Free The Thin Red Line by James Jones

of them were suffering from shock, as well as from blast, and the consummate tenderness with which they were handled first by their rescuers and then by the corpsmen was a matter of complete indifference to them and meant nothing. Bloodstained, staggering, their eyeballs rolling, the little party faltered up the slope of the beach to sit or lie, dazed and indifferent, and acquiescently allow themselves to be worked on by the doctors.
    They had crossed a strange line; they had become wounded men; and everybody realized, including themselves, dimly, that they were now different. Of itself, the shocking physical experience of the explosion, which had damaged them and killed those others, had been almost identically the same for them as for those other ones who had gone on with it and died. The only difference was that now these, unexpectedly and illogically, found themselves alive again. They had not asked for the explosion, and they had not asked to be brought back. In fact, they had done nothing. All they had done was climb into a barge and sit there as they had been told. And then this had been done to them, without warning, without explanation, perhaps damaging them irreparably; and now they were wounded men; and now explanation was impossible. They had been initiated into a strange, insane, twilight fraternity where explanation would be forever impossible. Everybody understood this; as did they themselves, dimly. It did not need to be mentioned. Everyone was sorry, and so were they themselves. But there was nothing to be done about it. Tenderness was all that could be given, and, like most of the self-labeled human emotions, it meant nothing when put alongside the intensity of their experience.
    With the planes which had done this to them still in sight above the channel, the doctors began swiftly to try to patch up, put back together, and save, what they could of what the planes had done. Some of them were pretty badly torn up, others not so badly. Some would yet die, so much was obvious, and it was useless to waste time on these which might be spent on others who might live. Those who would die accepted this professional judgment of the doctors silently, as they accepted the tender pat on the shoulder the doctors gave them when passing them by, staring up mutely from bottomless, liquid depths of still-living eyes at the doctors’ guilty faces.
    C-for-Charlie, standing nearby, and already counted off again into its true structural unity of platoons, watched this action at the aid station with rapt fascination. Each of its platoons and its company headquarters instinctively huddled together as though for warmth against a chill, seeking a comfort from the nearness of others which was not forthcoming, five separate little groups of wide-eyed spectators consumed with an almost sexual, morbid curiosity. Here were men who were going to die, some of them before their very eyes. How would they react? Would some of them rage against it, as they themselves felt like raging? Or would they simply all expire quietly, stop breathing, cease to see? C-for-Charlie, as one man, was curious to see: to see a man die. Curious with a hushed, breathless awe. They could not help but be; fresh blood was so very red, and gaping holes in bared flesh were such curious, strange sights. It was all obscene somehow. Something which they all felt should not be looked at, somehow, but which they were compelled to look at, to cluster closer and study. The human body was really a very frail, defenseless organism, C-for-Charlie suddenly realized. And these men might have been themselves. So might those others, out there now under the water over which the LCIs still scurried, and who would not be searched out and raised until the cessation of the unloading offered time and opportunity.
    The wounded men, both those who would die and those who would not, were as indifferent to being stared at as they were to the tenderness with which they were treated. They