The smell reminded Jesse of a lit cigarette, but the smoke was black and thick across the blue sky, the shells falling like rain on the beach, echoes and ripples across the deep water. Missiles hissed their sparks above the boat, and the forty men huddled together, approaching the shore. Being deafened by the screeching bombs, the marines held their breath, for the smoke was thick.

"Two hundred yards until the shoreline," the coxswain cried. "God have mercy."

Jesse was ready, as he had been ready all his life, as he had been ready since setting foot on Guadalcanal, since walking through the recruitment office on his eighteenth birthday. The date stuck in his mind—January twenty-third, of the year. It had been cold in Ohio, but he had been displaced into the tropics.

The boat lurched on, its drab metal hull grinding against a sandbar. Another bomb burst nearby, only louder.

"Fuck it, cut the line," the coxswain grunted, his words flicking Jesse's ear as Jesse pressed up against the front of the transport bay. "We got two hundred yards of goddamn mines ahead and we've run up on a sandbar."

He was speaking into a radio to the command on board the ships.

"Get ready..." Lotz said next to Jesse. "We're the front, gonna get the Japs. Gonna gun them down, keep yourself down."

Everything shone through a tunnel, a single beam of light—shouted commands lowered the ramp, and the sun glittered on the waters, two hundred pure yards of warm Pacific surf between Jesse's feet and the beach at Saipan. Forty men pushed, and the first rows slid, slipped off the wet metal into the water, their boots quickly soaking up the lukewarm ocean, rifles held above their heads. A long dock stretched out to the left, and the sand rose up into jungles and hills beyond the beachhead.

"Let's go, fellas," Lieutenant Sinico, falling amongst his men into the low water, only reaching his abdomen. "Two hundred yards for the beach, keep moving. Guns out, this isn't a training exercise, this is the real deal."

The platoon forced their way through the water, their saturated bodies wedging through toward the shore. The naval bombardment on the white shore had left smoking craters, from wherein muzzle flashes popped like flashbulbs toward the Marines. The bullets would only penetrate water two feet before losing velocity. Jesse learned that in infantry training school, Parris Island, South Carolina, and the slow-moving water bullets bounced off his legs harmlessly, devoid of energy.

A hundred and fifty yards to go. The gunshots were audible, and the flashes of rifles and machine guns on the shore hissed and whirred past the Marines. "Keep going, keep going," Lieutenant Sinico called, and ahead of Jesse, Lotz's head split open like a zipper, the gentle wind scattering the droplets of his brains across the water, his blood making a red tint in the sea.

A hundred yards to go. "Keep going," they said, and no fear. The bullets hurtled into a squad a little further on, cutting them down into the water. The men behind them tried to lift them, but their wounds gaped bloodily.

Fifty yards to go. Up ahead the tank traps and dark wooden violent spikes loomed below the trajectories of the heavy machine guns. Jesse ducked down, sloshing through the water, a Browning Automatic upward, pulling the trigger and firing blindly up at the Japanese soldiers. The casings sputtered out smoking onto the surface of the surf, the waves carrying them along, the clip of twenty rounds expended into the ocean.

Ten yards to go. "Don't waste your bullets until you reach the range!" they called.

Jesse's leg burst free of the water, and he ran through the tangles of wooden barriers and tank traps, onto the wind and bomb-tossed sand. The decimated lines of platoons hit the beach, and the bombs flew in every direction, black and white grains of color and blood hissing in the air around him. Lieutenant Sinico ran with the men across the gun-streaked beach, onto the grassy dunes a few dozen yards ahead, under the scopes of the heavy guns.

Jesse's mind was moving too fast to reflect that he finally was here—finally on the solid firmness of Saipan, with the US Marines. He looked out upon the second wave of Marines quickly approaching in the surf, and felt his tense heart slamming against his ribs.

"Grenades," Sinico ordered, and the Marines drew out their pineapple grenades. Pulling the pins out, they hurled them far beyond the grassy slope of the concrete seawall and into the gun emplacements far out of sight.

The grenades detonated, and Lieutenant Sinico leaped over the seawall, followed by Jesse and all the platoon. Their feet struck the concrete emplacement, and they rushed forward, BARs firing, sputtering bullets in glowing ricochets on the concrete. They ran at the pillboxes in violent fury—

Beyond the emplacements was the forests, the trees—Jesse ran forward, firing shots randomly at the blasted remnants of the enemy—he stopped.

A Japanese soldier, fragment of metal through his leg, leaned against a wide tree, pistol in his hands. He was pale, dying, but fierce and set—Jesse pulled the trigger and shot the man in the shoulder, and he dropped the gun.

Jesse fired, expending his last five shots on the man, striking him in the bloody femur and bursting gunshots across his abdomen and the ground around him. The man fell back; immediately a fly landed on his eyeball. Jesse vomited.

"Get back here, Sanchez, you're too far ahead!" Lieutenant Sinico cried to Jesse. "Leave the Jap alone, you stupid motherfucker, and come with us."

Jesse scrambled along with the rest of the platoon, down a clear forest path. Up ahead on a hill, smoke and fire surrounded a cruel firefight on the ledge looking down over a cliffed valley. Lieutenant Sinico called them all along, and Jesse pondered the word—motherfucker had been a recent invention after all.

As he thought and ran with the rest of the Marines, trying to look out of all sides of his head, Jesse was stopped in his tracks by a line of several dozen Japanese women, accompanied by their children. They wore regular clothes, looking scared to nausea by the Marines, clutching their weeping infants to their bosoms.

"Don't worry, you're gonna be safe," Jesse called out as he rushed to the battle.

The forest broke up ahead, and Jesse stepped along with the rest of his platoon onto a ledge maybe forty or fifty feet above the forest floor below. Jesse looked down, and then looked toward the hill. A bunker was dug deep into the hill, and a Marine was nonchalantly aiming a lit flamethrower into it, gas exhaled into the air.

At the top of the hill, three Marines were planting an eight-foot American flag in the blood-soaked dirt, moist with the jungle dew and the bodies of the Japanese around the hill. Lieutenant Sinico observed their progress, satisfied in the reach, and turned back toward Jesse's squad, congregated by the edge of the precipice, looking out over the steep drop. Several dozen yards away was another side of the cliff, looking out on the dark forested valley of the inner island of Saipan.

"Arrived in time, didn't you?" said Lieutenant Sinico. "At least that flamethrower's drying out our clothes, huh?"

"Yes sir,"

Jesse's eyes were drawn to the opposing cliff face, forty feet above the rocky ground below. The four dozen or so Japanese women and kids were gradually making their way to the edge, looking out at the Marines a hundred feet away. With the scared Japanese women and children were some elderly fellows, grey-haired and ancient, being helped and prodded to the main group by their daughters and grandchildren.

"Yeah, fuck the Emperor!" Lieutenant Sinico called out, swaggering with the Browning aimed coolly out at the civilians.

From somewhere below, in the forest, somebody—a Japanese-accented voice—called "Fuck Roosevelt!"

"I couldn't kill a Republican," Jesse muttered.

Observing the exchange, a Japanese woman at the forefront of the civilians grabbed her child up into her hands and stepped toward the edge of the cliff, propelling herself forward off of the edge, tumbling down toward the rocks. Jesse locked his jaw in shock, watching the descent.

"Lieutenant!"

In ones and twos, the civilians threw themselves from the cliff face. The single women went alone or with their girlfriends, and the elderly tottered at the edge with the tenacity of tortoises, their aged bodies shattering forty feet downward. The children cried as they fell, but the mothers were stoic.

"It's all right! I told you it's all right!" Jesse called out, and he wasn't the only one. The Marines on the hill, mostly the newer recruits, were shouting out to stop jumping, that they wouldn't be hurt. The Japanese continued their suicidal plummets.

"These guys are a freak show," Lieutenant Sinico said, feeling up his body for a cigarette that hadn't been soaked in the ocean.

The falls were rarely perpendicular. They bounced off the rocky wall of the cliff, landing together in a bloody morass at the bottom, limbs sticking from limbs, a pile of human wastage. The last few women slipped into the abyss and down with their beloved, and the valley was quiet except for the Marines adjusting the flag and taking pictures of the scorched bodies.

"Anyway...it looks like you're a Marine after all," Lieutenant Sinico said, his rifle pointed down at a Japanese soldier with a gaping wound smoldering in his stomach. The edges of the abdominal gash were glowing like embers, and Jesse wondered what could have caused such a hurt, and if the flamethrower had done the damage, or an exploding shell. Lieutenant Sinico noticed the singeing body and smiled morosely.

He lit his cigarette on the burning corpse, and raised it to his lips. The smoke filled the air around Jesse's nostrils.