The Pistol by James Jones

on buying up all the candy bars they could get hold of from the CF personnel, who were able to send money in with the kitchen truck which served the other half of the company sector, the town half. They were unable to find any whiskey. All four of them felt a great sense of warmth for the company commander. They thought it nice of him to take so much of his valuable time with them. They wanted to do a good job for him. It was not that there was not any whiskey here, at the CP, they all knew that, it was just that no one would part with it for mere money.
    Soldiers have a great instinct for being suspicious of kindnesses. Any time things are made easy for them, they are wary. But they also know that since they have no choice anyway, they might as well take advantage of whatever little benefits are offered them. So it was with the historic first Marconi Pass patrol. While a detail sweated and cursed loading their supplies they were to take with them, the patrol itself loafed and drank coffee and basked in its newfound notoriety. The cooks even went so far as to make up special hot sandwiches for them even though it wasn’t mealtime. And at one time or another almost everyone at the CP came around to discuss their assignment with them. But all too soon, as they had known it would, this flattering attention and extra service ended and the truth began, and they were gone, off out on the highway in the truck with no more audiences.
    They were being guided by a Signal Corps Pfc who was one of the few men in the Hawaiian Department to have scouted this area. He had been found especially for this mission. He rode up in the cab with the driver. The four of them rode in the back. And the floor of the truckbed was so crammed with their supplies that they were jammed all together at the very back. There were ten gallon milk cans of water, cases of C ration, boxes of other food such as eggs, canned beans and bacon supplied by the kitchen, axes, picks, Very pistols, ropes, as well as their two machine guns and case after case of ammunition and grenades. They were well supplied, and soon they found out how far they were going to have to carry it. Leaving the CP the truck had turned east back toward Makapuu, but about halfway there it left the highway and turned inland, stopped for a wire gate which the Signal Corps Pfc got out and opened, and then ground on along a dirt road that was no more than two tracks through what appeared to be a cattle feeding ranch. Down on the flat, aged Hawaiians and Japanese who were apparently caretakers for the ranch peered at them from rickety little shacks from which cooking smoke drifted, but soon they began to rise and even these were left behind. Before long the tracks of the dirt road disappeared, and the truck ground on up through steepening open fields in which the trees and little fingers of forest became steadily more numerous, making its own road in and out among rock outcroppings which became thicker and thicker. Finally it reached a point where it could go no further, at the spot the Signal Corps Pfc had been looking for. This spot was the bottom of a steep, tree-grown, boulder-strewn, dry mountain runlet, too rocky and too steep even to be called a creekbed, at the point where it debouched into an honest, if steep, dry streambed. Here the truck stopped and they got out, and with the driver’s help began to unload it.
    High above them, up the tree-studded, rock-strewn chute which would be their staircase and appearing to be almost straight up, towered the main ridge of the Koolau Range. Below them out over the last clearing the truck had crossed they could see far, far below the highway, the beach and the sea. A car traveling along the highway appeared to be the size of a lighter flint and they watched it, fascinated, until it disappeared. Without exception the first Marconi Pass patrol had the feeling they were standing out in the open, protectionless, on the side of a steep roof, and the effect