BOOK ONE
THE SHIP
CHAPTER 1
WE GOT THE WORD that the four of them were coming a month before they arrived. Scattered all across the country in the different hospitals as we were, it was amazing how fast word of any change in the company got back to us. When it did, we passed it back and forth among ourselves by letter or post card. We had our own private network of communications flung all across the map of the nation.
There were only the four of them this time. But what an important four. Winch. Strange. Prell. And Landers. About the four most important men the company had had.
We did not know then, when the first word of them came, that all four would be coming back to the exact same place. That is, to us, in Luxor.
Usually, it was us in the Luxor hospital who heard news soonest. That was because we were the largest individual group. At one point there were twelve of us there. It made us the main nerve center of the network. We accepted this responsibility without complaint, and dutifully wrote the letters and post cards that would keep the others informed.
News of the company still out there in those jungles was the most important thing to us. It was more important, more real than anything we saw, or anything that happened to us ourselves.
Winch had been our 1st/sgt out there. John Strange had been the mess/sgt. Landers had been company clerk. Bobby Prell, though busted twice from sgt and only a cpl, had been the company’s toughest and foolhardiest sparkplug.
It was strange how closely we returnees clung together. We were like a family of orphaned children, split by an epidemic and sent to different care centers. That feeling of an epidemic disease persisted. The people treated us nicely, and cared for us tenderly, and then hurried to wash their hands after touching us. We were somehow unclean. We were tainted. And we ourselves accepted this. We felt it too ourselves. We understood why the civilian people preferred not to look at our injuries.
We hospitalized knew we did not belong there in the clean, healthy areas. We belonged back out in the raging, infected disaster areas; where we could succumb, die, disappear, vanish forever along with what seemed to us now the only family we had ever had. That was what being wounded was. We were like a group of useless unmanned eunuchs, after our swinging pendants had been removed, eating sweetmeats from the contemptuous fingers of the females in the garden, and waiting for news from the seneschals in the field.
There was arrogance in us, though. We came from the disaster areas, where these others had never been. We did not let anyone forget it. We came from the infected zones, had been exposed to the disease, and carried the disease in us to prove it. Carrying it was our pride.
For our own kind, an insane loyalty flamed in us. We were ready to fight all comers and sometimes, drunk and out in the town, did fight them. We would fight anybody who had not been out there with us. We wore our Combat Infantryman badges to distinguish us, and nothing else. Campaign ribbons and decorations were considered contemptible display. All that was propaganda for the nice, soft people.
And the company had been our family, our only home. Real parents, wives, fiancées did not really exist for us. Not before the fanatical devotion of that loyalty. Crippled, raging, enfeebled, unmanned in a very real sense and hating, hating both sides of our own coin and of every coin, we clung to each other no matter where or how far the hospital, and waited for the smallest morsel of news of the others to filter back to us, and faithfully wrote and mailed the messages that would carry it on to the other brothers.
Into this weird half-world of ours the first news we had of the four of them came on a grimy, mud-smeared post card from some lucky-unlucky man still out there.
The card said the four of them had been shipped out to the same evacuation hospital, almost at the same time. That was all it said. The next news we got was that all four had been shipped back home on the same hospital ship. This came from the base hospital, in a short letter from some unlucky, or lucky, man who had been wounded but had not made the boat. Later, we received a letter from the company’s tech/sgt, giving more details.
Winch was being shipped back for some kind of unspecified ailment that nobody seemed to know much about. Winch himself would not talk about it. He had bitten through one thermometer and broken another, chased a hospital corpsman out of the compound, and gone back to his orderly tent where he was found slumped over his Morning Report book in a dead faint on his makeshift desk.
John Strange had been struck in the hand by a piece of mortar fragment which had not exited. The hand had healed badly, the wound becoming progressively more crippling. He was being sent back for delicate bone and ligament surgery and removal of the fragment.
Landers the clerk had had his right ankle smashed by a heavy-mortar fragment and needed orthopedic surgery. Bobby Prell had taken a burst of heavy-machinegun fire across both thighs in a firefight, sustaining multiple compound fractures, and heavy tissue damage.
This was the land of personal news we ached to hear. Could it be that we were secretly pleased? That we were glad to see others join us in our half-unmanned state? We certainly would have denied it, would have attacked and fought anyone who suggested it. Especially about the four of them.
There were quite a few of us sitting in the shiny, spotless, ugly hospital snack bar, having coffee after morning rounds, when Corello came running in waving the letter. Corello was an excitable Italian from McMinnville, Tennessee. No one knew why he had not been sent to the hospital in Nashville, instead of to Luxor, just as no one knew how his Italian forebears happened to wind up in McMinnville, where they ran a restaurant. Corello had been home once since his arrival in Luxor, and had stayed less than a day. Couldn’t stand it, he said. Now he pushed his way through to us among the hospital-white tables, holding the letter high.
There was a momentary hush in the room. Then the conversations went right on. The old hands had seen this scene too many times. The two cracker waitresses looked up from their chores, alarmed until they saw the letter, then went back to their coffee-drawing.
Rays of Southern sun were streaming through the tall plate glass from high up, down into all that white. In sunny corners lone men sat at tables writing letters, preferring the clatter and people here to the quiet of the library. There were five of us from the company at one table and Corello stopped there.
At once, men of ours sitting at other tables got up and came over. In seconds all of us in the snack bar had clustered around. We were already passing the letter back and forth. The patients from other outfits looked back down at their coffee and conversation and left us alone.
“Read it out loud,” someone said.
“Yeah, read it. Read it out loud,” several others said.
The man who had it looked up and blushed. Shaking his head about reading out loud, he passed the letter to someone else.
The man who took it smoothed it out, then cleared his throat. He looked it over, then began to read in the stilted voice of a student in a declamation class.
As he read the news, a couple of men whistled softly.
When he finished, he put it down among the coffee mugs. Then he saw it might get stained, and picked it up and handed it to Corello.
“All four of them at the same time,” a man who was standing behind him said hollowly.
“Yeah. The same day practically,” another said.
We all knew none of us would ever go back to the old company. Not now, not once we had been sent back to the United States, we wouldn’t. Once you came back to the States, you were reassigned. But all of us needed to believe the company would continue on as we knew it, go right on through and come out the other end, intact.
“It’s as if— It’s almost like—”
Whichever one of us it was who spoke did not go on, but we all knew what he meant
A kind of superstitious fear had descended over us. In our profession, we pretty much lived by superstition. We had to. When all of knowledge and of past experience had been utilized, the outcome of a firefight, or a defense or an attack, depended largely on luck. Awe of and reverence for the inexplicable, that heart of the dedicated gambler’s obsession, was the only religion that fit our case. We followed a God which coldly incorporated luck within Itself, as one of Its major tools. For a commander, give us the commander who had luck. Let the others have the educated, prepared commanders.
We were like the dim early human who watched his mud hut destroyed by lightning and created God to explain it. Our God could be likened to a Great Roulette Wheel, more than anything.
We had thought the God looked warmly on us, or at least our company. Now it seemed the Wheel was rolling the other way.
There was nothing to do about it. As superstitious men, we understood that. That was part of the rules.
We could only not step on the crack, not walk under the ladder, try not to let the black cat cross our line of advance in front.
But it was difficult to accept, without fear. That the old company could change so completely. Become the home, the family, the company of some other group. It was about the last thing we had left.
“Well—” one of us said, and cleared his throat massively. It sounded like a shotgun fired in a barrel. We all knew what this man meant, too. He did not want to pursue it. Otherwise, might not some of the bad luck rub off?
“But all four of them at once,” someone said.
“Do you think one of them might get shipped here?” someone else said.
“If we could get Winch here,” one said.
“Yeah, it would be like old times,” another said.
Anyway, we could get some inside scoop firsthand,” someone said. “Instead of letters.”
“Speaking of letters,” another said, and got up. “Speaking of letters, I guess we might as well get on with our chores. Huh?”
At once, two or three men got up with him and moved away toward a couple of clean tables. Almost at once, two other men followed and joined them. Paper, pens, and pencils appeared, and post cards, envelopes, and stamps.
In the sweet, reassuring, late-summer slant of Southern sun which exploded in a dazzle below against all that white, they began to write the letters that would pass the news on to the other hospitals across the country. Some wrote with their tongues sticking out of their mouth corners.
The rest of us went on sitting. There was curiously little talk for a while. Then there was a sudden wave of signals for more coffee. Then we went on sitting. Most of us stared at the white walls or the white ceiling.
We were all thinking about the four of them. The four of them could legitimately be said to be almost the heart of the old company. Now those four were making the same strange trip home. We had all of us made it. It was a weird, strange, unreal voyage. We had made it either on the big fast planes, or on the slow white ships with the huge red crosses on their sides, as these four were doing.
We sat there in our demiworld of white, thinking about the four men making it as we ourselves had done. We wondered if those four were feeling the same peculiar sense of dislocation, the same sense of total disassociation and nonparticipation we ourselves had had.