Free Reluctant Warriors by Jon Stafford

too was in bad shape. He was trying to say something, but
he couldn’t speak.
    Oh, Walter, I wish it were me , Harry thought.
    Wood seemed to recognize Harry and blinked a few times, but said nothing. Harry couldn’t
tell where he was hurt. He grabbed his friend and, for some minutes, did his best
to hold him to the debris; then Walter became limp, just like Fostel.
    Harry couldn’t let go. He held Walter up longer, hoping he had just fainted and would
revive. But the burden became too great. He knew he would have to choose! If he held
on, the time would come soon when he could no longer save himself.
    He looked into Walter’s slack face.
    “Walter, forgive me. I can’t hold us up. I have to let you go.”
    Walter was dead, Harry knew. His body was completely limp.
    Harry felt himself reaching exhaustion, coughing, water coming into his mouth. He
had to rest or die. He let go. Walter slipped straight down, and in ten or so feet,
was out of sight in the greenish water.
    Walter had been his roommate at Annapolis. They’d spent thousands of hours together.
He had laughed when Harry came aboard Mojarra at the chance that both wound up on
the same ship. Fostel seemed to have a particular dislike of Walter, though no one
had a clue as to why. Walter was as amiable a guy as you could find.
    Harry grabbed onto the debris and hung on for a while. With the captain dead, he
fully realized that he was the senior officer and that he should take charge and
swim to try to help the others. But he couldn’t move.
    I always kidded Walter that he would become a movie star , he thought, without a smile. And he was such a great runner at Annapolis too. I was best man at his and Sally’s
wedding. They didn’t get a chance to have the kids they wanted. Now she’ll have nothing
left of him.
    His parents are such wonderful people too. His dad tempted both of us with the idea
of getting out of the Navy and becoming lawyers in his booming practice. Who’s gonna
tell them what happened?
    His thoughts were interrupted when one of the men called out: “There’s a ship off
to the east!”
    Harry couldn’t see well enough from where he was. Carefully, painfully, he climbed
onto the largest piece of planking and slowly stood up, recalling something he had
overheard the radar man say just before Mojarra exploded. He peered, shielding his
eyes from the glare.
    His face sank. “It’s that patrol boat we had on the radar before we got hit!”
    Quickly, he jumped back in the water. He perched himself on the planking with his
torso out of the water and yelled to the men. “There’s a patrol boat out there about
three or four miles off. I think she’s headed this way.”
    The men who could perked up. A few asked what they were to do. Harry called out to
them again.
    “Men, whatever you do, don’t signal them. You know that they’ll try to kill us or
bring us on board to torture us if they find us. Stay down!”
    In the next hour, as the hurt and exhausted men continued to slip away, the patrol
boat got closer. Harry prayed for darkness, but the enemy finally saw some of the
debris at about 1830. They sped up and closed on some wreckage about five hundred
yards from Harry.
    First the enemy ran over some men in the water who couldn’t get out of the way. Harry
could hear their screams above the craft’s motors. Then they methodically began machine-gunning
men from the prow. With such a small ship, they couldn’t take on many survivors,
and so took joy in killing the Americans. Harry tried to stay absolutely still, hoping
the enemy would mistake him for a corpse. The boat was close enough that he could
hear the Japanese laughing.
    Suddenly, a tremendous whine came from overhead, and an explosion jarred everyone.
A great geyser shot up fifty feet in the air, yards off to the north and much closer
to the patrol boat.
    “She blew up, sir. That damned patrol boat blew up,” a sailor nearby yelled.
    No, I don’t think so , Harry thought. As the