Pacific Sniper

He had propped his battered portable Corona Zephyr typewriter on a wooden crate. Made in New York state, the typewriter would have cost the average newspaperman a month’s salary—if he’d even been able to get one. Typewriter production had been halted due to the war, and the plant was now making Springfield rifles. The sea breeze fluttered the paper he had rolled into the Zephyr, but the typewriter worked well enough so long as he could keep the sand out of it.

He preferred to write about the individual soldiers fighting this war, to bring home news about their sons and fathers and young men to the good folks of places like Waterbury, Connecticut; Grove Hill, Alabama; and Orrville, Ohio. But this story required more than a few sketches and quotes to put the battle in perspective. While the army brass was reluctant to release official numbers, Pyle had his sources. More than seventeen hundred Americans had died in the fighting, with another six thousand wounded. Most of the wounded were now being cared for on the hospital ships offshore. As for the Japanese, their losses were hard to fathom.

He typed the number and stared at it for a long moment: eighteen thousand. That was a lot of dead Japanese.

Depending on whom you believed, around twelve hundred Japanese had been captured. A relative handful had managed to escape.

With losses like that, it was clear that the Japanese could not sustain this war.

But from what he had seen on Guam, it was just as clear that the Japanese had no plans to give up. For them, surrender was not an option.

He typed the last word, rolled out the paper, stuffed it into an envelope. There might be a few typos, a few sentences that could be smoothed out, but he would let the editors address that.

When he thought about all those dead boys, Americans and Japanese both, he was less concerned with sweating the details of a misplaced comma.

“I either need some coffee or some sleep,” he announced to no one in particular.

After that, it would be time to find his next story. He’d heard rumors that the infantry division that had been fighting here on Guam would be sent to the Philippines, to a place called Leyte. Lay-tee, it was pronounced.

He wasn’t about to put that news in his story and give anything away to the enemy, just in case the censors missed it.

But he could sure as hell pack his typewriter and hitch a ride to Leyte.

More supplies poured onto the island. Now that the airfield was open, crates were being flown in from other bases around the Pacific. Yet more supplies landed on the beach. Pretty soon, it seemed like the island might be in danger of sinking under the added weight. If there was one thing America was good at, it was producing stuff in endless quantities.

Out at the airfield, a soldier worked shifting crates. He had missed all the fighting and felt sheepish about it. All the other guys were getting the glory, and he was getting a sore back and a sunburn.

He jumped back in alarm at the sight of a small snake slithering out from a gap in the crate he had just moved.

“Holy cow!” He reached for a shovel to deal with the snake, but it was already zooming across the sand and into the jungle.

If only he’d been a little quicker with that shovel, future generations of islanders would have given him all the medals he wanted.

The unwelcome hitchhiker was a venomous brown tree snake. Though relatively harmless to humans, the snake proved to have an appetite for tropical birds and their eggs.

With no natural predators, millions of the snakes would eventually overrun the island, wiping out the native birds and even clogging up electrical transformers and plumbing systems.

“Darn snake,” the soldier said, shaking his head and getting back to work.

Deep within the jungle, a handful of Japanese soldiers pressed deeper into the mountains. Caught behind American lines, they had opted to keep fighting rather than surrender or launching a pitiful banzai attack, as many of their comrades had done. Instead, their plan was to wage a guerilla war, keeping hidden in the hills.

“We must not disappoint the Emperor,” said Sergeant Yokoi. Lean and wiry, he was a man of few words, but his face conveyed determination. The Emperor had commanded them to fight, and that was what they would do until ordered otherwise.

Occasionally, they heard American planes overhead, but they were screened from view by the dense canopy of trees. Here in the jungle, everything seemed to be alive and green. Looking around, Yokoi thought with satisfaction that there was everything a man needed to survive, if he was willing to live by his wits and make sacrifices. They dodged a few small Chamorro settlements—already, the local population that had been liberated by American forces was returning to their farms and villages after having been rounded up by the Japanese more than two years before.