Hunter Sniper

All morning, they had been moving toward the sound of fighting. Machine guns, mortars, even some artillery. The sounds indicated that this wasn’t just another skirmish at a coconut grove, but the sounds of a substantial fight taking place. Without doubt, they must be approaching the Japanese bastion around Ormoc.

His fevered mind convinced Deke that he could already smell the scent of spent gunpowder and blood, burning crops and the sap of the broken trees. In places, patches of jungle still pressed close to the trail, so that a thousand tiny branches seemed to scratch at his face and bare hands. He felt each one of them, his feverish skin extra sensitive, each brush against the leaves and branches seeming to have a different texture and shape, like running his hands over rough-cut lumber or rubbing his face with sandpaper.

He shook his head to clear it and took a drink from his canteen.

The fact that he was itching to get back into the fight made Deke realize that he felt marginally better, the fever starting to release some of its grip on him. At least the jungle wasn’t spinning quite as much as it had been. He had been popping aspirin like gumdrops and washing the pills down with more of Danilo’s tea. One or the other seemed to be working, or maybe it was a combination.

Sometimes, after having dodged so many bullets, Deke got to feeling invincible. Anyhow, nobody wanted to think that he could die. Getting killed was for the other guy. It was a convenient fiction that kept a man going, because if you believed that you were going to die in the next minute or the next hour, you’d curl up in the bottom of a foxhole instead of doing your job as a soldier. The fever was a reminder that death lurked in all sorts of ways, lest Deke get too bold.

Up ahead, Deke could see Danilo leading the way along the trail, several feet ahead of the nearest soldier. The Filipino guerrilla reminded Deke of the jungle cat that he had seen, all the man’s senses on high alert, like some creature of the forest.

Deke considered that he knew almost nothing about Danilo other than that he was one of the guerrillas who had served with Father Francisco to fight the Japanese occupiers in any way possible. He didn’t know how old Danilo was, if he had children, or how his family might have suffered under Japanese occupation.

The man had made an effort to nurse Deke back to health in his own rugged way. Would Deke have done the same for him? He realized that he might not have, at least not before Danilo had done so much for him. He felt ashamed about it. When it came to the Filipinos, Deke realized there was so much that they took for granted about these generous people.

Danilo signaled a halt. They saw him crouch, rifle at the ready.

“Dammit, it’s probably more Japanese,” Captain Merrick could be heard muttering as he hurried forward. “Frazier, get that BAR ready.”

Private Frazier hurried forward, shouldering his way past the other men in an attempt to catch up with Captain Merrick at the head of the column. Instead of gunshots, however, they were met with a booming American voice that demanded, “What’s the password?”

Danilo looked at Captain Merrick, who shouted irritably back at the unseen sentry: “I don’t know the damn password!”

There was a pause in which everyone held their breath. The moment was tense, considering that more than one incident of so-called friendly fire had been caused by nervous or overzealous sentries. “How do we know you’re not Japs?”

“Do we look like Japs to you, soldier? We don’t know the damn password because we’ve been hiking through the damn jungle. Goddammit.”

Two GIs emerged from the cover where they had been hiding, their rifles almost casually pointing in Merrick’s direction. As the captain moved forward, they lowered their weapons. More men appeared, and one of them turned out to be an officer. In keeping with policy, there was no exchange of salutes or formalities. Not that most officers needed any. It was easy to tell an officer by the way he carried himself. When it came down to it, Merrick held himself the same way — a little stiff, a little apart from the enlisted men.

No wonder the Japanese snipers keep picking off our officers, Deke thought. They make awful good targets.

“We were told that we should be expecting a patrol that had been cutting across the peninsula,” the officer said. He looked over the battered column. “It looks as if you and your boys caught hell.”

“You have no idea,” Merrick said. “I guess you’ve been having a regular Sunday picnic over on this side of the coast.”

The other officer snorted. “If your idea of a picnic is getting shot to hell on the beach and then fighting Japanese all over the place, then yeah, I guess it has been one helluva picnic.”