Some Came Running (172 page)

“Here they come,” somebody would say, and he would stick his head up over the edge of his hole—with that extraordinary feeling of complete nakedness it gave you—and then would, as soon as he could pick out targets, begin to fire.

They want what we got, was the phrase that always jumped into Wally’s head as he squinted at targets. They want what we got. Our bread, our food, our guns, our ammo, our grenades, our warm clothes. And more than that, they want all of that that we’ve got back home: the luxuries they’ve never dreamed of—the richness of America. And we want to keep it, and that’s why we’re here. We built it, we made it, why shouldn’t we want to keep it? Squint and fire. Squint and fire. Pick your targets. Don’t waste ammo. And still they kept on coming, dog-trotting up the slopes at the perimeter. Or walking, in the slow, thin, widely spaced lines. You could go on killing them forever, Wally sometimes thought, and you just couldn’t kill them all. And they would still keep on running, dog-trotting uphill in their funny quilted uniforms, silently, stubbornly, endlessly. It was like some new kind of way of life, he would think. Without justice for either side; no law; no courts; no police forces; and only the Company existed
truly.
They want what we got. They want what I got. But I intend to keep it.

“They’re going back,” somebody would say, and the firefight would slack off and once again you could hear the bugles in the night, and the funny shepherd’s pipes blowing, and the cymbals and weird rattles that sounded like Hallowe’en.

“They’re going back!”

Or—

“Bug out! They’re gettin in! We got to pull out. Fall back, fall back.” And shepherding his squad, what was left of it, they would try to work their way back, and re-form again, on some other hill. Almost every time, they would lose at least a man or two in the platoon; sometimes more.

Dead tired. Almost all the time, except when the firefight started. They want what
we
got. And we got to keep it. Squint and fire. Squint and fire. And still they kept on coming. They weren’t like people, they were more like animals.

The ROKs were the ones he felt sorry for the most. The Chinese did not hesitate to shoot them, without compunction, most of the times when they took ROKs prisoners. They didn’t shoot nearly so many of the Americans, though they did shoot some. But the ROKs also shot the Chinese when they took them prisoner, shot them even when prisoners were wanted for information. And yet they were your close friends. But they were like children. They just weren’t like us. They were Asiatics, of the most primitive sort. One man just wasn’t important. Wally had read Harold Lamb’s
Genghis Khan
and
The March of the Barbarians—
long ago—and they chilled his spine then. And they chilled his spine now, these inheritors of Genghis Khan.

“They’re turning back!”

Or—

“Pull out! Fall back, fall back! Bug out!”

What was it Napoleon had once said? when asked of China?
“There lies a sleeping dragon, let it sleep.”
Maybe someday, in some far-off future, the Russians themselves would be turned upon and destroyed by this Frankenstein they had created so cavalierly. That would be nice, he thought drowsily. Squint and fire.

“They’re turning back!”

“Pull out, pull out!”

The last time, the time he had somehow always known was coming, he shepherded his dwindling squad—four men now, besides himself—ahead of him toward the rearward crest and off the hill, and it was then that the burp gun firing from somewhere near took him through the ass with a prolonged burst and he fell. Am I dead? No, not dead. But he couldn’t move his legs much, and when he did, it hurt so much he had to quit. Must have got him through the hips. The remnants of his carefully shepherded squad—good boys—were a good little ways ahead of him, running hard. Maybe they would notice he was gone, and somebody would try to come back for him. But maybe they wouldn’t even notice, in the confusion, until later. Much later.

Working hard with his arms and sweating with pain in the cold, Wally squirmed himself around until he was facing the other way: toward the enemy. Such a funny word. He had dropped his rifle when he fell, and it had bounced away somewhere; he couldn’t see it. He had no pistol. All he had left now was his knife.

He got it out, then held it comfortingly in his hand against his side. There was no describing the enormous comfort that it gave him. And it was still razor-shaving-sharp, too. Grinning, Wally thought suddenly of the time he had slashed his finger with it, and the scar. The scar he had been so proud of.

Was anybody coming back? Had they found out he was gone yet? Well, maybe they wouldn’t come this way. The Chinks. Maybe they’d go on around the other side of the position. They might bypass him completely. That had happened to guys lots of times, and they were collected later.

Then he heard the jabbering voices, talking in their funny, droning firecracker talk, dead ahead of him. Raising his head, he saw several Chinese appear over the crest. All but one of them were to his left. But that one saw him, and stopped. He must have been eight or ten yards away. And for a moment, they simply looked at each other, two foreigners, two total aliens, two men. Then the Chink approached him cautiously. He wasn’t carrying any rifle. And Wally raised the knife and menaced him with it. The Chink stopped again.

He might have tried playing dead. But hell, they shot most of the dead ones again anyway, just to make sure. Maybe it was a mistake not to have tried it, but then the Chink had seen him looking right at him. Once again, the Chink started to approach him, cautiously, and once again Wally menaced him with the knife and he stopped. Then, fumbling with his uniform he took out a grenade—an American grenade—and pulled the pin and tossed it over at Wally. There was the loud, familiar pop, as the spoon flew loose, and then the fizz. Then he and the others with him who had been watching all this jumped back down over the crest grinning.

Wally lay, staring at the fizzing hand grenade. It was only a few feet in front of him. But, of course, he couldn’t reach it. At least he’d got the squad out.

Wally Dennis. Sgt Wally F Dennis, Infantryman. And he thought suddenly of the unfinished manuscript locked up in his bureau drawer at home. Then the whole world blew up in his face.

The several Chinese came back up over the crest after the grenade exploded, and the one who had tossed it walked grinning over to the blackened figure. The American grenade had not torn the figure up much, but the whole head was blackened. The Chinese approached it cautiously and rolled it over with his foot, then he stepped on the wrist and pried the long beautiful knife out of the hand and looked at it curiously. Squatting on one knee, he pushed the chin back and drew the knife sharply across the throat. Looking down at the body, the Chinese stood up grinning happily, and inspected his new knife. Then he unfastened the ammo belt around the waist with its sheath hanging on it and jerked it loose. Putting it around his own waist, he swaggered back to his companions jabbering excitedly, proudly flourishing the blood-covered knife. All of them looked at it enviously. Then one man, more acquisitive than the others, reached out and made a grab for it. The new owner merely flicked his wrist, and the envious one drew back a badly cut hand. Except for him, everybody laughed. Then the proud new owner jammed the bloody knife down into its sheath without bothering to wipe it off; and the four of them walked on.

Once again upon looking back over the six years it took to write this novel, I find no other term applicable to the writing of it than to call it all a “collective enterprise.” This time though, having had the experience once before, I no longer find it a startling development. I was prepared for it.

Grateful acknowledgment is here tendered to Mr & Mrs Harry E Handy for their unfailing confidence and help, both financial and spiritual, and particularly to Lowney Handy herself for her invaluable editorial and creative aid and advice; to Mr Burroughs Mitchell for his unflagging faith and belief and his remarkably astute editorial aid in cutting; to Mr Horace S Manges for his tenderly careful care of a rather unstable “artist” like myself; and to Mr Ned Brown, agent, of Beverly Hills, California, who kept a repeatedly cramping finger on the pulse of it for six long and often grueling years.

James Jones (1921—1977) was one of the preeminent American writers of the twentieth century. With a series of three novels written in the decades following World War II, he established himself as one of the foremost chroniclers of the modern soldier’s life.

Born in Illinois, Jones came of age during the Depression in a family that experienced poverty suddenly and brutally. He learned to box in high school, competing as a welterweight in several Golden Gloves tournaments. After graduation he had planned to go to college, but a lack of funds led him to enlist in the army instead.

Before war began he served in Hawaii, where he found himself in regular conflict with superior officers who rewarded Jones’s natural combativeness with latrine duty and time in the guardhouse. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, which Jones witnessed, he was sent to Guadalcanal, site of some of the deadliest jungle fighting of the Pacific Theater. He distinguished himself in battle, at one point killing an enemy soldier barehanded, and was awarded a bronze star for his bravery. He was shipped home in 1943 because of torn ligaments in his ankle, an old injury that was made much worse in the war. After a period of convalescence in Memphis, Jones requested a limited duty assignment and a short leave. When these were denied, he went AWOL.

His stretch away from the army was brief but crucial, as it was then that he met Lowney Handy, the novelist who would later become Jones’s mentor. Jones spent a few months getting to know Lowney and her husband, Harry, then returned to the army, spending a year as a “buck-ass private” (a term which Jones coined) before winning promotion to sergeant. In the summer of 1944, showing signs of severe post-traumatic stress—then called “combat fatigue—he was honorably discharged.

He enrolled at New York University and, inspired by Lowney Handy, began work on his first novel,
To the End of the
War (originally titled
They Shall Inherit the Laughter
). Drawing on his own past, Jones wove a story of soldiers just returned from war, presenting a vision of soldiering that was neither romantic nor heroic. He submitted the 788-page manuscript to Charles Scribner’s Sons, where it was read by Maxwell Perkins, the legendary editor of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe. Perkins rejected it, but saw promise in the weighty work, and encouraged Jones to write a new novel.

Jones began writing
From Here to Eternity,
a story of the war’s beginning. After six years of work, Jones showed it to Perkins, who was fully impressed and acquired the novel. After Perkins’s death, the succeeding editor cut large pieces from the manuscript, including scenes with homosexuality, politics, and graphic language that would have been flagged by the censor of that era, and published the novel in 1951. The story of a soldier at Pearl Harbor who becomes an outcast for refusing to box for the company team, it is an unflinching look at the United States pre-WWII peacetime army, a last refuge for the destitute, the homeless, and the desperate. The book was instrumental in changing unjust army practices, which created a public outcry when it was published. It sold 90,000 copies in its first month of publication and captured the National Book Award, beating out
The Catcher in the Rye
. In 1953 the film version, starring Burt Lancaster and Montgomery Clift, won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and made Jones internationally famous.

He returned to Illinois to help the Handys establish a writers’ colony. While living there he wrote his second novel,
Some Came Running,
which he finished in 1957. An experimental retelling of his Midwestern childhood, it stretched to nearly 1,000 pages and drew little acclaim.

In 1958, newly married to Gloria Mosolino, Jones moved to Paris, where he lived for most of the rest of his life, spending time with his old friend Norman Mailer and contributing regularly to the
Paris Review
. There he wrote
The Thin Red Line
(1962), his second World War II epic, which follows a company of green recruits as they join the fighting in Guadalcanal; and
The Merry Month of May
(1970), an account of the 1968 Paris student riots.
The Thin Red Line
would be brought to the screen by director Terrence Malick in 1998.

Jones and his wife returned to the United States in the mid 1970s, settling in Sagaponack, New York. There Jones began
Whistle
, the final volume in his World War II trilogy, which was left unfinished at the time of his death. However, he had left extensive notes for novelist and longtime editor of
Harper’s Magazine
Willie Morris, who completed the last three chapters after Jones’s death in 1977. The book was published in 1978.