From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [432]
And in the G Co orderly room, Warden chortled to himself smugly, as he worked.
Once, when Lt Ross had gone to the supply room, Maylon Stark stuck his head in at the door. “The kitchen truck’s loaded and ready to roll.”
“Right,” Warden said, without looking up.
“I want you to know I think you done a hell of a swell job,” Stark said reluctantly strangledly. “It’ll be two hours, anyway, before any other kitchen in this outfit is ready; and some of them probably have to stay behind to get loaded and come down later.”
“You done a good job yourself,” Warden said, still not looking up.
“It wasnt me,” Stark said. “It was you. And I just want you to know I think you done a hell of a job.”
“Okay,” Warden said, “thanks,” and went on working without looking up.
He rode down in the jeep at the head of the Company’s convoy with Lt Ross, Weary Russell driving. There was terrific traffic. The roads were alive with trucks and taxis as far as the eye could see, bumper to bumper. The trucks were taking them down, to beach positions; the taxis were taking them up, to Schofield, where their outfits would already be gone. Recons and jeeps slithered in and out among the long lines of trucks, but the big two-and-a-halfs could only lumber on, a few feet at a time, stopping when the truck in front stopped in back of the truck in front of him, waiting to move on until the truck in front of them moved on a little in back of the truck in front of him.
The trucks had been stripped of their tarps and one man with his BAR or machinegun mounted over the cab rode standing on the truckbed wall. Helmeted heads were poked above the naked ribs watching the sky like visitors inspecting the dinosaur’s skeleton in the Smithsonian Institute.
In the jeep, riding up and down haranguing on the road shoulder alongside the Company’s column, Warden saw them all, a lot of times. Their faces were changed and they did not look the same any more. It was somewhat the same look as Stark had had in the messhall, only the drunkenness was evaporating out of it leaving only the hard set of the dry plaster. Out here on the highway, lost among hundreds of other outfits, the idea was not only clearer but bigger, much bigger, than back at your home barracks in your own quad. Chief Choate, riding with a BAR up, looked down at him from above his truck cab and Warden looked back.
They had all left everything behind, civilian clothes, garrison shoes and uniforms, campaign hat collections, insignia collections, photograph albums, private papers. To hell with all that. This was war. We wont need that. They brought nothing but the skeletal field living equipment, and the only man who packed in anything comfortable to bring with him was Pete Karelsen. Pete had been in France.
Gradually, foot by foot, the trucks moved on down toward Honolulu and whatever waited on the beaches. Up till now it had been a day off, it had been fun.
Pearl Harbor, when they passed it, was a shambles. Wheeler Field had been bad, but Pearl Harbor numbed the brain. Pearl Harbor made a queasiness in the testicles. Wheeler Field was set back quite a ways from the road, but parts of Pearl Harbor were right on the highway. Up till then it had been a big lark, a picnic; they had fired from the roofs and been fired at from the planes and the cooks had served them coffee and sandwiches and the supply detail had brought them up ammo and they had got two or three planes and only one man in the whole Regiment had been hit (with a .50 caliber in the fleshy part of his calf, didnt even hit a bone, he walked up to the dispensary by himself), and he was getting himself a big Purple Heart. Almost everybody had a bottle and they all had been half-drunk anyway when it started and it had all been a sort of super-range-season with live targets to shoot at. The most exciting kind: Men. But now the bottles were fast wearing off and there was no immediate prospect of getting any more and there were no live targets to shoot at. Now they were thinking. Why, it might be months—even years—before they could get hold of a bo