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By Root 29469 0

b lasted a month. It was a wonderful time, even though there was a strict order against giving passes. In a situation like this who the hell wanted passes? Engineer Companies delivered them ready-cut beams and planking of koa wood that they had cut on the slopes of Barber’s Point. All they had to do was dig holes in sand and set beams in them and line them with planking, and then put beams over them and line them with planking, and then cover it all up with sand, after they had made sure the MG apertures pointed the right direction. Their nights were their own. The officers hardly ever came around from the CP in the daytime, let alone during the night. The Company took care not to strain themselves with overwork in the daytime, so as not to detract from the nights. In fact, they were usually so hungover and worndown from the nights that they could not have strained themselves if they had wanted. That was one of the reasons the job took a month. It was a wonderful time.

Another reason the job took a month was Position #28 at Makapuu Head. It was not a wonderful time at Makapuu Head. The thirty gasoline driven Barco drills had been for Makapuu Head. Makapuu Head, a foot under the surface, was one solid rock. Also, the Waimanalo Girls School was eight or ten miles away down in Kaneohe Valley. And, because Makapuu Head was manned by more than a full platoon, instead of just three or four men, there was always an officer there; he even slept there. There were no estates, bars, dwellings, or places of recreation at Makapuu Head—unless you wanted to count the two public outhouses down below on the Kaupo Park beach just opposite Rabbit Island, from which a number of men caught the crabs. All there was at Makapuu Head was the lighthouse out on the Point and the one solid rock, and the Engineers across the highway with the pneumatic drills, digging and blasting into the cliff wall where the highway demolition would be.

Makapuu Head was the most crucial spot in the Company sector. If an enemy landed at Kaneohe, there were only two roads he could take into Honolulu without going clear around the whole island, the Pali road that came down Nuuanu Avenue into town, and Kalanianaole Highway at Makapuu Head. The majority of Pete Karelsen’s weapons platoon, under Pete, formed the nucleus of the Makapuu Head complement because they were the best machinegunners in the Company, and there was another whole platoon of riflemen to protect them because they were precious. But now both machinegunners and riflemen worked together side by side with the Barco drills and shovels like a nigger labor battalion. At Makapuu it was definitely not a wonderful time.

Gradually, as the work on one position after another was completed, and Makapuu still made no headway into the one solid rock, more and more men were shifted out there to help cut with Barco drills the one solid rock. Until finally the whole Company was out there, working in eight-hour shifts, around the clock 24 hours a day. A kind of frenzied ecstasy for work got into everybody, particularly the night shifts for some reason, and specially after The Warden made it his headquarters and took to operating a Barco while lashing sarcastically at everybody in a voice that drowned even the stuttering one-cylinder engines. The cooks stayed up all night in shifts voluntarily, to keep them supplied with hot sandwiches and coffee. Even the clerks and cooks took their turns at working the Barcos; Mazzioli, when he came down from Schofield for a couple of days to look around, put on his unfaded fatigues he had hardly worn in a year and displayed his surprisingly good physique naked to the waist on a Barco and it turned out much to everybody’s surprise that his old man had been a sandhog on the Holland Tunnel job in New York. It was inexplicable, the whole thing. The men who had been out there from the start wrapped handkerchieves proudly around bleeding blisters and laughed uproariously as the blisters on the hands of the new men began to break.

Maybe somebody would even sing the old soldier’s parody of Chow Call.

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