The Naked and the Dead Read Free Page B

be an end to it. He massaged his neck, looking dourly at the water, his long thin body sagging at every joint. It was about one o'clock now. In three hours the guns would start and the men would bolt a hot nauseating breakfast.
                There was nothing to do but to go from one day into the next. The platoon was lucky, for tomorrow anyway. They'd have recon working on the beach detail for a week probably, and the first patrols where all the trails were strange would be made already, and the campaign would have dropped into a familiar and bearable rut. He spat again, kneading with his blunt scarred fingers the knurled swollen knuckles of his other hand.
                In silhouette against the rail, his profile consisted almost entirely of a large blob of a nose and a long low-slung jaw, but in the moonlight this was misleading for it did not show the redness of his skin and hair. His face always seemed boiled and angry except for his eyes, which were quiet, a pale blue, marooned by themselves in a web of wrinkles and freckles. When he laughed his teeth showed, big and yellow and crooked, his rough voice braying out with a contemptuous inviolate mirth. Everything about him was bony and knobbed, and although he was more than six feet tall, it was unlikely that he weighed one hundred and fifty pounds.
                His hand scratched his stomach, explored about for a moment or two and then halted. He had forgotten his life belt. Automatically he thought of going back to the hold for it, and was angered at himself. "Goddam Army gets you so you're afraid to turn around." He spat. "You waste half your time trying to remember what they told you to do." Still he debated for a moment whether he should fetch it, and then grinned. "Aaah, you can only get killed once."
                He had told that to Hennessey, a kid who had joined recon only a few weeks before the division's task force had loaded ship for this invasion. "A life belt, that's something for Hennessey to worry about, a life belt," he said to himself now.
                They had been up on deck together one night when an air raid sounded, and they had squatted under a life raft, watching the ships in convoy lashing through the black water, the crew at the nearest gun standing tensely by the breech. A Zero had attacked and a dozen searchlights had tried to focus on it. Hundreds of tracer arcs had lined red patterns through the air. It had all been very different from the combat he had previously seen, without heat, without fatigue, beautiful and unreal like a technicolor movie or a calendar picture. He had watched in absorption, not even ducking when a bomb had exploded in a livid yellow fan over a ship a few hundred yards away.
                Then Hennessey had destroyed his mood. "Jesus, I just remembered," he had said.
                "What?"
                "I ain't got any air cartridges in my life belt."
                Red had guffawed. "I'll tell you what. When the ship goes down, you just ride a nice fat rat to shore."
                "No, this is serious. Jeez, I better blow it up." And in the darkness he had fumbled for the tube, found it, and inflated the belt. Red had watched him with amusement. He was such a kid. The way they turned them out now, all the kids wanted to obey the rules. Red had felt almost sad. "You're all set for everything now, huh, Hennessey?"
                "Listen," Hennessey had boasted, "I ain't taking any chances. What if this boat should get hit? I ain't going into the water unprepared."
                Now, in the distance, the shore of Anopopei slid by slowly, almost like a huge ship itself. Naw, Red thought, Hennessey wouldn't go into the water unprepared. He was the kind of kid who would put away money for marriage before he even had a girl. It was what you got for following the rule book.
                He drooped