Tomorrow We'll See Morning

Chapter Three

Attu Island, AK. May 28th, 1943.

Winters in Michigan had always been harsh, but they paled in comparison to the bitter, stinging wind that relentlessly pummeled Attu. Coldness was not an afterthought here; it was the island's only thought. Besides sheer rock mountains and a perpetual fog that shrouded the island from dusk to dawn, there was not a single defining feature other than that horrible coldness. Even trees didn't dare to take up residency.

     "Jesus, it's cold," Maurice kept repeating as they had struggled to trek up a rocky, ice-slicked hill. The ground had been too slushy to support vehicles any farther inland, and everything just seemed to exist in a perpetual state of dampness. His rucksack kept slipping off his shoulders, and he had to stop several times to grab onto a rock, lest he slid down the hill. "I can't feel my damn cul."

     "We get it, Snail," Patrick wheezed from ahead of him. His ginger hair, now grown out, whipped wildly about his face in the wind. "Now shut up about it, would you? I thought you said you lived in Michigan."

     The last two weeks had been all hell on Earth. Moving from hill to hill, throwing up flimsy canvas tents for barracks that did little to nothing to protect them from the cold. Japanese fire sometimes woke them up in the middle of the night, and it quickly became an all-hands-on-deck situation for something as simple as a lone shot in the dark. He was sorely tempted to just sink deeper under his blankets at times like that, but self-preservation always won out.

They stuck near the shore of their first landing site for a while, on a ridge facing the direction of the Japaneses' assumed position. The black pebbles of the beach were slick with slush, and the wind often whipped up otherwise soft snowflakes into stinging daggers. A slimy layer of damp, decomposed vegetation—Patrick called it muskeg—completely covered all the ground inland. It was, as one of the lieutenants elegantly put it, "like Satan's rear end."

     He could handle the cold. It was the explosions, the bullets, the injuries he saw that were most disturbing. He had nearly thrown up on the third night upon coming across a comrade who had been caught in friendly fire. A deep anger had filled him in the first week, but by the second he just felt numb. It was as if he had always been doing this, had always been shooting mortars on a foggy island in the middle of nowhere. And maybe he had. Who knew?

It was still early in the morning, and Maurice stood by their gunner, Kevin Wei, a short, rather loud man in his early twenties with a pale complexion and a distinct Californian twang. He would shout "SEMPER FI!" each time a mortar exploded out of the mortar gun, and would then, without fail, look back to Maurice with his eyebrows drawn up expectantly. They weren't even in the Marines.

     "I think you meant Hooah," Maurice supplemented snappily after Kevin's seventh cry. He leaned back in the shallow dirt pit they had dug for the mortar, looking out over the steeply sloping valley they were currently pock-marking with craters. He fidgeted with the strap on his helmet, trying to ignore the persistent ringing in his ears. He couldn't even smell the acrid, metallic tang of gunpowder anymore.

    "Hooah, hurrah, yippee; whatever. Some guy's gotta keep you awake." Kevin nudged him with an elbow.

     "It just seems a bit overkill to me, Kev," Maurice shrugged and pushed his arm away. "But what do I know?"

      "Boy, let me tell you something when I say you haven't seen the worst yet. You ain't seen the half of what these fuckers are capable of," Kevin said after a pause, while Maurice hauled over a crate of ammo. Maurice looked up from the valley, eyebrows raised, but let him continue speaking.