The Pacific rain thundered down from the sky is smashing in sheets against the heavy jungle foliage.

Driving into the muddy ground like millions of bullets, driving incessant rain, that

dissolved the earth in a fluid mass, uncomfortable, hostile rain, that caked mud on weapons,

uniforms, equipment. The crouching men on the top of the clearing on a late

a mountain watched the rain come down. They sat, wet and miserable, in their muddy foxholes,

and watched it passively and hopelessly.

Rain was something that couldn't be fought, couldn't be stemmed, only watched and perhaps in moments of utter desperation, cursed, damnedish rain. Damned this stinking, no good rain. Corporal Levy spoke quietly without a motion.

Occasionally he lifted one of his feet out of the clinging mire in which he was standing and surveyed it soberly.

His boots were mud. His legs were mud. His uniform was caked with the stuff.

The rest of the squad were in holes on the other side of his. Etherson, the sergeant, in the

hole to his left, sailing in Reagan on the machine gun to his right, Sloan behind them,

and the gaunt sick Hibbard was in Levy's hole. They were tired, hungry men, with dirty-bearded faces

lined with crevices of fatigue. When they had first fought their way up the mountain,

they had been spirited, alert, fighting men,

tempered perhaps, by the realization of fear and danger,

but still protected by the peculiar human defense mechanism

known as humor. But now they had no

humor. They were trapped in a clearing surrounded by jungle and Japanese, out of contact with

everyone, out of touch with all possible aid and reinforcements, out of food, and short of ammunition. They were men whose

minds and bodies had been attacked by two formidable opponents. One was hunger, which gnawed

at their stomachs. The other was fear that gnawed at their morale.

Levy looked at these men and wondered if he looked as bad as they did.

...