Whistle by James Jones

him. There was nothing to do. Prell ran.
    They were lucky. A big, well-prepared patrol would have killed them all, at once. Apparently the group that heard them was a small one of only five men, and had no help nearby. When he came running down, his men were just finishing killing the fifth. One of his men was slightly wounded. A nick. His own single Jap trooper apparently had been all alone.
    Prell slowed long enough to yell at them to move. The ones in front were already running down the trail, and needed no urging. The others began to follow. “Move, move,” he screamed at them. The Jap troops often called mortars down in on themselves, and Prell had anticipated it.
    Mortar shells began to whump in around them. One man a little in front of Prell went down from a near direct hit. Prell and the man immediately in front of Prell, hardly pausing, scooped him up by the armpits and half-carried him. A man up ahead dropped back and took over Prell’s half of him to free Prell. Prell paused, to make sure they were all in front of him and running, then turned around to fire rear guard, running backward. But no enemy were visible behind them on the trail. Another man went down from a mortar round but got up and ran on by himself. Then the patrol was apparently through the mortar screen. That was when the .50 caliber took them from the flank.
    The Jap was firing from an obtuse angle to the line of the trail. Fortunately, they had run nearly through his field of fire by the time he could get his gun going. Fortunately, most of them were already through. Only the men at the tail end caught the fire.
    Prell, of course, was the last man. A burst caught him across the thighs, and cut him off from his legs and feeling them just as if a big scythe had swept through a field, and Prell knew he had had it, or if he hadn’t, his legs certainly had. The impact seemed to fling him forward. As he started to fall, he watched the same burst, drifting higher, take the two men running downhill in front of him across the lower back and lungs, inches higher on the third man than on the second. There was no question they were killed. The third man was his point man, Crozier. Both bodies went on running several yards before they fell. Prell, his teeth clenched, by sheer force of will, helped along by the push of the heavy bullets, managed to run past them on his non-legs before he too folded up like thin cardboard and fell straight down on his face, headlong, sprawling. He had the curious impression that he was continuing still to run, horizontally, even as he struck. But as he fell his mind told him none of it really mattered anyway, because his mind told him he was finished.
    He yelled and a couple of his squad ran back for him, in tandem, like a pair of matched, finely trained horses, and got him by his armpits. But in the same moment, miraculously, all firing stopped. The jungle quiet, always ominous, and never really quiet, which seemed to drip from the trees like moisture, fell on them.
    They turned him over on his back. His number two crawled over. Their faces looked scared. “Well, let’s see! Let’s see!” Prell demanded irately. “Damn it!” He needed passionately to know. See for himself how bad it was. “Don’t just sit there!” His number two and another man unbuckled his belt and began to pull his pants down. Prell, beginning to sweat as they moved him, sent two men back up the trail for the two dead. Crozier, and Sims. He was damned if he was going to leave them here, for the Japs to piss on, or eat, or whatever it was they did with their captured dead.
    The legs were a mess, when they got his pants down. Like hamburger. It made his belly go cold inside, looking at them. The skin across his thighs was already turning blue from bruise. It was impossible to tell how many of the heavy .50 caliber bullets had hit him. He was bleeding badly. But there didn’t seem to be any arterial bleeding. The first hopeful sign. His number two