The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [336]
If only he had conceived that patrol a little earlier in the campaign, had had time to work it out more completely. It had been a botch, and Hearn was dead.
Well, one could not really call it a shock. Still, for a little while, Hearn had been the only man in the division who was capable of understanding his more ambitious plans, capable even of understanding him. But Hearn had not been big enough. He had looked, become frightened, and crawled away, throwing mud.
He knew why he had punished him, he knew it was not accidental that he had assigned Hearn to recon. And his end had not been unforeseen. Cummings had extracted at first a fragile grain of pleasure from it.
Only. . . for an instant when he first heard the news of Hearn's death, it had hurt him, wrenched his heart with a cruel fist. He had almost grieved for Hearn, and then it had been covered over by something else, something more complex. For days whenever Cummings thought of the Lieutenant he would feel a mingled pain and satisfaction.
In the end the important thing was always to tot up your profit and loss. The campaign had taken a week more than had been allowed for it, and that was not going to count too effectively for him. But there had been a time only a week or two ago when he would have settled for an extra month. Besides, as far as Army was concerned, the campaign had been won by the side invasion of Botoi. That would be undeniably in his favor. Altogether, he had not been either fundamentally hurt or benefited by Anopopei. When the Philippines came up he would have the entire division to employ and a chance to achieve some more striking results. But before that the men would have to be shaken up, given vigorous training, and their discipline would have to be improved. He had again the same anger he had felt in the last month of the Anopopei campaign. The men resisted him, resisted change, with maddening inertia. No matter how you pushed them, they always gave ground sullenly, regrouped once the pressure was off. You could work on them, you could trick them, but there were times now when he doubted basically whether he could change them, really mold them. And it might be the same thing again in the Philippines. With all his enemies at Army, he did not have much chance of gaining an added star before the Philippines, and with that would go all chance of an Army command before the war ended.
Time was going by, and with it, opportunity. It would be the hacks who would occupy history's seat after the war, the same blunderers, unco-ordinated, at cross-impulses. He was getting older, and he would be by-passed. When the war with Russia came he would not be important enough, not close enough to the seats of power, to take the big step, the big leap. Perhaps after this war he might be smarter to take a fling at the State Department. His brother-in-law certainly would do him no harm.
There would be few Americans who would understand the contradictions of the period to come. The route to control could best masquerade under a conservative liberalism. The reactionaries and isolationists would miss the bell, cause almost as much annoyance as they were worth. Cummings shrugged. If he had another opportunity he would make better use of it. What frustration! To know so much and be hog-tied.
To divert his balked nerves, he carried out the mopping up with a ceaseless concentration on details.
Sixth Day: 347 Japanese -- 1 American
Ninth Day: 502 Japanese -- 4 Americans
The patrols filtered along the trails behind the Japanese lines. In great numbers they threaded all the aisles of the maze, hacked through the jungle itself to find any survivors who might have crawled up a game trail. From early in the morning until twilight the patrols were out and always with the same mission.
It was simple, a lark. After months of standing guard at night, of patrolling up trails which could explode into ambush at any moment, the mopping up was comparatively pleasant, almost exciting. The killing lost all dimension, bothered the men far less than discovering some ants in their bedding.