From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [429]
Down along the roof men yelled at each other to throw the empties down into the yard and went right on piling them up beside them.
“God damn it!” Warden roared, and moved out from behind the chimney. He walked down along behind them like a quarterback bolstering up his linemen. “Throw them clips down, goddam you Frank. Throw your clips down, Teddy.”
“Come on, Pete,” Grenelli said behind him. “Let me take it a while now, will you?”
“I got firsts on it,” Mikeovitch said.
“Like hell!” Grenelli said. “Its my gun, aint it?”
“Shut up,” Pete said. “Both of you. You’ll both get your chance. Pretty soon.”
Warden was behind the Chief and Reedy Treadwell on the inside edge when the next ones came in, a double flying in in echelon from the northeast like the single, and he dropped down beside them. Down below the bugler stopped blowing and ran back in under the E Company porch again.
Straight across from Warden on the roof of the Headquarters Building there were only two men up. One of them he recognized as M/Sgt Big John Deterling, the enlisted football coach. Big John had a .30 caliber water-cooled with no tripod, holding it cradled in his left arm and firing it with his right. When he fired a burst, the recoil staggered him all over the roof.
The winking noseguns of the incoming planes cut two foot-wide swathes raising dust across the quad and up the wall and over the D Co roof like a wagon road through a pasture. Warden couldnt fire at them from laughing at Big John Deterling on the Headquarters roof. This time Big John came very near to falling down and spraying the roof. The other man up over there had wisely put the chimney between him and Big John, instead of between him and the planes.
“Look at that son of a bitch,” Warden said, when he could stop laughing.
Down below the loading detail dived out to pick up the clips in the lull, and the bugler ran back to the megaphone.
“I been watching him,” Chief grinned. “The son of a bitch is drunk as a coot. He was down to Mrs Kipfer’s last night when me and Pete was there.”
“I hope his wife dont find out,” Warden said.
“He ought to have a medal,” Chief said still laughing.
“He probly will,” Warden grinned.
As it turned out, later, he did. M/Sgt John L Deterling; the Silver Star; for unexampled heroism in action.
Another V of three flashed sliding in from the southeast and Warden turned and ran back to Pete’s chimney as everybody opened up with a joyous roar. Firing with the BAR forearm resting on his hand on the chimney corner, he watched his tracers get lost in the cloud of tracers around the lead plane spraying the nose, spraying the cockpit and on back into the tail assembly. The plane shivered like a man trying to get out from under a cold shower and the pilot jumped in his seat twice like a man tied to a hot stove. They saw him throw up his arms helplessly in a useless try to ward it off, to stop it pouring in on him. There was a prolonged cheer. A hundred yards beyond the quad, with all of them watching now in anticipatory silence, the little Zero began to fall off on one wing and slid down a long hill of air onto one of the goalposts of the 19th Infantry football field. It crashed into flames. A vast happy college-yell cheer went up from the quad and helmets were thrown into the air and backs were slapped as if our side had just made a touchdown against Notre Dame.
Then, as another V of three came in from the northeast, there was a wild scramble for helmets.
“You got him, Pete!” Grenelli yelled, bobbing around on the bucking tripod leg, “you got him!”
“Got him hell,” Pete said without stopping firing. “Nobody’ll ever know who got that guy.”
“Hey, Milt!”
In the lull, Chief Choate was yelling at him from the roof edge.
“Hey, Milt! Somebody’s yellin for you down below.”
“Comin up!” Warden bawled. Behind him as he ran, Grenelli was pleading:
“Come on, Pete. Let me take it for a while now. You got one already.”
“In a minute,” Pete said. “In a minute. I just want to try one more.”
Looking down over the wall, Wa