Marines who lose weapons have to pay for them. That's what I meant, silly as it seems in the circumstances.
Just as we were falling in at the sand-covered ramps of the three LCVP's, Krane cried out: "Where are the Japs?"
It gave me a chill. There was no escaping a peculiar fact: that even while the invisible was herding us, assembling us before our LCVP's, something of it, or about it, had snatched away the Japanese. They had simply vanished.
The walls were not circular now, but oval, roughly encompassing the LCVP's. Haggerty assembled his men before his LCVP. Hoose did the same. Mine assembled about me on the central ramp.
Then, when we were inside, in position as he had been when we landed, with only one man missing—Yount—the wall ceased closing in. For ten minutes we wondered about this. Then I had a hunch.
"Can we raise the ramps without the motors?"
We couldn't, not all the way, but we could, with two men at each outer corner, raise them about four feet, catch and hold them with their rattling chains.
When we figured this out we did it by the numbers—
And we almost left twelve men on the beach!
No sooner had we raised the ramps than the Caribbean was tugging at our LCVP's, the waves trying to take them back to sea. Our ramp men jumped up on their ramps, rolled crazily into the LCVP's, and the ramps raised all the way, clicking into place to become the prows of the unwieldy landing craft.