“Don’t fall down the rabbit hole yet,” said Jack, looking at Christian’s somber face. “The first campaign is the hardest. Now you’re already a murderer, so the Philippines will be different. You’ll find your backbone. Maybe a little patriotism.”
“Patriotism isn’t the problem,” said Christian, watching Jack eat pineapple hungrily, like he hadn’t just had it for breakfast and lunch. “I love this country, and I would give my life for it. Obviously I would. I’m still here. But this war: killing strangers because some men we’ve never met decided we should. It just doesn’t lay right with me anymore.”
“Even if those strangers are trying to destroy the world?” said Jack, reaching his arm out like a Nazi soldier.
“Even if,” said Christian. “There should be another way. They shouldn’t just send out boys with weapons.”
“I’m going to start calling you the Dove, too,” said Jack, and true to his word, that’s what he yelled at Christian two months later as they landed in the small coastal town of Dulag on October 20. They began moving inland as soon as Dulag was secure, heading for Japanese airfields after they’d already been attacked by American planes.
On the twenty-eighth of October, Christian, Jack, and Dave were lined up with the rest of their unit outside a Japanese pillbox captured the night before, Christian’s moral compass still spinning.
“It’s snipers and bunkers today, boys!” Perko shouted. “Remember, tend to the wounded but get them to the water fast. There are hospital boats right offshore. You know the drill. Don’t sit there wondering if someone is going to die. Move him out of this cesspool to guarantee that he won’t.”
It was on that day that Christian and his unit saw kamikaze pilots for the first time, crashing their Zero fighter planes into the giant U.S. ships floating in Leyte Gulf.
“Jesus Christ,” said Jack, looking up at the Japanese planes falling out of the sky. “It’s like they’re crashing on purpose. Killing themselves.”
“That’s exactly what they’re doing,” said Perko, looking up, too. “We’re going to take a major hit on the water.”
But it wasn’t just from the sky that the Japanese came at them with apparent disregard for their own lives. It was on land, where Christian’s unit was, too.
“I could never be that brave,” Christian said to Jack, wiping the sweat out of his face as they squatted down in a bunker. “I’ve already gotten sick just thinking about grounding the nose of a plane like that.”
“That’s not bravery, what the Japanese are doing, kraut. That’s stupidity.”
They heard gunfire immediately above them and Jack yelled for them all to hit the dirt, but Dave wasn’t fast enough. Christian and Jack could hear him scream even over the din of the shooting.
Christian reached Dave first and saw bleeding from his chest.
“Jesus Christ!” Christian cried out, turning him over. Blood was also trickling from his mouth.
“Gunshot! I need a medic!” Christian screamed while Jack kept firing at the enemy line.
No one was coming to their aid, so Christian picked up his gun, crouched down, reloaded, and felt Jack slide down next to him. “What the fuck are you doing still down here, kraut?” he screamed. “Get back up and kill the assholes who shot Dave!”
Christian shook his head, pointing at Dave curled up on the ground, clutching his bleeding stomach. “Someone needs to help him!”
“Get the hell back up, kraut!” Jack shouted, pulling Christian by the arm. “Do your job!”
Jack repositioned himself and started firing again, even as he continued to berate Christian. “The Japanese shouldn’t have gotten their hands all over the Philippines. That was a stupid move and now they’re dying like insects!”
He fired round after round before throwing himself to the ground, grabbing for Dave’s gun. “Kraut, take over! I can’t feel my arms.”
Christian glanced at Jack, then at Dave, who looked just a few breaths from death, stood up, and fired off every bullet they had left between them.
Between rounds, he could hear Jack talking softly to Dave.
“How about you don’t die here in this hellhole so you can impregnate a whole bunch of women after the war?” said Jack, wiping Dave’s mouth with his sleeve.
“Thanks for shooting him,” said Dave, his eyes closed. “Thanks for shooting the fucker who shot me.”
“Of course,” said Jack, resting his hand on Dave’s forehead. “You would have done the same for me.”
“No, I wouldn’t have,” said Dave. “I didn’t fire my gun. Not even once.”
Christian turned to look at them just as Jack was turning Dave over on the ground. He was dead.
“Write to the Dove’s parents and lie like crazy,” Jack told Christian when they finally had time to grieve that night. “Say he killed all sorts of men and ran into the onslaught of armed commanders. Don’t say he never fired a single shot.”
“Why not?” asked Christian. “I think there’s something pretty honorable in that.”
“Yeah, at a kid’s birthday party, kraut! Not in the middle of a war. It just means you’re a coward who won’t defend the cause or your fellow man. I’ll write the goddamn letter. Everything will be spelled wrong, but at least the lies will be the right ones.”
By December, the American hold on Leyte was solid. The Seventh helped capture Ormoc City on the western coast and the body count on the Japanese side was over a thousand from the push to Ormoc alone.
Walking through the dead with his superiors, Christian left Jack and ripped off his shirt, throwing it over a particularly maimed Japanese body. He walked on the scorched earth in nothing but his sleeveless white undershirt, his torn pants, and his boots. So many corpses littered the ground that he almost couldn’t get to his sergeant without stepping on their hands and feet.
“They all get cremated anyway,” said Perko. “Good enough to leave them here half-charred. The job is almost done. And for free.”
“You’ve got a heart of gold,” said Christian, bending down and closing the eyes of one who looked as if he wasn’t a day over fourteen.
“You going to go around and do that to all of them?” Perko asked, laughing. “You’re going to be mighty busy.”
Christian thought about Lora’s tiny body and how sick it had made him to see it. Now, with hundreds of bodies around him, he was steady.
Christian took Perko’s water and splashed it on his face, then followed his sergeant around to the back of a building, which was nothing more than a shell. It provided a slip of shade for the injured Americans waiting to be transferred to the hospital boat.
Beyond them he could see a group of Japanese prisoners, sitting in a tight row in the scorching sun, their hands tied behind their backs.