The Naked and the Dead [antikvár]

PART ONE wave I j I Nobody could sleep. When morning came, assault craft would be lowered and a first wave of troops would ride through the surf and charge ashore on the beach at Anopopei. All over the ship, all through the convoy, there was a j^owledge that in a few hours some of them-were going to be dead. A soldier lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide-awake. All about him, like the soughing of surf, he hears the murmurs of men dozing fitfully. "I won't do it, I won't do it," someone cries out of a dream, and the soldier opens his eyes and gazes slowly about the hold, his vision becoming lost in the intricate tangle of hammocks and naked bodies and dangling equipment. He decides he wants to go to the head, and cursing a little, he wriggles up to a sitting position, his legs hanging over the bunk, the stee pipe of the hammock above cutting across his hunched back. Hfe sighs, I reaches for his shoes, which he has tied to a stanchion, and j. ; slowly puts them on. His bunk is the fourth in a tier of five, |. and he climbs down uncertainly in the half-darkness, afraid | ¦ of stepping on one of the men in the hammocks below him. | i On the floor he picks his way through a tangle of bags and , packs, stumbles once over a rifle, and makes his way to the bulkhead door. He passes through another hold whose aisle is i' just as , cluttered, and finally reaches the head. !, Inside the air is steaming. Even now a man is using the sole j! fresh-water shower, which has been occupied ever since the |, , troops have come on board. The soldier walks past the crap i j' games in the unused salt-water shower stalls, and squats down on the wet split boards of the latrine. He has forgotten his [/ cigarettes and he bums one from a man sitting a few feet ,i away. As he smokes he looks at the black wet floor littered with butts, and listens to the water sloshing through the la- i r trine box. There has been really no excuse for coming, but he j ,