The Pistol by James Jones
Sergeant Pender, slyly shunted the responsibility of picking the patrol by the young lieutenant who came down from the field phone with the orders, stepped outside the doorway of the hutment he was working on, took the nails out of his mouth, wiped his grizzled head while he thought, then bellowed for Burton’s assistant squad leader, Corporal Fondriere. With Burton detached to the roadguard Burton’s squad was already split anyway. Then he bawled the names of his three most inept, students of carpentry, a great deal of which work still lay ahead of all of them, put the nails back in his mouth and went back to work. One of them was Mast. Another was O’Brien. The third was a tall thin southerner named Grace. Thus was the historical first Marconi Pass patrol chosen.
A two-and-a-half-ton truck picked them up, and they reported in to the first sergeant at the CP with all their gear. The company commander himself, whom even back in peacetime they saw to speak to only about once in three months unless it was by their own request, explained their duties to them and showed them himself on the map where they would be and the strategic and tactical reasons for it. Everything was being prepared for them that they’d need, he said. All they had to do, now, was wait for it. The company commander could not tell them exactly how long they would be up there, but he judged it would be about a week or ten days before they were relieved. (Actually, as it turned out, it was more than two weeks and they were almost out of food; but nobody minded.) The company commander went on to say that he had asked for picked men, so he knew they knew their business. He would not try to give them a peptalk except to say that they would be up there entirely on their own, with no higher authority anywhere, that the eyes of the Hawaiian Department would be upon them, and that he trusted them. He was sorry, he smiled kindly, but he really did have to get back to work. After that they strolled lazily around the grove of thorn trees, walked out to the little bluff and leaned on the fence and looked at the sea, and concentrated on buying up all the candy bars they could get hold of from the CF personnel, who were able to send money in with the kitchen truck which served the other half of the company sector, the town half. They were unable to find any whiskey. All four of them felt a great sense of warmth for the company commander. They thought it nice of him to take so much of his valuable time with them. They wanted to do a good job for him. It was not that there was not any whiskey here, at the CP, they all knew that, it was just that no one would part with it for mere money.
Soldiers have a great instinct for being suspicious of kindnesses. Any time things are made easy for them, they are wary. But they also know that since they have no choice anyway, they might as well take advantage of whatever little benefits are offered them. So it was with the historic first Marconi Pass patrol. While a detail sweated and cursed loading their supplies they were to take with them, the patrol itself loafed and drank coffee and basked in its newfound notoriety. The cooks even went so far as to make up special hot sandwiches for them even though it wasn’t mealtime. And at one time or another almost everyone at the CP came around to discuss their assignment with them. But all too soon, as they had known it would, this flattering attention and extra service ended and the truth began, and they were gone, off out on the highway in the truck with no more audiences.
They were being guided by a Signal Corps Pfc who was one of the few men in the Hawaiian Department to have scouted this area. He had been found especially for this mission. He rode up in the cab with the driver. The four of them rode in the back. And the floor of the truckbed was so crammed with their supplies that they were jammed all together at the very back. There were ten gallon milk cans of water, cases of C ration, boxes of other food such as eggs, canned beans and bacon supplied by the kitchen, axes, picks, Very pistols, ropes, as well as their two machine guns and case after case of ammunition and grenades. They were well supplied, and soon they found out how far they were going to have to carry it. Leaving the CP the truck had turned east back toward Makapuu, but about halfway there it left the highway and turned inland, stopped for a wire gate which the Signal Corps Pfc got out and opened, and then ground on along a dirt road that was no more than two tracks through what appeared to be a cattle feeding ranch. Down on the flat, aged Hawaiians and Japanese who were apparently caretakers for the ranch peered at them from rickety little shacks from which cooking smoke drifted, but soon they began to rise and even these were left behind. Before long the tracks of the dirt road disappeared, and the truck ground on up through steepening open fields in which the trees and little fingers of forest became steadily more numerous, making its own road in and out among rock outcroppings which became thicker and thicker. Finally it reached a point where it could go no further, at the spot the Signal Corps Pfc had been looking for. This spot was the bottom of a steep, tree-grown, boulder-strewn, dry mountain runlet, too rocky and too steep even to be called a creekbed, at the point where it debouched into an honest, if steep, dry streambed. Here the truck stopped and they got out, and with the driver’s help began to unload it.
High above them, up the tree-studded, rock-strewn chute which would be their staircase and appearing to be almost straight up, towered the main ridge of the Koolau Range. Below them out over the last clearing the truck had crossed they could see far, far below the highway, the beach and the sea. A car traveling along the highway appeared to be the size of a lighter flint and they watched it, fascinated, until it disappeared. Without exception the first Marconi Pass patrol had the feeling they were standing out in the open, protectionless, on the side of a steep roof, and the effect of the height gave them the optical illusion that they could just simply sit down and slide all the way back down to the highway. But it was when they turned the other way and looked up that their eyes widened and awe really took them.
“Are we going to carry all this up there?” someone said.
The Signal Corps Pfc, who wore a big sheath knife on his web pistol belt just behind his pistol and was apparently a member of some ‘Pioneers’ outfit or other, organized the unloading and the separation of the supplies into individual loads, and then prepared to leave.
“But aren’t you going to help us carry this stuff up there?” Corporal Fondriere asked him.
“Hell no,” the Signal Corps Pfc said. “You think I’m crazy?”
“But what if we get lost?”
“How can you get lost? There’s nowhere else to go. Unless you were to cross one of these side ridges and leave this draw entirely. If you could cross one of these side ridges. You follow this—” he paused, searching for an appropriate word, then gave up and jerked his head at the tangled, dry, boulder-strewn giant’s staircase, “—this creekbed up as far as it goes. Then you go straight on up about two hundred yards more, and there you are. It’s the saddle between the two high points. You can’t miss it.”
He stared at them combatively for a moment, as if daring them even to try and miss it.
“I’ve been there. I’ve seen it. What the hell do I want to go back for? Anyway it’ll take you three days to get this gear up there. See you in a week with your relief. Come on, mack,” he said to the driver.
So the historic first Marconi Pass patrol stood dumbly and watched truck, driver and guide disappear down the mountainside, leaving them in what suddenly and for the first time appeared to be this remarkably hostile mountain wilderness, now that they were alone.
“Well, let’s get with it,” Corporal Fondriere sighed.
It did not, after all, actually take them three days to get the gear up. It took them only two days, two whole days. It was nearly noon when the truck left them and they started the first climb, and it was nearly noon of the third day when the last case of grenades started its trip to the top. Corporal Fondriere, who never had been a forceful man and who had acquired his corporal’s rank simply by staying in the Army nine years, decided that they would take the milk cans of water up first. There were four of these. They started off with all four, one to each man.
At the first huge boulder they had to climb up around,
Luckily, there were enough cracks and small ledges in the chimney so that they could rest the edge of the can on something whenever one or the other man had to move up to a new foothold. But when they came out breathing heavily onto the open slope, thinking their worst troubles were over, they discovered first that this slope which had appeared as such a haven from below was one of fifty or sixty degrees; and second they discovered that there was nothing up here, absolutely nothing, to hold onto except grass, which pulled out. The trees had stopped near the bottom of the chimney. Up here, they felt that they were really out in the open on the side of a roof. And that was exactly what it was like.
The only way to surmount this new obstacle was to crawl, crablike, two men in front pulling and two behind shoving, and literally draw the milk can the last two hundred yards to the top. For every ten yards they gained someone would start to slip back, and the only way to stop was to roll over and dig your heels in under you. The only way to rest was to dig a dirt ledge with the shoeheels and set the can upright and squat around it, because to let go of the can at all would be to lose it entirely.
At the very top, in the saddle itself, the slope lessened considerably until it was no more than twenty degrees, before it plunged itself abruptly over the other side into sheer rock. They left the fourth can there and went cautiously back down after the third can at the bottom of the chimney, and brought it up. Then they went all the way, almost to the bottom, for the other two cans, and repeated the first two climbs. All of the other gear, the cases and boxes and the machine guns and their tripods, was brought up in the same way, in stages, but nothing that they had to carry was as awkward and dangerous and nearly impossible to handle as those first four round milk cans of water. On every trip, all the way up to the chimney, tree roots and branches caught at them throwing them off balance on the slippery rocks, and when they got above there where they could have used them, they ceased. It was as if the mountain itself had a personal enmity for them. They worked all that afternoon until dark, and worked all the entire next day, and worked the entire morning of the following day.
It was bruising, grueling, killing work. But if the work was killing, it was nevertheless forgotten and made to count as nothing by what they saw that very first time they came up into the saddle of the pass with that first milk can of water. And each time they climbed exhaustedly back up with some new piece of gear, the experience was repeated as if it had never happened, refreshing them. Each time it was as if they had not seen it before.
The view was literally breathtaking. The whole of the Kaneohe Valley lay spread out before them in all its patchwork, verdant floorplan, running on to the north between the mountains and the sea until it lost itself in the mists of distance, looking much the same (except for modernizations) as it must have looked to Kamehameha’s men when they first climbed to the Pali. Standing up here in the unobstructed winds of the upper air, which made them acutely aware of the height, they had spread out for them at their feet in a way which gave them a peculiar feeling of proprietorship, almost a fifth of the entire island. From the white surf of the beaches which they could see to the east, to the cloud-draped mountains in the west, it was their personal possession because they stood above it. As they stood and watched that first time, a B-18 bomber took off from Bellows Field in the valley below and climbed to its chosen height and began to practice maneuvers. It was still over a thousand feet below them, and they stood and looked at it first with astonishment, and then with superiority.
To be here, to be the first men to be stationed here if not actually the first to be here, and to live here for a week or ten days, these were to all four of them more than worth the heartbreaking work of getting their supplies up. During their stay (actually it was seventeen days, before their relief arrived) they did not once set foot on level ground, and walking on slopes became so natural that they were surprised to find flat earth when they finally came down. The pass itself, its saddle funneling all the winds as it did, was far too turbulent to pitch their sheltertents in, or stay in, except for the one man who was supposed to stay on post at the guns. But after exploration they found another comparatively level slope around the corner of rock beside the saddle, and here they pitched their two puptents, rigged up a rock-lined firepit, and made their camp. Here they cooked, heated water with which to shave, washed themselves when they felt like it which was seldom, and lived. They slept always on a slant. But they had been smart enough in the beginning to pitch the little sheltertents so that they opened down the slope with the closed ends up, in order to have their heads above their feet. As a result they enjoyed the unique experience of crawling up into their beds every night. It was like a quiet cove, their little slope with its two small tents pitched on either side the firepit and the cooking utensils and axes and other gear scattered around, out of the wind and the weather, and it quickly acquired a quality of home, of being lived in. Most of their days when they weren’t on post they spent exploring like excited boys, singly or together, along the treeless slopes of the main ridge or down in the edges of the forest.
It was the first time since Mast’s company had moved out for the beaches, and Mast himself had come into possession of the pistol, that Mast had been happy. And the reason, had Mast looked for it, which he did not, was easy to find. It was because up here he felt he no longer had to think about protecting the pistol.
The awareness of the state of war in which they lived, and which gave the pistol its meaning, had not left Mast. It had not left any of them—although in actual fact there were moments up here, especially when he was exploring, that Mast forgot about it. But most of the time this cloud (with which they all were to become so familiar over the next several years, until it became almost second nature to them) was there, fully sensed, in the back of his mind and looming over everything. So Mast’s particular, personal enemy, his devil, the Japanese major with the saber, had not left Mast. He was still there. But he had been abstracted by this free mountain living from an actual flesh-and-blood picture in Mast’s mind to a mere idea. And as with so many people, mere abstract ideas were not nearly as disturbing to Mast as immediate actualities.
Probably a great deal of Mast’s relief from the tension caused by the need to protect his salvation, the pistol, came from the fact that up here on top of the mountains the constant, omnipresent, omnipotent authority of the Army over every tiniest facet of their lives was removed from them, pushed back to the middle distance. Up here that Authority was represented only by the unforceful, amiable command of Corporal Fondriere.
And apparently Fondriere felt something of this same thing because after the first few days Fondriere did not even insist that one man stay on post at the guns at all times. After all, as he said, from here they could see the beaches where the Japs would land. Time enough, when they landed, to have a full-time sentry. All he asked was that there be one man in the camp at all times. After that the whole thing became one big vacation.
Mast had been under tremendous strain at Makapoo, trying to protect the pistol, and knowing all the time that all around him were numbers of men just waiting for a chance to grab it. He hadn’t been able to enjoy anything, even life itself, because of the pistol. And so now, when he let down and relaxed, he let down all the way. He stopped the uncomfortable business of wearing the pistol inside his waist belt under his shirt at night, stopped wearing to bed the rifle belt with the holster on it. He wrapped it all up in itself and left the whole thing to lie at his head in the closed end of the tent, and began to get his first good sleep in weeks. He even stopped wearing the rifle belt in the daytime, as the others had theirs, and
After all, as he reasoned, there were only the four of them up here. And they were living in such close proximity in their little camp that there was no possibility of hiding a theft. Then too, being up here as they were, with the world, the war, the Army, everything so remote, it seemed somehow as if some sort of truce existed, not only about the pistol but about everything, between the four of them. And they were all enjoying it. It would be a ghastly immorality for any one of them to violate this feeling, and apparently they all felt it. This was evidenced by O’Brien.
Mast’s relationship with O’Brien had remained the same as at Makapoo: they spoke to each other only when absolutely necessary in some line of duty. But up here, whether it was this sense of having been removed from under the thumb of Army authority, or whether it was because of having shared the now unbelievable job of bringing up the supplies, or whether it was just simply the being thrown together so much on the patrol, the two of them had started speaking when it was not in line of duty. It started first with a few stiff, brusque “Helios,” each man looking at the other tentatively, ready to draw back if rebuffed. Later a few other stiff words were added, finally a grin or two. And then one day O’Brien came up to Mast where he was sitting alone in the pass looking out over the valley that none of them ever tired of viewing, and made a pronouncement:
“Look. I know you’re leavin’ your pistol in your tent. I just wanted to tell you you don’t have to worry about me snitching it. Not while we’re up here anyway.”