The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [41]
These elaborations gave Cummings a constant pleasure. No matter how many times he had seen it, the slow improvement of a bivouac was always satisfying. By the time his pivoting operation was a week old, he felt as if he had erected a small village. During the day there was constant activity with men working on improvements in the bivouac area, and trucks constantly moving in and out of the motor pools. On the other side of the road the maintenance shops were in operation in service company, and in the somnolent afternoons in the jungle he could hear their machine tools grinding. His own bivouac had been enlarged several times and by now the barbed wire around the perimeter enclosed an ellipse of earth almost two hundred yards long and more than half as wide, and in the area were over a hundred pup tents, a dozen pyramidal and squad tents, a row of twenty fly tents in which his officers were housed, three latrines, two field kitchens, over forty trucks and jeeps, and almost three hundred men.
Recon was a very small part of all this. With the five new replacements, the platoon had a total strength of fourteen men, and their arc of the bivouac consisted of seven pup tents extended in ten-yard intervals along a section of the perimeter. At night two men in the platoon would be awake at any hour, sitting in the two machine-gun emplacements that faced past the barbed wire toward the jungle; in the daytime the perimeter would be virtually deserted, with only one man left behind as the rest of the platoon went out to work on the road. Five weeks had gone by since invasion day, and with the exception of a few routine security patrols around the new bivouac, the platoon had seen no activity. It was approaching the rainy season, and it grew hotter each day, more trying to work on the road. By the time they had been in the new bivouac for a week, many of the men, including some of the veterans of the Motome campaign, were wishing for combat again.
After evening chow Red had washed up, and moved over to Wilson and Gallagher's tent. All day it had been extremely hot and sultry, even more unbearable than the days and nights before it, and Red was feeling irritable. The day, like every other day, had been spent working on the road.
Gallagher and Wilson were sprawled in their tent, smoking quietly without talking. "Whateya say, Red?" Wilson drawled at last.
Red wiped his forehead. "That kid Wyman! It used to be bad enough bunkin' with a Boy Scout like Toglio, but that kid Wyman. . ." He snorted. "They're gonna be sendin' 'em overseas soon with a sugar tit."
"Yeah, the platoon seems all topside-bottom since we got the replacements," Wilson complained. He sighed, and ran the sleeve of his fatigue shirt over his chin, which was moist with perspiration. "Weather's fixin' to act up," he said quietly.
"More fuggin rain," Gallagher snorted.
Dark slated clouds were washing the eastern sky and mounting thunderheads in the north and south. The air was leaden and moist, hanging limp without a murmur. Even the coconut trees seemed swollen and expectant, their leaves drooping languidly over and raw chopped earth of the bivouac.
"That corduroy we put in is gonna be washed out," Gallagher said. Red looked out across the area and scowled. The tents were sagging, and appeared gloomy and somber although the sun was still shining with a dull red glow in the west.
"Just so we don't get our tails wet," Red said.
He debated for a moment whether to go back to his tent and deepen the rain trench, which had almost overflowed in the previous night's downpour, and then he shrugged. It was about time Wyman learned how to do it. He crouched and dropped into the hole in which Gallagher and Wilson were resting now. It was a hole about two feet deep and about as wide and long as a double bed. Wilson and Gallagher slept side by side in it with two blankets between them and the earth. Overhead they had anchored a ridgepole of bamboo on two uprights, had draped their combined ponchos over it, and staked the ends to the ground on each side of the hole. It was possible to kneel inside the tent without bumping one's head against the ridgepole, but not even an eight-year-old child could have stood in it. From outside, the shelter appeared to be no more than two feet above the level of the ground. This tent was typical of almost all the pup tents in the bivouac.