Meanwhile, Steele had another surprise in addition to Deke’s promotion. It turned out that they really were having a Christmas dinner, even if it was a day late.
The decision to serve a traditional Christmas dinner on December 26, rather than on the holiday itself, had been made quite deliberately by General Bruce, commander of the 77th Infantry Division. Throughout the Pacific, similar decisions had been made to align with the time difference. Their dinner would coincide with what was actually Christmas Day in the continental United States. Across the thousands of miles of ocean, the troops would be celebrating Christmas at the same time as folks back home. It was an important real-time connection that had nothing to do with dates on a calendar.
A makeshift mess hall had been erected, and cooks were at work preparing the meal. There were no tables — each man had to sit on the ground to eat — and everyone kept his rifle within reach. That was OK, considering the wonderful smells that greeted them.
Steele explained that the supplies for their holiday meal had come from an air drop. Again, it was a testimonial to the miracle of the American supply line juggernaut that the troops on Leyte were soon eating roasted turkey, glazed ham, real mashed potatoes, stuffing, and canned string beans. Each man got a slice of apple pie made with canned apples. The boys had even been allotted one beer each to wash it all down, or all the fresh coffee they wanted. The nondrinkers did quite well trading their beer for extra pie.
“Can you believe this, fellas?” Philly asked in wonder, balancing a heavily laden plate on his knees as he settled onto the ground. “It sure as hell beats canned lima beans and ham.”
Philly was referring to the least favorite “flavor” of C ration. More than one man would return from the Pacific vowing to never allow a lima bean anywhere near his plate.
“It’s sure somethin’,” Deke agreed. His belly growled at the sight, but staring down at the plate, he felt overwhelmed. The mess crew had loaded his plate with more food than he could eat. Their stomachs had all shrunk after weeks and months of living on so little. Philly hadn’t been far wrong when he had kidded Deke about being able to find shade under a blade of grass. Deke was now as lean as a bayonet, and just as sharp and hard.
He took a mouthful of mashed potatoes swimming in butter, closing his eyes as the taste took him back home to better times, before they had lost his family’s mountain home to greedy bankers, when they had still been a family. His father had died in an accident at the sawmill where he’d been working in an attempt to keep the family farm from going under. His mother had died not long after that, most likely of a broken heart and broken dreams. Now it was just he and his sister, Sadie, who was a female police officer in Washington, DC.
He raised a forkful of mashed potatoes in a silent toast.
He forced himself to eat another bite because it was so delicious, but he was already getting full. He ended up just looking down at his plate, feasting with his eyes, thinking,
His thoughts wandered. When other men recalled the holidays, they spoke of things like presents under the Christmas tree or sled riding. He just recalled it only ever being the four of them, the sole present being an orange, its color almost glowing unnaturally in the winter drabness of the Cole family’s modest home. At other times there might not be enough to eat, but not on Christmas. Ma had cooked buckwheat pancakes and bacon on their flat-topped potbelly stove, the pancakes drizzled with molasses, and Deke had thought himself a prince.
Looking around, he could see that Philly was eating like it was his job, pausing just long enough to shoo the flies away. Nobody dwelled on the thought that these same flies might have been crawling on the Japanese dead just beyond the tree line.
The feast also drew the newspaper reporters and photographers who had been embedded with the troops, covering the war.
One of those reporters caused a stir. He was an older man — much older than the soldiers, at least — with a narrow, hangdog face and a sad smile as he listened to the GIs tell their stories. He was skinny to the point of looking unhealthy. A cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth.
“I’ll be damned, it’s Ernie Pyle!” Philly declared. “Hey, Ernie, put me in your story!”
Pyle was famous among the GIs and well loved for telling their side of things with his folksy, everyman style of writing. He had done just that in Europe and was now covering the Pacific, although he was something of a latecomer to the war in this part of the world.
