Battleground Pacific Read online

  Everything’s gonna be fine, Sterling. Everything is going to be fine.

  *

  It’s here that perception becomes serrated and ill defined. Abstract. Smeared against the hands of time. I’m awake but asleep, where the mind can only handle so much before it rocks the madman to sleep.

  Sometime during the night, marine dog handlers come up through our lines. These two dogs, sleek war Dobermans—all etched musculature and regal black-diamond fur—look like better marines than us raggedy-ass riflemen.

  The dogs’ coal-tinted eyes stand out glossy and unfearing, in front of animal brains that know no difference between kennels and killing fields. They are out of place, despite their purpose.

  “Hey, you guys, wanna see the dogs?” a handler asks, really showing off here.

  “Yeah, let’s see ’em. C’mere.”

  “I’ll be a sonuvabitch. What kinda mutts are those?”

  Smiles go around, and morale is cranked up a few notches. Their handlers take good care of these dogs, and it shows. I’ve hardly eaten three bites in the last three days, and there’s still the ever-present lack of clean water, but these Doberman pinschers haven’t missed a square. They’re majestic.

  The handlers tell us that if there are any Nips out here, the dogs will root them out. Sure as hell, they will. The Dobermans have been trained to whiff out the scent of a Jap from several yards. That’s a reassuring thought—if it works, that is. Otherwise, what’s going to happen when the dogs run into a Nip?

  So they let one of the dogs run into the jungle. All around we detect movement as the dog sniffs and paws his way through the mangrove. I figure twenty minutes, and if the dog doesn’t find a Jap, we’ll feel a lot safer. Here’s the rub: If the dog’s only out looking for a place to take a leak, we’re not going to care how beautiful these beasts are. For all we know, he could be giving our position away.

  Nippo Baxter leans over to me and whispers, “Ya know … I heard them Nips … they like to eat a dog, is what I heard.”

  Some marines will believe anything they hear about the Japanese, like the Nips file their teeth down to points, they rape their enemies, and even that they eat their fish uncooked. I’m not here to judge Japan, though. I’m here to hurt him before he hurts me. The real Pacific war. Whether or not they eat domesticated animals doesn’t do me one bit of good in the jungle.

  Nevertheless, soon the dog comes back out, uneaten, and the handler appears pleased, giving us a matter-of-fact look.

  “Okay, that clears you guys out. Good thing for you fellas this is a Nip-free area.”

  There’s nobody in front of me but the enemy.

  Looking at these dogs … I can’t explain what I feel. I’m in the middle of a sweltering jungle and I’m thinking about 1932. The winter of 1932. I’m eight years old in one place, freezing cold, icicles hanging from Wall Street awnings—and then I’m twenty in another place, feverish and frightened.

  Miz Muggins gave birth to six puppies. Yes, I remember that now.

  A winter morning, the puppies are just weaned off of Muggins, and my dad puts all six of the pups in a cardboard box. He bundles me up, and Dad and I walk a mile to the Lefferts and Liberty station, catching the El for a nickel apiece, riding across the Brooklyn Bridge and into Manhattan.

  At the Park Row Station we get off the train and walk downtown with the box of pups, near Wall Street, on Maiden Lane.

  A lot of people work in these big office buildings in Manhattan. To have jobs out here, during the Depression, means a little something extra to most people’s pocketbooks. These New Yorkers are like royalty as far as we’re concerned; which also means they are rubes. Plain and simple, easy prey.

  Dad and I place our box of pups down and set ourselves up in front of a tall building as the biting wind comes screaming around the sharp angles of city blocks.

  As the people come out of the buildings for lunch, we have a couple of the puppies out, playing with them. I’m herding them from one place to another, on display as if we’re carnival barkers or some such. If they aren’t pedigrees, you wouldn’t know it, they are so cute—pawing around, nipping at each other’s tails and ears—and here I am, eight years old, and despite the arctic air, I’m having a good time.

  Sure enough the number-crunchers and pencil-pushers make their way out, and one of them says, “Oh, that’s cute. How cute! How much?”

  My dad says, “Six bucks.”

  It’s not a hard sale. All the pups are gone within an hour.

  The Dobermans are fine specimens, yet at the edge of the swamp the dogs have the shakes so bad, it looks as if they’re trying to shit out peach pits.

  The next day, we see one of the same dogs crapped out from heat exhaustion, lying on his side, panting, his tongue swabbing the deck. The Doberman couldn’t stand the heat.

  Beasts and men are alike. They evacuated the dog and Dennis Hoffman the next day.

  *

  The next day is more of the same: a fever dream, sloshing through a mix of mangrove, jungle, and swamp. Peleliu is where God must have taken out the trash once he had created the rest of the world. It’s all a joke. Our Father, the benevolent caretaker and master designer, but the shittiest comedian of all time. Instead, he gave his sense of humor to his Marine Corps children, with our rifles and grenades, bayonets and Brownings. We are here to kill the Japanese man, not to die by means of jungle taint and claustrophobia.

  A deadly war within and without, without firing a single shot.

  I’d give anything to know what’s trying to kill me.

  So by the time we reach the eastern shore, the sea and the sky greet us with a crocodile’s grin: full of hospitality, yet barbed with great sharp teeth.

  There will be no evacuation. There will be no Pavuvu. The “three days” gag is just a dry-hump. Blue-balled, we are now on Purple Beach, where we’re ordered to keep guard against Nip infiltration and reinforcements along the eastern shore. If the Japanese wanted to, they could send in reinforcements from any one of the Nip-held islands in the Palau chain: Babelthuap, Ngaraard, or Ngesebus … and they would aim straight for Purple Beach as their port of call.

  Codenamed “Purple Beach,” this is the original beach where our invasion was to take place, but it was thought by Rupertus & Co. that it was too heavily defended to make a successful landing. It ended up that they were correct in their assessment. For although we don’t see pillboxes or any signs that the Japanese had ever been here, just one look at the beach—much longer and wider than Orange 2—tells us that we would have been clay pigeons to the Nip gunners had we attempted a landing. Much, much worse than the inferno of Orange 2.

  Yet finally we’ll have at least some semblance of respite.

  After three days of brutality, human emotions have become too frayed. First it was the enemy, then the war with our environment, and lastly the straw that broke the gunny’s back: There had been a ghastly slaying during a night patrol.

  It had rained all night. They sent forty of us, waterlogged and soaked to the gills, out into the wild, hunting for Nips.

  Buzzing through a thin radio frequency, the voice of our shepherd for the evening, Major John H. Gustafson, said something about when, where, and how to make contact with the enemy. However, I don’t think the mission was very clear to anybody except for maybe First Lieutenant Edward “Hillbilly” Jones and Sergeant Hank Boyes.

  The scuttlebutt had come down that there were two thousand Japanese reinforcements chopping their way west through the jungle, trying to link up with their forces in the mountain ranges. The funny thing was, the Nips on the ridges must not have needed their friends badly; otherwise the Jap commanders would have picked a better route for their reinforcements, given that the jungle we had just hacked our way through was assuredly the longest path that one could take to reach the road to hell—and it sure as shit wasn’t paved with good intentions.

  So it’s forty marines against two thousand Japanese in an overgrown arboretum, with perhaps o
nly a few openings in the jungle in which to fight. At night, no less. In the rain, no less. Whoever hatched this plan must have laid an egg—and a lot of marines say as much.

  It’s no wonder our anxiety is stuck in the red: Morse-code nerve endings, synapses crackling at thirty million pops per second; I can’t make out the marine in front of me. We’re going in goddamn circles here. Even so, I know the rest of the 3rd Platoon is somewhere up ahead, as well as a couple of other BAR men, Gene Holland and Frank Minkewitz. Also with us are some of the mortarmen and machine gunners, but unless they have somewhere to set up their weapons in this labyrinth, if we get into a row with the Nips, there will be mortar rounds bursting in the screw-pine trees, raining down stuff on us a lot more vicious and heavier than water.

  So it went all evening, green-garbed mud-crunchers, noctambulist dreamwakers, numb but highly volatile, so keyed up that close to the next morning, Lieutenant Jones convinced Major Gustafson that he should reel the patrol back in.

  If the Japs had been out there, they had missed us and we had missed them.

  It wasn’t until our patrol had returned to Purple Beach that the guys in my squad learned that one of the boys in the mortar platoon, in a fit of fright, had slain one of his own with a spade. What would provoke a marine to kill another marine was anybody’s guess. Whoever the killer was, he must have been damned good at his job, committing the act so quietly that none of us heard a thing.

  “Jesus H. Christ! What the hell were they doing out there?” Jack Baugh asked, lighting cigarettes and passing them around to everybody.

  “Beats the fuck outta me,” Billy Leyden said frowning, “but if I ever see one of those shitheads walkin’ around with a shovel, I’m surrenderin’ to the goddamn Japs!”

  There’s nobody in front of me but Marines.

  *

  Purple Beach, Peleliu, Palau Islands, 7° 1′ 0″ N, 134° 15′ 0″ E, September 20-something, 1944.

  It was almost like I didn’t want to tell anybody about Purple Beach, it was so good. That’s why you’ll hear few marines mention our stay there.

  On Purple Beach, marines actually enjoyed digging, because the digging was so good. Real sand, not that jagged coral rock, provided a deep hole for each marine to cozy up in. A machine-gun section dug in right beside me, guarding, scanning the ocean from surf to tide. If the Nips decided to land on this shore, we would tear their asses up. Little slant-eyed Japs, putting us through the meat grinder for the last three days—I don’t think there was a marine who wasn’t trigger-happy enough to send one of those bowlegged bastards back to whatever passed for a god in their savage yellow minds.

  So, despite the bitterness of not getting off the island, our new purpose was at least assuaged by the relative ease of our duty on Purple Beach.

  Those of us who hadn’t eaten in the last three days once again found our stomachs (for the most part). We could bathe in the ocean and not care too much about the tacky residue it left on our skin. None of us had to speak in those too-hushed voices to which we had become accustomed while clambering through the jungle. Purple Beach was almost serene.

  Almost.

  I dug my foxhole only ten feet from the ocean. Dozens of marines dug their foxholes close to the shore as well—as close as we dared without running the risk of water seeping into our holes. Crisp little pops of snapping breakers came in with the currents, not too far away from me, as the moon cast a bridge of light upon hypnotic waves. Gently, gently … For brief moments there was not a war going on at all. Only at night, when you cared to see it, could the eye make out the silhouette of a navy minesweeper, gliding up and down the coast: Faint lights aboard ship, some ensign smoking a cigarette on deck; their easy duty was our easy duty, trying hard to blank out the muffled sounds of carnage ringing out on other parts of the island.

  When daylight came you could find marines playing cards on the beach, or fortifying their positions, when … Crack! Foom! Out by the minesweeper a funnel of ocean sprayed up as one of the navy guys, on deck, took out a mine with his M-1 rifle. We looked for a second but immediately resumed our game, uncaring. A novelty. A marine could get used to games like this.

  *

  “Hey, Mace, wouldja take a look at that!”

  I squint out the sun and look in the direction that Orley Uhls is nodding.

  “Well, I’ll be a sonuvabitch!” I say. “Is that Levy?”

  It is Levy, standing only a few yards away with some other marines, Levy sporting a clean set of dungarees (much too green and bright for a place like this). Yet his dungarees are not the only thing that sticks out; for on the bottom half of his face is a bright white swath of thick gauze, held together by liberal strips of adhesive tape. To tell the truth, my pal looks like some sort of wacko Santa Claus, his faux beard obscuring his good looks. Above the cotton, though, Seymour’s eyes are smiling more than enough to make up for what we can’t see below them.

  It’s a situation that’s hard to describe, seeing Levy back.

  “Levy! What the fuck are you doin’ here?” I grin at Sy and he grins back.

  “I was on a hospital ship, but I saw this DUKW coming back so I figured I’d just hop aboard.” He shrugs.

  Some of the other guys rib him good-naturedly. “What the hell’s a matter with ya, you stupid ass?”

  “Yeah, boy, you sure blew it this time, Sy!” says Leyden.

  Levy merely beams above his wounds. “I just wanted to be back with you guys,” he says, as if it were the most noble and sane thought on earth.

  “Jesus, Sy, you must be friggin’ nuts,” I reply, shaking my head, still not fully comprehending. “Anyway, c’mon, I’ll get ya squared away over here.”

  So we walk over to where the foxholes pock the beach at the ocean’s curb, but I see that Levy’s eyes have suddenly lost the sparkle they had radiated only a few seconds ago.

  “What’s wrong, Sy?”

  “Ya know, Sterl,” he says, “when I came back on this island … when I came back, it just stunk! It really friggin’ stunk! This place is so bad that I just … I just felt like turning around and goin’ back out, ya know?”

  I don’t know. I have never left the island and then come back. Desensitized, I don’t realize that the whole island—even Purple Beach, maybe a mile away from the nearest fighting—holds the stench of mortal decay, fire, blood spilled on coral, aged brown by the sun, the constant odor of spent munitions, amalgamated with the rank bouquet of festering swamp water and a dying jungle collapsing in on itself.

  Whatever it is that Sy discovered—what he saw—was the truth.

  There’s nobody in front of me but this crap.

  It’s only now that I see what Levy sees—that the light at the end of the tunnel is just a freight train coming my way.

  *

  I will never forget our last couple of days on Purple Beach.

  Some marines will tell you about the land crabs there, swarming into your foxhole—a hive mind of clipping claws and blue-black bodies. Other marines might tell you about the sand fleas on the beach and how the fleas would breed inside your dungarees, making life an itchy hell for anyone who wore the globe and anchor. Some marines will just bellyache about anything:

  “You know what? I’d like these goddamn eggs better if there were any goddamn eggs in ’em!”

  “Ah, c’mon. You know they don’t care about us!”

  “Ah, jeez, ah, Jesus—just take a look at my skin, willya! I look like a buck-Chink from all those atabrine tabs they’ve been tellin’ me to take!”

  “Would you guys shut the fuck up? I’m trying to take a crap over here, for God’s sake! Christ!”

  To me, in those last days, the sun was just as hot, yet it smiled a little cooler. I was just as filthy and unshaven, but simply gazing upon that crystal water made me feel a little sharper. Any piece of sky to hang my civility on was enough to allow me to feel normal again, and that was enough, even for the briefest of time we spent under a different sun—fooling ourselves wit
h foolery.

  So when an LST had moored up to the edge of our beach and parked itself up against the reef out there, Sy and I pulled the perfect caper. One last stunt under the banner of youth and imagination, before Peleliu tore us from the tides and sucked us into the undertow of a river running red.

  “Hey, fellas!” some navy guy called from the railing of the LST.

  “Hey, yourself!” Sy shot back. We smiled at each other and shielded our eyes from the sun.

  “No, hey, really, you boys got any souvenirs to trade?”

  Souvenirs, souvenirs … my mind quickly cataloged what I had picked up along the way (which wasn’t much). I had one crap Japanese “Bible” that I had found somewhere, and … what else, what else? Oh yeah! I had hung on to a couple of those photos of geisha girls we had borrowed from the JASCO unit. (“Yeah, a nice buncha boys, those JASCO guys, huh?”)

  “Yeah, we got some souvenirs!” I said.

  Levy didn’t ask me what I was talking about, but the look he gave me said, We do?

  I winked at Sy, as if to say, Whattaya mean, Sy, sure we do!

  “Well, then,” the navy guy interjected, “why don’t you guys swim out here and let’s see what ya got?”

  “Alright, alright. Keep your girdle on, we’ll be over in a sec.”

  It wasn’t that far to swim. Just to the berm of the reef, where the big front gate of the LST was already opened about ten feet away from the other side of the coral. Another couple of navy guys stood on the reef, smoking and talking, as they gave us a hand up the ramp; from there we went topside, shaking ourselves of water, standing on the upper deck.

  Showing off our bullshit souvenirs, I knew those navy guys wouldn’t know hot air from a blowhole when they felt it. They looked pleased as they passed the photos among themselves. As for our presence, though, they eyeballed us almost resentfully, as if they were reading from the Navy Manual, under the subtitle “How to Resent the U.S. Marine.”

  The only one who did any talking was the swab who initially called us up.

  “Have you guys eaten?” He looked at us, perhaps admiring Sy’s battle scars, as Levy had gotten rid of his weird Santa’s beard nearly as soon as he’d rejoined the platoon.