Read Online Goodbye, Darkness by William Manchester - Free Book Online

dripping, however, until Fatso cleaned up. He drew the sheet over the dead man's face and folded it over in a straight new margin. I dozed off. The Doc awoke me, peering at me from a range of about three inches.
    “Have a good nap?”
    “Sure.”
    “How do you feel?”
    “I'm OK.”
    “Do you hurt much?”
    “Nope.”
    “Do you need something?”
    “Nope.”
    I looked around. Chest Wound had gone, too; there was only a lump under the sheet where his head had been. The next time Fatso appeared I asked how many other men we had lost. He tried to change the subject, but Mummy heard us, and his voice, a rich baritone, rose through his bandages. He said: “Three others, all at this end.” Fatso looked distressed, maybe because he couldn't tell whether Mummy was grinning under all those layers of grease and plaster. Then he brightened and said there wouldn't be any more deaths.
    Actually there was another, a man at the far end I hadn't seen. By the time we entered our glide pattern over Hickam Field, I had almost mastered the geography of our C-54 quarters, with one exception. Down near the tail, to starboard, there was a dark place. Squint as I might, I couldn't make it out. I assumed that the lights had burned out there, or that it was used to store gear. But as we touched down, two of the corpsmen entered the place, and when the door opened they emerged carrying a litter — another corpse, hidden under its temporary shroud. As the Doc passed, I called to him. He paused. I asked him who else had died.
    “The poor fellow,” he sighed. “He was so quiet that most of the other patients didn't even notice him.”
    “Who was he? What was his outfit?”
    “He was a private in the Fifth Marines.”
    I felt queer. I said, “My father was in the Fifth.”
    “Your
father?”
    “A long time ago. Another war.”
    He said, “Do you want this poor fellow's name?”
    “No,” I breathed.
“No!”
    He looked at me closely. “You
do
need something.”
    “Shove it, Mac.”
    Mummy chuckled.
    United flight 005 touches down at Honolulu International Airport at precisely 7:35 Hawaiian time, and as I emerge I am instantly wrapped in sheets of hurrying rain, torrents slanting down diagonally, at intervals coming down in waves, like surf. I am unsurprised. It
always
rains when I arrive in the Pacific. If there is ever a drought, they can cable me; I'll come out and fix it. Expecting just such a storm, I have fastened all the intricate buttons in the collar of my Burberry. No protection against cloudbursts can match a Marine Corps poncho, but ponchos are unacceptable in the Halc-kulani, the last of Waikiki's great prewar hotels, where I am soon dining with Jean and Bob Trumbull. In the early 1950s Bob and I were foreign correspondents in India, he for the
New York Times
and I for the
Baltimore Sun
. I have friends scattered through the Pacific, and a fairly good working knowledge of Asia, but Bob's is encyclopedic. On December 7, 1941, he was city editor of the
Honolulu Advertiser
and a stringer for the
Times
. Then the
Times
hired him full-time, and he has been with the paper ever since, mostly around the Pacific basin. He is the last of the
Times
World War II correspondents still on the job.
    Hawaii, he tells me, is, for the first time in its pluralistic history, gripped by racial tension. The problem is the Japanese. Although a minority, they are tightly organized, and as a result they control the local Establishment — the politics, industry, unions; even the presidency of the university. The other inhabitants, and particularly the white Americans who have retired here, resent all this. But, Bob adds, Nipponese affluence is not confined to Hawaii. That, or something like it, will appear almost everywhere on my journey. In peace Hirohito's subjects have achieved what eluded them in war: dominance of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. I tell Bob that the Germans have done the same thing in Europe. The victors of V-E and