The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [221]
"Okay, Japbait." Croft was pleased. The information had not surprised him.
The platoon began marching again. The stream Martinez had chosen was very narrow, and the jungle closed over it almost completely. After a hundred yards they were forced to slough through the water on their hands and knees, ducking their heads to avoid the leaves and brambles that drooped into the stream. It became shortly no wider than a footpath and began shredding into many tiny runs of water which seeped from the rocks of the forest. Before they had gone a quarter of a mile, Croft decided to cut trail. The stream took a bend back toward the ocean, and it would be worthless to follow it any longer.
"I'm gonna divide up the platoon for cutting trail," he told Hearn, "but I'm gonna leave us out of it, 'cause we'll have enough to do."
Hearn was panting. He had no idea of what was customary on something like this, and he was too fatigued to care much. "Anything you say, Sergeant." Afterward he was a little worried. When you were with Croft, it was too easy to let him handle all the decisions.
Croft took a sight with his compass in the direction he wanted to travel, and found a tree, in the brush about fifty yards away, which would be a good target. He gathered the platoon around him, and divided them into three teams of four. "We're gonna cut trail," he told them. "To start you can aim about ten yards to the left of that tree. Each team is gonna work about five minutes, and then get spelled ten. They ain't any reason why we gotta be all day doin' this, so let's not be fuggin-off. You can take ten before you start, and then, Brown, you begin it with your men."
They had to slash a route through a quarter mile of dense brush, through vines and bushes and bamboo groves, around trees, and into the thickest brambles. It was slow, tedious work. Two men labored side by side, hacking with their machetes at the net of foliage, trampling underfoot what they could. They progressed at a rate of about two yards a minute, working quickly through a thinner patch of brush only to halt and chop inch by inch at a tangle of bamboo. It had taken them three hours to advance up the river, and by noon, after two more hours of hacking a trail, they had added only a couple of hundred yards. But they did not mind it; each man had to work only two or three minutes in a quarter hour, and they were shedding their fatigue. When they were not working they lay on the trail resting and joking. The fact that they had gone so far cheered them; they assumed instinctively the open hills would present no problems. After toiling through the muck and water of the stream, after being convinced so many times they would never reach its end, they were proud and pleased to have managed it, and for the first time some of them were optimistic about the success of the patrol.
Roth and Minetta were wretched, however. Minetta was in poor condition from his week in the hospital, and Roth had never been very strong. The long march up the river had fagged them brutally; overtired, the rest periods did them little good and laboring on the trail was torture. After thirty seconds, after three or four slashes with his machete, Roth was unable to raise his arm. The machete felt heavy as an ax. He lifted it with both hands, dropped it feebly on the branch or vine before him. Every half minute, the knife slipped out of his sweating nerveless fingers and went clattering to the ground.
Minetta's fingers had begun to blister and the handle of the machete rasped against his palm, rubbed sweat into all the sores on his hand. He would attack a bush violently and clumsily, forcing himself into a rage at its stubbornness, and then he would halt, winded, cursing between his sobs at the dank pappy mesh of verdure before him. He and Roth worked side by side, cramped together in the narrow aisle of the trail. In their exhaustion they often blundered against each other, and Minetta would swear with irritation. They disliked each other as intensely as they hated the jungle, the patrol, and Croft. Minetta brooded because Croft was not working; it became the crux of his bitterness. "It's easy enough for that goddam Croft to tell us what to do, but he ain't doin' it. I don't see him working his ass off," Minetta muttered. "If I was a platoon sergeant, I wouldn't treat the guys like that. I'd be right with them, working."