Battleground Pacific Page 11

  “Nah,” I said. “We haven’t eaten a thing.” (Which was a lie.)

  So there Levy and I sat in the ship’s galley, gluttonous, our bellies near bursting to the tune of steak and potatoes, greasy, with thick white bread to sop it all up with.

  I think I’m full now.

  Full on Peleliu. Nothing lasts forever.

  *

  Suddenly they were there. The Prophets of Combat. The 1st Marines.

  They were our future selves.

  Eyes glazed and distant, they looked like hell, with battered dungarees salted white with sweat, unshaven and filthy from powder burns, bloodstained and near emaciated. They came to us at Purple Beach, a menagerie of funhouse mirrors, in which we saw the skewed reflections of ourselves in a host of dull likenesses.

  The 1st Marines were done as a unit that early into Peleliu. They had hit a brick wall of Nips at a place called the Point on White Beach, and now they could neither kill nor be killed any more than they already were.

  We were ordered to get our gear together, told we were moving out and we’d draw ammo along the way.

  As the remains of the 1st Marines flopped down on the beach, exhausted, our guys sidled up to them, quizzing them, as if their attempts to draw information from those grizzled marines would somehow imbue them with the power to face what we were about to. A transference of wisdom, if you will … yet the prophets had nothing more to give.

  Me, I simply sat alone, watching the slow surf to my right lap lightly against the shore. I was usually one to cut up and shoot the breeze. Now, however, I had no desire to speak to those elderly young men of the 1st. They appeared too familiar. Slightly too real. To commune with them would tell me things that I really didn’t want to know.

  Here, our guys readied themselves, slowly, languidly, giving up our rotten piece of paradise to the boys who had come down from the mountain. We had already gone through the blast furnace, but the sight of the 1st Marines told us that there was something worse out there than hell. If only we had known. If only we had known that Peleliu was the place where even devils feared to tread.

  I remember Corporal John Teskevich, Corporal Walter Stay, and Private Henry “Hank” Ryzner getting their gear together with their squad. Lieutenant Bauerschmidt was gathering up his things, too. He didn’t have to say anything to get us moving. We were a good unit.

  Private Joe Mercer didn’t pal around with anybody, but he was waiting on the beach, too, ready to go.

  PFC Lyman Rice was ultimately busy trying not to scratch the ringworm on his back. Little did Lyman know that in a few days ringworm would be the least of his problems.

  Nippo Baxter carried more equipment than anyone else. Besides his Marine Corps issue, Nippo had a Japanese saber in his belt, a fur-lined Nip officer’s pack that he strapped to the top of his gear, and on top of all this, his helmet fastened to his pack.

  The pièce de résistance of his whole getup, however, was a Japanese-made phonograph, which he had hanging off the right side of his cartridge belt, complete with a full array of 78 rpms.

  Nippo would play his phonograph all night long on Purple Beach, unless enough of us got together and told him to knock it off. The music (if you could call it that) was a grating noise of plucking and pinging sounds. Then, above the din, a Nip voice sang in tones that made it impossible to tell if the singer was a man, woman, or child. It wasn’t lyrical, and it stung the Western ear; nevertheless, it was quaint—but only for a little while.

  I’m not sure if anybody ever questioned where Nippo got all the best souvenirs; my theory was that he had to have been slinking off and scrounging around for that loot when nobody was looking. We had already seen Baxter in action on the airfield, a few days prior, but the trophies he had on Purple Beach were real beautiful things. They didn’t come from the airstrips, that’s for sure.

  For all I knew, Nippo could have been slipping right into a Jap camp and lifting his swag from under their noses.

  Now we are to head north, up the West Road, and into the hooks of the enemy.

  Whether a marine lived or died, from there on out, none of us would ever be the same.

  6

  AND ALL THE MONKEYS AREN’T IN THE ZOO

  The Battle of Ngesebus

  THIS IS A BATTLEGROUND.

  A conglomerate of filth and garbage, moving muscle, and the progress of steel. On a moonlike landscape, arid and blinding, thousands of us, the living and the dead, worm into an island that is only a few miles square from stem to stern. The smell is hideous. The noise of battle sings in all directions.

  We pass a small aid station clogged with various casualties—immediate cases whose lives can be saved if they’re rushed to a hospital ship fast enough.

  Combat fatigue victims, who fall prey to themselves, look like mice trapped under a bell jar—clawing for a way out, around and around in circles, all within their own minds.

  Dead marines, too. Dead. Just a couple of them outside the aid tent, covered with ponchos. The only sign that there had once been a life under the marine-issue poncho is the uncovered boondockers, roughly analogous to tombstones dotting Boot Hill. Here lies PFC Chestwound, KIA, 09/25/1944. Beloved Husband and Father, Sgt. Avulsion to the Cranium, Killed in Action, Peleliu, 1944.

  Here, some sort of stretcher bearer is down on his knees, scrubbing the red off a cot with a coarse wire brush. The cleaning agent he’s using curls the blood up into a thick pink froth.

  A group of Hellcats moan over the ridges (which now loom over us, so close we can almost reach out and touch them, if we dare), coughing bursts from their machine guns. Little rings of smoke drift behind the fighter planes, afterimages of the rounds they’ve just fired, as the pilots make quick time against the sun. Beneath them I hear the tinkling sound of spent cartridges, raining down hot, below their flight.

  There, some orderly from the aid station, hands flecked with blood, shakily smokes a cigarette below the bags under his eyes as we pass by. He leans against the tent post, frowning, flicking his ashes into a bucket filled with soiled gauze, piss-soaked paper, and strips of stiff dungarees. I don’t want to look at him. What would his gaze say if our eyes locked for only a second? See ya soon, marine?

  Everywhere there is commotion, as jeeps and trucks in clouds of coral dust roll this way and that. The bite of diesel fumes and gasoline hangs noxious in the air. Marines, like us, march in single file, heads angling toward the sporadic pops of small-arms fire somewhere up the ridges. Muted thumps of explosives ring down, echoing through the caves and pockmarked surfaces of a cliffside that has been eroded, unnaturally, by the hammers of hell.

  The ridges of Peleliu represent the healthless backbone of the island—a sickly spine that will never heal.

  Yet the disharmony of our environment is not as chaotic as those first couple of days of the invasion. Although the battle still rages relentlessly, there are pockets of Peleliu (small though they may be) where marines can walk openly, if cautiously.

  I know—the rifleman knows—however, that we are headed to places on tiny Peleliu, just a few yards from where the rear echelon guys feel safe, that nobody but the rifleman is expected to go. We’re an elite fraternity of trained dumb asses. Damn the cost, we are expected to go, to get the job done, to spill the blood—be it ours or that of our enemy. For, the fact is, if we don’t do it, then nobody will, and we’ll all be stuck on this beautiful island for as long as we’re unfortunate enough to live.

  So they send us north, up a road lying on the extreme west of the island, to a place called the Lobster Claw. Gazing at a map, I don’t think this western stretch of island looks anything like a lobster’s claw. All the islands out here look the same, like Rorschach blots to a madman’s eye—which is fitting, since anyone will believe what he wants out of all this lunacy. To one guy, the island might resemble the jaws of a monster. To another marine, Peleliu might appear like Saipan with a broken neck. To me, however, it all looks like a screwed-up version of the 1939 World’s Fair.
Here, the cotton candy is plumes of smoke. The exhibits are tanks and carcasses, howitzers and head lice … and a menagerie of young men slogging their way though Sniper Alley, up the West Road, muscling to the front of the line.

  Sniper Alley is its own main event, although the Japanese along this stretch are not snipers at all. They are Japanese riflemen, pure and simple. Our yellow-hued brethren who, either by command or by their own moxie, have decided to harass us with fire from the mangrove along either side of the road.

  That marines call them “snipers” gives them almost a bogeyman quality—a mythos that doesn’t belong. That the Jap “sniper” is somehow more trained or more motivated than the marine is up for debate. Yet his effectiveness is not debatable at all. In fact, the little bastards must have nuts the size of cannonballs to be able to hold their breath out there in the heat, alone, just waiting to drill a hole through an American soul.

  We’re not thinking about snipers at all, though, by the time we get to where the road begins. We’re hot. We’re exhausted. The confusion and noise that surround us shake the nerves, like rattling a bean inside a tin can. We are the human beans.

  “Goddammit, how long do we have to hump this friggin’ island?” PFC P. A. Wilson mumbles.

  “Hey, stow it, willya, Wilson?” Billy Leyden says, fed up. “We’ve got enough hot air without you addin’ to it, alright?”

  We’ve been marching since morning, and the scuttlebutt is that some of our guys from the company got to ride trucks across the island and up the road. Nobody says much about that. Somebody has to get the crap duty, so it might as well be us.

  Before anyone can start bitching about the trucks, however, a Sherman tank chugs right up beside us, and Lieutenant Bauerschmidt suggests that at least some of us should climb up the tank and ride the rest of the way in.

  It takes but a moment for those of us standing closest to the tank to toss our weapons up the side of the Sherman. Helping each other up, we perch against the turret, John Teskevich, Jesse Googe, and Sy Levy on one side, with Jim McEnery and me on the other. I can’t speak for anybody else, but I am elated to be riding—because who knows how much farther we’d have to walk to reach our day’s objective.

  “Well, it ain’t a Caddy, but it’ll do.” Levy beams.

  “It’s a goddamn limousine, is what it is, Sy.” I smile back.

  Kicking out of idle, the tank lurches forward as we hang tight to the beast; yet she’s only crunched forward a few feet when …

  We don’t even hear the shot that hits Teskevich in the stomach. The whole world is a mash of noise and pressure. From where I sit I see John double over and grip his stomach, but it isn’t until I hear the screaming that I snap that something is seriously wrong.

  “Ahhh, I’m hit! Christ, I’m hit!” That’s Googe yelling. What about John?

  Quick, I’m off the tank; everybody’s off the tank, as if the Sherman is surrounded by plague.

  “Stop this goddamn thing, now!” Jimmy bangs on the top of the tank. “Corpsman! Goddammit, where’s Chulis?”

  I run up to Levy. “What the hell’s goin’ on, Sy? You alright?” Levy is feeling around his leg, confused. Grabbing one of Levy’s arms, I help him scoot on his rear, getting him behind the tank.

  “Yeah, yeah. I’m fine,” Levy says, out of breath.

  “For chrissakes, corpsman!” Googe is on the coral, holding his right arm, which is a sad rag of useless meat at the moment. The blood is slippery down his arm and soaking into his dungaree jacket.

  Teskevich, on the other hand, says nothing. Both Googe and Teskevich are being treated behind the tank when Chulis and Alfred “Doc” Jones decide they need to get John the hell out of here or he’s not going to make it. In fact, John’s not going to make it. No. His stomach is clotted with blood and some clabbered matter that must be John’s breakfast from this morning. The square-set jaw and rugged looks that Teskevich once sported now appear gaunt and filmy. His body looks fragile. Yet his deathly frame isn’t a product of the bullet that just killed him.

  Things don’t work that way.

  The truth is, none of us realize that our lack of food and sleep, our gain of worry and fatigue—our general environment has been changing us into something else. In John’s case the Nip bullet simply quickened the process.

  Double-timing it, they evacuate Teskevich on a stretcher. Googe goes next, but the stretcher bearers are not in too much of a hurry with him. He’ll be fine. Besides, it appears as though they gave Googe a shot of morphine; he isn’t raising nine kinds of hell anymore. Teskevich, on the other hand …

  You can see it in Jimmy’s sorrow, that despite the best efforts of our corpsmen, Teskevich will die on Peleliu. He was dead when the Nip bullet hit him, though he clung to life a little longer, for all of us to see—more painful, to the living, than if he had died right away.

  What happened was a one-in-a-million shot. The bullet had passed through John’s guts, out his back, and then through Googe’s arm. Levy was holding his leg because the round had lodged in his legging, yet without piercing the skin, having lost velocity after spending itself through Teskevich and Googe.

  “Sy, you’re one lucky SOB, ya know that?” Chulis asks, patting Levy on the back.

  “Alright,” Jim says. He looks up toward the sun. “There’s nothing more we can do here. Let’s go.”

  John had been one of Jimmy’s closest friend in the Corps. They had been on Guadalcanal together and Cape Gloucester, too.

  “Let’s go, guys.”

  Nobody says anything about John, just as nobody says a thing about the tank.

  It’s unanimous. We’ll walk.

  *

  The road headed north might as well have been the road going south, because as soon as Teskevich was killed that’s how everything went. South.

  They’ve bulldozed the Japanese dead to the seaward side of this stretch. Pressed and torn among the mangrove on our left, the Nip corpses crack open like too-ripe fruit. They are sulfurous to the scent—brown uniforms painted with swarms of gut-wagon flies.

  It’s hard to imagine that when traveling from one small place to another on Peleliu—just a matter of feet or yards—there is something new to take in, to cope with, to experience, even to the point where the mind doesn’t register it right away. The brain is forced to view it all impassively; otherwise the intellect will either go screwy or shut itself down completely.

  Every few hundred feet or so an MP is posted along the road, moving men along, shouting out warnings.

  “Hey, you marines, move your asses! Hot zone, next twenty yards! Hot zone!”

  We take off on a dead run for the next twenty or thirty yards, because the so-called snipers are known to be picking off marines at different intervals. Me, Jim, and Levy. Run and pant. Walk, walk, and run. Fatigued. It goes without saying that nobody wants to end up like Teskevich; more to the point, the whole way up the sounds of combat have been fanning our way: bad breath, behind the decaying jaws of the little yellow imps from Tokyo. The jangle of marine gear bumps together as we speed it up. We sprint on sore feet, then walk some more; all the time we take sips from the tepid water in our canteens.

  It’s amazing how drinking hot water, even under such a humid climate, can cool the senses and quench the palate.

  I don’t think I’ll get used to it, though. I don’t get used to any of it.

  What the hell am I even doing here?

  All of us. Every man on this road is heading north for a purpose.

  *

  They told us it would be Ngesebus.

  Ngesebus.

  Sound it out. The word makes no sense.

  Ngesebus is a baby island only six hundred yards across a causeway to the north of Peleliu’s Lobster Claw. The island itself is only two miles from point to point, running SW by NE, yet it’s a mere mile across its width, from west to east. Ngesebus looks exactly like a drop of bird shit on the windshield of a Pontiac. Splat!

  Evidently, they had been hol
ding K Company back for the invasion of Ngesebus. We’d even been told we would be pulling another amphibious assault, which came as a shock to us. For one thing, it was unheard of for a marine unit to make two identical beach landings in the same operation. Another thing, the Japanese garrison on the island (total forces unknown) was shelling the hell out of a regiment of the 81st Army Division, who had been raking across the upper portion of Peleliu for a few days and catching crap everywhere they went.

  Ngesebus needed to be closed down—and closed down fast. The island was a sty in the eye of the whole operation, in that the northern portion of Peleliu couldn’t be secured until Ngesebus was taken, too. With its miniature airstrip, Ngesebus was another vital key to unlocking Pandora’s war.

  So, once again, it was up to the marines to save the day.

  Before we jumped off at Ngesebus, however, our job was to mop up and support the army on the Lobster Claw, as we secured the high elevation of Hill 80, protecting their eastern flank in the process.

  Though the Lobster Claw was a frightening and miserable place, none of us knew what a rattrap Ngesebus would turn out to be. Then one night, we were inoculated to the facts in short order.

  I had a front-row seat.

  One of our last nights on Peleliu, before Ngesebus, was a particular stygian shade of black. An obsidian wall where light did not bend or break an atmosphere that was almost palpable. It didn’t get much darker than that.

  Quietly we set up a defensive position on one side of a dirt road. Across from the road, recessed about thirty feet, was a copse of tall scrub trees—probably the tallest we had seen on Peleliu.

  Charlie Allmann and I were manning one foxhole. It was a beauty of a hole—simply beautiful. There was real dirt to dig in, not just sand, because of the rich earth near the phosphate factory. Everyone had great foxholes that night; the only problem was, the night was such an inky syrup that we didn’t have any idea who was to the immediate right or left of us. We knew that Item Company was somewhere out there clockwise, and I knew that Hank Ryzner was in a foxhole, by himself, to my right (so close we could reach out and touch hands if we wanted), but beyond that I could see nothing. Only the same hard darkness everywhere.