What 24 Hours in a WW2 Pacific Battle Would Be Like

[00:00:00]The order comes and you're already awake. The truth is you were never really asleep. You don't really sleep anymore. At least not the way you used to when you were in houses with roofs and doors that close.

[00:00:12]What you do now is something closer to waiting with your eyes shut. Two hours of horizontal darkness and then you're up before anyone calls you because your body has learned that Guadalcanal doesn't reward the deeply unconscious.

[00:00:25]The last guy who slept for real never woke up fast enough to take cover from a grenade. So in order not to be like him, you pull yourself out of the funk hole.

[00:00:34]Your field jacket is wet. It's always wet. Your boots are also wet. Everything on this island is wet. Well, almost as your mouth still tastes like dirt, last night's fear, and whatever passed for dinner. You climb onto the fire step, rifle up, eyes on the tree line.

[00:00:53]300 yards of jungle separate you from Japanese soldiers doing exactly what you're doing right now.

[00:01:00]Pointing rifles, waiting. It's almost like a ritual you both perform.

[00:01:05]At the far end of the line, Private Tully crouches with Rex beside him. The Doberman is already looking at the jungle. Ears forward, body still. You've learned to watch the dog the way you used to watch the sky for weather forecasts. And like clockwork, the sky shifts from black to gray. Immediately, you focus on your friends 100 yards out.

[00:01:28]A movement, a sound. Anything, but nothing happens, so you stand down.

[00:01:34]Sergeant Kowalski moves behind the line without a word. You step off the fire step. Corporal Askey is already at the fire doing something to a tin that will eventually become coffee.

[00:01:45]You've done this before. You'll do it again tomorrow. That's all this is, just another morning on Guadalcanal. At 0600 hours, you are given breakfast. Here, breakfast is whatever it is. Yesterday, it was tinned ham and eggs. Today, it's hardtack, [music] tea, and something from a tin that Askey calls beef stew.

[00:02:06]The tea tastes like the can it came in.

[00:02:08]Motor fuel and rust and something sweet underneath that you've stopped trying to identify.

[00:02:14]You drink it anyway, all of it. After that, work begins. Sandbags. It's always sandbags. In Guadalcanal, the rain comes every afternoon at the same time, same volume, same indifference.

[00:02:28]>> [music] >> Every afternoon, it takes another piece of the trench wall with it, and every morning you fill the sandbags that fill the gap that the rain will open again by 1500 hours. You've done this calculation. You understand that you are not winning it. So, you fill the sandbags not because Kowalski tells you to, but because the alternative is no trench wall between you and a sniper's bullet. You fill, you stack, and make sure you don't look over the top. A man in your section raised his head 3 in above the parapet last week. Just 3 in.

[00:03:00]He wanted to see where a shell had landed. The sniper who took him probably never even broke his rhythm. Now, you make sure you aren't him next week.

[00:03:10]Corporal Askey walks the line around 700 hours. Rifles first, then feet.

[00:03:17]You unlace your boots and peel your socks back. Your feet are pale and wrinkled and soft in ways feet shouldn't be soft. Askey nods. He writes nothing in his notebook for you today. You lace your boots back up. Private Briggs is beside you. He takes longer with his boot than everyone else. But immediately, [music] it's off. The smell arrives. Askey doesn't say anything dramatic. He just writes in his notebook and moves on. Briggs nods like he already knew. He probably did.

[00:03:46]You watch him walk down the communication trench toward the rear, [music] toward the medical officer, toward a ship, toward England, toward whatever comes after a foot that's turned the color of a winter sky.

[00:03:58]You look at your own boots. You lace them tighter and go back to the sandbags.

[00:04:03]At 1,000 hours, Kowalski [music] picks four men. You're one of them. You don't react. You just sling your [music] rifle and fall in. Tully is already at the edge of the perimeter with Rex. The dog is sitting, watching the tree line.

[00:04:16]Tully gives him a hand signal. Rex stands. Another signal. They move out.

[00:04:22]You follow. The patrol route is a trail Rex has run twice before.

[00:04:26]Kowalski knows this. That's why he chose it. A known route means a known baseline.

[00:04:33]The dog's behavior on familiar ground tells you more than his behavior on new ground, because on new ground, everything [music] is interesting, and interesting looks the same as dangerous on this island.

[00:04:45]As you all move, the jungle closes behind you immediately.

[00:04:50]The sun doesn't reach the ground here.

[00:04:52]It gets partway through the canopy and then gives up. Everything below [music] is green, wet, and a specific shade of wrong that you've stopped being able to describe to yourself.

[00:05:02]The trail is muddy, so your boots sink with each step you take. Rex works in front, nose down, ears moving independently, tracking separate sounds.

[00:05:13]You don't watch his head. Instead, you watch his shoulders.

[00:05:17]Tully once told you that the shoulders tell you what the head is deciding.

[00:05:21]Then, the shoulders stop. Ears forward, [music] body rigid. The dog becomes a fixed point in a moving world.

[00:05:29]Immediately, Kowalski raises his fist.

[00:05:31]Everyone stops. Nobody breathes. 2 minutes, maybe more.

[00:05:37]The dog holds the point as you stand behind him and try to see what he sees.

[00:05:42]You can't. [music] Just when you think this will go on for longer, Rex moves on. And just like that, whatever [music] it was isn't there anymore. Or maybe it was never there.

[00:05:53]The truth is, you'll never find.

[00:05:55]Actually, you never want to find out.

[00:05:57]What you find instead, 200 yards further in, is a cache of Japanese rice buried under a false [music] floor of leaves and mud. A body 3 days old that used to be someone and is now a problem of smell and orientation.

[00:06:12]A piece of equipment none of you can identify. Metal, cylindrical, with markings in Japanese. Kowalski photographs it in his head. You all do.

[00:06:21][music] Then, you take the rice. You leave everything else. You walk back to the perimeter in silence as Rex leads.

[00:06:30]His shoulders are loose now. You all should be back by 1400 hours. Whatever this morning was, it's finished. Well, until tomorrow when it begins again. But for now, you have nothing to do but wait. The waiting is its own kind of violence. You've been at war long enough to know that the Germans, or the Japanese, or whoever the enemy is, they're not the only thing trying to kill you. Boredom is trying.

[00:06:57]The jungle heat is trying its best.

[00:07:00]This is why some men write letters.

[00:07:03]An officer reads every one before it leaves. You've watched him do it, sitting at the far end of the trench with a pencil, crossing out anything useful to the enemy.

[00:07:13]Most letters say the same things, the same careful nothing. "I am well. The food is fine. Don't worry." You wrote one like that last week. You meant none of it and every word [music] of it simultaneously.

[00:07:26]Opposite you, Private Garrett is playing cards with anyone who'll sit still. He's been playing cards since Samoa. He'll be playing cards until someone makes him stop. You, on the other hand, run a candle flame along your shirt seams.

[00:07:40]It's the only reliable way. The lice die in the heat as they fall. You stopped counting them for a while now. You just work the flame along the seam and move to the next one. Above you, somewhere in the white sky, Washing Machine Charlie makes his pass. It's a Japanese plane that makes it round every afternoon. You know the engine sound by now. Irregular, asthmatic, like something held together with the wrong parts. It's why you call it Washing Machine Charlie. Still, as it passes over you, nobody runs. Nobody even looks up. You all just wait for the bomb that either comes or doesn't.

[00:08:16]Today it doesn't, so you go back to the lice.

[00:08:19]By your side, Rex is asleep in the shade beside Tully, legs twitching.

[00:08:25]You know he's definitely chasing something in a better jungle than this one.

[00:08:29]You watch him for a moment. Then, you go back to the seams. 1500 hours comes, then 1530.

[00:08:37]As the rain makes its appearance for the day, the rain has been falling for hours, and it never really stopped. You've been wet for 7 hours. Your field jacket stopped being useful around hour two.

[00:08:49]Now it's just wait. The trench floor is 2 inches of moving water, and the sandbags you filled this morning are already failing. Tomorrow morning, there will be more sandbags to fill.

[00:09:00]There always are. It's 2200 hours, and you're standing your watch in the rain.

[00:09:06]2 hours on, 2 hours off. That's the shift here. Rifle up, eyes on a tree line you cannot see.

[00:09:12]Rex is somewhere to your left, breathing steadily.

[00:09:16]Tully says the dog smells Japanese before they're within 50 yards.

[00:09:20]You take this as information and try to believe it. Still, you don't let your guard down.

[00:09:26]At 100, a flare goes up from the Japanese side.

[00:09:29]Green light. You freeze. You pray it's not one of their bonsai charges, the suicidal charge they make. [music] Last time they did so, your side suffered a lot. They lost more men though, but men are guaranteed to fall on both sides. [music] But the light shows nothing. You let out a breath of relief as darkness returns at 0200.

[00:09:53]Private Hicks materializes out of the rain. You hand him your position without a word. You crawl into your funk hole.

[00:10:01]The ground beneath you is mud. You close your eyes, but you don't sleep. Not really. It's 0325 hours. You wake up to Rex barking. Not the slow alert bark, the urgent one. You're up before you're fully awake. Your rifle is in your hand as you climb onto the fire step before your eyes have fully opened. Your brain arrives a second later and finds everything already happening. Wire, movement, dark shapes that could be two men or four.

[00:10:30]Kowalski fires. Someone to your right fires. You fire. Rex is going insane somewhere to your left. It lasts for two minutes, maybe less. A flare goes up and there's one body in the wire. The rest are gone. Back into the jungle. Back into the dark like they were never there.

[00:10:49]You see the sagging sandbag wall in the flare light for a moment. It's still failing. It'll have to wait for a while.

[00:10:56]You stand on the fire step and watch the sky begin to lighten at the edges. In 20 minutes, Kowalski will say, "Stand to."

[00:11:05]You'll point your rifle at the tree line. Rex will sit beside Tully with his ears forward and his shoulders still.

[00:11:12]Reading whatever it is he reads out there.

[00:11:15]And everything will begin again exactly as it was.

[00:11:19]Today is Tuesday. Wednesday will look the same. And Thursday. And the Tuesday after that. And the one after that.

[00:11:27]You'll do this till you die or win the war.