William Charles “Bill” Dunn, USMCR, of Point Clear, Alabama, was twenty-one years old, five feet six inches tall, and weighed 142 pounds; he’d been a First Lieutenant, USMCR, twelve, days, and a Naval Aviator not quite six months; and in all that time-in all his twenty-one years, even-he’d never had a night as hard as the last one. By the time he threw off the sheet that morning and swung his feet onto the floor, he did it with the sinking conviction that he was a coward. That conviction didn’t come as a surprise to him.
The thought, if not the conviction, had been there when he crawled into bed, and more times than he wanted to count he’d woken up during the night with it.
Just about every time he did that, he’d had to rush to the head to move his bowels. As far as he was concerned, that made him-literally-“scared shitless.” It did not strike him as amusing. Now that his bowels were empty, he had an urge-suppressed only with enormous effort-to throw up.
And every couple of minutes he felt a cold and clammy sweat on his back and on the seat of his skivvy shorts.
The reason his body was acting so wild was that today he was going, as the Naval Service so quaintly put it, “In Harm’s Way.” The Japanese were about to attack the islands where Dunn was stationed, with the objective of capturing them; the United States Navy was determined not to lose them. Both sides had sent formidable naval forces toward the area.
