The resulting explosion picked him up off his feet and hurled him deeper into the jungle. He was thrown through the air, arms and legs flying, air ripped from his lungs. His mind flashed back to being a boy playing at the beach, when he’d been caught by a big wave that tumbled him underwater. Both then and now, he gasped for breath.
He landed among deep ferns and undergrowth. Dimly, he was aware of Kimura landing next to him.
The bombardment shook the ground. Trees shattered and splintered. Flashes of fire blinded him. Okubo saw no point in false bravado and burrowed as far as he could into the tangled logs and brush as the bombs fell.
Fortunately for Okubo and Kimura, they had been deep enough into the jungle to be spared. Any Japanese at the jungle’s edge had surely been obliterated. His ears ringing, Okubo extricated himself from his hiding place once the bombardment had ended. He inspected his rifle, pleased that it had escaped any serious damage.
“Let me see that arm,” he said gruffly to Kimura, who stood nearby, looking dazed. “If you lose too much blood or it becomes infected, you won’t be of any use.”
Deftly, he bandaged Kimura’s wound, given to him earlier by the American sniper when the private had been hidden inside the tank. When he was finished, he grunted in satisfaction, then started deeper into the jungle.
Wincing from the pain in his arm, Kimura followed.
Chapter Sixteen
Hours after the failed Japanese attack, the soldiers of the sniper squad sat in their foxholes, smoking cigarettes and drinking rusty water.
“We showed those Japs, didn’t we?” Philly said, gazing out at the vast number of bodies strewn across the empty no-man’s-land between the foxholes and the line of jungle. In the growing heat of the day, the bodies had already begun to swell and decompose. The breeze carried the odor of rotting human flesh. Even men who didn’t ordinarily smoke lit up cigarettes.
“I reckon we did,” Deke replied. He found the sight of so many dead to be awe-inspiring. He was also saddened by it, but he pushed that thought from his mind. The Japanese had brought this on themselves. It might seem like a massacre in hindsight, but there was no forgetting that, in the predawn darkness, the Japanese had swarmed out of the jungle in a terrifying banzai attack.
Philly looked over at Yoshio. “Kind of awful to think it might be your distant cousins starting to stink out there, isn’t it?”
Yoshio shrugged. “I do not know if they are my cousins. But I do know that they are the enemy.”
Philly shook his head and took a deep drag on his cigarette. “You Japs show about as much emotion as a bowl of rice, except when you’re riled up. When you’re riled up, look out! Those banzai bastards were plenty riled up, for all the good it did them. Yoshio, your cousins are good and dead now.”
Yoshio’s only response was to move as far away from Philly as the foxhole permitted. He pushed past Deke in the process, and Deke could feel the anger radiating off Yoshio like steam off a radiator. Maybe the comment about those being his dead cousins out there had stung more than he wanted to say.
Deke gave Philly a look and a slight shake of his head, sending a signal to knock it off. As far as Deke was concerned, Yoshio might look like a Jap, but he had fought like an American.
One of their gruesome tasks upon returning to the line had been to clear out the foxholes. They had added the American bodies to the neat line of dead, while the dead Japanese had been tossed unceremoniously into the scattered bodies in the no-man’s-land.
To his surprise, Deke had found a new spare boot in the belly of the foxhole, along with other discarded gear and endless brass shell casings. He didn’t want to think too much about what had happened to the owner of the boot—or why there was just one.
The wounded, including a few Japanese who had somehow survived in spite of their best efforts to die for the Emperor, had been carried back to the beachhead, where they awaited transport to the navy ships. It was a slow process, impeded by a strong wind that had stirred up the surf crashing across the coral reef and making passage difficult for the smaller craft. Many wounded didn’t survive the wait.
The American dead had been lined up in neat rows, awaiting the graves registration and the burial detail. Victory had been won dearly. Hundreds of soldiers and marines had died defending the beachhead. The fighting had been so brutal, with casualties caused by everything from tank rounds to grenades to bayonets—up close and personal.
Yet the butcher’s bill had been far greater for the enemy. They had cleared away the dead Japanese from the immediate vicinity of the line of foxholes, pitching the bodies into the no-man’s-land where the scattered dead already lay, many of them mowed down by machine-gun fire. For long stretches, it was entirely possible to step from body to body, without ever touching the ground. The burned, scorched remains of the Japanese tanks punctuated the field.
