Word: surf
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...clammy Channel mist hung chilly over Boulogne as the British ships sneaked inshore. In the murk of the early morning, the Commandomen, their faces daubed with jet black war paint like fantastic military minstrels, splashed into the surf and slipped ashore...
East Side, West Side. Malaya (see map p. 20) is divided by a great watershed. To the east is an inhospitable land. Its beaches are broad, but they lie behind treacherous offshore ledges, riparian sandbars and extended shallows, which soon will be pounded by the terrible surf of the northeasterly monsoon. Behind the beaches, beyond a fringe of graceful, feathery casuarina trees, lie the swamps-great stinking pestholes which house most of nature's nightmares: crocodiles, pythons, cobras, and the nasty little Anopheles, the mosquito of malaria. Behind the swamps lie jungles which are almost airtight, home of adders...
Steinbeck bathed, too, in a heady stream of life-force. At Cape San Lucas he observed that the rocks were "ferocious with life....Perhaps the force of the great surf which beats on this shore has much to do with the tenacity of the animals here. It is noteworthy that the animals, rather than deserting such beaten shores for the safe cove and protected pools, simply increase their toughness and fight back at the sea with a kind of joyful survival. This ferocious survival quotient excites us and makes us feel good, and from the crawling, fighting, resisting qualities...
...crowded bunks, were piling over the side into pitching beach boats, settling their combat packs, fixing bayonets as they squatted down. An hour after the light had blinked its message, the muted roar of 1,500-horsepower engines overtoned the growl of the waves. The boats were in the surf; men with their rifles held high piled into the water...
Along the beach the First Battalion set up its machine guns and mortars, disposed its riflemen. Just before dawn waves of beach boats began to rip through the surf. The First opened up with a chatter of blank-cartridge fire as two attacking battalions splashed through the shallows, made a dash for the cover of the dunes, dug in. It was around ten o'clock and everybody was sweating when Task Force 18 finally wound up its first landing party exercise...