Behind the Beyond

BEACHHEAD ON THE WIND -- Carl Jonas --Little, Brown ($2).

As the homebound ship nosed through the grey fog towards San Francisco, the sailor gripped the steel bulwarks with tight hands and prayed: "Oh Lord, oh dear Lord, make it so I can talk to them.

And make it so they can understand." The Lord has made it so that Boat swain's Mate Second Class Carl Jonas can talk to them. In deep emotion and a rhythmic, sharp-focused prose, Coast Guardsman Jonas has tried to make his book a communication line between the Americans who went to war and the Americans who stayed at home. He comes closer to succeeding than most. And perhaps the best measure of his success is in helping civilians understand why they cannot understand.

Author Jonas, 32, wrote Beachhead on the Wind, a first novel, in such places as Amchitka, Honolulu, Saipan. The war he writes about is not the bloody fury of combat, but the kind of war most soldiers know -- the endless, searching attrition of nature against man. The beach head of his action is a wind-seared island in the Aleutians. His story is about what the island does to its invaders.

The Wind. The men of the Greeley were expendables -- castoffs, misfits and supernumeraries from every surf station and receiving ship on the West Coast.

"If there was ever a crew unwilling to go to sea, it was this one. The flesh was weak. Not even the spirit was very willing. . . ." What made them even less ready was the look of the soldiers they took aboard at the frozen, dirt-colored camp at Adak.

When the Greeley's Commander Loes asked one expressionless dogface where he could find General McGinty, the soldier nodded down the dock. " 'You see that little snot-nosed son-of-a-bitch?' the soldier asked. . . 'Well, that's him.' This [incident] more than anything else yet made the men on board the Greeley realize that somehow they had gotten out behind the beyond."

The wind began to blow before they left Adak. It died down a bit for the landing at Tartu, and at dawn the men crowded the rails to see their new home -- "a long flat reef . . . like something lost and left over from long-gone and saurian ages of creation, dead now and dripping."

The Men. The men of the beach party were expendables of expendables -- except for Chief Krotch, without whose competent, tight-lipped profanity there would never have been any men at all to beach the troop-filled landing craft in that crushing wind. But during the months the beach party stayed ashore to salvage the smashed and sunken boats, its strangely assorted members became a team.

There was O'Higgins, the Indian with the poet's soul who was at home on Tartu from the beginning because "his people had been there." There was Spanish Ramirez, whose soft, easy voice could persuade even Chief Krotch to go prospecting for fool's gold in a nonexistent mine. There was querulous bankteller Pegler and handsome Ensign Flood, nominally in charge, who had never consciously done anything wrong in his life--and consequently had never done anything right. Tartu did not make a man of Flood, but no one cared.

The men of the Tartu beach, who worked neck-deep in the freezing, oil-fouled water day after grueling day, were not particularly brave men, but they came to regard the regular Jap air raids as something in the nature of a diversion. These were the sad sacks of 1942 who would go on to beach LCIs at Saipan and Tarawa, Iwo and Okinawa, who would come back to America to find themselves half-strangers in their own land.

The Homecoming. To emphasize this civilian-serviceman barrier of unshared experience, Author Jonas jumps intermittently from the Aleutian action to the miserable frustration of a returned sailor amid civilians who cannot understand what he has no words to tell them. In the downtown businessmen's club the sailor could only play nervously with the silverware when the man said: "Well, how are the boys going to vote?" When the girl spoke out of the darkness: "Don't I mean anything to you at all?" he could only say suddenly, "No, I guess you don't." And when they asked him in the Market Street bar what it was like out there, he could only repeat: "It was the wind."

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