About two dozen men decided to back the sergeant in his feud with the newcomers. Mohr wasn’t surprised. He figured some would be genuinely pissed at the idea of a black man having the gall to show his face in their bar. Others were hurting from the battle at Midway and looking for payback. Some were just plain ornery, and some of these guys genuinely enjoyed the prospect of a good clean fight.

If anyone was worthy of sympathy, it was these last, poor, stupid chumps. They sailed into the fray with ham-fisted gusto, only to find themselves targeted by a focused and unforgiving type of violence with which the average American was unacquainted, even in the early days of 1942. The three men who braced themselves in the door of the bar didn’t seem to place much store in dramatic flourishes. They quickly and somewhat mechanically crippled anyone foolish enough to attack them.

The thing that stayed with Eddie Mohr was the look on all their faces. They weren’t snarling defiance or obscenities. They weren’t scared. They just looked blank. Like they were somewhere else. They fought like machines. It was fucking Midway all over again.

A Seabee went at the intruders on their own terms. He flipped the bottle of Royal Beer he’d been drinking, smashed it on the edge of the bar, and advanced on the trio with murder in his eyes. The ground in front of his intended victims was strewn with the fallen bodies of men who screamed and thrashed while clutching at broken elbow joints and kneecaps. They impeded the engineer’s progress sufficiently that he changed his target to the black marine, who parried the strike with compact hand block. Using the momentum of the weapon’s thrust, he turned his hip slightly and swept the engineer’s hand up level with his chin. He took control of the bottle and jerked, breaking the man’s wrist. As the unnerved attacker cried out in pain, the marine shifted minimally at the hip again, driving his elbow into the engineer’s own. The pressure shattered the joint and the man blacked out before he could scream again.

It appeared to Mohr as if the three of them were constructing a berm of their victims. They were obviously much fitter than anyone else in the bar, and they expended a minimum of energy in the way they fought. Mohr thought they looked like they could wipe out the entire joint, but they weren’t there for the entertainment value. They were methodically edging toward the exit like they wanted nothing more than to get safely away. The fury of their attackers made that difficult.