No wonder those paratroopers think they are gods among men: they get such a nice view of things, so much better than a poor Marine grunt stuck down on the beach, who is always looking uphill into courses of pillboxes. All of Luzon stretches out before him. He can see one or two hundred miles north, across a mat of vegetation as dense as felt, to the mountains in the far north where General Yamashita, the Lion of Malaya, is holed up with a hundred thousand troops, each of whom would like nothing better than to strap lots of explosives to his body, sneak through the lines at night, run into the middle of a large concentration of American soldiers, and blow himself up for his emperor. To Shaftoe’s starboard is Manila Bay, and even from this distance, some thirty miles, he can see the jungle suddenly turn thin and brown as it nears the shore, like a severed leaf that is dying from the edge inwards—that would be what’s left of the city of Manila. The fat twenty-mile-long tongue of land protruding towards him is Bata’an. Just off the tip of it is a rocky island shaped like a tadpole with a green head and a bony brown tail: Corregidor. Smoke jets from many vents on the island, which has been mostly reconquered by the Americans. Quite a few Nipponese blew themselves up in their underground bunkers rather than surrender. This heroic act has given someone in The General’s chain of command a nifty idea.