It was a Tuesday. Lunchtime with rations running short. Ledford slept alone on the dirt with his helmet over his face. He was dog tired and bug-bitten, from inside his ears to between his toes. He sat up, took out his Ka-Bar, and cleaned his fingernails. A skinny boy with a pitiful beard walked over from the shade of the pagodas overhang. Ledford? You tryin to fry yourself? His name was McDonough and he was from Chalmette, Louisiana.
Ledford didnt answer or look up from his fingernails.
You want to get somethin to eat? McDonough blinked his eyes at two-second intervals. He was seventeen years old.
Ill eat with you, McDonough, Ledford said, if you promise not to talk with your mouth full.
But McDonough was one of the nervous ones, and when they sat down inside, he talked with his mouth full of canned fish and rice for ten minutes straight. Aint had that sinus infection a day since maneuvers in Fiji, he said, after chronicling his lifelong battle with a clogged nose and headaches. Its like I been waiting my whole life to come breathe this air in the Pacific.
Ledford didnt even nod to show he was listening. At that moment, it seemed hed do most anything to have steak and cake instead of fish and rice.
My mother said I got the bad sinuses from her, and she got them from her daddy, and so on and so forth, back to my great grandfather, who stuck an old rotary drill up his nosehole one day and had at it until he killed hisself trying to unclog all of it.
Ledford laughed a little with his mouth full of rice, but then he stopped, thinking such laughter might disrespect the dead.
Its all right, McDonough told him, smiling. Its a story meant to be funny. But it is true. He held up his hand to signify Scouts honor or stack of Bibles both.
Ledford liked McDonough.
Back at camp that night, he looked over at the boy before lights-out. McDonough was flat on his bedding, looking up at the tents sagging roof. The rain that pelted there came harder and harder until the sound of it drowned all others. A roaring quiet. A rain not seen or heard by any American boy before, even one like McDonough, a boy from the land of the hurricane. He just lay there, his finger stuck up his nose so far it almost disappeared.
Ledford thought of Mann Glass and Rachel. Of steak and eggs and the sound of West Virginia rain on the cafeteria tin roof. His chest ached. His gut burned. A drip from the tents center point landed on his Adams apple. He stared up at its source, a tiny slit at the pinnacle. The rain roared louder, its amplitude unsettling. Ledford opened his mouth and called out, Gully warsher boys, but no one could hear him. He turned his head and watched McDonough dig for gold a while longer, then fell off to sleep.
In his dreams, there came a memory. He was a boy, and he fished on a lake with his daddy. The two of them sat in a rowboat, oars asleep in their locks, their handles angled at the sky. Father and son bent over their casting rods and spoke not a word. There was only stillness and silhouette, quiet as a field stump.
Twice Ledford was awakened by the sound of Japanese Zeros zipping overhead. The rain let up. The bombs came down. He jolted when they hit, and in between, he wondered about the dream. He could not remember any lake near Huntington, nor could he remember ever fishing with his daddy. And the quiet. Why had it been so quiet?
In the morning, the men waded through calf-high water outside the tents. It had gathered in the middle of camp, channeling the makeshift road theyd fashioned. Oil barrels floated by on their sides. A dead spider the size of a hamburger spun slowly, emitting little rings of ripples as it went. McDonough ran from it, got himself to higher ground at the muddy base of a giant palm tree. He had a deathly fear of spiders. The men laughed and pointed at McDonough, who, like many of them, had gotten the dysentery bad. The sprint from the spider had stirred things inside him, and he dropped his trousers right there at the base of the tree and let rip.
It was a sight. Ledford laughed heartily and shared a smoke with Erm from Chicago, who told him, You think thats funny, just wait till the malaria eats him up.
September 1942
THE RATIONS HAD GROWN a pelt of mold. Nightfall had come to resemble a wake, the mens mood shifting with sundown to gloom and the inevitability of death. Fever shivers gripped more than half, and on that Monday, orders came down that they all swallow Atabrine at chow time. Some said it would turn men yellow.
Saturday found them on the ridge Ledford had admired from a distance. Camel Ridge, some were calling it. They had no way of knowing that its name would soon change, and that the new name would be one they could never forget.
Bloody Ridge was high and steep.
Theyd scampered through the jungle and then the ravines, on up through the head-high kunai grass that clung to the slopes, thick and tooth-edged. It sliced mens fingers and stung like fire. But theyd been told that the ridge would provide ease, a place away from the airstrip bombings.
Ledfords platoon dug in at the crest of a knoll. He and McDonough and a fellow named Skutt from Kentucky shoveled a three-man foxhole quick and quiet. Skutt got low, on his knees, and cut a shelf inside. He took a photograph of his daughter from his coverall breast pocket, set it gingerly on the ledge. He smoothed the dirt away from it with his bloody fingers. The girl was no more than two, fat like a little one should be. There was water damage at the corner, so that her stiff white walkers bubbled up at the ankle. Skutt licked his thumb and smoothed it.
That your little one? Ledford asked.
Thats my Gayle.
She a springtime baby? Saying those words nearly caused Ledford to smile.
Summer. Skutt coughed. Once he started, he couldnt stop, and it became irritating in a hurry. The foxholes quarters were tight. McDonough seemed to wince at every sound.
Night came, and with it the air-raid alarm. Bettys and Zeros filled the sky above the ridge, and they littered the hillside with daisy cutters. At first, it didnt seem real. The airstrip bombings had been one thing, but in this new spot, the feeling of exposure was almost too much. The earth quivered. The nostrils burned.
Ledford pressed his back against the foxholes bottom and dropped his helmet over his face. Beside him, McDonough did the same. They waited.
But such waiting can seem endless inside all that noise, and some men cant keep still. After a time, Skutt leaped from them and ran, screaming, maybe firing his weapon, maybe not. He was cut to pieces.
When the raid was over, they surveyed the dead and wounded. All but two were beyond repair. Skutt was splintered lengthwise, groin to neck. Ledfords insides lurched. He turned back to the foxhole. He saw the picture of the baby girl on the dirt shelf. Somehow, she hadnt blown over.
The Marines were pulling back to the southern crest now, digging in there for more. Holding position.
Ledford looked at the picture again and left it where it sat. He followed.
JAPANESE FLARES WITH strange tints lit the sky overhead. Underneath, the enemy scampered ridgelines, closing quick on freshly dug Marine fox-holes, where grenades were handed out, one to a man. Bayonets were at the ready. Brownings ripped through belts of ammo, humming hot and illuminating machine-gunner faces locked in panic or madness or calm. Mortars made confused landings, and everywhere, men screamed and cursed, and many of them, for the first time, truly wanted nothing more than to kill those they faced down.
Ledford wanted it. He bit through the tip of his tongue. He hollered and swallowed his own blood and stood and lobbed his grenade at the onslaught. Then he sat back down inside the hole. McDonough panted hard and followed suit.
After a while, Ledford climbed out again and got low. He set the butt of his rifle to his shoulder and looped the sling around opposite arm. Bellied down and zeroed in, he watched under the glow of a flare as a thin Japanese soldier ran across the ridgeline ahead. Ledford led him a little, shut an eye, and squeezed. The man buckled sharp, like a rat trap closing, and a black silhouette of blood pumped upward. Immediately, a hot sensation flooded Ledford from head to belly. A wave of sickness. A swarm of stinging blood in the vessels. He rolled back into his hole. His head lolled loose on his shoulders and he lurched twice. Killing a man had not been what hed anticipated. God oh God, he said. God oh God.
SUNDAY-MORNING DAY BREAK BROUGHT the battle to its end. The Marines had held. Their horseshoe line bent but never broke.
Ledford walked the ridge with McDonough at his side. Neither spoke. They looked at the bodies covering the ground like a crust. Hundreds of them. Nearly all had bloated in the sun. Their eyes were open, glazed, burning yellow-white in their staredown with the sky. Some of their faces had gone red. Others were purple or a strange green-black. The smell was too much for McDonough. He cried to himself and covered his face with a handkerchief and muttered about his sinuses, blaming everything on his bad pipes. Ledford tried not to breathe. He felt for the boy from Louisiana. This was too much for him to bear. Hed known it since McDonough had pissed himself in the foxhole. The smell had gotten bad, and McDonough had apologized. Ledford had told him, Youve got nothing to be sorry for. Hed vowed in his mind to watch over the boy.
TWO WEEKS LATER , Ledford watched McDonough climb the sandbar west of the Matanikau River. The boy turned back to stare at the waters surface, suddenly wave-white, alive with the plunk and stir of hand grenades, mortars kicking mud. He looked Ledford in the eyes, confused, and then his face exploded. His body sat itself down on the embankment, almost like he still had control of it and had decided to rest his legs. McDonough rolled the length of the embankment into the water and bobbed there, knocking against a tree root that had caught the collar of his coverall.
After that, when Ledford went flat on his bedding at night, he saw it: McDonoughs confused face and the way it was instantly changed into something no longer a face, into something Ledfords brain could barely comprehend. His memory held no pictures such as this one. The only thing that came close was a sight hed beheld as a boy. Hed come upon his father on the front porch, the dog whimpering and held off the ground by the scruff of its neck. His father swung a switch at the dogs backside, just as if it was a boy whod done wrong. At the corner of the porch, where the chipped floorboards came together, sat a heap of ruined leather. His fathers white buckskin mitt lay there, mauled almost unrecognizable. Hed kept it oiled regular since his time in the Blue Ridge League in 1915. Now the dog had gotten a hold of it and it was ragged-edged and wet and ripped from the inside out. Same as McDonoughs face.
Ledford played a little game with his brain for six straight nights in late September of 1942. The game played out on the backs of his eyelids, where the furnace fires had set his mind on visions. Now hed lay down, shut his eyes, and here would come McDonoughs ragged-edged noface and his daddys exploded buckskin mitt and the squeal of the dog and the crack of the switch on short-haired hide. All of it would amplify against those eyelids until it became so loud that Ledford could not be still. Hed open his eyes and the sounds would quiet. But no man can hold open his eyes forever, and when they closed again, Ledfords heart beat against his breastplate double-time, and he sat up bone straight for fear his own mind and body were killing him. On it would go like this until he got up from his bunk and swallowed sufficiently from his own pint or somebody elses. Whiskey was the only thing to save him.
Erm Bacigalupo had won enough poker hands to own what little liquor the men had left. Some of it was Navy-smuggled, some of it was swiped from bombed-out Japanese camps. Either way, Ledford owed Erm for liquor. It was all written down on paper scraps Erm kept in his cigarette tin.
On the seventh night, the whiskey finally killed the pictures and howls in Ledfords head. Rendered them temporarily gone.
He woke up the next day a new man. His voice had changed, gotten deeper. There was a whistle in his left ear. But from that morning on, Ledford was no longer visited by McDonoughs exploding face.
In the days to come, he saw other men suffer similar fates to McDonoughs. The enemy took to staking American heads on sharpened bamboo poles. It wasnt long before a Marine returned the favor.
After a time, Ledford found a quiet space inside the whiskey bottle. It was the same place his daddy had once found.
Ledford listened to the woods. He watched the treetops sway. He slept easy and ate well.
Rachels letters saved him. He could get a hard-on just picturing the pen in her hand, moving across the paper he now held. I love you, she wrote, and he wrote it back.
October 1942
HE AWOKE IN HIS foxhole at 0300 hours. It was black and quiet. The dreams had visited him again, but already they were gone. At the mouth of his hole, Erm crouched, smoking a cigarette. Lets go, he said.
Ledford stood. He slugged hard from Erms flask.
In front of him, Erm covered ground in silence. They put five miles behind them at a quick clip. Stopped, breathed, slugged the flask. Tucked themselves into the ridge folds west of the Bonegi and crept, then belly-crawled toward a small camp of sleeping Japanese. The rain beat in torrents. Its sound allowed them to move unheard. Its curtain allowed them to advance unseen. Single-file, they belly-crawled, stopping now and then to survey. Each gripped his .45. The mud sucked at their bellies and hips and knees.
Behind the enemys line, Erm looked for sleeping pairs.
He found two such men tucked inside a makeshift tent of bamboo shoots and canvas. He peeked inside the open flap, then signaled for Ledford to stand watch. Erm slipped inside. Ledford kept his head on a swivel, once or twice glancing at the sleeping men inside. Each had dropped off while eating a tin of rice, now emptied and atop their chests. Ledford watched the slow rise and fall. He listened to the snore, recognized the exhaustion. The rain kept up. There was no sign of movement on the perimeter. Erm reached from the tent and tapped his shoulder. Your knife, he mouthed. Ledford holstered his .45 and fished the dogleg jackknife from his breast pocket. It had been his fathers before him. Pearl-handled and well made. Thackery 1 of 10 etched by hand on the flat. Hed spent hours honing the bevel on a pocket stone.
Ledford watched Erm crawl between the two men. One of them wore a thin mustache, the other was clean-shaven. They were rail thin. Young as McDonough. Ledford looked at the lids of their closed eyes, barely discernible in the low glow of their lantern, its oil nearly spent. He watched the eyeballs rolling wildly underneath. It was deep sleep. Dream sleep. He wondered for a moment what haunted these men, and then he watched Erm looking from one to the other and back. He chose the one on the left, put his hand over his mouth and drove the jackknife into his jugular vein, pulling it across the throat with all the muscle his forearm could muster. Blood came fast and heavy, surging in time with the young mans heart. Erm waited out the few soft gurgles, his eye on the other soldier, who continued to snore. He wiped the blade across the dead mans still chest, one side and then the next, so that it made a red X next to the empty rice ration. He folded the blade shut and handed it to Ledford.