unless the gain was worth it. Double worth it. In Prell’s case the gain had been worth more than that. Even if it had never got realized.

At the aid station, while they splinted him up and took care of the other wounded, there was a lot of rehashing of the patrol by the healthy, and the subject of the loud clank that had given them away to the Japs came up. Prell only heard the first part of it. He made his report to the battalion commander, stressing the coming attack and how close he had come to getting Sasaki, and then, relaxing his control and aided by the shot the doc gave him, quietly passed out for a while. There was more rehashing in the Division hospital when the squad came down to say good-by to him, and the clank of equipment they had all heard came up again. None of them, nor the other wounded either, would admit to having been the cause of it.

Several men thought the point man, Crozier, had done it when he came running down to them. Perhaps one of the dead men, Crozier or Sims, had done it. If one had, both had certainly paid dearly for it. More than anyone could punish either for now. Prell could only think bitterly how that single clank had kept him from becoming famous, kept him from getting $1000, and how it might still cost him both of his legs. It probably had kept him from single-handedly shortening the whole New Georgia campaign by a month. Because in the end, the cocky, strutty General Sasaki had put up an obstinate, gallant defense that was still going on in August, when they reached Frisco, and would go on into October. It was still winding down when Prell reached Luxor. He only heard of the end of it there. By that time he no longer really cared about New Georgia.

Prell had had a hard time of it, in the Division rear hospital, to keep from breaking down completely when the remnants of the squad—there were only nine now—filed out of the big tent after saying good-by. He had had to exercise all his considerable will power to keep tears from coming in his eyes. These nine men had saved his life. They had put together a makeshift stretcher for him without even being asked, and had carried him at least a mile along slippery trails, without being ordered to. At great risk to themselves. And without so much as one word of complaint or grumble. They had performed like princes. And they had saved him, and Prell hated to see them go away from him a last time. What they thought of him meant more to him than whether he ever got any medal, and they clearly thought well of him. For this, he loved them back.

In the railroad hospital car, the pain in his legs hurting him more than he could remember it ever had, he missed them deeply and he missed the company. At least on the ship he had had Strange and Landers to talk to once in a while. But after the shake-up at Letterman, he hadn’t seen either again. He had caught one fleeting glimpse of Strange at a distance, ambling down a hospital corridor in a GI bathrobe. That was all. He did not know whether either of them was going to Luxor. In fact, both of them were on the train, in other cars up forward, but Prell had no way of knowing that. He knew that there were some members of the company at Luxor; he had heard it vaguely somewhere. He hoped he would be able to get together with them. Without the old company, Prell did not really feel he belonged anywhere. And he was beginning to suspect that that was the way it was going to be, from now on, and go on being. All that was past, and in the past, and every hour and every mile put it further and further behind them all.

As the train started, sending a painful jerk up his hurting legs to the broken thighs, Prell realized he had not even seen one building of all of San Francisco. Before, on his way through, he had picked up a girl downtown on Market Street, and spent two days with her screwing in a hotel. He wondered how she was, and what might have happened to her. As the train began to fall into its peculiar rhythm of movement and speed up, he shut his eyes.