“Friends to the end!” the two soldiers sang, briefly clasping hands as ridiculously as possible before separating, both moving lightly, stealthily, and spreading wide through the overbearingly humid jungle. It was January 1943 at Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, summertime in the Southern Hemisphere, the jungle laden island scorched with boiling temperatures and sopped with withering humidity that seemed too strong for any man to withstand, much less men in full fatigues. They were on a reconnaissance mission, both members of the American Army’s XIV Corp’s Reconnaissance Platoon, and were there largely for mop up duty after the Marines had retaken the island from the Japanese by bitter fighting in the previous six months. Accompanied by three assault vehicles, their party of ten had started in late afternoon when the sun would be slightly less oppressive yet with enough daylight to finish their mission, which was collecting data from the last small pocket of territory on the island, an area considered either free or virtually free of the enemy but too heavily canopied by the thick jungle foliage to know for sure. The assault vehicles had run out of road and the ten men Platoon moved on without them, only intending to move forward about a quarter mile in case they came under fire, though this was not expected.
Our two soldiers, Bob Smith and
Dave Jones, as generically and ordinarily named as could be, had been fast
friends since joining the Reconnaissance Platoon in early 1942, shortly after
the attack on Pearl Harbor. They clicked
instantly, somewhat resembling two of their favorite stars, Bob Hope and Bing
Crosby. They had been on several
missions, a few involving heavy fire, in the South Pacific up until that point,
always performing admirably and without a scratch; they had been so fortunate
in avoiding ordinance that they regarded themselves with tongue in cheek
invincibility, the kind where you know a truck will easily kill you yet you’re
able to walk in the middle of the road without incident anyway. They weren’t godlike by any stretch. They had just been so fortunate, like dashing
Hollywood leading men in movies doing their dangerous jobs and always making it
through the picture unharmed. In
between assignments, they were near constant attendees of whatever USO camp was
in their area. They never missed a Hope
and Crosby Road movie or an Abbott and Costello GI picture and, though they
loved Bud and Lou, they preferred to be the GI version of Hope and Crosby, Bob
Smith as, interestingly, not Hope but Crosby and Dave Jones as Hope. Bob, the slightly better looking one, was the
kind in the movie that got the girl while Dave, as Hope, looked on
understandably, always there with a zinger to lighten the mood. They both treasured each other’s company in
this cluttered yet lonely war where family and sweethearts remained behind at
home, all GIs hoping to avoid a dreaded “Dear John” letter from their perceived
one and only.
On this latest mission, they were particularly talkative on the way to their destination, not expecting action of any consequence.
“I’ve got a hang nail,” Bob said, biting it irritatingly.
“Well, stop having a hang nail!”
Dave replied. “We have to keep our
perfect record alive!”
“I’ll do the best I can for your
majesty,” Bob smiled with mild sarcasm.
“You do realize there is a war going on, don’t you?”
“If we’re going to blow our record,
let’s at least have a finger or toe blown off, something particularly
gruesome,” Dave said.
“Okay,” Bob replied. “It doesn’t count unless one of us is
maimed. Deal?”
“Deal. Although for your own good, having your nose
blown off your face may improve your looks.”
Aware of his friend’s good looks, he was always making cracks like that.
“How about you get your nose shot
off and I’ll have my eyes gouged out so I won’t have to look at your skeleton
head,” Bob said with a chuckle.
“We’ll make a deal,” Dave
said. “You get your nose shot off and
your eyes gouged out and I’ll get my very own hangnail just for you,
okay?”
Bob laughed loudly. “Deal.”
His friend cracked him up so much.
It was the only thing that made him laugh in the whole war.
They had left the crude, almost
non-existent dirt road behind them minutes before and, consequently, their
support from the three assault vehicles.
The ten men platoon began to spread moderate distances apart as they
creeped into the unknown territory of the small pocket left on the island.
Bob and Dave were the last two to
separate. With their “Friends to the
end” send off, Bob moved slowly to the left and Dave moved slowly to the
right. The sun, whose respected presence
prompted the mission’s late start, had moved from a high, almost violent yellow
to a much lower, more benign yet almost frightening blood red. They thanked the Lord it hadn’t rained for
the last three days, possibly a record for the Solomon Islands that time of
year, because it would have made their activities nearly impossible to
endure. It was oppressive yet tolerably
so, the nearly humorous equivalent of playing a baseball game in 97 as opposed
to 105 degrees. Their mission now
required intense focus and sensitive ears ready to trigger rapid, lethal action
if necessary. Bob and Dave, despite
their clowning, were all business when it was called for.
Moving through the jungle was a
surreal experience, like exploring a foreign planet in an HG Wells novel. Enormous emergent evergreens towering over
the vast, similar trees of the jungle canopy, so packed with foliage they cut
off nearly all sunlight and acted like a roof over an understory level just
above the forest floor. The platoon was
moving through an area so thick and dark that only shafts of sunlight broke
through making nearly all plant life on the forest floor non-existent, which
made the landscape seem even more alien and imagined than it had just been
moments before. The sparse terrain
denied them cover but also allowed them to see greater distances and no enemy
or enemy activity had been visible to that point.
After a few hundred feet, the
canopy opened and they were in a large clearing laden with evergreens barnacled
with strangler figs juxtaposed by dozens of King Ferns and flowering plants of
all colors filling in the spaces between the trees. As cluttered as the last was barren, the
area marked a perfect place for an ambush.
Though not expecting a firefight,
the set up made all ten men so nervous ten rifles were instantly up and
ready. Suddenly, gunfire exploded from
multiple directions and two men from the platoon were hit immediately. Dick Reynolds, a nice guy that Dave knew
better than Bob, took a bullet in the head and died instantly. Benjamin Franklin Paine, a cold, efficient
soldier who was a direct descendent of the author of Common Sense, Thomas
Paine, was hit in the left arm, left leg and upper chest just right of the
heart. He slammed violently into a mix
of leaves and dirt and succumbed one agonizing minute after being hit.
“Get back! Get back!” the platoon leader roared, trying
to make himself heard over the incessant noise that had been added to by the
return fire of the eight remaining soldiers.
They barely knew the platoon leader but he seemed like a good guy that
cared about his men. Bob felt two
bullets whiz by him on the initial volley and had hit the ground moments
later. He rolled for cover behind a
nearby bush that wasn’t much protection but all he had at the moment. Clearly, they had stumbled upon a larger
than expected Japanese unit that not only existed but was ready for
action. Bullets flew by the bush, one
even striking the top of Bob’s helmet jarringly before bouncing away. Bob waited for several minutes until the
shooting seemed to shift to his right a little.
Sensing an opportunity, he crawled backwards with alacrity, got to his
knees then his feet bent over in a crouch and stumbled as quickly as he could
away from the enemy fire before taking cover once more behind a thicker bush
laden with blue and yellow flowers, one of which was blasted off just as he
dove behind it. He saw three members of
the platoon likewise retreating while three others laid down cover fire,
including the platoon leader.
“Everybody out! Everybody out!” the platoon leader
shouted. The order was unnecessary but
had to be made anyway in that situation.
The three laying cover fire joined their brothers in retreat with the
unstated goal of reaching the safety of the assault vehicle escort. Bob, bringing up the rear of the fleeing
troops, looked around, his eyes darting to get the logistics of the situation
and, specifically, the presence of his friend, the only platoon member besides
the dead he hadn’t seen. Like a mother
looking for a lost child, he slowed his retreat when he couldn’t find Dave,
bullets roaring and clipping the jungle trees around him like kids throwing pebbles
his way. He crouched and scanned the
area where he had last seen his friend.
The sun was low but there was still enough light to see a moderate
distance. He made out the prone body of
Dick Reynolds with a bullet squarely in his forehead on a small rise a hundred
feet away. His next sight was a leg
and boot jutting from behind a thick King Fern near a large Tualang tree with
enormous buttress roots protruding above ground like the tentacles of a giant
octopus.
“Dave!” he shouted. “Dave!”
Upon the leg not moving, Bob ran in the same crouched position towards
it. Moments before, the gunfire had
lessened a bit but, seeing a US soldier coming back into the fray, picked up
again. Bob reached the leg of what
turned out to be his good friend, not moving, body sprawled face down on the
jungle floor. In one motion, Bob
grabbed the back of Dave’s uniform at the neck and hauled him behind the tree’s
massive roots, the biological wonder providing amble protection. Dave began to move as Bob turned him over,
his body bucking in pain from what Bob saw was a gut shot, blood spewing forth
mixed with dirt from where Dave had been lying face down. Frantically, Bob instinctively put his hand
over his friend’s wound, eliciting a loud cy from the injured man. Whipping his head around, more to get his
brain to work than to find anything, Bob remembered the towel he had stuffed in
his belt, ripped it out and put it over the wound, blood filling it up almost
immediately as if it had been placed under a steady flowing faucet. Dave cried out loudly again, then seemed to
melt as his cry ebbed and ended.
“It’s going to be okay,” Bob
lied. “We’re going to be okay. I’m going to get you out of here.”
Dave coughed uncontrollably, his
body seeming to shrivel with each passing second. His eyes shot open and he stared into his
friend’s face. Laboring to speak, he
forced words out through gritted teeth.
“You…have to go,” he said. “I can’t make it out.”
The words grabbed hold of Bob’s
emotions and squeezed, nearly sending tears exploding from his face. No, it wasn’t supposed to happen like
this. It was never supposed to happen
like this but he knew it was true.
Hemmed in by enemy fire with a wound that was all but fatal, it was
clear Dave Jones would never make it out of there alive. Dave slumped his head on the ground and
forced a smile.
“Well, we’re friends…to the end…and
this is the end. I don’t know why…I
guess my luck just…” His eyes opened and
he looked directly into Bob’s face without comprehension.
“I…can’t see,” he gasped. His smile slowly faded into a neutral calm
and he was still. Tears in his eyes,
Bob nudged his friend gently but there was no sign. His friend was gone.
“Smith!” the platoon leader,
continuing to fire blindly in the direction of the Japanese, roared. The rest of the platoon had evacuated and,
other than Bob and Dave, he was the only one left at the scene. “Get out now! Now!”
For Bob, it
was now or never. He snapped to his feet
with explosive energy then froze.
No. No. He wasn’t going to leave. He couldn’t leave. He wasn’t going to allow his friend’s body to
be hauled out by the Japanese like cattle and dumped in some burial pit. They were friends to the end. Bob realized that meant to the end for both
of them.
“Go! Go!” Bob shouted at his superior, gesturing
wildly for the man to retreat fully. The
platoon leader, good for the perception that he cared for his men, was stuck
between moving forwards and backwards for a few seconds while also stuck
between yelling at Bob Smith and staying silent. Heavier fire came like a rain shower
becoming a deluge as the Japanese, aware of their advantage, began to press
forward. The platoon leader took a few
steps back then angrily turned and ran for safety, secure that he had done all
he could and not happy about it one bit.
Upon seeing him flee, believing the area secure, the Japanese gunfire
stopped. Readying his rifle, Bob took a
deep breath and came out from behind the thick tree roots firing at will. The first two bullets missed, the next two
bullets struck one Japanese soldier in the leg and another in the chest,
killing the man instantly. Aware of the
presence of another American, they opened fire again. A bullet whizzed past Bob’s nose as he dove
behind the roots once more.
“Hey, Dave,”
he laughed. “I almost got my nose shot
off. My luck is still holding up!” He patted his friend’s dead body on the leg. Lost in the moment, he wasn’t concerned for
his own safety. He was only concerned
with protecting his friend, even if it was only his friend’s body. He couldn’t let it fall into the hands of the
enemy without a fight. Dave was still
Dave and he deserved all Bob had.
Bullets ripped and tore at the buttress roots as Bob bit his
hangnail.
“It doesn’t
count unless one of us gets maimed.
Those were the rules, right?” Bob laughed, peering at the serene calm of
Dave’s inanimate face. “Well, you took
a shot. It’s the least I can do to make
us equal, buddy.”
Bob came out
from behind the Tualang tree again and got off one errant shot before taking
bullets in the left leg and the upper right chest. His leg collapsed under the first bullet an
instant before the second one knocked him flat on his back. His immediate senses became intoxicated with
the sweet honeysuckle smell of dozens of flowers from a nearby plant as he
rolled over onto his knees and slowly crept behind the buttress roots. Assessing his injuries, he nodded in his mind
at the realization that the second one would cost him his life. He leaned up against the roots, blood
pouring from both wounds. He took his
final view of the sun which happened, fittingly, to be a sunset. He looked at his friend.
“We’re even,
pal,” Bob gasped, determined to speak though it was almost impossible due to
his chest wound. “I couldn’t let
you…have all the fun. We’re friends to
the end and…” he gasped shallowly several times and closed his eyes. “This is the end.”
A few
moments later, two Japanese soldiers, guns raised, cautiously came from around
the buttress roots. Seeing the dead and
mortally wounded men, they looked down with a sense of satisfaction but also
pity. Dead men were still soldiers and
they were more than aware that the roles could be reversed with American GIs
staring down at them dead and mortally wounded. With the American occupation in full swing,
the Japanese, almost fanatic in fighting to the end, knew it was probable they
would go the same way, possibly in the next few days. In the end, perhaps the only real honor was
not in fighting for country but for each other.
Hearing the shuffling of feet, Bob opened his eyes and stared in the
direction of the two soldiers.
“Hey,
Dave,” he said with a smile. “Guess
what? I can’t see anything,
either.” Moments later, he was
dead. The two Japanese soldiers scanned
the area as the sun disappeared. Two
more dead men, two more stories whose endings would never be known to their
family and friends, a sad ending to all but the two men for, in death as well
as in life, there will always be glory in friends true to each other. Friends to the end.
