Shaftoe realizes that his mental concept of what this mission was going to be like, as he reviewed it with the officers in the LCM, bears no relationship to the reality. This is only about the five thousandth time Shaftoe has experienced this phenomenon in the course of the Second World War; you’d think he would no longer be surprised by it. The antennas, which looked wispy and inconsequential on the reconnaissance photos, are in fact sizable engineering works. Or they were until they got de-engineered by the naval gunfire that silenced those big guns. Now they are just wreckage of a sort that is going to be peculiarly nasty to parachute down on top of. The antennas were, and the wreckage is, made of all kinds of different shit: spars of Philippine mahogany, sturdy columns of bamboo, welded steel trusses. The most common bits are the ones that catch a parachutist’s eye: long metal poky things, and miles and miles of guy wire, snarled into a briarpatch, some of it taut enough to cut a plummeting Marine’s head off and some of it all loose and tangly with sharp hovering ends.